This is why I drive a gas-guzzling SUV with four-wheel drive - so in weather like this, I can at least get to the store to get baby food, which is the item I forgot to stock up on before the storm hit. The baby fruit, anyway, which Geiger* has come to expect at the end of every meal. Last time we had a storm like this, diaper rash cream was the forgotten item, and Mad Libs* ended up with the worst case of diaper rash I've ever seen.

We're twelve hours into a thirty-hour storm. By tomorrow, I bet we can't get out of the house without snowshoes, which we don't have. They're on my Christmas list, but I don't think anyone took me seriously enough to actually buy them for me. After we took this picture, we had to break out the snow shovel to get the door closed again.

That's my Australian Shepherd, Bella, peering over the snowdrifts that have piled up to our doorknobs. At two o'clock this afternoon, the snow in the front yard was above my knees. When I went out to run the few errands that seemed really urgent, such as picking up baby food and going to the bank, visibility was down to a few car lengths, and there was at least a foot of snow just sitting on the roads.

*Mudbug and Boo have earned the new nicknames of Geiger and Mad Libs. Mudbug has always liked it when I click my tongue, and about a month ago she started doing it herself. I can sit in my office chair and she swims around the room (she doesn't quite crawl yet, but she can swim rather quickly) and all I hear is *click*click*click*click*click*. Boo has started interjecting odd words into his sentences. They're the right part of speech, for instance, ordering his vanilla steamer with no foam and no belly buttons. Thus the Mad Libs moniker.

Caveat emptor - Dillon Millsap is at it again

A year ago, my husband preordered an Xbox 360 from Alliwire.com, a company that seemed to have a decent reputation - references were listed on the site, there was an active forum that seemed to have customers posting on it, etc. Shortly before the launch date, the owner of the website, Dillon Millsap, announced that his seller for the 360s that he had promised to ship had disappeared with everyone's money. He kept promising to refund everyone's money, and some refunds were issued (including my husband's, after I called the sheriff in Denton County, TX and started inquiring about pressing charges). All the while, he's posting on his forums about various Xbox 360 games that he's playing. During all of this mess, he announced that he was a 17-year-old high school student and that he could just bow out of paying for any of this - a notion I think he was rather quickly disabused of when disgruntled customers started calling his parents and threatening small claims suits against them.

As far as I know, there are still people who have not received a refund - a quick bop around Google shows people posting as recently as September that still are out their cash. The people I feel really sorry for are the people who told this kid that they'd hang in there for their systems, and that they were confident that he would eventually come through. He also was delisted from Ebay at about the same time, although whether the two events were related I don't know.

Alliwire.com has been down for a while. I was doing some research on where to find a PS3 or a Wii, just in case I happened on some poor soul that had one for sale and didn't have the connections to advertise it well enough to run up the price. I came across a post on Cheap Ass Gamers from a year ago that mentioned that alliwire.com was doing PS3 preorders. I started wondering whatever happened to Dillon Millsap - I knew he'd been NARUed from Ebay, and that he'd closed down most of his contact information. A Google search turned up this post from someone posting as Dillon Millsap - with a homepage of entertainextreme.com. The kid's advertising that he has four years experience in selling game consoles. I don't see any mention that one of those four years was spent not delivering $40,000 worth of preorders. He's also relisted on Ebay - although I see that he's sold two items and one of the items never reached the buyer.

Oh, and guess what - on entertainextreme.com he has a section for preorders! Get yer ice-cold ripoff here!

I wonder if his parents are aware that he's back in the Internet fraud business.

Oh, and

The last eight weeks have been about as stressful as life can get without someone dying. More later. I've got a stack of stuff I've been planning on writing about, but haven't had time to. I even had a post in my head for Thanksgiving mentioning that I was thankful that we had so much paying work that I hadn't had time to think about blogging, but I didn't have time to post it.

Waah freakin waah

I've never been so happy to hear that someone is being driven insane...

Quote: "Using solitary confinement, Supermax is designed to inflict as much misery and pain as is constitutionally permissible."

I'd be disappointed if it wasn't.