February 2008 – akaemi.com
 

Month: February 2008

gonna get me a grill

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I finally had my crown put on.  I was supposed to do it last week, but was sick with a cold.  With a nose-stuffing cold.  Which meant I really didn’t think I wanted to not have the option of, say, breathing through my mouth while it was full of implements and other peoples’ hands.

It was surprisingly painless.  A pair of tweezers pulled the temp crown off (it’s amazing the thing didn’t fall off on it’s own), and then the dentist tried it on and filed down one edge of it before gluing it on for real.  Tada!  A new tooth!  No needles or drugs required!

A new gold tooth.  🙂  Porcelain apparently wasn’t an option because of the littleness and far-backedness of my rotten tooth.  And you know the dentist isn’t making that up, because porcelain costs more.  So now I have a gold tooth.  That looks like I bought it at the dollar store, according to the husband.

It’s awful far back in my mouth.  Which makes it awful hard for people to see my new bling.  Which is why I need the grill.

I just threw my husband a murder-myster dinner party.  Not only that, but I wrote the mystery myself.

Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves, and there were some great costumes:  A butler in a tuxedo, and a vet in scrubs and stethoscope, to name a few.  Unfortunately, the husband was in charge of party pictures and he didn’t want any, so there are no pictures of the memorable event.

The mystery involved some great props:  kitty x-rays (google ‘cat xray,’ and print out what you find on a transparency), a scrap-book of the deceased, bottles of medicine, bottles of repackaged medicine with hand-written labels, ‘poisoned’ cat treats, and an empty vial of stolen drugs.  Ok, so I made them all so of course I thought they were great – but as someone who loves puzzles, I wanted to put in tangible elements of the story that people could use to figure out whodunnit. 

Not all the props were clues – some were just fun (like the x-rays) – but I was pleased to find that people did pick up on the hints I left.  They weren’t obvious – not everybody caught on right away – but they were all eventually sniffed out.

I want to make a few edits, and get the husband to look over everything and provide suggestions (he’s way more creative at that stuff than me), and then I’ll post the complete story for people to use for free.  I feel fairly certain that it was better than the mystery I paid real money for last year, so I think ‘free’ is a fair price.  🙂 

EDIT:  So I just looked at my google analytics, and I got a hit from someone searching ‘free murder mystery dinner script’!!  So I’ll try to hurry and get it out there, so the next googler won’t have to be disappointed.  🙂

some basement pics

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Ok, I’m still sick, but much less cranky now.  So here’s some screenshots of my preliminary basement design.

Pretend the shark is a turtle.  In a giant rubbermaid tub.  I’ve been doing some research, and apparently it is downright cruel to keep a tortoise in a clear enclosure – they’ll continually try to walk through anything they can see through.  So it looks like it’s rubbermaid for poor tortellini – though I think I’ll spring for a new one with the basement remodel, she’s probably tired of blue by now.

Oh, and pretend the series of desks in the corner is really one sleek corner desk.  The furniture selection in my software leaves much to be desired.

And also the hideous CRT monitor is really a 19″ LCD tv.

Floorplan:

basement floorplan

Some screenshots:

basement - standing on the kami desk

basement - standing in the fireplace

basement - standing on the exercise bike

basement - standing on the husband’s desk

For yesterday, I mean.

The husband got me the most perfect present yesterday.  Diamonds?  Flowers?  A new basement?  you might ask.

Nope.

A card with a purportedly flea-ridden dog on it, and a snickers bar.

You might think I’m joking about liking the present, but I really do.  It fills me with giggles.  The husband caught me in the kitchen, laughing all by myself – and I had to admit I was laughing about the snickers bar.

Because, well, I didn’t get the husband anything for valentine’s day.  I had meant to cut out a paper heart and write a heart-felt ‘roses are red’ poem for him (with a monkey in it somewhere), but then I got sick and didn’t feel like it.  So – that means we’ll be sharing the valentines snickers bar.

(Word of caution:  men, most women are not nearly so non-romantic and anti-sentimental as myself.  Stick to flowers, jewelry, fancy dinners, and valentine-themed chocolates.)

basement remodel

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The husband and I have run into a dilemma with our basement remodel.  Namely, the fireplace.

We have never used the fireplace; it’s just too much work.  Plus we’re not really fireplace people; we had a gas fireplace in our old apartment that I used all 3 times – and all I had to do was flip a switch. 

The fireplace is also very outdated.  The house was built in 1992, and it’s really starting to look it.  The brass accents on the fireplace door and the marble hearth were top-notch, I’m sure, when the house was born – but it really doesn’t jive for me today.

We use the basement as more of a den; it is where the desks, computers and books live.  Oh yeah, and an exercise bike.  Oh, and our old set of couches that we can’t seem to craigslist so they’ll be going out for trash pickup one of these Thursdays.  Oh, and that’s where the turtle lives.  In a giant rubbermaid bin.  Oh, and I can’t forget Jimmy

So we want a multi-purpose room, but we’re having a hard time placing everything.  What with a fireplace in one corner.  A fireplace with a mantle, so we’d have to tear it off to, say, hide it with bookshelves ….

We’re also having a hard time picking a paint color.

And also a hard time figuring out where, exactly, you stop painting a room when it is just a large open space whose last wall goes up the stairs.

The husband just wants to dump the couches, buy himself a new desk, paint, replace the 13″ tv/vcr with a 19″ lcdtv, and call it done.

While I’d like to turn it into something less … eclectic.  And with recessed lighting!  And a fancy new fireplace!  And an actual terrarium for the poor turtle!  And with fancy bookshelves with little doors on the bottom!  And fancy leather seating!

I’ve been doing some 3D modeling, but I’m sick and cranky right now, so I don’t have the patience to take screen shots to post … so they may or may not be coming later …

works with windows vista

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I got a new computer a few weeks ago, and up until this evening, it has been nothing but wonderful.  Vista works a little differently than XP, sure, but I was getting the hang of things.

With the advent of tax-return-season, the husband and I have decided to do some work on the basement.  It’s already finished, but we’d like to paint it and get some new furniture.  Which means I need my 3D house software installed on my new laptop, so I can arrange things virtually before we run out and buy desks and bookshelves that we end up hating.

No worries, the Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 7 has a sticker on the box:  Works with Windows Vista.  That means I can just insert my installation cd and be good to go, right?

Wrong.

I inserted the disk, and told it to autorun startup.exe when I was prompted.  And then nothing happened.  At all.  So I tried again.  And got the same results.  I opened task manager, and sure enough, there were two startup.exe processes running.  So I end-processed them.  And they didn’t end.  So I end-processed them more furiously than before.  They would not be ended. 

I hollered to the basement at the husband.  He told me to reboot my machine, and then try a little run-as-XP-compatible trick.

Telling Vista to restart yielded no restarting, so I held the power button down until it took me seriously.  Upon restarting, I was happy to see no setup.exes in the task manager.

I inserted the install cd, but this time didn’t let it auto-run.  I opened it in Windows Explorer, found startup.exe, and right-clicked on it.  I selected properties, and found the compatibility tab.  And I checked the run-this-program-in-compatibility-mode-for box.  And then I hit ‘OK.’

And then I ran startup.exe as administrator, and allowed the program to run when Vista tried to save me from myself.

And it installed!

It put a little icon on my desktop, so I clicked it to start the program.  And then it told me I had to be an admin to run the program and to contact my sys admin, k thx.  I am the sys admin on my box.  And my user IS an admin, thank you very much.

So I right-clicked the shortcut icon and made it XP compatible.  And tried again.

It let me start the program.  Finally!

So don’t believe it when you see that little ‘Works with Windows Vista’ sticker. It might just mean ‘Works-with-windows-vista-when-you-install-as-XP-and-then-run-as-XP.

water water everywhere

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So, with the discovery of my 9 cavities, I have stopped drinking sugar.  (To be honest, I’ve had a lemonade, a cranberry grape juice, and two sprites in the last few weeks …)

Which means I must drink water.  At first, it really wasn’t my favorite – but then it started growing on me.  Yesterday, I drank 64 ounces of water.  And I went to the bathroom about 20 times.

And now, I’m thirsty all the time!  Always for water.  My new fridge with the water in the door has never been so appealing.  It takes that Ashburn taste right out of the water.  (I supposedly live in one of the richest cities in one of the richest counties in the richest country on the planet – and my tap water tastes horrible!  I should be able to pick the flavor of my water …. just sayin’ …)

So it seems that I might just be able to stick with this change.  At least until I get all those cavities filled ….

um, mr. groundhog …

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Are you sure about that whole seein’ your shadow thing?  It’s 70 degrees outside.  In February.  In northern Virginia.  Where the average February high is 46.

Not that I’m complaining – I hate being cold.  On account of I hate having blue extremities. 

I would welcome an early Spring – I do so hate the cold of the wintertime – but I really don’t want to be teased by a week of 70 degree weather just to be slammed with 2 feet of snow.

So Mr. Groundhog, I do so hope you were wrong this year.

I love my phone.  Or, should I say, my cell phone-pda-camera.

I’ve had a cell phone of some sort for the last 6 years.  Flip phones.  Camera phones.  Clunky phones.  Phones with difficult interfaces.  Phones that tried to do too much – and ended up not doing much of anything at all.

But the phone I have now is heaven.  It does so many things – and it does them well.  I was really wary of purchasing a smart phone, but the husband talked me into it.  He got the beefier Palm Treo, while I stuck with the entry model Palm Centro.

And I love it!  I got the black one, but it has a fun glitter in it.  It’s not so much that people think you have a child’s phone – but it’s enough to keep it from being a boring black. 

I love the size of it – it fits nicely in my hand when I’m using it as a phone.  It doesn’t look like I’m just holding a pda to your head – it’s a reasonable phone size.  It is the most adorably tiny pda you will ever see.  Granted, it’s probably too small for power-pda users – but for someone like me who uses a phone to a) make phone calls, b) send the occasional text message, and c) kill time while waiting in lines, it is perfect. 

I love that it runs the Palm OS.  There are so many Palm applications out there – Quicken, Office, games galore.  If I can imagine something I need, it’s there.  Also, since Palm has been around awhile, they have had time to polish their OS for hand-held devices.  They know what works, and how to keep things responsive on a mini-computer.

I love that it has a touch screen!  Whether surfing the internet, playing sudoku, or entering contact information, the touch screen adds an intuitive way to let you do it all faster.  I did replace the tiny little plastic stylus with a slightly more sturdy metal and plastic one, but the upgrade only set me back $7, so I’m not complaining.

I love the tiny little keyboard!  Most grown adults would probably find it too small, but it works for me.  I was blessed with wonderfully strong thumbnails, and I find that the corners of my nails work perfectly for it.  When I want to send a text message or write a note to myself, I have a little keyboard which is wayyyyy faster than phone-typing.  I’m not 14, so that whole phone-typing thing is beyond my ability.  I haven’t had a chance yet to IM on my phone, but it’s got all the different IM clients on it – and with a full keyboard, I could actually keep up with a conversation.

I don’t really use the camera much, but it’s actually pretty impressive for a phone-camera.  There’s no flash, only a 2x zoom, but the pictures aren’t half-bad.  It’d certainly do in a pinch, to capture pics of a wreck in case the other guy tries to change his story later, or an unexpected celebrity sighting.

The thing I like the most, though, is that every time I see it, I think, “oh, I LOVE my phone!”  I’ve never felt that way about a phone – there was only one other phone that I thought was cute, but cute isn’t enough to make a great phone.  I love the way it looks, the way it feels – and most importantly – the way it works.

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