SilverWordz

2009-01-21T11:39:00.003-05:00

Holy cow! It was cold this morning. Now, I’m slightly ashamed to say that, because it was only 40 degrees out and my home town is currently suffering from temps in the -20s. My only defense is that I’ve lived in Florida for almost 12 years now, and I can’t help it if my body has adjusted to the climate. So there.

On a funny note, for the second time I’ve received a phone call where the person calling thought they were calling Starbucks. Two different people calling. Next time, I’m going to ask the caller some questions about why they think my cell phone is a Starbucks.

I don’t even like coffee.

In knitting news, I’ve knit 3 more cat toys, all in one night while watching The Tudors with the girls. One toy went to Cher’s cats, the second went to Karen’s, and the third is currently stored in a safe place until I can bring it over for my mom’s cats.

We’re getting closer to the end of season 2 of The Tudors, pretty soon Anne will be losing her head, and then we’ll probably have to pick something new to watch for a time, since season 3 starts airing in April. Perhaps I can convince everyone to watch Ugly Betty, I’ve been thinking about trying that series.

Okay that’s all I’ve got for now.
Crazy Cat Lady Photo of the Day:
It’s Eos snuggling with her good buddy Totoro.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T15:55:00.003-05:00

I’ll keep this part brief because if you want to read about the inauguration there are many places that can sum it up better. Honestly, for me, Obama’s speech was excellent. I’m not politically minded, and don’t have a lot of opinions on politics so I can’t confidently discuss those things. But the speech made much sense to me and I’m hopeful the sentiments presented in the words spoken are what we have to look forward to.

And the benediction from Dr. Joseph Lowery was like a cherry on the top, cause it was awesome and made me laugh. :P

Aside from that, where have I been the last few days? Just busy.

Saturday I was supposed to spend the day with my mom but she ended up getting called into work, so after the weekly trip to the Humane Society to play with the kitties I ended up just chilling out and playing EQ2. It was nice because I haven’t played in a while, so got caught up finishing up quests. Little things, but it felt like a lot was accomplished. Nothing wrong with that feeling.

The pet tags I ordered came in last week so my crazy monkeys are finally tagged, and the worry about what happens if one of them gets out of the house has relaxed a bit. They of course didn’t really like the new weight around their necks, but they’ve gotten over it. Eventually they’ll each be micro chipped as well, but micro chipping six cats is a little too expensive to do all at once.

Sunday I spent 9+ hours on the phone with my best friend back home in Wisconsin. Yep that’s right, 9+ hours. What can I say, our phone conversations are EPIC.

Aaaaaaaaand I’ve finished my first knitting project! Like most “first knitting projects” it was a scarf, but it came out pretty good, in my opinion, and at the very least, I’m proud of it. I also knit a cat toy right afterwards that only took me an hour to knit up. The cats went nuts for it, but then I’m pretty sure it was more for the catnip inside of it, rather than the fantastic knitting job I did. Planning on making a bunch more, since now I know the pattern they should knit up much quicker.

On the work front, in addition to learning that no one will be receiving raises this year, we got an email on Monday that 401k matching is suspended until further notice. It’s rather disappointing news. While being upset and disappointed, I have to remind myself that I should be thankful that I still have a job, especially in the light that on Friday alone 50,000 jobs were eliminated across the country.

Which brings me to the news of Circuit City closing. While I have no loyalty to Circuit City itself, it was the only electronics store in our town, and I’m going to miss it. When I went in on Saturday to check out the liquidation sales, the place was even busier than it was on Black Friday. And after all that I only purchased three movies.

Crazy Cat Lady Photo of the Day:
Here’s Yuki going nuts for her new toy.

Friday the beginning.

2009-01-16T11:02:00.004-05:00

Scrambling to get ready for work this morning, which is my usual routine, got a call from my boss that when they did the tally of my time card this morning I would end up with an hour of overtime if I worked my 8 ours today. So was asked to come in an hour late. Times are tough, we’re not allowed even a minute of overtime. And suddenly I had an extra hour on my hands. If only I had known about it earlier I would have used it for sleeping.

Anime night did occur last night, though we got a very late start on it because The Office started up again, and Karen and I both are big fans. Finally started watching some Nana but were only able to get 3 episodes in. Watching the Nana anime with people is interesting for me, since I’ve already read all the available manga. It’s refreshing, but then I already know what’s going to happen through the entire series and beyond, as the manga is ongoing. Going back to the beginning of the story gives a new perspective on how things are leading up to bigger events, and the narrative has a much greater importance to me now.

Got started on that NES controller project, which went well. Got all the plastic measured and cut out, and started on the stitching. I’m amused that as I cut every thing out, I though to myself “I’ll have this done in no time”. After four hours of stitching, I barely made a dent on the first piece. Glad I started working on it now. Will try to remember to take some pictures.

Perhaps I’ll write more later, feeling chatty today. But in the meantime here’s the Crazy Cat Lady Photo of the Day:
This features my old girl Nyx, doing her best to fit into the door of the makeshift kitten fort I made for the little monsters. Eventually I ended up cutting a bigger hole for the door so she could get in.

It’s a looooooong boring day here.

2009-01-15T17:34:00.003-05:00

One of our new employees who started exactly 3 days ago did not show up for work today. Dunno what the details are, but I guess he quit. Kinda odd.

Yesterday I went into Michaels to check on knitting needles, which was supposed to be purely a fact finding mission. Upon leaving I ended up buying a few things I had forgotten I needed (and some things I imagine I didn’t really need), including these plastic sheets for another Nintendo related craft project. Something else I can hopefully finish before Valentine’s day.

Last night’s dinner and a movie was a pretty good night. We ended up watching Wall-E and Goodfellas, two movies that go hand in hand I know. AND we were able to stay computer free, well mostly. But it did end up being a nice relaxing evening. At one point Yuki was sitting on my lap and I somehow managed to hypnotize her by rubbing her face. Quite funny to see.

Tonight is anime night, I haven’t confirmed with Karen and Cindy yet if they’ll be able to make it, but I hope so, cause I’d really like to watch some more Nana. Either way I want to get another few inches knitted on my scarf, or start the NES controller project. Stuff to do, stuff to do!

Three consecutive blogs! Oh my!

Crazy Cat Lady Photo of the Day:
Here’s Yuki trying to finish off what ever is at the bottom of my glass.

The day I was on time.

2009-01-14T10:36:00.001-05:00

We had a breakfast meeting this morning, which was blissfully more about breakfast and less about meeting. It did mean getting out of bed earlier than usual, a task that I was worried I may not be up to, but somehow I made it on time.

Last night was the weekly hang out night, where the guys get together to game and the girls get together and watch saucy girlie TV and movies. We’ve moved onto season 2 of The Tudors which is quite enjoyable, season 2 focusing on the fall of Anne Boleyn. It’s obviously not historically accurate, but entertaining either way. Plus I managed to get a bunch of knitting done on my scarf. Since I’m still new to knitting and a bit slow its only 50% done, but I’m really happy with the way it’s looking. I haven’t made any glaring mistakes with it yet at least!

I need to get cracking on knitting project #2 soon. The Goomba hat. I’d like to finish it by Valentine’s Day.

Hopefully today won’t drag on too much, really looking forward to going out to dinner tonight and then snuggling down to watch Wall-E with Joe. He hasn’t seen it yet so it’s exciting, and it’s a fantastic movie. I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

Oh and I figured out how to blog from my phone, so who knows, I may end up sending in little updates from here and there.

Here’s my Crazy cat Lady Picture of the Day:
This picture features Biscuit, who didn’t really seem to enjoy her first walk outside and is desperately trying to get back into the house.

Holy cow an update!

2009-01-13T11:14:00.003-05:00

For those of you anxiously awaiting the news that I have completed all of the goals I listed months ago, and I know there's a lot of you, I'm sorry to disappoint. Not a one! There's always next year right?

I decided last night that my favorite time of the day is the moment I get home from work. I get to walk into my cozy home and am greeted by my several kitties who do their best to pretend they missed me all day. It's a nice feeling.

On that note here is my new feature, since I have recently decided to embraace my inner crazy cat lady.

Crazy Cat Lady Photo of the Day: This photo features Patch, the goof ball, and Yuki, the sleepy head.

Arms up or arms down?

2008-08-16T12:09:00.003-04:00

For life's roller coaster.

Its been a decent week. As for the goals, I haven't exercised every day but I did make it to the gym three times this week, which is great because I've been a huge slacker and haven't gone in a couple months. Getting in the grove again. It felt good.

Been trying to be strict with myself on the food I'm eating, and I think I did mostly good.

As for creative projects, I finished another digital painting earlier in the week. This one is of the calico twins taking a nap. I don't like it as much as the LK portrait from last week but its all practice anyway.

The anime goal: Finishing up Mushishi tonight. Actually finished yesterday but I dozed off during the last ep so need to re-watch it. But, watched about 12 eps this week. Anime goal, check. It's a great series too. Gotta figure out what to watch next. Read a few volumes of manga this week as well. Genshiken, which is fantastic geek related stuff. Highly recommended.

My laptops not working at the moment so that may slow the anime down a bit. And make me mad.

The abandoned mama cat, which my neighbors dumped on me was spayed earlier in the week, so the threat of more neighborhood kittens is a thing of the past. When I got home from the store today she was outside being super friendly and rolled over to show me her stitches. I got scared because she appears to have ripped them open a bit. She's now bandaged up in my bathroom again, waiting to go back to see the vet on Monday. Five days too early for stitches to come out.

Weekly blog, check.

~ja ne

Goals.

2008-08-11T16:09:00.003-04:00

In an effort to get things done, here is my current list of life betterment and short term goals. They're in no particular order.

The first list are time related, I'd like to complete these by the end of the year.

Finish the current chapter of my comic.
Get the first chapter of Panda Panda ready to be published.
Lose 20 pounds via diet and exercise.
Manage to save $1500, which is a lot for me. :)

The rest are ongoing, things I'd like to make a habit of until it's a given.

Complete one creative project a week.
Try one new recipe every week.
Watch at least 5 episode of anime per week.
Complete one hour of exercise a day. Either by going to the gym or playing WiiFit.
Blog at least once a week.

I'll let you know how it goes. Feel free to kick me in the pants when I start to slack off.

~ja ne

Well look at that.

2008-08-11T12:04:00.005-04:00

It's been almost a year since I updated here. Time sure does fly, or something. I will spare you the year in review. Rather than focusing on the past, lets just start fresh. And let's try the keep-it-simple-stupid approach as well.

There's a new block to the right above the Links. It's basically a mini blog. Twitter lets me "tweet" little updates on the fly from anywhere using my phone. You can also subscribe to my tweets through Twitter.com if you like and it'll even send my updates to your phone... and hell it can even be used to chat, if so inclined. It's neat, so check it out if you want.

~ja ne

Halloween fun!

2007-10-31T23:46:00.000-04:00

So here it is, it's me in a panda costume! Look out. And there with me is Joe all dressed up as Mario. Sadly neither Joe or I won the contest at work, but no worries, the day itself was a ton of fun.

I'm also proud to say that my mouse cookies were a big hit. I realized after unveiling them that I never even tested them to see if they tasted good, but everyone said they loved them and I got lots of compliments on how cool looking they were.

If you'd like to see more pics of me and my co-workers all dressed up you can check them out here. The first place winner of the contest was one of our reporters, Gary, who dressed up as a red hatter, which was pretty funny. Gabe and Karen also won trophies for their costumes, which was awesome. Gabe came as the mayor and Karen was a letter from Wheel of Fortune!

Mice Cookies!

2007-10-30T23:43:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is Halloween and we're celebrating at work with a costume contest and a big lunch! It's super exciting since we've not really done anything like this before and I'm excited to be dressing up as a..... you guessed it... a panda.... tune in tomorrow or the next day, and maybe... just maybe, I'll post pics of some Halloween costumes!

But anyway, I just got done making some silly cookies for the party...

.... yes they're mice!!! But they're cookies..... but they're mice....

Okay, I'm out for now, I've got to put some finishing touches on my costume. :)

Portfolio is live.

2007-10-22T17:37:00.001-04:00

So I kinda did this on the sly about two months ago, but it's finally complete, my portfolio is now online. You may or may not have noticed the link to the right. If you haven't, well, here's the link again. :)

What will you find there? Basically it's a collection of stuff I've done over the last few years. It's in no way everything I've done, cause that would be ridiculous, but there is a fair example of what I do or am capable of doing.

For the record, the last three years I've worked as an ad designer at a newspaper, so the majority of what's up there is examples of ad design. I'm more pleased with the collection of Special Section covers and some of the other random artwork stuff I've tried to do over the years.

There's also a copy of my resume up there and links to here and off to my webcomic, Panda panda!

Enjoy. :)

Work

2007-10-02T13:47:00.000-04:00

Okay here comes one of the promised updates.... sorry I wrote so much!

The year is winding down, which means work is picking up.

I live in an area of Florida which is heavily populated by snowbirds in the winter, and during the summer months some businesses in the area can seriously just grind to a halt.

What is a snowbird you ask?

For those of you lucky enough to not even know what a snowbird is I'll explain. A snowbird is a person whom migrates with the weather, much like birds who go north for the summer, and south for the winter, following the ideal weather. Most snowbirds tend to be elderly.

So these elderly folk live up north usually from April or May until October or November, when they literally flock back to Florida and stay through out the winter. This is not usually a gradual migration, you can pretty much tell the exact moment when they've all returned because the entire IQ of the driving population drops by about 100 points. Traffic becomes slow, and dangerous. And I could go on to many of the other side effects of snowbird season, but well... we don't have all day.

My friend Gabe did a great editorial cartoon for our paper which sums up the snowbird a bit. And yes we had angry snowbirds calling in to complain about the cartoon, because complaining is one of their many hobbies, along with bingo.

What does this have to do with my work? Well this town caters to these people, and they bring in a lot of business, so businesses like to advertise more, which means, since I work at a newspaper, as a graphic designer for advertising, we suddenly get flooded with more ads.

Throw in the holidays, and all the extra holiday sections our paper produces, and that ups the ad count even more.

And as an added bonus, this time of the year seems to be the best time for us to lose employees for one reason or another... so once again this year we are severely understaffed. So in order to get all the ads done, which absolutely has to be done since ads = income for a newspaper, the staff that is around ends up shouldering overtime. A LOT of overtime.

Last year around November, pretty much our entire staff worked 30 days straight with no time off, usually 12-16 hour days, not bothering to take any breaks during the day. It nearly killed us all! :P

Starting the middle of September, we've started to get into this overtime cycle. Most of us have already started giving up days off, and even then we've begun the process of skipping lunch breaks and tacking extra hours onto our day.

So this is one reason I've been too pre-occupied to update here. :)

A whole month.

2007-09-27T09:14:00.000-04:00

And then some, since I've updated. Sorry about that, I told you from the begining I was no good at this blogging stuff. And things have just been crazy busy.

So lets see what's been going on... posts to follow. :)

Inchworms... the return?

2007-08-21T17:17:00.000-04:00

Could it be the inchworms have returned... in moth form?

This fellow was found hanging out all day on the hallway wall. He was all alone though, perhaps he was the only one that didn't self distruct.

Panda Updates

2007-08-20T11:05:00.000-04:00

So holy cow, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world of pandas. And I've missed a lot of news updates. Let's see...

Bai Yun's 4th Cub Arrived

That's right Friday August 3rd Bai Yun gave birth to her fourth panda cub at San Diego Zoo. As of right now they're still not sure if the cub is a girl or a boy. Washington Post Article Here

In related San Diego panda news, Mei Sheng, is celebrating his 4th birthday today, and his little sister Su Lin celebrated her 2nd birthday on August 2nd! Their both Bai Yun's previous cubs.

Panda Poo Souvenirs

It's no joke, China's trying to come up with ways to cut costs and such when caring for pandas, and it turns out their poo can be recycled and made into paper and other materials which are being sold as souvenirs. Full Article Here

Now, I can back this up too. A while back we'd heard something about this and I went looking to see if any thing was available on ebay as a joke. Well we didn't find anything. But then... there we were at the San Diego Zoo... and holy cow... panda poo notebooks.

Panda Attack!

Yeah they're cute, they look cuddly, and overall they are a mild mannered species, but that doesn't change the fact that they are wild animals. A zoo keeper in China was tore up when a panda grabbed his arm which was sticking through the wire cage. The keeper required 100 stitches after the attack. Full article here.

A couple things to note, this young panda was already in a state of distress when the attack happened, he had, within the week, just moved to that location, hadn't been eating since he'd gotten there, and was not accustomed to the zoo keeper that was attacked.

Male panda gives birth to twins!

Poor Jinzhu. Mistaken at birth in 1996 as a male panda, this girl was sent off to Japan in 2000 to mate with another female panda there. After Jinzhu showed absolutely no interest in mating with the other female there, they went in to do artificial insemination and discovered.... Jinzhu was not a male panda either....

At which point specialists believed she was either hermaphroditic or just had under developed sexual organs. It wasn't until 2005, when she was 9 years old that they discovered in an examination that her ovaries were simply in the wrong place. After a two hour operation, and then another two years later, she proudly gave birth to twin girls just two weeks ago.

Poor girl.

And lastly...

Send Chuang Chuang home?

This story bothers me a little bit, and I feel so sorry for Chuang Chuang. The Thai have been trying so hard to get their pair of pandas to successfully mate and produce a cub. I think they've gone a bit to far here and there.

Chuang Chuang has made the news several times in the past on the issue of mating. First they believed he was too heavy to mate, making him lazy and that he would crush his partner. So they put him on a diet, and the whole world heard about it. Then they even staged a panda marriage ceremony.... for real...

And then again they tested out the "panda porn" theory on him, forcing him to watch videos of pandas mating, hoping he would learn a few things, or simply just "get in the mood".

All these attempts failed, and I mean, come on, pandas are known for not being great at mating. So they went with artificial insemination. Which I might add, is widely used at most zoos to help with panda breeding, so in no way should it be a slight to Chuang Chuang.

Apparently the pregnancy has ended as a pseudo pregnancy. So still they will have no baby panda this year. but now talks are going on to discuss whether or not they put Chuang Chuang on another diet, or give up on him completely and send him back to China and basically trade him in for a better model.

Poor Chuang Chuang, hasn't this panda been through enough? I mean, you can't seriously blame a pseudo pregnancy on him as well. For those who don't know, pseudo pregnancies are EXTREMELY common. Two out of the three expected panda births in the US this year ended in pseudos as well.

Come on... give the guy a break. Plus... isn't he married now... are you going to stage a divorce as well?

Full article here.

Inchworms. The end.

2007-08-13T00:23:00.001-04:00

Since Friday night, I've only had one or two inchworms show up in the house. Both those on Friday. Not a single one Saturday or Sunday.

As quickly as they came, they simply disappeared all over again. While scrubbing everything up on Saturday, I did find tons of little inchworm corpses, and I'm feeling a lot better without them coming in, and exploding all over the place.

I assume this means that they've all found a little corner of the world to cocoon themselves up in, and shortly we'll be seeing an increase in the moth population. While enjoying the day in my apartment with the windows shades open to let the sunlight in, I did see quite a few butterflies outside... are moths soon to follow?

Now they're gone though, my attention has been brought back to the original cockroach problem. I dunno if they were just afraid of the inchworms and didn't come out for that entire week or maybe I was just so distracted with exploding inchworms I didn't notice them, but they're back. I really can't stand them, but at least they're not falling on me from the ceiling and leaving goo puddles on the walls and floor.

And on that thought, goodnight, and sweet dreams. :)

Clean house and other stuff.

2007-08-12T11:27:00.000-04:00

I've been fairly inactive online and with certain creative outlets the last two days. But for good reason, I've been cleaning house. All day yesterday, top to bottom the house has been cleaned. Now I'm not a neat freak, as my mother will tell you, but there's nothing more motivating and good feeling than a nice clean and organized space to mess up all over again.

After the recent bug invasions I really needed to remove the carcasses, scrub the floors and vacuum and organize some spaces that have gotten out of control. And now things are good.

The only truly frustrating aspect of this weekend is coming to the realization that my iPod has definitely played it's last tune. It started acting up a couple weeks ago, and I kinda just let it sit cause I didn't really want to deal with it. Especially since the recommended option was to reformat it. That's such a pain having to reload 40gb of stuff onto it all over again, making sure files are named correctly and blah blah blah...

So I finally sat down and decided just to go ahead with it. Plugging it in, the computer and iTunes wouldn't even recognize it. After reading up on the support site I figured I'd have to force it into disc mode, which I was able to do after some battling, and the use the restore option. Essentially reformatting.

Well it had an error and as much as I've fought with it over the last two days I'm pretty sure its a hardware issue and the little sucker just needs to be lain to rest for all eternity. The other option is to smash it in a fit of rage but well...

Technology is a wonderful thing. And sadly it's still a pretty expensive thing. And even sadder still, with new technology coming out, and the lifespan of current technology.... you constantly have to replace and upgrade things in order to stay up to date. This iPod cost me $400 about 3 years ago. It's not even a video iPod, it's the old standard two tone display 40gb iPod. And it only lasted just under 3 years. That's around 35 cents a day... I guess that's not bad... but when you've not got a lot of money to begin with....

But now I'm looking at paying around $350 for a new fancy shmancy video iPod. I mean I don't have to... I could go iPod-less and probably be okay.... but technology also makes you dependent on it, and I need my tunes, all of them, available to me, at anytime, with just the touch of a button..... :)

Sunflowers.

2007-08-11T13:31:00.000-04:00

A while back I decided I was going to try growing some plants. I've never been very good with plants, but I thought why not. I planted basil, tomatoes, rosemary, and sunflowers.

Now the rosemary never even sprouted. The tomatoes came up real nice, then just... well held at where they still are, no where near growing any tomatoes. The basil kinda did the same thing.

Most of my original sunflower sprouts were eaten by something in the neighborhood. The second sprouting did well enough but most didn't get very big, some fell over and died, but one.... one lonely plant grew up. And it flowered the other day!

Inchworms continued....

2007-08-10T00:52:00.000-04:00

They're still coming in, and I swear they're getting bigger. See example on the right.

I'm pretty confident now that they're coming in right through the front door. This weekend's plans include fortifying the weather stripping to hopefully cause a cease in the invasion. I've researched into renters rights in Florida to see if I need to pay for the exterminator or if that's my landlords responsibility. Turns out, since I rent half a duplex and not an actual apartment, the bill is on me.

Considering the extremely low amount of money I have right now, I guess I have to live through it for the time being. It's certainly making for interesting stories though.

Like the other day, when I was sitting at the coffee table working on Panda panda and suddenly I feel something... a little tickle.... going across my lower back....

Yup, it was an inchworm...

And then an hour and a half later.... the same thing happened all over again.

Or my current personal favorite... tonight I was sitting on one couch, and Joe was sitting on the other across the room, when suddenly he freaks out and flicks one off his neck.... and it flies across the room before I even know what's going on and lands right on me. Or should I say it bounces off the side of my face and then lands in my lap. And don't worry, that little worm was just fine.

I on the other hand was less then calm.

Oh the memories. Like cleaning up all the self destructions. See example to the left.

RoboPanda has arrived!!

2007-08-09T22:35:00.000-04:00

So holy cow! Gabe text messaged me the other night with a picture he had taken at Walmart of the one, the only, RoboPanda. I couldn't believe it, but after a quick trip to confirm with my own eyes, there he was on the shelf, looking back at me... with those big, cute, glowing blue eyes.

Okay, so the eyes weren't glowing, but man was he awesome. And with an awesome price tag of $150, so for now, I had to leave him behind on the shelf. But I was amazed to see him there since the company website had said they weren't hitting shelves until October.

He's bigger than I had imagined he would be, but seeing him in person confirmed even more how much I really want to bring one home. And hey, feel free to paypal some money to silvrwrdz@aol.com if you want to help him come home that much sooner. ;)

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see my previous blog post about him here.

Inchworms!!

2007-08-03T23:22:00.000-04:00

For those of you who read my delightful story earlier about cockroaches, let me inform you that not only do I currently still have the cockroach problem, but now I'm infested with inchworms.

Yes inchworms.

Over the course of the few days or so, I've removed countless inchworms from my ceiling and walls and relocated them back to the yard where they belong. But there seems to be no end to them, and I have never seen anything like this before. My brief research into the inchworm phenomenon tells me that it should be a temporary problem since they'll be shortly cocooning themselves and turning into moths.

At which point I'm sure I'll have a lovely moth problem on my hands.

I'd also like to add that the inchworms seem to have this annoying habit of self destructing. Yes occasionally one will self destruct into a spatter of brown red goo, either on the wall, or floor. I've never seen this happen but I've come across what was left behind a few times, and it's always a pleasure cleaning that up.

Still investigating the cost of an exterminator.
I may go insane before I'm able to get one in here though.

RoboPanda!

2007-07-23T12:28:00.001-04:00

Oh man, I am so excited. It's RoboPanda!

I read about this almost a year ago, but now he's actually coming. He'll be at Target and Best Buy in October for the low low price of $150.

Look at that adorable little robo face!

Pandas in Albuquerque?

2007-07-23T00:16:00.000-04:00

The mayor of Albuquerque is off to China to work out a deal to get them some pandas. A couple interesting points in this article.

1. They talk about the San Diego Zoo, and what it's plans may be once their panda contract is up next year.

And 2. The idea that they may not get a panda from China, but are working out a deal to take one of San Diego's cubs.

I'm quite curious about that actually. Which cub so they have their eyes on, they've currently got two, and another on the way. I would think that China would want the cubs back for breeding, but it's possible to breed them here too. Also, though panda adults mostly live solitary, most young adults outside of China are paired up for life with a mate of sorts. So will this panda remain by itself, or will it be getting a mate? We'll see, we'll see.

The count down is approximately one week until I get to lay my eyes on some pandas!

It's the rainy season.

2007-07-22T11:11:00.000-04:00

Florida summer has officially been underway, including daily thunderstorms, and sweltering heat. On some days I get into my car, which feels like an oven, and I remember why it is I don't like Florida. Winters are nice, but summer is hell.

Additionally, because of the heat, and excessive rain these last couple weeks the bugs are out in full force. Or should I say they're in. Cause they're all up in my house making my skin crawl. I'm getting so frustrated.

If you're bug squeamish I suggest you skip the rest of this entry.

First Joe and I noticed a cockroach or two, one night. So we nabbed and flushed them. Then there was a couple more... then a few more... then I got angry and got my insect spray out and sprayed all around the doors, windows, and edges of every room. Suddenly it was like an exodus.

In one night we must have flushed or killed 30 of the little bastards. The next morning I woke up to find 10 more corpses. And they've been steadily on the move since then. It's been two weeks and not a day goes by where I don't find at least 10 corpses, have at least one run across my foot, spot the cats trying to torture one to death, or have a couple run across the wall out from behind furniture.

Pest control is coming on Tuesday to give me an estimate on treating the entire house. Back in the day when I moved in, I had asked my landlord, who lives upstairs from me, if he takes care of pest control. His answer to me, was for me to just get a little boric acid and sprinkle it around behind the couches and stuff..... yeah... so I guess that means he's not going to take care of it himself. While the boric acid is a feasible solution, I'd rather not mess around with insecticides I don't understand.

He will however, be getting a bill.