Downpourette

Southern California is getting its first autumn rains today. Of course, we call it a "storm," which will drop an inch or two of rain in a 12-hour period. It's actually the tail end of a low that brought the northern part of the state much more weather, but down here we have news teams covering it like it was the arrival of Will & Kate.

But the day is cool and I love being inside watching the gentle falling of the rain. For the first time in months, I've been able to put on a long-sleeve knit shirt and not break into a sweat.

Yesterday, I met with a woman Steve knows who does custom chocolates as a sideline. I am going to give her marketing stuff (such as it is) a makeover, with a new logo, brochures, cards, etc. I'm doing the work gratis, since I really need something recent in my general design samples online. I'm also going to put together a website for her and do the photography of her products for it.

I'm still waiting on the job at Pasadena City College. I checked in with the woman in HR with whom I am in communication, and she said the position was still being reviewed by the committee, and that I should check back in a couple more weeks if I haven't heard anything by then.

As I've said before, I'm holding off putting the big bucks down to start my studio until I know whether this job will pan out or not, so the only thing I have left is to redesign my own website with the new logo and all, and wait to upload it until I find out.

Until then, we're being very good about pinching our pennies, except for the one extravagance of spending $100 to replace our Blu-Ray player. We got our first one a couple years ago, and it was not playing some of the discs we get from Netflix, so we decided to upgrade the firmware on the machine. After much research and several calls to the Sony "help line," we had burned a firmware upgrade disc, which we popped into the machine.

It accepted the disc and started whirring and flashing, and whirring and flashing. After about 45 minutes of whirring and flashing, we noticed it had not advanced from the readout "0/9." What's more, there was no way of getting the disc to eject (we had tried Sony's technique and it hadn't worked). The last call to the help line elicited a verbal shrug from the "helper," who said to take it into an authorized repair shop for servicing. Knowing that this would cost far more than the unit was worth, Steve decided to use some of his overtime cash to purchase the new one.

While we were installing the new player, we also broke down and pulled the old VCR from the stack, as we hadn't used it in years. This will also give us a good reason to donate our remaining VHS tapes and get some much-needed room back in the upstairs closet.

Well, we seem to have arrived at a lull in the "storm," as the rain has stopped falling. But the skies are still a close dark gray, and I think we have a few more hours of downpourettes in store before tomorrow morning arrives. By the weekend, it promises to be back up into the 80s and 90s, one last stab at summer, which is usually the case in mid-October here in La-La-Land.