Me? Ummm…I'm working late. And you?

 Talk about a double fault situation…

oh man.

this is how you start out a week.

1. i am hours away from submitting my novel to the amazon contest. i have some thoughts on that, but they will wait.
2. i left my work badge at home this morning. the train was over 30 minutes late, which meant that tons of displaced people crowded on with me. and i have a package to sort, which, awesomely, i picked up the incorrect bundle of items in order to mail. though, in the midst of all of this, my ebay auction for visual studio .net 2003 is up to over 100 dollars with a day to go.
3. the real reason today is rocking my pants off:

i sent a package, a box full of negatives, to scancafe about 6 weeks ago. in trying to avoid spending time doing things that other people can do better, i decided to find a service that would scan my pictures for me. the photos on this site have been scanned and taken over years and years. i simply don't have the time now to do more. and there are thousands of pictures of my family i would like to have in a digital form.

so i dug and poked and looked and finally found scancafe. 6 weeks ago, there was virtually no reviews, no press, no nothing for them. after looking around for an hour or so, i had turned up one single forum thread. it was glowing, but it wasn't quite enough to make me feel comfortable sending all of my family's photos to india in one fell swoop.

so i bundled up about 250 negatives and sent them over a couple of months ago. and today, i got notified that i could review the scans.

let me back up a tiny bit and explain what's happening:
you take all your negatives, your slides, your photos and send them to scancafe (who is located here in the bay area). they take that package, combined with a bunch of others and ship the bigger box over to india, where they have an office that does nothing but scan. then you get to pick which photos you want to buy and they send you your negatives plus dvds of the scans. the prices are good (19 cents for slides, 39 cents for a printed photo) and they scan at a great resolution.

so yes, i was nervous about irreplaceable items getting sent halfway around the world. but they swear up and down that they won't lose a single photo. in the past couple of weeks, they have gotten some great press including lifehacker and kottke.

looking at the preview pictures today, i am blown away. they look amazing. they look like postcards in some cases. (i placed the order this morning for the dvds and it seems that once you do that, you can no longer review the pictures you are ordering. i snagged a couple of them though they are not the most beautiful ones by any stretch.

petunia — i know you have hundreds of prints in boxes and i cant imagine we are the only two. i can't recommend doing this (using them or someone else) enough. my day is made. i'm sure ill post more once i get them back and send even more boxes to them. i couldn't be happier. scancafe=awesome.

and here are the samples i snagged:

bet you didn't know this even existed, did you? yeah, that's carter and tripp rocking it with david copperfield. commence with project envy.

a little more recent, with the carter and i opening christmas presents.

just about the first thing i do after turning off my alarm in the morning is click my tv on. i leave the tv on channel 4 the night before so i only have to press one button to have the local news helping to perserve the effect of the alarm initially jarring me awake. this morning i actually said "no!" out loud when my alarm rang. and i switched on the news and the first words i heard from one of the anchors was "it's a bit unsettling out there."

i hate being tired or cranky when i wake up in the morning. i never hit the snooze button and try to force myself right out of bed as i think the snooze, like heroin, if tried once could quickly lead to my downfall. before i moved here, i didn't need an alarm when i was in NY. i'd sit straight up in bed in the morning with a smile on my face, all rah-rah, i'm in new york! it's a great day! i'm getting up! time's a-wasting! this didn't last once i moved here. it's nothing against new york, i guess, just against the daily drone of being a worker bee and getting up when it's dark outside, which just seems plain unnatural.

wow. i barely even remember posting that (at 6.57.35am) this morning!

i am psyched about getting a new land line phone plan today. a friend from gilda's had mentioned that verizon was offering a new, unlimited long-distance inclusive plan so i called to ask about it and ended up getting it with no hassle at all. it actually costs a dollar less than my previous plan, which had no long-distance! and voice mail, too, which i didn't have before. i ——- love a good deal.