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Category: Should We Talk About The Weather?
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Another day, another tornado watch
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
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Sleeplessnesslessness
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
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Cold snap
I guess I really haven’t been paying attention to the forecast (amazing how my concentration on such matters slips when I’m not actively working around it), so stupid me, this cold snap caught me completely by surprise (and here I was thinking my friend Kevin was crazy for complaining about where spring went on the DP forums). To give you an idea: it’s already close to freezing outside, the wind is blowing ferociously outside, and Xena’s in for the night, something which hasn’t happened much recently. I’ve also got the game room lights on to warm the place up, and it’s time to play!
Or at least it was after I rewired the RF output for the Colecovision. A couple of nice trades have recently brought some Colecovision goodness into my collection that I haven’t gotten to try before, including working Super Action and Roller controllers, and a few games I hadn’t really expected to acquire anytime soon. But the console itself was out of commission…because I’ve got kittens who like to grab dangly cables and pull. One new RCA cable later, I’m basking in the 8-bit goodness (and badness – one game which shall remain nameless until the review pops up was a real stinker!). It’s becoming clear that, in light of the next new addition to the family, the current system is going to have to be rethought rather drastically, and rewired rather drastically too. One possibility I’m looking at is taking some more-or-less briefcase-sized plastic tubs with hinged lids that I already have, and setting things up so consoles or computers can be stored that way, and (barring adding on something like an expansion or voice module) left in the tubs and plugged into some kind of patch bay in the game room. Machines that get the least play will be stowed away like this, and only a few frequent flyers will be left out on the shelves as they are now.
It’s a sad day when even the game room’s gotta grow up a bit, but just think, I’ll eventually have someone else who might want to play a round or two with the old man. 😀… Read more
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Tornadic dramatic
So I stayed up as long as I could to watch the weather; right around the time I was fading fast, storms were just firing up and flashing instantly into severe status along a dry line in eastern Oklahoma. I went to bed but tried to stay at least semi-awake, forcing myself to lay in a semi-sitting position, writing a DVD review on the ever-handy Mobilepro.
Half an hour later, when she awoke to the sound of the tornado siren just down the hill from us, this is where my wife found me dead asleep, lulled into unconsciousness by the magically relaxing stereophonic sound of two purring catboys, with the Mobilepro not only still open, but still on, waiting for input, and displaying an entire paragraph – a surprisingly coherent one – that I don’t remember writing. (I’m going to credit the cats as co-authors on this one, just in case.)
As we watched hail pile high on Xena’s doggy bed on the deck (fear not, Xena was let in before it even started raining), we reflected again on the effects of one piece of video editing equipment on our lives. If I was still working at the station, I probably still would’ve been at the station when this happened, leaving my pregnant wife at home to deal with God only knows what kind of weather (and apparently this was a reasonably close call), three skittish cats, and a nervous dog. Pregnant or not, she’s put up with enough years of that sort of thing.
That said, the old school tie is still there, because practically on reflex I turned on the TV and went straight to Drew’s weather. 😆 While I did that, nervous Olivia skittered across my Mobilepro keyboard and erased the entire DVD review. (Thankfully, there’s this thing called Undo…)
Back to bed for me, this time without a computer in hand.… Read more
Log cabin fever (it’s a remote possibility)
This blog is about to become a chronicle of my descent into madness. I couldn’t even get out of the driveway to go to work this morning, which is just as well because the road our house is on is a solid sheet of ice. They’ve plowed it, but didn’t sand it – what’s the point? All that does is just expose the ice. Might as well have left the snow there so at least there’d be something to get some traction on. Anyway, yet another day where I’m not making any money. Yeesh.
I do have some cute new kitty pictures for ya though. Isn’t that what this blog is really supposed to be about?
Guess who’s keeping the bed warm for mommy? How about…everybody? (Well okay, the dog’s not up on the bed. But she would be if she could.)
The beast awakens.
The beast asks his big brother to handle that bright flashing thing and then goes back to sleep.
Speaking of cute kitties, there’s a newly-re-processed, higher-resolution version of Olivia Vs. The Daleks here for your amusement – and this one doesn’t even go to another video when it’s done! 😀
Watched the very, very good bonus features on the Doctor Who Inferno DVD today, and did some more work on the massive, nigh-insurmountable task of converting our entire music review section into a database.
Thanks to everyone who’s ordered stuff through theLogBook.com – the first quarter revenue is in and I’ve turned around and spent the lot of it. 😆 Your patronage is appreciated – don’t stop now, please!
I’ve been following the saga of Boston vs. the Mooninites with great amusement. Keep in mind, I don’t even really like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but the hysteria surrounding this whole things has been amusing and frighteningly enlightening. I’m almost convinced that the city officials who are going balls-to-the-wall with the pressing of charges and so on are just doing this to try to justify their initial reaction. In the end, the joke really is on them – and it’s created the kind of publicity that Cartoon Network couldn’t have bought if they had originally wanted to. Now that it’s News, don’t expect any arm of the Turner octopus to let it drop out of the headlines any time soon. Maybe I’m sympathetic to Turner because I’m left in goggle-eyed admiration of what they managed to pull off here (without even trying!) in the name of promoting a TV show, but I’m also less than sympathetic to Boston for just not getting it. Yes, I’m sure they spent money mobilizing their task force of terror…but they’d probably get a lot more points for laughing it off, bragging about how well they responded, and asking Turner Broadcasting to reimburse them for the “exercise.” This is kinda like prosecuting someone to the fullest extent of the law for toilet papering your house.… Read more
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Oberon’s Big Adventure (or, The Lion In Winter)
It all started when I leaned out the back door to let Xena in and snap a couple of pictures:
Next thing I knew, somebody had escaped back into the wild!
… Read more
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Stewing over the weather
Latest update at about 2am:
Xena tromping around in the snow doesn’t even leave footprints that go all the way to the ground.
To mark the occasion, we’re making stew. It smells really really good – better than the snow, according to Xena.… Read more
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Snow day!
After quite a few near-misses, we’ve finally gotten some winter weather here. It’s not half a foot of solid ice or anything like that…but it’s bad enough. Because of all the near-misses, the highway department completely blew this one off, and didn’t start sanding streets and highways until it was already bad. It took me nearly two hours to get home because highway traffic wasn’t moving any faster than 35mph.
Highway 71 North, which is already one of the most treacherous highways in the state, if not this part of the country, was worse than usual – just trying to go in a straight line at not-unreasonable speeds, I was fishtailing all over the place – and I even had my trusty camera running! Check out the mildly scary video here.
This is what my car looked like when I closed down the office and went outside today – it was around 2 in the afternoon. … Read more
