hellziggy

I have been caffeine free since February 10th (with the exception of chocolate, and some random sips of Diet Coke that are less than one can's worth).  Today at work I was hella-tired due to my foolishly trying to catch up on too many Tivo'd shows last night. So I got a 20oz Diet Mountain Dew from the machine. WOW!!!! Now THIS is what caffeine is supposed to do! Too bad daily intake of it creates a tolerance that negates its effects. So yeah, I'm not slipping back into my old caffeinated ways, but it's nice to know that when I am dragging so bad that Ritalin has no effect that I've got a cheap convenient legal drug to pick me up. 

My computer at work got a trojan somehow and IS had to re-image it for me. I was able to put all my important docs on a flash drive to save them. I also decided not to copy any podcasts since they can be re-downloaded and they can be so space intensive. Instead, now I have to try to remember all the ones to resubscribe to. (And yes, all you podcast ladies on my flist, yours have already been added back in!)

Because I didn't lose any documents it's actually kind of nice having a "fresh" computer. Seems to be moving a bit less sluggish. I did have to spend a fuckload of time this morning though getting all my settings back the way I like them. The menu bar goes at the TOP of the screen, darn it! 

One nice thing was that I learned that it is *OK* to have iTunes. The rule here is "NO INSTALLING ANY SOFTWARE ON YOUR MACHINE! IF YOU NEED IT IS WILL INSTALL IT!" Well, given that I felt it was a better risk to put on iTunes than to see if there was a better podcatcher option. So I did it. Then, when my machine was all new the IS guy was still here making sure everything worked. When I dragged the Windows Media Player shortcut to the recycle bin (and possibly said something derogatory about it...) he smiled and said, "Oh, that's right. You had iTunes." So I laughed and told him he must have imagined it since we aren't allowed to install programs. Then he said that anything by Apple was OK. 

It is Friday tomorrow!! Yay! I get to see Jon Stewart tomorrow! 

genevra and akdar will also be joining us because I still needed to get genevra a birthday gift. 

And now my lunch is over. See y'all later. :)

 

I've been a major LJ slacker lately. Yes, I'm still here. No, nothing really new in my life.

Just over a week ago snoopygirl_niki had her puppy! A little girl! I haven't seen her yet, and she hasn't sent me any pictures yet (Yes, Niki, that is a hint!)

Friday I tried to take lucky13charm to see the baby owl at Wood Lake. He wasn't there up in the tree, and from the guy working in the nature center we learned the sad news... Sometime Monday night the baby fell from the tree. They found him on the ground Tuesday morning and put him in a basket that they put up into the tree so predators wouldn't get him. He must have sustained internal injuries because he never bounced back from it and he was dead Friday morning. :(
So, since I couldn't show her the fuzzy owl I took her over to show her the eagle nest.

I sowed the seeds of this year's Darwin garden on Friday. For the curious, a Darwin garden is when you sprinkle a bunch of seeds randomly through your garden and see what manages to grow: Survival of the fittest.

Speaking of survival of the fittest, I'm tired so I'm gonna go to bed now. Night all~


*edit* I must have been tired last night, I forgot to hit the post button on this!

I haven't been around much lately...
Blame school & James!
Most of today was spent doing homework. But I have a kick-ass layout done that looks like it is right out of the pages of Q magazine!
Just sent an up-to-date file of the Coverville playlists to Brian for his ASCAP, BMI, etc licensing. He's just hit show #250!
Yesterday afternoon was lunch with genevra and two of our old high school friends. It's nice to see them, but my life is so different from theirs now that I have a hard time communicating and just plain relaxing. There's just not a lot in common any more. Then when I got home Saturday afternoon, hellbob told me that we were going to go out to dinner with Jeanine and a guy she's currently dating. We tried to go to some Dim Sum place, but it was closed for a private party. We ended up at Big Bowl instead, and the food was way yummy as usual.
As y'all saw in my previous post, on Friday night Moose & I met John Hodgman. We also got to meet author Neal Pollack and musician Jonathan Coulton. hellbob was tired and not really looking forward to going, and lucky13charm had to go to Iowa to sing in a wedding, so when I got home from work on Friday I set about looking for someone to go with me. camel0t wanted to but she already had plans. She did have the brilliant idea of checking with her man, Ty, to see if he was interested. He was and I think he had a pretty good time.
And now it is late on Sunday night and so I'm gonna go to bed!

*EDIT*
D'oh! So I blame James for my non-postiness and don't say how he's contributed... Yes, I am still working on the over-abundance of pictures from the Queen Mary. Also, since meeting them on the boat I joined the Yahoo group where many fabulous women hang out, and those girls never shut up! It's exhausting trying to keep up with them. *waves at MS contingent* The phone's ready, give me a call!

So, I haven't really posted much in the last few days and I only just finally got caught up on reading too. Feel free to blame the Nibleys. I do. If they weren't so darn fun and cool I wouldn't have spent as much time out with them!

I think I will just do quick bullet point updates for now because my brain is tired.

*kniblet & dibsy drove to Mpls for the Jasper Fforde reading and book signing. When we found them in Barnes & Noble on Wednesday it was the first real life meeting 'tween us & them. (Us is me & genevra)

*They got immediate bonus points by bestowing Vosges chocolates & mix CDs upon us!

*My collection of cover songs in iTunes practically doubled! Hooray for dibsy's obsessive love of covers that matches mine!

*BTW Simon, you had one band mislabeled. The Gin & Juice cover is actually by the Gourds. The attribution to Phish is actually because back in the days of Napster it was incorrectly labelled. Wikipedia info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gourds

*Jasper Fforde is a very charming & funny man. Kind of a warped sense of humor too.

*Thursday evening hellbob and I got dinner with kniblet & dibsy. We decided to go with fast & cheap on the food and so got gyros at Santana's right near the U.

*Dinner was followed by the performance of Die, Clowns, Die! by Joe Scrimshaw at the Fringe Festival.

*It got a good review from the Nibleys, but we got a better one:

Another fantastic evening. It turns out that hellziggy and hellbob are an insane comedy duo in disguise. And Joseph Scrimshaw wasn't too bad, either.** Yes, the clowns do in fact die.
**Deliberate understatement for comic effect.

*People I Know who we saw at the show were: (in alphabetical order) cajones, chebutykin, dewey921, eldogo, joshuwain, & stark0228.

*The show ended with eldogo kissing the sad clown.

*Clowns died. This is good. There was no actual clown makeup. This is very good.

*Unlike the previous day when I didn't go home before meeting them, on Thursday I actually had Stuff to gift to the Nibleys. They received the first adult size Jayne Cobb hat that I've made, and a CD of all the cover song MP3's I had. Also after talking to them on Wednesday, a bottle of HellDad's homemade cranberry wine was added to the stash as well as an audio CD of all the covers that I had from the iTunes Music Store that couldn't be burned as MP3. Grrr. Stoopid DRM!

*dibsy & kniblet got to experience many Minnesota Goodbyes (tm) while here.

*OK. So we're at Friday now? Only Friday? What a long week I've had!

*Friday night was dinner at Sawatdee and our first meeting with the Cute-as-a-Button boliviafang.

*The food was excellent. The company was better! We have had such good luck with all the internets people we've met that I want to go hunt ALL of you down! Yes, I shall win the lottery and use my winnings to become an LJ stalker! OK. List of places I need to go: Alaska, Northern California, Texas, Kansas (I think...), Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire (or somewhere similarly East Coastish...), England, and Iceland. And I'm sure there are many more places that I am not thinking of now!

*There is a cheesecake place in Uptown, Muddy Something?, that has positively orgasmic cheesecake!

*Simon & Nicky claimed to be the most unphotogenic people in existence. I didn't believe this until I took a picture of them and as I looked at the digital LCD and back at them in real life I could not figure out at all how the picture on the screen could be of a totally different person and not the Simon sitting right there. I have never seen anything like that. It was a different freakin' person! Bizarre. There are those cultures that say that a photo will steal your soul. In the Nibley's case the camera actually photographs someone elses soul!

*Saturday morning we met kniblet, dibsy, genevra, gigglemonkey_b & technomonkey_m at the Walker Sculpture Garden.

*The Nibleys are in agreement that the Monkeys are cuter in person than the pictures, which is saying a lot since they are darn cute in pictures!

*The Sculpture Garden is a great place to take two-year-olds because there is a lot of room for them to run while still being vaguely contained in each of the little hedged off sections.

*gigglemonkey_b insisted on carrying Moose for much of the time. It's OK. He likes her.

*There were birds by the pond with the Cherry fountain. I am still unsure as to what kind they are. Definitely Bitterns (a small egret/heron like bird) but I'm not 100% sure on what kind. I'm thinking American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) *edit* As I do more looking online I think I might have actually been right with my absolute first thought. When I saw the bird but wasn't close enough to see details I told Genevra that it looked like a Green Heron, but then when I got closer I saw that the colors were all wrong. Now I'm looking at pictures online of immature Green Herons and I'm about 90% sure that's what they were but when in doubt, email Birdchick! I got some very good pictures of them, both on the ground and in flight.

*I fell in love with Woodrow. He is a horse made of cast bronze. But, until you actually touch him, you would be convinced that he is made of wood. You can stand a foot away from him and swear that he is made of wood. Absolutely fucking brilliant!

*Then the Nibleys had to leave. *sob* Have I mentioned yet how much we absolutely adored them? Although we're not sure it is safe to have Simon & Rick in such close proximity for a length of time. Poor Nicky was trapped between them for a comic book geek session. Now we shall have to plan an expedition to Chicago at some point.

*After the Walker, hellbob & I came home and took naps to prepare for our evenings of debauchery.

*The so-cute-together Nissa & Darek are getting married next month and so both the bachelor and the bachelorette parties were last night. For us girls the night consisted of dinner, drinks at a bar, and a slumber party at Nissa's house.

*camel0t & the girls did a FABULOUS job planning everything. Dinner at Bellanotte was delicious! Danny, our waiter, was charming and did a great job. Drinks were down the street at the Imperial Room. I drank chocolate martinis. Yum!

*After we all got settled in with our pj's on, it was chick flick time! We started with Top Gun. Someone suggested doing a drinking game as we watched.

*Do you have any fucking idea how many times they say "Maverick" "Goose" and "MIG" in that movie? Yeah, neither did we! Thank the gods we decided not to also add "bogey" or "Iceman" or to have it count if they just said "Mav"

*Needless to say we never got a second movie watched.

*camel0t made scrambled eggs for breakfast and then we watched The Notebook.

*Now I am home and I have napped and I've finally caught up on reading LJ, which I haven't been caught up on since Wednesday.

*And what's the deal with the little push-pin symbol on comments? Is there finally a way to track threads not in your journal when it's not a reply to you? Sweet! Must investigate!

Tired & grumpy & my knees really hurt today. I don't remember the last time they hurt like this... We have to do f**king mandatory overtime next week and to get it done and still leave work at 1pm for CONvergence hellbob & I had to change our weekend & 4th of July plans. We're going to his dad's cabin for dad's birthday over the weekend instead of Monday night so I can come to work on Tuesday. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

It is Monday. Urg. We hates the Mondays.

If you want to laugh go to hellbob's journal and click his Snakes on A Plane link. (No fancy linkage from me while at work. So there.)

Had a killer headache yesterday. It was just a wee headache when Becca & I took off to go to Target (new Monkey socks!) and to the MonkeyHouse for her to meet my cute monkeys, B & M. I had food, and I had caffeine, and I had ibuprofen but it didn't go away. Fuck! At that point only sleep will cure it. Which meant that I did not get to attend romeoa's birthday party with Hellbob. *sigh*
At least the headache was gone when I woke up.

Mason Jennings on Saturday night. It frickin' rocked! Even if we were the furthest from the stage that we have ever been from Mason.

hellbob & I get to have really good steaks for dinner tonight! Becca is buying them to thank us for letting her stay. Mmmm. Dead cow!

Oh, Moose made it safely to Arizona last week. He apparently had a really good seat for Serenity. He gets a brief mention during the Slice of Sci Fi Voicemail show, which I'm not sure if it's out yet or not... The beer homemade preserves should be getting delivered to Draco-vista studios today. yay!

Ok. 10 minute break over. Back to the salt mines.

Have a wonderful day my Minions! :)

It was a pretty busy weekend, but it was fun.
On Friday night Becca came over to use our internets and to hang out. We were gonna watch a movie and she admitted to never having seen Mallrats. We rectified that distinct lack of culture in her!
Saturday was akdar's annual invasion of his mom's house. She's got a fabulous inground pool so every year he has a birthday party there. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and so we spent most of the day in the pool. The monkeys also had a bunch of fun playing in the pool. There was one unfortunate event when both monkeys were going down the deck stairs and gigglemonkey_b missed a step and rolled down about 6 steps to the patio. Luckily she was wearing her life jacket and so didn't really get too banged up other than a bloody nose and a cut in her mouth. Poor little thing looked so swollen and beat up by the end of the day.
Today was the house warming party for Nissa & Darek. Their new house is gorgeous! Way far south though. We also got to see Becky & Tyler, Kris & Daryl, and Mark while there.
It looks like the Serenity screening here is pretty much full up now so if you haven't RSVPd yet there most likely isn't any more room.
I've shot up through Day 98 on my hundredpics, but I can't upload the pictures today because I forgot to renew dreamflyte.com. It's been done now, but I have to wait for them to process everything. *sigh*
I don't wanna work tomorrow!!!!

A blind man teaching an android how to paint? That's gotta be worth a couple of pages in somebody's book.

Loooooooooooong day.

It started with helping frozendragon get all the big heavy stuff out of the basement and over to michaellee's house because she had gotten a truck rental for today. After that hellbob & I headed on over to our friend Art's house to help paint the outside of that so that he can get it ready to sell.
Things I learned.
1. paint sprayers are uber-cool
2. mole chicken is yummy
3. I am old and I really ache right now
4. A not very big bat house can hold 20-25 brown bats

I'm betting that I am stiff as all hell tomorrow. Urg.

It was a good weekend.

I got outta work at 1:00 on Friday and saw the aforementioned snakes. Then, Friday night, hellbob & I headed over to the KalHouse where lucky13charm joined kaldeth, kalfoley, GirlChild, hellbob and me for a game of Killer Bunnies with the new pink booster cards mixed in. I drank some Strongbow Cider while playing and it was yummy. 'Twas a late night though.

Saturday started with meeting Darek & Nissa at Southdale to see The DaVinci Code. All four of us had read the book and the movie was a pretty good retelling of it. Nothing wonderful, but nothing horrible either. We chatted over coffee for a bit after the movie until it was time for us to head to the Mall of America for dinner.

freyjakj was going to be in town for 3 days and so it was determined that for fitting as smoothly as possible into her schedule that we'd do dinner at the MoA. We had decent food at Ruby Tuesday's. Much like the movie, nothing wonderful, but nothing horrible either. I got to spend pretty much all the time we didn't have food cuddling little Mr. technomonkey_m who was a perfect angel. hellbob claimed custody of Ms. gigglemonkey_b who lived up to her name. I had finished knitting a nano sock for freyjakj that I was able to bestow upon her in person instead of mailing it! It looks a lot like this one that I made for lucky13charm. I also acquired dakegra's Moleskine for the Magnificent Moleskine Migration.

After the mall we headed home and when the KalFamily and Mark all got here we trekked through the backyard, through the gap in the hedge, and into the land of Tiki!
Our neighbors, Steve & Tammy, were having a party. We ended up hanging out there until the weeeeee hours of the morning.

Today was Lazy Day. I didn't even shower until about 5 pm and that was only because we were headed back over to Steve & Tammy's for dinner to help them eat up the party leftovers. Steve had already "found" a copy of last night's Doctor Who so I just confiscated a copy of it. Evidence, don't you know?

Six episodes in. I've used my superior psychic abilities to remotely view British airings of all of them from the comfort of my living room. The episode called The Girl in the Fireplace was just freakin' great. I really loved that one. Especially the line ( mild spoiler ) I really like this new doctor. I didn't want to because I had liked Eccelston so much, but this new one is good too. As far as the Cybermen go, I really don't know anything of their original story, but this one was good.

And now, as usual, I am awake far too late at night and I'm gonna go to bed now.

'night all!

hellbob & I got home from up north at about 10:30 tonight. I survived over 24 hours with no internets. Can you believe it?

I did continue to take my photos for hundredpics. Today's was going to be of the statue of the iron miner in Chisholm, but Mother Nature changed that plan by convincing another bird to pose for me. I got a couple great shots of a bald eagle that we passed on the drive home. :)

Hey freyjakj, look what was waiting for us when we came home!