My normal weekend activities, though it seems I am busy enough, are really worthless as exercise. On Saturday my pedometer recorded only 3908 steps — with deliberately scheduled walks throughout the previous week my average had been well above 10,000. One hour at colgaffneyis military drill really did not do much for the total, though it was pleasant enough and it was good to see basil80 settling in as Captain.

After the drill we went to c_nocturnum‘s for “camp drill”, an opportunity for everybody to get together and work on various activities not directly related to the specificly military part of colgaffneyis, e.g. costuming. My plan was simply to work on the organization’s newsletter. For this I had brought along my ASUS Eee 900 PC. Unfortunately, a couple hours in the trunk of our car, on a cold Minnesota winter day was too much for it. It would not boot. Even after I let it warm up for an hour it would not boot. I tried again in the evening, giving it several hours to warm up. Still no joy. Perhaps some of the unsupported customizations of the software I had made had come back to bite me.

On Sunday we went to church early since there was a business meeting about finances. The parish is doing OK. Considering current economic conditions, we are doing really well.

After church we took our son Tom out to lunch. It was too cold for a walk, so we went for a long drive to a restaurant — across both St. Paul and Minneapolis and the near NW suburbs, to Three Squares, one of the local Blue Plate restaurants. This worked out quite well, but we probably will not go back much unless we need a long drive or are otherwise in that part of the metro. No complaint about the restaurant directly, but the menu was very similar to its sister, the Longfellow Grill, which is much closer to home.

After taking Tom back to his group home, and mia_mcdavid back to our house I went out again. I did a walk of about a mile outside, and then more around the perimeter of the St. Paul Menards, where I looked around for quite a while, but only bought one drill bit. I then went to the Gaeltacht Minnesota fundraiser at the Dubliner pub. I left that early, because my Blackberry was showing messages about trouble at my employer’s computer systems. In fact, by the time I got home and was able to log on, the problems had cleared themselves up.

In the evening I went back to work on the Asus Eee 900. I was able to download the installation iso image of Easy Peasy to one of my other computers and burn a DVD. I was then able to install it on my Eee 900. Still a couple annoyances, but I have a working laptop again, and I did it my way, not the manufacturer’s.

By including extra walks in the afternoon I was able to manage 10,409 steps today, a big improvement over Saturday.