HyLoft shelving doesn't suck

As a matter of fact, Hyloft ceiling shelving does more than doesn't suck. I think I'm in love with these shelves. This place did the opposite of what my digital camera did as far as their instructions - it was just a few pages, and everything was explained out so well that I think my husband could have even assembled it. They must have had some clueless idiot go through and try to put together their shelving from their instructions, and then rewritten the instructions based on the idiot's feedback, because every single time I had a question about where something went or how something fit together, it was RIGHT THERE. I'm gonna cover the entire ceiling of my garage with these, I swear.

This is not my garage, by the way. This is a picture I swiped off the Hyloft site. My garage is entirely too messy to post a picture. This despite having done a complete cleanout last summer - my husband doesn't understand that the garage is not for discarded box storage, and he doesn't seem to understand that the best place to store boxes of old papers is not next to the furnace, which is why I was installing shelving in my garage at 11:30 pm on a weeknight.

I would KILL to be able to write instructions as clear as whoever the technical writer for Hyloft did. If they're not paying their tech writer oodles of money, then they don't know what a good thing they have.

Information overload

Does anyone actually read this much documentation?















That's 18 ounces of documentation. That's right, over a pound of docs for a camera that weighs 5.5 ounces.

7 ounces of that documentation is in Spanish. Separate books that are Spanish, that is, not books that are split between multiple languages.

Shades of Fargo...

Above are the google ads that came out when I sent a gmail out with a picture of Geiger after MadLibs fed her lunch.

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.

More bodies than morgue space...

...in Baghdad.

And we want to offer a timetable to pull out? Are the Dems f'ing NUTS? We shouldn't be leaving until the only bodies showing up in morgues are the bodies of 'insurgents'.

Silly Parenting Tip #2

If you unbuckle your baby from his/her carseat for comfort while you're waiting someplace, clip your keys to the carseat. That way, you remember to buckle the baby back in before you go driving off somewhere.

Don't ask how I know this one.

Voting wait times

There's a three hour wait at the Thornton Rec Center, but there is a fifteen minute wait at the firehouse at 140th and Colorado Blvd.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, part 2

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that John Kerry made his comment about the intelligence and work ethic of our troops, and continues to press the issue, to sabotage all the gay rights bills on the ballots across the nation in this election. Kerry didn't show up for the vote on the Defense of Marriage Act in '04, and his recent remarks are a way of mobilizing the right to show up at the polls, and, as a consequence, sink every gay rights bill. You know, since so many conservatives were saying they were so disgusted with the state of things that they weren't going to even bother showing up to vote.

(h/t: Ace of Spades)

If I were a conspiracy theorist, part 1

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd go out and fill all my cars up today, because gas prices are controlled by Chimpy McHitlerburton and the cost of filling up my gas-guzzling SUV will be going up like my husband jumping on a chair to avoid a spider.

Waah! My Senseo is dead!

Or at least on its last legs, anyway. Everything breaks down a month after the warranty expires, or if it is still under warranty, it's impossible to actually get it fixed (yes, I'm talking to you, CES Covina).

The Senseo just suddenly stopped forcing water through the pod. Enough water will come through when there's no pod in it, but as soon as I put a pod in, it only fills my mug a third of the way.

I'm thinking about buying a SimpleHuman Pod Brewer, but there's not the instant gratification of having my coffee RIGHT NOW - or even this week, possibly. Thursday seems like about as long as I'd want to wait. But there's no way to tell how long it takes SimpleHuman to ship. UPDATE: Crate and Barrel actually carries it in store!

I guess this solves the problem of my bimonthly coffee delivery from Cool Beans not being here yet. I was grousing about that this morning, as I'm out of my favorite brews from them, Midnight Blend and Sumatra Mandheling. The *really* odd thing about it is, they charged my card on the 31st, but I still haven't received a shipping notice. Not typical of them.

Silly Parenting Tip #1

When we just had one kid, it was easy to handle medication dosing - one person (usually me, since I'm the stay-at-home parent) was in charge of medication and keeping track of when the last dose was given. With two kids, the lack of time, and the lack of sleep, my husband's reluctant to wake me up to ask just when was the last time I gave Boo a dose of ibuprofen for his ear infection? And what's his dose again? And am I really giving a coherent, accurate answer when I'm not awake?

I bought a dry-erase board that's designed to go on the inside of a locker, so it has magnets on the back. It hangs out on our refrigerator. The dosages for every medicine that the kids could possibly need is written on it, and when we give one of the kids some medicine, we write the date and time on the dry-erase board. The important thing to remember is to write the date and time on the board just before giving the medication, to ensure you're checking the last medication time before dosing.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a link to the dry erase board I bought, and most of the 'magnetic' dry erase boards just seem to accept magnets rather than being magnetic themselves. I would think that magnetic tape could be bought to be stuck to the back of a lightweight dry erase board. The board I bought is really only big enough for two kids worth of medication anyway - if I were this gal, for instance, I'd probably need at least an 11x14 board. (Chris has a fantastic blog, hop on over there if you haven't read it.)

Another priceless headline

The question is, a hit of what?

Yep, this is why we want undocumented aliens coming across our borders unchecked.

Chicken with Chicken Gravy

Mudbug tried Gerber Chicken with Chicken Gravy out this morning. The cats liked it much better than she did.

Band on the Run

Boo's interpretation of the Wings classic, Band on the Run.

He calls this the 'owie dance'.

This is a recipe for some really awesome chicken. We made it last weekend, even though there were no lemons in the store so we had to use bottled lemon juice, and it was still really tasty, tender and flavorful. I've got the real thing with real lemons (although I still didn't get around to brining the chicken) cooking in my oven right now, and my stomach is rumbling and my mouth is watering from the smells coming from my kitchen.

Plus the recipes on this guy's site make me laugh. I just wish he'd get around to posting his Hollandaise recipe, or at least make an email available so I could ask him if really good Hollandaise tastes like the stuff I had at the Delectable Egg or more like the crappy yolkey-tasting stuff that I've had the misfortune to have at a couple of restaurants and created in my own kitchen. He promised he'd post his Hollandaise recipe someday in his Eggs Benedict recipe, and I want it now, dammit!

Hyperreactive bronchial airways

I was surprised to find that this Google search only has one hit. Am I the only person in the world who develops a persistent cough after any kind of respiratory illness?