...painting in my underwear using just a hand brush. My pants kept trying to slide down because I bought them in my chubby days, and the roller just seemed clumsy as fuck to me.

Just put a second coat on the wall where my perpetually unfinished mural used to be. It still looks sloppy, but may improve with a third coat. In the subdued light through the tinted film on the windows, it's actually sort of passable as is. It certainly looks no worse than the walls in my bedroom from when I painted last time.

...and now I'm wondering why. Somehow I managed to forget just how much I hated that shit the first time I did it. It doesn't help that I'm fucking short and need to use a damned ladder just to reach the top of the walls. Or that I sling paint like somebody who's suffered a severe head injury.

Oh, well. Already started...

...paint the computer room (I put some tinted film on the windows in there a couple of weeks ago to cut down on the morning glare.) and my bedroom while the old man is away. I'd have to buy paint at least. I think we might have some brushes and rollers in our shed. I painted my room once before, but I ended up kind of hating the color I picked. Also, I did a fairly shitty job. I dunno. Bored.

The old man's never going to do it (I know he wanted to repaint the computer room at some point.), because he's getting..well, old.

I'm also thinking about trying to move my big aquarium from my bedroom into the computer room, but there are issues with that. Where to put other stuff, and also the weight of the thing. I was looking at some web page listing aquariums and terrariums by external dimensions and weight, and it says an empty 110 tall weighs only 226 pounds. Having helped move it before, though, I find that a little hard to believe. If nothing else, I should at least be able to scooch it out a bit to paint behind it. Hopefully.

If I decide to paint.

I was walking near the kitchen window when I saw one of the local feral cats hunched down in hunting mode in our driveway, staring intently at a mourning dove walking around in the grass nearby. For a second I thought about rapping on the window to startle the cat and give him away (Yeah, I'm one of those hippies who worries about stray cats preying on songbirds.), but then I considered that birds and other critters might be the only food he gets and I decided to just watch.

He sat there for about 3 or 4 minutes, occasionally changing position slightly and moving forward only the tiniest fraction of an inch. There was about 6 feet of bare cement between him and the dove in the grass. I was thinking he didn't have a chance in hell because he was so exposed, and then...

Then the dove made the mistake of ignoring him for a second and the cat strolled (Not jumped. Not ran. Strolled, albeit quickly.) the distance between the dove and itself and grabbed it with the cold-blooded nonchalance of a guy buying a newspaper.

Damn, Nature!!! You scary!!!

...will be setting off for a European cruise tomorrow with my youngest niece.

I'm going to have the house to myself for about 9 days, so if anybody wants to come over and sacrifice a goat to Cthulhu or something let me know.

Is it weird that I enjoy seeing these in my yard?

Anyway, pictures of snails...

I managed to get my speakers working again, though I'm not exactly sure how. (But what the hell. It's not like I'll ever need that information again in the future, right? Right...?)

I was doing a little celebratory dance in the hallway like an idiot. Seriously, that's how excited I was. Because I never dance. NEVER.

I am now in the process of placing everything gingerly back where it was before and telling myself to never casually unplug anything on my computer ever again.

I did a BIOS update and I now have audio through my headset.

Through my speakers? FUCK NO!!! But my headphones? Yes.

Who knows? In another year or two I might actually get this shit to work. I'm not real fond of listening to shit through headphones, though. Between my tinnitus and my aging, my hearing is getting to be shitty enough as it without my blasting loud noises directly into my eardrums from a half-inch away.

...on my sound problem. It's extremely fucking annoying. I've tried a ton of shit to fix it, and still nothing.

I'm beginning to think it might be a hardware problem. I'm thinking about going out and getting some reasonably priced new speakers today to see if they'll work. If they don't, there's a chance my sound card may have somehow gotten fucked up when I unplugged everything to clean up behind my computer and then plugged it all back in.

Either that, or it's probably some glaringly obvious thing in the software that I'm not seeing that will give whatever person with a working brain that I finally call in to fix it a good laugh at my expense.

(This shit is pissing me off like you wouldn't believe. What kind of fucked up shitty technology stops working just because you unplug it for a few minutes???!!! FUCK IT ALL I JUST WANT TO WATCH MY DVDS AND BE ABLE TO HEAR THE WOMEN SQUEAL WHEN I WATCH MY GODLESS, DEGENERATE PORN!!!)

...of actually getting off my ass long enough to dust behind my computer and clean up all the accumulated cat hair and whatnot. To facilitate this, I unplugged all of my cables.

My reward? After plugging them back in, my computer started telling me that the driver on my cable modem is outdated, and for some reason I no longer have sound. Still working on fixing both problems.

Edit: My modem problem might be fixed. Might. (It was being weird for a while. I'd update the driver, and then when I'd restart it'd be fucked up again.)

So far as my sound problem is concerned, all I can find on the internet are a lot of people with the same problem ("I unplugged my speakers, and when I plugged them back in they didn't work.")  and a lot of people making suggestions that apparently didn't help anybody.

I dug out my headphones and plugged them in to try and see if I had a computer or a speaker issue, but I honestly don't have a fucking clue. If I play a video, I can't hear the audio through the headphones, but if I play the test sound for the headphones I can hear that. Are those two different things, or should I be able to hear the audio from the video if I can hear the test sound?

Fucked if I know.

Edit: My computer now says my speakers are working, but I still have no sound of any kind. So much fun...

...while I was in bed last night (i.e., stretched out on my old, broken sleeper sofa), I found myself wondering what I'd like to do today if I could suddenly do anything I wanted, with absolutely none of the restrictions normally imposed on me by time, finances, or the sad, hard facts of reality.

I couldn't think of anything.

Or is it great niece? Or either? Fucked if I know. Abigail Grace, born this last week. (My memory is shit and I've already forgotten the day.)

I've been watching some of my DVDs lately in an effort to do a little sorting and make sure I've watched all of them at least once. Naturally, I came across one that was defective. (Which is why you should watch them at least once when you buy them, so you can return them in a timely fashion.) Unfortunately, I bought the DVD in question ages ago, so I had no choice but to buy another copy.

I got it in the mail today. Watched it. Or tried. Yep...also defective. So now I have to return it and fuck around with all of that bullshit.

...just sort of playing World of Warcraft, when I thought to myself, "Man, how depressing is it that I'm probably going to be doing this for most of the day?" (I'm having some serious Warcraft burnout right now. I should really stop playing altogether for at least a couple of months, but I'm trying to equip all of my characters with an at least marginally respectable array of crafted armor and weapons before Mists of Pandaria comes out. You know, so I can replace all of that shit with new greens within 10 minutes of starting to play the new expansion. Anyway...) It was that point that I decided to do an early morning store run.

I just got back, $74 dollars lighter. Everything is too fucking expensive. I bought some stuff to make pork stew tonight though, so just the price of the meat jacked the total up a bit. I got held up for a few minutes because I decided to check out at the one register with an actual living cashier that they had open. I hate the self-checkout lanes because the machines are buggy as fuck, and I'd grabbed a copy of the original Straw Dogs (1971) with Dustin Hoffman from the $5 movie bin, so I was going to have to deal with a cashier anyway because it's R-rated.

The old woman in front of me had bought one of those things you use to stand framed pictures up on tables and there wasn't a price on it, and naturally they were having trouble finding someone from that department. She decided to chat me up for some reason, starting with the only compliment I ever get from women : "I like your shirt." (You seriously have no idea how much that line is starting to grate on my nerves. Not that I expect compliments from people, but seriously...) The shirt I'm wearing today has kittens on it. She probably wouldn't have liked it as much if she'd noticed that the kittens are playing with a grenade that's had its pin pulled, but whatever. She then proceeded to tell me about her cat, which apparently weighs 23 pounds.

A screenshot from the upcoming "Mists of Pandaria" World of Warcraft expansion, from the Krasarang Wilds region. The statue on the right is a representation of the mogu, a race of beings that once held sway over much of Pandaria.

Previous wallpaper selections can be found here...

...on my troll druid (Not in real life. I haven't done that in years.), getting mats for food, when...lo and behold! A wild sea turtle mount appears!

The sea turtle is a rare water mount that drops from schools of fish in high level zones in Warcraft. It's slow on land, but fast in water. Of course, it would drop for my druid, who can turn into a sea lion and doesn't really need a fast-moving water mount, but whatever.

...I was wishing it would rain. Surprisingly, since then it has been raining, but it's also gotten chilly as hell.

I guess I should have been more specific.

...made an "OMG, I'm so glad he came back!!! He's been missing for 10 days!!!" post about their cat.

A veritable assload of people responded with similar stories about their own cats, some of which eventually came home and some which didn't, and how "concerned" they'd been when their cats were gone.

Seriously, it's all I can do to not go on there and scream at them...

"You know, you people wouldn't have that problem if you just KEPT YOUR FUCKING CATS INDOORS!!!"

It's a cat. It's not a little person. Stop projecting your emotions onto it. It sleeps half the day and then eats, craps, and gets petted during the other half. If you seriously think your cat is bored, buy it a fucking cat toy and play with it. Don't throw it out in the world where it can get run over by a car, picked off by a redneck with a BB gun, or eaten by a fucking coyote.

I was questing in Deepholm on my night elf death knight this morning when NPCSpan detected Aeonaxx, and now I've got my first Cataclysm drake!

...has discovered texting and now spends a good chunk of every day on his phone sending messages to God only knows who. Most likely waitresses half my age who wouldn't give me the time of day if I put a gun to their heads. Yay!!!

Consequently, this has caused a fair increase in the number of times per week that he quietly walks up behind me while I'm on the computer and then loudly asks me how to spell something. (Thus almost giving me a heart attack or making me crap myself.)