I love taking photos of my dog
Our dog's pretty photogenic (at least I think so), and because they got treats for taking photos when they were little, the moment they hear the camera noise come on they sit at attention and do something cute out of habit - whether they were the intended target or not.
It doesn't hurt when my dog does something really cute, such as this. We call her "Nana dog" or occasionally "Mama dog" because sometimes she displays an undeniable maternal instinct. Anything "baby" automatically becomes her baby, regardless of species. In this particular instance, it was a stray kitten that creeped out of the floorboards (literally) and found it's way to her.
After snuggling for a while, it (or maybe one of it's siblings, climbed on her back)... that will simply not do, so she tenderly grabbed it and put it back between her front legs where it was "safe".
I'm tempted to buy a digital frame to display these kinds of pictures in, but I think I'm old fashioned that I prefer ordering prints and getting an old "wood and glass" frame to store a single photo in, so I can look at the exact photo I want, when I want.
'Tis the season...
... for stuff to break.
The water somewhere in the upper part of our truck appears to have frozen, so it ran hot for a while and when we shut it off something burst and it pissed coolant everywhere. I'm hoping the damage is localized to something inexpensive, but we'll have to see. Freezing water can occasionally be the death of engines, so here's hoping it's nothing too serious.
The cooling fan on the GPU for my wife's computer is almost had it. It's making the familiar "groan" noise they do on the way out, so she's stopped leaving it on at night and is forbidden to play games. I've been hunting around, but it doesn't even appear that they sell GPU fan kits any more, and most all GPUs these days have a goofy logo-plastered fan/heatsink on them making finding another fan difficult. Her last two GPUs had the fans go out as well, however both of those went out in summer and cooked the GPU, I guess we did get at least a little lucky.
Our laptop is almost completely screwed up, I can't wait to get it fixed. I'm tempted to take another look at it, it seems to me like there might be a bad resistor (hopefully, because I can diagnose those easy) in the power management area - it seems to think it's "over voltage" when it's not... IE, when you plug it in, or when the battery is fully charged, it won't come on. If the thing is like 80% charged you can use it until the battery runs dead and it behaves just fine.
I don't feel like breaking out my old Toshiba Satellite (which is so painfully slow, about all it's good for is browsing very simple webpages), so it's the desktop or nothing. There's a terrible draft coming from somewhere around my desk, too, which makes that option even less appealing.
Finally, parts of our house's water froze yesterday as well, so I spent the better part of yesterday thawing everything out with an arrangement of heaters and a blowdryer.
Hopefully that's the worst of the bad news though, christmas is coming up and I would really like for it to go smoothly.
Weird Winter Sleeping Patterns
It's 1:30am and I'm not tired in the slightest.
Over winter, our house has weird characteristics. It'll warm up from about 9pm and stay warm until around 4am when it starts to get freezing. I have no idea why this is, you would think the house would be warmest from noon until early evening, but that's almost never the case.
So our sleep pattern in the winter almost always ends up consisting of us waking up around noon and going to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. This used to be my most productive time, but since I started playing various MMORPGs, not so much (some friends found a really neat private server for Phantasy Star Online, which is cool - some might say it was the birth of the MMORPG genre, unless you're a douchebag then you'd say EverQuest or WoW was, depending on your level of douchebaggery).
All jokes about diet pills aside, I've really got to stop doing this. It's not really that cold, but I'm too cold/lazy to walk downstairs to get something decent to eat, so I'm eating some cookies I got tonight, because I didn't put them far enough away.
Yep, that's right, I have this weird trick I can play on myself. If I put food or soda or something stupid too close to me, I'll eat it mindlessly - occasionally to the point of getting sick. If I put it just out of reach, I won't touch it.
Fortunately, we keep the bottles of water within easy reach.
