Day 569

When I took the dogs out this morning, I almost stepped on a giant snake that was lurking just outside the back yard fence. Judging from where the snake was located, I would guess that it spent a fair amount of time inside the back yard as well. I don't like snakes. There are over a dozen varieties of snakes that make their home in the park behind our house. At least a third of these snakes are poisonous and I can never remember which ones are harmless and which are to be avoided. With the unpredictable behavior of dogs around snakes, I don't take any chances and do my best to avoid them all. Now that I've seen this huge snake so close to home, I'm going to be thinking it is slithering around in the bushes whenever I'm outside. This was one thing I liked about living in Alaska when I was in high school. The state has no snakes.

The first thing I noticed when I went to the office this morning was that the main switch that controlled all the lighting had burned out. None of the lights would come on at all. This wasn't much of a problem in the morning when light was streaming in from the window on the East side of the room, but as the day wore on, the room kept getting darker and darker. I knew I was going to be forced to fix this thing soon because it would be hard to write the blog in the dark.

I had made an appointment to get a haircut today anyway, so my outing quickly expanded to a haircut and a search for a very weird switch that I had installed years ago and didn't think was available anymore. True to form, I went back to my expensive stylist instead of going to a barber like I had vowed to do the last time I got a haircut. Equally true to form, something as easy as changing out a light switch turned out to be quite difficult. I never did find a match for the old switch assembly, but I finally found something completely different that I thought might work. I wasted the rest of the afternoon trying to get the wiring hooked up properly, and after some initial trial and error mistakes, the lights are on again.

When I was at that networking breakfast yesterday, one of the guys sitting at my table said that foursquare was really good for small businesses, because they could add their own coupons for specials that would show up whenever somebody checked in at their business. I'd been trying to avoid foursquare because I don't like things that involve badges and competition. Against my better judgment, I joined foursquare today, because I didn't want to be ignorant about it and I do happen to have several retail clients that might be interested in the coupons. Right away people started signing up as "friends." I was perplexed. Why would you need friends on a GPS location app? One of my clients told me that the whole point of the application was to make it easier for you to find your friends when you were out and about. Hmm. What a novel idea. When I'm out and about, I just want to get my business done as soon as possible so I can go back home again. Maybe I'm not part of foursquare's target audience.

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