Mom killed the spider. I was just going to drive away tomorrow and let things fall where they may. I was too freaked out by it at night to do anything about it – daylight should have been better. Also, I did actually want to take a picture of it during daylight (for some reason, things are as scary when you have a camera between you and them). Yes, part of me is relieved that thing is gone. Of course, the other part of me left the broom outside because I wasn’t 100% sure the spider didn’t just jump onto it and was okay. And I’m also not 100% sure it didn’t run into the house when I wasn’t looking since mom did her broom thing while I was firing up the hose (I thought she was going to wait and I was supposed to spray it with water – that the broom was just back-up). Frankly? I liked it better when it was up in the air and I could see it. Hey, Mom never produced a corpse. And my cats are acting weird. It lives! I just know it…

(And yes, I realize I’m one of the biggest wusses on the planet. Sue me.)

There’s a huge spider on my carport. Since I parked my car there at about 7pm, it’s managed to build a 2 and a half foot wide web that’s attached to the carport and the car. I didn’t get too close (skeered!), but I swear it’s well over an inch long (with legs). I took a picture while shining my flash light on it. Don’t look if spiders freak you out!

They just said on the news that we’ve had 32 days in a row without rain, 32 days in a row with a high temperature over 90 and 4 days in a row with the temperature over 100. I hate summer.

Well, apparently, all it took was complaining about it for me to find them. Where were they? In the box my PowerBook arrived in. That makes sense, doesn’t it? I don’t even know why I still have the box – nor do I remember putting anything an it, but there was a bunch of stuff in there! So, since that seemed to work: where are my scissors? Not the little thread snipping ones, not the plant cutting shears, but the fabric cutting scissors.

I’m so frustrated! It’s been one of those “little things after another” kind of day. After watching Davenport lose Wimbledon, I got up to buy air conditioner filters. When I got my new A/C, they gave me a ton of them, but I’ve worked my way through them. Turns out, neither Home Depot nor Lowes carries them. After going to those stores and having no luck, I came home and started making phone calls. I can’t find anyone in town who carries the right size. They carry 1 inch think ones and 4 inch think ones, but no two inch think ones. I’m starting to realize why the A/C people gave me so many freebies. I found a place online to order them – guess I’ll have to live with the $15 shipping fee.

Then, I decided I wanted to start a cross-stitch project. It’s been years since I’ve done any cross-stitching, but watching my friend work on (and finish) projects has given me the itch again. The last time I had this itch, I went out and bought a ton of patterns, specialty thread and lovely fabrics. Instead of going shopping again, I thought I’d do one of those. I have been searching my house for 5 damn hours and I can’t find the damn patterns! I can find the fabric and the thread, but no patterns. The only one I can find, is for a partially finished project that I do not want to start on again. (It’s a 5 foot long celtic banner that’s tough and it’s going to take a day just to figure out exactly where I left off before digging in again.) This is driving me crazy – I know those patterns are somewhere in this house.

A few weeks ago, I drove my car out to Mansfield Dam. Sadly, you can’t walk across it anymore. I took a few pictures through the fence.
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Mishka needs a lot of attention – and he tries to get it even when he’s sleeping.
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Yes, that’s him hanging over the edge of my computer monitor. And, he’s none-to-happy when you wake him up.
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My favorite show (The Amazing Race for you slow people) is going to start rerunning on the GSN network. This starts on July 11th. Well, my local cable company only carries GSN if you pay extra for digital cable. Not only is the service more, but you also have to have a converter box to see the digital channels. I kept trying to say it wasn’t worth the extra money to watch the old episodes, but I found myself calling my cable company to get a total on just how much extra it would cost. Turns out they are having a special and, for the first three months, my bill will actually go down $9 a month. After that, it goes up $20 – oddly enough, exactly what I just saved on my DSL bill. So…that made me want a DVD burner so that I could burn the shows to DVD. This led to days of searching and thinking about it followed by me breaking down and spending more than I could afford on a burner. I bought it and brought him home to discover some problems – it won’t fit in the homemade shelf I had under my TV in my entertainment center.

I thought I might have to buy a new shelf or drill more holes in my entertainment center, but I think I’ve managed to avoid all of that. I put the new DVD recorder on the shelf above the TV – I had to go buy tons of new cords in order to have some long enough to do that. Right now, I have a splitter on the cable with one end going to the (new) digital cable box and one to the DVD Recorder. The stupid cable box complicated everything tremendously. I’m doing something like this:

• Coax from splitter to cable box
• S-video from Cable box to TiVo
• Composite A/V from TiVo to TV
• IR Blaster from TiVo to Cable box so TiVo can change channels on Cable Box
• S-video from TiVo to DVD recorder
• Coax from splitter to DVD recorder
• Composite A/V from DVD to TV

In theory, I should be able to record any non-digital channel on my DVD recorder while also recording/watching on my TiVo. For some reason, though, the “standard cable” channels are fuzzy on my DVD recorder. I’m wondering if it has something to do with the splitter and the cable box. I hate the cable box.

I transferred my first test recording from the TiVo to the DVD recorder and am now trying my first burn! What did I use for testing? Why the TAR7 finale, of course.

The funny thing is, I decided to keep my older kind of crappy DVD player so that I wouldn’t have to adjust those cords (which connect to my 20 year old stereo receiver – yeah, I should have updated that first). Well, it’s the same brand as the new one and I sat the new one on top of it. So, every time I press “play” on the remote for the new DVD recorder, the old one springs to life and yells at me to insert a disk. (Okay, it doesn’t really yell, it just says, “No disc” on the display, but after a few times, I felt it was getting a little testy.)

Other than figuring it all out and buying all the cords, the worst part was moving all the furniture. My entertainment center is huge and heavy. My TV while not HUGE, is heavy and it sits on a weird homemade wannabe shelf. When I bought the entertainment center, it was a floor sample and, thus, heavily discounted (only way I could afford it). It was missing a shelf that’s supposed to go on the main closet like bit – that shelf is, normally, where one would set their TV. Well, I figured that was no big deal. How expensive could it be to replace that? I found another store that carried the same piece of furniture and asked if one could just buy the interior shelf. Yep – that’ll be $250. The hell? No way I was paying that. So, I went to Home Depot and bought a pre finished board that was close to the color of the center. I then bought four rectangular glass bricks, put them in the center and set the board on top of them – instant shelf!

The problem with this is: the bricks aren’t attached to the shelf. Actually, the only time that’s a problem is when you want to do something like, oh, turn the TV around. Say, if you have some new equipment to hook up to it or something. This is complicated by the fact that the TV is so deep, it barely fits in the piece. So, you have to slowly shimmy the TV around – rotate it a little; check the bricks and move them back under a good place in the board to keep things from tipping; repeat over and over again as you slowly move the whole thing far enough to get at the connectors in the back. And, of course, once done, you have to repeat the whole dance in order to get the TV back into place. The whole thing had me asking myself over and over again: why did you spend money on a new DVD recorder and not on a proper shelf?

I have been seeing all these adverts for DSL that featured low rates – much lower than what I pay. So, I called SBC and asked them about the lower rates. Yep, I could have one of them! So, I went with one that’s $20/month less than what I was paying and offers twice the downstream rate. Yay!

I went to the circus today. Yeah, I know, the circus? It was fun though. I decided to go because one of the performers was in the forth season of my favorite TV show. He was great and the show was fun – worth the drive to Belton. You can see the pictures I took here.