I think Janguru wa Itsumo Hare nochi Gū is possibly the funniest, strangest and most surprisingly coherent anime series I’ve ever watched. Here’s a link to the season 1 intro song. The best in my opinion.

March 15 (Saturday)
Ken took me to the airport at 7am for my 9am flight to my parents place. All I’ll say it that it was a really long day, followed by some drama and errands. Ended up ok though with some nice real info for once.

March 16 (Sunday) to March 21 (Friday)
We took Mom and Gary to the airport pretty early for their trip to Reno and spent the rest of the week running errands and letting Dad rest from his eye surgery. He really played out the eye-patch pirate thing though :p I had to play him some Pirate themed Metal that my friend, Nick, sent me. He loved it.

I love my puppies but being woken up at 8am every morning after only going to sleep around 2 or 3am is really tiring. Dad and I worked out a schedule for his eye-drops, 2am, 8am, 2pm, 8pm. The puppies get fed at 8am as well and Vashti got her morning medicines, then we tried to get Vashti to finish her food at 8pm and gave her the night medicines. She seems to be doing ok with her cancer. She got really loopy some nights though, I think it was her medicine. We also tried several things to get her to eat her pills easier. She’s very picky. She used to gobble them down with just bread, but the first night I tried it with bread and she didn’t want it. So I put some butter on it, it took forever to get her to eat it. Then we tried mixing alpo canned dog food into her food to get her to eat that, so I dipped the bread in the gravy and she loved it. But it was messy and the bread fell apart sometimes. Then we tried some beef ravioli thinking that at least the pills would stay tucked in. But she really didn’t want it. She chewed it and spit it out when I dipped it in the alpo gravy, and broke open one of the pills which spilled all over the floor. Mookie and Wolfie are vultures and tried to eat whatever she dropped so I had to kick them away and yell for my dad to let them out while I cleaned it up. I did not need those two getting loopy, they’re a handful enough! Finally we got Vashti to reliably eat her pills by stuffing them into bits of hot dogs.

March 22 (Saturday)
Dad spent all day trying to rearrange flights for Mom and Gary because she’d gotten food poisoning and Gary had to take her to the hospital. I just played with the puppies and cleaned the kitchen, wiping down the cabinets, walls and appliances. They get really muddy at doggie height.

March 23 (Sunday)
Happy Easter! Mom and Gary were supposed to be home just after midnight that morning but Mom got food poisoning and was throwing up too much to travel. Dad had rebooked their flight for midnight that night but she still wasn’t feeling well enough so they had to change it again. Dad and I however went to King Street Blues restaurant and both had their new brisket sandwich. I don’t usually go for that kind of thing but it was pretty good, but I had to pick through the brisket pieces and take out the fatty sections. I hate that.

March 24 (Monday)
Mom and Gary finally made it back to D.C. Their flight came in just after midnight but it took FOREVER for them to get to the baggage area and another FOREVER for their bags to come through.

March 25 (Tuesday)
I had to be at the airport by 11:30am.. had no trouble through security. Grabbed a BLT bagel because my tummy was growling and read my book. The silly flight attendant made me put my purse up in the bin, which I’ve never ever had to do before and really pissed me off. It was an hour flight and I didn’t want to bother the woman sitting in the aisle seat to get up and get my book and headphones for the 30 minutes that the seat-belt sign is turned off. So I just slept. Had a long walk through the terminal to customs and baggage but no problems there either. Got a cart for my bags, **note** I really hate this brown suitcase I always end up using because it’s got a hard shell and is wide enough for all my jewelry making tools that I like to bring on longer trips to my parents place. It has no wheels and it cumbersome to carry through customs. I don’t have to carry it on the way home though, as the baggage drop off at Dulles is right next to the ticketing counter, but I do have to shuffle it through the sometimes long line in Toronto when I’m leaving. I really need a new hard shell suitcase.

I called Ken once I got outside and told him which pillar I was standing by. It was snowing pretty hard and I had only brought my light windbreaker. I was freezing cold and Ken accidentally missed me and had to drive all the way around again. We stopped at Lonestar on Dixon to warm up and have lunch but the snow didn’t stop. Ken told me that it had pretty much started as my plane left D.C. and it hadn’t snowed at all while I’d been gone. Lovely! It was kinda pretty though, the gigantic snowflakes looked like the cheap soapy bubbles they sometimes use in stage plays.

March 26 (Wednesday) to March 27 (Thursday)
Spent these two days catching up on my shows on the pvr.. it was at 88% and afterwards was at like 25% :p

March 28 (Friday) to March 30 (Sunday)
Mailed off Melar’s daughter, Alana’s birthday bracelets. I made her 2 so she could share one with her best friend if she wanted, as girls often do. Then I went to pick up Ken’s cousin, Michelle, from Kitchener which is about an hours drive away with no traffic. We hit a little traffic on the way home and arrived around 5pm. Ken was still working so she and I took a walk down Yonge Street to the Sassy Bead store I go to sometimes. I’ve mentioned before but it bears repeating, I hate shelves and shelves of beads in tiny tiny jars.. We spent a good long while there and we both picked up a few things. I got some curved silver tubes, a silver leaf pendant and a circle pendant. She got some matte grey beads. I also picked up a neat little tool that’s supposed to help you put on bracelets by yourself. It has a clip one one end that holds the clasp open and a ring at the top to grip with your fingers, then you use your other hand to hook the other side of the clasp on. I think it would be great for Ken’s grandma.

When Ken finally finished his work we went down to Papa’s Grill and both Michelle and I had to bring home doggie bags. I had a village salad and humous .. My favorite. She had a beef souvlaki dinner and Ken had lamb souvlaki dinner.

Saturday Ken took Michelle to the Farmer’s Market at St. Lawrence Market. They were there till around 2:30, and Karen stopped by at 7pm to chat. I hadn’t seen her since Ken was away in Sausalito. At 8pm Ken flipped off our breakers to turn off everything for Earth Hour. We lit a few beeswax and non-toxic candles. Michelle knitted while I read them questions from Trivial Pursuit: Canada Edition. It was 9:30pm by the time we realized Earth Hour was over. No harm in that, we had fun, but we use Bullfrog Power anyway.

We decided to stay in for dinner so we ordered Chinese from C’est Bon. They have a really good barbeque pork and crispy sesame beef dishes. While we ate we watched the Stargate movie The Ark of Truth (second time for Ken and I). Then played some Rock Band till sleep-time.

Sunday we all got up kinda late. Played some more Rock Band and I was pretty hungry by 4 and wanted Hero’s hot dogs. They don’t deliver till 6 and Michelle needed to get home to pick up Daisy so we ended up driving to Hero’s on the way to bring her home. I had hoped to stay home and get some chores done because I’ve decided it’s time to Spring Clean. Still, I don’t have a time limit or anything so it’s ok I guess. I just need to get motivated again. Ken and I hit the grocery store on the way home for fresh stuff for salads and bread, got home around 10pm.

Spent the rest of the night playing Guild Wars with Melar, cheering up Reina on the phone and Ken finished Assassin’s Creed.

March 31 (Monday)
Having stayed up playing Guild Wars with Melar till 2am and then continuing on by myself till around 4:30am, I’m surprised I woke up at 11′ish. Chris was over working with Ken and I did some straightening up. The boys went out to lunch at 2 and Andrea arrived at 2:30pm. I hadn’t seen her in 3 weeks, once because I was passed out sleeping, and the other 2 from my trip to Virginia. So she was very happy to update me on everything she’s been up to and I showed her all the bracelets I made for birthday presents. I waited until Ken got home and let him present hers. Hopefully, we want to treat her and her husband (whom we still haven’t met yet!) to dinner this weekend or next at Pier 4.

Chris stayed pretty late working with Ken. I was dying to play some more Guild Wars because I hadn’t been able to play while I was away. Stupid laptop wouldn’t partition for Boot Camp. So after he left, I jumped on with Melar and we blew through the Gates of Kryta mission and attempted the D’Alessio Seaboard mission but failed twice. Sadly our henchmen available there are only level 10 so we’ll either have to wait until my friend, Luvene, can join us, or we’ll have to grab some random players /shudder

Melar went off to watch a tv show at 10pm and I kicked around some more, picking up quests and exploring the North Kryta Province and Nebo Terrace. Then I got through episodes 7-10 of Law & Order: SVU season 1. I’d seen some of them but I like rewatching Law & Orders.

April 01 (Tuesday)
April Fools! I got a cute little card from my friend, Miuu. He knows my fear of spiders is immense but I have lots of <3 for Hoops and Yoyo the Hallmark card characters. The card started with Hoops telling me that I had to save Yoyo from the spiders that they were going to release from a big glass jar. My cursor controlled a big mallet with which to whack them. So I click the button to release the spiders and they start chasing Yoyo.. I dutifully try to whack them but the mallet is frozen in place. At first I thought I had a plug-in error or something... Hoops was chastising me and calling me heartless and such.. They they laughed and said they were just kidding and it was an April Fool's joke then they displayed the message from my friend. It was a good card!

I spent most of the day spa'ing myself. Well as much as I can in our tiny bathroom.. Bubble bath while reading a magazine, deep conditioning my hair... etc.. I really need a pedicure though. I've been trying to wait till I'm ready for a manicure at the same time though. My nails all broke off in the last few weeks and are just starting to come back. Didn't know I was so girly sometimes did you? :p

Ken's cousin, Joel, came over for a dinner date around 8:15pm. We haven't seen him in quite awhile. Ken and I debated all day on where to suggest for dinner. Duffs would have been a great choice but Tuesdays are 1/2 price wings night so the line-up is insane. We also thought Mongolian Grill, Hernando’s Hideaway or La Mexicana would be good choices and Joel chose Mongolian. The first bowl I made contained, beef, bean sprouts, scallop onions, white onions, pineapple, red pepper and their Korean sauce with extra garlic, sesame seeds and a dash of liquid sugar. Sooo good. I really liked how it turned out.

The second bowl contained, beef, bean sprouts, scallop onions, white onions, pineapple, and their mongolian sauce with extra garlic, sesame seeds and a dash of liquid sugar. The beef wasn’t as good, it was the last call so they hadn’t replaced it with fresh stuff. I’m not sure if that’s why the second bowl didn’t turn out as well or if my mixture was off, I’ve done that combination before, but it really was no where near as good as bowl 1.

After dinner Joel played a bit of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. He’s quite good at the shooting parts and I teased him about always trying to solve the games puzzles with his gun first. He left around 11pm to go get ready for work.

I jumped online to play some Guild Wars with Melar before she went to sleep around 12:30am. We did some quests in Nebo Terrace and explored the Cursed Lands. A little ways into The Black Curtain we came upon a rather nasty boss mob who was level 28 and had friends. We’re only both level 17 and our poor henchmen are level 12 if we get them from the Bergen Hot Springs and run from there. I managed to survive and get away but only barely. That’s when she decided to call it a night.

April 02 (Wednesday)
I can’t sleep, so I’m up at 3:30am writing this and playing Guild Wars. I have a bit of a sinus headache, my neck is sore and my ear is bleeding. I have a dentist appointment at 12:45 so I’ll probably just stay up.

Our last episode left us at Valentine’s Day, which was 2 weeks ago .. I am so fired. :p

February 15-21 (Friday-Thursday)
Not much to note, we gamed a lot. Me mostly on Guild Wars with Melar and Luvene and Ken on EQ2. Monday was the newly added Family Day holiday, no Andrea or Chris. So Chris came on Tuesday instead, we had lunch at Duff’s. More gaming and relaxing, catching up on shows like American Idol, Numb3rs and ANTM.

February 22-24 (Friday-Sunday)
Friday was our big “slumber” party at 151, I tagged along with Ken and Chris for their upgrade / moving servers work with Nick and Myles. I had hoped to be able to play Guild Wars on my laptop while I was there but a: Ken didn’t have time to install Boot Camp and b: Chris forgot his laptop anyway so he had to borrow mine. We played a bit of Rock Band before heading downtown and Chris had me giggling over some ad-libbed words to Metallica! We were at the colo from about 10pm to 9am and it was pretty fun. I got to sneak in some Civ IV playing whenever Chris didn’t need my laptop and the pizza we ordered ended up being an EPIC EVENT*

I mostly just tried to stay out of the way and not bug the guys too much. Finally was able to give Myles the souvenirs I picked up for him in Kiev in November and give Nick the hilarious phrase books that Ken picked up for him in Sausalito in January. We also gave Nick the bag of chocolate covered coffee beans we got from Soma and I can’t wait to hear a review on them

When the boys were finally finished, Ken, Chris and I went to the Golden Griddle for Saturday Brunch. We were all pretty tired though so we didn’t eat much and got the check quickly. The rest of Saturday and Sunday were spent napping and trying to recover sleep habits.

February 25th (Monday)
10 Months of Not-Smoking! I couldn’t get to sleep that night, and Chris was over for working. Right after our lunch at Tandoori Buffet I passed out and completely missed Andrea. She brought us some amazing chocolate croissant type things though. We also ordered my tickets to Virginia for March.

February 26th (Tuesday)
The day started off innocently enough. I was originally going to go pick up Sos and hang out with Erika for the day, but after finding out that Sos hadn’t been able to get to sleep and worrying that the snow would get worse by the end of the night we decided to “Snow Check”. Ken downloaded a game demo for the PSP called PataPon, which is a really cute rhythm game. Then all hell breaks loose.

I started to smell something like chlorine and after writing it off to the amazing pools website I was reading at the time, it kept getting stronger. Ken smelled it too eventually and we heard dozens of sirens heading our way. Ken looked out from the balcony and said that Eglinton was blocked off to traffic along our block and that there was thick smoke from somewhere near the corner. He turned on the news and could find nothing about it, searching online didn’t get us any info either until almost an hour later after the power had shut off and we were running on battery backups. Good ol 680 news.

Ken and I decided we’d be better off finding a place to eat or something because they were saying the power might be off for up to 12 hours. So we loaded up the cats with food, just in case, and trudged down 24 flights of stairs to the 2nd sub basement and since Eglinton was blocked off between Yonge and Mt. Pleasant our back streets were heavily clogged. It was only around 3pm though so once we got away from it a bit the roads were fine. We drove around trying to decide where to go and ended up at the Eaton Center Mall. We hung out there, I got new shoes! I’ve always been partial to Skechers. (Sneakers & Shoes) until around 7pm. Ken had brought his laptop so we opened it up and found some wifi to look up hotels. We’d kept calling our house phone to see if it would ring indicating that our power was back on. Just after we’d picked a nearby hotel, we tried to call the house phone again and it rang. Yay!

Decided to have dinner at Pickle Barrel at Yonge & Eglinton where we could watch the literal army of Toronto Hydro trucks lining the street. That light was still out but there were 2 cops there directing traffic. I think they had all but one elevator shut off so it was a rather long wait and it was packed but we walked into the apartment around 9pm. Checked that the computers and air conditioners hadn’t blown if they tried to restart themselves. All were off, so that was good, then there was an announcement over the intercom system that Toronto Hydro was in the building and demanded that everyone turn off as much power as they could, and not use their stoves, or they would have to shut off all the power to the building. So we left our computers off, turned off and unplugged everything we could think of and took naps.

February 27-28 (Wednesday & Thursday)
Tried not to do too much, our knees were finally feeling all those stairs. After moving around a bit it was ok, but the initial acts of standing or walking were pretty freaking painful.

February 29th (Friday)
Happy Leap Day! Didn’t do much except watch the snow fall. Caught up with Melar in Guild Wars and finished off some tough quests we both had. We basically had to zerg ourselves and 2 henchmen against a couple dozen Charr who were guarding the ashes of Prince Rurik’s fiancee Althea. Luckily there was a rez shrine right next to the temple. Althea was one of my favorite pre-searing npc’s so I was not very happy about her being burned at the stake.

I’ve just finished cataloging all of our DVD’s & Blu-Ray’s. The program we use (collectorz.com) can export the list into html or other formats so I’ve got our entire list up on my website. I’ll eventually get around to linking it to my other pages and adding buttons and stuff, also making it match my theme, but for now here’s the link Sapphire’s Movies

I’m debating whether or not to catalog our games and books this way as well.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18014242/

By Craig Berman
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 11:25 a.m. ET April 9, 2007

To hear critics talk, Sanjaya Malakar’s ascendancy to the final eight on “American Idol” is a travesty, threatening the success of the show’s brand name and the credibility of the musical competition. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sanjaya is not the best singer in the history of the competition. He’s not even the best of this season’s finalists. But he’s not a disaster either. In fact, those who are looking to tear him down or use him as an example of the shows weakness need to keep a few things in mind before ranting away.

Sanjaya’s not the one who put himself into the semifinals. Every time the judges rip on Sanjaya, or insinuate that he shouldn’t be on the show, keep in mind that it wasn’t the show’s viewers who made him a candidate in the first place. That honor belongs to none other than the three judges; Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Simon Cowell.

Here’s my current ranking:

Max points = 6, Min points = -6. Red text = eliminated, Bold = points >0
+1 if she or I liked the performance / -1 if she or I didn’t like the performance
+2 if she or I thought the performance was in the top 2 / -2 if she or I thought the contestant was going to be eliminatedClick on the image here to see the full size:

I’ll be mentioning some TV shows in future posts, so here’s a list of what we are currently watching:

• The Daily Show
• The Colbert Report
• The Amazing Race 10
• Heroes
• Stargate Atlantis
• Stargate SG-1
• Gilmore Girls
• America’s Next Top Model
• Criminal Minds
• Ugly Betty
• Supernatural

Not much to say about this weeks show again, it seemed that everyone was off.

My favorites were in order:
5. Chris Daughtry - Sang “What If” — my favorite song of the night
1. Katherine McPhee 9. Lisa Tucker - Sang “Because of You” — Love the song but she was pitchy, didn’t think she’d be going home

Not much to say about this weeks show except all the contestants seemed to have done well working with Barry Manilow. My favorites were in order:

5. Chris Daughtry - Sang “Walk the Line” — this was just awesome… I watched it 3 times
2. Kelly Pickler