I was really happy about my score for the final running of the Almaniac when I got the answer booklet – I thought I had only missed one question of 81, and I was pretty sure I had earned a trophy (I didn’t see a footnote which affected the answer for the one question I missed).

So I was crushed when I got the final result booklet and found that I’d missed two questions and wasn’t getting a trophy after all. I asked the Old Maltese to rescore my submission and got a prompt response.

The final question on the Almaniac requires you to add up the last digits of the page on which you’d found the answers for questions 5, 15, and so on. Easy – the sum was 48. And I wrote 8 on my scoresheet – the last digit of the answer, not the actual answer. Which was wrong, and cost me a trophy.

Oh, well – I still have a plaque from my best previous finish in 1993!

We had to be out of the house this morning for our housecleaner; Diane had a dentist’s appointment, so the timing worked out well. While she was in the chair, I wandered around the area (near Westgate Shopping Center) to get a little exercise. The weather was beautifully clear and not too cold; I was surprised to see snow on the East Bay foothills.

After she was finished, we went over to the Los Gatos Creek trail for more walking; the water was muddy and flowing very briskly. We saw a lot more birds in the water than we often do; there were lots of ducks, as well as a few more unusual birds (I think these are cormorants).

This evening, I went to Toastmasters Club Officer Training. It’s nice to be able to do it from home – the food’s much better here!

It was mostly dry today and there were even a few sunny moments while we were out walking!

I spent most of the day inside anyway, first at the gym, then making lunch, then ripping DVDs, then going to the allergist, then ripping more DVDs, and finally watching a little TV (including an episode of “Fawlty Towers” which I’d just ripped earlier today). I kept the computer busy ripping DVDs while we were watching TV, too.

Not a particularly interesting day to write about, but I feel productive!

We followed our usual Sunday morning routine, more or less, with a trip to the Farmers’ Market and a walk through Los Gatos. Los Gatos parks and trails were closed due to the threat of falling trees, but the streets were open and not very busy.

I did a lot more DVD ripping and converting today. So far, I’ve only found two DVDs still in their shrink wrap (The Blob and Citizen Kane), but I’m sure there will be more before I’m finished.

Embrace the Moon is a short (one-hour) Tai Chi instructional video; we’d watched it a couple of times, so I didn’t expect to have any problems ripping it. But it took well over an hour to transfer the data from the DVD, which surprised me – most DVDs transfer at about 3-times normal speed. I looked at the transferred file and found that the publisher had taken the original VHS version of the video and played it into a DVD recorder to create their master copy. But they didn’t stop recording when the tape ended – they kept recording until the DVD was completely full. The last two-and-a-half hours were just an almost blank screen and a little hum; I was able to remove that before sending the video to the Plex server.

The rain has been pretty steady all day; it didn’t stop us from taking our walks, but it did discourage us from doing more than the bare minimum. It’s supposed to clear up this week; I’m ready for a break. If only I knew where I could learn some Tai Chi….

It was too rainy to go out for a walk this morning, so we went to the JCC and exercised there instead, though we did manage a couple of walks later in the day during relatively dry intervals. Ross Creek was noticeably higher than it had been a couple of days ago, but still well below a worrisome level (and it’s gone down again since we came home).

We’d stopped watching Wednesday’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert when he and Janelle Monáe started talking about Glass Onion; he suggested stopping the show and watching the movie to avoid spoilers. So we did that today, and I really enjoyed it. It might have been even better if I’d upgraded Netflix to premium to let us see the movie in HDR, but I doubt I missed anything significant. And after we watched the movie, we went back and watched the rest of the interview; I’m glad we waited.

I decided I didn’t have enough projects going on, so I’ve gotten back to ripping DVDs so I can put them on Plex and possibly watch them some day. It will take a while.