Slide presentation graphics, Nestle Freze and McDonald's greetings

Okay, time for some glad things:

1. I have been spending most of my time at work making slide presentations for the lecture class I am teaching for the first time. This is the part I enjoy most about teaching: making instructional materials. That covers making slides and handouts; deciding on the format, fonts and colors; customizing animations and making graphics to accompany the text as example or illustration. As always, I make the illustrations using the drawing tools available in whatever presentation creation software I'm using at the moment (OpenOffice 2.0. nowadays if I'm working at my PC at work). This week I found pleasure in making two slide graphics that I'm extremely proud of. It was fun making the graphics mainly because it was a challenge trying to figure out how to assemble basic shapes to form a figure/object.
2. Last Friday, I bought Nestle Freze/Granita (minus the bits of coffee jelly, an additional Php16!) at the Mini-Stop convenience store just outside campus to have with my McDonald's McRice chicken burger (my lunch that day). Ahh .... there's nothing like the stimulating taste of coffee and an ice-cold drink/dessert on a hot day.
3. You know how here in the Philippines, you're greeted (yelled at is more like it) by an eager-to-please employee at the counter with "Welcome to McDonald's" every time you enter a McDonald's fastfood joint here and then there's an appropriate farewell when you leave the place as well. For me it seems to be done too automatically for the greeting/farewell to sound sincere. Take for instance this morning's episode when my father and I decided to eat breakfast at the local McDonald's while waiting for my mom to have her hair trimmed at a nearby beauty parlour. I went ahead to order our breakfast while my father attended to something in our car in the parking lot. I was about to approach the counter when I suddenly remembered that I needed my father's senior citizen card to get a discount. (The usual store policy is for you to present the card before you place your order.) So I turned on my heel and proceeded to walk out of the place. Just as I was exiting the doors, I heard an employee call out after me "Thank you for coming to McDonald's!" I couldn't help chuckling at that once I got outside.