I was downstairs swiping candy from Gremlin's bucket-o-candy when I heard something kinda bad -- water hitting the floor somewhere. Not a sound you want to hear. Not even a little bit....

It turned out to be coming from the drain pipe for the upstairs stuff. All the upstairs stuff. So, yuck. Also, yuck. Annoying and yuck. But we've got the downstairs, so we can use that. Except...the dishwasher's upstairs. And the bathtub.

Lowe's was a bit too far away to get to before it closed, so we tried the nearby more-auto-than-hardware store, and found...some of what we needed. The hose clamps turned out to be too small, and the patching stuff ended up being mostly useless, because what we really needed was a replacement flexible coupling. The one currently joining the two pipes was the age of the house, warped and brittle and not at all coupley anymore. I guess that makes sense, since it was probably made around the same time I was.

Anyway...it took a couple of days to get to Lowe's, because of various things [snow, and conflicting hours of operation]. A couple of days in which the pipe was sealed, but not...water-tight. Really very yucky to think about, but...it could've been worse. And I'm guessing that I couldn't have gotten anyone else out here to fix it any quicker. And doing it this way was cheaper, and left me with a sense of accomplishment. And a hole in the wall. Also, annoyance at the cat for not understanding that kitty does not go behind the furnace. Not at all. Bad kitty. Get the hell out of there.

Zombi could use a few consecutive baths now, I think. And, hey, we can do that now, because that pipe isn't leaking anymore. Because I replaced the old not-so-flexible coupling with a new actually flexible coupling.

Yay.

Proud-of-Myself Edit: The dishwasher is running, and the floor's not getting all wet!

It's one of the new ones. And it's white, with Darth Vader on the battery door.

So far, I like it.

I haven't tried any movies on it [although I now have a few that Gremlin moved off his PSP for me], or music, but I did set the kittylump as the wallpaper [like my phone]. It's become a sort of generic me-wallpaper, I guess.

Anyway...pictures later, or something. Maybe. As if anyone needs to see another one of these things, right?

I kinda wish I'd gotten some proof of that godawful theme. And yes, that probably meant that it was all custom firmwared and everything, but I don't care. I can do that again later. I just wanted the damned thing to start up properly and not get stuck. Because I wanted to spend less battery on that, and more on Loco Roco.

Stupid Yahoo.

Oh, and, it's my birthday today.

I haven't opened it yet, though. I'm waiting....

We just got back from this sort of 'get away from the neighbourhood a bit' type of walk, and I decided that, instead of taking my camera, I should take Gremlin's camera and play around with it instead. Because his has that night visioney thing.

I also managed to get some slightly less blurry shots of the city lights at night.

Oh, how I miss my 'random thumbs' tag. It'd be so great if someone were to add a function like that to WPG2 [or WPG3]. Something like 'insert [number] of random thumbnails from selected group'. Also, a way to set the size of the damned thumbnails without having to go back through and edit the things would be nice....

I also experimented with the night shot on shadows.

...but that was after the most interesting event of the night.

There was a fox in the Safeway parking lot.

The pictures I got weren't all that great, really [I don't know how to use Gremlin's camera properly], but I did think to get some video. And if you want to see the rest of the pictures, just click on that one up there, and it'll take you to the rest of the album.

Excuse the craptasticalness of the video. I'm not very good at that sort of thing.

Or, actually, Thursday was weird. Gremlin covered some of that, including the video.

It started with shoes. Gremlin apparently needed a new pair, because...I don't know. So I ordered them from Zappos.com, and, as mentioned over in his post, we went for a walk.

That, in itself, was fairly ordinary. The walk, I mean. Except for the shoe, which was weird. Some kid lost the same sort of shoe I'd just ordered. Almost. Different colour. But same brand.

I'm not making anything of it; I'm just commenting that it was kinda weird to see a perfectly good shoe just sitting there in the middle of the sidewalk. I wonder if the parent noticed, eventually.

While Gremlin was getting his hair cut, I sat there trying to drown out the overly-loud, inane bullshit conversations that all the other stylists were having with their victims with my iPod. It turns out that the sountrack for Beautiful Katamari does not overpower these things as well as I'd hoped. I was stuck listening to a conversation about how someone's little kid might be autistic, because mommy and daddy getting haircuts sends the child into fits of terror.

This tells me something about why there are suddenly five out of three kids being diagnosed as autistic these days. I remember hearing stories about how I had issues whenever one of my close family members got a new hairstyle, or new glasses, or new facial hair. That's not really autistic, that's just being a child. Sorta like how spazzing like a ferret after three gallons of coffee isn't ADD, it's just being a child. Let's stop giving kids illnesses just because they act like kids.

...now, if they insist that their shoelaces be run through the holes in an exact way, there might be something wrong with them.

And while we're on the subject of kids and wrongness, the quarter-eating junk machines are getting seriously fucked up. Glow Crosses? And that thing next to it, with the unfortunate glare? That really says 'Bling'.

I guess it's good to know where all those people wearing that shit are actually getting it, right?

Then there was the Pizza Delivery Car Tail Fin Sharky Lookin' Thing. I think I'm going to end with that, for now. There's more, but I think they might actually deserve their own posts, and I'm a little over-progressed.

See, I actually got some stuff done yesterday, after we got back. It didn't have anything to do with my site, though, so it doesn't really matter. Unless you count the pictures I uploaded from July 4th, and the at least 100 pictures of a sunset from the same walk I was just talking about....

I did it again. I drank the rest.

It doesn't get any better with age. Or with warming, since 'room temperature' in here is about 80.

Actually, thinking about it, the aspartameyness was slightly less at 80 than it was at...whatever it was yesterday. Perhaps something terrible has happened, because today it just tastes like ass. Orange ass.

If oranges were made out of chemicals in lowest-bidder type labs in a third world country, by disgruntled third-world workers, and those oranges had asses, this is what those asses would taste like. Especially if those oranges had poor hygiene, and you happened to come along for a taste about three weeks into the worst heat wave in Earth's history.

I'd bring up the part about how these oranges can only sweat through their anus, and how they sweat pure artificial sugar, but...you don't want to hear that.

Then again, maybe not. I don't think that a bit of warmishness and a day of being opened is going to move up the expiration date by that much....

This time, instead of drinking it from the cute little bottle, I dumped it into a plastic cup and got a picture of it. It took a few tries, because, apparently, my camera was horrified at what it was being asked to do, and it kept returning pictures of whiteness -- either this was due to the flash going off and the picture being overexposed, or it was the camera's way of telling me that it would much rather go into the light than be forced to have anything to do with this shit.

The 'New Orange Flavor' is...vaguely pink.

Which, again, is better than the strange antifreeze colour of the stuff Gremlin got, but...pink? For orange? No.

So, I bought a bottle. Actually, two, because Gremlin tried some. What the hell. We were out buying donuts anyway, right?

After careful consideration [read: "How much is this shit again?"] I decided on the NEW! Orange Flavor, because none of the other bottles had a flavour listed, and I couldn't imagine anything worse than opening up one of these and finding out that the natural flavour resembled a combination of feet, ass and ground up tylenol with a base of seven year old off-brand Tussin. Because what the hell else is something made out of Niacin, Folic Acid, a couple of B vitamins, a touch of Sodium, Taurine, Glucuronolactone, Malic Acid, N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine, L-Phenylalanine, Caffeine, and Citicoline going to taste like? Certainly not the 'purified water' they claim is one of the 'other ingredients'.

Gremlin's smelled and looked a bit like green KoolAid, which...I'm thinking was lime, except that it tasted like grape...which is extremely upsetting. So, yeah. NEW! Orange it is, then.

Opening the Bottle

You practically need an energy drink just to open the damned thing. First, you have to slice open the heat-shrinked plastic wrappy stuff that is the label, which should be made easier by the perforation, except that it's not perfectly aligned. And then the bit around the cap gets in the way, because you think you're making progress, except it's just the plastic turning, and not the cap.

When I finally got the cap off, I was a little disturbed by the strange brown crusty substance on some of the bottle's threads, but since they obviously hadn't reached the upper part...I ignored them. And, besides, the plastic bit was all sealed, so it can't possibly be anything bad, right?

...it smells like KoolAid again. Orange, this time. With a hint of Sunny Delight.

Unfortunately, it tastes like neither of those things.

It tastes like aspartame and regret -- two things that aren't on the ingredients list. There's Splenda, which, in my experience, has a aspartamey taste.

I think I'll, uh, save the other half of the bottle. Yeah. For later.

Maybe I'll pour it into a cup and see what it really looks like....

Yeah, it's weird. But it suited me.

I may've covered all this before, thinking about it, but...what the hell. I'll say it all again, because I'd rather not talk about anything else right now.

...so I got this watch. And about a month after I got it -- the night I got the monitor back from Acer, and was reformatting Gremlin's tower -- that funny little scratch appeared...that turned into a crack. Today, it was a good quarter inch nasty thing right across the face.

Today, in spite of all my craptastic 'luck', we made it to Kohls to see if we could swap it out, because Nike said I should try that first. Something about Kohls having a very fair return policy.

Boy do they ever....

I was intending to exchange it, but they only had one that was metallic pink, and the numbers weren't even inverted. So, no.

But they took it back. More than a month after I purchased it, with obvious damage [which wasn't my fault]. Full refund.

So...that was good. Kinda sad, because I'd gotten really used to having that watch, but...I'll get over it.

But, yay Kohls.