Month: February 2006

Mr. Dump has bad luck when he flies. Not when he flies with me, but typically when he flies on business. One time, the guy sitting next to him had a heart attack and died mid-flight. That was probably the worst of the bad experiences. He was so freaked out by the dead guy that he went into the airplane bathroom and passed out, wrenching his bad knee, making a bad situation even worse (for Mr. Dump anyway).

Yesterday he had a cross-country flight and dropped a can of Dr. Pepper on himself, so he had to sit for 2.5 hours waiting for jeans to dry. I’m guessing it was fairly unpleasant. But worse, he got stuck sitting next to a woman who talked to herself. A lot. That’s a long time to be stuck next to someone who more than likely has some psychological problems. Ms. Chatty also didn’t do well during the approach to the airport, which was fairly turbulent. She asked Mr. Dump for his airsickness bag because there wasn’t one in her seat pocket.

Mr. Dump doesn’t do well around people who are throwing up.

Ms. Chatty announced to her invisible friends, “Last time I did this I used 2 bags.” I can only imagine the look of horror on his face as she said it, while trying to ignore the fact that she was throwing up next to him. This sentence was followed by “When it go to this point I had to switch.”

You cannot imagine how hard I was laughing when he told me this story. Luckily she only needed the one bag and Mr. Dump didn’t join her. But God, can you even imagine?

There are a couple of people (like 5 or so) from my high school class who I’ve always wondered about…wondered what happened to them after high school, where they ended up, what they are doing. I didn’t have a lot of close friends in high school, but I was a fringe member of a group of kids who did theater and and seemed to end up in the same college prep classes.

But those folks aren’t signed up with classmates.com so every once in a while, like when my classmate Tony died in January, I think about them and continue to wonder.

I hate to say that I found out the hard way today where one of them lives, because her dad was the man who died in the fire yesterday. So even though she probably doesn’t read this website, probably doesn’t know that she’s on my list of people that I wish I’d kept in touch with, I just wanted to set out my thoughts and prayers to the Dunn family.

For lack of real content, I’ll provide you with some filler material today. I know you want to know what’s on the old iPod for your “Be Like Jody Day” day. I’ll break it down into to categories: What is physically playing right now, and what shows up as the top 5 most played songs.

Now Playing: Death Cab for Cutie’s CD “Plans.”

Top Five Most Played: Oh crap, I can’t tell which ones are the top five. My “most played” playlist has 25 items in it and I think it’s sorted by date added, not by number of plays. I’ll have to look in iTunes when I get home to see the exact number of plays.

Also, here is a picture I “painted” using the oil brush tool in Paint Shop Pro. I am in artiste mode, apparently.

Lastly, to add to the list of items that I like that may be discontinued add L’Oreal’s Airwear Concealer. I can’t find it in my normal haunts, and it didn’t look like CVS had an empty space where it would have been. Grrr.

Okay, that was a crappy title. I’ve been searching for animation software for a while. Something that would “fill in the blanks” as it were. You know, sort of like Flash does, filling in the blanks between A and B without me having to do it. Because I don’t have the energy to fill in all the blanks.

I’ve been looking for a tool out there that is in my budget (let’s say no more than a hundred bucks, better at 50 or less) but does what I want. I think maybe I found something in my search. It’s called Moho and it’s by a company called Lost Marble. I’m playing with the trial version and I can save my files in color with their logo all over it, or as a Flash file but it only saves my drawings in black and white. I will share my first effort with you in Flash format because it is a way smaller file. The background is still in color, because it’s a photo that I put in. So forgive the amateur nature of my work, but hey, I only downloaded the software an hour before I saved this file.

Oh, and to register it costs $100, so that’s good too!

Click to view my file

Okay, and to show how someone could REALLY use this software, here’s a video someone else made as part of a contest run on the support forum for the software. It’s FANTASTIC, and safe for the kids. In fact, I think the kids will dig it.

I was very excited to try Campbell’s “Soup at Hand(r)” soup, chicken with mini-noodles flavor. You are supposed to just heat and sip it through a little hole in the lid. For this reason, instead of the way cool long noodles their standard canned soup comes with, this one was full of little round noodles. Have you ever had Spaghettios? Okay, well you know how there are three sizes of Os? Well they used the tiny ones in this soup.

So okay, I get over that initial disappointment. The next disappointment is the consistency. This soup is wayyyy too thick. It’s like the canned soup if you forget to put in a can of water. That’s just too much soup for my taste. So now I’ve heated up a can of thick soup filled with little mini Os.

And you’re supposed to just sip this soup, no spoon needed. But low and behold, when you’ve run out of the broth pudding (okay, it’s not that bad but doesn’t that paint a pretty picture?), there’s a stack of noodle Os left at the bottom of the cup! How am I supposed to sip that?!

I can’t. I’m only human. I have to go get a spoon.

Do you see what I mean? And that was only about 1/3 of what was left in the can.

I’m so disappointed. Mmm Mmm Good my butt!