After all, what other blog will bring you this particular combination of goodness? Saturday I pulled out almost all of the Star Wars vehicles and other large items I hadn’t taken pictures of or written articles about yet, and did them all in one shot. With a little help from my furry friends.
So it’s May, and it’s the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, and it should come as absolutely no surprise that I’m digging into more of last year’s Great Star Wars Toy Haul for some upcoming pictorial pieces here on the site. And you know, by now, it should come as absolutely no surprise that there’s a great deal of interest in these items…from the kitten community.
And Olivia will be happy to check under your hood while you’re fueling up at “Meows Eisley”:
Stay tuned for next week’s update to see if I actually get any shots of the Falcon sans kittens. 😆 (And yeah, I know, I know, I better just get used to this sort of thing…)… Read more
‘Twas a year ago this weekend that my wife sent me to the local Petco to pick up this lovely little lady…
…and the year since has been full of love, kitty kisses, and, frankly, more spazzy behavior as exhibited in the first “baby picture” than we ever could’ve imagined.
I hang out on video and computer game collecting message boards where my friends always boast of massive hauls from garage sales, yard sales, and thrift stores, and I never have that kind of luck.
Tonight, I can report that I continue to have precisely not that kind of luck. My wife, however, is a different story. Because in addition to finding a really adorable (and, for this part of the country, kinda unusual) stuffed moose for the baby (my baby was bit by a m00s once…), she also snagged this setup for me:
Oh, but wait, there’s more… … Read more
Ahhh, April and May. I look forward each year to April and May…being over. We seemed to escape the worst of the dastardly weather last night, only to have another shot at it tonight – and on Lost night of all nights! Bastards. Still, last night was a fine night to gather all of the living creatures that comprise our family under one roof. Xena had to go in for her annual shots yesterday, and she apparently handled it like an old pro – mainly because it was Jan who took her, and all I had to do was hoist her into the back of Happy Wagon Of Death 2K3. I remember thinking at the time that she’s actually managed to get heavier, and lo and behold, we now have at least 90 pounds of dog guarding our home. Must be all the chicken I’ve cooked for her since her last round of shots. The cats loved having Xena inside, and once the rain was pouring down in not just buckets but large wheelbarrows, I think Xena loved having Xena inside too. These bad-weather family gatherings will become very interesting when the baby arrives…
It’s also raining music…and I’m coming up dry. In one of those cruel twists of fate, there’s a sudden glut of music that I’d love to get my paws on, and here I am in one of those increasingly familiar situations where I consider the change in my pockets my life savings. There’s a new Jason Falkner out (with an eyebrow-raising price tag since it’s a Japan-only import – why in the world can’t this guy get a U.S. label deal!?), the entire Idle Race catalog has been reissued in a 2-CD set (they had quite the career), and the first Alan Parsons Project album has been remastered and reissued. Argh. Add that at least two of these are going to be imports, and the fact that American currency isn’t so much falling as plummeting against, well, just about every form of legal tender that exists on the planet. Except maybe whatever penguins use for currency. If penguins sold CDs that I really wanted, I could so get a sweet deal. In the meantime, I guess I’ll leave a (increasingly worthless) quarter under my pillow and hope for a visit from the Amazon Wish List fairy. 😆
Anyway, those are my musings for right now. There are a lot worse problems in the world to have than the “can’t afford a few CDs” variety, so I’m really not complaining. It’s just one of those funny feast-or-famine things. 😛… Read more
I guess that would mean that I’m actually managing to get some sleep, wouldn’t it? Okay, scratch that subject header from the official record.
Oberon gave me a big scare today, taking off out the door when I got home this evening and zipping off into the countryside. Then he slowly started looping back toward the house and then just stayed still and started crying pitifully – he lost his house! Bearing in mind that a house is a rather big item for a little fuzzy guy to lose, I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of how he came to us in the first place: he ran outside and kept wandering until he spotted the 50-foot tall “SUCKER FOR CATS” neon sign affixed firmly to the top of my house. I went out into my pasture and showed Oberon how he could get back to me, and the little guy wasted no time doing precisely that. These little unexpected excursions scare me because we’ve had him neutered and front declawed – he’s completely defenseless if he takes off out there and gets lost. I’m starting to harbor ideas about screening in at least part of the front porch to serve as an “airlock” of sorts for cat containment purposes. That it could later be used to keep a baby from straying away is just the icing on the cake. Now that he’s back in, he’s just fine and dandy – it’s not that he wants to leave us, he just has absolutely no sense of direction.
Tuesday and Wednesday are supposed to be packed with really nasty weather for us. Somehow it always manages to happen around the anniversary of the ’96 tornado. The SPC has already accorded this one humdinger status, so it may – or may not – be a doozy. Generally speaking, I don’t like being inside the pink bubble inside the red bubble inside the light blue cross-hatched bubble inside the dark blue bubble on an SPC map. It’s not a healthy place to be, and it just doesn’t fit in with my not-getting-pelted-by-hail plans that I’ve made for today.… Read more
Thank you, that will be all.
(Hey, at least pound for pound, it’s less disturbing than that Burger King “Spongebob No Pants” commercial. I’m just a little bit more scarred for life everytime I see that.)… Read more
Olivia and Oberon are enjoying the recently installed screen keeping them from jumping out this open window.
I might actually have something to say tomorrow – stay tuned!… Read more
I’m about to keel over here from exhaustion, so here’s a cute picture of Oberon and Xena:
Actually, no, I’m not just going to leave it at that. My wife and I spent the afternoon at my dad’s house, because we haven’t been to see him in ages, and because we wanted to show him the ultrasound video and personally deliver the still pictures. My stepmother was there too… ’nuff said. Still, it was pleasant enough visit, and I’m hoping we can have an even more pleasant one in the near future. (‘Nuff said.)
A less pleasant part of the day was finding out that my wife’s vehicle, which was in for one more minor repair, now requires one more major repair. The repairs don’t seem to come in flavors of under $600 or so, so I’ll admit that the word “lemon” has been rolling off my tongue quite a bit lately. It was a good deal when we got it, but I’m starting to think this was a set of wheels with one good year of service left in them, and we’ve passed that year. Long since passed. The constant surprise problems we’re getting have completely eliminated any kind of “backup for a rainy day” that we had built up, and when we need to be buying baby stuff and working on redoing parts of the house, that’s just absolutely killing us.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on GreenhouseFX.tv over the past few days, including working up what’s basically a print version of the website to distribute as a printable PDF.
I’m having one of those weeks where I wish I could declare my own by-week and just catch up with the rest of the world later. Too damn tired to even think about thinking about thinking.
Now that I’m done cooking up the food we’ll be nibbling on tomorrow during the day, I’m going to go get…well…maybe all of a couple of hours of sleep.… Read more
Some random, unrelated notes from today:
In what must be the 6 and 9/10th sign of the Apocalypse, I walked into a national chain store in Fort Smith, Arkansas today and bought a Doctor Who action figure right off the peg. Not a special order or anything like that – it was already there. I hadn’t picked any of these up since I got a couple of loose Cybermen last fall from someone on eBay who had already imported them, so I was just utterly stunned. I’m under no illusion that this means that Fort Smith is stepping up in the world; I’m sure they wound up here because they never left the pegs in the Hastings in Little Rock or Tulsa. 😆 One final note: as difficult as it is not to win yourself some snickers or at least weird looks when you’re 30-something and bellying up to the checkout counter with an action figure, a new layer of difficulty is added when the figure in question is a baroque, frilly-costumed Clockwork Man from The Girl In The Fireplace. Trust me, funny looks are guaranteed…and despite that, I hope they get the Ood, Cassandra and/or Captain Jack figures that I’m missing. My trip to northwest Arkansas has been delayed until next week, so maybe I can check any Hastings stores that might be lurking up there. Inasmuch as a store can possibly lurk.
After I went there and went to get dinner to bring home, I stopped to get gas at one of the ubiquitous Murphy Oil stations perched next to Wal-Mart Supercenters. There was a youngish guy ahead of me, I’m going to say 20 or so, who was tweaking. He was extremely agitated, cursing up a storm for no readily apparent reason, and got pissed at the girl working the checkout booth when it turns out he didn’t have enough money for a pack of cigarettes. He then turned to me and asked if I’d buy them for him and I just shook my head. I had half a thought about offering to buy him some nicotine patches instead, but it’s just as well that I didn’t say a word, because he then proceeded to go off on me. Of course, I can already hear the argument that he needs his next pack of cigarettes as much as I need a Clockwork Man, but y’know, if I hadn’t been able to afford that…I wouldn’t have gotten it. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have asked anyone else to pick up the tab for me for something that isn’t exactly – okay, not exactly and not remotely – essential to my continued survival. (I’m sure the jury is still out with my wife about whether or not I needed a Clockwork Man, but hey, at least he’s not gonna damage my health. 😆 )
I’ve finally started getting GreenhouseFX.tv put together. A lot of what I’ve put on there so far is copied over and modified from the original 2002 version of the site. The list of services is still in “flux” – there are a couple of things under “what we do” that I won’t, in fact, be doing. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but hopefully in about a week it will be.
I tried to watch the premiere of Painkiller Jane on Sci-Fi tonight. I’m not familiar with the comic that it’s based on, so I can’t vouch for how faithful it is/isn’t to the source material, but overall I found it just left the taste of apathy in my mouth. Kinda like…I dunno. Dark Angel Minus The Barely-Engaging Backstory.
Tomorrow I’m going to get some dog food, as well as some new cat food that we’re going to see if the kitties like. We’re going to start out mixing it into their Iams dry food, but hopefully we can wean them off the Iams completely, very very soon. The food we’re getting is from an outfit that grows its own ingredients rather than buying them in bulk from, oh, say, Menu Foods, especially since it seems as though damn near everything Menu is putting on the market is either already on recall, or is about to be recalled. The fearsome threesome have checked out just fine so far, and I’d like to keep them that way.… Read more
… 
…