Another morning I have slept in until 8 am. I went to bed last night by 10:30 (still can’t seem to get to bed by 10, but I’m working on it), slept pretty well, and still couldn’t drag myself out of bed before 8 am. Why am I so weary all the time? I’m off the antibiotics, finally. Well, maybe it takes a few days for the drugs to leave my system.

I had pretty much decided that I didn’t have time to do my run yesterday, then at 9 am I went ahead and put on my shoes and went out. I didn’t feel like running back up the hill, so I just ran around the house—forgetting about the trench across the road, so I ended up hurdling the trench every time I did a lap. But I ended up having a really good run, and got to work on time anyway. I’ve managed Tuesdays for the past couple of weeks, but then the rest of the week falls apart. I guess the real test will be whether I manage to run tomorrow and Saturday. I’m planning to try to do six miles on Saturday—that’s the length of my last long run. I think if I carry on from there, I’ll still have time to reach 14 miles before the Half-Marathon. I suppose I’d better get out my calendar and re-do my schedule to make sure. But maybe I’ll wait until I see if I actually do a long run on Saturday.

Today is our last Wednesday afternoon event of the library’s summer reading program. I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but we may have a movie. In which case, I’ll no doubt be leaving before the movie’s over, so I’ll miss the post-event crush. I wouldn’t mind that. Summer reading is fun, but it’s also tiring. The shelves have been a mess all summer. Things are settling in a bit as far as staffing, but we still don’t have an OST to replace Lori.

I finally caught the mouse that’s been living in my kitchen, getting into the drawers, making me re-wash everything numerous times and finally move all my cutlery and stuff over to the buffet. I killed it in a trap. I felt really bad about it… I don’t mind when my cats kill mice and other small critters, that’s just their nature, but I am solely responsible for this mouse’s death, and it makes me sad. I wish I hadn’t had to kill it. I need to find another way to keep varmints out of my kitchen. I’ve seen things in catalogs that are supposed to create a vibration or something that keeps pests out. I wonder if they work? They’re not supposed to bother cats or fish, but we’ll see about that. And it’s something else that would be plugged in all the time, I’d have to see how much electricity it uses.

I don’t have anything to take to work for lunch today, I’m going to have to eat at Quiznos, I guess.

Yesterday was exhausting, but a lot got done. Not the new battery meter, unfortunately, although the guy wired up a new line to the house, using braided wire (which should put out less interference) and using ties to hang it about four inches off the phone line instead of tying it directly to it. But both of the meters he brought out were defective, so I still have no meter. Turns out the old one is 12V, and the new system is 48V, which is why the old one couldn’t be used. So they’ll have to bring another meter next time they come.

The trench, however, is finished! Yay! I met Mark in town at around 9:30 and rented the trencher, which turned out to be bigger than I thought! It came with a trailer they hooked up to my pickup—I was very glad that I’d thought to buy a new ball hitch and install it some time ago, so I was good to go. Digging the trench turned out to be harder than we’d expected—the ground between the shed and the woods was very hard and rocky, while the ground in the trees was very soft and steep. The easiest part was up at Mom’s, on the flat pad around her house, but that was the shortest part! We also had to be careful not to cut her water line that comes in right near where the electrical panel is.

Of course, Mark did most of the work, but it was still exhausting, driving the truck and trailer, helping rake out the path through the woods, keeping track of the solar guy and Mark, and just stressing out over everything. But it all got done. Cost $189 to rent the trencher and I gave Mark $50, so $239 for the trench, which seems like a real good deal to me! And now, finally, everything is ready to run a line to my Mom’s place so she can have some electricity, too.

The solar guy took a bunch of pictures and measured the length of the trench so they can plan out the rest of the work. He said they should be able to finish it all the next time they come! Which seems a bit ambitious to me, but hey! He also said he had a friend looking for a cheap system, and wondered if I wanted to sell my old one. I told him he could have the old inverter, DC disconnect, charge controller, and two of the Arco panels (since he said they could only use four, that would be the limit of the system) for $1000. And he could take the old batteries for free, since they’re dead and I just want them out of there. He said maybe they could be recharged. I don’t know if his friend will be interested, but it would be great to get some bucks from the old equipment I don’t need any more.

I should go out and run this morning… it’s already getting late. I’m having a really hard time getting back into my training. I’m even thinking of bagging Long Beach. I can’t really afford the trip anyway. Maybe I can transfer my registration to next year and try again.

I’m just waiting for the solar guys to show up, so I can go over with them what they’re going to be doing today. Then I’ll call Mom to come and hang out here while I go into town, and call Mark to meet me at the rental place, and go rent a trencher so Mark can dig the trench between here and Mom’s. Progress is being made!

The solar guys are coming to install a new battery meter. I don’t know why I need a new meter, they could just hook up the old one. As long as they untie the meter line from the phone line! (I hope they’re not planning on stringing a new line and leaving the old one where it is. I want that line off my phone line!)

As soon as the trench is in, I’ll call Curtis and tell him to get someone out here to run the line between my place and Mom’s ASAP! We’ll also need to move the wires in the circuit box to switch the 12V line back to AC. Possibly I can do that myself, or maybe Mark can do it. And we’ll need to replace all of Mom’s 12V lights with compact fluorescents.

And I need to continue working on all my leaky pipes and faucets. Don’t know how much I’ll get done today, but progress will be made!

The fun stuff will be to burn a DVD of the first two SGA eps of the season. I’d originally planned to just use my DVD Recorder to record them off my DVR. But, for some reason, I couldn’t get the DVD-R to read the signal from the DVR. So, it was off to plan B! I imported the eps to my computer (one at a time, because that’s all I’ve got room for on my laptop) and edited out the commercials in iMovie, put in chapter markers, then copied the iMovie projects over to my iMac (after upgrading it to OS 10.4 and installing iMovie 6 and iDVD 6) and created an iDVD, with fancy menus and scene selections and everything! It’s going to be so cool, almost as good as a commercial DVD! I’m excited, and it wasn’t anywhere near as tedious and time-consuming as I thought it would be. Well, I haven’t actually burned the DVD yet, I didn’t finish getting the iDVD project ready until about 6 pm last night, and I didn’t want to leave the computer on all night—I know from when I was burning my YGO DVDs that it takes up to 6 hours to burn a DVD—so I’ll do that today. That part is time-consuming, but it’s also something I can set up and just go away and leave it till it’s done.

I could set up my DVD-R to record directly from the satellite receiver, I think, and save myself the trouble, but I like having the commercials edited out and chapter markers to make it easy to find what I want to watch, so I’ll probably continue recording this season this way.

I might end up doing my Todd vid on my iMac—there’s tons of disk space on it, over 20 GB even with two full SGA episodes on it. It’s going to be hard to manage the space on my laptop, especially if I’m going to be copying in the SGA episodes each week. One full episode takes about 8.5 GB, and I’ve only got about 11 GB free. As I make more clips for the vid, that free space is going to get eaten up. Unless I’m very judicious in ripping clips, I’m going to run out of room pretty quickly.