Planning Ahead

I don't know yet whether I'm going to be working at Manito-wish; they haven't said yet, but he did say he'd let me know no later than Wednesday, which is tomorrow (or technically today). So there are a few ways this summer could go.
-If I get the Manito-wish job, I'll quite likely work the boys' half of their summer schedule, which is four weeks and ends in July. Then I think I'll come back home and work on my fonts for the rest of the summer. If possible, I may also try to get that Hillman warehouse job, and do the fonts after work. The manager has shown reservations about hiring me for a four-week shift, but this one would be five or six, and it also wouldn't include the end of the year and Christmas like the other one did. The reason I wouldn't probably work at Manito-wish all summer is that I wouldn't be going on any trips the second half - only female counselors go with the girls. All I would get to do is take canoe trips on my free time. Which is excellent, but if I'm going to be in the dishroom all day the whole time, and only getting paid something like $208 a week (though with free room and board), I think I'd rather come home and get paid much more and have an opportunity to work on fonts as well.
-Alternatively, if I somehow don't get the Manito-wish job, I'll search right away after I find out for a job copy editing for a local paper, and if I find nothing, I'll fall back on the warehouse. The warehouse is pretty much my all-purpose backup plan.
-Another plan revolves around my fonts. I want to, before the weekend, finally get all the members of the Newt family in working order. I've figured out how to use FontForge for the most part, though I still haven't gotten it to output fonts that Windows will use. I've asked tech support about that, and they were very timely with their last response, so that shouldn't take long. With any luck, I'll have some money coming in from that during the summer. FontForge is a pretty great program, and free, so I think I'll be working with that a lot. Though, TypeTool is a bit more user-friendly, so I think I'll use FontForge mainly for the technical bits and for the brute force things - it has some wonderful features that automate things that take a long time, like making accented characters and then kerning them. Oh, I just heard the sound of you falling on the keyboard bored to death. Let's move on.
-I plan to FINALLY finish that snake cage I've left alone since eighth grade. All I really need is some Plexiglas, and then I can pretty much call it finished. There's an All-Ohio Reptile Show in Columbus on August 16th, just shortly before school restarts on the 27th. So I would finish the cage before that, and then buy* a carpet python there. I think it would be far and away best for me to talk to reptile enthusiasts in person. Websites are all right and all, but I've recently been coming to the conclusion that they really can't compare to talking with a real person. Ever since I retired from the xkcd forums, I've found that getting out in real life is much more satisfying than typing messages to faceless computer people. When you think about it, it makes sense. Only in the last ten years has interaction that involves not physically seeing the other party become so common. Before that, there was telephone and mail, but those were generally a fairly subordinate way of finding out information, and if you had questions you visited the nearest expert on what you wanted to talk about. Parallel to that, in the department of friends, only in that same decade has it become possible and prominent to find out in depth about someone without ever actually seeing them. Pen pals were a fun diversion, but ultimately never ranked as high as friends you talk with. Compare these ten years with three million that humankind has devoted to making friends via actual contact. The internet is an extensive way to make friends, but not a natural one, and internet relationships typically are nowhere near as deep as those with real friends. I'm not saying internet friends can't be real friends, but usually if they start becoming real friends you go meet them in real life (or, affectionately, "meatspace" - if anyone uses that with me in any way besides sarcastic, I will smack them). To me, someone I only see through a small rectangle will always seem a bit unreal. Adding to this, exchanges by spoken language are much more efficient than exchanges by text. Again, they have three million years over the competitor. They're also much quicker and you can communicate in a much more varied way, using your full arsenal of techniques - gesture, inflection, and even drawing pictures if you need to. Text communication has, at best, emoticons. You've probably gathered that I didn't come up with all of this thinking about why attending the All-Ohio Reptile Show is better than visiting herpetologist forums online. I've actually been thinking about this for quite a while, and now I've finally ended up writing it down. (Which is slightly ironic, actually, that I wrote it on my blog.) But to return to my main point, I want to go also because I can pick out a snake based on more than a few pictures, and I can buy stuff without having to wait for shipping. That's one reason I really prefer buying stuff at stores, rather than by the internet - shipping. Can I get a "witness" on that?
-This has become quite the rambling post, and I'm up a lot later than I expected to be. I'll just leave everyone with one final question: did anyone notice that I replaced the four-year-old straight quote in this blog's title with a much prettier curly one? I'm surprised it took me (the typographical purist) so long to do it.

*Actually, I seem to recall either Mom or Dad saying that if I successfully built a cage, they would buy the snake for me. This deal was of course made upwards of four years ago, before I had any significant source of income. It would be entirely reasonable now to insist that I buy it. After all, what else am I gonna do with all this money I earn?