Sheep Guarding Llama

Well, yesterday was the biggest shopping day of the year so, as you can imagine, I was out shopping with everyone else. Normally I avoid shopping on the day after Thanksgiving but something compelled me to go out and shop yesterday. I did manage to find quite a number of video game bargains, though. I want to congratulate Microsoft on a decision that they made with Age of Empires I Gold Ed. It seems that if you purchase this game, you can install the game on any number of computers for use with multiplayer games as long as there is a purchased game CD for every three players. That means that three people in my house can play against each other online with only having bought one copy of the game. I thought that that was really nice. Plus the game was only $20 at EB anyway! I also managed to pick up the new game Nations at EB for only $10. I have been wanting to try that game out for a while. Eric and Dominica have both started playing AoE2 so we will be playing against each other very soon. Josh has promised to pick up a copy of the game this week.

So, AT&T has been calling the house so often that I finally just shut off all of the ringers on the phones here. No one ever calls for me and I am the only one home so I have stopped answering the phone. (So if you call here and only ever get the answering machine for the next week, you will know why.) I am pretty much home alone all week so I am (in Bob’s own words) “running around in everyone else’s rooms and farting on their clothes.”

I did manage to get quite a bit added to our Funny Email section, in fact, it is almost twice the size that it was before. Everything is expanding a little bit at a time.

Well, I hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving yesterday. I know that a lot of people are out there eating turkey today and tomorrow yet. Hope that you can all handle all of the turkey. We had eleven people manage to show up for our seventh annual Llama Thanksgiving dinner at Nick Tahou’s. Emily managed to come in from Denver and Mandy came in from Albany and Dominica and I drove straight in from Ohio so there was some serious effort put into getting everyone there.

Ok, I am posting a day early but I have a lot of stuff done to the site that I wanted to let you know about since I posted yesterday. First of all, all of the pages have been updated to the new design and I think that all of the link problems have been eliminated. A number of the larger images have been modified so that they are not so large. This helps with how the site looks and it decreases the load times on some of these larger pages. For those of you with phone line connections, a single page on this site may take up to six minutes to load! And I understand that the site is not all that exciting. Make sure you check out our new video games section that now includes downloadable video games by our own house Loopy.

My friend Natalie in Canada informed me that she is from Burlington not Toronto and that that was like calling it Caledonia when it is Buffalo. I am not sure what she meant by that but we will go with it. I suppose it would be like confusing Burlington, Ontario with Burlington, Vermont. And you wouldn’t want to do that. That would be like confusing an sno-cone with Italian ice. Come to think of it, what is the difference between a sno-cone and Italian ice?

Happy Turkey Day everyone! I am signing off until after the festivities.

Today is a busy day. The Nimda virus was discovered on the machine used to create this web site (BigBird for those familiar with out network.) So today was spent doing virus checks on as many machines as we could. Our primary web server (the one that you are using now, as a matter of fact) checked out clean. We are very lucky.

Loopy has a new Nintendo Game Cube that he has been busy playing now. He has Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on it.

Tomorrow I am driving to Ohio to see my family for Thanksgiving so there will most likely not be an update until after the gang Thanksgiving Dinner at Tahou’s on Thursday night. I have been busy getting this site updated as quickly as possible. We are almost done. Not too much left to do.

Today, also, we are adding the new Video Game section complete with downloads of video games made right here in the Llama house.

Well, Nate, Josh, Joe and I are back from Toronto. Another year Marching in the Santa Claus Parade. The parade went well. It was fun as always. This year we got to play for a crew from GlobalTV that stopped by to film us in the staging area. That was really cool. So there might be a little special on us. We played Frosty the Snowman for GlobalTV. The weather was a bit warm for us, we were quite sweaty by the time that we were finished. But it is easier to play when you are warm, so that was good. The four of us drove up to Toronto separately from the rest of the band because Joe had to perform in a wedding on Saturday. So we waited for him and went up later in a rental car. I am not going to go into details but let me tell you, NEVER rent from Hertz. What a pain. All of the Llamas would like to say hi to Natalie who marched with us and is from the Toronto area!

I have had a bit of positive feedback on the new look of the site. It sounds like everyone likes the changes. I am definitely much happier with this than with the previous look. I did get the chance to do some more work on the site this morning. Nothing serious, just fixing a few things here and there. Tweaking, for the most part. I did reduce the size of the big Pacific Ocean picture on this page. That cleaned up the page a little bit and will speed up the download.