odds & ends

I’m going to be part of a Consumer Focus Group in about an hour. I rather expect to be told not to talk about it, afterwards, so I may as well say something now while I can. The screening questions were mostly about high-tech cooking gadgets. Should be an interesting couple of hours-- and I get paid, too!

My physical therapist kicked me out today. Reevaluation showed that I’ve met most of the therapy goals, and made big progress on the others; she says I’m at a point where I can continue to rebuild my ankle strength on my own. I’m still in considerable pain, sometimes-- but 8 weeks ago I was taking high-dose ibuprofen during the day and Darvocet at night; now I’m only taking over-the-counter stuff as needed, so I’ve definitely improved. Guess I get to start mall-walking, just in time for Christmas shopping!

Crashed my hard disk Monday night. Managed to power back up with the restore disk without losing any data; noticed that the restore operation had reloaded my system software, so I downloaded and reinstalled the update for that. Felt rather pleased with myself for coping, and it was all a good reminder to backup constantly during NaNoWriMo.

Focus group fun

When we moved to St. Joseph three years ago, Patty, the realtor selling our old house in South Bend, referred us to a realtor here. We just didn’t click. I had asked for a realtor comfortable communicating via email, but she didn’t check her mail frequently or respond quickly; didn’t seem to be comfortable with me looking at realtor.com and asking for information on specific properties; and when we spoke by phone, our styles just didn’t work together. So I told Patty, and she got me another referral, to a realtor in another office, and everything was fine.

Guess who was in my small, intimate focus group today? Yup, the realtor I fired. Her name is unusual; mine isn’t, and we had never met in person, so I’m hoping she didn’t make the connection. If she did, she was classy enough to not show it.

As I expected, I can’t tell any details about what I saw, so I’ll just say... I saw prototypes of a number of things that I wouldn’t bother to put in my dream house even if money were no object at all.. and one gadget that I want NOW, can I steal the prototype? It was lots of fun, and I got paid, too!