Month: June 2006

If there was ever a site that totally lived up to its name, it’s Cute Overload. Oh my goodness, how freakin’ adorable! Lisa and I spent plenty of time awwing last night at the sickening sweetness of it all. I need to go through my photos and submit a couple.

But the whole thing was kicked off because of this… I can’t even come up with any new ways to say cute… this cute clip:

And just in case you missed the previous one making the rounds, another sleepy kitten:

Gates is stepping down. That’s right, the man himself is letting go of that crushing grip he has on the software development out in Redmond. I almost didn’t believe it, but Slashdot is already being flooded with lame jokes and pointless pretentions of intellect in response.

I’m not gleeful in the sense that I view Gates as an enemy; but after reading a recent article that pointed to him as one of the forces holding back the creative flow from Microsoft, I can’t help but feel good things will come of this.

Kottke put it best. I’m not going to talk about it at all, and I’ve done a fairly good job of ignoring it. I recommend everybody else following suit. There is absolutely no reason to waste anytime on trolls – no matter how big and nasty (or grotesquely anorexic as the case may be).

I am currently watching Mean Girls. This wouldn’t be so embarassing, except that it’s like the tenth time I’ve seen it. It’s like totally bad candy that’s rotting my teeth, and not even all that good tasting, but I don’t care because, well, Lindsay’s slamming. There are some really funny moments, and some realistic high school things, but overall it’s just… awkwardly humorous? At least for someone of my advanced years.

The one thing that really bothers me about the film is the two hot chicks making out… wait… no… that’s definitely not what bothers me. At least, not in the traditional sense. In a word, it’s Rachelmcadams. She looks cute in other films (at least the trailers I’ve seen), but give me a freakin’ break. The woman is my age, and she’s playing alongside girls a decade younger. AND IT SHOWS!!! Please, it’s bad enough when you fill a high school with 30 year-old actors *COUGH*90210*COUGH*, but when only one of them is significantly older… that’s just kinda sad.

Goodbye Jessie. We miss you already.

Shadow is still going strong, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get him a new companion – but Teddy and Jessie will always remain the original goobers:

Today is about a week shy of the 1 year anniversary of Teddy’s death.

Jessie fought pretty hard since we noticed the stone. We had to put Teddy to sleep not much more than a week after the issue first developed. Jessie lasted over a month. But in the end, there were just to many factors pulling his system in one direction or another. He barely ate the past couple days and was too weak to move today. I can only hope that my efforts to save him did him more good than harm. We love and miss both of you guys.

The sun has finally broken out completely, and the winds aren’t too chilly. After mowing my lawn this morning, I decided to take the piggies out for a little romp out front. Jessie’s on his last legs, so I’m desperate for anything that might give him a boost. While they haven’t been bounding with energy, the little goobers have found a nice patch to cozy up together and munch on some grass and dandelions.

There really isn’t much hope for recovery. His eyes have been slowly closing. He keeps his head down towards the ground. He’s not really eating much of anything anymore. I’m sure we’ll have to make the call soon – I’ve been debating about it most of today – but I just want to give him as much of a fighting chance as possible. At least Shadow’s been trying to be as good of a companion as Jessie was to Teddy at the end. We’re worried about that little bugger, too. He squeaks more and more whenever we take Jessie from the cage.

I already miss him, and he’s sitting right in front of me.

I do! I do!

Seriously, I do. And I might just get my shot. You see, from time to time Lisa and I would catch a couple episodes of the sometimes-irritating-but-still-fun game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Since I’m pretty good at trivia – my brain is filled with more useless facts than you can imagine – I had fun and often did as well as the best contestants. I even got all but one right during one guy’s run at a million bucks. Lisa – being far more ambitious than I – kept telling me I should audition. Sure. Whatever. That’s likely.

Well, what do you know, Lisa saw information for auditions and signed us both up. This past Monday night, we went into Manhattan and… passed. Wait, before you get all excited, it doesn’t mean a whole lot… yet. You start off taking a 30 question test with about 100 other people. Assuming you pass that (best guess I heard is that you need to get 26 correct), you then go on to be interviewed. In a couple weeks, you get a postcard telling you yes or no. If they like you, you’re put in a pool from which they select contestants. In other words, no matter how well you do in all of this, you aren’t on the show until you’re on the show.

I won’t go into much detail – as I’m sure they like to pretend it’s very secretive – but it was a fun experience. The test was pretty much what you would expect from the show – a lot of questions of varying degrees of ease, largely dependent upon whether or not you happen to know a subject. In case you haven’t seen thee show, what I mean is that the questions aren’t very in depth, so if you’re familiar with the subject you should know it. It’s much easier than Jeopardy, but can still throw lots of curveballs. I was in the 6:30 group, and was among maybe 15-20 that passed the test and moved on for interviews. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but while waiting to be called up I’d say most of these little get togethers with producers lasted about 3 or 4 minutes. I was up there for at least 10 or 15. I’m thinking they liked me. Lisa’s experience was almost exactly the same (she was in the 7:00 group), right down to having one of the longest interviews.

The only thing that bothers me now is that we could have signed up together for their special couples week, and almost would have been assured a spot on the show based on our performance (there are far fewer applicants, and even fewer that have both people pass). Instead, we’re going back in a couple weeks to try out again together – hey, we could use the money. But there’s no guarantee that we’ll do as well the second time around.

Anywho, I am excited about the prospect, but I’m also terrified that my first question will involve something stupidly easy that I often screw up – like trying to tell Renee Zellweger, Joey Lauren Adams, and Jewel apart…

With the the Great Flood apparently nigh here in the Northeast, now seems to be the perfect time to find out just how dry our basement is.

It isn’t.

Alright, it’s not like we’ve got buckets here and are bailing water out for fear of our very lives. But I still had a bit of panic on Saturday. While cleaning up some things before Jeff and Sara swung by to head out to see Pearl Jam (my 10th show – more on that later), I noticed a small puddle in the middle of the semi-finished portion down below. I looked around, and figured it must have been seeping in through a crack – but there wasn’t much water and I figured we could just keep an eye on it.

Unfortunately, when I showed it to Lisa, we found more dampness around the floor below one of the windows. That would be the window that I wisely stacked the many boxes of CDs under. Oh yeah, I am sooooo smart.

You’ve never seen someone tear apart cardboard so quickly. There was that sudden realization that all of my indie CDs – including many expensive, hard-to-find ones – as well as pretty much all of my favorite bands, were on the bottom. And the boxes were looking more and more soaked as I dug through them.

Amazingly, nothing appears to be damaged. It was a whole lot of dampness going on, but no soaking. I still had to setup some places to stack all of the CDs, since keeping them in the wet cardboard could not help at this point. Once that was finished – and I breathed a slight sigh of relief – I finally pulled out the dehumidifier Lisa’s Dad gave us and set it on extra dry. And it had been going full blast ever since. I empty it twice a day, and tonight it still managed to overflow (the automatic shutoff is broken). I have to admit that I’m really amazed at how dry it’s keeping the basement – there isn’t even a hint of dampness around the stacks of CDs.

Unfortunately, this victory does not change the fact that I must clean out the gutters ASAP!

We haven’t received any voicemail in a few weeks. I got kind of lazy about looking for the indicator on the phone, but after awhile I just forgot to check. Today I heard the phone ring while I was… indisposed… and it turned out to be Lisa’s parents. Yet there was no message. Hmm, time to look into this. So I finally log into the Sunrocket account to check – ELEVEN FREAKIN’ MESSAGES!

Somehow the indicator got turned off, and we haven’t known about any of our messages going back to the middle of May. That included two notices from Whole Foods about the herbal extracts I ordered, a few from Lisa’s family, a couple from mine, among others. Ain’t technology grand?

Well, now I’ve set it up to e-mail and IM me when a message comes in – I looked for a smack me upside the head option, but couldn’t find it.

We sent out most of the invitations after this past holiday weekend. There are still more to go out as I didn’t have some friends’ addresses – heck, I’m lucky if I know most of my friends’ last names. Anywho, the first reply already came in today – I guess this thing is really going on.