The Big DumpTruck

I'm not sure if you guys still need me to post when there's an updated DumpCast. I suppose I could set it up over on BlogRolling and ping it when it's updated. Or maybe theres an RSS feed built in to the website (I use iWeb to do that one, I have no idea what's built in. Is that lazy of me?)

Let's see...in other news...I was really disappointed with my lunch today. I'm sorry, it had to be said. My dinner, however, was excellent. Thanks for cooking, Mr. Dump!

Labels: podcast, video

I've decided to not try out for American Idol. Mostly because I can't really sing. I can sing but I can't sing. So I would have to go on the show as one of those flashy people, you know, dressing up like a chicken or whatever. And that wouldn't be good for anyone. You do NOT want to see me dressed up like a chicken, under any circumstances.

So no need to thank me. I know you're grateful.

Oh and to make you even more thankful, I won't be singing any Celine Dion. I never sing Celine Dion. I'm just sayin'.

Labels: American Idol, singing, tv

No, no, no, no, we didn't give her away. (Are you daft? She was one of Junior's 10th birthday presents. You can't just give away a birthday present like that. If you could, Mike the Fish wouldn't have lived with us for 3+ years.)

No, we had a lot of issues with her in the fancy hamster home we originally purchased for her, as I mentioned in my earlier post. So we took Karen's advice and bought a 10 gallon aquarium, one of those grate thingies for the top, a new "silent" wheel [more on that later] and a little wooden 2-story house. She digs the house. We decided that the bedroom is on the first floor, though, so it's a non-traditional layout. I assumed the kitchen and living room were on the first floor, but that's where she naps.

This is a good move for all of us, because I have to tell you, it's far easier to clean a big glass square than it was to clean that nightmare of a cage. Sure, it looked good, but Izzy is a pooping and peeing machine, I tell you, and if I have to clean it more than once a week, I need it to be easy to do.

Oh, and the silent wheel. Well, it is silent. The wheel part. But the base that holds the wheel? When she's running at full speed the whole thing kind of shakes and now that she's in a glass box, the metal base thingy was just banging against the bottom of the tank. It sounded like a construction site. So I put a piece of cardboard in the bottom of the tank (also good for chewing!) and put the wheel on top of that. I didn't hear her ONCE last night, which was the first time since we got her that I didn't. I think we're on the right path now - we just need to get Phantom to understand that she's not a snack food waiting to be eaten.

Labels: Izzy, pets, phantom

Me: So, you awake in there?

Izzy: Zzzzzzzzzz

Me: [poke poke]

Izzy: Hey! Oh, it's you.

Me: Ya, it's me. Who were you expecting?

Izzy: The short one. He sneaks me sunflower seeds when you aren't looking. By the way, my ass is huge, I'm scared I won't fit in the tubes soon.

Me: I'll be sure to let him know.

Izzy: So what's doin'?

Me: I wanted to talk to you about the purse thing.

Izzy: Oh, right. That.

Me: Ya, that. You know, that was my favorite Vera Bradley purse.

Izzy: I didn't know that. You never told me.

Me: I shouldn't have had to.

Izzy: Also, it was dark. And the thing was leaning against my cage. How was I supposed to know?

Me: I don't know. I guess once you tasted it, could you have maybe thought to yourself "hey, this isn't a food product"?

Izzy: Those pink things you put in my cage don't taste like food products either, you know.

Me: Those are for you to gnaw on, so your teeth don't grow out of control.

Izzy: Maybe I thought that's what the strap was.

Me: ...

Izzy: Well maybe it was!

Me: ...

Izzy: Are you done? If I don't get back to sleep I won't be able to run in my wheel all night.

Izzy is cute, that's for sure. She should get down on her knees and thank the good Lord above that she is, and that I love my son, her owner, because she would have been released into the snowy wild this morning if I had my way.


You see, in the middle of the night I had to go and move her cage because she had decided to move all of her bedding and a lot of her food into the "wheel" section of her cage. And when she decided to run in it in the middle of the night, all the bedding fell back out into the tube and left only the seeds, which rattled around as she ran. And ran. And ran. It was like someone shaking a pair of maracas.


So at one in the morning, I stumbled downstairs with the cage, shoved stuff out of the way and put the cage on the counter. I then stumbled back upstairs to try to fall back to sleep.


This morning Mr. Dump broke the news to me that I hadn't pushed things quite far enough out of the way, and Izzy spent a large portion of the night chewing through the strap of a [discontinued] Vera Bradley purse that she had pulled in through the wire of the cage.


I am so very very very angry with her. There had better be a letter of apology on the door of her cage when I get home tonight.

Labels: family, Izzy, pets

I got my birthday present a week early (well, one of my birthday presents, I'm sure, right honey? Right?)...I picked up a Flip video camera to use for the DumpCast. It's not the high quality one I want to fully replace the Sony that broke, but I didn't want to have to wait until this summer to have ANY kind of video camera device. The Flip was on sale at Best Buy and I also had a coupon so bargain city!

The first results of the Flip filming is available on the DumpCast webpage (or via iTunes). The second one is being fine tuned and will be up later today. That's two in two days. You can't beat that type of quantity, er, quality entertainment!

Let's just say that the first podcast features someone cheating at a game, and the second one summarizes our road trip to Maine. Cause if you can't make a movie about your road trip, well, what kind of movie director are you?

Labels: camera, movies, podcast, video

Junior has inherited my poor spelling skills, if the test I had to sign today because the score was so bad is any indication. I seem to have forged out a life for myself despite the fact that I had to use spell check to make sure I spelled "despite" correctly. (I did.)

Of course, out in the real world, being a lousy speller can embarrass you in front of millions. Check out this ABC News Headline (from their RSS feed, captured on Google)




Stox? Is this person a Boston native? Because yes, I do find myself having a bit of a problem if I have to write the word "socks" when not referring to the local baseball team.

Labels: News, words

Okay, quick, tell me what this is:

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If you guessed "Mr. Dump playing Guitar Hero with the television muted" you'd be right!

My God, that is just a horrifying treat for the whole family if only one person is playing and the others are surfing the web on their laptops while they sit in the recliner, pondering the meaning of life and re-doing the household budget so that there is a small amount of cash available so that you can eat dinner at Chilis because you have a fierce addiction to their chips and salsa. (Yes, I am reduced to wanting to spend money on chips and salsa. I think that's better than trying to figure out how to get $400 to buy a replacement video camera, anyway.)

Anyhoo, thank you for playing. And someone promise me that a version of Guitar Hero for Wii will come out with something other than "Legends of Rock" or whatever this is. I hate 80% of the songs on here, and if I have to listen to Miss Murder one more time I'm going to scream. I have an idea. They should come out with a classical guitar version of G.H. You could play like Andres Segovia or something.

Labels: fun, music, odd, wii

Izzy is Junior's new friend. She's a teddybear hamster. She is getting used to us. Phantom is not getting used to her. We knew he'd freak out, but whew!

Izzy's photo on Flickr...

Labels: hamster, Izzy, pets

I am home today because I have an earache and oh, because it's snowing like crazy outside. This is the 15th or 16th straight Monday that we've had a storm of some kind.

Okay, maybe not the 15th or 16th, and certainly not straight, but every storm so far this year, and I count ice storms, too, has happened on a Monday. I know this because we have the "do you think the rubbish guys are going to come today" conversation practically every Sunday night. The one time they did come, I showed you photos of them shooshing all over the street. So far, no trucks today, but I almost didn't expect them.

The other treat is trying to figure out where to place the barrels so that the plows don't knock garbage all over the yard. So you need to put them fairly far down (in case the rubbish truck does show up) but not so far that the snow thrown up by the plow doesn't knock it over. It's a delicate balance.

Personally, I'm ready for the next storm to be on a day other than Monday. Let some other part of Leominster deal with wondering if they should put out the rubbish.

Labels: chores, snow, weather

I have been downloading a ton and a half of video podcasts now that I have a new iPod nano that shows video. I highly recommend the following free, free, all free, podcasts, available for your viewing enjoyment even as we speak:

• Discovery Channel Video Podcast
• Nation Geographic's Atmosphere
• Onion News Network (Video)
• VH1 Best Week Ever
• Vintage ToonCast

Of these, the Onion News Network wins a prize for blowing me away at the amount of effort put into simulating a CNN-like news network. The "set" and graphics and music and live interviews...holy cow, my hat is off to the guys at the Onion.

VH1 Best Week Ever is cool because it's almost sort of like "The Soup" Lite. I would love for The Soup to be available as a free podcast. I'm not going to pay for it because I download it to my Tivo, but I don't always have time to watch it. It is one of my favorite shows, though.

The Discovery Channel Video Podcast gives you behind the scenes and background on bits from some of your favorite Discovery Channel shows. I'm in it for my Mythbusters addiction.

National Geographic's Atmosphere is just gorgeous footage that basically works as an almost screen saver. If you love stunning footage of nature, this is the podcast to end all podcasts.

Vintage Tooncast - public domain cartoons, and lots of videos flagged as explicit because the content is inappropriate for today's kidlings. You can imagine some of the images from back in the day all on your own, I'm sure. But if you are like me, the slice of American life seen in some of the old propaganda cartoons is endlessly fascinating. (Side note: A friend of mine just mentioned that a new DVD is coming out with old Sesame Street bits and it's flagged as being inappropriate for today's toddlers. I cannot WAIT to get my hands on that.)

I have some footage for a new DumpCast just waiting to be processed this weekend, so keep your eyes peeled for that as well. It's not quite as good as the ones mentioned above, but they aren't attempting to be mundane, now, are they? No, I don't think so.

Labels: itunes, review

Had an interesting few moments at UNO last night for Junior's birthday dinner. We were sitting in the bar area because Junior and I like to play the trivia game and Mr. Dump wanted to watch the San Diego football game.

For some reason, Step-Junior noticed something under the table that Mr. Dump confirmed was [ewwwww] thong underwear.

There was a thong on the floor under our table.

SO many thoughts on this, I almost had a complete mental shutdown. But in summary, I will stay on the innocent side: how spicy do the buffalo wings have to be that you find yourself removing your underwear to cool off?

And no, we didn't tell anyone. I wanted the staff to assume they were mine.

Labels: odd, restaurants

You know, I was all excited about dipping in to the archives to pull out some quotes from 10 years ago, but 10 years ago the Dump was sort of in transition and half the content was hand-edited and some but not all was on blogger, and the end result is that a lot of my content was lost when I moved from my ISP and they deleted a bunch of my files on me before I could copy them. Which is the long, round-about way of saying "Happy 10th Birthday" to Junior, who made his first appearance on "Mookie's Driver Training Page" way back in the day. (Those pages are, sadly, part of history.)

If any of you are obsessed fans who laboriously saved every word I wrote to your hard drive, I'd be more than happy to have a copy of the archives. You know, as long as it wouldn't involve me having to have personal contact with anyone who would have laboriously saved every word I wrote to their hard drive.

Junior and Step-Junior went for a morning of skiing with Mr. Dump, who will just be watching. I am as sick as a dog today, and am hoping to feel good enough to continue the birthday celebrations after they get home near lunchtime. Wish me luck!

Labels: birthdays, blogs, family, junior

I did not realize I forgot to post my New Year's Eve story. I apologize for making you wait so long. The shame of it all!

But seriously, Mr. Dump and Junior and I stayed home. Step-Junior went out to dinner with some friends but was home by 10-ish. We stayed up to watch the ball drop, our only snack companion some cheese and crackers, and onion dip and chips. (I think I may have out-grown onion dip. Seriously. 4 or 5 chips and I was done).

The men-folk wanted to watch some true-crime thing on the History Channel, but that is not really festive, if you ask me. We ended up watching a DVD of Will Ferrell's "greatest" SNL bits. (I have a hard time believing some of the ones chosen were the best he did in 7 years with SNL, but I did not produce the dvd.)

At about 5 minutes of midnight we put the tv back on network television so we could watch the ball drop. We watch the countdown, 5. 4. 3. *click* We're suddenly watching something on I think the Discovery Channel.

So we missed moment the ball finished dropping. We rang in the New Year with completely puzzled looks on our faces. Now we have a Tivo, and it automatically records things that we ask it to, but there is some kind of bug with ours because it's SUPPOSED to ask us if we want to cancel the pending recording and stay on what we're watching, but it only does that I'd say 30% of the time now. Often it will just unceremoniously dump you into a new program. Picture the famous "Heidi Bowl" football game from 1968 - with 64 seconds left in the game, the network cut to a showing of the movie Heidi and anyone watching on television missed a 14 point comeback. Our Tivo often "Heidi"s us, often at very inappropriate times.

So we missed the actual moment it became 2008. So did it happen?

Labels: holidays, sports, television