Since we bought our car at a dealership in Annapolis, we felt compelled to take it back there for the first scheduled checkup. There are closer dealerships, but Annapolis isn’t very far and it’s a fun place to spend a couple of hours.

We had lunch at McGarvey’s Saloon, an Irish bar with pretty good food. I had their house ale and a bratwurst. After lunch we did a little shopping and wandering around. Mandi found an eye-bleeding bright red jacket and I found a sweet new shopping bag to replace this embarrassing one.

Our street still wasn’t plowed earlier today, but enough people had driven up and down it to pack the snow down pretty well. The Mini has very little ground clearance but made it the 1/2 block to the nearest plowed street and we were free! We just went out for groceries and gas, but it was sure nice to get out of the neighborhood for a little while. Even though the big roads have been plowed there’s a lot of slush and ice all over the place.

Not long ago a plow finally came by. I can’t tell whether it moved any snow, but maybe the salt/sand will get some melting done before the next snow storm starts tomorrow.

The storm ended a few hours ago, and I think we’ve got more than two feet of snow. We still had a couple of inches left over from the last storm in the back yard, so there might be 30 inches out there. Maybe tomorrow I’ll snowshoe out to find out.

We cleared a shovel-wide strip to the sidewalk and around one car. Hopefully a snow plow will clear our street tomorrow – we saw one go by a block away so there’s some hope. It’s supposed to be sunny so maybe that’ll help melt off the cars.

The most serious issue so far (besides stir-craziness) is that the cable and internet went down early this morning and haven’t come back. Hopefully Comcast is working on it, but since the road hasn’t been plowed yet I can’t really fault them. Fortunately, we’ve got power, iPhones, a couple of Netflix, and an expanded Tivo full of suggestions. We shouldn’t get bored enough to try to light anything on fire until at least Monday.

A week or so ago we went to Seattle to visit our friends who just had a baby. I always tell people that Seattle isn’t as rainy as they think – just a bit gray in the winter – so of course we arrived during a rare stretch of heavy rain. I guess I should say that Seattle is not always really rainy in the winter, but might sometimes be really rainy.

Between cooking dinner and meeting up with as many other friends and family as possible, we made it to most of our favorite spots in Seattle. We had dinner at Mashiko, easily the best sushi restaurant in the whole world. We had breakfast at Le Pichet on our way to go shopping at Pike Place Market. We had coffee at Caffe Ladro, maybe still my favorite coffee shop.

We tried a couple of new things thanks to friends. We had coffee at Caffe Fiore in Ballard, where the espresso is possibly as good as Caffe Ladro. After Mashiko we went to Shelter Lounge, which had great beer and bar food. We met some friends for dinner at Mission in West Seattle, which had excellent adobo pork.

We mostly just walk around Pike Place Market looking at stuff, rarely buying anything. For real shopping we head down the hill a street to World Spice Merchants, where we get spice mixes and chai. We also like The Spanish Table and their new sister store Paris Grocery.

That was about it for this trip to Seattle. I wish we’d been able to stay longer and visit with more people. It was a hard to leave, but the monsoon that greeted us on arrival did make it a little easier.

Why I wanted to do this: I got an IRS PDF form from someone. Many of the fields on the form were fillable, but obviously it couldn’t be signed – and the date field also wasn’t fillable. So, I could have just printed it out, completed it, then mailed it, but this is 2010 fergawdsakes! I know that Adobe thoughtfully sells just the tool for the job, but that’s no fun at all.

I knew I could import the PDF into Gimp (converting it into a bitmap) and edit it there, dropping in my signature and whatnot. Next I needed to turn the bitmap back into a PDF. Gimp doesn’t make PDFs, so I saved the bitmap as a high-res PNG and went looking for something to convert a PNG into a PDF.

ImageMagick should have immediately occurred to me, but I needed Google to connect the dots. Here’s the command I figured out after some trial-and-error:

convert -page Letter -density 28.3 input.png output.pdf

Note that the 28.3 part was specific to the resolution of my PNG. Using other values, when I checked the PDF’s properties the dimensions weren’t 8.5×11 – so I just tried numbers until I got close enough. I’d imagine there’s an automated way to do the calculation, but for just one PDF trial-and-error worked fine for me.