30 percent off? Laaaaame. ( OK, in this case, it's lamé, like the gold shiny fabric, but still....)

My dog has chewed a smiley face into his bone. See? (I thought that was kinda cool, actually...)

Mr. Easy Lai? Seriously? This is from an Acer monitor help file, so it should be legit...

That, on the left, is a WEEEEEE-TINY frog. Our yard, apparently, is replete with these tiny little frogs. Aggie Ring on right is for scale. Yep.

I love full moons...

...because theater 8 nine!

It has amused me more than once to see that in this particular phonebook, MENTAL and MIDGET are the two headings... That _can't_ be entirely chance...

Is that not cute? He just passes out all cool like that...

I need one of these...

so... I'm in the study a minute ago, and on Facebook, posting about the asshole terrorist in Dalla-- wait, that's another story.
So Nicole's singing in the living room, and I hear "shoo fly..."
and the next thing I hear -- in my half-deaf left ear-- is
"Lobotomy".

(same cadence as "don' bother me", it was....I'm not a moron...honest)

This is a rack to hold our tupperware. But to me it looks like (with the exception of the hole in the top middle) Darth Vader's helmet.
No, really.

Very relaxed right now. Laying on the couch in our new house, just decompressing from a long day.

I'm currently VERY much enjoying the lack of other-people-around-us sounds. And being in _our_ house is awesome.

Everyone doing good?

So...flew back from Vegas tonight. Took off from DFW for Killeen just as all the fireworks were teeing off... And the pilot kept the plane at 4000 feet for 30-some miles, so we saw thousands of fireworks. Amazing, seriously. Won't happen often, since there's about a one-hour-a-year window to fly to be able to see it...
Anyway. If you can, do it. High point of the evening...

Those are chickens in a mural at the DFW Airport Popeye's Chicken, covering each other in tabasco. Genuinely creepy, when I first noticed it... At least the suicidal catfish in the same mural seemed dumbly happy, not manic...

Ok... Pretty cool. But I still don't buy that the slot machines are random...

Well...cross that off the drinking checklist

Ok, so... Caesar's is cool...

View out the window of our room...

off to Vegas for the first time... Staying in the Monte Carlo until the 4th. Give me a call or an email if youalre around; maybe we can work something out....

So I'm working on a computer that crapped out the other day, and I put the hard drive into another chassis we got at a police-seizure surplus auction, k? And today I'm working on drivers, and I see "TAE_BO" listed as the contents of the drive... And this was in it.

Odd...someone was watchin' Tae Bo when the cops bust in...

K... Something seriously wrong with a pig enjoying a big ol' bowl of pork rinds...

Only at Walmart; a Christmas tree in the back of a truck, the day before June....

If you can't read all that...

Buy one, get one free, or 2.99 each.

*boggle*

what?

Word of the day: triboluminescence.

Get a bandaid, those that come in the paper wrapper you peel open. Or a breath-right strip. DON'T OPEN IT YET. Go someplace really dark. Watch the wrapper as you open it.

See that glow? Triboluminescence. Look it up. Physics mystery, still...

</geekery> (oh, come on, you think it's kinda neat if you tried it...)

So. Wired a 2-line telephone extension today, at work. I think that's another geek cred/life skill point. most difficult part is determining what the hell was going on in the wiring panel. And the fact that there's about eight miles of unnecessary crap wired up in there...not helpful.

Eh. Made for a long day, but accomplishment's always a good thing.

Wall insulation and rafters are going up on the house... Woo!

So. The house, she is being framed. And now it feels huge inside... It felt smaller before the framing, since you have less frame of reference. EXCITED ABOUT THIS, yo.

It's weird to see a band on Jay Leno (Eli Young Band) that Nicole and I saw play in Gun Barrel City (no, really, that's the city name, honest)

So. We're in Daytona Beach, and the shuttle launched yesterday. The contrail was cool. Being able to see the boosters separate was cool-- realizing that they were headed to space as we saw it was really cool. We have a lot of better pictures, those will come later...

Yay, Disney world later in the week...

Yeah, so it was on sale, and Nicole bought it. And it makes me remember 4th grade. No kidding.

And some of you young'uns don't know this music. And I'm not gonna say that newer boy bands are any better, either. Yeah.

Best possible ending to that. Badass.

www.anesthesiology.org/pt/re/anes/abstract.00000542-200804000-00018.htm;jsessionid=JCDJ4x3MnXp137q5fl9LGtmVKRYXKvpK2Bbt6M0XY4YCWhlNTnnf!-26702612!181195628!8091!-1

if that link doesn't work, search google for 'h2s "suspended animation" '. Several articles come up. But- and I still don't think I'm wrong- breathing hydrogen sulfide gas at 80ppm for six hours- jeesh, what a ton of dead brain cells. You'd be, like, the dumbest interstellar traveler ever. Still only tested on mice, and,well... They got wee lil' mouse brains. Not much higher level thinking there.

More tomorrow when I don't have to use my phone to type. Ouch.

EDIT OK, so the CDC says here that Hydrogen Sulfide (H₂S) ILDH (Immediately Dangerous to Life/Health) level is 100ppm. And apparently the body can endure 170-300ppm with little apparent damage.

But. Until someone DOES IT-- like, they ship a dude around the earth in orbit for five years and he's cool when he gets back-- I'll be damned if they're gonna expose me to H₂S on purpose. That was specifically one of the things I disliked about working in chemical plants -- POISON FREAKING GASES.

Anyway. maybe it's not scientifically entirely moronic. But... maybe it is...

so I'm watchin' Eleventh Hour, and they say (and I know this is tv and much of the science is effectively magic beans) that hydrogen sulfide gas puts the body into suspended animation. And this, in the way that Ted Williams' -literally- disembodied head is in "suspended animation" while frozen solid, may be the case. But hydrogen sulfide does two things to humans- at less than 10ppm, rotten egg smell, and somewhat toxic. More than 10 parts per million in air, it's effectively odorless (since your nose is overwhelmed and gives up) and actively toxic. No Space Travel Miracle Gas (tm), though.

So. science rant for the day... You're welcome. Yeah.

So we moved a bunch of stuff at work, and we hired a bunch of movers to help with the sheer volume of stuff.

And one of them looked and sounded very much like Cleveland from Family Guy. Odd, yo.

Words fail me. Made me laugh in spite of myself, though.
--------------------------
and there was a face in the clouds this morning... Eyes, brows, a nose... Pretty neat, in a totally-coincidental sort of way...

I wish there was a full version of the Cat Power version of Bowie's Space Oddity, from the Lincoln MKS commercial. the cover is great...

If you know of a full version... man, you'd be my hero.

So. Now EVERYONE CAN STOP ABOUT THE ELECTION since it's over. Thank God.

Please to be posting non-political interesting things tomorrow, thanks.

BAM. Italy. travel goal completed.


OK, OK, Italy, Texas... (details, details....)

OK. I've listened to a lot of music, in a lot of genres. And I swear...Dave Brubeck's Take Five in Chinese-style muzak. (it was music for Infiniti for a while...) What the hell, seriously.

this debate makes my head hurt. Obama makes some damn good points, though.

Where is McCain proposing to get the money to buy "all the bad mortgages"? Thin air?

Rrgh.

I love southern crafts, sometimes...

Holy shit, a fried moon pie. Seriously, it was actually pretty good. I mean, I hate bananas, and it was a banana Moon Pie, but otherwise it was all I expected. Think batter like fish-n-chip batter, but sweeter. And then a Moon Pie with chocolate sauce and powdered sugar.

Lessee... Looked at SUVs at the car show, ate a metric ass-ton of fried things... Corndogs FTW.

Watching Europeans wander around the state fair was entertaining, All sorts of new-to-them things. Heh.

More from me soon...

K, so as a possessor of T-rex arms myself, I feel like this is appropriate to post about... This is a cool freaking statue... It's like giant action figure...