I didn’t get nearly enough done today, or so it felt anyway. I didn’t meet my daily bonus goal today, but I am ahead of the curve, so that’s a good thing.
My brother Adam called to see if Amanda and I wanted to go see a play of Beauty and th Beast with him and his girlfriend Renee Sikes tonight or tomorrow night. Tonight there was the possibility of hanging out with Greg and Stephanie Zugrave (whose wedding I shot a few weeks ago) and tomorrow we may be going out with the people from our small group. Well, it turned out that we weren’t hanging out with the Zugraves tonight (although we may in a couple weeks) and nobody felt like going to the play tonight.
I met our intern, Noelle, at The Connection this morning. Unfortunately, since I’m laptopless I wasn’t able to hang out there after we met, but I think we had a good meeting. She’s working on a client survey for us, and she’s been looking into the way a few other design companies contact their clients and such. There are two things I found particularly interesting about the research she’s done into the other design companies. The first is that a lot of them never called or e-mailed her back after she sent in a quote request form, and I know that at least one of them does a lot of print advertising. The other thing I thought was really interesting is that the big dog in town starts their sites out at $2500 and e-commerce sites start at $6000, and they want a several hundred dollar deposit to even sit down and talk to you about doing an e-commerce site. I guess they’re just big enough that they can do that.
Our custom websites start around $1500 and, if you don’t need a lot of customization or anything, we can do e-commerce sites for about half their cost. Good information to know. In fact, it came in handy today when Scott was explaining rising costs to an older client who was complaining about costs.
After work Amanda and I played in the yard a bit. Well, we didn’t play. Amanda planted some lilies while I spread a few years’ worth of ashes in places where we didn’t care whether anything grew or not. I then raked the rest of the ashes into as even a surface as I could. There’s a big black spot in the yard now, but it looks better than a big black pile. The yard’s really looking pretty good I think.
We couldn’t decide what we wanted for dinner and we were out of milk and cereal so we went to the Lowe’s Food and got some of each before settling down to watch Lost, Supernatural and Scrubs, the latter two of which were season finales.
Lost. Man, Lost. What a show. The whole time you’re gearing yourself up for Charlie’s inevitable death. The episode had all the markings of it- he finally kissed Claire, there was a Desmond prophecy and the flashbacks were about the best moments of his life, “a greatest hits” as Charlie put it when he explained the list he was making of his memories. All that happened while the rest of the Lost crew was gearing up for an assault from the Others, only to find out the Others were coming one day early. Oh, and Charlie didn’t die. Not yet. But the ending was another one of those Lost “Huh?” moments.
Supernatural, solid as always. They certainly set up next season, where the Winchester boys will be hunting down escaped demons and working to free Dean of the deal he made to bring his younger brother Sam back. Oh, and it appears they killed the show’s main adversary; the Yellow-eyed Demon.
Scrubs ended with JD and Elliot about to kiss, both of them troubled by their current relationships- JD getting closer with the woman he got pregnant who he later found out lied to him about having miscarried the baby and Elliot struggling with pre-wedding jitters. I think it would be a mistake to get them back together.
Thinking of Scrubs, I just found a site (via Wikipedia) listing the music on Scrubs for all the episodes. It’s got me wanting to find out more about some of the artists. The music on Scrubs is great- it really can give you an emotional connection with the episode. My absolute favorite example of this is Please Forgive Me by David Gray at the end of the pilot episode. Of course, I really like David Gray anyway. Another one is “Hallelujah” performed by John Cale, performed on one of my all-time favorite episodes where a “neat” old lady decides she’s lived a good enough life and is ready to die. Then there’s “Overkill” performed by Colin Hay, where Colin Hay follows JD around and sings to him sporadically throughout the episode. That last one isn’t as emotional an attachment, but it sticks with me.
Off the subject of TV, I read an article on MSN that talks about what you’re like as a date based on the order you were born in. I so don’t fit the oldest child profile, although Amanda does. (We’re both firsts.)
I played a few rounds of the Halo 3 Beta tonight, but I had an epiphany. I don’t play games online to play against live opponents. I generally play to be social with people I know. I get bored playing if I’m not having good conversations with the people I’m playing with. I think I’ve known that for a while, which is why there are times I’ve not bothered playing Gears of War when I knew nobody I knew was on, but the idea mentally vocalized within me tonight. I remember back in Raleigh playing hours of Rainbow Six online with nobody I knew. Since I worked odd retail hours and Amanda and I often had different schedules I’d be on playing with a bunch of British guys throughout the day.
Amanda’s got lots of plans for tomorrow. First we’re eating breakfast at 10:00 with Alison and Trish at Saltworks, which is cool because I like them and I like the food. Then Michael and I are supposed to see about moving the smaller shed out back to the total opposite corner of the backyard. That’ll be fun. I need to mow too I think.
Zach Dotsey