This is Chris dot com

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

ューュー 500 

This weekend I did something so awesome that it deserves an X. I performed some aweXome surgery on my MacBook.

Here's some background first: I tend to name all of my computers. Usually they have something to do with pop culture. My first laptop was named Raichu. My tandem PC towers that are in my office right now are named Totoro and Voltron. These names just kinda find their way into my lexicon; I never really sit down and think, "What would be a good name for this computer?"

Except that's exactly what I did when I got my white MacBook almost 2 years ago. I thought, "I need a better way to identify it rather than just 'laptop' or 'MacBook.'" I wondered (probably because I'd been hanging out with tangentbot) what the Japanese word for computer was. So I typed "computer" into Google Translate, and it came back as コンピュータ (sorry for anyone who doesn't have Japanese character fonts installed).

With my limited knowledge of katakana (and help from Wikipedia) I figured out that コンピュータ is pronounced "konpyuta." So the Japanese word for "computer" turned out to be "computer" pronounced with a Japanese accent. I began calling my MacBook "Konpyuta," saying it with the accent and everything.

Quickly, though, with my wife and I talking about it quite a bit (mostly asking where it was and if the other one of us had it or not), Konpyuta developed a nickname: コンピューュー, or "Konpyupyu," which was very quickly shortened to simply ューュー, or "PyuPyu" (pronounced like you're shooting a tiny, cute laser pistol—"Pew! Pew!").

PyuPyu came with an 80 gig harddrive, which seemed like a lot at the time. But Carrie & I like to have a wide variety of music on hand, and I've made quite a few videos and movies for Fools Play. As you might know, audio and video are two of the most expensive things to put on a computer from a memory-hogging perspective.

When I got under 8 gigs of free space I knew it was time to do something.

So I spent my Christmas money and did this:

500GB MacBook Harddrive Upgrade for Under $100

I simply followed all the steps and it was absurdly easy. Copying PyuPyu's harddrive to the external took about two hours. Actually swapping the harddrives took about 20 minutes.

So now instead of a dwindling 8GB of dwindling space, I have in the neighborhood of 400GB to luxuriate in. That's a lot of audio. That's a lot of video. And that's plenty of space to finally be able to dual-boot with Windows XP (on my to-do list for Saturday).

To commemorate this aweXomeness, PyuPyu has been renamed "PyuPyu 500." But we still just call it "PyuPyu" for short.

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posted by Christopher at 8:58 PM

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Friday, December 05, 2008

You Need More Rad? 

Do you ever sometimes think, "Y'know what? There aren't enough rad people in my life. Rad kids, rad ladies, and especially rad dudes — I just can't seem to find enough of 'em"

I know I've that quite frequently, so I assume all of you have as well.

Well, I've got some good news for all y'all. There's a website out there entirely devoted to RAD DUDES. You've probably guessed, but I'll tell you anyway: it's pretty rad.

http://radduderadkidradlady.blogspot.com/

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posted by Christopher at 11:48 PM

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Thursday, November 20, 2008

John Hodgman Knows That This is Chris 

Last week I made a big post about the John Hodgman/Jonathan Coulton show in Seattle that Carrie & I went to.

Well, recently John Hodgman himself made a post about my post at his website, The Areas of My Expertise. It's true! Look!

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posted by Christopher at 7:36 AM

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Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Three Ninjas Rocked the Hizzouse, Yo 

So, yeah, this happened last Wednesday and I'm only now getting around to writing a post about it. But last Wednesday I went with Carrie and Laura up to Studio 7 in SoDo to see my pal Three Ninjas (Website, MySpace) perform his very first-ever live show.

I'd heard a lot of bad things about the venue, but honestly it was a pretty typical, dive-y Seattle venue. Cosmetically not much worse than Neumos, just in a much, much worse location. There were many of our palz there, including (using their Twitter names) gendlec, tangentbot & HeartFeltRobots, toraton & whimsi, and jayseman. Also my brother, but he doesn't Tweet. Three Ninjas went on third of eight total act. We arrived at Studio 7 in time to miss the 1st performer (a woman, I'm told). Carrie, Laura, and I staked out a position on the front of the balcony (where the bar was located) in time for the 2nd band, which HeartFeltRobots joked should have been called "Midlife Crisis." Agreed.

Three Ninjas was up next, but he didn't perform alone. NOPE! rabbiddogg went up and played bass for him! Honsetly, I did not know what to expect from a live Three Ninjas show. His music, which I love dearly, is not necessarily what you'd call "accessible" at all times. But he had a good, simple musical setup, which included a MacBook and an MPD32. The show turned out to be an absolute hoot and/or laugh riot in a good way. I was surprised and delighted that he actually performed "Beluga Calf." Not only did he perform "Beluga Calf," but he performed several different versions of "Beluga Calf" in a row, including the hip-hop and holiday versions.

He also performed his brand-new, never-before-heard song "Going Gay for House" about House M.D. That song eventually evolved into the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of this)," except they sang, "Sweet Dreams Are House M.D."

We all thoroughly enjoyed the show AND ourselves. HeartFeltRobots recorded the whole thing on video, so I'm gonna hafta see what I can do about getting a copy of that from her. I drove Carrie & Laura back to Tacoma after hanging out for a few minutes after the show.

As a post-script, on Friday we were hanging out with Laura again and she was talking about how her job was very boring. As she was leaving our house she said, "Well, if my job gets too boring and starts to make me sad, I'll just think about Beluga Calf." Then she turned and walked away, into legend and into all of our hearts. Or she walked away into her car instead of those last two things.

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posted by Christopher at 8:29 AM

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Friday, September 26, 2008

Where They Filmed Bits of The Goonies 

HAVE BEEN BUSY

Last week was our 4-year wedding anniversarary! Hooray! To celebrate, we both took the whole week off and went on vacation.

The weekend before the vacation we had a big ol' yard sale. I followed the advice of my own article about Garage Sale Etiquette, and the whole thing went swimmingly. Carrie actually did most of the work during the actual hours of operation due to the fact that I was working on the big Bead Factory Fashion Show handouts, as I had been doing the entire week leading up to that weekend.

I should say that Saturday went very well; Sunday was pretty much dead. We made enough moneys to buy lunch. Carrie did get to hang out in the front yard with Laura & Lawrence and play backgammon while drinking margaritas, so the day wasn't a bust by any means (I once again spent much of the day working on handouts). After it was all over we loaded everything that was left into my car and I ran up to Goodwill and gave it all to them.

The next day we left for vacation. We rented a house in a tiny little town called Tierra Del Mar, Oregon. We found the house through homeaway.com. We actually stayed at this house. Tierra Del Mar is sewiously small; it consists of about 12 streets branching off from the main thoroughfare. If you sneezed you would practically drive through it without noticing. It's about halfway between Tillamook and Pacific City.

Wait, did I say Tillamook? If you know me, then you know that I loves me the cheese, and Tillamook happens to have a great big ol' factory that just pumps out the stuff. So that was the second stop on our journey.

What was the first stop? A Burgerville in southern Washington. They (coincidentally?) have a fantastic bacon burger with Tillamook cheese all up on it. They also have sweet-potato fries and very delicious milkshakes. Y'know, I shouldn't say that Burgerville was our first stop because we didn't actually stop there; we just hit the drive-through. We stopped at a rest stop a ways down I-5 and ate our yummy foodstuffs at a picnic table OM NOM NOM. Burgervile is kind of a tradition whenever we drive to Oregon. There was also a dog area at the rest stop, so we let Suki run around in it for a bit.

Then we headed on down to the Tillamook Cheese Factory using this route. It wound up through the "mountains" between Portland and the coast. It was very pretty. But naught so pretty as the pretty cheese in that factory.

We, as is our custom, bought the packaged odds-and-ends. When they carve cheese into those brick shapes, what do you think happens to all the leftover bits? They shrink-wrap them and sell 'em at the factory for a reduced price! They only had one style that day, a garlic white cheddar. That was okay with us!

From there we got on 101 and headed on south to Tierra Del Mar. It was after 4:00 by the time we arrived, so we quickly hauled everything out of the car and then walked Suki down to the end of the road where there was a big, huge, northwest-coast-style beach. A few miles to the south was a big ol' Haystack Rock, though not the Haystack rock—that was up north many miles out of view near Cannon Beach, where they filmed bits of The Goonies. This Haystack Rock was not in the movie The Goonies. Don't know why they couldn't give both rocks different names.



We played fetch with Suki. She seemed to like the beach quite a bit, and didn't mind getting her entire mouth completely coated with sand. It woulda bothered me. Ah, well.

Suki at the Beach

I took a short video of the beach so you could see just how crowded it was there:


Yeah. After fun in the surf and sand we headed back to the house where I hosed Suki down (she didn't like that). For din-dins that evening we made clam chowder from scratch (it just seemed right to make clam chowder while you're staying at the beach).

Carrie made this really fascinating bread product. I'll see if I can describe it:
For this recipe you will need:
  • (2) cans of buttermilk biscuit dough
  • Bacon
  • Shredded cheese
Instructions:
  1. Cook the bacon until it's crispy, then crumble it to bits.
  2. remove all of the biscuits from the cans. Cut them up into little 1" - 2" triangles.
  3. Arrange half the biscuit bits in a single layer (as best you can) in the bottom of a greased baking pan (it's supposed to be a fluted bunt pan, but they didn't have one there so we just used 2 regular 9" square pans). The triangles don't have to be tightly interlocked; it works better if they're just loosely arranged.
  4. Sprinkle half the crumbled bacon and half the shredded cheese on top of the layer of biscuits.
  5. Make another layer of biscuit bits on top of the bacon/cheese layer.
  6. Sprinkle the rest of the bacon and cheese on top.
  7. Bake in an oven at an appropriate temperature (??) until the biscuits are cooked to a nice, golden brown.

The cheese seeps into all the cracks between the biscuit triangles as it melts, and then when it cools it creates this matrix-like glue holding the whole thing together. To it it, you just rip off a triangle or two and pop it in your mouth. You can dip it in your chowder first if you'd like!

After that first evening, the low clouds rolled in and stayed for the remainder of the vacation. When I say low, I mean like 50-100-feet-off-the-ground low. Fog unless you were at sea level. It was actually kinda nice because it kept the weather very, very moderate. It weren't too hot and it weren't too cold. It weren't too windy, neither.

The rest of the days of the trip were spent exploring all the little towns along the Oregon coast. We went as far south as Newport, where we had some beer inside the "Brewers on the Bay" pub at the Rogue Brewery. That place was really cool; you had to actually walk through the distillery (guided by arrows on the floor and taped-off areas) to get to the pub. It almost felt like you were trespassing. We went as far north as Seaside, which we did not like very much; it had a strange, aggressive, "angry carnie" energy about it.

Our favorite town was Cannon Beach, which was clean, well-maintained, and tourist friendly. Lots and lots and lots of cute shops full of cute stuff. I didn't buy anything.

An interesting thing to note about our trip: we didn't ever eat out at a restaurant. We had beer at the Rogue brewpub, but not food. We cooked our own breakfasts and dinners, and we packed picnic-style lunches that we took with us. It was really tasty and a much less-expensive way to have a vacation than to eat out for every meal. We made horribly delicious things from scratch, such as beef fajitas, chicken salad, burgers stuffed with bleu cheese and covered with garlic cheese, etc. We made way too much; we brought home leftovers from pretty much every single meal we made (except for the breakfasts, which we usually scarfed right down).

Another interesting thing to note was that there was neither TV nor internet tubes at our vacation house. We brought my MacBook, though, and it has a nice media player. So we watched a lot of My Boys and Veronica Mars and some Anthony Bourdain while we ate our breakfasts and dinners and relaxed in the evening. We also brought some books but didn't actually end up reading them!

Early on in our stay we were were heading south through the fog along a big, forested cliff over the ocean. I needed to find a restroom (a side effect of having no large intestines), so we pulled over at this one touristy landmark type place that had a gift shop. It didn't have any restrooms, but there was a lookout outside where you could stand at the top of a 500' cliff and look out over the ocean. It was so foggy that you could only see maybe halfway down the cliff. It was like Silent Hill. Still looking for the bathroom we continued up a ways to the Devil's Punch Bowl area of the Oregon coast, where we just happened to stumble upon a winery at the edge of another (smaller) cliff: Flying Dutchman Winery.

After quickly ascertaining they did not have a public restroom and backtracking to some port-a-potties we'd spotted, we came back and did a tasting. They had really, really tasty berry wines. We bought half a case of blackberry and raspberry wines. We'd never have known about this place if I hadn't had to go to the bathroom!

While driving through Pacific City we noticed something familiar about the place. We'd eaten at a restaurant there and stayed at a motel there many, many years ago on an overnight trip we'd taken with Geoff, Josh, and Melissa! It was the trip where Josh and Carrie both tried to learn how to drive stick with Melissa's car. Ah, nostalgia.

There was also a cute little town to the north called Nehalem. It had like two blocks of cute little shops, all linked up with covered walkways. It also had a bead shop (we stopped at at least two bead shops during this trip) that had a going-out-of-business sale happening. Hey, I just learned that there's a Google Street View of Nahalem, of all places! Go take a look.

Eventually it was time to head back home. But just because it was our last day didn't mean we were done with our vacation! Not by a long shot! It was time for wine. Wine time!

Instead of going back the way we came, we jutted south and then headed east on Highway 18 towards McMinnville, towards the heart of Willamette Valley wine country.

Traveling generally northeast on 99, we hit the following wineries:

Yamhill Valley
Had a cool koi pond out front. We bought a couple of whites.
Anne Amie
Very classy place. We bought three bottles, including a shockingly tasty Müller Thurgau and an easy red blend they called Amrita. We ate a picnic lunch at a table on their patio
Archery Summit
Least-expensive bottle there was $48. We didn't buy any but did the full tasting (generous amounts). Got to drink some $100 pinot noir. It was easily the best wine there, but honestly not $75 better than a good $25 bottle of pinot noir.
Erath
Our perennial favorite. We got a couple of interesting whites, including a dry Gewurztraminer (which was kinda fascinating). We tried to have a snack on their patio but were driven away by bees.
Argyle
Interesting little place, had an unusual selection. We got a bottle of sparkling rose wine (the most expensive single bottle we got on our trip) and a very delicious ice wine.

Carrie did the driving so I did most of the drinking, and I was a little tipsy by the end, I tell you what. But still—still—we weren't quite done!

Late afternoon, following phone directions, we wound ourselves into that strange hilly area directly south of downtown Portland to the apartment of Heather & Chris. They took us all up curvy roads towards the top of the hill.

The roads skirted around huge, forested chasms, along the sides of which were many terribly expensive houses built on stilts hanging over these chasms. It was kinda crazy. One house was only connected to the hillside by its driveway; the rest of it was supported by stilts. The road was actually level with the TOP floors of these houses. Often they extended three or four stories down into the chasms. Is Portland a more geologically stable area than Seattle? 'Cause it'd be suicide to build like that up here, what with this being earthquake country 'n' all.

Anyway, we did not fall into any chasms on the way to Council Crest Park, which is basically at the summit of the hill. It's a pretty cool park with a big watertower in it. There's a steep hill on the southeast side of it that dogs can run around in, so Suki ran around in it with us all.

After that we got back on the freeway and headed north for home. About the only thing we missed on the whole trip was a jaunt to Voodoo Doughnut in downtown Portland, but we didn't feel like stopping either time we drove through the area.

It was plenty dark by the time we got home. But get home we did.

As a P.S. of sorts, this post wins the record of having the most labels of any of my posts!

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posted by Christopher at 4:13 PM

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Monday, September 01, 2008

Surprise! Google Chrome! 

Well, you might have heard of this, but it was leaked (due to an early mailing of promotional material) that Google has *surprise!* created its own web browser! It's called Chrome, and since I'm a big fan of Google's other products, I'm really looking forward to trying it to see what it's like. You can read about it at the
Official Google Blog.

One of the coolest things about the whole launch, though, is that they got Scott McCloud, one of my favorite comic book artists, to draw a 30-page comic as an introduction to the concepts of Chrome! Here's the first page:


You can read the rest of it here. It's got some interesting stuff! I'm totally downloading it on Tuesday when it's released.

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posted by Christopher at 11:30 PM

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Thursday, August 07, 2008

Garfield Minus Garfield 

I cannot believe how funny this is. Someone took a bunch of Garfield strips and then edited Garfield out of them so that Jon is talking completely to himself.


It makes the Garfield comic into this fascinating & hilarious portrait of a lonely, disturbed, horrifically sad man. I couldn't stop laughing for a long, long time after I started reading it. Just keep clicking "Previous Comic" because the effect is cumulative; the more you read, the funnier and more disturbing it gets.

I ♥ it. So very, very much.

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posted by Christopher at 11:50 PM

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Tim Minear’s “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” Script 

Apparently back in 2004 Tim Minear, an important writer on a bunch of television shows including (I don't know if you've heard of any of these) The X-Files, Angel, Firefly, and Wonderfalls, was hired to write a screenplay based on Robert A. Heinlein's book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. This is probably one of my top-five favorite books. And how is Minear's take on it?

Glorious.

It's surprisingly faithful to the source material, and the places where it does differ are at once shocking and highly (in one instance devastatingly) effective. But don't take my word for it! A copy of the script has found its way online as a .pdf! So instead of reading this post, you should go read Tim Minear's “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” Script

(via Whedonesque)

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posted by Christopher at 4:36 PM

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Monday, June 23, 2008

Arrr in the Stars 

Schill time: So I've started playing this cute little free online game called Star Pirates. It has a very old-school, text-adventure feel to it. And, seriously, you can log on and play for just a couple of minutes at a time. It's the kind of game where you can spend real-world money to get advantages, but I know first-hand that it's a very enjoyable game even if you don't shell out anything. Go on... give it a try. My character's name is AngryBeef and my ship's name is Lil' Angro. I'll see you... amongst the stars! Arrrr!

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posted by Christopher at 8:54 PM

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Friday, June 13, 2008

All the Pies of the Movie Waitress 

Carrie & I recently watched the movie Waitress starring Nathan Fillion and Kerri Russel. The waitress character is a phenom of a pie maker and invents a bunch of wacky pies over the course of the film. Well, TechLifeBlogged has cataloged the names and ingredients of All the Pies of the Movie Waitress. Some of them are pretty funny.

Plus Waitress it's a good, sweet, movie with a hint of spice. And whipped cream on top. And I don't know where else to carry this metaphor.

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posted by Christopher at 7:55 AM

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Thursday, June 12, 2008

Signal Patterns 

This is actually one of the more accurate personality tests I've ever taken. I tend not to take these things at all 'cause I don't like being pigeonholed, but I agree with most of these results, especially scoring a zero in the "Traditional" category. I scored highest in "Stable," "Open," and "Agreeable." So there you go.

The test is from Signal Patterns, which is an interesting website if you like that kinda stuffs.

(via ゆがまえ (Yugamae))

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posted by Christopher at 7:53 PM

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Monday, June 09, 2008

hello naomi's photosets on Flickr 


This woman who calls herself "hello naomi" makes the world's mostest awexomest cupcakes. If you don't believe me, go take a look at hello naomi's photosets on Flickr.

(via Loup-Vert)

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posted by Christopher at 9:46 PM

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Tuesday, June 03, 2008

I'd Be in Good Company 

No real surprises for me in this survey/test. Though it is interesting that I rated "Moderate" for Level 7. I think it's just because I like to watch action movies.

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to the First Level of Hell - Limbo!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
LevelScore
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)Very High
Level 2 (Lustful)High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)Very Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)Very High
Level 7 (Violent)Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)Low
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)Low

Take the Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test

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posted by Christopher at 1:43 PM

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A Programming Question That's Bugging Me 

Let's see if anybody out there in teh intarweb tubez can help me with this problem.

I was finishing up the re-design of everafterstore.com when I stumbled upon a strange rendering problem. For some reason the top margin above a certain line of text was two pixels lower in Internet Explorer than it was in Firefox. I could not for the life of my figure out why. I scoured my CSS for possible problems, but padding, margin, background-align and the like were all perfectly valid.

Then I realized it was because the line of text I was using had an inline <input type="text"> element, and for some reason Firefox and IE display inline text boxes differently: Firefox aligns the top of the box to the top of the line-height, whereas IE aligns the bottom of the box to the bottom of the line-height. It wasn't very noticeable (as I said, only two pixels), but look at what happens if you have (for some reason) a very tall text input box:

Firefox renderingFirefox rendering

IE renderingInternet Explorer rendering

Does anyone know how to prevent this? Is there a Stylesheet hack that makes it display the same way in both browsers (I don't really care which way, just as long as its consistent)? I'm hoping one of my code-literate friends (tangentbot, ninjasockmonkey, jeffthefish, codelove, etc.) will see this post and help me out.

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posted by Christopher at 4:24 PM

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Sasquach is Really Just Chewbacca 

Perhaps one of the strangest comic book stories of recent years: Indiana Jones finds the remains of Han Solo in the Pacific Northwest.

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posted by Christopher at 3:29 PM

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Friday, May 09, 2008

Birfday Funtimes Continue 

Tuesday (my actual birfday) I got a bunch of cupcakes at work, and my boss gave me a gift certificate to NoiseBot. There were several other good ones, but in the end I selected this T-shirt:


Carrie had to work late (until like 6:00 or something), but then after she got off we went down to Gateway to India for my birfday dinner, where we were met by Christine & Lawrence. I had Gosht Korma! Very good!

Later on in the evening Carrie & I went out and saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Another "Blanking Blank" title movie!). It was very funny and incredibly intelligent. Now I have two movie reviews to write.

Wednesday we cleaned the house and then in the evening went downtown to The Harmon restaurant, where we met my whole family, which came to 9 entire people around one table. Carrie & I hadn't been to The Harmon in a few years, and we were pleased to find that it was still very tasty (and they still had their beer ski). I had a steak with a green peppercorn reduction on a bed of crispy onion straws.

Then everybody came back to our house, where we were joined by Neighbor Gary. I then opened presents. I got cool stuff!

Carrie made me some lemon cupcakes with chocolate frosting (my favorite cake combo), and after those I played some Smash Bros with my own Bro and Cassie.

Thursday in the afternoon Lawrence took me out to see Iron Man. I now have three movie reviews to write. When I got home I got a package from Amazon.com, which I thought was odd because I hadn't ordered anything from them. Turns out it was a birthday gift from Taisha, Battlestar Galactica - The Complete Epic Series (Limited Edition Cylon Head Packaging)

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday in person, online, over the phone, and/or by giving me a gift!

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posted by Christopher at 8:06 AM

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Jonathan Coulton Has the Coolest Instrument EVAR 

It's called the Tenori-on. It was created by Toshio Iwai, the same guy who created Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS. Here he is using it to perform "My Monkey" at the Triple Door in Seattle this last weekend (I didn't go to the show 'cause of Fools Play):


(By the way, the woman he's singing with is sweetafton23, a very talented and funny singer/ukulele player)

I think it would kick ass to own one of these instruments, if only they didn't cost quite so durned much. Though I imagine it would be better off in the hands of Tangentbot. I bet he could K some serious A with it.

(via Jonathan Coulton)

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posted by Christopher at 4:40 PM

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Friday, April 25, 2008

Kobe Blue, the Greatest Pilot in the Galaxy 

I thought this was pretty funny (marginally NSFW):


(via Dustin Weaver's Livejournal)

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posted by Christopher at 2:28 PM

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Sunday, April 20, 2008

Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles 

Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles
It sounds impossible, but just watch the video.

(via Wynn Ryder)

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posted by Christopher at 6:12 PM

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Most Unwanted Song 

So apparently these two Russians did extensive polling of Americans to discover our tastes in music. They then compiled the results and created (with the help of musician Dave Soldier) one song that statistically was the song that Americans most wanted to hear... and one that was statistically what Americans least wanted to hear. From the article:
"...over an accompaniment of bagpipe, tuba and accordian (statistically, America's least favorite instruments), an operatic soprano (our least favorite type of singer) raps (ditto) about cowboys (ditto). Their research indicated that the most hated lyrical subject is holidays (disliked by 33%), so the song is suitable not only for Christmas, but Easter, Labor Day, Veterans' Day, and Halloween. These interludes are introduced abruptly by a children's chorus ("Hey everybody, it's Yom Kippur!"), who couple their refrains with cheerful commercial messages. By the end, the subject has shifted to human slavery and genocide. The whole thing, going on for nearly 22 minutes (the least favorite song length), is as impossible to ignore as a car crash."

When I listened to The Most Unwanted Song I nearly wet myself; I was actually crying with laughter. It is truly one of the most spectacular pieces of music I have ever heard. I also thoroughly enjoyed The Most Wanted Song, with its absolute over-the-top blandness and inanity of lyrics (including an over-abundance of "baby"). I thought both were hilarious. Go on. Click those links. Listen for yourself and then decide for... yourself. Here's some more info (and a link to buy a CD of the songs).

(via tangentbot, in a round-about way)

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posted by Christopher at 6:01 PM

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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

オバッチの Jacket Lunch Box 

Whoever runs the オバッチの Jacket Lunch Box has the unusual hobby of re-creating album covers using only ordinary bento lunch box ingredients.



(via Pink Tentacle)

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posted by Christopher at 3:22 PM

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The Incredible Upside-Downs 

The incredible upside-downs, created in 1903, are first read right-side up, then finished by reading upside down! Gustave Verbeek accomplished this for 65 installments! Weird but topsy-turvy!


(via Arflovers)

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posted by Christopher at 3:19 PM

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Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Fools Play Funtimes 

This Saturday, April 5th 2008, is Fools Play's 15th Anniversary! We're having a big 15th Anniversary Show, and to go with it you can enter our online 15th Anniversary Contest!

Also, have you met this character on Fools Play Island yet?
If not, you should go dig around the Format Forest RIGHT NOW until you do! It's seriously the craziest, coolest, and most fun quest you can undertake on all of Fools Play Island. You think you've seen it all on Fools Play Island? THINK AGAIN!

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posted by Christopher at 10:56 PM

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Fool's Day Round-Up 

Here were a couple of my favorite intarweb pranks from yesterday:

Chemical Periodicity Remains ONLY a Theory
(via jeffthefish)

The Legend of Zelda Film Trailer
(via Whedonesque)

Surprisingly, Maddox's annual April Fool's Day joke wasn't ready yesterday!

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posted by Christopher at 2:43 PM

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Friday, March 28, 2008

Hard To Drive a Bus in the Snow 

Yesterday (Thursday) we woke up to snow on the ground. This was no big surprise considering that it was snowing Wednesday evening. It was kind of a surprise that it was snowing at all this close to April, though. This never happens 'round these parts. I got Carrie off to work nonetheless, and from there she left for Portland for the weekend (boo).

After work I came home, had a sammitch, fed Suki, took care of a couple of sundries around the house, then I headed up to Seattle. It started to snow again while I was on my way up there!

I hung out with Sandy a bit and then we went and got Mathias and proceeded to have dinner at Taki's Mad Greek. This has got to be one of my favorite Greek restaurants evar. Especially the Oven Baked Feta appetizer. And their pork is cooked just right: not too much, but not too little. And everything just tastes really, really tasty.

I also took a photo of the decorations in the men's room:

On the left there we have a completely nude Poseidon, but on the right we have Theseus covering his privates with a leaf! I wonder why. Does he not measure up to Poseidon? I just thought it was funny.

After dinner we parked near their apartment and then walked through the bitter cold (though it wasn't snowing at that time) to Neumos, where we met up with Jason and his wife Jennifer, as well as Geoff and Lisa!

Why were we there? Why, to see Busdriver, of course! Look:



The man moves as fast as he raps; it's difficult to get a good picture of him. Just look at the blur lines on his left hand in those pictures!

When we got to Neumos we were basically the only people there. Everybody else was in the attached bar. When Busdriver took the stage we were still practically the only people there, but Busdriver plunged ahead anyway. A handful of other people trickled in after he started (30 to 40). Last time I saw him the place was packed so we all thought it was weird, until we figured out that this was a 21-up show, and he usually plays to all-ages at Neumos. I guess only the kids like the Busdriver.

Anyhoo, it was a great set, and he did that cover of Man, It's So Loud in Here by They Might Be Giants that I really like. He played for just under an hour. We all met him over at his merch table, where Sandy bought the last copy of his rarities CD. He told me he'd go to his car and see if he could find another, but I wasn't able to catch him again before we left. I talked to him a bit about that TMBG song he does, and he said it was pretty old and he was thinking of retiring it. He's very shy and awkward off the stage. Hopefully he'll have another copy next time he comes into town.

Sandy kinda creeped him out by showing him a picture of the Busdriver Bot magnet that she made.

An hour after he left the stage the "main attraction," the Gray Boy All-Stars took the stage, and suddenly the theater was swarmed with frat boys, bros, and similar early-to-mid 30s types (and the kind of women who hang out with them). They were a jazzy kind of quintet, with drums, bass, guitar, sax, and keyboards. They were all very skilled musicians, but it was just not what we were in the mood for, and also didn't really sound like what they offer on their MySpace page. They sounded like they were straight out of 1985. Seriously! They even looked it.

At one point Sandy turned to me and said something to the effect that she felt like they were a band that the Huxtables would go and watch on the Cosby show. Mathias summed it up best by saying they were "Sportscoat and Bluejeans" jazz. They didn't go with Busdriver at all, so it wasn't a big surprise that none of their fans came out to see Busdriver go crazy.

We left after four or so songs. Jason gave us a ride back to S&M's apartment, and from there I drove on home.

You can read Mathias's "version" of events over at his website. He's got some really crazy pictures up, too.

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posted by Christopher at 4:41 PM

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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Cutest Remote Control EVAR 

ApriPoko, this unbearably cute remote control from (where else) Japan can tell when you're using another remote control, and actually asks you what you just did. You tell it (for example, "I turned up the volume on the TV"), and it records the infared signal that the other remote sent out. Then if you later tell ApriPoko, "Turn up the volume on the TV," it emits that exact same infrared signal to the TV!

(via Pink Tentacle)

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posted by Christopher at 10:50 PM

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Monday, March 24, 2008

Heart Felt Robots == Cute! 

Heart Felt Robots makes all kinds of robot-themed cuteness. Check it out! (and not just because she's one of my best friends!)

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posted by Christopher at 2:56 PM

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Saturday, March 15, 2008

My New Favorite Animal 

The microscopic Water Bear: TARDIGRADE!

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posted by Christopher at 2:37 PM

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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Evolution is Funny! 

My pal Jason over at jeffthefish.com has for a few months been making periodic posts about hilarious Creationist quotes and other inanities. They're very funny in a sad/infuriating way, and Jason has a rather funny, dry writing style. Take a read: Evolution at www.jeffthefish.com

His recent post about letterboard misspellings is also very funny.

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posted by Christopher at 12:00 AM

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Saturday, February 16, 2008

In a Round-About Way 

Earlier this week I was going through all of my They Might Be Giants music to see what I still needed to get in order to have a "complete" collection (knowing full well that some songs are impossible to get right now, like Monsters of Mud) of studio recordings by Them. In researching, I discovered that not only do They have a podcast (which I knew about and enjoy), but they've been doing a video podcast for kids as well!

It's hosted by the Puppet Johns and they play a couple of videos from their two most recent kids' album-slash-DVDs, Here Come the ABCs and Here Come the 123s. I'd seen most of the ABCs before, but I'd never seen the 123 videos.

One video in particular, the one for Eight-Hundred-Thirteen Mile Car Trip, struck me as being particularly well designed (and passably well animated for a low-budged flash video). So I went to This Might Be a Wiki and discovered that it was designed & animated by someone named Pascal Campion.

A quick Google search turned up not only a website for Pascal, but a blog as well! I have to say, I really dig his style. It has kind of a Maurice Noble vibe, but is still very individualistic. He's got great lines and a phenomenal sense of color. He's actually done a handful of videos for TMBG, including some on Venue Songs and ABCs.

Art by Pascal CampionIt's safe to say that he's one of my new favorite artists, and I discovered him in a very cool round-about way.

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posted by Christopher at 2:34 PM

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Monday, February 11, 2008

Robots Would Never Hurt Us 

Robot Guitar!I'm going to say: It's about damned time. Gibson has come out with a Robot Guitar. What makes it a robot? No, it doesn't transform into a bipedal robot and run around. Instead, it tunes itself. It automatically spins its tuning knobs until all the strings are in tune.

I am wondering why it took until now, many years into the 21st century, for someone to actually create something like this.

But that is of little import. It is here now, added to the growing list of useful robots that the general populace can actually own!

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posted by Christopher at 2:37 PM

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Monday, January 21, 2008

Why Does the PSP Get All the Coolest Looking Games? 

First there was LocoRoco.

Now comes Patapon, a rhythm-based, 2-D scrolling war game of sorts. Check out the trailer:


I'm serious: if anybody has a PSP that they don't want anymore, I'll totally take it off your hands. I have a little bit of Christmas money left.

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posted by Christopher at 2:36 PM

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Sunday, January 13, 2008

Katsu Kraziness 

This story kinda starts a while back, quite a ways before Christmas.

I was up in Seattle hanging out with Tangetnbot's wife, waiting for him to get off work. She was prepping a dinner of pork katsu with panko bread crumbs and tonkatsu sauce. It ended up being delicious.

Then in her Christmas stocking(s), Carrie received both a bottle of tonkatsu sauce and a package of panko.

So a while after Christmas Carrie & I made chicken katsu for dinner with equally delicious results. The sauce and the crumbs were both from the inimitable Uwajimaya up in Seattle. I love Uwajimaya, but Seattle is just a bit too far away for a casual jaunt out to get some Japanese foodstuffs. So I started wondering if there were any Asian markets closer by.

A quick search told me that there was a place called East Asia Super Market (note "Super Market," not "Supermarket") just a stone's throw across I-5 from us. Tacoma Mama gives it a sterling review (Tacoma Mama is, by the way, a great resource for things in Tacoma), so I'm curious to go check it out sometime soon. I doubt it can be anywhere near as cool as Uwajimaya, but at least it's something, eh?

By the way, Tangentbot is posting some tasty recipes on his site if you wanna make some good food. He hasn't posted a katsu recipe yet, though, so here's what Carrie & I did!
Chicken Katsu
INGREDIENTS
Chicken cutlets (or chicken breast halves, pounded until they're as thin as cutlets)
All-purpouse flour
1 egg, beaten
Panko bread crumbs
Salt & Pepa to taste
Tonkatsu sauce
DIRECTIONS
  1. Set up three shallow dishes: 1 with flour in it, 1 with a beaten egg in it, and 1 with the panko in it.
  2. Season the chicken to taste.
  3. Dredge the chicken through the flower to coat, then through the egg, and then through the panko until it is thoroughly coated with bread crumbs
  4. Heat about ¼" of oil in a pan over medium to medium-high heat. Fry the chicken in the oil 3-4 minutes per side (until golden brown and cooked through)
  5. Let the chicken rest for several minutes, then slice on a diagonal (like you're julienning a carrot).
  6. Serve on a bed of steamed white rice and drizzle with tonkatsu sauce (you can add purple cabbage to the rice for even more authenticity)

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posted by Christopher at 9:28 PM

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Saturday, January 12, 2008

USAVICH 


From Japan comes a very strange CGI-animated series of shorts: Usavich. It's about two rabbits in prison. They're all under two minutes, and most-surprising of all is the fact that they have continuity! Once you get into their rhythm, they're rather hilarious.

[Found via Cartoon Brew]

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posted by Christopher at 3:41 PM

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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Shameless Self-Promotion & Vacation Dreams 

I just discovered that if you type "Samus Aran" into Google, my site is the 2nd listed! holy crap! Just because I wrote a humorous article about the endings of the various Metroid games... like three years ago! Take a wook:


So, if anybody wants to know anything about Samus Aran, it's either Wikipedia or me!



Anyway, let me tell you about a dream I had a couple of nights ago. It involved Carrie, Me, and my whole family going on vacation together. First off we went to one of the San Juan Islands, which was historically famous for having the first-ever freeway onramp in America. It was also famous for having the first-ever comic strip written about a freeway onramp (my dream people actually showed me a closeup of the comic strip, and it was drawn in a glorious 60s-futurism style. Very cool).

After the excitement of the freeway onramp, which was strangely high-tech, we all headed to the area between Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens, which (you might not be aware) is a large desert basin that stretches for miles and miles, ringed with rocky hills.

While we were wandering around the cartoon-style sand dunes in this desert, all of a sudden Mt. Rainier erupted. It wasn't an all-ash eruption like St. Helens in 1980. It was more of a single, quick, but very large explosion. Very fiery and red. It wasn't at all scary. It was just kind of like, hey, look: Rainier finally erupted. huh.

A few moments after rainier erupted we all saw the shockwave from the blast as it caused the desert floor to swell up like a big wave (which we all calmly and un-eventfully rode out). We all stood there and watched as the shockwave traveled south across the desert, until it disappeared in the distance. Then a couple of seconds later we saw Mt. St. Helens erupt in a big cloud of ash. We all kinda nodded knowingly, like, "Yep, the Rainier eruption caused a huge earthquake, and once it reached St. Helens of course it erupted."

Then the aftershocks started hitting, and the whole desert was going up and down in waves. Then one of the waves actually broke like an ocean wave—it broke right over Susan's head, burying her in the sand! She was easy to find, though, because when the wave settled down there was a susan-shaped mound in the sand. She was just a couple of feet down, and it took me only a second of non-worried digging to get her out.

The whole family then decided to head somewhere else, but I woke up before we actually got anywhere.

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posted by Christopher at 1:06 AM

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

The Year I was Born 

My eyes! My eyes! Aargh!

http://teamsugar.com/group/46813/blog/771943

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posted by Christopher at 5:43 PM

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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy H'ween, Everybody! 

Today (Wednesday) is Halloween! Hooray!

On Friday Carrie got me a Wii because I'm an awexome husband. Take THAT, all you lousy husbands! Har har! Score! She also got me The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess. Boo-yah!

Gina came and stayed with us over Halloween weekend, because Halloween weekend was also the Bead Factory's 15th anniversary weekend. They needed extra help, so they paid for Gina to take the train up from Portland for the weekend. She slept on our couch. I cooked breakfast for us (scrambled eggs & sausage on Saturday, Li'l Smokies and orange rolls (Christmas breakfast) for us on Sunday). We like her. It was nice having her around, even though we really didn't see her that much because everybody was working so mucho.

Saturday evening was Fools Play Trick or Treat, our annual Halloween show. Not as many people came as usual, but here's what us Fools dressed up as:

As Cactus Jack - Jake Ynzunza the Pink Fool:


As the victim of a pillow fight - Taisha McFall the Jade Fool:



As James, ½ of Team Rocket (with the very lovely Tia as Jessie of Team Rocket) - Mike Harris the Blue Fool:


But I know what you're asking: What whas Chris Harris the Purple Fool's costume? And what awexome punkins did he carve this year?

Well, lucky for you all, I wrote a new Article all about that! What was my costume? What were my punkins? What new H'ween craft did I do this year? And what could possibly make The Ocean Shores Pirate cry a single, gigantic tear? You can only find out by reading...

A Halloween Surprise for The Ocean Shores Pirate

Well, my in-laws are coming over soon for our annual H'ween tradition of soup, Reuben sammitches, and handing out full-sized candy bars (not them crappy little dinky things) to everyone who comes to the door!

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posted by Christopher at 4:45 PM

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Sunday, October 07, 2007

It Went "Whoomp" And my Whole House Shook 

Around 3:00 yesterday (Saturday) I was watching John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (horrible movie, but it stars Ice Cube) when there was a big noise like a gigantically close sonic boom. It went "Whoomp!" and my whole house shook. I could see the big bay window actually flex a little bit. It startled Suki quite a bit.

I went outside and looked to make sure a tree didn't fall on my house or something, and noticed that the sky was full of birds—they'd all fled the trees and were screeching around overhead. Then I heard dozens and dozens of sirens way off to the south.

Read this news story.

Watch this movie:



That was almost two full miles away from my house. The explosion created enough of a shock wave that it was felt at least as far away as UPS, which is another half mile further away.

Thankfully Carrie came home via Stadium Way and not Highway 16, because a piece of tanker truck actually flew up in the air and landed on the highway, hundreds of feet away.

And somehow nobody was killed.

Update: 10-16-07

Here are a couple of views of the explosion:



And here's a remarkable video where you can see cars driving on the freeway (highway 16) as they're silhouetted by the explosion behind them.

Unfortunately the driver of the propane truck died Sunday morning: http://www.thenewstribune.com/1001/story/179347.html

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Farewell to Studio 321 



But fear not! Fools Play has a new venue: starting September 29th, Fools Play Improv will be at the Mariah Art School across the street from Garfield Elementary on Olympia's west side.

Mariah Art School
1403 Garfield Ave NW
Olympia, WA 98502

The show will still be every Saturday night at 8:00, and will still be only $5 a person ($4 if you wear your Fools Play T-shirt).

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posted by Christopher at 11:46 PM

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Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Hey, I Know That Guy 

Hey, everybody who knows Geoff should go watch this trailer for a movie by clicking the picture below:


Also, click here!

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posted by Christopher at 12:11 AM

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Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Sugarshock 

Joss Whedon has written a new, entirely un-Jossverse related comic book! It's called Sugarshock and you can read it here.
©Dark Horse Comics.

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posted by Christopher at 5:35 PM

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Thursday, July 26, 2007

Oh Yeah... Time For a Shameless Plug 

I keep on forgetting to mention that the store where I work, Ever After, is having a big ol' sale all this week (ends Friday the 27th). Everything in the store is 20% off, and there's a sidewalk sale where things are even more off than that. I know, sounds impossible, but there it is. Undeniable. So you have two days (today, Thursday, and tomorrow, Friday) to take advantage of it.

Also, the website (which I'm in charge of) has everything 10% off all week. So for those of you out-of-towners who can't make it in to the store and buy something on sale—wrong! You can still buy something on sale! Via teh magic tubez of teh intarwebs.


Come to Ever After's
Big Annual Sale!

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posted by Christopher at 9:03 AM

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Cutest Towel EVAR 


Over the weekend I went to Ryan's 30th birthday party up in Bellingham. I snapped this photo of the hand towel in his bathroom.

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posted by Christopher at 4:42 PM

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Tuesday, July 17, 2007

What's Going On!! 

The Puget Sound Bead Festival continued for the duration of the weekend. I actually went and walked around the show on Saturday for a bit, and saw the out-of-town girls (in order I saw them) Nicole, Brandy, and Gretchen.

That evening Fools Play did an ambitious new format called "Learnin' the Ropes" in which we try to get our apprentices ready to perform in the span of five (5) days. It had a really large audience, due mostly to friends of the apprentices wanting to see them perform.

Sunday I left Fools Play practice early so I could help tear down the classrooms at the PSBF. Then I drove up to Issaquah for Mike's birthday diner at XXX Root Beer. Man, that place is so good. I had a bacon burger the size of my plate. Then afterwards I went and ordered onion rings.

Carrie & I both took Monday off so we could recover from the PSBF, but also for another reason: we needed to buy a car. A couple of our bead colleagues had bought a car just last week from Toyota of Puyallup and highly recommended the salesman, so we went down there as well and talked with him. And ended up buying the exact same car that they'd bought. They didn't have our 1st choice color available at all, and our 2nd choice color was down in Portland, so it would have to be driven up and so wouldn't be ready until Tuesday. But we were also satisfied with the salesman (though the paperwork department for some reason took for-freakin'-ever). So if you ever want to get a Toyota, go to Toyota of Puyallup and ask for John Martinez, and tell him that Chris Harris & Carrie Hamm sent you (we'll get some sorta kickback if you do).

Monday evening Carrie & I went out on a date and saw Ratatouille.

That brings us to Today, when, after an afternoon nap, Carrie & I went and picked up our new car from the dealership. And here it is:

It's a brand-spankin'-new Toyota Yaris 4-door sedan. Only 400 miles on it. And it's so freakin' cute! I made Carrie drive the rental home from the dealership just so I could drive the Yaris home [evil laugh].

I bought a new car! In the past 8 months I've bought a house, a MacBook, a new mattress set, and a new car. I'm a grown-up! All I need to do now is get a dog.

Then after I dropped Carrie off at the store to teach her evening class (I dropped her off with my NEW CAR) I headed back home and noticed a car in front of mine had the same Toyota of Puyallup dealer plates that I had. "Hmm," I thought, "they got their car at the same place I got my car. That looks like the same type of... hey, wait a minute!" Indeed, it was Robbie, the friend who bought the same kind of car last week! He pulled over at our house and we talked about how cool the Yaris cars are. What's plural for Yaris? Yarisses? Or Yari? Anyhoo, I also gave him back the couple of Gamecube controllers that we'd borrowed, oh, quite a while ago.

I leave you with a pretty picture of the clouds reflected in my new car's hood:

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posted by Christopher at 7:39 PM

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Friday, June 15, 2007

Last Hurrah (For Now) 

Yesterday (Thursday) my dad came over to work in the yard while Carrie & I were still at work. Carrie walked home at one point and was rather startled to see his car in the driveway. She forgot that he has a blue car now, so she didn't know who could possibly be parked in our driveway!

Anyhoo, after work I picked up Carrie and we quickly swung by the drugstore and then headed home. I took my dad out to lunch at E-9, where he had an onion/Swiss burger and I had a good ol' club sammitch. I took some of it home for Carrie, then worked in the backyard a bit with my dad, digging up grass in preparation for paving.

Geoff showed up while we were out back. He leaves for China today! So this was our last chance to hang out. We set up our laptops on the dining room table and spent many hours making each other listen to our music collections. "Hey, have you heard this?" "Wow! I really like that! But have you heard this?" That kind of thing. It was really a lot of fun, and a very fitting way to hang out with Geoff before he goes away for six months.

He left around 7:15 to go do capoeira, and I settled down with konpyuta and did what I promised to do: I wrote my review of Spider-Man 3. Take that, procrastination! Pow!

So I really didn't get any work-work done, which is unfortunate because there's quite a bit I need to still do. But hanging out with my best friend since kindergarten seemed more important. Weird, I know. But fear not! Geoff has set himself up with a blog so he can chronicle his adventures in the exotic Orient! It's called More Qi! There's nothing on it right now, but that's okay, he plans to post photos and maybe even other things once we figure out how he can.

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Hosted by a Puppet of Quetzalcoatl 

Yesterday (Saturday) I had planned on spending the vast majority of the day cleaning and cleaning and mowing the lawn. Well, it rained all day, so mowing the lawn was pretty much out. And when I was hanging out with Geoff on Friday he mentioned that he kinda wanted to host Fools Play as Quetzalcoatl, but he didn't want to have to spend so much time on the ground. He'd do it if he had a puppet, though.

So I spent much of Saturday making a Quetzalcoatl out of felt. I watched the special features of PotC:DMC while I cut and sewed. The puppet came out looking pretty good, but I stupidly forgot to take a picture of it! (Geoff, if you're reading this, is there any way you can take a picture and send it to me?)

I did spend the rest of the day doing dishes and laundry, and I got a substantial amount of cleaning done before I left for Fools Play.

It was Geoff's final Fools Play before leaving for China, so all five of the Fools showed up. We did the Fools Play Tribute format, which consists of doing one scene and one recurring character that showcases each of the Fools (for example, my character scene was The Odd Cuppo, and Taisha's was Cororan & Son). We did a Nanamo in which we used only characters that we'd never gotten to perform before. I played Nanamo's penpal, with whom Nanamo refuses to converse in person.

At the end of the night we did a clip segment wherein we re-created actual things that had happened on stage that prominently featured the Yellow Fool.

The night was a huge success with a very large audience, including Steph & Jamie from the Babe Factory, and Erik Melver—even though his wife is extremely pregnant and due next week!

After the show I went and picked Tia up from her place and took her to Rib Eye with me. It was cool to see her! So many people came out to Rib Eye that we took over every single table in the big half of the place. That's 10 tables! There was a lot of funny that evening, including Geoff wearing Tiare's coat and a pair of Red Robin glasses (see the videos in the previous post). Mike sang Geoff a song in which he apologized for eating his sandwich several years ago. Jason had a four-minute conversation with me, which is going to be used as background noise in a song he's gonna make. I wore Lacey's extremely metrosexual hoodie, which made me look like a complete tool.

I ended up staying until 1:00-ish, which is about an hour-and-a-half later than I usually stay. Then I headed on home.

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Friday, June 08, 2007

In the Driver We Trust 

Yesterday (Thursday) after work I came home and wrote an entry in this here blog. Then I headed up to Seattle and met up with Sandy. I got supremely sleepy on the way up, so when I got there I took a ten minute nap whilst Sandy got herself readied.

Then we got in her rental car and started the long, strange journey to go pick her car up from the dealership where it had been repaired.

First off, it was almost impossible to get to the freeway. For some reason the downtown entrances are all blocked off (like I discovered when I tried to use them on Tuesday). So Sandy planned to go through the international district and onto the onramp by SafeCo Field (like I ended up doing on Tuesday). This proved to be extraordinarily difficult, though, due to the fact that for some reason there was a fire truck parked at almost every intersection in the International District, lights flashing and spinning and all that. We didn't see any smoke anywhere, so who knows what that was about, eh?

Well, finally we got on the freeway, and that wasn't actually too all that bad until we got around Tukwila. But that's always bad. We went over on 405 to 167 and took that down to Auburn. That was wide, wide open all the way through Kent, and then came to a grinding almost-halt. We slogged our way down through to Auburn's Auto Mall, the horrifying string of car dealerships that stretches for miles and miles in the north half of Auburn. There we finally made it to the car dealership after well over an hour of travel.

After Sandy paid for the new radiator, the manager came out and looked over the paperwork and said that he'd go through everything, but he might be able to as much as half the price that Sandy was charged, and if so then he'd cut her a check the next day. I don't know if that was every actually done or not, though.

Anyway, we went and ate at a tiny little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place for an early dinner 'cause we were both starving (this was around 4:30 or so). We were given our place settings by a six-year-old girl! It was kinda adorable. The restaurant was just a mom, a dad, and their daughter running the whole place. The daughter brought out silverware and napkins and stuff like that while the parents waited and cooked and all that stuff.

I had two cheese enchiladas with onion, and they were very tasty. We also each had that drink that's like rice milk with cinnamon. It's called horchata. Get it if you're ever in a restaurant that offers it. Ve'y tasty.

After that Sandy & I had to slog through much traffic to get to Highway 18 so she could go to Mathias's mom's house and pick up two packages that Mathias had had delivered there. Then we went up Weyerheuser to avoid getting back on 18, and finally we got back onto I-5 and took that all the way up to SoDo, where we retrieved Mathias from Cobalt much later than had originally been planned. But we got a meal to go from the Mexican place for him, so it was all good.

We headed back to their apartment, and as we parked and were walking up to the door, long came Jason, with whom Mathias & I were gonna hang out that evening. We dallied in the apartment for a little bit so Mathias could open his packages (he got an animé DVD, some new fancy headphones and a signal scrubber thing so that his audio monitors would stop picking up radio signals).

Then all four of us walked to Neumos, where Sandy split off and continued walking on to the garage bowling alley to have a bowling night with her co-workers at Starbucks. Jason, Mathias, & I stopped at Neumos, because we all had tickets to see Busdriver live on stage there!

While we were waiting in line a redhead girl asked if she could buy a ticket off of us for $40. We declined, and then proceeded to waste her time by talking about exotic fish and animals with her. Later on her boyfriend or somebody arrived and they were offering $100 for a ticket. A little tempting, but I really wanted to see Busdriver and hang out with M&J. So no go.

We got in and staked out a position towards the right of the stage, close up but out of the way of anyone who wanted to get rowdy. This being Seattle, though, of course nobody got too rowdy.

Busdriver was actually opening for a band called CSS, which I learned did not stand for the internet term "Cascading Style Sheets." It stands for "Cansei de Ser Sexy," which is Portuguese for "tired of being sexy." Before the show started I bought Busdriver's new CD, RoadKillOverCoat. I bought it by handing a $10 bill to Busdriver himself, then he handed me the CD! Yes, Busdriver works his own gimmick table. He was on the phone, though, so unfortunately I didn't get to talk to him. Jason did later, though, and Busdriver actually remembered him from an earlier show! Jason made an off-hand mention of Master P, which will be important soon...

Anyhoo, there was a band before Busdriver played. It was called Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, which I assume is a reference to V for Vendetta. They sounded like early 80s energetic electro-pop stuff. Nothing terribly original, but very well done, and I really appreciated the fact that they wore matching costumes and had two backup dancers! They were very much a kitschy nerd band who were kinda parodying the music they were making. Like an electro-pop version of The Darkness.

Busdriver came on after NPSH, and he had a super mixing board thing, a digital turntable, and two mics (one for regular voice and one with a variety of effects). That was it. It was a really, really good set, and he really tried to work the crowd, which is always hard in Seattle. He made some subtle fun of Seattleites, saying how we made depression look so very stylish and stuff like that. Funny stuff.

Between several songs Busdriver would go off on a tangentical freestyle. During one of these freestyles he did a bit about Master P! Jason was proud for having planted that seed in his head.

My favorite moment, though, was when Busdriver performed a brand-new song based on the They Might Be Giants song "Man it's So Loud in Here" !!!!! It was spectacular! One of my favorite musicians doing a song by my all-time-favorite musicians! I turned to Mathias after he finished that song and said, "Well, I liked that a whole lot!"

We didn't stick around to hear CSS because we were all kinda tired and weren't terribly interested. So Jason was picked up by Jennifer, and Mathias & I walked back to his apartment so I could pick up my murse, which I had intelligently left there. I said goodnight to Sandy, who had also a very fun evening of bowling, and then I got in my car and drove back home.

It was after midnight when I got back, but I was hungro so I mixed some sour cream with salt, pepper, onion & garlic powder, bacon bits, and bleu cheese. I used this concoction as a dip for a bunch of carrots, which I ate in bed whilst watching Teen Titans. Then I fell asleep.

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Monday, June 04, 2007

Nostalgia Detour 

There's something in the air tonight.

I'm in bed now. Teen Titans is playing on the TV. Carrie is soundly asleep beside me. She's been in bed for several hours now; she has to get up by 4:00 in the morning in order to get to the airport to catch her flight.

Most all of the windows in the house are open, and I can hear the window fans drawing the cool air inside. It's air from a day that saw some sporadic rain, and there's something about the cool temperature and a slight whiff of some smell combined with the whirring of the fans that takes me straight back to a time ten or eleven years ago.

I was a college boy, though I was staying at my folks' place during summer break. I didn't have a job. I didn't do anything that required any amount of money, really. So I would stay up late at night. Very late. Everybody else in the house would be in bed by 1:35 at the latest (when Late Night with Conan O'Brien got over), but I would continue on for several more hours.

I liked having the run of the downstairs all to myself in the middle of the summer nights. The sliding glass door to the back would be open, the sliding screen door would be shut, and one of those big, white, square fans would be set up so that it would draw in the air, the air that was cooled by the lake just a few feet from the backdoor. And off to the left I would be able to hear the distinctive sound of the fountain in that lake.

I actually had an excuse for staying up so late, though it was sketchy at best. At 5:00 or 5:30 Transformers would air on the fledgling Sci-Fi Channel, and I would stay up to make sure the VCR recorded it correctly onto a video tape, many long years before it would become easily available on DVD.

These were the days when the Cartoon Network and Sci-Fi Channel were still getting their toes wet in the cable waters, waters which were themselves still a little unsure and sketchy. These were the days when TNT showed The Rudy & Go-Go World Famous Cartoon Show, and the Sci-Fi Channel would show a random assortment of cartoons in the wee hours of the morning. Shows like Bionic 6, Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dream Zone, Captain Scarlet, Snorks, and Transformers.

I would stay up all those hours through all those cartoons, enjoying my nocturnality. Often I would make a Monterey Jack cheese quesadilla in a frying pan with butter, and eat it with barbecue sauce. I would play on the brand-newish computer in the corner of the dining room. I would sit on the couch and marvel at the quality of cartoons from the 80s, and wonder why anyone would ever find Gerry Anderson's supermarionation shows to be anything other than interminably dull.

Then, when Transformers came on and I hit record on the VCR, I would climb upstairs and crawl into the top bunk in the room I shared with my brother (yes, we had bunk beds, but only after I started going to college, curl up in my Batman: The Animated Series sheets, and sleep until around 1:00 in the afternoon.

There was nothing to do that summer but hang out, play video games, watch TV, and do Fools Play. And think that that new girl who tried out for Fools Play was awfully cute...

This was also the summer that Susan and I would play Mario Kart 64 for at least one hour every day. But that, as Mako would say, is another story...

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posted by Christopher at 11:35 PM

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Friday, June 01, 2007

Can't Think of a Good Title 

Yesterday (Thursday) as soon as I got home Carrie left for Sonja's. In the interim I baked and ate an pizza. On her way home she called and asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. I'd just eaten an entire pizza. I wasn't particularly hungry.

I took a nap in the late afternoon and had weird dreams about the Fantastic Four and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. One of my long-ago friends was somehow in them both. She was a replacement for Sue Richards and a love interest for Odo, respectively.

Neither of us ate dinner before Carrie went and taught her evening class. During the evening I worked more on client stuff and confirmed to myself just how very cool Google is with Google Bookmarks.

I also went looking for free fonts, and found several sites. My favorite of them all, though, was one called Fonts for Kids. That's probably not a big surprise. But it has some really, really good ones, and tonnes of fake re-creations of movie/TV title fonts and things like that. Take a gander!

Carrie got home really late from her class—well after 11:00. We made spaghetti and went to bed.

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

They Still Need to be Taken On 

There's been a re-design of Take On the Toughies! Go and read all of the excerpts, now presented in random order!

TakeOnTheToughies.org

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posted by Christopher at 7:01 PM

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Sunday, May 20, 2007

TGI Friday Harbor - Day 1! 

On Friday morning I went in to work a whole two hours early, as I mentioned in my last post. While I was at work Carrie stayed home and packed a couple of overnight bags. Then she swung by the store and picked me up and we drove (she doing the actual driving) up to Anacortes to catch the Anacortes ferry to Friday Harbor!

We got to the ferry terminal plenty early. It had a stand-up of Raiden Fighters that unfortunately was out of order, so I played the other shmup stand-up they had there. We watched an episode of Teen Titans on my MacBook's DVD player, and then we boarded the ferry. It was kind of a gray day, but it was still nice enough. Here's the view out of the ferry window:

We passed a ferry going the opposite direction.

The ferry ride lasts over and hour, and weaves through the San Juan Islands to San Juan Island itself, the site of the hilarious British/American Pig War. We sat in the upper floor for most of the time, but towards the end we grabbed all our bags (since you can't leave them unattended) and wandered around the upper floor deck.


Finally we arrived at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. After disembarking the ferry we turned right as instructed and were picked up by Leah, super-cute haircut and all! Hooray! She drove us to our hotel so we could check in, and then drove us around the island, past the lighthouse to a secluded little beach.

As we were walking across a grassy field towards the beach (actually towards the cliff you have to climb down to get to the beach), Carrie's foot entered a hole in the ground and down she went!

But we made it down the cliff without incident. Then Leah showed us around the beach.

She told us about her school project where she turns over rocks and catches all of the crabs underneath them, then measures them. Needless to say, there were a tonne of crabs at this beach.

Here's a cute picture of Carrie and Leah:

And here's another crab:

Here's a view across the water towards some other islands. I'm not exactly sure which direction this is looking; the overcast sky really wreaked havoc with my direction sense. I think that might be Canada over there, though:

Leah said that this gigantic stump hadn't been on the beach the day before. Tides sure are sumpin', ain't they:

I like this photo. If it were 30 degrees warmer and the beach were a little less gravelly and a little more sandy, then this would look just like some location from Lost:

Leah was getting hungry, and I was on vacuum cleaner mode (meaning I could eat any amount of food at any time), so we scaled back up the cliff

And Leah drove us back into town where we had dinner at Vic's Driftwood Drive Inn, a really cool little place with an enormous menu. The menu in fact took up the entire back wall of the restaurant. Leah eats there quite a bit, so she knows them. She ordered a breakfast sammitch even though they technically weren't supposed to serve them anymore. Carrie hitched herself to Leah's star power and ordered a breakfast sammitch, too. I ordered a club sammitch. The guy behind the counter (Vic himself?) was really funny and cool. And my sammitch was ENORMOUS! I couldn't even pick up the frikkin' thing! Just ask Mathias if you don't believe me (he got the same sammitch when he went to Vic's while visiting Leah).

After dinner Leah took us to the Laboratories where she lives and works. The University of Washington runs a world-renowned marine research lab and campus just outside of Friday harbor. And that's where she took us. First she showed us the electron microscope, which was super cool. It was like something out of an old Sci-Fi movie. Then she showed us some lab rooms, which universally had big tanks of water and hoses and grates and water.

She took us to the lab room that she uses, where there were several cool creatures in tanks, such as shrimp, anemones, sea stars, and sea cucumbers. Here's Carrie not enjoying holding a sea cucumber:

When they get agitated, sea cucumbers swell up something fierce. This one got to the size of a football before we put it back. Some sea cucumbers spit up their guts as a defense mechanism (so predators will eat their guts and not them), but this one thankfully never got THAT agitated. Its skin felt like a rubber wetsuit.

Leah also poked an anemone with a sea star and set it lurching around the tank. It was pretty funny. Some of the most fun over the weekend was watching Leah poke and prod and toss around various sea creatures. She's actually posted videos of herself doing this (including one of the swimming anemone, called "swimming anemone").

The laboratories had a cool Japanese-esque architecture to them. I only took one photo of one building, and didn't really successfully capture the Japanese feel of the place. But I like this picture because you can actually see the Friday Harbor docks across the bay in the background:

Leah showed us her dorm room and everything. Then she took us back to our hotel. We were staying at Elements, which up until just a few weeks ago was the Friday Harbor Inn. We got a "water" room, but unfortunately they didn't have any water rooms with jetted tubs left. Fortunately, though, the facilities included a pool and a jacuzzi. Very fortunately, Leah had her swimsuit with her at the labs (it makes sense for a marine biologist to have a swimsuit with her), so we all put on our swimsuits and spent time in both the jacuzzi and the pool. Going back and forth and all that. It was a tonne of fun. Carrie & I like hanging out with Leah! It was a good way to close out the day.

Day 2 coming soon...

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Thursday, May 17, 2007

Wir gingen zum Flughafen 

Yesterday (Wednesday) around about the time I got off work I started getting a serious grump on. My blood sugar decided to tank for some reason. So when I picked Carrie up from work we swung by Jack in the Box and loaded up on calories. I felt much better afterwards, although I also felt much less healthy.

Yesterday was odd in that Carrie had a split-shift instead of her normal 8:00 - 4:00 shift. So after lunch I didn't have to take her back to the store until later on. After I did take her back I made myself a stir fry of tofu and green beans. Very tasty! I made it with tarragon vinegar and lots of black pepper (and of course soy sauce). That made me feel much healthier than lunch!

Around 7:15 I swung by Stadium and picked up Lawrence, and the twain of us drove up to the SeaTac airport whilst listening to The Wastelanders' BlackHearted American Water. On the way we stopped at Carrie's folks' house so I could drop off our contributions to the Broadway Center auction thingy. Carrie donated ten pairs of earrings, and I donated these etched martini glasses:

It's way difficult to take good photos of etched glassware, so I'm very proud of this one! Some color/contrast adjustment in Photoshop didn't hurt none, either.

There was crazy construction at the airport (as there always seems to be), but after circling around (in a much more complicated circle than usual—it involved going down into the street, through a stop sign, and practically back to the Burien freeway) a couple of times we pulled over and picked up Christine, back from California! Hooray!

I drove them back to her place before coming home, watching Mythbusters, doing laundry, and playing some of Final Fantasy I. Carrie came home after her class late (after 11:00) and we went to bed shortly thereafter.

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@#$%!&#!% 

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/4813455.html

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posted by Christopher at 6:50 PM

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Saturday, April 28, 2007

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends 

Yesterday after work my dad came over again. We went out to The Rosewood for lunch, where I had the special sammitch, a sub piled hight with absolutely delicous ham and red bell peppers and yummy.

Then we came home and worked in the yard for a little bit longer, digging up the newly conceived flowerbed. He also brought over a couple of flowers to get me started! Very cool. I really like the way the yard is shaping up this year.

At 4:00 I headed up to Seattle once more and hung out with Sandy for a bit before we left and got Mathias from Cobalt. We then met my brother at this cool little Japanese restaurant called Takohachi. It has a sign with a big red octopus on it (octopus is "tako" in Japanese, hence "Takohachi"). According to Sandy & Mathias, the food in there is authentic Japanese food, the kind you'd find at regular ol' diners and non-fancy restaurants. I had "croquettes" and pork cutlet, both of which were good. And not expensive. My brother had been holding the table for a while, and right after we got there a whole bunch of other people showed up and there was no room for them! There were easily eight people waiting for tables the whole time we were eating. If you go to Takohachi, get there before 6:00!

Originally a couple of other people from Cobalt, as well as one of the Purtlebaughs' friends, were going to meet us there for dinner, but they all crapped out, so it was just the four of us. I guess they heard I was coming...

Anyhoo, after dinner I went back to Sandy & Mathias's place. Sandy parked and when we got out of the car she saw her other Chris friend walking up the street (this Chris was one who was supposed to meet us at Takohachi). We chatted about turtle soup, and then he left to go eat oysters. The rest of us hung out for a bit before Chris came over, then we all went to Daiso (again for Sandy & me). I bought a notebook for work and also some paper kite hanging decorations. Dunno quite what I'm gonna do with them, but they's cute.

After that we went back to S&M's apartment, though Chris went back up to his own apartment. The rest of us hung out and watched some YouTube stuff—they'd never heard of the thing with Mentos and Diet Coke, so we found the video of the two guys in lab coats putting on a fountain show:


We read all about Daiso. Sandy made warm fudge sundaes. At 10:00 we all watched Numb3rs, which S&M had never seen before. I like that show—this was the one where Larry comes back from space.

After that I drove on home and played with my MacBook. I'm writing this blog entry in it right now! Tee-hee!

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Monday, April 23, 2007

Fish & Photos 

Yesterday (Sunday) Carrie & I got up at a relatively reasonable time so we could make a tour of tech. We started at Office Depot, then Chét Targét (where Carrie also picked up various other sundries she needed for her trip), and ended at Fred Meyer's (where Carrie picked up various groceries).

The point of this Tech Tour was to price and compare various digital cameras. I'd gone onto Digital Camera HQ and found all of the highest-rated, ultra-compact cameras under $250. Fred Meyer's had all the same ones that were at the other two places, and at the same prices, so I decided to get one there. I settled on the Casio Exilim EX-Z75. It's very cute, very intuitive, has an "easy mode" for Carrie and has enough options to suit all of my needs. It's also more than 3 times as powerful as my old camera, and doesn't take 30 seconds to turn on or a full second to take a photo when you push the trigger (it actually takes only about 0.01 seconds). I like it so far.

We then ate some Mandarin chicken, and I went to Fools Play practice. We worked on recurring character stuff, re-tooling a couple of character bits and coming up with a couple of new ones. A really good idea and a really, really bad idea. 'Twas a lots of fun.

When I came home Carrie & Lawrence & Christine already had the coals going on the barbeque, and Carrie & Lawrence had prepped 3 types of salmon: Lemon/garlic salmon, Teriyaki salmon, and Plumb BBQ sauce salmon. They were also making brownies and a big veggie tray, and Carrie even made guacamolé. I put the salmon on and it cooked away.

As the even went on, more and more people started coming over, including the likes of Carly, Liana y Robbie, Melissa y Travis, and Jen w/Lila. Liana & Robbie even brought their two dogs over, which delighted Carrie (but made Fantastico none too happy).

It was a very fun evening of barbeque, beer, and video games (Robbie brought over two more GameCube controllers and we mostly played Bomberman Jetters and Mario Kart Double Dash, although at one point Travis actually brought out a working 3DO system). And since we'd used paper plates and disposable cups, cleanup was a snap!

Here's a pic of a whole bunch of peoples playing video games (taken with the new camera, of course):

After everyone was gone, Carrie then watched the season finale of The Apprentice while I finished up some computer stuff, and then we went to bed.

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Monday, April 16, 2007

Damn It All to Hell 

http://www.faireconomy.org/research/CEO_Pay_charts.html

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posted by Christopher at 8:09 PM

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Saturday, March 31, 2007

I Taste Like Bread 


What Flavour Are You? I taste like Bread.I taste like Bread.


I am a staple in almost everyone's diet. Friends like me are a complement to any other friends I get on with almost everyone, remaining mostly in the background, but providing substance when it would otherwise be lacking. What Flavour Are You?

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posted by Christopher at 11:20 AM

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Friday, March 16, 2007

Get Back in the Game 

I h'ain't written fer quite awhile, ha'e I?

Well, that's because I'm still (after nearly three months) having trouble putting blogging back into my daily routine. I should really do it in the morning when I wake up, but in the morning my brain almost always subconsciously thinks, "I could get up now and write in my website, or I could sleep for another 15 minutes." Which do you think it chooses?

Anyway, this week has been spent almost entirely recovering from a bizarre medical procedure. Don't worry! I was never in any sort of danger or anything.

But I didn't eat anything from Sunday midnight until 5:00 PM Wednesday. That was difficult. I was on a liquid-only diet, and let me tell you, it's difficult to take a bunch of pills that are labeled "Take With Food" when you can't eat food. Consequently, I threw up Monday night due to a less-than-well-protected stomach.

I stayed home from work on Tuesday to recover, and then on Wednesday I actually had Carrie drop me off an hour early. I got all set up to start working, went in the bathroom, and ate a large sammitch. And when I say "ate a large sammitch" I really mean "Threw up a whole bunch in the sink." So Carrie had to come on back and pick me up and take me home where I slept a whole bunch and tried not to be TOO hungry.

Fortunately I was able to get a whole bunch of work done later in the day, and at midnight *gasp* the new Ever After website went live: www.everafterstore.com

I was actually able to eat in the evening, so I had some chicken drumsticks that Carrie had cooked up, and some banana/apple bread that Carrie had cooked up, and some other stuff. And it was all good.

Yesterday (Thursday) I went in to work as per usual. Carrie had to stop by and steal the car from me in the middle of the day, though, to take stuff to the Lareau homestead. She came back and picked me up after work, and as we were driving home we spotted Lawrence walking up the road, so we pulled over and gave him a ride to the Starbucks on the corner near our house.

Then I took a couple of nice naps in the afternoon, while Carrie took one gigantic one that lasted the entire afternoon until 6:00. Well, she was tired!

In the evening I worked on some stuff for websites, not that I have any visually-apparent results from any of it. I also watched Andy Richter's new show, Andy Barker: P.I. It was very funny. And very Conan. I also watched some of Raines, which premiered right afterwards. I liked that it looked like it was gonna be another lame Ghost Whisperer type of show. But it turned out that Jeff Goldblum's character can't actually see ghosts; he's just batsh*t crazy and is hallucinating them.

I tried to cook up a yummy stroganoff-style dinner, but the beef had gone horribly wrong and tasted rather rancid, so that put me off of food for the entire rest of the evening. Until Carrie came home from teaching class. Then she made a gigantic pot of extra-cheesy mac & cheese, of which I did partake.

In bed I played some Tetris DS with me wife, and she soundly whupped me 4 games to 2. Since she started playing online with people she's improved dramatically. Plus, I hadn't played it for probably a month.

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Monday, February 19, 2007

I Told Carrie... 

...that I wanted to redecorate our bedroom so that it looked like this:


But she said I couldn't. She said that if we ever have a kids, I could make their bedroom look like that. But then I still won't be able to sleep in it!

See all of this stuff here.

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posted by Christopher at 3:42 PM

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Thursday, January 25, 2007

86 Years Ago 

The word "robot" was first used when Rossum's Universal Robots premiered in Prague. Read all about it.

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posted by Christopher at 9:56 AM

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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Almost Gone 

Yesterday (Monday) I went in to Ever After even though it was a Holiday for most people. I'm working on creating the templates using the incredibly complicated shopping cart system that Karla got for the site. It's crazy complicated!

Oh, by the way, if anybody is in the least bit interested, you can check my progress in the re-design by going to http://thisischris.com/proto/everafter/

Compare my version to the current version!

For lunch I made a couple of hot pockets. Carrie made a pizza and then shocked us both by eating the whole thing! After I dropped her off I tried to deposit some checks in the bank, forgetting that it was a holiday and they'd be closed. There's a lot of remodeling going on at Fred Meyer's right now, though! And most of their clothes are way on sale. I might go back and rummage through, but I didn't feel like it yesterday.

The roads were all much better conditions than they'd been in several days. Most all of the ice was going away, especially since it was sunny and above freezing for much of the day.

I worked on some Bead Factory stuff until it was time to get Carrie. We went straight from work to workout for about 45 minutes before coming home. For din-dins we (mostly she) cooked up all the leftover Rib Eye tots with onions, garlic, sour cream, and cheese, then cooked up some Li'l Smokies and some scrambled eggs. Everything was put in one big pan and we both ate from it with forks, "trough-style" as we called it.

In the evening I did a li'l bit more Bead Factory work, then watched a bunch of Brisco County, Jr. (I still have about a disc-and-a-half to go)while I worked on a Thirsty Robots order. That's what I forgot to mention! I got my first out-of-state order, from someone at a publishing company in New York! This is very exciting for me, because I'm pretty sure I've never seen her (all my other orders have been repeat customers from Winterfest). Hooray, robots!

Then, in the middle of the night it snowed almost three more inches. Sigh.

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Friday, January 05, 2007

NOT a Website for an X-Men Character 

Yesterday (Thursday) I picked up Carrie straight after work, and we came home and ate some crackers with various dips & cheese balls for a while before Laura came over.

Laura is going to France in about half a week (boo!), and she, like Brandy before her, wanted a website so she could keep those left behind updated on what she was doin' across the pond.

So I helped her to build "Laura's travels"

We had trouble finding login names and stuff like that, because her name, Laura Kinney, just happens to be the name of a very popular X-Men character: X-23, the female clone of Wolverine. Whenever we tried something only to find it wasn't available, we would exclaim, "That damned X-23 girl got it first!"

Carrie made us all some lunch of Mandarin chicken, and then we took a walk over to the Mandolin Café for some tea and/or hot cider. The walk over there was much colder than we'd expected it to be. I mean, it was really nice and sunny out. But the wind had a bite to it.

We all walked back and hung out at our house for a while before Laura left. There were some near-tearful goodbye hugs, because we prolly won't see her again before she goes. Sad!

I took Carrie back to the store to teach her evening class, then I ate some cheese, crackers, and bonky-stick for my din-din before driving out to the mall to return an un-used dress to J.C. Penny's. While I was there, I did some shopping for my dad's birthday (which is today, Friday) and also looked around for myself (though I didn't find anything).

I came home and read the comic book that Lawrence gave me for Solstice: Mage Volume 2: The Hero Defined. After I picked Carrie up from the store, she made us some macaroni, and then we played some Tetris before bed.

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Friday, December 29, 2006

Good Things to Know for this New Year's Eve 

http://health.howstuffworks.com/hangover8.htm

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posted by Christopher at 7:46 AM

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