I won an award at work and they're sending me and Linda on a 5 days, all expenses paid, 5 star vacation to Mexico in February. This news came at just the right time, as I've been starting to feel the stress of my position quite a bit in recent months and some good news for my efforts is just what I needed. If I can make it a few more months, I'll get to enjoy a week of sitting around by the pool drinking iced drinks with absolutely nothing to care about. That'll be nice.

I finally got around to applying for a passport. From what the lady said, they're getting turned around in about 3 weeks which was way faster than I figured. Cool.

Iowa beat Penn State today, ending any chance that we had at a national championship. That totally sucks.

I this I might be taking it worse than last time. It's at least not as bad as when the Yankees lost to the Diamondbacks in the series a few years ago. Still, this feeling sucks.

Linda has this piece of graph paper with our entire week planned out. She is always saying "let's go to XYZ this weekend" but never has anything for us to actually do there, so I tend to veto these requests. She hates this. So she took this matter into her own hands and micro-planned the entire trip. I've got my work cut out for me next week to live up to the tourist expectations that her calendar has me scheduled to do... and just think: all I wanted to do was see a couple of Yankees/Redsox games at the stadium before they tear it down...

Saturday of next week, we're catching a train to Erie to see my family for a few days. I haven't been home in about 4 years so this is long overdue. Then we're flying from Erie back to Seattle. Well, that's not really true, we're flying from Erie to Cleveland, and from Cleveland to somewhere in New Jersey, and from there back to Seattle. That day is going to be pretty nasty. Then a full day off after I get back to Seattle before I return to work on Wednesday.

And that's my plan.

It was tough.

Inspiration struck me today though: plug the composite video and stereo audio cables into the capture card of my SGI O2 that I have on my desk. Now the XBox displays in a window on the IRIX desktop and the audio gets piped out the tinny internal speaker built into the workstation. So we all gathered around and watched the intro to Lego Star-Wars (one of the only games we have) play a few times and everyone ooh'ed and ahh'ed and then we all went back to work. Nobody even bothered to pick up a controller.

It's wonderfully retro and I love it. But that doesn't mean anybody needs to actually play it.

That line immediately turned my shouts of joy into a groan.

TBS: get some real commentators!

Thinking back to the last dog that I spent much time with, I was already comparing this dog to Benny - also a male beagle and probably the sweetest dog on the planet.

When we got to the adoption center, we found our way pretty quickly to Hunter and he seemed pretty eager to see us. He was pawing at the cage door and looking us right in the eye while wimpering. But as soon as he got out of the cage, he managed to get away from the volunteer and started running around the property. They chased him down pretty quickly and put him into a bigger cage where we could spend some time with him... but this didn't work out so well. He more or less spazzed out and ran around the cage avoiding us for half an hour, barking at other nearby dogs, pissing over everything, and generally not acting like he had any interest in people at all.

The only time he gave us any attention was when we were given some treats to feed to the dog. Oh yeah, and Hunter weighs about 35 pounds and they said he is on a diet and could stand to lose about 10 pounds. So we had a dog that needed to loose about a third of its body weight that wouldn't give a human the time of day unless he was being fed.

I felt pretty bad when we took him back to his cage, because he immediately turned into a sweet dog again, but I just didn't think he'd deal well with my condo. The volunteers told us that some dogs get their personalities warped by being in the pound and that this was the case with Hunter... but yeah, he's going to have to find someone else to take him home. Someone with a fenced in yard and some grass and some more patience than me.

She has bad taste sometimes. It's really too bad.

The thing is, I don't think she's ever actually heard the song before. You have right? You know that it's magical. She swore that she didn't like it - never liked it - and would never like it - but again, she had never even heard it before. This really bothered me.

So I'm playing it now in the living room. Linda is in the bedroom. She probably can't hear it. Which means she still hasn't heard it.

It's a good song though.

I've been to plenty of concerts in my day, including Cake. I still insist that it was the best show that I ever went to. Just awesome.

I haven't heard any of their albums since "Comfort Eagle". I don't know why I haven't picked any of their stuff up since then because I really like that album.

I think that's enough rambling about Cake.

I don't think I have anything more to say about this topic.

It'll probably be trash very soon.