Disconnected goal

Today is International Women’s Day, and my watch gave me a rather unusual way to mark the day (image at left). Naturally, I embraced the challenge, because I’m competitive in my own way. But I didn’t for even a fraction of a second think it had anything to do with anything. That’s good, because it as a busy enough day as it was.

I had several errands to run today, and I planned to take on my watch’s challenge along the way. But first stop was a revisit.

I needed something that the computer store I visited last week sells, and their website said they had one. I arrived at the store, scanned-in using the Covid Tracer App, as I did all day at every stop, and set about finding what I was looking for, with little success. While I was wandering around I found the sort of monitor stands I was looking for (though with a glass shelf), in a spot that had no monitor stands (the spot they were in was marked for an entirely different product).

I finally found someone to ask, showed them the product I was looking for (I had it pre-loaded on my phone), and they pointed to it for me (but didn’t actually lead me there…). They did, indeed, have the one the website promised. I also picked up two of the monitor stands (see the photo at the bottom of this post).

Checkout was torture: Only one person running the till, despite it being in the busy middle of the day, and each transaction seemed complicated. As someone I know would say, they need better systems.

My next stop was The Base, the shopping area not far from my house that’s also home to Te Awa mall. I parked at one end and walked to the other, figuring it would fill most of the 20 minutes I needed to meet my watch’s challenge. Yeah, well, I guess I walk too fast: I reached the shop I was headed to before I reached the halfway point in the challenge. Oops.

So, I kept going, ultimately walking into the mall and back, and then going into the shop—with yet more minutes to walk. I went through the shop hardly stopping, but that was mostly because I couldn’t find what I was looking for. In that way, I eventually completed my watch’s challenge.

I took my purchases back to my car, then moved it closer the next shop because I expected to have a trolley full, and I did. Mainly, I wanted the wood screws I couldn’t get at the other home centre the other day, and I did.

I went to a few shops hoping to see the monitors and printers I’m interested in, but they didn’t have them—in one case, despite their website claiming otherwise. That was one of the main reasons I’d planned to go to The Base (not just to meet my watch’s challenge), and it was rather underwhelming.

Once I got home, I set up the monitor stands, which are really well designed, and made so much sense: They’re under the window, so the glass let’s the light through, which a solid shelf doesn’t, and that’s important to me.

I also used that device I picked up at the computer store to rescue the files on one of the hard drives in my comatose Hackintosh (so I now have all those files, which I didn’t before). However through doing this I found out there has to be another hard drive in the Hackintosh’s case. A work in progress.

At least I completed my watch’s International Women’s Day challenge.

The image up top is a screenshot of my phone's explanation of the challenge. The montage image of my desk shows the more recent version at top (the one from my post the other day), and today's version is at the bottom of the montage. Two of the plastic baskets that I used as supports for the shelf are now under one monitor are used for storage of things I'm not using (like my webcam, phone charging cable, that sort of thing). I'll use that shelf elsewhere, so it won't go to waste.

Update – July 18, 2021: I did, indeed, use the white shelf that had been my temporary monitor support. When I put hanging shelves in my kitchen, I used that shelf.