It’s been a while since I posted.  Last week was the summer workshop that I use as my excuse to give myself one week a year when I’m allowed to be really selfish and not help people around the office.  This isn’t to say that I’m not asked, and sometimes I do, but since I’m co-herding 35 people for a week from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm, it doesn’t leave me much time to pay attention to, say, your problem.

So, let’s play catch up, shall we?

Last Friday, I drove to Houston with my parents (I love them dearly, but we were barely out of town before we had to stop for a bathroom break) in order to take my passport to the Brazilian consulate to get my visa.  I had two versions of the form: one with smiley picture (the one the guy liked) and one without, as I had been warned that sometimes they don’t like it when you smile in visa photographs.

I know that they do it for a specific purpose, i.e., they want to make it as annoying as possible for Americans to get Brazilian visas because it’s that annoying for Brazilians to get American visas, but it’s not my fault personally.  If you don’t take the application yourself, you have to pay $20 more, and the local visa service wanted $110 to do it for me.  So, I spent the $20 on gas, $18.30 on an express mail envelope, and saved myself $91.70 by taking it myself.  It has been pointed out that this is a false equation, but it’s my logic so shut up.

For the record, my appointment, which was on the books for 11:05-11:15 am, lasted exactly 3 minutes.  It took us longer to sign in to the building.  My visa showed up a week later and, considering the hoops they make you jump through to get it, it’s not the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen–and they put it in my passport crooked (I know, petty).  On the other hand, I now have unlimited access to Brazil for 10 years (even though my passport expires in 3).

In order to make sure that I was in Houston on time for the appointment, I left the house at 7:30, which means that Ray and I were not in line to get the HTC EVO 4G when it came out at 8.  I started calling around when I got home, and most of the places that I called were nice enough not to laugh when I asked if they still had any.  How was I to know it would set a new one day sales record for Sprint?

We started thinking outside the box and were rewarded for our efforts when we discovered that WalMart had received their shipment late and still had some left.  Ray called with the news and I raced over to meet him, only to find ourselves enduring one of the slowest customer service experiences ever.  It wasn’t the guy’s fault — as it turns out, Sprint’s system was way overloaded with people trying to buy the phone, however, while we were standing in line we were treated to a one man show from a guy who clearly never had a thought he didn’t express out loud.  To as many people as possible.  We endured him for about 45 minutes before he finally announced, “I guess I’ll get out of your hair now,” at which point we realized that he’d been hanging around just to have someone to chat to.  Sad, really.

As for the EVO itself, it does kind of rock.  The warnings about battery life turned out to be true, however.  Usually, by the time I get to work I’ve lost 10% of battery power.  I’m learning to remember to turn off the wifi when I’m in the car, and the Bluetooth when I’m at work, but even on its worst days (and there were a lot of worst days) my Samsung Instinct didn’t suck up power like that.  Back in the earliest days, I could even travel overnight without a charger — there won’t be any of those with the EVO!  Not until someone comes out with a longer life battery.

Last week was mostly a blur, between the workshop and whatnot, and the weekend was blissfully uneventful.  And now that it’s all over, I theoretically have time to work on other things but why start now