I was supposed to go ice skating at Nathan Phillips Square yesterday, but it didn’t quite work out as planned. When I drove home on Friday night I noticed one of my headlights was out, but I decided to postpone changing it until the morning. When morning came ’round, I popped the hood and tried to pry out the old bulb but I couldn’t get the spring out of the way to pull it out. I’d never actually changed the bulb on the Ford before, but I always did that sort of thing on my old Volvo and I figured it couldn’t be any more complicated on this car. After all, it’s nearly 20 years newer and a domestic make.

Man, did I struggle with that silly spring. It’s hard to see anything because it’s inside a well, but I could not for the life of me disentangle the spring from the electric wiring. It was stuck!

Meanwhile, everyone was already skating at the square, but it’s the weekend and if I put this off for too long I’ll never be able to find a shop that’s open. With a big sigh I drove off to the mechanic shop that I went to for my last insurance inspection. They were too busy and I felt foolish even asking for help with something as easy as changing a silly bulb. I’m a DIY person at heart; I loathe the “helpless female” image, but I just wanted to get this done and out of the way. My drive to ground school is over an hour long each way and through the boondocks — the last thing I need is my available light source halved.

Finally, I was able to find a place that wasn’t too busy and one of the mechanics managed to get the spring apart from the wiring and change the bulb, but not without some teasing. I think he didn’t want to believe this was a one-off request, but he didn’t charge me so I kept my retorts to myself.

By the time I got to the skating rink it was nearly 1 o’clock, so I didn’t hold out much hope that the crew of people I was supposed to meet were still there. No matter, I got out my cameras and shot to my heart’s content in the brilliant sunshine of Saturday afternoon. The funny thing is, last night I found out they were there until after 2 o’clock, but I didn’t see them! The rink’s not that big, but I guess it was a combination of people bundled up incognito in winter clothing and my not paying attention.

I watched this little guy on the right for a long time; I was silently cheering him on while I was taking his picture. He fell down countless times and just kept right on getting back up again. I could tell sometimes he felt defeated, sprawled on the ice surface while everyone skated around him, but eventually he’d pick himself up and keep going. His persistence was inspiring.

Bravo!

It was (relatively) warm and I could’ve stayed at the rink longer, but I figured I’d pop into Eaton Centre or Best Buy and look at some hard drives while I was nearby. My PowerBook’s hard drive has been running at near capacity despite regular archiving onto CD and DVD, and my 120GB external drive is completely full.

Herein lies the rub: Best Buy did not have a single external drive with FireWire. Not one. How could this be?!?! I’ve had my PowerBook for 2.5 years — it’s OLD by computer industry standards and it has both FireWire 400 and 800. Well, I wasn’t going to settle for a USB drive, especially since I only have two USB ports and most of my peripheral devices are USB (printers, card reader, etc.). I have a lot of photos and video, which are large files and optimally I would rather archive to a FireWire 800 drive for those. I was also going to move my entire 16+ GB electronic music collection off to an external drive and run iTunes from there. USB 2.0’s transfer rate is just too slow for my type of usage.

With FireWire my choices narrow considerably, basically leaving me to choose between LaCie products. There’s a $60 spread between their USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and 800 (D2). I was very tempted to get the 800/D2 which is $300, but I compromised and bought the FireWire 400 version that will tide me over for the time being. I know this isn’t the end of my hard drive purchases, anyway. When I start getting into RAW photo files, it’ll ramp up my need for storage and by then the 800 version will be cheaper. There aren’t any LaCie rebates floating around right now, so I’m going to keep an eye out for a new product release because that usually means rebates for older models are coming.

I’m sure those last two paragraphs put most of you to sleep. And probably the whole first section on car maintenance. What can I say? I’m not very girlie. When I hear talk about nail polish or skin products, *I* fall asleep.

And speaking of winter, it’s SNOWING again. It looks beautiful but man, I do not want to drive in it!