UK pictures and other miscellaneous items of potential interest

After many problems with our crappy Mac uploader "JetPhoto Studio", we've finally gotten our good UK pictures up on Flickr. The Flickr slideshow stream on the right-hand navigation bar should be showing the last 10-15 photos we uploaded. I am still in process of naming and organizing all the pictures into their respective sets and collections, so if you check them out right away, they won't be named or have any hilarious notes written on them. We will create a set of our top ten favorite pictures from the collection once they are all organized. I'll post about it later, when we've assembled the set.

I am still in partial-recovery mode from the knee surgery last Friday. My pain meds have run out, so it's back to the grind (literally) as I work on getting my knee up to snuff for the 5K walk in a little over a week. I have an official go-ahead from my doc, so I'm not really worried about blowing the knee up right after having it worked on. There is lingering surgery pain, but the chronic pain that I had been dealing with for the past few years seems to have abated some. That, and the horrendous grinding/snapping sounds that would accompany any lateral movement of my calf have also greatly diminished. So far I have to say I'm very pleased with the outcome.

Now that I've had a few days off for medical leave, I've been able to get a some things done that have been piling up due to me being out of the state on business and plain, old procrastination. I now have an official Colorado license, I am registered to vote, washed, vacuumed, and got an oil change for the car, and have two new pairs of glasses on order. The last thing I really should do with this semi-free time is go in for a teeth cleaning. I dread this as I'm pretty sure I have a cavity that needs filling, and we have no dental insurance. Alas. Might as well get it done before they all fall out.

Nikki has been having doggy-seizures. We've always been kind of suspicious that when she stares off into the distance and her head begins to shake (like a palsy, not a foaming, rabid grand mal kind of thing), it might be a seizure. She has been having them more frequently (she had a good 5-minute one this morning), so we decided to set up an appointment with our vet to get some tests run and try out some anti-seizure medication. Another clinching thing is that Nikki is having many of the side-effects from seizures on dogs are prone to. She looses her appetite before having one (she refused to eat breakfast and even treats this morning - just before having a seizure). She'll also get restless and won't sleep. Hopefully we'll know more tomorrow when her appointment is done.

That's about it from here. We're heading out to GR next week Thursday and will be sticking around until Sunday at the earliest. I have work at the Smithsonian in DC and in Minneapolis starting that Monday, so I don't know if I'll leaving Sunday night late, or Monday morning early.

(I want one very badly.)

Dog Revalations and Car is Still Dead!

The car is way dead, it turns out. Transmission blown. Poof. Like that. Sadly, this comes only about a month after we dropped $1,300 on a new timing belt, spark plugs, and a belt tensioner. The cost will be somewhere in the vicinity of $1,000 to fix the transmission, and that's with the used-parts kit. The suck of all sucks with this is, right now the car is worth nothing*. If we drop another thousand dollars into it, it may run for another 30,000 miles... or we may blow a rod the week after the repairs are complete. If we do end up sinking the money into the car, we can at least recoup the cost of the repairs and a little more (hopefully). This should give us enough time to have a functioning car that will allow us to drive around and look for another car, then sell this car, and buy another. Bleh.

Did I mention my not liking cars? No? Well, truth be told, I don't like cars.

On a lighter note, the voting for the crazy fact about one of the many dogs Mandy watches is closed. It seems that the readers are going with the patriotic, 9/11 people-saving dog.

DOG!

The truth is, the dog is a Thompson, of the Hunter S. variety. Yes, Bodi's owner is the ex-wife of Hunter. Hunter's son, he keeps his dog at the day car too. I hear ego-Googling is up, so it's likely that these people will come across this blog and find out the secret identity of their dog is now in the requisite domain of the interweb tubes where any Hunter-obsessed sicko can find it. Sadly, these are the times we live in. I don't get a chance to interact with many bona fide celebrities, let alone their dogs, so I hope you'll grant me leave to indulge in this particular instance.

Hunter's dog! I don't love the man. I've never met him. And from what I understand, he was an absolute bastard to interact with in real life. That makes sense, considering how crazy and reckless his writing is. On the other hand, being a bastard and a being a good writer seem to go hand-in-hand. What I can say is I like his writing. He was a great social mover and shaker. Like me, he hated hippies and the laziness they embodied.

*Update: It actually is going to cost $1,500, and we've decided to go ahead with it. I'm not totally sure why, but there it is. Again, hopefully, this will be the last major repair on it for a year or so, and we can continue to drive it. If it bothers us, we will sell it and hopefully break even with these repairs. The transmission is totally gone. Nothing salvageable. It should be done today, so when we get it back, I will post about how it drives like it always had, except a little faster due to the lightness of our wallet. Bleh.

Today is the Winter Solstice! Our car is dead!

Solstice. Sol (Latin for Sun) Stes (Latin for unmoving, as in to stand still). In effect, the day that the sun stands still in the sky. In the Northern hemisphere, this marks the first day of winter. In the Southern Hemisphere, it marks the first day of summer. At whatever Northern latitude you are, this will be the day with the shortest amount of daylight. Since the Summer Solstice, the sun has been rising progressively lower in the sky with each passing day. On the Autumnal Equinox, the sun rode the same line as the ecliptic, or the plane of the solar system. The great part is that while this is the darkest day of the year, with each passing day, the sun will rise a little higher in the sky and we'll get a little more daylight.

I was in Norway recently. Friedrikstad is not within the line of the arctic circle, but it is close. When I was there, a month ago, the sun was only up for about 5-6 hours a day. By this point, it's down around 4 1/2. Crazy. But they make up for it in the sumer with 16-18 hours of sunlight. Bastards.

Mandy's parents showed up this morning. We've been hanging out and catching up. Our car died last night. Likely cause: The transmission is blown. This is great because we were thinking of updating our entertainment system with a new center speak, satellite speakers, and a receiver... but what we really wanted was to spend that money on a new transmission. God. I hate cars. We can't really do anything with the car until after the holidays because all the shops are closed until Wednesday. If it does turn out to be the transmission, I think we're just going to junk to car and get a new one. At least the new one will be (in theory) slightly more reliable, but still. We spend $1,300 replacing the timing belt a month ago.

To reiterate: God, I hate cars.