This being my birthday month (*wink, nudge*), I had to take a trip to the LTO to renew my license this morning. Since it only took my brother less than an hour (yup, drug test and all) to renew last year, I had high hopes that if I leave at 9, I’ll be able to get my new card in an hour, run to the grocery, and then get home early enough to cook lunch for dear hubby. In fact I proudly told him not to come along so he can work while his wife “took care of everything”.
Sadly, my well-orchestrated plan was not to be. (First of all, I woke up at 9 so I was already running a bit late to start with.) I left at 9:30, got to LTO by 9:45, finished the drug and medical test by 10, filed the license renewal form by 10:30, then waited. And waited. And waited. By 11:30, they hadn’t even called me to the cashier yet so I called Arn and told him that the chances that I can get home before lunch is rather, well, bleak. I finally got called to Window 6 at 11:59, only to be told that my license will be ready after lunch. (And it was, I got it at 1pm, on the dot. My card was just unfortunate enough to be in the pile that had to be set aside due to lunch break.)
Lesson: wake up early. It turns out that Calvin was there by 8, no wonder he finished early.

Just for posterity, you may want to read the blog entry I wrote after renewing 3 years ago.

Thanks to the rah-rah from good pals Carlo and Terry, I’m now an InDesign convert — a mere 12 hours after they convinced me to give it a try. This is actually a big deal because I’ve been a loyal Freehand user since the Aldus days. I only started enjoying MX a few months ago so I didn’t care about InDesign until our print producers requested that I use it for the magazine’s next issue. I’m taking some time to learn it and I can’t believe how much I’ve been missing, gee. InDesign makes it so much easier to control how characters kern, how paragraphs flow, and how text runs across columns. I know Quark Express can do that, too, but the thing I didn’t like about Quark* and the old Pagemaker was that I couldn’t draw vector shapes with them. Freehand, meanwhile, was a blend of Illustrator and Quark, but it had limitations. For one, I often have to manually space type to control how it looks. It’s really for graphic work than for publishing, and even then, colors do not translate exactly as I’d like them to in different applications. InDesign might be the key to solving those limitations. I could be gushing too early but I have a feeling that this program will take a beating from me in the next few months.

*not this Quark — this one I like, hehe! (: