Wrong Delivery

Today I collected all the trash from the house. There were a bunch of smaller bags that I consolidated into one 30 gallon bag. When I took out the trash, I saw two packages in our carport. I wondered who they were for. Normally Little Kat gets a lot of packages these days. Turned out they were for a neighbor.

I was going to walk the packages over to the neighbor's house. They are about 5 houses away down the block. However the bottom package was heavy. Nope. I drove my car up into the carport, and used it to transport the packages up to the neighbor's house. The neighbor had a steep hill in his front yard.

These guys have a Tesla and some other nice cars. But nobody was home at the moment. I saw another package inside their storm door. Must be a big delivery day for them. I left their packages outside their door. Seems Amazon has been slacking a bit lately. Or at least their delivery guys are mixing up destinations.

Microwave Mystery

I woke up this morning a little late. Ran downstairs to my work computer. For some strange reason, the microwave was running. I called out to see if maybe Kit Kat was cooking breakfast. Nope. It could not be Little Kat - he sleeps in until the afternoon. I pressed the stop button on the microwave. It kept cooking!

Did not have a lot of time. So I unplugged the microwave. Then I plugged it back in. Still kept running and would not stop. I texted the family about this problem. Momoko said we needed a new microwave ASAP. Great.

I decided to take my time at lunch, going to Roy Rogers. Then I headed over to Best Buy. They had a lot of microwaves that mount above your stove. Not for us. There was a limited selection of countertop microwaves. I wanted one that was black, in stock, and not tiny. I found one and wheeled it out.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Little Kat asked me if I would buy him Adobe software for him to use for school. Oops. That software is usually extremely pricey. Little Kat said that, as a student, he had the option to rent the software at a discount on a monthly basis. Bottom line is $20 per month for software rental.

I told Little Kat we could start by me paying for the software this semester. That is only for another 4 months at the most. Then we can reevaluate whether he needs to keep the software. This is actually a pretty good deal.

Here is what that $20 gives you access to:

• Photoshop
• Lightroom
• Spark
• XD
• Illustrator
• InDesign
• Premiere Pro
• Acrobat Pro

If we were to use the old method of actually purchasing the software, I am sure this would run into the thousands of dollars easily. Even with a student discount, I am sure purchasing the software for permanent usage would run over $1000.

The rental sounds like the right move. If Little Kat ends up not getting into graphic design, no trouble. We can just cancel the rental. And if he need this all through college, it is like we are slowly paying the cost on a monthly plan.

The other good thing is that with this rental, you get the latest versions of the software. You can also install it on multiple machines as long as Little Kat is the guy using the software on those machines. Ah. This must be the future of expensive software.

Always Be Learning

I have finished up a personal study on some programming. Going to move to another topic. It is hard to find time to study, since I am also taking a college course at night. Needed to make some room on my bookshelf to put away my programming materials. Decided to clear out half of one shelf.

Shredded a lot of documents from my last company. Going to recycle the rest. I found my list of completed training records while working at my last company. There were some interesting courses I took while employed there. Before I shred the list, I thought I should document the course names here:

• Building Forms and Reports Using Oracle Developer
• Clearcase Windows Fundamentals
• COM(+) Programming with C++ and ATL
• Enterprise JavaBeans
• Hands-on Java Programming
• Hands-on Win32 Programming
• Java for Web Application Development
• PL/SQL Program Unit Development
• Principles of Peer Review

That was quite the diversified list. Strangely enough, I am current going back and reviewing my Oracle knowledge. Got to be ready to find a job with those skills. Even at my last company, I was getting training on the topic.

Taking a Tumble

Momoko is on a new health kick. Happens every once in a while. There are some dietary aspects to this effort. But I am affected by the exercise portion. Momoko said we should walk a few times a week. I was down with that.

So I said let's walk every day. That seemed too much for Momoko. Okay. Then I countered that we could do it every weekday. I can usually get off work by 5:00pm. So we set the daily walk for that time.

Momoko wanted to start small. So we would walk down the end of our street, turn around, and come home. I figured that would be a good start. However I thought we should walk a little farther each day. There is some resistance from Momoko on this idea.

I got off early one day. So I thought we could walk at 4:30pm instead of 5:00. Nope. Momoko was glued to some drama on TV. I had to wait until the designated time. I got some chores done. Then we headed out.

The weather was cold. The wind did not help. Halfway down the street, I perceived Momoko falling down and taking a tumble next to me. Not exactly sure why this was. Ground was flat and free of any obstacles. Street was pretty clear. I think this is a sign that Momoko has to do a whole lot more walking.