Thursday, August 03, 2006

What I Did on My Day Off

Wow! Eight hours straight. It's been so long since I've spent that much time in bed that I kept waking up, looking at the clock and then dropping back off to sleep. Even DBFA managed to get in a decent night. Other triumphs of the day included figuring out how to vectorize a bitmap image in Adobe Illustrator and getting the flamingomobile back from the dealer.

(Techno-geek alert - if computer stuff bores you, skip this paragraph) If you're expert in Illustrator, or have no idea what it is, you can't appreciate how excited I was when it worked. Yipee (jumping up and down, clapping hands). I managed to take a picture sent to me on my cell phone, send it to my email. Convert it from color .jpg to black and white .bmp in Photoshop, then live trace and clean it up in Illustrator. Final step, import it into the sign making program to verify it will cut. Yes!! Exciting because I solved a puzzle (I love puzzles) and because it saved me a bunch of money - I won't have to buy the software upgrade for my vinyl cutter. While I was GoogleTalking to MM, she tried to walk me through the steps, but I finally broke down and when out to buy a "how to" book for Illustrator, which is sort of cheating.

And the flamingomobile cost bunches less that we feared. Turns out the first part DBFA replaced here before turning it over to the dealer was defective. Since that part was new, it was the last part the dealer checked.

The only failure of the day was with a bank. I am trying to open a bank account for the International Lawn Greetings Association (ILGA). The 3 signers to be on the account are all in different states. That makes it a little awkward to get us all in the branch to sign the papers. So far, no one has been able to figure out how to do this. Back to the drawing board.

Back to work this morning. The crows landed in Redwood Shores, way out at the edge of the bay. Last time we were in that neighborhood, it was overrun with rabbits. This morning we saw only one. But there are lots of stop signs. Every intersection in the residential area is a 4-way stop. I'm sure the morning commuters appreciate it, but the night flockers don't. Ah well, that should be the worst of our problems.

And on the other side of the Bay, a flock in Pleasanton. We arrived in the vicinity of the address and couldn't find the right house number. As I was getting ready to call the sender (at 1:30am) I noticed that I had entered the wrong street name. There's another one to put on the list of ways to screw up an order. Sure glad I noticed before I made the call. Especially glad the wrong street didn't have the same house numbers (but they were very close). I hate those early morning phone messages from either a puzzled home owner or an irate sender. And the leaping out of bed, throwing on clothes and rushing out to correct the mistake is a morning rush I'd rather live without. We moved over a couple of blocks and landed the flock in the right yard.

Thus ended another successful day.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

HAPPY DAY OFF:)
From me...and Michele

Carli N. Wendell said...

sounds like a good day. . . banks can be frustrating. . . michele sent me!

barbie2be said...

this is just the coolest idea ever! michele sent me.

The Merry Rose said...

Glad you had a good day off - I can certainly relate to the sleep thing atm.
Michele sent me here!!

Anonymous said...

Wow, sleep and vectorizing a bitmap in the same day. That looks like it could have easily been an either/or proposition.

Uisce said...

"caws" -- that's a good one!! and I thought a "caw" was just what I drive to work! :)

Anonymous said...

My church group did this to raise money for a youth trip back in 1997. We raised a lot of money and had a lot of fun trying not to get caught when we delived them.