First major project of this weekend: the deck.

Before:

After cleaning and sanding:

Second major project: recovering from installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. “Within hours of its release, Microsoft’s Service Pack 3 for Windows XP began drawing hundreds of complaints from users who claim the update is wreaking havoc on their PCs” I later discovered (source). That was in May, and apparently it’s still not fixed.

A half-project of taking our Jetta in for a flat tire fix provides a striking contrast. “Imagine if everyone provided service like that,” I said to K. “We’d go to pick up our car and find someone in the shop had opened the hood and taken a sledgehammer to the engine: it would look the same, but would never work again.”

Yet another mind-numbing example of the “mystery” of the Microsoft monopoly: crappy products that rule the world.