I wasn’t completely satisfied with the still shots I got from the Oklahoma Aquarium video earlier today, so I re-ripped the DVD that I dumped the raw video onto. I think there’s a slight improvement.
Last year for little E’s birthday, I took him to the Tulsa Zoo. They had monkeys and elephants there, so he was happy, but I found the place kind of underwhelming. Funny story: this time a year ago, the Crapquest, erm, sorry, Mapquest directions to the Tulsa Zoo were so horribly and amazingly and utterly wrong that we got seriously lost and accidentally found our way to the Oklahoma Aquarium. If I had only known how hard the OK Aquarium rocks compared to the Tulsa Zoo, we would’ve stayed lost and gone there instead. So this year, the whole family went to hang out with the fishies.
Dinner is cooking in the dashboard oven. Seriously.
Why build up excess heat in the house and run up the electric bill? It’ll take a bit more time than the oven would, but it’ll get the job done by the time I need to go get the little guy from daycare.
Or maybe you’d like a hot dog instead?
(Don’t worry, Xena’s doing just fine. Also note nice new window on the front of the house, replacing the one I accidentally blasted a hole through with a projectile thrown by the lawn mower…)… Read more
Meet the latest addition to the pantheon of critters hanging around my house. This one is a first though – we have a new semi-regular who has no paws, but does have wings. We haven’t had one of those before. But this one’s kinda pretty – and potentially very useful on the earning-one’s-keep scale. … Read more
So, Xena has given up on her career of chasing bunnies out of our yard. She used to keep us awake all hours with her quest of vengeance to keep dastardly bunnies away from the house, but evidently our guard-dog has moved into semi-retirement. Or she’s got union-guaranteed bark breaks or something. Whatever. The point is: we suddenly have a healthy population of big brown bunnies roaming our yard.
It started with one particular big (and I mean big) brown bunny, who I named Stu after I noticed he wasn’t going anywhere. That way, he was Rabbit Stu, or at least he would be when Xena got back to the business of chasing and, occasionally, catching and dismantling big-eared yard intruders.
Obviously, it didn’t happen. Soon Rabbit Stu was joined by his friend, Flufferella and Little Johnny (sort of a miniature version of Rabbit Stu – I’m sure you can work out what’s going on here). I wouldn’t be surprised if Flufferella is expecting little Buffy sometime soon. The point is: there are now as many bunnies, and I mean regular recurring cast members, as there are cats. And mom and dad are as big or bigger than any of the cats. There are many copies. And they have a plan.
Xena, what gives? Do we need to find you a trainee dog? Did these little cotton-tailed bastards chase off Todd the Possum and Mystery Cat? Do we need to make like Aussies and build a rabbit-proof fence? Please let us know. Soon. Before Buffy is followed by little Ignacio.… Read more
Last night, the super-nasty thunderstorm that had been dropping tornadoes all through Oklahoma went right over my house, complete with a very big, very obvious rotating wall cloud. Which, of course, my wife took my son out on the back deck to see, since it wasn’t even raining at our house. I’m all for giving him an intellectual understanding of bad weather so he’s not afraid of it, but… wait a minute. Who’s this knocking on my door at 3:30 in the morning? “Dad, I’m scared.” Um… yeah. Couldn’t get him back to his own bed without a major meltdown until 5 in the morning. Good show!
But other interesting phenomena happened at our house last night as well. I don’t think he was deposited by the storm either. He was lured by the smell of dog food on the back deck. (The reason dog food hits the back deck is simple: Xena hauls off her dog food bowls to points unknown for fun. It’s gotten expensive and a bit silly trying to replace all the bowls. So… dog food on deck!)
Of course, it wasn’t our dog chowing down on dog food. It was someone all three cats were very eager to eat, erm, sorry, meet.
…our two stars of the show for today!
For the past six months, I’ve had a problem plaguing my Avid video editing system: direct output from my other PC was a no-go. Running that same PC out to a DVD recorder, and then playing the resulting DVD-R back into the Avid, was okay. But direct recording, which is much more desirable? Nope. For some reason, the video signal was arriving weak and out-of-phase – the color was nearly 180 degrees out of phase, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to resolve the issue, even after re-seating/swapping cables, swapping out distribution amps at the source, and basically rewiring everything. This is a big item for me to do without, because I record a lot of video for the site this way (including Phosphor Dot Fossils video pieces).
Lo and behold, the first time Puck gets behind the Avid and starts playing with the wiring, the problem is fixed. Seriously. The video quality is just beautiful. He wouldn’t even have gotten back there except that I had removed some obstacles so that I could get behind the machine. Maybe if I let him get back there again, I’ll wind up with HD.
The sad thing about this whole story is that the only reward I have for the little guy is taking him to the vet in a few hours so they can snip his boy bits and, after much delibration, his front claws. He’s literally torn apart some of our furniture, just doing routine scratching. This was a tough decision, because that aside, he’s actually very judicious in his claw use: as much as Evan has been getting a bit rough with his feline friends of late, he’s accumulated all of two or three scratches. Puck normally just looks at me as the boy is trying to drag him away by one leg, as if to say “Help! I’d rather not shred your kid here.” For an ex-stray, Puck is a very gentle cat, with both Evan and the other cats. I think he knows he’s got a better gig here than in the big field behind the TV station. Unlike Obi, our other adopted stray, Puck shows zero interest in returning to the outdoors; obviously he’s not feeling any nostalgia for checking transmitter tower lights. If he keeps embarking on successful rewiring projects around here, though, I may start bringing Puck to work with me. Not to drop him off where I found him, but to lend his expertise to the engineering department.
The standard instructions for a cat who has surgery in the morning is to cut him off from food and water at 10pm the previous night. The key words here again being “ex-stray,” this has proven amazingly difficult. That little cat can get into just about anything. He’ll also eat just about anything. Dirty dishwater? Check. Fig newtons left out on the counter? Check. Who knows, by 7 o’ clock this morning, we may have to postpone the snipping of his outboard gear on account of not being able to enforce the food/water embargo.… Read more
… 
… 
… 
… 
… 
…