hello, sorry about the (sometimes unattended) mess

While Abby and I were out fighting my way through Wal-Mart tonight, Jon discovered a cache of lollipops that Rachel had somewhere in the house. Rachel went for them in order to find a better, more secret place for them.

Jon very helpfully offered, "No, no. I hide them from me."

He then grabbed his propeller cap, hid the lollipops and took off.

Rachel and I panicked this morning when neither knew where Ms. Kitty had gotten to. She typically will wake us early to feed her.

So we took her bag of food out, shook it a bit--which usually brings her running--and nothing.

Rachel then remembered that she had taken the garbage out into the garage last night and sure enough, Ms. Kitty bolted into the house. She ran to her litter box, took care of business and then proceeded to greet and rub on all of us as if she hadn't seen us in weeks. Then she ate.

In other news, Abby managed to get a hold of eyebrow trimmers that were in the medicine cabinet this morning and shaved nearly half of her eyebrows off. It was odd to me that Abby was being really slow at getting dressed this morning.

Her school pictures are set to be taken next week.

So, I've really been getting along with Guild Wars for a bit now. I've got three characters in varying stages of development, am part of a guild, and have been enjoying myself.

The only problem I had run into were the random BSOD and just plain lock ups. I resisted the typical Microsoft error reporting because I've typically gotten no joy from the "help" provided, if any was at all.

Anyway, after restraining myself from flinging the beloved laptop across the room and pulling an Office Space assault on it, I chose to submit the error report all the while thinking it would result in no help whatsoever. So, it returned a video driver problem and suggested updating it to the most current version. Ok, sure I thought to myself begrudgingly.

So I navigated over to Intel, updated it--which took an unusually long time since the d/l speed was between 10K and 21K per second which was odd.

After installing and rebooting, I fired up Guild Wars, and played the rest of the evening--with no lockups! Amazing what a little update will do. I'll have to see how it behaves tonight.

This tells you how little I have been around the office water cooler.

The huge bottles are now pretty much monkey proof? The way the Culligan bottles for the cooler are, there's absolutely no way to spill the water all over the place like the bottle styles that require one to remove the entire cap off of it.

We're having someone out today to estimate how much it would be to paint our home. We'll see if that's the route we go.