chessandlena.com

Lena and I are officially back from parts south & east; more specifically, the Home Country, Sanibel Island, and Epcot. We have been back since Sunday night. We drove. Ugh. Anyway. More later. Too tired to elaborate right now, but good trip.

not sure if we're coming back. Evar!

I got what is perhaps the oddest email spam title ever:

FLUTE CASE COVERS.

okay... yeah, I got nothing.

I don't know what it is, but those who pun will pun again.

So I'm driving to go get a paper this morning, just a quick ramble around the hood. I'm listening to NPR, as I am wont to do, and they're doing a piece on Coptic Christians in Egypt. I'm barely listening, as my window is rolled down and I'm enjoying the (finally) warm wind on my face.

I stop for a red light, and a police car pulls up beside me, and the officer inside it and I trade sidelong glances, nods, and a short wave that says, from me, you're a cop and I'm going to try not to do anything uberstupid while you can see me, so please don't drag me off the road and shoot me like a dog, and from him, you're making eye contact with me, but you're probably not a tweaked-out meth-head, so I'll let you go without dragging you off the road and shooting you like a dog. This time. But don't look me in the eye again. Ever.

And, all of a sudden, completely unbidden, into my head pops the line, Cheezit! The Copts!

God, I feel so sorry for Lena some days. What she married...

From the holy-God-I'm-tired department:

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wonder are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither, garbage bins were not made to be crossed.
(apologies to Tolkien)

When cats attack:

Conversation, negotiation, or commiseration? You make the call:

Finally, this is Lena if she were a cat, where sleep-ridden conversations have dropped to the level of autonomic responses:

The latest in our Pointless Waste of Time video series presents to you sci-fi/fantasy TV pilots that never made it past the pilot. God alone knows why. I mean, come on! The Man With the Power! Genius! Featuring George Kennedy, Leonard Nimoy, clones, Godzilla's one and only speaking role, that guy from BJ and the Bear, and of course, dazzling special effects.

This had me crying.

Sigh. This video lands me somewhere between nostalgia, homesick, and longing for the late summer of '95, when I was in Estonia with Lena and her brother, studying classical guitar, was practicing and playing all the time. Happy times, and a great soundtrack. :)

I would love to learn this lady guitarist's name... flattering though "Crazy Asian Guitarist" is, I'm sure it's not the one she would release any recordings under.

In other pointless news, I picked up a small red laser pointer, specially marketed as a pet toy, for five bucks. Dasha loves it. Maya loves it. Bear fears it. I've unintentionally terrorized the little guy several times already. Fortunately for all of us, he's got a memory only slightly better than that of a goldfish, and he forgets almost as soon as he runs away.

Anyway, today was laundry day at the compound. Here are a few of the sights.

Ah, regular expressions. If do right, no can defense.

txt2re.com

Behold, a tool for generating regular expressions from a string. Particularly nice that you can generate in 15 different languages. Might be of some use.