It’s been a busy day.

My computer finally finished the Handbrake phase of the Mel Brooks Blu-Ray conversion after working on it for 60 hours. We started conversations with two companies about installing solar on our house. We made a trip to Costco. We made a quick stop at the soon-to-be-closed Bed, Bath, and Beyond and left with two head assemblies for my shaver (something I needed to buy soon anyway) and two tray tables (I’m sure we’ll find a use for them, and we did resist buying the four-pack), all at 40% off. And we went to Best Buy and picked up a Denon AVR-X1700H receiver to finish the A/V upgrade cycle.

The receiver is still in its box and I haven’t tried reworking the subtitles on any of the converted Blu-Rays. How’s that for restraint?

Shabbat Shalom!

I spent yet more time today converting the Mel Brooks collection to streamable format; I wanted to keep the deleted scenes, outtakes, and features on the Young Frankenstein disk and that required me to go back to the Blu-Ray player and cross-check what I’d ripped with the menus. At least it was material I won’t mind watching again. :-)

That was far from the most tedious thing I did today. We had to sign and submit some paperwork to Vanguard, which didn’t seem like it would be difficult. It needed to be notarized, and that didn’t seem hard, either – there are at least three places offering notary service within a 20-minute walk of our house. But the signatures also had to be witnessed by two people other than us and the notary, and that proved to be a pain.

First, we tried the local AIM Mail Center. They could do the notarization, but the clerk said we’d need to bring our own witnesses. No dice. Then we went to our credit union – there were only two people working when we got there, but the teller said that a third person would be back from lunch in about 15 minutes, so we went out for a short walk, and when we returned, they took care of us. They even waived the notary fee because they’d made us wait, which I appreciated.

After that, we took a quick trip to FedEx and sent the forms off for Vanguard to handle. One chore accomplished!