Min’s back hurt this morning, we assume from trying to move furniture last night. So she ended up just lying on the floor in the living room sleeping for a lot of the day. We don’t think that her back is too bad but it is really sore.
A quick technology udpate: New Mozilla software is available from Mozilla.org, both the web browser Firebird and the email reader Thunderbird have been updated with new versions.
Min and I watched The Pink Panther and The Return of the Pink Panther which is actually the fourth movie in the series. The third one, A Shot in the Dark is available but I haven’t gotten it yet and the fourth one is totally rare and no one knows it and heaven only knows how one would go about getting it. I hear it isn’t any good and it has a different inspector, not Peter Sellers. Few people really consider it a part of the series even though it is officially.
I cooked lunch today – a very dangerous undertaking – while Min was stuck lying on the floor. I just did eggs, toast and fake bacon. I think that it might be my first time cooking in the new house. My parents let me borrow some folding chairs yesterday so that we will actually have four places to sit when we eat until our real chairs arrive in a month or two.
Andy called from Puerto Rico today. He has moved into his new apartment yesterday. It is a studio on the beach. It isn’t in San Juan, it is a lot closer to where his job is. He said that the place isn’t very nice. Everything is dirty and not very well taken care of. It is a tiny studio with everyting in one room, including his laundry. There is powerful air conditioning but it blows in a straight line through the middle of the apartment so you can either stand in that air stream and be cold and stand outside of it and be warm. Either way, it isn’t very good. He has no phone reception there so he has to drive to Walmart to be able to make a call. It’s hard to believe that there could be any place on such a tiny, overcrowded island without cell reception. But they only got him a Sprint phone so maybe that is why. He has no Internet access yet. They are supposed to be installing that tomorrow. His choices for high speed broadband down there were 64kb/s or 256kb/s (in New York, it is hard to find any service offering less that 256kb/s.) So he won’t have a really fast connection no matter what he does. The apartment is furnished but with really crappy stuff. He is considering buying himself a microwave so that he can cook and just leaving it there when he leaves. He has a television but one have the television is one colour and the other half is another colour. He is thinking about buying a cheap television to use while he is there and just leaving that there when he is done too. Luckily, he did take his integrated DVD/Monitor unit along with him so that he is able to watch DVDs down there. Otherwise, he would really have to do without anything. He works so much, though, that it doesn’t make too much of a difference. He does have two golf courses and tenis right there at his apartment. That is nice. But he doesn’t like golf so it isn’t all that good for him. He was at Walmart getting groceries and then he was shopping for a digital camera. It will be nice if he gets one because he will be able to send us pictures of his new place and where he works and stuff.
After watching the Pink Panther movies, Min fell asleep so I went down to the basement and played some Age of Empires 2. I played in the basement for four hours or so while she napped.
When I came back upstairs, Min had just woken up. Her back is much worse than I thought. She wasn’t able to get up herself. She was in a lot of pain. So we decided to order dinner in since it was best not to have me cook again and she sure couldn’t do it. We got pizza and french fries. They forgot the bleu cheese again. That is like the fourth time. If only we had Andy here to rough them up a bit. He knows how to take care of a restaurant that doesn’t deliver bleu cheese. But now he is in Puerto Rico where they probably don’t even know what bleu cheese is. Luckily, Min bought some bleu cheese at the grocery store so I could still have some on my pizza. For those of you who know good bleu cheese, we recently discovered that Marie’s was bought by Morningstar. That is why they have new packaging.
So, we started watching the BBC’s Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair. The Silver Chair is one of my favorite, if not my favorite, of all of the Chronicles of Narnia. Warwick Davis – the actor made famous by his staring role in George Lucas’ Willow in 1988 – is in both of the later Narnia movies. In one he plays the mouse and in the next we plays the owl. Min and I both heard his voice and knew who he was immediately. We were interested to know what other roles he had been in that we weren’t aware of so I did a little research. He has done a lot of movies but the ones that really stand out are his first role as Wicket in Return of the Jedi and his subsequent recurring roles as Wicket in the Ewok movies. He appeared in some famous films like Labryinth, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone.
The laserdisc player that we won on eBay is expected to be arriving tomorrow. We are excited to be able to watch the LD collection again. There are tons of movies that we haven’t seen in a long time and lots that Min has never seen at all. There are five boxes of discs just sitting in the cellar waiting to be watched again.
Art went to the city to see how much it is going to cost to get the wiring done in our basement. We are very anxious to get the electric run in the basement so that we can get my office cleaned up, get the theatre set up and get the server room in order. Everything is coming together in the basement now. The new projector will be along soon, the new subwoofer is here, the SDSL should be in and running any day. Things are good.
After watching The Silver Chair, we decided that it was time to move onto The Pink Panther Striker Again. I just love the Pink Panther movies. Peter Sellers is just a genius. It is hard to believe that Blake Edwards directed the Pink Panther movies and movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. For those who are wondering when the infamous “Pool of Jello” scene appears, it is in the beginning of the seventh film, Trail of the Pink Panther, 1982. That is the first film made after Sellers died in 1980. The film was made using unused clips of Sellers from the first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth Pink Panther films (Sellers character was played by Alan Arkin for the third movie.)
Our Internet connection is flaky again tonight. Frontier is very unreliable. It has already been down for over 24 hours in the past week. And not just their high speed ADSL service but their dial-up as well. The problem that we have is weird, though. We loose the ability to look at web pages but we do not loose our actual connection. We are able to look up DNS names and email keeps working. But if we restart the “DSL Modem”, then we are just out of luck because the DHCP server will not get us a new address. Of course, as I am writing this, we have lost all connectivity and cannot even send email anymore. Great, probably another day of not having any way of communicating with the outside world. Who knows how long it will be before I am able to post today’s update. Luckily, I updated this morning so we are not behind at all at this point. I am very happy that this October looks like it is going to be our busiest updating month ever. I guess there is just a lot going on here this month.
Next, we were on to The Mummy Returns. I saw part of it before but I have never managed to see the whole thing. As you can tell, I am writing the update while we watch the movies. It’s days like today, when Min’s back hurts and we can’t possible go anywhere, that I am really thankful that we have a movie library right here at our dispossal. If we didn’t have it, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do. She would like to play video games but she has tried that before and she can’t do that while her back hurts this bad. She can’t really read either. I am very glad that she got this new recliner for her back, though, because it lets me sit in comfort while we watch all these movies. Since she is stuck on the floor, it works out well. The Hamster is really enjoying us being around in the living room. He is very active running around his cage tonight.
While I am sitting around writing what could easily be the longest update in SGL’s long history, I should probably also point out that this autumn means that we have completed our THIRD year of updates. Three whole years of Sheep Guarding Llama. Can you believe it? SGL started by announcing the Llama New Years Millenium Party for Dec. 31, 2000. Since then we have come a long way. The site has changed a lot. I moved first from the 8-1 Sanctuary Dr. house to 13 Observatory Circle and now we are living in Geneseo. Roomates have moved in and out. Jobs have changed, many, many times. There is a new hamster. We have met new friends. Even discovered a few who were missing. A number of us have gotten married. The economy has fallen and now begun to return. The political world has even changed around us. It has been an exciting three years. We look forward to another exciting three years. I hope that all of you can join us for the adventure.
Well, that is more than enough update for one day. We have no Internet access so I am going to shut down for now and hope that we can do an update tomorrow. Min will still be stuck in bed for at least one more day. The telephones will be going to my cell phone since the main line is down. I expect to be working from the house tomorrow, especially since I can’t really leave Min here alone. Hopefully she will be able to go to the Microsoft show on Tuesday, that will be a really good time. Only two more days. Okay, everyone have a good night – Scott out.