Hey, it snowed last night. I went out in it a minute ago. It's very slippery and my nose got cold. It's a heavy, wet snow, and it's still above freezing so it's all drippy and water puddles are melting through in big patches, but it's still about five inches deep. That's kind of a lot for around here, in the middle of Arkansas. Used to be you could rely on 6 inches to a foot of snow in winter, enough to keep you out of school for a week. Haven't seen that in what seems like decades, though. Still, I have a lot of nostalgic memories concerning snow, even though there was seldom that much. One that I recalled earlier was walking through the neighborhood with family and.. cousins, maybe? Or was it neighbors? All I remember is they started rolling a big snowball along the sidewalk at one of the cross streets at the top of the hill. It just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I was of course very small at the time, so it seemed like it was about 5 feet tall. I remember seeing chunks of concrete that it had picked up embedded in the outside. When they got it to the curb, it was too heavy to roll any farther, so they just left it to sit there, a giant snow ball on the corner. I suppose it gradually melted into a giant snow lump.

Also
"Peas and carrots do not make a meal, they make a side dish. And you can pile up a mound of mashed potatoes, but you're not gonna get any meat."

November Updates

Haven't written all that much lately. Not too much has been happening, and when I do think of something to write about it I put it off until later and then forget about it. But I figure I should jot done some minor events. For posterity and all that.

Well, October has come and gone. It's normally my favorite time of year, what with the change of season and Halloween, but I just wasn't feeling it too much this year. One reason is because I came down with a bad cold right in the middle of the month, which sapped my energy and enthusiasm for the holiday. It's been a month but I still have some sniffles from that one. Another reason is it was very unseasonably cold here for most of October, so it just didn't feel right. For a week or so it felt more like December, really. But now the other holidays are approaching and I might be more in the mood for that. I was noticing today how it's always feels sorta refreshing just after all the leaves fall.. the sky is opened up, you can see deep into the woods, everything's gray yet bright. Of course, after a few months of that, you definitely start looking forward to some leaves again.

Speaking of leaves, I still need to get mine removed. I hire someone to do that. I'd do it myself, but I have like 11 oak trees in my yard alone... that's a lot of leaves, and a lot of bags. When I was young we'd just rake em up into a heap on a tarp, drag the tarp across the street into the woods and dump them. But now the ruined stone wall we used to dump them off of has an ugly modern house built on top of it, and there's not really an suitable dumping site in the remaining woods.

My gaming computer died a month or so ago. That's not good, ya gotta have one of those. I wanted to replace it with a decent one, but the fancier pre built ones you can get are extremely expensive, upwards of a couple thousand. So I did my research and started ordering stuff, and set about to building my own for much cheaper. It was very nerve-wracking, handling that expensive hardware, hoping not to damage it. It took all evening but I finally got it together... and, amazingly, it worked! It's still working. It's not all that hard once you figure out what goes where, but I still feel proud about it. And better yet, the computer case I got is bright pink! You can't go wrong with a pink computer.

Also, a quote from a recent dream--
"And you added giant electromagnets... why?"
"Dude, everything is cooler with giant electromagnets."

Latex. Paint, that is!

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks, it has.  A while back I finally called a contractor to come see about replacing my retaining walls in the front yard.  They're currently old brick and are tilting and cracking with the weight of ages.  I want to see them replaced with some nice looking field stone.  Mmm, rocky.  But the price he gave me was way too high.  He did, however, give me a reasonable offer on a house painting.

My house was last painted when I was around.. eleven?  Twelve?  Something like that.  Many eons ago, anyway.  They painted it themselves, actually, to save money.  My mom was always about saving money even when we had plenty of money saved up.  She would almost never let us run the AC in the summer.  It was only with much persuasion and begging that I was able to get a window AC in my room when I was 16.  Anyhow, it's been a long time since the house was last painted and it's been flaking and chipping a lot in the past few years.  And some of the masonite siding and wood trim was warped or rotten with age.  Not to mention the gosh darn woodpecker holes.  So I decided I needed paint far more urgently than a new wall.

Well, it's done now.  Except for some odds and ends like the doors and steps.  I wanted to go for tannish gray walls and black trim.  Little bit goth, ya know.  But the gray turned out much lighter than expected, like a very very light beigey gray.  I had an anxiety attack or two worrying about how that would look.  It turned out okay, though the contrast of the light color and the black is starker than I had planned.  Ah well.  The house certainly looks tidier!  They replaced a lot of the damaged boards and caulked my cracks...  yes.  So that should last a long time.

Distressingly, they discovered some termites when removing a damaged board.  They hadn't gotten into the framework or anything, just the wet, crumbly stuff, but still.  I've never had termite problems before.  So I had to get the termite people out here to take a look.  They're going to dig a trench around my house and fill it with poison, it would appear.  They wanted me to get rid of a ton of cardboard boxes my dad had left in a corner of the basement for some reason.. rainy day boxes, I guess.  It's been pouring rain since then, though, so I haven't been able to get to work on that til today.

My basement is really more of a dirt floored, deep crawl space accessable only from the outside.. it's about 6 feet at the deepest end and about a foot at the shallowest.  Sadly it's not very suitable for a dungeon.  Well, it's dirty and dank and such, so that's not so bad, but it's also full of bugs, spiders, and the occasional Arkansas scorpion (they're small and pale, but pack quite a punch).  It's not really a place I would want to leave someone tied up in.  Not responsibly, anyway.  Alas. 

It's been pouring rain for a couple days and the deepest part, which I had to cross, was flooded with several inches of water.  I had to take a few spare cinder blocks from behind the house and put them down as stepping stones.  Then I moved a ton of dirty old boxes of all sizes out of the cramped corner.  They're piled up outside now, taking up half the patio.  I'm not sure what I'll do with them, as I'm not sure the garbage men take heaps of loose boxes.  Well, at least it's done now.  One of these days I need to totally clean out all the ancient detritus from my basement, but I guess I could wait til I have a slave.  Slave labor, you know.

Retro day

While shopping today I noticed they had a new drink for sale called Mountain Dew Throwback.  It's made with sugar instead of corn syrup.  Hardly anything has sugar in it anymore, it's all corn, corn, corn.  I thought that interesting so I got some and just tried it.  I like it.  It's very smooth, perhaps not as much carbonation, and the sweetness lingers in the back of the throat a lot longer.  It's refreshin!

The other day I happened across the name of an old Commodore 64 game I used to enjoy.  This was back in, oh, 85 or 86.  I'd never forgotten the game, but try as I might I couldn't remember the name.  Well, I found it and it's called Ultimate Wizard.  It was a very frustrating game (it was so easy for the little wizard guy to die), but it was fun.  I didn't have a C64, myself - we had an Apple 2c with a teeny tiny green and black screen monitor - but I'd play it for hours at a time at a friend's house when spending the night.  And it was one of the first games that had a construction set, so we could build our own levels that often didn't work right.  But it was fun.  Anyway, seeing the youtube videos of it and hearing the sounds instantly took me back, so that was nice.  We also played a game called Mail Order Monsters a whole lot.  That one was fun, too.

because

   "Why does she want me?" Coraline asked the cat.  "Why does
she want me to stay here with her?"
   "She wants something to love, I think," said the cat. "Something
that isn't her.  She might want something to eat as well.  It's hard
to tell with creatures like that."

- Coraline

Who will bake the cake when I'm gone?

1 18.25 pounds packaged chocolate cake mix
1 can prepared coconut pecan frosting
3/4 cup vegetable oil
4 large eggs
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup butter or margarine
1 and 2/3 cups granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour

Don't forget garnishes such as:
Fish-shaped crackers
Fish-shaped candy
Fish-shaped solid waste
Fish-shaped dirt
Fish-shaped ethyl benzine
Whole and peeled licorice
Fish shaped volatile organic compounds
And sediment-shaped sediment
Peanut butter candy coated pieces, shaped like fish

1 cup lemon juice
Alpha resins
Unsaturated polyester resin
Fiberglass surface resins
And volatile malted milk impoundments
9 large egg yolks
12 medium geo-synthetic membranes
1 cup granulated sugar
An entry called "How To Kill Someone With Your Bare Hands"
2 cups rhubarb, sliced
2/3 cups granulated rhubarb
1 tablespoon all-purpose rhubarb
1 teaspoon grated orange rhubarb
3 tablespoons rhubarb on fire
1 large rhubarb
1 cross borehole electric imaging rhubarb
2 tablespoons rhubarb juice
Adjustable aluminum head-positioner
Slaughter electric needle injector
Cordless electric needle injector
Injector needle driver
Injector needle gun
Cranial caps
And it contains proven preservatives,
deep prenetration agents, and gas and odor control chemicals
that will deodorize and preserve putrid tissue

Doggone!

Yay!

The dog's owner checked with the local vet I took the dog to this morning. They got my info, and now he's back home. That's a relief :)

Now I have to find something to do with these dog food and treats. Hmm. I think I'll keep the dog bowl and leash, though.