Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon

I like the concept of leading off with an appropriate song title, a la "Here Is the News", and so I present another today. I'm fairly confident that this has all the signs of becoming a regular blog feature, so today's cut is from Queen's A Night at the Opera, which also includes the perhaps more well-known (even renowned) "Bohemian Rhapsody". While fact-checking this, I also ran across two other Queen (if we're talking Queen here, "favourite" must be spelled in Freddie and Brian's native English) favourites which I haven't heard in sometime: " '39" and "I'm in Love with My Car", both of which were on my personal heavy rotation back in the day.

So, how and why does one laze on a Sunday afternoon?

Well, for one, the temperature was predicted to be about 90F (~32C) today. As Jennifer and I are not fans of humidity or hot weather-- and these two are mates here in the Greater Chicago area-- we were pleased to see the temps pretty much sticking to the low 80's (~26-29C) with a slight breeze. There was not a hint of rain in the sky, although the forecast included a 30% chance and so we decided to do a bit of shopping.

The first stop was our local pet store. We've been doing a bit of searching for a second cat carrier, as Schwarz and Tinka need to be in a carrier when they have their annual veterinarian's exam- and the one we've been using for the past several years is just too small. We had both done a bit of looking on Amazon for something similar to the one we currently own, but nothing struck our fancy. At the store, we saw a few of the carriers which we had seen online, and decided to keep on searching.

The next stop was the Goodwill store. Sundays and Mondays, Goodwill has half-price specials, so we visit a few times per month on the weekends. Our final stop was Aldi (yes, that Aldi!) We picked up a few things, and then headed home.

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I've had this "thing" laying around for a while, so long I've forgotten exactly what it is. It was part of a printer at one time, and I had thought it might be interesting to disassemble some day. Today was that day. I gathered several screwdrivers, needle-nosed pliers and a few other tools and began to disassemble the thing. I did this outside at the picnic table, as I didn't know if it had any residual toner in it. Fortunately it didn't, and after about half an hour of disconnecting, unscrewing and sweating in place, I had a pile of parts- plastic, sheet metal pieces, screws and springs. Apart from the plastic, everything went into our spare parts collection; the plastic, unfortunately, was not recyclable, so it went into the trash.

By the time I had finished, it had gotten noticeably cooler and the breeze had picked up... perfect for cutting grass!

Except that the breeze was developing into a wind, the light was fading as the clouds expanded, and it looked like the 30% prediction was going to turn into 100%. As the passing seconds became passing minutes, the clouds became darker and more ominous, and the grass seemed to heave with the mounting winds. And there was thunder... thunder, but no lightning. By this time, I had decided that the grass could wait another day. Jennifer was making what would be a supremely delicious curry by now, so I just messed around a bit on the computer. When the rain finally arrived, it was incredibly underwhelming, evaporating almost as soon as it came down. By the time the thunder had passed out of earshot, you couldn't tell there had been any precipitation whatsoever. And we ate.

And that is how we were found to be Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon. In the wonderful world of Not-So-Big-Data, all that happened was a bit more work on the Lego spreadsheet. I haven't even set a deadline for the completion of this part of the project as yet, because data entry is just one part of the Lego component of the database. I still need to design the other Lego look up tables before importing it into the database.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

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