Yesterday while at work, Susan called me to relay that “the school called, Mason’s sick and you need to go pick him up.” The clock on my computer read 2:42pm; I usually leave at 3pm. It took me five or ten minutes to pack everything up, walk out to my car and hit the road. I got to Mason’s school about 3:15pm or so and walked in to the office. “I’m here to pick up my kid who is so deathly ill that he cannot stay here another fifteen minutes until school is over,” I announced. Mason, who looked pretty far from deathly ill, was waiting in the office for me. I excepted to sign some paperwork or at least have my ID checked when leaving with a kid, but instead the secretary (whom I’ve never met) simply smiled as Mason and I walked out together.

The latest home project I tackled was replacing the light fixture in the kitchen. Susan thought the old one looked cheap so she bought a new one which has been sitting in the box in our kitchen for over six months. The packaged instructions were the same quality of every desk, chair and set of shelves I’ve ever assembled. The paper basically read, “put the thing together according to the diagram and don’t get shocked doing it.” Of the 10 or so steps, at least seven of them were about avoiding getting shocked. I read the instructions a couple dozen times and they never did make sense so finally I just pulled the old one apart, looked at everything, and put the new one in place. Of course the fixture’s wires run straight up the middle of everything so after assembling the entire thing you realize that the wires are not through the center and now you have to take the entire thing back down, run the wires up the middle and start all over. The end result after two hours of work is a light fixture that to me looks strikingly like the other one but I’m told this one isn’t ugly and the other one was so what do I know.

Today, Susan is throwing a baby/wedding/something shower for one of her high school friends. While Mason plays Xbox (he’s tired of the Wii right now for some reason) and Morgan naps, I’m working on yet another project — converting videotapes to DVDs. It’s one of those time consuming projects that you never seem to get around to. One of these days I may spring for one of those dual DVD/VCR units that does everything automatically. Instead, the way I am currently doing it involves hooking up a VCR to my computer via a capture card and recording the video that way. Just to give you an idea, for a 60 minute video, the first step is to play the tape into the computer and record it (which takes 60 minutes, obviously). Then I’ll need to render that video as an MPEG to save on the computer — that will take another 60 minutes. At that point, If I want to make a DVD out of it it’ll take me another hour or so. As you can see, it’s a pretty lengthy process. It doesn’t require a lot of skill or hands-on work (most of the process is waiting for one to end so the next one can start) and on top of that it ties up your computer for hours at a time. While I’m sure I won’t do every old videotape we used to own, I do want to do all the irreplacable ones.