Not really a good friday, but a decent enough one

So anyway, Friday rolled around yesterday, as it usually does that time of the week, and the owner of my shop had decided to let us all off at 2:00 pm. So at 5 minutes to 2, just about everyone else had left, or was picking up their things and getting ready to leave, and what does the guy do? Hands me a quote to write up and email for him. Gah. Fortunately, it wasn't a big quote, but still...its the little stuff like that which grates on the nerves. I mean, he couldn't he had handed it to me 20 minutes earlier or something, when I literally had nothing to do? Its almost like sometimes he *doesn't* want me to leave on time.

This morning, I went by my old job at the Community Center and enjoyed their annual spring breakfast. It was nice seeing a few familiar faces, and I got to talk to one of my co workers for about 20 minutes. Plus, the food was good too! Oh man, how I missing working there. Really, I do. The only downsides were the pay, and the hours, heh.

After that I drove over to the Lafayette Iraq War Memorial. The funny thing was, although it was something I wanted to photograph, I couldn't for the life of me figure out just where it exactly was. So much to my surprise, I came across it completely by chance. A bit of backstory -- Lafayette is a sleepy, hilly, semi-rual upscale suburb of San Francisco, located some 20 miles east of the city itself. A man who owns a hillside next to the BART station and the freeway decided to erect one cross for every soldier killed. 3000+ crosses, and growing. Especially troubling was the fact there was a pile of crosses lying in the dirt off to the side, ready to be installed shortly. Not even the builders of the memorial are hopeful for a quick resolution to this conflict. Photos can be seen here.

I'm *this* close to a new computer. And it looks like my new computer may end up being an old one. Specifically, a Mac G4, Mirrored Drive Door model with Firewire 800 natively installed. Why not a new one? Because $2.5K is just a tad too much to drop on a computer. I figure I can one thats a few years old, but still has plenty of muscle and ability to upgrade. I still don't know if its the best buy possible, but I want to distance myself from the Microsoft Empire as much as possible, and I don't want to take the time to learn Linux (then of course hunt around for decent graphics applications that will run on it). If I'm going to get more serious about my graphics work, I need a better machine. This one will at least last me a few years until I (hopefully!) start making more money, and can afford something up-to-date (a near oxymoron in the computer world anyway, the things are out of date once you take them out of the box!).