morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Pet Number Two, AKA Fluffy. She’s a little bit fuzzy there – she kept moving all the time and I didn’t want to spook her by using the flash. Not a great introduction to the new camera. Great pet, though. See the milkiness in the eyes there? We think she might be getting ready to shed.

It’s wonders of Blogger time again. I spent the entire afternoon and evening with Loyal Reader Number Six, working on installing Loyal Reader Number Four’s new water softener. It’s still not actually installed yet, but we made a lot of progress. We want to have absolutely everything ready to go before we shut off the water to the house and solder the water softener in. Sometime today.

Unfortunately, Loyal Reader Number Twelve was up most of the night last night, so we’re watching her now (she’s currently sleeping peacefully) and Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Six are getting some badly-needed shuteye. The water softener will have to wait a little longer.

Today (actually tomorrow, if you believe the date of this post) is the Firefly marathon. We’re a little more than an hour into it. It’s an entertaining series so far. We have five non-Loyal-Reader friends over watching with us. Pretty much everybody in the show has double-crossed everybody else at least once. It’s an entertaining cross between a space movie and a cowboy movie. One of the most interesting things is that the main characters keep getting shot, and we’re still in the first show of the series. I have no idea how they’ll get through even a single season. It certainly keeps you on the edge of your seat.

More on Wednesday evening. See you then.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One trying to emulate William Tell’s son earlier this morning. Not a good idea. Fortunately, I didn’t get a bow and arrow for Christmas.

Speaking of which, Merry Christmas! I trust all my loyal readers are having a great day with their families. I know we are.

I have good news about the blog! I received a beautiful Olympus SP-350 digital camera for Christmas. Eight – count ’em – eight megapixels. Now my Great Art will be even better than ever. Today’s picture is from the old camera (taken just before we started opening gifts), but look for the new one’s work to start showing up Real Soon Now.

Spent some time playing two-player Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator against Mark. Of course, he totally and completely smeared me. No contest. It was fun, though. He’s enjoying it because he received a new video card for his computer and it has really pumped the old machine up. His old graphics card was a part of the motherboard, and it’s amazing to find out how much computing power it was sucking up for pretty mediocre results. It seems like a brand-new machine now. And those graphics are really pretty.

I also spent a lot of time ripping music and video for Gary’s new iPod. It’s the 80GB model – the best one they make – and I really like it. The video is surprisingly watchable, just like everybody says. We ripped and downloaded several albums and barely made a visible dent.

Perhaps the best part is that I figured out how to rip DVDs and convert them to iPod video. I’m using an application called Mac the Ripper to get the files from the DVDs and then one called Handbrake to massage the files into iPod-viewable form. It took a few tries before I got the format right, but I found some helpful information in Handbrake’s online forum. The only problem now is that it takes an incredibly long time to encode the files – plan on the computer working overnight to encode a movie.

And that’s the end of a relaxing and satisfying Christmas day. Merry Christmas and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve once again, sucking her Nuk and getting back to her favorite hobby. The rebellion is over. Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five, as usual.

I’m using the Wonders of Blogger again – there was a movie on last night that kept me too distracted to blog. No problem, though – it’s a nice quiet Saturday morning and very conducive to creating Great Literary Art.

Work is over for the year! I left at about 11:00 Friday morning and have been enjoying the day ever since. Now we can start having fun.

Speaking of fun, Loyal Readers Numbers Three and Fifteen arrived this evening after a safe but long trip. Everybody’s here now and we’re having a great time together. LRN3 and LRN15 brought us our Christmas present – a cute little corn snake named Fluffy. She (we have no idea which it is, but we’re calling it a girl) also came with a cage, fortunately. We need to get to the store sometime today to buy some bedding and frozen dead mice for her – yum! She has to be fed on Monday. And what better way is there to say “Merry Christmas” than by watching a snake eat a dead mouse?

– Later –

It’s Saturday evening now and it was museum day, just as Loyal Reader Number Sixteen mentioned in her comment to yesterday’s post. They went to the Henry Ford museum; we went to the Cable Car museum and Chinatown. It was fun going down to San Francisco. We went over the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. We saw the piers along the Embarcadero. We had a view of Alcatraz way out in the bay. We ate lunch at an outstanding Chinese restaurant in the heart of Chinatown. We drove down Lombard street.

And we enjoyed the museum, although its scope was somewhat limited. It had only three actual cable cars, including the oldest one in existence. There were several very nicely-made streetcar models that were only rendered slightly irrelevant by the fact that they were models of electric streetcars, not cable cars. There was an interesting historical movie, some great photos of the devastation from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and a fairly large gift shop. But the best thing by far is that all that stuff was on the mezzanine overlooking the actual motors used to run all the cables that drag along all the cable cars in San Francisco. It was kind of loud but very industrial and cool. I’m glad we went.

And that’s enough for today. Look for an update on Christmas day and have a Very Merry Christmas!

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve yet again, this time in protest mode. Fight The Man, LRN12! Power to the people!

Okay, I admit it. She was just yawning. But it kind of looks like she’s Fighting The Man, doesn’t it? Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five, by the way.

Well, well, well. What a red-letter day it is. We have two more Loyal Readers, bringing the total to a nice, round nineteen. Welcome to Scott and Matt. I’m delighted you’re here. As is usual, your names are Over There On The Right, and your Very Special Days will come as soon as I receive/find a picture. Feel free to send one that you think shows you in a positive light (if possible). Otherwise, I’ll try to dig something up. At any rate, thanks for reading, and stay Loyal!

I’m pleased to report that we got our testing finished up and shipped our software this afternoon. That means my Merry Men can take the day off tomorrow. And I can take half the day off. Not too shabby. Well, not as shabby as it could have been, anyway. After tomorrow, I’m home for a week!

I have plans, big plans. I’m planning to stay up a little too late and wake up a little too late. I’m also planning to get some work done on all of the cars. And I’m even planning to make some things, starting with a pummer or two. Not to mention doing some cool things with my Arduino and playing with my mountain of Christmas presents. And of course I’ll be generating some Morrowlife Great Art. Those pictures don’t just take themselves, you know. The days will just be packed.

We finally got a little bit of action from the moving company on paying for all the stuff they broke and/or lost last August. No, they didn’t actually send a check, but they did send a nice letter telling us they plan to send a check Real Soon Now. That’s progress, anyway.

Congrats to Loyal Reader Number Seventeen on her major award. A thousand bucks is a pretty cool Christmas surprise. Send me a present! Something extravagant would be appropriate.

And many thanks to Loyal Reader Number Sixteen for her highly effective recruitment efforts. The Morrowlife blog has never had it so good. Maybe you should consider going to work for the Marines.

And how nice it is to hear from Loyal Reader Number Seven. I had a feeling you were still reading but just not finding time to post.

Time for bed, once again. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve engaged in one of her four favorite hobbies (the others are, of course, eating, pooping, and looking cute). Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number Five.

In an incredible development, we have yet another Loyal Reader! Everybody give a big hearty Morrowlife welcome to Jane, Loyal Reader Number Seventeen. If I’d known LRN12 would pack ’em in like this, I would have gotten grandchildren sooner. Anyway, LRN17’s name is now officially Over There On The Right, and her Very Special Day will happen as soon as either she sends me a picture or I find one in my Voluminous Photography Archives. Or both.

Busy day today. We’re working like crazy to get an important product released tomorrow so we can all take vacation on Friday. We’re getting close and I think we’ll get there. In the meantime, it’s noses to the grindstone (which would hurt like crazy, and I can’t really see the point of it anyway, can you?) for my Merry Band at work.

Traffic was a little worse than usual on the way home. I left the office late, which may account for it, and it’s getting close to holiday travel time, which may also account for it. All I know is that I had about twenty minutes at home before I had to go to my Wednesday evening meeting. Fortunately, that was enough to eat a little dinner (curried beef – very tasty, thanks for asking) and write out some Ward Mission goals for next year, which were due at 8:30. Fortunately, I knew pretty much what they would be but hadn’t put them to paper yet.

The goals are in addition to the Ward Mission Plan that I’ve been working on for months now. I came up with a modest suggestion that was roundly rejected by everybody else. In its place, we have a very nice but overly vague statement of desired outcomes. Unfortunately, there’s not much there that can be measured, and you can’t control what you can’t measure, so I wrote down some much more specific goals too.

Anyway. It’s late now, and I’ve committed to getting this done tonight in five or ten minutes. So I’ve gotta go. See you tomorrow, and thanks for being Loyal Readers. Tell a friend. Maybe we’ll get the roster up to twenty.

By the way, do you think I ought to add Scott to the list, seeing as how he posted a comment on Tuesday’s post?