California state employees had the day off today because it's Caesar Chavez's holiday.

Most of mine went to working on the demo CD, normalizing voice-over tracks and finishing up the modifications suggested by beta testers. The big goal is to get it perfected and out to real potential clients on Monday.

We got a new electric (corded) leaf blower today. Way cool -- very powerful power toy. It blows. And it sucks, because it converts to a vacuum device, so instead of just blowing all the cut grass and dirt around, it can suck it up into a cloth shoulder bag for permanent disposal. Cleaning several inches of fallen wisteria flower petals off the patio took about five seconds with the blower. Now they're all over the yard in the grass and apparently I have to suck them up and get rid of them. Maybe they'll go away if I wait long enough.

Taxes, on the other hand, just blow. Or maybe they suck. No refund, that's for sure. Looks like we owe a couple grand at this point, most likely because one or both of us had too little witheld. It's possible we've also bumped into a higher tax bracket too. We had some income from various endeavors that wasn't taxed at the time, but this is a far larger debt than we expected.

Oh well. Signed up for the Cool Breeze Century in August. This time Shelley's going for the 100-mile ride, and I'll try the double-metric, which is about 120 miles. Time to get training!