Jetta Maintenance & Christmas lights

Saturday we took my Jetta in for maintenance and got stuck in the waiting area with two of the most obnoxious people on Earth. The guy didn’t know how to walk, constantly shuffling his feet while impatiently walking around, and then he screamed into his cell phone. I seriously thought he was yelling across the room to someone, not saying hello to the person he was calling. His partner wasn’t quite as bad but she was rather loud too and also felt the need to make a public phone call. What is with people? Ever hear of an indoor voice? Ever hear of actually being embarrassed to be on the phone in public? Guess not. I really don’t like talking on my phone in a public setting. I always keep the conversation quiet and short.

After my car was done we ran some errands which included a trip to the crowded post office to send a package to Joe’s parents. Luckily the line moved pretty quick and we were back home in the early afternoon.

In the evening we went back out to check out the St. Charles Christmas Lights Tour. It was … ok. We didn’t hit all the houses, but enough to get my fix. The iPhone wasn’t turning the entire addresses into a click-able link since it would cut off at the period after “St.” in the city name which made mapping to each house extremely aggravating. I should have planned ahead and bookmarked them first before going out; it would have saved a lot of frustration. I will keep that in mind for next time.

One of the houses had music synced to their lights, but it wasn’t done as well as some of the ones I’ve seen online which was too bad. My little Powershot took some pretty great photos, though. There’s a night snapshot option that works well but what’s really annoying is if you switch between the regular and scene modes, the camera resets the flash settings that were last selected in the scene mode. It defaults to the flash being on which is really annoying, particularly when you don’t notice and end up taking a picture. Doh! I don’t understand why it can’t leave all settings as they were last were, but it does the same thing for the timer settings too. So I had tons of fun trying to set up each shot with no flash and a 2-second timer every time I switched between modes (which I did to ensure I got clear shots as I hadn’t used the night snapshot before and didn’t want to use it exclusively) and also look up the next address on my phone (since the park district only provides directions to each address from the same starting point; would be nice if they could also do point to point directions too).

@ Flickr: Holiday Lights Decorating Tour