Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I just did major maintenance on the Austinbloggers webring. 21 current members did not have the web code on their pages, so I moved them to the queue and emailed them the ring HTML. I also added in members from the queue who had the proper code, but there are 6 sites left who did not have the code. There were a few I ended up zapping completely because the domain names were invalid. That makes 27 people in the queue who don’t have the right code (most have none, some just have the wrong site ID) and 50 people who do. I think that some people might be confused because the meta-site is the same name as the webring, but they are not the same. A link to the meta-site does not send traffic through to the other members of the ring.

Webrings are normally used to draw traffic to your site. People see the ring links on your page, think, “Oh, a link to more bloggers who are in Austin… let’s see what the next guy has to say” and click through to the next site. If the next site doesn’t have the ring code, the guy who’s down the line doesn’t get the visitors, and so it’s generally unfair. Think of it like you live on a nice happy river and get lots of company from the people paddling by on their canoes, until suddenly someone upstream decides to build a dam and you’re left sitting next to a mudflat and nobody wants to come see you anymore and your children are crying and lonely and all you can do is sit there and wish your neighbor would take the dam out and why why why, oh the hell with it, might as well just indoctrinate the kids with Disney and Barney and never socialize again because people are inherently bad anyway, what’s the use?

So put your ring code in. Do it for the children.

I ignored Friendster. I tried to ignore Orkut but people kept sending me invitations and curiosity killed the cat. So I’m there now. Add me or something.

I blame society.

Quite possibly some of the most disturbing artwork I’ve ever seen. Can’t sleep, bloody little girl will eat me.

I was sitting in the living room when Jo said, “Look Mommy, another spider.”

Crap.

I turn around and the mighty hunter cats have what appears to be a huge brown recluse cornered by the kitchen. Max kept playing with it and I trusted him to keep it busy while I went on a mad dash for an Agent of Spider Death. We didn’t have any bug spray, so I spritzed it good with some stainless steel cleaner. If I’d smashed it, identification would have been hard to do, so it was a last resort.

I put it in a jar and got a flashlight to look closely at it. It was all drawn up for a while so I couldn’t see the eyes. Eventually it relaxed (died?) and I could see. Instead of a real fiddle and the eye pattern of the brown recluse which is three pairs of two eyes in a crescent shaped pattern, this guy just had one cluster of eyes right in the middle. That makes it a Southern House Spider, non-poisonous and fairly common.

Still doesn’t change the fact there was an honest-to-goshen brown recluse in the bathtub with my girls the other night. But thinking that I had mutant huge recluses who just waltz around my living room had me pretty fricking depressed.

Rune writes:

I saw this at easy bake coven and it intrigued me.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“June is the driest of the summer months, July the warmest, and August generally the rainiest money of the brief summer, but warmer than June.”

Which is a nice segue to what I was going to say tonight anyway. We’ve made our vacation plans for the year. We’re going to Alaska for a week in May! We’ll be staying at the Kenai Princess Wilderness Lodge and the Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge. Rather than try to go nuts and do everything in a week, I decided to make it an honest vacation and make it a relaxed pace. That way we’re not packing and unpacking every day. We’ll have coastal activities (salmon and halibut fishing, Prince William Sound) and mountain activities (hopefully one of the three days will be clear enough to see Denali and do some flightseeing).

Buy a Gun Day 2004!

Aaron’s Rantblog has declared April 15, 2004 as Buy a Gun Day, or BAG Day, again. While I’m waiting until the end of the month when I can try out a friend’s Springfield XD9, I encourage anyone else to get out there and buy themselves a gun. Legally, of course.

Our 4 year old recently started preschool and therefore has been getting sick weekly. This time she brought home a cough and cold which has the whole family sick. Yesterday evening we finally got the girls both non-feverish at the same time so I popped them in the bathtub. They like lots of bubbles. After washing them off, I let them play in the tub for a good 20 minutes, during which time the bubbles went away. When I went to pull the plug, I saw a dark shadowy thing floating around the tub. On closer inspection it looked like some thread. On even closer inspection it looked arachnid. I grabbed one of their bath toys and scooped it out. Guess what?

There was a freaking BROWN RECLUSE in the bathtub with my children!!!

Hub and I spent the next hour or so trying very hard not to freak out in front of the kids. We did a lot of big fake smiles and speaking in code. “Hey, is that one of those things?” “Maybe.” “Gee, wonder from where he might have originated.” “We need to check those.” (surreptitiously pointing at children, wondering if someone got bit)

Then later, “Mommy, do ‘piders bite?”

“Well sweetie, yes they do, that’s why,” and I pull out the old Eddie Eagle line, “when you see one you should just leave it alone and come tell Mommy or Daddy.”

“Why did that ‘pider get in our bath?”

“He just wanted a drink of water!” (accompanied with the falsest grin you ever did see)

Where did that little &*#^@^ come from? The possibilities are disheartening. The tub overflow? The ceiling? One of the bath toys?

This blog is supposedly written by a well-known Hollywood actor. Named bandied about have been John Cusak, Owen Wilson, and Matt Damon. Who do you think it is?

Did anyone ever figure anything out about Isabella V.?

Do not click this link if you are at work or have children around.