Have a heart

This week I did something a little different. Wednesday was our training day at work, and we finished a bit early. There happened to be a bloodmobile at the airport that day, so I took advantage of the extra time to pay them a visit and donate blood. It was the first time I had ever done so; I never weighed enough in high school or college to be eligible, and after that there never seemed to be a convenient opportunity.

The bloodmobile doctor told me that I shouldn't do any strenuous exercise for the next 24 hours, which tanked my plan for doing yard work on Thursday. Instead, I spent the day wrestling with Adobe Illustrator, which I am using to produce the graphics for a board game that I'm in the process of designing. I've used Photoshop enough to be familiar with it, but I had never used Illustrator before (though it came together with Photoshop as part of the Creative Suite). It took me the entire day just to get the game map and a few of the card designs finished.

The image on the left is an example of one of the cards. It may appear relatively simple, but it took me about two hours to get the heart design looking the way I wanted it. I haven't even started on the design for the backs of the cards yet...

Anyway, on Friday I ran an errand to turn my DVR in to the cable company, because it has been malfunctioning in such a way that it is unable to access the on demand programming that I should be able to watch, in exchange for a new one. The service person gave me a newer model that has more memory (yay!) and at the same time reduced my monthly rate (double yay!).

Unfortunately, after I came home and hooked up the new DVR, I ran into trouble trying to activate it. The automated activation service didn't work, though that was initially my fault for connecting the cable wrong. After I fixed the cable, though, it still wouldn't activate. Two separate customer service people tried to activate it, but it remained stuck on channel 1 with no picture.

They scheduled a technician to come Sunday (today) to fix it in person. However, I got a call saying that the person who was supposed to make the service call didn't show up for work, and I had to reschedule for Tuesday. They gave me a $20 credit for the inconvenience, so I'm not too upset about it, but I am sorry I'll be missing Cosmos tonight.