Notival

As you all (should) know, Ninsi and I ordered our wedding rings about a week and a half ago. We were expecting them this week, but had not heard anything yet. So yesterday I called and was told that they did not have the gold to make one right away, so the order had been delayed a few days. They were shipped out today. No big deal, a few days late, but still months before we need them. I received an email from them that was supposed to have a tracking number for me, but the girl had forgot to put the number in, so I called them again today. The rings had been shipped. Today. To the right address. In the wrong city... We live in Grand Prairie, not Corsicana. So, the guy said he would get it rerouted. Thank jebus we are doing this months in advance, or we would be totally screwed.

Of towels: There are two basic types. Big towels suitable for drying ones body, and small towels suitable for doing dishes and wiping down counters. Sometimes, you get a small towel that is a little large, and it is a Big Little Towel. Sometimes, you get a big towel that is smaller than it's brethren, and it is a Little Big Towel. These have no real place in my world. They are too small for the body, to big for the wiping down of things. They are good for putting things on top of, and that's about it. Giving a towel a fancy name like 'bath towel' or 'kitchen towel' doesn't change what size it is. Or what it can and cant do for me.

I've been informed that I will be moving upstairs by the end of the week. Monday at the absolute latest. It makes me just want to cry, or beat someone up. Im losing my office. My door. My window. fuck.

It has turned into quite the dreary Friday. Clouds have rolled in, and it is now raining. I was up working til about 1:30 this morning, and then up close enough to my regular time to be insignificant.

I will probably move upstairs on Monday. Because my boss just wants me up there by the end of the week, as near as I can tell.

No real big plans for the weekend. We will be heading to A-kon at some point tomorrow to hang out. Ninsi wants to get a hotel room downtown so that when we get unable to drive home, we wont have to. So we will probably do that.

In the meantime, I have to make a lot of beef jerky. We will be taking it on vacation with us, so I need to get it made this weekend, then hide it for a week. So that will be part of my plans for this evening. Buying a roast, and marinading it so I can start dehydrating it tomorrow.

The weekend is over. Today, Im moving upstairs.

Friday, I was tired, having had to stay up til almost two the prior night getting some stuff done for work. Ninsi and I were going to go to dinner, and possibly to a movie, and maybe even make an appearance at A-kon. But after dinner, I was all ready for bed. So, we went home, and I had a beer. I managed to stay away until almost midnight, but remained slothlike.

Saturday, got up early and started making jerky.
Ninsi and I eventually got around and hooked up with Zero and Demi, and we all went down to A-kon. Snagged some complimentary badges, saw a few people we knew, and then realized we couldn't get into the Dealer's room because it was closed. We had just missed it by maybe 15 minutes. There was some sort of fire hazard violation (booths too close together or somesuch) so they had to evacuate that room while things were rearranged. We waited a couple hours, and then gave up, since we were planning to come back later.

Which we did. Ninsi and I caught a cab from the hotel over to A-kon. It was a quick enough ride. But as we were going North down one Dallas street, we had a green light and no traffic in front of us, a truck came through the cross street completely ignoring his red light, and the other cars in that street that had stopped. We all did a double take to make sure that our light was green, and it was. About three seconds later, we would have been in the middle of that intersection when he came barreling through, and there's no way he could have stopped. So, we think that we're pretty lucky. And we get on up a few streets, and we are stopped at a stop light, when the car behind us just rolls right into the back of the cab. The Gods had decreed that Ninsi and I were to be involved in an accident one way or another. Fortunately, we were in the much lesser of the possibilities we saw. The rear ending actually did no damage to either vehicle, or us, so we were on our way fairly quickly.

When we got to A-kon, there was some drinking, but not much of course.

So, I play golf. Poorly, but I play. Usually with Zero. Occassionly with one or two other people. For several years, like 5, I have used an online score tracker (golfstats.net) to keep track of the scorecards. It tracks your scores, calculates your handicap, does comparisons, keeps track of 'records' for your group, and has just hundreds of charts to look at. Most of it doesn't mean anything to me, becuase I mostly just go to hit the ball. But it was free, and convenient, and let me enter scores, and then send a copy of the scorecard to other interested parties so we could all laugh and poke fun at our lack of golf prowess.

Last night, I started to enter the scorecard for Sunday's match with myself and Zero. As soon as I log in, the screen was new, and it was asking me to pick a new pricing plan. I went with the free 'Classic' that I had been using for nigh on five years. But everything was different now. I was only able to enter scores for one person at a time. Almost all the charts I had before were gone. I could no longer see 'records' of who did how well, and when. Annoyed by the sudden lack, and full of righteous anger that I was now going to have to pay for what had been free for so long, I sent an email. I was mostly bothered by the lack of any notification of this change.

It took them about a minute to respond back. I actually got two responses, but they both said essentially the same thing:
1) Yes, there was a new pricing plan, but the prices had been REDUCED
2) They just upgraded to new software
3) The free plan I had been using for the last 4 years was actually the two month trial of a premium plan that I had just never been charged for.
4) They were checking with the programmers to find out how my account slipped through the cracks for so long.

The funny thing was the first email was real indignant. The guy was kinda snippy in his email. Some choice quotes: "Why
would you need warning of a price reduction?", "In fact, according to my
records you haven't paid for more than four years!", "Group 314159 is long, long past the free trial period."

He also stated he couldn't backcharge me for four years, but I think he wanted to do so. The other email said much the same, only she was very polite about it. All in all, yes, I did get a good deal for four years. And it isn't like it is a lot of money ($13/year) so I will probably actually start paying for it, once I have been through the new free version to see if it actually isn't good enough. Ninsi and I got a good laugh from the indignant reply though.

If only my four year freebie had been worth more than $50.

Technology is sometimes a bad thing.

The guy that lived in the house before we did had a subscription to 'Black Men' magazine. It is basically Maxim, for the black man. There was a whole stack of them in the garage when we moved in. They were all thrown away. I figured they were being forward, but yesterday, we received a new one in the mail. Maybe it just slipped through, I dunno.

Ninsi and i noticed that the woman on the cover appeared to have large, fake boobs. Pretty much expected. And we thought that her boobs were somehow glued, or taped to the top she was wearing so that you could see a lot of boob, but no nipple. Ninis looked at it closely and said "They airbrushed it out!" Once you see that, the whole thing just looks freakish, because it makes her boobs look like, well, a torpedo. I dont know what it looked like, but it was unnatural, and wrong. So, I open the magazine to the covergirl's pictorial, and they have done that with all her pics. The top she was wearing wouldn't actually cover her boobs, so they painted over the nipple, and made everything look just really really weird. And honestly, even if there had been a nipple, they still wouldn't have looked right, because you look at them in the magazine, and think "Okay, the nipple should be here. No, that makes it a cow udder, how about here? No, that is the wrong side. Here? No. Here? No." And you wind up just sticking it on her forehead, because it doesn't look as bad there as it would anywhere else.

Next time, don't brush out the nipple. Just cover it properly, people.

Weekend.
Saw Hedwig on Friday night. It's not a bad show. Im not as enamored of it as Ninsi, but still think it's alright.

Saturday I drove to OK. Played a fairly decent round of golf with my brother, and then stay at his house a while for dinner while the other brother came over and the three of us just visited for a while. My mother worries about us getting along, but we seem to do just fine.

Sunday I headed up a little further North and picked up the Squid and her sisters. Packed the car so full that I had to take out my golf clubs and leave them in Oklahoma. The journey to Texas was uneventful. Left the sisters in Garland and the Squid and I finally made it home. She seems to like the house, though was dissappointed in the lack of trampoline. She's at work with me now. Making it through the day. And one more of it tomorrow, then it's vacationing time!

Not much today. Mostly waiting til quitting time so the vacation can get started. There will be no more posts between now and next Thursday at best. Unless somewhere between here and the Canyon and back, Ninsi's laptop picks up a rogue wireless signal.

I saw one of those things Sunday on the drive down that just confuses you for a few minutes. We were cruising down 75 on the edges of the metroplex, around McKinney or so. There is a lane coming up on the right for traffic to merge onto 75. There's some moderately high grass in the median separating the highway from the merge lane. It is in the moderately high grass, that I see a boat traversing the median. The brain couldn't exactly follow it for a minute.

"There is a boat moving across the median about to enter the highway.
It cant be a boat, there is no water; it is a real funny car.
But why is it driving across the grass in the median and no on the pavement?"

Then it all came together and I realized that it was a boat. On its trailer. And it had come UNHITCHED from the truck pulling it. Striking out on its own, perhaps. Thinking it no longer needed to be pulled around. Off in search of fame and fortune... Whatever. It was still a boat on wheels moving of its own accord. Fortunately, between the high grass, and the hitch digging into the ground, the boat stopped just shy of entering the highway.

It became immediately non-exciting at that point to everyone except the truck that was now on the median trying to retrieve it, so we cruised on.

More later.

We left Thursday
Ate lunch at Arby's in Wichita Falls. Weird ass Arby's.
Drove on to Albuquerque.
Spent the night.
Casually drove to Flagstaff Friday. Saw Batman.
Went North to the Grand Canyon Saturday. Spent a few hours there. Big hole. Next time, we hike down it.
Hung around downtown Flagstaff Saturday night.
Left early Sunday.
Visited the Meteor Crater (haha Jessie!)
Did a little shopping in Albuquerque. Missed Hagrok again.
Drove to Moriarty.
Stayed the night.
Went through Roswell. Spent to much on Souvenirs on Monday.
Drove on to Carlsbad. Saw the Caverns. They are really cool.
Stayed and watched the half-million (472,000) bats fly out of the cave. Very cool.
Stayed the night.
Drove across boring ass Texas to get home late Tuesday.
Relaxed Wednesday. Back at work today.

May go into details later, and put up a few of the 500+ pictures we took.

Tomorrow is "Fatherland Liberation War Day (Start of Korean War)" in North Korea, and "Statehood Day" in Croatia.

Sunday: "Independence Day" - Madagascar
and International Day in Support of Victims of Torture - that's just an international Weird-ass holiday.

Enjoy the weekend. Celebrate with some hot tongs or something.

From The Australian, a reason to keep your socks on. Maybe that is why cowboys never take their boots off.

Maybe tonight I will go through some of the pictures we took while on vacation so they can be made viewable for all. I should have time for it when I get home, but odds are, I will find somethough else non-productive to do.

In the meantime, can someone tell me why you can't get popcorn salt in Flagstaff? We went to see Batman Begins while we were there, and Ninsi took care of the purchasing of popcorn and Icees. But there was no popcorn salt. They had a lot of other popcorn toppings, but no salt. She came back into the theater with the concessions, and several single serve packets of salt, like you get from a drive-thru. Am I missing something in all this?

We also learned that bikers are big fans of natural tourist attractions. Everywhere we went, we passed, or were passed by, a lot of people on motorcycle. Maybe it's just a desert thing, but they seemed to be everywhere that we were.

I need a motorcycle.

zombie dogs

The Biblical Arts Center museum is on fire today. 6-alarm. According to the news. Im sure they will put a nice reverent spin on it. But from what I read, a big part of it could have been avoided if the center had ever bothered to install a sprinkler system. Remember, God helps those that help themselves.

Not a whole lot else going on. Cassini may have found a methane lake on Titan, finally. And that is good news. Not exactly stellar news, but it would mean that some of the predictions weren't wrong after all. It is generally nice when your theory works out the way you want it too.

Tomorrow will be an early day. I have to come up here to move a server to it's rightful place before anyone gets in to actually start using it. But it probably means I will leave early as well. So it works out. Once I get past the actual waking up part.

Sometimes, I get to feeling creative. And I want to do stuff. Sometimes, it involves sewing. Sometimes chainmail. Lately, I've an itch to do etching. Glass etching. It is fairly easy to do. Anyone can go to Hobby Lobby and pick up one of a couple of types of glass etching kits. No skill required.

That is all well and good, but the problem is that I learned to do glass etching using Fluoric Acid. And I can't help but want to do it that same way again. Of course, you can't just go out and buy it. It's poisonous. It's noxious. But it won't eat through plastic. Just glass. Anyone know where I can get some? A couple gallons maybe? My high school chemistry teacher had a big plastic jar of it. It isn't like Im asking for Carbon Tetrachloride here. The acid has legitimate hobby uses. I can't really think of a good use for Carbon Tetrachloride outside of making mustard gas. And maybe nylon. It's been too long.

Ninsi goes to 6 Flags tonight. I will probably read. And clean. Always with the cleaning.

Ive taken tomorrow off. I had planned it a long time ago since a buddy of mine was supposed to be in town from Florida for the weekend. But he wasn't able to make it. I decided to go ahead and keep the day off though. Never hurt to have a four day weekend.

Ninsi went to Six Flags last night, and she is going again tonight. So, since she will be having her fun, I am going to go have a little of my own. Maybe. I figure tonight will be as good a night as any to drive up to OK and see how the poker is at Winstar Casino. I already called them, and was disheartened to hear that you have to be there in person to even get on the list. That really blows, since I had planned to call on my way up and not have to wait forever to play. But I'll drive up anyway and see how it is. That's my evening in a nutshell.

And probably no more entries til middle of next week. I think we have something going on most of the weekend days til then. Wish me luck at the tables. Have a safe Fourth.