November 10, 2001

Ok, so I am back from South Carolina. It was nice to be in a place that hasn’t seen any snow yet! It was also nice to be in a place where gas is only $.97!!! No, I am not kidding. Gas is incredibly cheap down there. We are really missing out up here in the cold north.

This is a short update today. Just letting everyone know that I am back safely and that I will be doing a more thorough update tomorrow. We had a number of visitors to our house today and I had little time to spend on the site.

Loopy’s video game is almost complete. It is very cool that we have a video game made right here in our house. Maybe we can convince him to let us download the game from our site so that all of you with DOS systems will be able to play it. Maybe we can even have a high score record thing or something.

Ok, it is bedtime for me and we all know how seriously I take that. – Scott

November 5, 2001

Well, today is going to be a short update compared to normal. I am writing this as I prepare to depart for the south where I will be all week. I have the car partially packed already and I am, overall, pretty set to go. I wish that I was able to stay at home all week but duty calls:) I was hoping that Josh was going to prepare an update for you this morning but he has neglected to do so. So you will have to do without his updates until the weekend when I am able to put them up on the site again.

I discovered some new products this week. In my quest to become a vegetarian, I have found (or more appropriately, been introduced to) Soy and Rice Milk. I never thought that these would be good but the actually are! I am very impressed with the tastiness of these products. I have not tried them plain but in chocolate and vanilla flavors, they are really excellent. I also found a new breath mint – Listerine Pocket Paks. These things are weird. They are like little scotch tape dispensers that dispense this strange breath mint tape stuff that dissolves in your mouth. Very, very weird.

I have been trying to do a little bit everyday to update the look at the site. If the site is a little bit inconsistent, bare with me.

Today was the first sticking snows of winter. I awoke this morning to a white and brown world. I love the first snow fall. It isn’t the white snow like January. It is a dirty snow. A melting snow of Autumn that has a magic all its own. A sign of change. A brisk breeze blowing through my open window that is cleaner than it has been for nine months. The first snow of winter always makes me want to stare out the window forever, watching the melting snow trip from the bare trees onto the muddy ground. Then to curl up with a good book. Not just any book, but an adventure with a moral. Books like Watership Down or Little Women. This is the perfect weather for that. This weather also makes me very productive. I never want to fall back asleep or just be lazy. I want to do things and go places before the hibernation of winter really sets in. This is the last chance to really do everything. To go outside, to take a walk. After this, now that Indian Summer has passed, all there is, is to hide inside until Spring appears.

So, I scheduled a consultation to see about having all of my wisdom teeth removed. In three weeks they will let me know what they can do. Fun. I want to have them all out by the end of December. That way I can start the new year without them, and then I can look into having some nasal surgery done as well. I don’t sleep at night very well because it is so bad. I want to have it drilled out so that I get more air through my nose.

Scott Alan Miller in High School Letterman Jacket circa 1993-1994

Ok, here is one of my favorite pictures of me (there aren’t very many) this one is taken at my parents house when I was about 19 or 20. I am wearing my letterman jacket from high school. York Central High swim team, Varsity Letter and two sectional championships while I was on the team. A whole lot more while Josh and Phil were on it. Anyway, I took this one myself on Kodak T-Max 100 B&ampW film. I really like that it is a self portrait. I used my Nikon 5005 SLR. This is back from the days when I used to work as a cover and sports photographer for the Livingston County News back in Geneseo, NY.

I had a lot of fun taking photographs but it just didn’t pay very well. Let me tell you, though, it is pretty exciting the first time that you find one of your photos on the cover of the newspaper. Even if it is just the local paper. I worked for them while I was a senior in high school.

Dana West (now Dana Qualls)

Here is a picture of Loopy’s little sister Dana who was up last weekend to hang out with us. She was up this weekend too, I guess. She has become quite the member of the gang. Here is a week old picture of her in our kitchen.

Here is one last picture of Loopy, Josh and I in San Diego. This is the three of us standing in front of the Pacific Ocean. This was the first (and only, so far) time that any of us had seen the western coast. I liked having this picture huge here so here we are:) Loopy seems a little surprised that he got his picture taken.

Andy West, Scott Alan Miller and Josh Relyea in front of Pacific Ocean in San Diego, CA

Ok, I think that this may be enough to leave you all with. I hope that my massive update and new pics will keep everyone happy while I am away in South Carolina. Look for new pictures soon. Now that we have a scanner and a digital camera, we are going to be out of control. I would also like to mention that our main page now takes well over six minutes to load for anyone using a 28.8 modem. Wow is that a lot of content. Imagine what this will be like when it all gets moved over to the archives! Talk to you all soon. Later – Scott

November 4, 2001

We had band practice in Caledonia today. That made for a lot of driving! I wish that things were closer. That would make my life a lot easier. Josh has official had his job moved to Victor so he nows works forty minutes closer to us than he did before. That will make life a bit easier for him traveling down here. Now he just has to find someplace to live in this direction. Josh has also, finally, submitted his first daily update to us so that will be included today as well.

Not much exciting to report on today, it was busy but very little happened. There is no growth in my pepper plants yet. I bought a basil plant that was still alive from Wegmans and we will see if it is able to survive in my hydroponic garden unit. Cross your fingers.

Tomorrow, I am going to be heading down to Washington, DC and then to South Carolina for the week so we are going to be short on updates since I am unable to post them to the site even if Josh and I are able to write them. I am pretty much computer-less while I am down there so don’t be worried if nothing gets posted for a week. Maybe Josh will keep writing updates while I am down there so that we will have a week of them to update the site with when I finally get back. I am going to have a lot of free time on my hands while I am in SC, I think, so maybe I will get a chance to read some of the Harry Potter that everyone is always wanting me to read. And maybe I can finish that Asimov novel that I have been reading as well. I hope so, it would be nice to have a break for a change. Something totally non-stressful.

I did get a chance, today, to do a little bit of updating on the site. Notice that we now have a Letters to the Editor directory page. Also notice that there are very few letters. That is because our audience is incredibly lazy! So write to me!

I heard, today, about another site visitor who spent some serious time learning all about the Llamas from our site. We get quite a few people doing that, I have noticed. I always suspect that we have very few people coming to the site but in reality, I keep running into people who have been checking it out on a regular basis. I am very happy. (I was told, however, that our pictures from the New Year’s Party, last year, are pretty boring. So if any of you are holding out on pictures from that, send them to me.) – Scott

Josh: Hey Llamas, this will be a first for me. I’m writing this on Sunday, so if Scott doesn’t put this up right away you’ll know. We still haven’t figured out why my machine can’t directly update the page automatically. So we do this the hard way. I first write everything down. Then e-mail it to Scott. He then puts it for up for everyone to read.

Everyone knows that I recently got a tattoo. If anyone out there is thinking about it think long and hard. It’s like having a fork poked in your body (wherever your having the tattoo) over and over again. The straight lines aren’t to bad, but anything that curls feels really painful (almost like ripping your skin open w/ a blunt instrument.)

We Llama’s, I gotta go for today but ill try and keep things as up to date as Scottly possible.

TTYL [:-)]

November 3, 2001

Well, we managed to spend a little bit of time out on the Seneca Wine Trail today. We only managed to hit about four wineries but we had a good time and it took us all day. We started off at Bloomer Creek and had an early lunch there. It was very nice, they had some nice tee shirts there too so I stocked up on those. Altogether, I think that we bought about 2.5 cases of wine. One entire case is the Champagne for New Years. We got some really good stuff. The weather was really nice this morning, it got a little bit dark and dreary towards the end of the day but overall, it was a great day to be out on the trail.

Tomorrow is one of the last practices before Josh, Nate, Joe and I head off to march in Toronto. We all play in a marching band and Toronto is our biggest show of the year. I think that this is the band’s ninth time marching this show. So we will be marching outside tomorrow in Caledonia.

I attempted to plant my first hydroponic plants today. Three orange bell pepper plants. I am starting them from seeds so we will see how well this works. Maybe tomorrow I can get the next six planted. I am trying a couple different things to see if I can figure out how to do this. Hopefully this will work, I really like orange bell peppers. The orange bell pepper was developed right here in Ithaca at Cornell, you know.

My friend Sara discovered that the Datil Do-It Sauces that we love so much are actually available through your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart! I am very excited about that. Now I can really stock up. She found them at the Wal-Mart in Big Flats just off i86.

Loopy is working on his first video game to send into development studios as a demo. He has made a couple of things before like a PC game called Looptris that was essentially Tetris and Space eVaders which was a Space Invaders style game that actually ran on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Bob, Josh and I have Game Boy Colors and Loopy has the Game Boy Advance. I am still impressed by how well these systems fair compared to all the crap that is always coming out on the regular console systems. I will get a GBA when more stuff comes out for it. For now, my GBC is great and I have really cool stuff on it like Deja Vu I & II, Dragon Warrior I & II, Shadowgate and Tetris. How cool is that? I am a big time lover of the old adventure games from the late 1980’s and I think that it would be the coolest thing ever if games like the Bard’s Tale, King’s Quest, Tass Times in Tone Town and The Faery Tale Adventure were ported to the GBA. I would run out and buy them all. Deja Vu was one of my all time favorite games on the Amiga back when that was my main computer in 1987. I had a pirated copy back then but I eventually bought a real copy for the Amiga and one for the GBC. So, they got their money from me!

Josh and Dana decided to leave early because they are poopy heads. We were in the middle of watching Shrek (which you must see if you have not seen it yet) and they didn’t even finish it. Speaking of movies… the Llama house went out and saw Monsters Inc. last night here in Ithaca. That was a really good movie. Everyone really liked it. The computer animation was right up there with Shrek and Final Fantasy. FF is still the best that I have seen, though. There are moments when you might mistake it for real film! I also had the chance recently to see Memento. Phil has been trying to get me to see it forever. I can’t tell you anything about it but I suggest that you run right out and rent it because it totally rocks.

Other news includes Loopy and I deciding to be vegetarians five days a week to try to make our diets a little bit healthier. Loopy has been doing pretty well at it. I have decided to switch to at least six days a week and I have been doing pretty well at not eating meat at all. I thought that I was going to get cravings like I have gotten in the past but I have been eating a lot of soy and I have not been getting the cravings. So I am very happy. It has been for more than a month now since we started. Loopy’s sister Dana is also vegetarian as is Dominica’s roomate Sara. Dominica is eating an almost meat free diet in support of everybody. I will have a real challenge next week, though, as I am in DC and South Carolina and they do not support vegetarians very well there.

I bought my first Harry Potter book today. I guess I am going to give it a try. I am still skeptical. So, I will let you know what I think when I am done with it.

Ok, for any of you that have actually taken the time to read through our archives are painfully aware of my theories on sleeping. As you know, I sleep on the floor in as cold of an environment as I can get to reasonably. Well, I have discovered another really cool thing that I can do. Because I am sleeping on the floor and I keep my room cold, I normally have my heat registers closed or covered. Well, one of these registers got part way uncovered but only by part of my bed. The heat vent ended up filling my bed with warm air and making for the neatest sleep heater yet. The bottom half of the bed was toasty warm while the room was cold and the top of the bed was cool. It works really well. You have to set it up just right or you end up blocking off the vent altogether.

Ok, I think that that is enough of an update for today. Check in with us tomorrow and see what Llama excitement is happening! Also, I am expecting to be doing another hardware upgrade (a fairly big one) to our main web server in DC while I am down there next week. You may notice another performance increase on our site. Maybe not, but it isn’t costing us very much to do the upgrade so we are taking advantage of it. – Scott