I woke up at 7am yesterday, got the kids off to school at 8:45am. Then I made an appointment for Vashti and Wolfie at the vets for noon and cleaned the kitchen. I called the delta lost baggage line and they said I should call back in a few hours to see if my bags were on the next flight in from JFK. G asked me for help putting all the loose items in the yard into the shed because there’s a hurricane warning this weekend.

G and I took the dogs to the vet and everyone was in love with Wolfie. He was behaving surprisingly well considering he’s usually hyper. Just taking in the praise and adoration. It took about an hour then we went home and I went back out to get us some lunch. Mmmmm 5 Guys (hot dog & hamburger place) sooo good.

I called the delta lost baggage line back and the guy was a little rude with me. He kept interrupting me everything I said, but there was no new information anyway. Then I went out to get some cleaning supplies and some replacement stuff for myself.

The kids got home at 4pm and I made dinner for 6. Everyone devoured it so I guess it was good, we were supposed to use the left-overs for tonight but there wasn’t any. After dinner I checked the delta lost baggage website and there was still no update so I asked Isabel and Mom to come with me to get something to wear. I should have taken a crash course on the assembly of Mom’s wheelchair. I’ve never done it before and I was struggling with it a bit to put it together though that was easier than taking it apart. At least I had Isabel wait in the car while Mom and I put it together, and both Mom and Isabel were in the car while I took it apart. I didn’t mind the rain. While we were out, G called to tell us that delta had found 1 bag. By the time we got home, both were updated as found! It said they’d be delivered between 8am-8pm Saturday. They actually arrived at 5am and scared the shit out of me but no one else stirred.

I had told the kids that I had a contest for them and the winner would be allowed to stay up a little longer than the other.. I gave them each a section of the low cabinets in the kitchen, and said whomever wiped them down the fastest and the best would be the winner. They were so excited about competing that they finished in like 10 minutes. If I’d known I would have made the sections bigger! LOL I called mom in to judge and she declared a tie. I said such a thing had never happened before in competition cabinet scrubbing and that I guessed they’d both get to stay up a little longer. They were so excited and begged to be allowed to do it again tomorrow. Strange strange kids but I’ll take it !

I went for a shower finally and threw my clothes in the laundry and it was so nice. It started to rain while us girls were out shopping but it started coming down harder. The kids were wrestling in Isabel’s room and finally settled down to watch the Incredibles. G and I sat down to watch The Seeker but it was pretty awful.. I never read the books but it felt like there were huge sections cut from the movie. The transitions just didn’t make much sense. Once I got the kids to bed, I pretty much passed out till the door bell rang with my bags. What a day!

Mom seems to be speaking much better. She did not seem to be feeling well from about lunch on though and she slept pretty much all day minus a few hours. At the end of the night she said her head was on fire. She said she’s felt that way before and that it just went away on it’s own. She woke up briefly this morning and said it still feels that way though. I’m wondering if it’s blood pressure related. She was doing very well in the morning which is when she takes all her medicine so maybe that needs to be stretched out over the day.

I’ve arrived in Virginia. My flight was an hour delayed in JFK but we only landed about 20 minutes late. My bags were lost though, I’m hoping they just arrived before me and were put away some where. I’ll know sometime today. My mom seems a little better but she’s having a hard time finding words sometimes. She went to get an MRI yesterday but when they arrived at the hospital they discovered that it’s power was out. Such strange occurances. There’s a hurricane warning on right now so we’ll be spending the day battening the hatches. Time to get the kids ready for school, if it’s not cancelled for the hurricane warning. Miss everyone already!

I also got a few more hours of sleep last night.. bringing me up to maybe 15 hours since 8am Monday? :/

I’m heading to Virginia Thursday evening. My mom has been really sick and in and out of the hospital. I’ll update more when I get there.

Tori Amos - Crucify

- Tori Amos Lyrics

I’ve found a new blog template that I will be switching to in a few days, hopefully. I need to rework the logo to match and check if Melar likes it or not Check back soon!

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.

This is a response I wrote on a friends blog about iPhone apps. His post is HERE but I thought I’d copy my reviews here. **are apps he reviewed that I haven’t tried but am interested in.

Bejeweled 2 - I love it so much but I was an addict already. I think it looks fantastic.

Tap Tap Revenge - I have it but it only has like 3 songs so it got boring.

Urbanspoon - I love this one, we’ve gone to 2 places based on it’s recommendations. They were both excellent places. Very useful for Ken and I because we’re horrible at choosing where to eat

Facebook - I’ve got it but I’m still waiting for it to update some more. I still use Safari to get to facebook.

**Evernote for iPhone - Don’t have this, I was worried it was too complicated for what I need.

**Midomi - Don’t have this either but I could use it

**Aurora Feint The Beginning - Don’t have it, might pick it up now.

**Units - Have you looked at Equivalence by ApogeeDev or Units Converter by Yuchao Zhou or Units by Ben Spratling.. I haven’t been able to choose between them yet.

I also have:
Dobot Todos by Aria Haghighi - I use it but I’m slightly disappointed with it’s limits.

Voice Notes by GarSoft - I’ve used it once just for fun but I can imagine an occasion where I’d need it and it was free.

Gift Wrangler by Raging Fjord, LLC - I mean to use it but it seems like a lot of work to set up.

Crosswords by Stand Alone, Inc. - Really hard to use, hard to switch between horizontal & vertical lines unless you use the clues window. The latest update seems to have fixed the keyboard covering half the screen issue. There’s now a smaller keyboard at the bottom of the screen.

Solar eclipse of August 1, 2008 (wikipedia link)
The Solar Eclipse that takes place on August 1, 2008, will be a total eclipse of the Sun with a magnitude of 1.039 that will be visible from a narrow corridor through northern Canada (Nunavut), middle of Russia, western Mongolia, and China. It belongs to the so-called midnight Sun eclipses, as it will be visible from regions experiencing Midnight sun.

In Siberia, the total eclipse zone will pass through populated places, including the “capital of Siberia” Novosibirsk, and the cities of Nizhnevartovsk, Barnaul, Biysk. Greatest eclipse duration will be reached near the town of Nadym in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Northern Siberia.

A partial eclipse will be seen from the much broader path of the Moon’s penumbra, including eastern North America and most of Europe and Asia.

NASA Link

Scientific American - (link)
Get your pinhole cameras—and laptops—ready. This Friday, August 1, a total solar eclipse will occur as the moon passes directly between the sun and Earth for the first time in more than two years. For a few minutes, the moon will blot out the sun, casting its dark shadow over a narrow, moving strip of land and revealing the sun’s corona.

Sadly, this eerie, awe-inspiring event—known as totality—will be visible only from remote parts of the Northern Hemisphere: Starting in northern Canada, the moon’s shadow, or umbra, will glide across the Arctic into central Asia. (View the path of totality at NASA’s eclipse Web site.) “It is best to see the eclipse live,” says Paul Doherty, a senior staff scientist at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. “If you don’t want to travel,” he says, “you will wait an average of 300 years for a total solar eclipse to come to you.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t share in the experience remotely. Doherty will be part of an eclipse expedition broadcasting the eclipse live via the Web from Xinjiang Province in northwestern China, near the Mongolian border, beginning at 3:30 A.M. Eastern time through totality at 4:09 A.M.

I just finished reading: Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King It took me a long time to get through this book, I threw a bunch of other books in front of it. I don’t know why, out of the 14 stories I really liked 10 of them.

Tales:
01. Autopsy Room Four - This story was written in 1997 but all I could think of was the plot for the movie Awake even though I’ve never seen it. Still the end was pretty funny.

02. The Man in the Black Suit - “King described the piece as an homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown”. He also states that the story evolved from one his friend told him, in which the friend’s grandfather had come face to face with Satan himself in the form of an ordinary man.” — Wikipedia

This was a creepy story, very detailed, I could see the fish, smell the creek and the sulfur of the man.

03. All That you Love will be Carried Away So very very strange.. I liked it, it felt very real. So many strange thoughts.

04. The Death of Jack Hamilton - “The story is written in the first-person. Homer Van Meter, a member of John Dillinger’s gang, tells of the slow, painful death of fellow gangmember Jack Hamilton. Van Meter begins by describing Dillinger’s death outside the Biograph Theater at the hands of Melvin Purvis’s men.” — Wikipedia

I didn’t care too much about this one, it was well written and certainly not boring, but not very interesting personally.

05. In the Deathroom - “Fletcher, an ex-reporter from the New York Times, has been captured by members of a South American government. The story begins as he is brought into the titular “deathroom” as he realizes that his captors, after interrogating him about a Communist insurgency he has been supporting, due to the government’s killing of a group of nuns which included his sister, will not let him leave this room alive, despite their claims that he will be set free.” — Wikipedia

This story was pretty cool. A nice twist on the torture scene. The ending was smooth.

06. The Little Sisters of Eluria - “The tale features Roland of Gilead, whose quest for the Dark Tower is in its infancy; its events precede those of the body of the Dark Tower cycle, but occur after Roland’s experiences in Mejis as chronicled in Wizard and Glass. At the time of telling he is accompanied by a horse and is already following Walter o’Dim, the Man in Black. He plans to eventually buy another horse, or perhaps a mule; which ties in with the events at the beginning of The Gunslinger.” — Wikipedia

The reason I bought this book was to read this story which ties in to the Dark Tower Series. I was not disappointed! It’s the best story so far and I’ll grab any piece of midworld that I can get.

07. Everything’s Eventual - I liked this story too. I wish it had been a bit longer and explained his power.

08. L.T.’s Theory of Pets - “Except getting mad at Lulu never did any good. Most times, if you had the king, she had the ace. If you had the ace, she had a trump. Also, the woman would fucking escalate. If something happened and I got irritated, she’d get pissed. If I got pissed, she’d get mad. If I got mad, she’d go fucking Red Alert Defcon I and empty the missile silos. I’m talking scorched fucking earth. Mostly it wasn’t worth it. Except almost every time we’d get into a fight, I’d forget that.”

Very good story, I loved this paragraph especially! Still I wish I knew more.

09. The Road Virus Heads North - Felt very short but right to the point I guess. No beating around the bush, no real history.

10. Lunch at the Gotham Cafe - “Before entering the Cafe, Steve impulsively buys an umbrella. Upon entering, he finds that the maître d’, eventually revealed to be named Guy, is talking senselessly about a dog.” –Wikipedia

A nicely laid triangle of crazy! It was all earthly crazy too, which is different from the other stories so far.

11. That Feeling, You can Only say what it is in French - I really dislike “groundhog day” type stories. They frustrate me for some reason and I don’t like it. This was bearable though, because you don’t know right away that it’s a groundhog day situation, and it’s a short enough story that it ends before it repeats too many times. It was more like a groundhog day going down a sink drain.

12. 1408 - I never saw the movie, I didn’t think I’d like it and I still don’t have a scary movie buddy. I was quite surprised when I really really felt creepy while reading it. For a short story it had the big and complete feeling of a full-grown novel.

13. Riding The Bullet - This was a very good creepy story. So vivid even I could see the smoke.

14. Lucky Quarter - Kinda out of place for the last story. I would have rather read Riding the Bullet last.

My friend, Nick, asked me this morning if I would like to have lunch together. I said sure but told him I had to do some laundry first. He said no problem, he had to take a shower then he’d head over and arrive by noon. Plenty of time I thought. The washer takes 27 minutes and the dryer 45 and it was only 10am. So I woke Ken up and told him the plan and ran the laundry down. I used the 3 giant washers, making sure they all started before leaving because sometimes they don’t.

Then I ran back upstairs and did some minor straightening up and getting ready stuff. When I went to switch the wash to the dryers I discovered that one of the washers was stuck in the spin cycle but wasn’t spinning. I pushed the stop button and waited for it to count down so I could open the doors, they are the front loading kind. Once it did I found that the clothes were all still soaking wet. UGh! I threw them all in a basket and wrang them out in the sink. Not fun at all, especially the jeans and t-shirts.

Then I split up the load into 2 dryers hoping they’d finish quickly. Ran upstairs, told Ken I was hopping in the shower and to answer when Nick called. Nick actually arrived a bit early while I was still in the shower so I quickly got dressed and waited for the dryer timer to go off. When it did, I started with the 2 normal loads and folded them while waiting for the last 2 half loads to finish. They weren’t quite done when I checked so I added some time and sat down with my iPhone, angry, frustrated and sticky. The laundry room is always hot, humid and they took the couches out and put a hard bench in.

After 20 minutes I checked on the dryers again. I pulled out some of the mostly dry stuff or stuff that could hang but one of the dryers wasn’t even turning on anymore! I tried to restart it 4 times but I ended up throwing that stuff in with the other half load and giving it another 20 minutes. By then it was 1pm and Ken and Nick were waiting on me to go to lunch and I was just sick of laundry so I just took it upstairs. I didn’t fold the socks so they could dry more though.

I don’t care if I get a dishwasher in our next place, I actually prefer doing it by hand after doing it that way for the last 8 years, but I must have a washer & dryer by the end of this year or I will go nuts.