Picture time: work edition

Here are some random pictures I've taken on the job over the last few months. So. Yeah.

I got some new stuff.

Mostly a new phone. It's a Sony Ericsson W760a, which I selected after approximately 10 minutes of research (wandering aimlessly around the AT&T store). It looks like this:

Only mine isn't usually floating in a black void, and there's only one of it. It's much better than my old bargain-basement-four-years-ago phone. I thought about going balls-out and getting something completely crazy that I don't need, like an iPhone, but I thought, meh. I'll probably just break it, job like mine and all. This one feels like it can take a few drops. Unfortunately, I'll have to go out of my way to buy some specific accessories: a USB cable, headphones, and Sony's proprietary M2 memory card.

What else? Oh, a camera. Ian left this little Fuji A360 digicam when he moved out. Turns out it kinda sucks, though it is small and light. The non-adjustable shutter speed is so high that it's virtually impossible to take a picture at any marginally close range without blurring. It uses a lame media card format that I thought was proprietary to Olympus: xD. Even worse, it has no on-board memory, and the xD card it came with is just 16MB. Since it's a 4.1 megapixel camera, and you can't adjust the picture size, that equals roughly four pictures. Awesome. I found exactly two xD cards at Newegg: 1GB for $11 and 2GB for $15.

That's enought random babbling for tonight. I'm jumping off to let Jenny watch TV on my computer.

Picture time.

Here's some catfish we baked a few weeks ago. Fresh garlic and parsley, dried sage and oregano, and other stuff I don't remember. We added the recipe to our cookbook, because it was so good you'd have thought one of those fish had been the reincarnation of Buddha.

This is what my cayenne pepper plant looks like now. It used to cower under the shadow of that tropical whatever-it-is on the left, and now it's practically a tree. There are too many peppers on it to count. Whatever I don't eat I'll dry and crush to make my own fresh cayenne pepper seasoning. I'm like a fucking farmer or something now.

I love this picture. I mean look at it. It was raining, and she's so cute, collecting rainwater for the plants instead of tapwater from the hose. What can you do when faced with such adorability except take a picture of it?

Wish I was home.

So I'm at my mom's house, watching the NBA finals while watching the dogs. My mom's in Birmingham helping out with my granddad, who had a brain tumor removed a couple weeks ago. He's doing really well, but his kids are keeping an eye on him until he fully recovers. They're taking it in turns, and unfortunately my mom's turn came up when one of her dogs, Lucy, is really sick. I don't know what's wrong with her, but just checking in on them and letting them out and feeding them and whatever has turned into a full-on dogsitting gig. I'm spending my second night here, and apparently my dog YaYa isn't taking it so well. I knew she liked me, but I didn't think she'd, you know, miss me. I love that dog.

Anyway, Lucy here has been sick for a while, but with my granddad ill and with my step-grandfather dying last week, my mom hasn't done anything about it, and now Lucy's getting worse by the day. In a sense, I don't blame my mom, but in another, more accurate sense, I really do. But there's no point in assigning blame, it's just important that she's coming back a day early (tomorrow) to take her to the vet.


Meanwhile, I'm finding it hard to sleep. I miss Jenny terribly, and I'm not used to sleeping on that little twin bed in the guest room. I slept on it last night, and all afternoon at work today my spine felt like it was going to wrench itself out of my body and strangle me for making it bend down so I could acid-adjust forklift batteries all goddamn day. So I'm wide awake at 10:30 and I think I'm going to be late to work tomorrow. If I work the full 8 hours I'm pushing overtime anyway, and god knows they don't want that to happen. Anyway the manager isn't going to be there tomorrow, so fuck it. All I have to do is make a few trips out to West Memphis to pick up some batteries.


Anyhow. I gotta try to feed Lucy again and take them out once more before I sack out. If you're reading this, Jenny, love you! See you tomorrow afternoon.

Another snow post.

Here's a short (very short) video showing just how much Yaya enjoyed last weekend's snowfall.

It's hard to see her, but she's standing right in front of the door. Way to live life to the fullest, dog.

So it snowed here. A lot.

We never get snow here. In general, we'll get one appreciable snowfall per winter, usually less than an inch. But for some reason last weekend we got our asses handed to us (in snow form). Here in Raleigh we got around 6 inches; here's what it would have looked like if you were me and were looking through our camera at our front yard Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning:






Three days later it was sunny and 70 degrees. But it was great while it lasted. Also, someone around the block from us built a snowman right next to the street with great big boobs. Didn't get a picture, you'll have to take my word for it.

Getting l33ter every day. People still say "l33t," right?

So Jenny's old PC finally died a couple weeks ago. It was a slow, agonizing death, and we're all just glad it isn't suffering anymore. This weekend we bought Haley's old computer, and we're busy setting it up for The Lovely. Anyway, it's a little mini-ATX tower, and there's no longer any room on top of Jen's rig for the little 15" LCD monitor. Therefore:


Behold! My first multi-monitor set-up ever. And I'm already addicted to it. Forget the gaming applications, I just need the extra desktop space, and this is definitely the best way to get around a monitor with a max res of just 1280x1024. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to geek out for a while.

UPDATE: Two screens! For one computer! What is this, the future?!

Gaming/blogging before a long day.

So tomorrow my job is sending me on an all-day PM (preventative maintenance) to the Winchester plant outside Oxford, MS. They have eleven forklift batteries we'll have to clean and/or repair, plus maintenance on probably half a dozen chargers. I'll have to go in an hour early and I'll probably get back an hour late, and since this is my second PM this week, I'll probably end up with some overtime for the first time since I started this god forsaken job a few months ago. So tonight I'm taking it easy. Playing HL2: Episode Two, GTA San Andreas (roaming around at random in one of my 100% saves), and maybe some Call of Duty 4 later. I'm also watching the Griz, currently down three in the third against the Wolves.

I've got a backlog of games to get to now, thanks to a small amount of disposable cash and a huge sale on Steam. At last count, I now have 55 games installed on my PC, counting expansions (two each for Quake, Quake 2, and Ghost Recon) plus nine games I've uninstalled recently because I'm running out of room on my 200GB and 100GB hard drives. The number of games I have that I haven't yet beaten has grown from five or six a few months ago to something like two dozen. And I now own three games that I can't even run effectively on my rig, at least until I upgrade, including one I can't run at all (Lost Planet, a Christmas gift from Mike that I really wish I could run).

Moving on. I managed to get Jenny's camera working, so we've been taking pictures of just about anything again. For example, here's a picture of me pretending to be Gordon Freeman at work:


Either there's a healthpack in one of those crates, or I'm about to get fired for carrying around a crowbar for no discernible reason.


This is a late-seventies International Harvester Scout II that's been parked on McLean in north Midtown for at least a year and a half. The first car I ever owned was a black '76 Scout II, and every time I see this truck I have a little flashback to 1995.


Maggie says: "I'M SO HAPPY OMG!!!1!"


My girls. This is actually an old photo, which explains the Photoshopping I had to do to get it bright enough to appreciate. I'm pretty sure Yaya was thinking, "You're using me as a photo-op, aren't you?"