I awoke today and looked at the bedside clock, the one with numbers large enough that even I can read it without my glasses, as long as I’m somewhere on the bed.  It told me that there wasn’t much time before my wife would be getting ready for work, so I’d better hurry if I wanted to use the bathroom.  I pulled myself upright, and grabbed my watch–which gave me an entirely different view of the matter, telling me that I had plenty of time to get coffee and get organized before her alarm would ring.

Of course, her alarm is in that other clock, the one with the considerably later time on it.  However, I realized, impressively quickly given how foggy I still was otherwise, that the bedside clock had compensated automatically for the change for Daylight Savings Time which was not to be this weekend, because we did it several weeks back.

I was working on moving both new books toward publication when I hit a snag.  I had both publisher sites open, because I figured I could upload Game Ideas Unlimited:  Volume I to the one site while uploading Faith and Gaming to the other.  The former is with a printer who has done merchandise for us in the past, but never books, so I was fighting my way through there process and very pleased finally to have come to the place where I could upload the text.  I had not to that point done the conversion to portable document format (PDF), but that’s a relatively quick fix.  After all, I’ve had Adobe Acrobat Professional 4.0 on my computer for most of a decade, and never had any serious problems with it.

However, I encountered my first serious problem with it.  It is not Adobe’s fault, but MicroSoft’s.  It seems that when we made the change to the new operating system, it failed to recognize the Acrobat software as printers.  If you have an Acrobat writer on your computer, it shows up as several different types of printer drivers, which permit you rather simply to hit “print” and turn just about anything you can print into the universal portable document format.  However, those options were absent from my system.

Nor does MicroSoft make it easy to move printer drivers around.  Obviously, the drivers are still on my computer, in the printers folder on the old hard drive; however, the printers folder apparently is not called that, and I could not find it.

Mercifully, I had to drive someone home last night a “fur piece”, about eighty miles each way, which put me in the neighborhood of our friend and treasurer Adam Keller, who owns a disused copy of a newer version of the software (he has purchased a yet newer version for his own use, so this was an unused license).  I will be upgrading later this afternoon or early this evening, which hopefully will resolve this problem in plenty of time.

So I have much to do, but hopefully enough time in which to do it.

–M. J. Young

I realized this afternoon, as six o’clock bore down on me and I had not yet begun supper and knew I would soon have to get Baxter for our Collision rehearsal, that it did not feel so late as it was. It struck me almost immediately that we changed the clocks over the weekend–last week at this time it was an hour earlier, or was it an hour later, I can never get that straight in my mind. Thus I felt as if I should have more time before the rehearsal.

I have long thought that this idea of Daylight Savings Time was pretty stupid. Even the name makes little sense–if we are saving daylight, when will we use it? The government wanted everyone to get up and go to work an hour later during the winter, so that they would stay up later and use what little daylight we had to maximum advantage, so instead of asking everyone to change their schedules, they just changed the official clock. This meant that twice a year everyone was off schedule, because even if we remembered to fix our clocks we still had to adjust our biological clocks to match. Then gradually our technology caught up. Computers were the first devices to adjust for Daylight Savings Time automatically, followed by some wrist watches, video recorders, and now even clocks. Unfortunately, now that we have all this equipment that does this automatically, the government has changed the days on which the changes are to be made. This means the clocks are now wrong four times a year instead of two: in the Spring we have to adjust them ahead before the date they would adjust themselves, and then when they adjust themselves ahead automatically we must put them back, and then in the fall they will adjust them selves automatically and we will have to put them back, only to change them again when the new date comes. Tell me that this is not a stupid idea.

Rehearsal went well. Brittany was not here this week, because her mother is going in for surgery and life is a bit chaotic there at the moment. Baxter and Adam and I focused on the instrumentals, and made solid progress on some of the more difficult sections. I also gave Baxter a CD copy of the repertoire for himself and one for drummer Kevin, whom he expects to see on Sunday.

Otherwise, I am behind schedule, and looking ahead at a lot of delays. Let’s see what we can accomplish today with the time that remains. At least my body isn’t telling me to go to bed so early.

–M. J. Young

I awoke relatively early today, but while I was still awakening I was abruptly reminded of two things I knew two days ago and had completely forgotten.

I had an untouched cup of coffee next to me, and I had even decided in a rare move to get some breakfast, so I had an untouched bowl of cereal next to that. Then my cell phone rang.

I don’t carry my cell phone on me. There was a time when I never had it in the house. It does not get good reception in the house, and for some reason the chargers made for this model that run on house current do not work right with this particular phone. I use a car charger for it, and I use to leave it in the Caravan all the time–until the Caravan died. Since now I do not really have one vehicle that is “mine” in the sense that I have exclusive use of it, I keep my car things in a bag very kindly given me by the Ubercon people. Thus I was staring at my computer screen, my clock was striking twelve, and mixed with the music of the clock there was another sound which my mind sorted out as the ring of my cell phone, somewhere in the bag across the room.

I managed to find it before it stopped ringing. I disabled the voice mail some time ago, because it was just annoying and I did not want to pay for people to leave me messages I wouldn’t get for days. But it was director and artist Jim Denaxas asking me if I remembered two things, neither of which I had remembered.

The first of those was that this being the second Sunday of the month (and it not being May, the month in which the second Sunday is rather busy at restaurants) we had a directors meeting at one o’clock. I remembered that the moment I saw his name on the caller ID; I was not yet dressed, and had no notes, but it only takes half an hour to drive there so I could pull something together.

The other reminder was that last night we came off Daylight Savings Time, moving all the clocks ahead. Since the federal government decided to change the date on which this happens after decades of it being reliably at the same time, none of the clocks designed to do this automatically do it on the correct day, and although I had known it was coming I completely forgot and changed none of them. I still have a few clocks to track down and correct. However, that meant that when the clock struck noon it was already one, and we were late. We scrambled to get out of the house, and made the meeting, but we’re a bit behind for the day because of it.

The meeting constitutes some progress, and we talked about how to get some of these projects finished, so we’re moving forward.

–M. J. Young