It took me three and a half hours to drive to DC this morning. I-95 was pretty much a parking lot from Fredericksburg to the mixing bowl in Springfield. A very wet parking lot (thankfully, I was going slow the whole time – I’ve got that flakey braked Stratus again). I had a lot of time to sit and think (I’m flying solo this week; my usual carpool partner is working at home this week). I did some mental math; bumping my hourly pay rate against the miles travelled and the time it took to do it, I earned a little over one dollar for every mile I plodded through. At least I got something out of it, you could say?

In any case, it wasn’t my favored way to start the day. At least we’re still ahead on the project work.

On the way home, though, I poked my nose into Best Buy, and found an open-box 4GB Sansa Clip mp3 player for 40 bucks! We picked up a Sansa C250(2GB) on sale for Colleen the other week (actually, we were shopping for one for Mary, but Colleen ended up claiming the new one and giving her little ipod to the kid); and it plays a lot better with linux than the ipod does. Now, I love my ipod, but it’s frankly a pain in the arse to reboot to windows to get a semi-reliable means to load files onto it. Sansa players load with simple drag-and-drop under Linux. It’s cool, it’s tiny, has a built-in FM tuner, and it makes a nice spare music box to haul around.

Otherwise:

Check out Colleen’s LJ for a rundown of the really cool Girl Scout activity she and the girls did this weekend at the Virginia Marine Science Museum Virginia Aquarium.

Andrew’s baseball game got postponed due to rain this weekend; of course, they didn’t call to tell us until after we’d left in the morning. I guess we’ll have a double-header one of these days.

Rest in Peace, Mindy; my first cat. She shall always be the little kitten who managed to survive being suck in a groundhog hole for most of a week with a big cast on her broken leg. Mike’s parrot Jacob. The cat in the lego suit. I gave my big fuzzy brown cat a big hug last night. She even let me.