Today was Saturday and a very quiet one at that. The first Sunday of each month in the Mormon Church is Fast Sunday — we abstain from food and water for two meals in a twenty-four hour period and donate the money we would have spent on food to assist those needing help. Nina and I go out to dinner on the Saturday before Fast Sunday. Since we’re now on the morning church schedule, our fast day now goes from after lunch on Saturday through lunch on Sunday (and, because the first Sunday was New Years Day, our Fast Sunday was postponed until tomorrow), we went to lunch today rather than dinner. That and picking up a couple of things from the grocery store were the only reason for us to go out of the house. So we went downtown about 11:30 and were back home by 1:30.

There was an important reason to be home this evening. Nina wanted to watch the NFL wildcard playoff game between New England and Jacksonville. The game was being broadcast on ABC — but the ABC affiliate here had a problem for most of the day and were unable to broadcast a signal. That meant no signal on the satellite, on cable, or over the air. Fortunately in the late afternoon the problem was fixed and the game is now on TV. Nina’s downstairs sorting through letters and cards and rooting for New England.

I had a power supply from an old computer and decided to convert it to a lab power supply. There were just a few parts needed, so I picked those up from Radio Shack yesterday and spent a couple of hours with soldering iron in hand (burning myself once in the process) doing the conversion. I plugged it in, turned it on, and watched a coil go up in smoke. It was fun, but in the end all I had was some junk to throw in the trash. I’ve got another one and will try this again soon….

While I was at Radio Shack yesterday, I saw on sale an electronic learning lab. It looked quite interesting, so I bought it (thanks, mom and dad, for the Christmas present funding!)! I also had some fun putting together a couple of small projects. That was a lot better result than working on the lab power supply!

Finally, I did some cleanup on our weblogs. The metadata in the header records needed to be corrected and get the right keywords and authors in the header records. That’s been done, so eventually the search engines like Google and Yahoo will have the right metadata. That’ll be good. It was a nice, pleasant Saturday!