Waiting for the Fedex guy. And a reminder that Eeyore's Birthday Party is this Saturday.

Afradet.

I guess we're spoiled for speed. I ordered the two Zeiss lenses on Tuesday and here we are on Thursday with me drumming my fingers on the desk, reading about some guy cutting his grass, and waiting for the Fedex truck to rumble up to curb and then deliver my package to the wrong house.

To be fair though that only happens on about one out of five deliveries. But what bothers me is that Fedex always sends along these authoritative looking emails to let me know about the progress of my upcoming delivery. And those emails are always so, so optimistic when it comes to projected delivery times. Read the fine print on the email and you can see that they've given themselves until 8 pm this evening to effect delivery. But in bigger type on the same email they tease me with "estimated delivery times" which I've never seen actually pan out here in the real world.  The latest email predicts that the package will arrive between 9:40 a.m. and 1:40 p.m. But I'm afraid, as usual, that this will turn out to be an administrative fantasy.

Since I bought two lenses and they have a certain dollar value the shipper elected to send them and require an actual signature to acknowledge receipt. Pretty much means someone has to be here until the package arrives.. .. .. and I would like for the package to arrive. Sadly though, B is back out of town, Ben no longer lives here, and we seem to have given all of the domestic help the year (or decade) off. When I ring the bell for the butler no one ever shows up!!!  That means there's only me to sign for my package. Given the choice, and the fact that we live in an hysterically safe neighborhood, I'd be happy to decline having to sign for the package and would take the bet one way or the other about finally getting the box.

If past performance is any indication of future results I can safely predict that the delivery time will be late enough to rob me of the opportunity to go out for lunch, the chance to get by the Blanton Museum before closing, and will shipwreck me onto this island that I call 'home' for the duration of the day. Thank God the refrigerator is working and there's plenty of nice food in it. Thought I saw a big box of fresh, organic blackberries in there. Merits further investigation. .. ... .... And two Cosmic Crisp apples. WooHoo. 

I'd be happy if the delivery person could just leave the box by the front door. That way I could be as irresponsible and foot loose as I'd like. I'm sure, if history is a guide, that the box would still be sitting there no matter how late my return. 

But the enforced captivity has had its upside. I've been on a crusade to eliminate from my Smugmug.com account all of the files that are no longer pertinent to my work or which no longer give me joy upon seeing them again. As of 12:47 p.m. I have permanently deleted about 27,000 of the 450,000+ images that have resided there. It's a start and it's also a bit cathartic. I mean really, who needs the full inventory of all shot images for Dell headshots from 2003? Or 2004 for that matter? Or another folder of building shots from downtown?

And I don't know if this happens to you but I have a tendancy to put folders of current work in progress on my desktop and then forget to trash the folders or move them once I've completed the projects. I just dumped about 60 gigabytes of stuff that's already backed up elsewhere off the desktop and off the system hard drive. That's got to be better for the system performance if nothing else. 

Hmmm. There should be a service that comes and waits at one's house just to accept deliveries or to meet maintenance people and refrigerator repair people so that not so busy but very spoiled people can "get on with their lives..." (See what it did just there? A correct amount of dots in my last ellispse... .. nope, lightining doesn't strike twice. .. . ). 

I'd call the service, "We're waiting for You!" A nice little double entendre. 

And in other news: we're slated to have rough weather here tomorrow and tomorrow evening but it's all supposed to clear out and give us all a sunny and cool day for Eeyore's Birthday Party. I'm trying to decide on my costume because I don't want to be one of those old guys who just lurks around on the outside of things grabbing surveillance style shots, with long zoom lenses, of beautiful young people. It's always better to be immersed in the social milieu in the moment. I think I'll go as a Viking this year. When I was in Iceland I saw a lot of fun sloganing around this: If you can be a Viking, be a Viking! Doesn't have much to do with Winnie the Pooh but what the hell?