One more cup of coffee

Go Vols

OK, so the Tennessee football team hasn’t exactly had a stellar year. In fact, it sucked.

But at least about the time football season winds down (or at least winds down if you sucked so much that you don’t even get to go to one of the 163 bowl games), basketball season starts up. And when you’re the Lady Vols basketball team, a terrible season is defined as one where you only make it to the Sweet 16, and not the Final 4.

This past week, they played Texas, a team they had lost to the last few years in a row, and wiped them out, winning 102–61. Then on Sunday, they played Stanford, and beat them 74–67. I like to remind Meredith, who got her masters at Stanford, that UT hasn’t lost to them since 1996. Meredith long since stopped making bets with me about the outcome of that game.

The only sad thing is that I didn’t get to go to the Stanford game, since we were driving back from LA during the game.

Tennessee is now 7–0, including four victories against ranked opponents.

Blog spam hell

I am rapidly losing my ability to keep up with the overwhelming amount of blog spam I get here. This is absurd. I should try Movable Type 3.0 to see if it can deal any better. Failing that, maybe I’ll just give up on MT completely and try to find something new. But there’s only so much of my day that I care to spend deleting this crap.

Tied House

A conversation tonight at Tied House:

Me: “I want to pay using points because I have almost 3400 now.”

Meredith: “OK. [pause] Wait, is that one point per dollar?”

Me: “Well, umm … yes.”

Meredith: gasping noises

So I’ve been there a lot.

Keeping the cat out

One of this weekend's chores was to replace the doorknob on our bedroom door. More specifically, to replace the lever-style doorknob with an actual circular door knob, so that Pippin can't open our bedroom door anymore. Now we can keep Pippin out without having to lock the door.

This cat is too smart...

Attention to detail

The local Fox station aired a segment on the news tonight about the story that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on US citizens.

And here's a picture from the newscast.

Look at the graphic carefully.

Birthday coffeecake

Nathan celebrated his first birthday today!

This morning, we took him to Hobee's, where they brought him a multi-layer coffeecake.

And here's Nathan demonstrating his clear understanding of the correct way to eat cake.

Home

We’re home from Christmas with Meredith’s family in LA.

I-5 is truly a boring drive. Not so many trucks on Christmas Day, though.

The weird orb(s) on the hill

This is on top of the hill behind my in-laws’ house. Rick says he thinks it used to be part of a radar installation. We drove up to the top of the hill, but the road ends in a giant fence before you get to the orbs.

Xbox 360

For Christmas, Meredith gave me a couple of Xbox 360 games. But, sadly, I had no Xbox 360.

Then tonight, I found a web site that had it in stock :) So hopefully I’ll get it this week, in time for the upcoming long weekend.

Blast furnace v. Nathan's toys

Our house has very little heat in it. It has one outstanding heater, in the living room. I’ve been known to refer to it as the house’s nuclear blast furnace.

Nathan learned very early on, before it even got that cold, to give the heater a wide berth when crawling. His hands and knees never even come close to touching the heater.

Nathan hasn’t learned to make sure his toys also stay clear.

This morning, I arose to the smell of burning plastic. In Mega Blok (Lego knock-off) vs. Nuclear Blast Furnace, the block had no chance. I scraped most of it off, but you can still see some of the red plastic that the heater claimed for its own (mouse over the picture to see it highlight). The handle to his brand new Fisher-Price popcorn popper was also lying on the heater, but Fisher Price toys are evidently made of far sterner stuff than Mega Bloks, and, aside from the handle being slightly warm, you couldn’t even tell that it had spent all night absorbing jets of super-heated air.

Tonight, after working in the office for a while, I came back out to the smell of burning … fur? Tickle-Me-Elmo was a few short minutes away from becoming Oh-Shit-Use-The-Fire-Extinguisher-On-Me-Elmo. (“Ha ha ha ha – ha ha ha ha – that BURNS!”) Fortunately, Elmo seems to have recovered, probably because anything made for babies is designed to be completely fire-proof. (If you’re ever in a burning house, you’d probably do well to surround yourself with baby clothes and toys. Preferably toys made by Fisher-Price.)

So, on the list of things to do when Nathan goes to bed, checking for toys on the heater clearly needs to move to the top. And now, having saved Elmo so he can giggle another day, I’m off to bed.

Xbox 360 -- Not

The order that said it would ship on Monday is now listed as back-ordered. Bah. So I called and canceled the order today. I'll try again somewhere else.

The limited capacity of a size 3 diaper

Nathan lately has been very thirsty at night. VERY thirsty. The last few nights, he’s had somewhere between 16–20 ounces of liquid between bed time and morning. We give him 4 oz. of formula at bed time, and then the rest is water, most of that consumed between 3 and 6 AM.

Size 3 Pampers, while overall excellent products, cannot actually contain 20 ounces of liquid. Or, stated perhaps more accurately, the combination of a size 3 Pampers diaper plus Nathan cannot contain 20 ounces.

So we are changing our sheets somewhat more often than we normally do.

Photoshop Elements 3.0 and Shutterfly

I started playing around with Photoshop Elements recently. I’ve seen a bunch of things on the web about how you can upload directly to Shutterfly from that, but it looks like they’ve dropped that for some Kodak service.

Does anyone know if it’s still possible?

Fever

Nathan woke last night at 4 AM (not unusual), and when I rolled over to comfort him, could feel that he was evidently channeling heat from our blast furnace (very unusual). He wasn’t any cooler when he woke for good at 7:30, so we loaded him up with Tylenol. Sometime in the last couple of months, he evidently decided that baby Tylenol was not yummy; did, in fact, taste like battery acid, so it was somewhat more involved than usual to force the liquid into him.

All day, he’s been his usual cheerful self, despite continuing to be hot and having his nose drop snot on him all day long. The only other sign that he’s sick is that he’s hardly eaten anything today, so I’ve been trying to load him up with formula and milk.

Hopefully the fever will break by tomorrow.

Technically, this is correct

Meredith picked up a Sunbeam humidifier at Walgreens tonight to help Nathan breathe better through his cold. On the box, it advertises “Fits under most bathroom sinks for easy filling.”

Then, inside, the instructions note: “Fill tank with clean, cool, distilled or filtered tap water. … [unfiltered] tap water may cause a ‘white dust’ to appear on your furniture, etc.”

It turns out that our bathroom sink doesn’t have a built in filter.

More RAM, or a new PC

My desktop PC at home is getting old and annoyingly slow. I had originally thought to just try upgrading the RAM, since it has only 512 MB and seems to spend a lot of its time paging, but it turns out that my PC uses Rambus RAM. As far as I can tell, this means that upgrading it to 2 GB would cost somewhere around $900.

For not much more than that, I can just buy a brand new PC with 2 GB of RAM.