I Danss cuz I happy

doh

Just 15 minutes can save you… NOM NOM NOM

KONUSHIWAH

RAR! SURPRIZE CANNIBALISM!!!

The worst part about taking off time from work? Coming back to work and getting to spend more than half the day fixing mistakes that were made when you were gone. The best part? Not having to be at work.

Yesterday I finally put a couch into my apartment. My living room now looks considerably smaller, but it still looks too bare. I'll have to get a smaller couch too, and maybe a coffee table or something to fill up the vast emptiness in the middle. I also acquired a tv that's much larger than the one I wasn't even using. AND I neatly ran the wires for my rear speakers up the wall and across the ceiling - no more tripping on speaker wires.

The blog is.. bloggy. I'm going to have to tweak the layout a bit, because there's certain things that I never really completed, and every time I look at it it just feels unfinished. I re-added the blogrush widget over on the right side. They've made quite a few changes, and cleaned things up, so I figured I'd give it another shot. It has brought in a little bit of traffic over the last few days, so I'm going to consider it successful. It'll stay for now. Yesterday I also upgraded wordpress to the latest version.. now I can tag posts in addition to just categorizing them - I'm not sure how that looks, but I guess I'm about to find out.

Lolcats tomorrow.. maybe some real content next week?

The local grocery store has handwritten notes at all of the checkout lanes.. or rather photocopies of a handwritten note. It's purpose is to inform customers that coupons printed from the internet will NOT be accepted anymore. The reasoning? Counterfeit Coupons.

Counterfeit Coupons.

At first I was perfectly willing to accept this explanation. A few people made up some fake coupons and screwed it up for everyone else, any reasonable store would implement a similiar policy in a situation like that. But last night I had a dream that I confronted the store manager about this. Yes, I realize that it's completely bizarre to have a dream about arguing with a grocery store manager that I've never met, but it happened, and my dream self totally ripped apart the reasonableness of this policy.

If counterfeit coupons are such a problem, why are they the only retailer that I've EVER SEEN that have taken steps to refuse to accept them? Here's what never crossed my mind until that dream - there aren't any "magic coupon numbers" for "$1.50 off of whatever." The coupon has a barcode, and if that barcode isn't in the store's computer system, it won't ring up as a discount. If that barcode IS in the system, then it shouldn't matter whether I pulled the coupon from a newspaper or drew the barcode (very carefully) with crayon.

The dream-manager came up with a few arguments.. such as people printing off coupons that were no longer valid (the barcodes should be purged/expired in the system in this case, so a printed or "real" coupon won't work anyway) and that people could print off multiple copies when the coupon was supposed to be a "limit 1" (have you ever seen a cashier check the coupon for a limit? I haven't. You know why? Because the system keeps track of these things and will reject it.)

So, now I have a policy that I blindly accepted but now reject the validity of. This leads to the question "Why?" Is the checkout system so screwed up that it can't keep track of prices and discounts as well as *every other checkout system* and if so, how am I supposed to trust the prices that it comes up with for anything that I buy? Is the store manager/owner a Luddite, and just took the "Coupons from the intarwebs?! I don't know anything about that so I'm going to pretend I do and overreact" approach?

Has anyone else encountered this sort of thing?

This weekend I was introduced to the writings and readings of David Sedaris.. who I must say, is absolutely brilliant. We had spent a good part of Sunday morning looking for recordings of his on the internet, and came across quite a few. Since I often convince myself that when I think something is brilliant that everyone else should agree with me, here is a collected list of our findings.

The Nuit of the Living Dead - Embedded mp3
Sedaris and Crumpet the Elf: A Holiday Tradition - "Listen Now" link towards the top of the page

David Sedaris - Diary of a Smoker (NPR Morning Edition) - mp3
David Sedaris - French Lessons - mp3
David Sedaris - Big Boy - mp3
David Sedaris - "The Youth in Asia" and "The Learning Curve" - mp3 (this one is pretty long)

I also created a playlist of the videos I could find on youtube - it includes:
David Sedaris on Letterman talking about the "Stadium Pal"
"Bend Over and Say 'Ah'" - from David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
"Jesus Shaves"
"The Squirrel and the Chipmunk"
and "Six to eight black men"

.. or maybe just the books and possibly any plant material that may be in the air. I still want to blame it on work though, since it is probably the most unhealthy thing in my life.

This weekend was incredible. It started out with a halloween party that I won't talk about.. and turned into one of those life-changing events that I always seem to be looking for but can never find. There aren't many people that I can attribute with having changed my life, in fact, I think now I'm only up to 3. I've never had someone in my life that could reflect my thoughts back at me so well, or just talk about everything and nothing, with absolutely no string attached to the friendship. Friends like that are rare. It was almost 2 days straight of me learning more about myself than I ever thought I could.. things I didn't even know that I didn't know.

I also rediscovered my ability to make food. REAL food. Food that looks AND tastes good.

So, if you manage to see me around and wonder why I seem to be even happier than I have been… It's an odd feeling, to feel like myself again. I need to hang on to this.

?

I iz sorry. Your prinsess iz in other cassels.

Invisible Step Ladder

1..2..3…..

so i put left footz in?

This would be a short post, but I've realized that some people don't know how a dryer or a dehumidifier actually work. So, real quick - a dryer passes air over wet clothes, the moisture evaporates and is carried away by the air, warmer air can hold more moisture, so a hotter dryer setting will dry things faster. A dehumidifier passes air over a cooled coil where the water will condense (like on the side of a drinking glass) and is then pumped away.

Here's what bugs me about clothes dryers - they heat up the air, remove some moisture from the clothes, and then pump that air out of the house. It seems a lot like turning on your furnace and then opening up all the doors and windows in your house, it just wastes energy. Also, since the pressure in a house will always try to equalize itself with the outdoors, outside air will sneak in (through window/door cracks) at the same rate as the air being pumped out by the dryer.

My idea is to put a dehumidifying unit inside a dryer. This way air can be heated up and recirculated within the dryer. The only thing that will leave the dryer will be the condensing water, which would be pumped to a drain. This idea would only work with electric dryers though, since a gas dryer has to vent the fumes out of the house, otherwise bad things happen to you.

I'm not sure of the efficiency of dehumidifiers, or the cost to run them, but if people leave them running in basements it can't be too horrible. Plus, it seems like it'd be very hard to be less efficient than heating up a bunch of air and then pumping all of that heat outside. This dryer/dehumidifier setup would also probably be a lot more efficient than your standard basement dehumidifier for two reasons - 1) it's a small enclosed area and 2) the air it's removing the humidity from has been heated up and has more water to pull out of it than normal room temperature air.

Someone build one of these, and make it affordable. I'm thinking of making a small unit that can be retrofitted onto an existing (electric) dryer.

And while we're on the topic of efficient clothes drying.. I've just started running the dryer less, and then hanging the slightly damp clothes to finish air drying. If I'm going to be using an inefficient beast of a machine to dry my clothes, I might as well use it less. (The clothes from my last couple of batches that I dried like this are also less wrinkly.)