Yeah... I completely lack regularity in my sleep schedule now. I did make it to work - the car arrived at the half-hour point, almost as if on cue...

If you were wondering why the car wasn't there in the first place, my mom had taken it to get its tires replaced. The rear pair was fine, but the forward pair, which was older, had been worn down to the point where there was almost no tread left. Being a rear-wheel drive vehicle, the tires were rotated forward, then a brand new pair of tires were installed to the rear, since it's more important to have traction in your drive tires. Suffice it to say, the car handles a bit differently with the tires having been rotated - it clings to the road a lot more, and the handling has increased - meaning, the car lurches sideways if I do more than nudge the wheel. o.O

After work, I ended up going to Jeff's place, as everyone had gathered there. It was a bit of an adventure finding the place, as I ended up entering the maze-like neighborhood from the wrong side, and I had to pull out the county road map to navigate myself to the proper side. How such a labyrinth of roads came about is beyond me. Konoha (whee!) was there, along with the usual cast of carpy, Dave, Kevyn, Bill, and of course Jeff (since it was his house). Kevyn and Bill left shortly after I arrived, to be replaced with Sarah and Mary a few minutes later ^^;

When I walked in, they were watching... a live Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles "concert" o.O The sheer... wow, I can't even find a word to describe it... was enough to turn Mary away from the room until it was finished. Need to get that tape vidcapped =P

The entire night was spent watching TV and other videos from the massive collection that had been amassed there for some reason. After TMNT, they watched an episode of "Captain Future", then switched to a very old dubbed anime which name I do not remember. That had decent entertainment value. ^^; Basically channel surfed after that, watching things like the end of an Iron Chef episode, Popeye shorts, a documentary of the history of superhero comics...

At around 4:30am, everyone departed from Jeff's - Konoha went to Dave's place, with carpy dropping them off before going home, and I dropped off the two girls at Sarah's house. I take what is probably the 2nd longest possible route home, since I'm not used to driving back from there.

I waste no time in peeling off a layer of tread from the new tires.

Well, suffice it to say, on Georgia Ave, I had my first encounter with a deer in my path. Of course, I was going at 45 and, while I saw the shadow of -something-, I didn't recognize it as a deer until it came into the range of my low-beam headlights. (The fact that I only have one low-beam working right now didn't help.) The sound of my tires screeching to a halt were enough to send the deer running, but stopping was quite good - I can once again stop on a dime, and probably wouldn't have hit the deer even if it had stayed still. Since the deer moved, I didn't have to stop completely, so I think I avoided burning major rubber. ^^;

Well, I should get to sleep now - I am done with my work shifts for a while (I only have to come in at 6pm for an overbudget store meeting), so I can concentrate on finishing up the ADV project before leaving... or otherwise, I'll have to take it to CA with me to finish. x_x

Those of you who actually look at the gallery may notice that I actually recompressed the Birthday images to about 1/3 their original filesizes - about the same compression ratio the 8otb photos have. I'm trying out Photo Studio for the purpose of actually converting my digicam output to sizes more friendly to limited-space webhosting such as mine. The gallery is not going to have very good image quality, simply because I don't have enough space to accomodate many images that way. I'll usually have higher-res versions of most images on my PC, though. I still need to get a better scanner so I can actually get decent scans of some of my film-camera galleries...

You probably didn't notice, but I also slightly increased the brightness of the text you're reading now. It's a stylesheet modification, so it should affect all the other pages as well. Some people complained about "low contrast" between the background and foreground back when I first put this site up (though the contrast was actually pretty high to begin with), so I decided to brighten it up just a little. Hopefully it's not too bright now - I didn't want to make it a pure white since that would be somewhat painful to read.