Category Archives: pets

Zelda; Diablo

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I actually did write a post yesterday, and somehow when I saved it it just disappeared. I don’t know where it went but when I opened the index.shtml file again it was the previous day’s post. I could not find the other one anywhere on my local machine, and I know I didn’t upload it so I will assume that I have somehow mistakenly saved it as a different date in my archives folder. That assumption doesn’t make any sense for a lot of reasons, most notably that would require me to use the ‘save as’ command and also to verify overwriting an existing file, unless I just somehow invented a date for it. The real reason that this theory doesn’t hold water is that my ftp client allows me to view files by the most recently modified and I could not find anything in there with the correct date on it, I searched through all of my documents and there was nothing.

That all happened last night as I was trying to ftp the file to my server, I could have written a pretty good copy of it yesterday while it was all still pretty fresh in my mind, yet I didn’t. Today I barely recall the topics that I discussed. I know that I made mention of our puppy’s condition, then I talked a bit about diablo, after that I am blank. Probably better that way I suppose, since today I have no more to talk about than I did yesterday and the same two topics are still on my mind.

Our Zelda puppy seems to be getting better for the most part. She is able to walk in limited doses, though she does strongly favor her driver’s side leg while she is doing it. Whatever pain that she is feeling isn’t bad enough that it is causing her to shake and breathe hard like it was when the injury first occurred. I think her progress may have come along a lot more quickly had it not been for my mother and father in law stopping by the day the injury happened, which led directly to her getting up and running over to them since both of our dogs get really excited when they see new people. Then yesterday my brother in law stopped by to pick up an old dryer, which again made her get up and frolic more so than a dog in her condition really should. I can’t fault the relatives for stopping by, nor can I fault her for being a happy little puppy, I do hope that she can just get a lot of rest over the next couple of days and hopefully get better. I just took the above photo and as you can see the dog does not look particularly happy. As you can also no doubt see, we are in serious need of new carpet (though the stains are not nearly that visible to the naked eye. I think my digital camera may be just a bit too good for my purposes; especially considering that the image size is one third of the actual photo, and it has been compressed insanely to make it viable for internet viewing).

• On the up side I was able to expend a bit of my time in mindless gaming yesterday. Why that is an up side? I got no idea. I played a lot more diablo. Not that it was my intention to play a lot more diablo, more I was hoping to get through the first couple of quests in act 3. What happened after that is the strange Diablo Time Warp that I have previously discussed, only about ten-fold.

There have not been that many changes to the normal difficulty since the recent patch, at least not many that I have found, but the ones that I have found have irritated me on a lot of levels. Act 3 is the most univerally hated of all the acts in the game to begin with, so hated that few people actually waste their time doing it. Knowing this, Blizzard went ahead and made it ever harder and more mundane even for the beginner. WTF were they thinking?

I wandered out into act 3 thinking that I would do the first quest pretty quickly, that didn’t happen at all. When the first couple of super-unique monsters didn’t drop the jade figurine I assumed that this was to keep people from doing only that quest for the +20 to life and the getting turboed to the next act, which is a good idea I think. After I had been playing for about an hour and had mapped the entire zone, not to mention clearing the false spider cavern near the waypoint, I still didn’t have the figurine. When I went into the real cavern (I always get the names confused) the figurine was dropped by the super-unique spider that guards the chest holding Khalim’s eye. I grabbed the figurine and went back to town completely forgetting to get the quest item from the chest. This would have been a very minor problem had I realized it at the time, unfortunately I didn’t realize it until I had gotten the Gidbinn and cleared the Flayer Jungle as well as the Flayer Caverns, where I got Khalim’s brain.

The only reason that all of that was bad is that I had to map the entire Great Marsh before I found a way into the Flayer Jungle. I dropped many Town Portals along the way and when I finally got the part of Khalim’s Will from the Flayer Dungeon (or whatever it is called) I just ran as fast as I could into Lower Kurast, hit the waypoint, went back to town and exited the game so that I could write yesterday’s post, which is lost. When I logged back on after having written yesterday’s post I looked in my stash expecting to see two pieces of the Khalim’s Will quest, but there was only one. This meant that I had to remap the zone (from the waypoint) to get back to the real spider cavern and get the damn eye. Once I had done that I just quit for the day. As a matter of fact that was when I realized that something had gone wrong with yesterday’s post, that is when I just gave up on anything related to the computer for good.

I am likely going to play a bit more of Diablo tonight, still in the act 3 area, but if it starts to piss me off like it did yesterday I may just have to but a real sword so that I can straighten out a few programmers over there at Blizzard. –Not that a situation like that would be likely, since it was my own haste that made me miss my quest item in the first place, and it is possible that it was just a strange map that made me have to clear every zone along the way, but My Random Fluctuations of Time and Space (God, for the religious) that was irritating.

If someone happens to car-jack me tomorrow, I may have some content that is a bit more interesting. If that fails to happen, you should expect the same dribble that you are getting now.

Zelda; Drive-Thru commandments

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Well, as I predicted in my last update I was not able to do anything on the site for the last few days. Well, that is not exactly true, I could have done stuff on the site but I chose not to. When your options are sleep before working all day or staying awake to write something that no one reads the choice seems pretty simple. Most of the time anyway.

What is thankful/unfortunate about the few days of the absence of the bosses is that nothing really strange or catastrophic happened. That is good for me as far as their opinion of me, but bad for trying to think of entertaining little things to write. I have so little on my mind that I just might have to show a little nipple to make this one interesting.

•

Before I get into anything else, I must mention that we are having a problem with our little puppy “Zelda”. She was fine when I left for work this morning, running, playing, barking and otherwise just annoying the hell out of me. Sometime after that something happened. (Once again to note that the previous sentence is one of the worst ever written.) Just before I was to come home for lunch, my wife showed up at the store to say that there was something wrong with one of little Zelda’s hind legs and that she was not able to walk. What could possibly have happened to her (the dog) in that span of only a couple of hours remains a mystery.

I should mention that Zelda has never really quite been a ‘normal’ dog. She has what we call a “Roach Back” instead of being flat. She constantly looks like she really needs to just stretch her back out but never does, whether that is due to inability, pain or other we just don’t know. Possibly as a result of whatever the issue is with her back, lower back specifically, she has always walked with a bit of a limp. I had always assumed that this was probably due to an unusual birth that left her with a broken bone that just didn’t heal correctly. With this new problem she is having I am beginning to think that possibly it is something worse.

I am not going to go into speculation about what the particular malady could be as it is just to soon to do so. After all I do remember a time not so long ago when I could not really stand or walk and it just turned out to be a cervical strain. What is to say that she just didn’t do a little doggy version of a sprained ankle? She appears to be getting better as the day progresses, yet she is also on drugs, well aspirin if you really can count that. Being that she is a dog she probably doesn’t have any concept that the pain has gone away because of medicine, so she probably thinks that she is getting better also. I sure do hope that it is just something minor, it is amazing how attached one can become to a pet in only a few months time.

• Now for a drive-thru story.

I have certainly watched enough shows on the history channel to know that the drive-thru came into being for the purpose of making fast food even faster. One of the shows that I saw was saying that the goal of a drive-thru was to go from the order to the car leaving with the food in 90 seconds. I think that 90 seconds might be a bit hopeful, but certainly three or four minutes should be possible, right? Nope.

There is only one fast food joint here in town, well only one place to get food fast through a drive-thru. It is a Burger King, and while I don’t really like the food there so much that I would eat it if I had any real options, I do eat it once or twice a week. The drive-thru experience usually does only take a couple of minutes, though often times we don’t have quite what it was that we had ordered. If you lived where I live you would understand that the simple fact that we got the food from there at all is enough incentive not to bitch.

I have always assumed that the worst case scenario at a drive-thru would be that someone ordered a burger that was not yet cooked, and that would result in having to wait the two minutes or so that it takes to get one done. Boy was I ever wrong.

On Saturday I worked another split shift, while that left me with a three hour lunch break, I still wanted to be home within ten minutes or so in case the people left to run the store needed to call me. I decided that I would grab a burger from the drive-thru, unless there were more than two cars there in which case I was going to just buy a sandwich at a convenience store. It turned out that there were only two cars at the drive-thru so I figured the experience to be about six minutes at most. In some alternate universe it may have even happened that way, it sure as hell didn’t here.

I have come up with a short set of “Drive-Thru Commandements” based on my experience on Saturday. I will list those here while bitching about my particular experience.

Thou Shalt Not Exit Thy Vehicle

The second car up from me had to wait for a minute or so while the one at the window (which I was not able to see in my earlier two car assessment) was waiting for their food. During this period of time you could clearly see that the woman was talking on a cell phone. Once the car that was in front of her had left, she pulled forward. About thirty seconds after she had arrived at the window I saw her put her cell phone down on the seat. Then she got out of her truck. My first thought was that maybe her window would not roll down, we have all been there, right?

Thou Shalt Have Thy Coin Ready

When the woman got out of her truck she proceeded to spend about two minutes digging through the pockets of her pants, handing the cashier a bill or a coin each time she found one. There seemed to be bills and coins in every pocket of the pants. Must be some new-fangled accounting system or something, yet if you are gonna do it, do it right. Maybe One dollars bills in the front right pocket, fives in the front left pocket, tens in the rear right, twenties in the rear left, and use your imagination for larger denominations.

Thou Shalt Not Order So Much Food As To Confuse Astrophysicists

The woman was alone, driving in a mini truck (I think it was a Chevy S-10), yet she got enough food for an army. The drink count was five, as they came out one at a time they were easy to count, especially since she then had to get into the truck to secure each drink, one by one. After the drinks came the food, four bags total, four big bags.

Thou Shalt Pull Forward To Check Thy Order When Others Are Waiting

While holding her receipt in her hand (the receipt was longer than many a college thesis), she proceeded to go through each bag, one by one, and place a mark through each item on her receipt. When she had completed the fourth bag I saw her holding the receipt to the cashier, I am sure that she was saying something like, “Well, I didn’t get this one”.

Thou Shalt Dispute Orders INSIDE The Establishment

The woman then handed back all four bags of food and the receipt to the window person. Thankfully the drinks must not have been in question as they did not go back. There must have been some sort of an audit going on inside the building but we will never know. About three minutes later the window opened, once again, and four bags of food were again provided. Again the woman went through them item by item.

Thou Shalt Leave The Pick-Up Window Immediately On Completion Of Transaction

The woman then got back into her truck, thankfully. Yet instead of driving away she picked her cell phone back up and dialed a number. This particular sequence only took thirty seconds or so, but it pissed me off more than the rest of it combined. If you are buying food for half a dozen people you really should go ahead and go into the place. Especially if you are going to get out of your car and stand there for over eight minutes disputing the order and looking for cash.

Thou Shalt Put A Stone Through The Skull Of Any Person Who Has Broken All Of These Commandments

I will admit that I did not put a stone through her skull, but I had no stone you see…If I would have had a stone I would likely be making this update from prison. I do not know why anyone would try to make such a large order through a drive-thru. It would be one thing if you were doing all value meals or something (which was not the case here for sure), why would you try to order all of that crap, then continue to break all of these commandments?

Just as a ‘for instance’, the guy that was in front of me had his cash ready, paid the girl and threw the bag on the seat. Total time at the pick-up window, about 12 seconds. My transaction was even faster since I told them to keep the extra penny. If I had been in posesession of a Penny Gun like they created over there at MythBusters (they were trying to see what velocity a penny would have to reach to penetrate human flesh/skulls), I may be in prison also.

That is about enough for today. Take the “Drive-Thru Commandments” to heart or you may be the first victim.

Puppies!; Deadly Rooms of Death; Wallpaper

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Well again I completely skipped making a post yesterday. I have no good reason for it, so don’t ask. Not that anyone ever really asks me anything about what I write here anyway. My wife does get on my case on occasion for missing posts, but beyond that I am the only reason that I continue to do this. I guess I kind of knew that going in. I figure if I just continue to write things here, eventually I will write something that someone will find in a search and then maybe become a reader. I think that my Shadowtwinian Reign may take a bit longer that earlier anticipated though.

After a lot of thought I have decided that the way I can drive traffic to my site is to play on the weaknesses of the average person. So, perhaps if I were to put up a couple of beautiful puppy photos I could lure some unsuspecting people into my web. Here is my first attempt.

Isn’t she so cute? Of course she is, what a beautiful little puppy! I should here mention that the whole demonic green eye thing is not what she really looks like, most of the time anyway. I have been snapping away happily with the new camera, but I have yet to read the owner’s manual (which is thicker than a lot of novels that I have read) which would surely tell you how to get rid of the green eye thing. Hell this camera has so many features that I am sure I will never know what a good two thirds of them are. Oh yeah, if you click on the thumbnail you will see all of Zelda, and Warlock looking on merrily. The thing that is hanging out of her mouth is, in fact, a pig hoof. The whereabouts of the rest of the pig are currently unknown. Also I cropped the hell out of the photo, then saved it at 50% image quality so that it would come in under 100kb. If you want to see it full size/quality you will really just need to come to my house, or pay for me to get a broadband connection so it wouldn’t take me ten minutes to upload the thing at full size/quality.

You can never go wrong with puppies.

• One of the guest columnists over at DII.net had an interview with the creator of this little game called Deadly Rooms of Death or D.R.O.D. for short. I know that link is currently dead, I assume that the influx of traffic generated by being linked to on such a prominent site pushed him way past his monthly bandwidth limits. I was able to download the game before that site went down, and I found it at least a bit amusing to play. It is like a lot of puzzle type games that I have played on the pc before, pretty simple to figure out, minimal graphics. But, it comes with an editor.

So after having played a dozen or so levels in the game I figure what the hell, I am gonna make me a Dungeon. I took a scrap of paper to draw a quick layout of how I wanted the rooms for the first level to look. Mostly just for the doorways going in and out. Then I started to make “JoeBob’s Dungeon”. I only made the first level to it, and I think it is about ten rooms. One of the rooms currently just has a big block formation that spells the words “Cake Walk”, as I didn’t want to take the time to figure out another puzzle to put there, but wanted to make sure that the level clear thing would allow you to move on. It was a lot of fun trying to come up with unique little things to throw onto the boards to make them make you think, yet easy enough that it wouldn’t take you an hour to figure it all out. I did hit one snag with it, as I discovered while trying to play my new level all the way through. One of the levels that I made was unbeatable. I was able to do it while I was play-testing it, since it let me choose where to start, and I always started right next to one of the enemies so that I could clear the board before it was a horrible mess of bugs. The problem was that when you came in through the only door you could it was possible to clear all the bugs, but the spawners would put back so many of them so fast that you were not able to kill them without getting cornered. Without actually playing it you really wouldn’t know what I am talking about, so long story short, I had to eliminate a few of the bugs and a couple of the spawners to allow a player to get at least one of them killed before the new bugs would spawn.

Wow, I believe I have reached an all new low in content. Talking in length about a game that no one has ever played, on a board that I created so there is no way anyone could have played it…Now for something completely different.

• When I gave my Mother her new computer on Sunday, she was excited by the fact that the previous PeoplePC wallpaper could now be something different. I told her that I would try to download her a better picture for her desktop, and that is just what I have been trying to do, the thing is that all of the pictures that I have found which match the specifications are .exe files. That could mean that they are simply packed as .exe files with winzip or some such program, but I don’t want to take the chance with mom’s pc since she certainly doesn’t know how to fix it if something goes bad.

What I am looking for is a really pretty image of a unicorn and pegasus together. The image size would probably be best at 800×600 as I am sure that is what her screen area is set as. I found one such image at a pc wallpaper site, but after downloading it the file would not open, siting an ‘unsupported start of file marker’ or some such. If you happen to know where I can simply download a .jpg image such as described without having to sign up for weird porn email from here to eternity, please send me an email.

That is all for today. I may actually make a post tomorrow, even though it is my concrete day off, just because I have a feeling that a topic is going to present itself. I am basing that assumption on something that happened today IRL and I really beleive it could make for excellent bitching material. That being said, if I make no post tommorrow, don’t be disappointed.

Camera; Dogs

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There were a combination of factors leading to me not posting anything new yesterday. The first was yet another silly little video game, which I may go into in some more detail at a later date. The second was a telephone conversation with my mother, which at least helped to ease a bit of family tension. The third was that I was looking to buy a new digital camera so that I could show off my handsome/pretty dogs, Warlock and Zelda respectively.

The first digital camera that I ever bought was an “Argus DC2000”, I bought that little sucker for 79 bucks a few years ago. You know, back when any digital camera started at a couple of hundred. That camera is just totally fucking useless, but don’t take my word for it, here are the reviews that it got on Epinions.com. Hardly glowing recommendations, to say the least.

I wanted to ensure that my next digital camera purchase would not just, well, piss me off, so I spent a bit of time reading reviews over at Epionions.com, as well as reviews for more recent cameras from sites like amazon.com. I read through the reviews on epinions, compared them to what I saw available on ebay at the time, and bit the bullet. The camera that I bought is a Kodak, which is a name that I am certainly more familiar with than the previous “Argus” camera that I had. The particular camera that I purchased has tons of reviews over there, the average is 4.5 out of 5 stars, yet there are a couple that just give it a 1 star rating. I think that might just be based on their inability to use it, but it could also be a piece of defective equipment. Only time will tell.

At any rate, I have not yet gotten that camera so I can’t yet voice an opinion. I am sure that it will be better than what I already have, but not sure if it will be the ultimate bliss that I am hoping for. I figure it will hit somewhere halfway between the two. If it is simply usable for taking still shots, it will be a hundred times better than my last digital camera purchase.

One humorous side-note to the whole thing. The number one ‘con’ to buying this camera was that it eats batteries, while the number one ‘pro’ was that it only takes two, while most cameras take four. Do the people that call it a pro that it takes less batteries, yet a con that it goes through them faster eat sugar-frosted lead flakes for breakfast or what? Of course it is going to go through batteries a lot faster when you are only using two, as opposed to four, the energy in the batteries is used as needed and, to my knowledge, can not be divined by simply praying over them. The camera runs on 3 volts, that means that it will operate on two AA batteries, the cameras that require 4 AA batteries last twice as long, but was there actually any savings to you?

I am sure that it is written somewhere in the fine print that the use of only 2 batteries is for the purpose of reducing the weight of the camera. I could be wrong, but it would seem too silly to think that you could get the same performance from a camera that had half the power. That is just my take on it, your opinion may vary.

• Country Thunder is descending on us like cancer. You can see signs of it all over the place, most notably the big-ass sign that they put up on the tiny little road leading into town. My wife often laughs when I say that I did not get the mail because there was too much ‘traffic’ in town. When I say that what I mean is that the drive-up-and-grab-your-mail slots outside the office are full. Once Country Thunder hits, it will be an adventure to simply make it home alive.

I said in my last blog that it is like Ozzfest, and it is in many ways, especially the drinking. People getting up at nine in the morning so that they can make the first show, taking time out only long enough to go get more beer. I have heard that they have better security and the such this year, but just imagaine trying to drive through a tiny town like ours at noon, when half of the driver’s are already drunk. I am pretty sure that I don’t want to have to be in the middle of that.

• Even as I pen (type) these lines, I may be looking at the last living moments of our older dog, ‘Warlock’. He is in perfect health, has had all of his shots, he is a good dog by the definition of dogs, but he may have to be killed. The little bastard kept myself and my wife awake all last night by first scratching on our bedroom door. She (my wife) let him go out, in case he needed to pee. He came back into the room and started sniffing at everything (you wouldn’t think that was loud, but you haven’t heard it). Then he scratched on the door wanting out, it took me about twenty minutes of laying there listening to him before I let him, and Zelda (who is the good dog at this point) onto the porch.

Dogs have nails like the talons of death, or so it would seem. After an hour of not being able to sleep because of the sound of the dog scrathing at the door, I let him back in. If the dog was intelligent, he would have noted that it gets better when he quits scratching, unfortunately, the dog is an idiot. Within ten minutes they were back on the porch. And the second he got there he was scratching at the door.

Long story short, if he does that again tonight, my wife and I will have a very beautiful stuffed dog.

I should also mention that I just got a call from my employers that will make it so that I will be able to make a post tomorrow, but not on Thursday. So Wednesday and Thursday are switching places, hopefully just for this week.

Dogs; Terry Brooks

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Well the night happened, and the day came, so I guess I must type something here for your/my amusement. I spent a long time, after arriving home from work, typing an email that I may just quote on this page since it is about a subject that just really crushes me. That being said, I am going to discuss my dogs for a couple of minutes, then go off on whatever tangent I will invariably end up writing about.

I have stated previously that my wife and I are the owners of two ‘Vicious Pit-Bulls’, I always say that in jest since the dogs never do anything to show the vicious nature of the Pit Bull. The stereotypical Pit-Bull is a Junk-Yard dog that is trained to attack and kill anything that it sees, our dogs are trained a bit differently. I really believe that if someone were to break into the house while we were away they might use their base animal instinct to attack that person, or failing that, the fact that they both sound like the spawn of Satan when they bark would likely keep your would be intruder well away from our place.

The thing, the important thing is that we have total control over them. I am sure that it sounds a bit silly to say that, since I have previously written about one of them carrying undergarments and shoes out into the yard, but as far as their actions while we are at home, they jump when we say jump. They sleep in the room with us, and they are just cuddly little things for our amusement most of the time. Most of the time.

During a requisite ‘belly rub’ the other night, we noticed that Warlock, the older of the two dogs, had a couple of pretty serious half cut/half abrasion type of things on his hind legs. He was limping a bit also. Thing is that when he didn’t know that we were watching he forgot to limp, so we know that it isn’t anything serious. It was just the two of them playing and she got him, she got him real good that one time, and he has a bit of a boo boo that will take a while to heal.

They ‘play fight’ a lot, and it is very difficult to discern whether the battle is real or playful, unless you look at the happy, wagging little tails, that is. She, Zelda, is not fully grown yet and still has all of the energy of a puppy, Warlock doesn’t have all of that energy, but he is a trooper and hangs in there most of the time. Zelda does use some dirty tactics though, her number one attack is to get him off guard and bite his dick. Not to speak for an animal that has been castrated and has no voice, but, I bet you if he had balls he would be a very unhappy animal a lot of the time right now.

Zelda has yet to be spayed and I am kind of wondering if that may be part of the reason that they seem to fight so viciously when they play. After a round of ‘play fighting’ we can usually find them both laying side-by-side on the floor, sleeping. Zelda certainly owns his ass though. He is probably in the seventy pound range (just judging by having to pick him up to carry him inside from time to time), it could be less or more. Zelda is about three quarters of his weight, but wins every ‘play fight’. She is a bitch. (Literally, she is a bitch by definition, and also she fights dirty so that just adds to the bitch description.)

My wife likes to buy them bones to chew on (I do too, since even as much as the bones cost they still cost less than new furniture) and that is when the real fighting starts. Treats and chew toys are always bought in equal quantites, one for each dog, but the dogs don’t seem to understand that, and will fight over one while there is another one, exactly the same, lying there untouched. Even if we put them into each dog’s mouth they will invariably start fighting over just one of them. I assume this is like the classic argument that children make about how the one glass has more Kool-Aid than the other.

While I was on the phone with my Mother the other night, the dogs got into what I am going to call a real fight. My Mother could hear the growling through the phone, her boyfriend could hear it also, and he was sitting ten or twelve feet from the phone that it was coming through. The dogs were both up on their hind legs (makes them stand about nipple height on a 5’10” man) and they were not pulling the punches. I did jump in to pull them apart, but I tell you that if they were not my dogs I would have run like hell. They looked and sounded like they wouldn’t care who or what they tore apart. It was quite a vicious display.

Knowing that they were both my dogs, I jumped right in there and pulled them apart, but don’t lots of stories about pit-bulls killing their owners start that way? Once I had them both by the collar, and smacked each of them on the snout, they calmed down. I guess if that huge black dog is yours, you know how well it is, or isn’t, trained and you no longer look at it as a huge dog, but the puppy that you raised. Everyone else will be afraid of the dog, because of the negative press, but they really are good dogs.

The one thing that the dogs do viciously attack is…Flies. Yes, the common house fly. Normally we never see them in the house, but the last few weeks they have been here and the dogs can snap them right out of the air and eat them. Also, they do enjoy cockroaches, but the chase them around way too much before they just let them die and leave the body for us to sweep up later. And the cockroaches only come out when it is dark, so that means lost sleep as the dogs sniff around at it for a couple of hours until I finally just get a tissue and throw the damn thing away.

After reading your email, I went to Amazon just to read some of the reviews for the magic kingdom series. The thing that I found interesting is that the first three novels in the series all get a customer rating of 4 or 4.5 stars, while the fourth book, the one that I only got a couple of chapters into, has five star ratings from all the customers. One of the customers said that next to the ‘Xanth’ series this was the best thing going. Why did this one get the best reviews when I thought it sucked so badly? Oh, I guess that you likely don’t go to write a review about it when you hate it then do you. And by the time an author is on his tenth or twelfth novel he probably has a following that would read a retaraunt menu that he had written and find it the best literary work of all time.

On a side note my wife came in as I was typing this and asked what I was writing about, after seeing the subject line she fired off her two cents that Brooks is just unreadable. I told her that your real beef with him was about it being so derivative of LOTR, she said that was funny since she read all of Tolkien’s stuff and never made it through a single one of Brooks, even though we have damn near every one of them on the shelf (in hardcover no less, gotta love those 5-7 dollar prices. Unfortunately that book store went out of business so now I have to shop through amazon just like everyone else.) So I guess that really does just show that everyone has a different opinion about what writing is good and what is bad.

Funny thing about that bookshelf of mine, I always wanted to have a bookshelf in my house, since that is one of the first things that I have always noticed missing when I visit other people’s houses. My bookshelf, though, has turned more into a book graveyard. Out of the probably 100 or so books on it the only ones that find regular use are the thesarus, dictionary and Bible (the bible just for reference when I am bashing it, I want to make sure that I have the quotes right and be able to site the book and verse), other than that we have some classics that get read, sherlock holmes, dracula and the unabridged complete works of Edgar Allan Poe to name a few. So about 8% of my bookshelf is ever touched and the rest of it might as well just be painted on the wall for all the good it does.

Yet, our dvd collection is used constantly, even the ones we don’t particularly care for get watched once in a while. Is that simply because you have to actively read a book while you can passively watch a movie, or do we (people in general) really hold a grudge against an author or a book that we would never hold against an actor or a movie?

Again, I have gone way off topic. I was intending to mention that Brooks had also done some books in the horror genre, I have never read any of them and was searching on Amazon when I found this link. It has nothing to do with his horror writing, but it does just go to prove that he readily admits that Tolkien was his main influence in the Shannara series. (I hope that link works).

Terry Brooks admits to ripping off Tolkien

With that, I think I am going to quit trying to defend him, and just remember his work with the fresh eyes I had a decade and a half ago. His work was the first that I had read in the fantasy genre and I really found it fascinating, knowing -now- that it was all pretty much ripped off from Tolkien can’t change the impact that it had on me in my early teens. Imagine if I had picked up that Piers Anthony novel and just hated it, I might never have read fantasy again. Instead I picked up Terry Brooks and became a fan of the genre. Knowing that I became a fan of someone who plagiarized (sp) someone elses’s work is a bit disheartening, but knowing that it is also the reason that I will be in line to buy the first edition of the Flux hardback should be enough to prove that his work had a profound effect on me.

Donnie

Dogs; Diablo

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Our puppy, Zelda, took it upon herself last night to start chewing on a pair of glasses that my wife had just bought, instead of the normal rawhide things that she is allowed to chew on. She has drug some of the wife’s high heels out in the past and chewed on them also, but dogs and shoes are pretty much linked by the oral tradition of our society, so that is to be expected. But, eyewear? There is just the tiny little piece of plastic on each arm, why would a dog find interest in that? A pair of slippers I could understand, especially if they were fuzzy, but glasses? What the hell was that dog thinking?

That is rhetorical, of course, and something that I may have been better off not to mention since I am the one trying to say that dogs are the more intelligent pet. The thing about training a dog is that there is a point where a puppy who can’t really understand discipline turns into a dog that knows that what it is doing is wrong, and you have to figure out at what point that happens.

Just like children, dogs go through a teething process. It is a bit different because the dogs will continue to chew on any item available until their teeth have completely grown in. I am assuming that this is because of their base animal instinct, knowing (however subconciously it is) that they must have strong teeth to tear apart their prey. I am speaking only from observation and have done absolutely zero research into it, but that is what I theorize from what I have seen.

Having been a dog owner since I was very young (3 or 4 years old at best), I have found that certain things do not help in teaching a dog what it should and should not chew on. Like the glasses, if you find them on the floor and they have been chewed on, showing them to the dog and smacking the dog seems to make it just hate them and want to chew on them the very next time it is possible. On the other hand, if you catch the dog chewing on something that they should stay away from it just takes a quick smack on the snout and the word “No” spoken firmly to make them never touch that item, or any similar item, again. I think that is why our puppy only drags her high heels out of the closet, since she has been smacked for dragging sneakers outside but has yet to be caught with a heel.

One other odd thing that she likes to chew on is bras. There is nothing crunchy on a bra, even the underwire ones only have a little piece of metal below the cup. I didn’t know that dogs would really chew on metal, but there are several old soup cans in my back yard that can prove that they do. We do try to keep rawhide chews available for her all the time, but those things can get expensive when she is going through one every day ( I mean like a bone, not just a strip ), and even then when it is gone she will start chewing on things like the laundry detergent bottle that is in the room they stay in while we are not home. With a bit of luck, and patience, she will grow up to be a much better dog than most pit bulls get credit for, unless she decides to start eating the wife’s jewelry next, in which case I will call a buy a gun and call a taxidermist, and then she will truly be a very good dog.

D2 talk below, may as well turn away now if you don’t play it.

Well, I spent entirely too much time playing Diablo today. Or to be more precise, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction version 1.10. Way too much time. It started out innocently enough, just screwing around with the new single player character that I created shortly after the release of the patch, but then I decided to go check on the on-line characters that I have remaining. I lost about 80% of my on-line characters through lack of play while I was playing everquest waiting for them to put out the patch for Diablo. The sad part is that had I sold some of the gear that I had over ebay I could be a couple hundred dollars richer because of it, instead, it is just gone.

I had a level 67 paladin that had just killed Baal in nightmare before I put the game on the shelf for a couple of months. He is one of the few characters that I still have remaining. I had not really tried to do anything in hell level since the patch was released, so I figured I would give him a go, just to see. They certainly have increased the difficulty in hell level. I am not saying that is a bad thing, just that it was obvious from stepping out the game that they had.

There are Super-Unique monsters galore. It wasn’t too bad going through the first couple of zones, I was able to survive using only potions and running like hell a lot of the time. Blood Raven was a lot more difficult than I remember her, but it has been a long time since I have faced her on hell level. Even longer since I have faced her on hell level with a melee character. It wasn’t that it was particularly hard to kill her, but it was significantly harder than it was prior to the patch.

The theme of having tons of Super-Unique monsters continued through as far as I got in act 1, and they are pretty tough sometimes. It wasn’t until I got to the Black Marsh (beyond the Dark Wood) that I started to get my ass handed to me pretty regularly. I happened upon four Super-uniques that were in about a four-screen range of each other. Two were Shamans, and were taken care of pretty easily, the other two were the two guys I am going to put pictures of below.

Any time they are stone skin and immune to physical a melee fighter has to cringe, but the lightning immunity made it even worse for me, since my weapon only does lightning damage. Luckily, this is the character that I had built to survive against physical immune creatures, so he has vengeance maxxed also, but this was still a pretty tough battle. My mercenary died a few times, and I got way too close a time or two myself. Then I decided to do the tower.

The tower might as well be a hack that was added to the game later, judging by the number of people that actually do the quest, but that could also be said for the majority of act 3, so who’s to say. I died in the tower. I am not sure if this guy had died before, but he died in the tower, on the first level. There were, again, at least four super-uniques on the first level of the tower. The fourth pack that I encountered were the ones that killed me, I did not have time to see what exactly their attributes were, but one had curse and spectral hit. I died with a full belt (16) full rejuv potions. Dead before I could hit a button. Thank god I don’t play hardcore.

I have read a lot about people thinking that the patch is too easy, or too hard, I think that it is just about right, you really have to think about your actions, and pay attention to what you do. It is certainly not a cake walk, but if you play it right it can be done with less than elite gear. So instead of bitching about how it is too hard or too easy, I am gonna say that they got it just about right. You have to really TRY to beat monsters at the higher levels, while you can just beat them up at the lower levels. Isn’t that the whole point of a game? To make the beginning easy enough for novices while having an ending that challenges the most seasoned player?

If I ever happen upon a game in my lifetime with the infinite replayability of D2:LOD, I will probably never have to buy another game.

Coolers; Pets

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Well, again, there was nothing new posted here yesterday. I would like to blame that on a lot of things, but the fact is that the blame should all go directly onto me. Sunday is, after all, the only day of the week when I don’t have to go to work, so I should certainly be able to stab out a few paragraghs at least, right?

The thing is that I had promised my boss that I would make one of the coolers on the roof be on-line by Sunday (as a side job). The hours that I worked this week made it so that I had to go through the entire process on Sunday, as I was not able to get up there to take care of some of the minor problems that can turn major on this type of cooler. I am not talking about something like changing the filter in your air conditoner, I am talking about servicing an evaporative cooler that is industrial-sized. I doubt that anyone that does not live in the state of arizona actually knows what an evaporative cooler is (strike that, I bet a lot of people who live in deserts in the middle east are pretty fond of them also).

I think that the name of the product may be a bit misleading though. Technically, water has to reach 216 degrees fahrenheit before it evaporates, that is 100 degrees celsius, and damn hot. Evaporative coolers can lower the air temperature by as much as 30 degrees in a zero humidity climate. The water doesn’t actually evaporate (I don’t think). Yet, I just googled it up and that page is Here. It really does evaporate the water. How water can be heated to the point that it evaporates being spewed into a room can cool a room is something that I still don’t understand.

I still don’t believe that it is actually evaporating that water, well, maybe I do, to a point. Water can hold it’s temperature a lot better than air can. That is likely why the oceans stay at within a degree or two of their average temperature year round. That is also why the air temperature can be cooled by the evporation process (maybe), the air that is being pushed through the pads is picking up molecules of water that have been underground, and as such are at the roughly 72 degree temperature that we consider normal. That does result in a nice cool breeze (if that is the way it works at all) but, I am a happy man either way.

If the cooler actually does ‘evaporate’ any of the water, that hot air is magically exchaged for the cold air that it blows into my house. I can deal with that.

There are lots of things in your average home that you could not explain how or why they work, take your computer for instance, it works, do you know why it works? Could you build one if you had to? I am not talking about taking pieces that you buy at a store and assembling them, I mean if you were stuck on a desert island, could you use the resources there to create a computer? or an evaporative cooler? Hell, even a can-opener?

I am 100% sure that I could not build any of those things. I could build all three of them, if I was given the parts to do so, and I coulld also beat a can against a rock until I finally got into it, but that is hardly the point. Technology may simplify our lives, but it makes us ever more reliant on people who know a particular trade and will take advantage of our ignorance of it.

Puppies vs. Pussies

I had every intention of getting some pictures of ‘Zelda’ up here today, the thing is that we have only a precious few of them, and they are all locked in a little disposable camera that has yet to be developed. Just take my word for it, she is a good dog at least 10-12% of the time, the rest of the time you just want to beat her senseless and forget that you ever had a dog…Not a good premise for where I am planning to go with this, but it has been written, and I do not edit.

It is not often that someone can see a very rich, important woman lugging around her pussy, but, she might be lugging around her bitch. Why the ‘American Dream’, or the myth that it has since created, has to involve a dog is far beyond me. The ‘American Dream’ also says that you have 2.6 children, so do you start lopping off your children’s appendages until you fall into that demographic? Hopefully not.

That is the entire reason I am going to go on about this, there seem to be pretty clear lines drawn between the ‘dog people’ and the ‘cat people’. Why? Pick a pet and go with it. If you like cats, that would be your choice. If you like dogs, that would be your choice. Pretty simple.

Stand next to your pet cat, throw a ball, what happens? Likely the cat will look at you like you are some sort of idiot for throwing the damn thing in the first place.

Stand next to your dog and do the same thing. He/she will chase the ball down, pick it up, and bring it back to you. The dog may or may not drop it depending on the level of training.

Stand next to your cat again, point towards something that is some distance away, the cat will just stare at your finger (in most cases), while the dog will look where you are pointing.

When you come home from work, wich one will jump up and wag their tail, just so happy to see you? Which one just looks up from their bed waiting for you to open a new can of food?

I think that dog is certainly the way to go for a pet, but cat is a very popular pet also. When you can make your cat sit, shake each paw (by saying left or right), beg and stand all for one single treat, I may consider them equal…Yet most cat owners will tell you that their animal is so smart that it doesn’t fall for those tricks… Okay, I didn’t want your stupid cat here anyway…

Odd news; Warlock

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Before I start to go into something else, I want to mention that when I read my update from yesterday I noticed that I had left out a detail I really wanted to include in my bitching about the movie ‘Signs’. The particular detail was about the fact that water is toxic to the aliens. The part that I forgot to mention was humidity -you know, the amount of water in the air-, so depending on what particular month the story supposedly happened there should have been enough moisture in the air to kill them on the spot. Then there is the issue with rain…but it is going way beyond what the small time/scale of the movie was going for, so we will assume that they just never thought it would rain. But, enough about that.

In other developements, I found that I have a site reader that I did not know I had. This person sent me an email with a request. Despite the request I am not going to quit doing these updates ;), The request was for more doggy pictures and stories, and the story of how I ended up two ‘vicious pit bulls’ is one that I think could be entertaining, or at least informative, so I will go into that below.

There is a very odd and short news thing that I have to put here today;

SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian handyman admitted he was stupid to shoot himself in the head with a nail gun in a misguided prank that left him with a nail lodged in his brain.Brad Shorten, a father of three from Victoria state, was enjoying a few beers with friends after working on his house when they began joking about industrial accidents.

Shorten, 33, picked up a nail gun that he thought was empty, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger.

He later said he had turned off the gun’s compressor and taken out its nail cartridge but did not realize there was still enough pressure in the gun to fire a nail.

“My mates and I were talking about construction site accidents and taking your eye out with a nail gun, and I foolishly put the gun to my head and pulled the trigger,” Shorten told the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

“I did a very stupid thing,” he said.

The bizarre mishap left him with a 1.25-inch nail counter-sunk through his skull just behind his temple.

Royal Melbourne Hospital neurosurgeons removed the nail in a delicate four-hour operation even though Shorten, who was expected to make a full recovery, had offered to take the nail out with a pair of pliers.

Isn’t it funny that they were joking about this exact thing when some jack ass decides that holding a nail gun to his head and pulling the trigger would be a good idea? I think he should be put to death (or at the very least castrated) to keep his idiot gene from passing to another generation. I am all about protecting the children after all…

Puppies!

You know, some people think that canines are no longer ‘puppies’ when they hit the fifty pound mark, but I know the truth, as long as you have control over them they are still puppies. Sure one of my puppies has eclipsed the 50 pound mark and ran with it, but he is well behaved and as such Is still my ‘pup’, well technically that is my wife’s pup, but the idea stays the same. A well controlled dog, regardless of size, will always be your puppy.

Here is the story of how we got our first dog;

When my wife and I moved from a studio apartment to the house that we are now buying, we thought that (well she thought really) that a dog would be a good addition to the non-existent back yard. We kicked the idea around for at least a month, maybe six weeks, before we decided to go ahead and get a dog. Once the decision was made that we were going to get a dog, we went to an animal shelter in the Mesa/Phoenix area to try to find one. We chose to go to the shelter to find a pet for the simple fact that if they are not adopted they will be put to death sleep. It seemed more logical to us to take a pick of the dogs in the pound than to pay someone for a pure-bred.

We walked all up and down the aisles at this place. I was hoping to find a small dog and I am not sure what my wife was looking for. She ended up picking out this guy, who we named ‘Warlock’. He was the only dog in the entire place that was not barking or jumping, he was just laying there in his cell waiting for someone to let him out. He did drag my ass when I was trying to lead him to the car, but once there he just jumped into the back seat and layed down to sleep for the duration of the roughly one hour trip home. Once home, I broke out my cheap-ass digital camera and took the above shot of him (which really doesn’t do him justice).

We were initially worried that he would mess in the house, but that never happened. He has never made a poop or a pee inside the house, though he did once vomit, but he licked it up before we could clean it up.

He was not only house-trained, but he was also quick to learn commamds like ‘sit, stay, lay down, shake, My wife actually has him trained so that he will do a certain trick depending on how many fingers she is holding up. I think those are some damn good results from a dog that was on the “half price” rack at the pound. (at our pound they go on the ‘half price rack’ the day before they are to be executed euthanised).

The story of how we got Zelda will come sometime in the next few days, but, for now you should just appreciate your pets and thank the random fluxuations of time and space that they are still in your home.

Neck injury; The most adorable dog photo ever

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Well, you know how one day you are at work and something bad happens and you think to yourself – or say aloud- this is the worst day of my life? I know I have sure said that a few times in my day but I can most definitely proclaim without a bit of doubt that when I said that yesterday, that statement was true, and likely will remain the pinnacle of shitty days in my life for a very long time. At this point you must be wondering what could possibly have been so bad about it, so I will tell the tale below.

The day started out just as every day, I awoke and took a leisurely stroll around the perimeter of my estate, my two faithful dogs by my side. A songbird flew from a branch of the the old pine tree near the stream, it landed on my shoulder and sang as I caressed its gentle feathers…Then the alarm clock went off and I woke up and fought my way past the dogs to the bathroom. I started the shower, shaved really quick and jumped in. After I had finished rinsing my hair, as I was reaching to turn off the water, someone hit me square at the base of my skull with a very heavy object.

It took a few seconds for the initial sharp pain to subside. I had either blacked out briefly, or the pain had just forced my legs out from under me, either way, I was on one knee in the bottom of the tub by the time I had a chance to look around. I didn’t see the guy with the bat, so he must be really quick, or maybe he was never there, that depends on how one feels about conspiracy theories I guess. The pain was still throbbing in my neck, right at the base of my skull, but I continued my normal routine confident that it would shortly go away. It didn’t.

I staggered naked into the bedroom, thinking that maybe if I could lay down for a minute it would go away. The truth was that the very second my head touched the pillow the pain quadrupled. I sat up and said to my wife, “I need to go to the hospital”. She looked at me for a second, I guess not quite sure if I was joking. We have been together for seven years, and in that time I have never even been to see a doctor, hell, I have only been in the hospital twice, once when I was born and once when I had third degree burns, when I was two. She must have been able to see that I was serious, as she immediately began to get dressed, and called my work to tell them that she was taking me to the emergency room.

As I began to try to get dressed, that was when I really began to worry. There are a few things in life that one should not need help doing, especially at 29. Dressing yourself is one of them, and I don’t mean the color-coordination kind of shit, I mean that I was not able to put on my own shirt, she had to button it for me. I gave up all hope in even trying to get my shoes on under my own power and just slid my feet into my flip-flops, and off we went.

The nearest hospital is at least a thirty minute drive from us, and the roads on the way are very bumpy, which is normally not a problem, but when each bump feels like someone ramming an icepick into the base of your skull..Let me just say that it seemed a bit more bumpy than usual. I was forced to remove the head rest from the seat only a couple miles into the trip, since it was pushing at my head, and thus magnifying the bumps in the road. The problem was that without the head rest my body was forcing my neck to do a bobble-head thing, and honestly I don’t know which one hurt worse.

The thirty minute drive took about eleven years. Actually, it probably took about forty minutes due to being stuck behind people who just didn’t seem to know or care that I really wanted medical attention. As it turns out, the hospital was much like the inconsiderate drivers. I was not able to stand when we arrived there (well, I did walk in, so I guess I was capable of doing it, it just hurt so badly when I did it that I was afraid I may feint from the pain) so I just sat down and let my wife take care of getting me on the list.

I must go off topic for a second here to bitch about the list. This isn’t a fucking night club, its a hospital. So you come in with a knife sticking out of your skull, do they put you on the list behind the guy who is here for a tetinus shot after getting a minor cut from a rusty soda can? Now, I know that everyone thinks that THEIR problem requires immediate attention, but come on. By all indications I had a severe spinal or cervial problem, you know the type of thing that usually ends up in you being restrained flat on a board with your head in a collar while they rush you to x-ray. Not the case here, I guess I wasn’t on “The List”.

I sat there patiently. I waited for over an hour, and every second the pain was getting worse. The pain was no longer just in my neck, my head was throbbing, I could feel my pulse in my eyeballs. I was keeping them closed to avoid the triple-vision thing that was happening each time my heart beat, also, I was pushing the palms of my hands hard against my temples to keep my head from exploding. In hindsight, I guess if my head was going to explode it would not have cared if my hands were there, but it helped to ease the pain a bit. If they had not called me back into triage when they did, I may not be here typing this now.

I could barely walk at this point, and again, I mean that the action was fluid, I could do it, it just hurt so bad. Every time my heart beat it was like I could feel it in every single capillary from head to toe. I walked as slowly as I could to try to give me time to breathe between steps. Upon arriving in the little room, the nurse began to ask some questions while the machine was taking my blood pressure. Now that I am thinking back on it, I can not remember some of the questions, I know my eyes were closed the entire time, I remember her asking my weight, and not believing me, then making me get on the scale. I remember barely being able to do that since I could not look down. I remember her telling me to sit back down and be very still. I remember hearing her say to a doctor something about getting me on a bed and stabilized before I had a seizure. I remember my wife crying, and me telling her not to worry I was going to be fine. Then some guy putting something around my neck that took some of the pressure away. Then letting me sit down, on a bed, and the throbbing receding just a bit.

I am going to go off topic again about “The List”. I guess it is pretty clear that I didn’t die, since I am typing this, but I wonder how close I actually came because of sitting out there waiting all that time. My blood pressure, when they finally got me into triage was 180something over 106, that was why they were worried that I was going to have a seizure. Any time that bottom number gets over 100 it is like a stroke looking for a place to happen (which was why I was feeling my hearbeat in every damn extremity). Why this actually happened to me I am not sure, nor did they have an explanation. My best guess is that the pain had driven my body into shock and that if I had not have gotten the pressure taken off of my neck I may have either had a stroke or gone into cardiac arrest. -But the guy in front of me, who needed a tetinus shot after being cut on a rusty soda can is going to be just fine, thank you.-

I sat on the bed there, wearing the collar, for a time while speaking to various other nurses and telling the same story about a dozen times, every one of them asking me to squeeze their hands (which I am assuming was to make sure that I had not lost use of the muscles in my hands, but who knows). Then they carted me off to x-ray.

That was a pretty amazing turn of events, eh? Let the guy sit out there waiting over an hour, then when you decide to see him you see that there is a real possibility that the guy may have a very major problem. So after an hour in the waiting room they got me into triage, and in less than twenty minutes after that I was in x-ray.

Once I returned from the x-rays, there was a guy waiting there with some pain killer. He wanted to inject me with pain killer. I am not big on needles, but I really didn’t want to be injected with the pain killer. My logic was that I do not use any drugs, except nicotine, caffeine and alcohol, and wanted to be able to walk out of the place if they were to release me at the end of the ordeal. The guy went and checked on this with the nurse, who then spoke to me, and we agreed that I could take a percacet in lieu of a debilitating shot. At this point, the man who brought me the percacet took my blood pressure again and it was down to 153/80, which is not really all that great by any stretch, but the fear of seizure was not there anymore. It occurs to me that had they gotten me into the collar to stabilize my neck, oh, say an hour earlier, there might not have been an issue with the blood-pressure?

At any rate, due to the nature of symptoms, combined with the blood-pressure they observed when I first got into triage, they wanted to do a CT Scan. I was in no position to argue, what being hardly able to walk, plus a good lie down seemed like a good thing at this point. The guy said that the scan would last for about twenty minutes, but I swear the second I laid down, the guy said I was done. I vaguely remember whirring noises as I was being pushed through this ..thing.. but I could swear it was nowhere near twenty minutes. -Them percacet pills must be good stuff-

So the good news is that the CT Scan showed that I do indeed have a brain (I have often wondered) and beyond that, my brain is normal. Well, they didn’t ever use the word ‘normal’ so I guess what they were getting at is that my brain did not have any huge clots or hemorrhaging, so I did not have a stroke. In even better news, I did not have a brain tumor – you see I have this recurring dream where I have a tumor in my brain that they must remove, and when the do the surgery I lose the use of my legs- So the problem is not with my brain, or my bones, so I am golden, right?

Not necessarily. My official release papers say that what I have is a ‘cervical strain’, and that I should use prescription ibuprofen and muscle relaxers(if/when necessary). Oh yeah, and wear one of those neck brace donut things. But they ( CT Scan and X-ray Techs )also said that it is possible that what I have is a herniated disc in my neck,(which the x-rays can miss) so if the condition does not improve, or if it worsens, that I should get a referral from my doctor for a head/neck MRI. Why the hell didn’t they just do that sometime in the 4 hours I was in the damn emergency room?

Now I certainly understand why I have this phobia of the hospital. I just can’t figure out what in the hell their agenda is. If I had died in the waiting room, you know when I was so close to having a seizure or stroke, would they not be held accountable since they had not yet seen me? If so, is that what they are going for? So if they are gonna die, let them do it in the waiting room, if they can live for an hour we will go ahead and treat them. Perhaps that was the reason that they did not let me read or sign the liabilty statement until they released me?

Once the blood-pressure went down, the pain was just in my neck, that is a kind of pain that I can endure. Mind you, I still have a problem if I try to bend completely down to pick something up off of the floor, but as long as my head stays above my heart I seem to be doing pretty well. I took enough ibuprofen on that first day to kill a goat, as well as a muscle relaxer, on top of the percacet, and I slept pretty well. In the morning the pain was all in my neck, just imagine the ‘crick’ you get in your neck from sleeping funny, then multiply that by about ten and that is the pain that I am feeling even as I write this. Yet, if I lay in the bed to let it heal, my back begins to hurt (and that is something that I have been battling since I was 16 or so), so I must pick my poison. The more I move my neck about, or even just using the muscles to hold it in place, the less the pain becomes as I move. I am certainly hoping for a speedy recovery, but this was certainly the ‘worst day of my life’.

On to happier thoughts. I have not shown any pictures of my beloved dogs here yet, so I will do so now. Keep in mind that they are beloved part of the time, kind of tolerable part of the time, and a nuisance all the rest of the time. They are pretty obedient, especially Warlock, he will do whatever you tell him to. Zelda, on the other hand, is not quite at the same level of obedience. We give her a bit of leeway since she is not fully grown, but she is nearing the time where her puppy antics will result in a swift smack to the snout.

As always, click on the picture for a larger size view.

This is the newer of our two dogs. We named her Zelda. She is quite a good little dog at least like what 30% of the time, the rest of the time is spent chasing her around to take whatever it is that she is chewing on out of her mouth. Sometimes she is chewing on our shoes and the such (as puppies do) other times she will be chewing on electrical cords, whcih puppies don’t really ever do if they want to live to wag another day.

This is our other dog Warlock, he is quite the ham. He will pose for any damn picture any damn where. If he sees that little box in your hands he knows that it is treats, when it turns out to be photos instead he really doesn’t seem to care, just as long as all your attention is focused on him. In the larger photo you can definitely tell that he is expecting a reward… the truth of it is that we were trying to take pictures of Zelda at the time, but I just really like this pose.

Zelda is also just a bit too quick to get a good shot of her. In a few months I am sure that she will calm down a bit so that we can get a few clean shots of her, but as for now we takes ’em like we gets ’em.