In the last few days, my crushing burden of side work has largely fallen away. In fact, this whole week has wound up being less hectic, more manageable, yet productive at the same time. And, I’ve had the time — and peace of mind — necessary to accomplish a few personal things on my lengthy list of stuff to get done before our big Road Trip to Motown™, scheduled to kick off in just one more week.

Of my two side jobs, one of them is done, and the money is in the bank. (There will be a little more to do once I get back from my trip, but for now, all is well.) On the other, I’ve gotten completely caught up — and while I haven’t heard back from the client about anything else they might need, I’m in no mood to remind them, if you know what I mean. At my day job, things are proceeding on schedule, and the launch of our redesigned website nears. Things are going well, and there’s just enough work to keep my schedule full for the foreseeable future, without going insane.

So, Apple and I have started making plans and doing prep work in the final days leading up to our trip. Last night I changed the oil in GTO, for example. After entering the work in my maintenance log, I had a chuckle at the realization that although the recommended time interval had gone by, there were probably only about 600-700 miles on the oil I disposed of. Oh well — if it weren’t for our little journey northward, I’d have left it in longer…but I like to start a 3,000 round trip on fresh fluids!

I updated the firmware on our Garmin nüvi GPS, then copied about six hours of audio books to its built-in 700 MB of memory. I also entered some “Favorite Locations” into its address book, including my home in Michigan, the Korean restaurant Apple and I always visit up north, and some other locales. The Garmin has a cool feature whereby you can search for food, shopping, lodging, etc. within the vicinity of any city you choose, so I looked for Asian restaurants around my home in Michigan. I couldn’t believe how many results came back — most of them for Thai restaurants, like a place called “Siam Spicy” near one of our favorite shopping malls. Hmmm, it looks like we might have some more restaurants we can try.

Of course, there’s still lots to do yet before the trip, including:

• Wash, polish & vacuum the GTO (Sunday/Monday)
• Apply racer’s tape to the front of the car
• See if I can find a cheap camera bag to hold my new camera
• Test-fit our luggage in the car’s abysmally small trunk
• Copy work files and email to laptop computer
• Pack clothes, Xbox 360 and computer equipment
• Prepare a bunch of CDs for listening in the car

That’s just the stuff I can think of right now. Fortunately, it looks like I may yet get away with having a free weekend here, assuming I don’t hear anything back from any of my clients. Most certainly, I’ll use any free weekend to my complete advantage in getting this prep work done.

In other news! I’ve been using some of my newfound free time lately to enjoy the single-player campaign of Halo 3, the final game in the iconic Xbox shooter franchise that has thoroughly taken the definition of “hype” to levels never before explored. Not that the games aren’t fun — they are, in my opinion — but the mega-hype has made being a Halo fan nearly an embarrassment. Anyway, the third and last game in the Halo trilogy is the first to debut on the Xbox 360, and it’s a great piece of work. It doesn’t look as amazing as Gears of War, but it’s usually got a lot more going on at any given time.

The story is what really drew me in. I’ve read all of the Halo books that flesh out the story behind the mysterious, extraterrestrial rings, alien Covenant and soforth. Tonight, I reached what is probably the penultimate level in the single-player campaign. I’m playing on “Heroic” difficulty — the second hardest — and it’s been just the right mix of challenging and exciting, although right now it’s a bit frustrating because there’s just so damn many undead alien Flood beating my brains out. But I’m close to a major revelation in the plot, so I press on. For those who are into the story, playing the Halo 3 campaign is like watching a great movie on opening night, cheering out loud at those pivotal moments when the hero sticks it to the enemy. I can’t wait to finish the campaign so I can play it again — except this time, cooperatively with friends, and on “Legendary” difficulty.

Tonight, Apple treated me to dinner at Uno Chicago Grill, a new pizza place here in town that I’ve been wanting to try since I heard of its arrival. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I’m sad to say that Apple did not, in part because the item she ordered — a panini sandwich — just wasn’t very good. (I tasted it, and didn’t really like it either.) Their deep-dish pizza, though, was very good, as was their calamari, and Apple liked the vegetable soup too. The outing was a very welcome celebration of the recent reduction of my ridiculous workload; next week we’ll have something more in tune with Apple’s tastes before we leave for Michigan.

This morning I did some in-depth study of the new phone lineup Verizon Wireless announced for the holiday season. After looking at the new Samsung Juke (a “switchblade” phone), the LG Venus (essentially another facelift of the Chocolate) and the LG Voyager (an impressive iPhone lookalike), I’ve decided that I still want the Motorola RAZR² V9m. Heh, yep. It’s just my kind of phone. I also noticed that Verizon is making some changes to their plans and policies; most notably, you can now change your plan or services at any time without incurring a mandatory 2-year contract renewal. Yeah…it’s about time. Also, they are changing their data services so that everyone has access to Mobile Web, even without a data package — but rather than deduct from your minutes when you use it, you will be billed as much as $1.99 per megabyte of bandwidth you use. That seems like it could add up very fast, so Mobile Web will probably continue to be of dubious use for me. Wireless service is expensive enough as it is.

Lastly, I recently upgraded WordPress (the software that powers this site) to the latest version, which now natively supports tags. Tags are essentially topical keywords that can be assigned to each individual post. They’re similar to categories (i.e., “Randomness,” “Rants,” etc.) but more specific. Over time, you can look at what’s called a “tag cloud” and see which topics I post about most often, and get a list of posts by tag. If I find these useful, I’ll eventually add tag support to my site design — for the moment, they’re invisible to you.

That’s all for now.