The consequences (if there are any) of not travelling to my meeting this week won’t hit me until tomorrow or later in the week (I suspect I’ll have at least one very early morning to match New York time), but today, it was all benefit.

I got to sleep about three extra hours; I got to go to the JCC and work out; I got to take a walk with Diane and Jeff in the evening; I even got to watch some of the backlog of TV programs on the Tivos.  Diane also showed me the Tai Chi DVD she’d recently bought, and I tried some of the warmup — it takes a lot of concentration!

I tried to make a DVD from one of our old MST3K tapes, but something went awry during the capture — the image jumps right-and-left every 1.5 seconds or so, which is rather disconcerting, especially when there are words on the screen (it’s not too bad at other times).  The other tapes I’d transferred didn’t have this problem, so it might have been a loose connection (I’ve been moving the VCR between the Mac and its usual spot).

I did manage to get a good enough transfer to see how much squeezing 90 minutes onto a single-layer DVD hurt the quality, and it was easily visible.  So I guess I’m going to go pick up a double-layer drive sometime, because I do have a few things where I want to maintain as much quality as I can.  Maybe I should just get a faster Mac with a double-layer drive already installed….

Today’s been a day of deciding not to do things. It hasn’t been a very exciting day. But I didn’t want to break my string of daily entries, so you get to read a very mundane posting — unless you choose to stop now.

This morning, I decided not to go to a week-long meeting in Somers, New York, next week. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit that yesterday’s events entered into my calculations — it wasn’t fear, though, it was not wanting to deal with the additional hassles at security. But that wasn’t the real reason I cancelled my trip — it was learning that several of the people who were originally going to be there all week were only going to be in for the first day of the meeting. I still gave it a lot of thought, but finally came to the conclusion that I could participate adequately by phone — and that way I won’t lose my Sunday to travel. Of course, I also won’t get to go to Ralph’s Italian Ice, but I’ll cope.

I also decided that we probably don’t have to do anything about our cooktop, either. When I tried to clean it, there was a mark which wouldn’t come off — I thought it might have been a crack. I called KitchenAid to see if there was anything that could be done short of replacing the glass, and there wasn’t. A not-so-quick search eventually yielded the model number, at which point I discovered that a glass replacement was $300+; a new cooktop would be even more. So I went back to look very carefully, and, as far as I can tell, all we have is a deep scratch.

Tomorrow, I visit the hazmat disposal site and the dentist. I hope neither of them leads to exciting writing either.