Golly, where did the day go?

Galina and I were out of the house by 10 am, headed off to physically select the chunk of granite that's going to sit on the new cabinets in the kitchen. This makes no sense to me, unless the intent is to hint that we're buying a particular slab and if, while machining it to fit our kitchen, anything should happen, we get to buy a new slab and take possession of some very expensive gravel.

I have been assured this is not the case, and that selecting the slab is some kind of legal requirement. As the process didn't involve signing anything, my skepticism is somewhat mollified.

From the granite yard, we headed off to order blinds for the new windows, as the curtains that had been used with the old windows were about as old (40+ years) and their rods had been, in many cases, already dismantled. In the middle of the proceedings, we got a call from a fellow that had been sent by the granite yard to do measurements at the house. He was at the house; we weren't.

We had been expecting him between 2 and 3 pm, and it was just a bit after noon. We finished our business and skedaddled home, in the rain. There and back, I got to remember why it is, exactly, I don't like to drive with Galina as a passenger in the car (she is the original nonstop Back Seat Driver™).

The process of measuring a kitchen for granite countertops is pretty thorough, involving far more than some guy showing up with a tape measure and a clipboard, as was the case for the windows, cabinets, and air conditioning system. The young man who showed up measured distances seven ways from Sunday and basically built a template of the countertop - including the spot where the sink is going to be - out of strips of corrugated plastic boxboard.

It's been raining pretty much all day long, and I roused myself from a nap a couple of hours ago to find new work in the hopper (that was easy!), which will tide me over until next Wednesday (and the more I look at it, I'm thinking I may need to extend the deadline one more day).

The horizon draws closer.

Time to get some dinner going and see about possibly finishing yesterday's assignment before hitting the sack.

Cheers...

Here and there...

I sent my Sansa e260 in for warranty service and it has arrived, as planned, via UPS Express Saver (which sounds better than "three day service," which is what it is), although unless I miss my guess, plain old ground service would have done the trick equally well between here and North Carolina.

A Priority Mail sent on Wednesday left Bethpage, here on the Island, at around 11:30 pm and arrived at the desination post office in Oregon at about 11:30 pm the next day, which I thought was pretty cool (and adds one more data point to my theory regarding postage "embedded" in labels).

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My intenet connection is... bahaving erratically. Google Mail comes up half the time with a message suggesting I use their basic HTML view since the connection is slow, and Netvibes is utterly useless. Killing my firewall doesn't help much, and one site I visited to test my connection yielded no results at all.

On the other hand, command-line pings are as fast as ever.

My "System Idle Processes" hovers above 90, Firefox hasn't bloated itself in RAM, so I'm wondering what else there is to check before I turn attention outward, to the other side of the router?

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Ideas currently on the back burner:

• the purpose of education
  Nothing you learn in school is supposed to be "useful" in the sense most people understand that word (as in "I'll never use algebra").
• the power of very small increments
  What the Grand Canyon has to do with financial security and learning a foreign language.

Cheers...