Men Plan….

Today went nothing like what I had planned. It was too cold to run off and take pictures – Penny’s ears don’t like that. Penny then looked at our reminder board and told me “I’m supposed to yell at you to send in the rebates.” We have $120 worth of rebates. That turned into about a 2-hour task filling out the forms, cutting out proof of purchases and UPCs, copying the completed forms and stuffing envelopes.

Since I had some computer software out I decided to do another job that I had been putting off. We have a subscription to Norton Antivirus that we can apply to 3 computers. I have it on my laptop and the desktop. Penny’s laptop came with a trial version of Norton that has expired. I would simply load her laptop as the 3rd machine under our subscription.

That sounds simple enough – until I went up against Windows Vista. When I tried to load my Norton Antivirus 2006 (good for Windows XP and 2000) the computer informed me that it was not compatible with Vista and aborted the process. It did suggest I go to the Symantec Website to see if they had an update. The Symantec web site did have the solution – It downloaded a trial version of Norton 2008. This process took about 25 minutes and I had to do it twice because I found the old Norton firewall would not let me install the new Norton. I uninstalled the old and went through the download process – now I was at about the hour and a half point in this process. I still didn’t know if Symantec would honor my older version subscription on the 2008 version of their product.

I reached the part of the install where they asked for my product key and I punched in the 2006 versions key, hit continue and crossed my fingers. The computer went away for a long time but finally came back and said I had 286 days left on the subscription. Thank you Symantec. At least their computers work properly.

Mid-way through the installation process I made lunch. We are eating soft food because of Penny’s dental work so lunch was chicken and rice. Soft food or not, while I was chewing, one of my gold crowns came off. There is nothing like chomping down on a hunk of metal.

I called Dr Woo and got worked in to get the thing glued back in place. It was now past 1 PM. Penny and I planned an efficient trip into town. First the dentist, then Catholic Social Services to drop off the food we bought for them. We weren’t sure where their offices were so we drove along First Street until we found them. Next we stopped at a NAPA parts store to get a spark plug (remember the spark plug from yesterday?) for the lawn mower. Finally we hit Jo Ann’s for Penny to pick up stuff for the Christmas stockings she is making. We got back home around 3:30.

Penny was twinging so we decided to relax. We watched two shows on the DVR.

So – no progress on the shed, the lawn or the Christmas decorations today. Maybe tomorrow. Then again, we can always run off and take pictures.