All the news that’s fit to print?
Glad we’re focusing on what’s important. Also saw this ad on Facebook recently:
Okay, folks. Horses are not bling. Please don’t do this to your horses.… Read more
Livvie cat wants me to stop typing, hold her in mid-air, and pet her.
Around these parts we refer to this as the Death Knell of Productivity. … Read more
Christmas was marred slightly by one minor thing: a blizzard hit. We had planned to spend the afternoon with friends, stuffing our faces and shooting whatever bulls wandered into our view, but there was already ice falling from the sky by the time we got there. It turned into a meet-and-greet-and-eat-and-get-the-hell-outta-Dodge.
Considering how bad the roads have gotten since then (the whole area’s pretty much been shut down, as thousands of schoolchildren bemoan the fact that this hit during a time of the year that they were out of school anyway), the haste was not premature. … Read more
Funny ’cause it’s true. Picture taken during an actual dog opera performance.… Read more
So last night it was below freezing well before bedtime. The dogs came in extra early last night. They’d go out and screw around and woof at stuff that no one could see a couple more times, but it’s generally speaking that time of year where I let them in around dark and we’re all one big happy family consisting ot two dogs, five cats, and three people. Now, trying to keep everyone in that equation warm is a whole different ball game – especially since we’re going into this winter with concrete floors and still no central heat/air. (That part of the story is a bit long and complicated, and unlikely to resolve itself anytime terribly soon.)
Once again, the trio of space heaters has been deployed: one near the boy’s room (which will very soon wind up in his room), one in the master bedroom, one in the living room. It’s sort of an unspoken thing that the kitchen and my office/game room/computer room will spend the winter operating on the same principle as the control room at the TV station where I used to work: there’s stuff in those rooms that makes its own heat. (That being said, the window in the computer room urgently needs replacing – it’s one of the only windows on the house that we haven’t replaced yet, and it allows a lot of cold air in, enough that I’ll probably start closing the room off at night to limit the “damage” to that one room. I doubt the computers will overheat…
At any rate, I set the space heater in the living room up to run until it heats things up to 76 degrees, and then shut itself off. That’s kind of an academic limit, since it got below 20 last night, and with the concrete floor, it was struggling to maintain 70 degrees in the living room.
Yeah, winter’s gonna be fun in this house. I bet we’re less than a week away from Gabby no longer complaining about her kennel being situated next to the clothes dryer. Right about now, that particular spot sounds like some primo real estate.… Read more
Winter seems to be arriving ahead of schedule. When it gets down to where water outside will freeze, the dogs come in. Gabby is still too hyper to not be kenneled, while Xena just hangs out by my door. I put a space heater in the doorway to my bathroom tonight to heat that “hallway” connecting the bathroom, my room, Little E’s room, and the rest of the house; it’s more of a glorified alcove than an actual hallway. I’d put a blanket on the concrete floor for Xena to sleep on – she likes her blanket, and this is her blanket.
And this was our conversation:
Mrs.: You’re going to put this space heater here?
Me: Yeah.
Mrs.: Are you going to move Xena’s blanket out into the living room?
Me: Nope.
Mrs.: She won’t like that heater blowing right on her.
Me: I’ve moved things around so the blanket won’t catch on fire. She’ll still sleep in the hallway. She’ll be fine.
Fast forward a couple of hours later…
Xena (hanging off the edge of the blanket so the heater blows right on her): ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz… Read more
…to exorcise the pressing issues that are troubling my soul. Hence:
I just sat
Upon an Obi cat
Now he’s a very very very very flat
Obi cat… Read more
Little E got a Super Mario Bros. checkers set for his birthday. We play it a lot. He’s gotten frighteningly good. He plays a pretty mean game – enough that his old man sits there, scratching his head, and mutters “How do I get out of this one?”
Here we see Olivia conferring with the boy on strategy. Donkey Kong and Blue Toad are impartial observers.
So is Puck.
A good time was had by all!… Read more
You can see it in almost every picture here. More caffiene is required!
From the boy who didn’t want to stop wallowing all over his cat to get dressed…
…to the dog who couldn’t be bothered to wake up in the guard shack…
…to …this. For some strange reason I decided to pay in cash today. If the little PIN pad thing is so sleepy that it shows us this, I’m worried that it’s going to try to charge me elebenty zillion quatloos*.
You know we’re going downhill when the car manufacturers give up on poetic names for their products and just put phonetic spellings on them instead. (But I kid the owner of this unfortunate Mountaineer…)
* again.… Read more
I’m not the most social animal in the world, but a quick inventory of the Twitter accounts I follow has revealed that nearly half of them are robots operating on or near other planets. I just like the company of cats (on this planet) and robots (on other planets). (I also like dogs on this planet, just for the record. Soviet-era Russia launching live dogs into orbit and never bothering to return them home in one piece: not OK. Poor Laika.)
I’m sure psychoanalysts would have a field day with that.… Read more
