I'm separating things out so this blog will remain personal (mostly cats and trips).  If you want to follow my technical rabble, take a look here:

http://blog.eppesconsulting.com/

My father-in-law was telling me the other day about how he heard of someone that spelled their name "le-ah".  Like me, he assumed the name was pronounced like Leah or perhaps Leigh.  As it turns out "the dash is sounded out" as they heard from the parents.  How do you say it?  Le-Dash-Ah or Ledasha.  Wow.

And do predators not watch Dateline and recognize the house when they show up?

"I hid the camera around the trailer for a while.  I got the idea off that show where the guy catches perverts in his kitchen every week.  He should really move..." - Randy on My Name Is Earl

As some of you already know, there was a litter of kittens born in the woods in our neighborhood.  They keep coming around looking for food, so we put some food out for them in the hopes that sometime soon we'll find someone that'll be willing to capture them and at least get them fixed if not find them a good home.  Interestingly, a raccoon lives in the woods too and also likes kitten food, but does not like cameras.

We've been having problems with our Dell Insprion 8200 recently...  mainly to do with the power supply and connector.  For a while there, it could be fixed by pushing the connector a certain way or propping something underneath the laptop.  As it turns out, we were experiencing two problems at once and just didn't realize it.  The first was that the cord on the power supply near the laptop connector had worn to the point that the smaller wires within the big wire had broken.  I had to cut this open and manage to solder them together.  I should probably purchase another power supply since this is likely to happen again since it has already happened to the three power supplies I already had.  The second problem is that the connector on the motherboard the power cord connects to was flakey.  Do you see the four regularly-spaced solder joints?  On the bottom line of that rectangle, do you see the triangle shaped set of three?  The connection on the bottom left corner is a bad solder joint.  I have no way of knowing if this came from the factory this way, but it's for sure there now.

I did fix it for a while by re-soldering the pin of the connector back down (effectively repairing the existing joint), but that eventually wore out again and I finally ended up soldering a wire to the back of the power connector and soldering the other end of it to the chip you see in the bottom right here, effectively bypassing the trace on the board.  The laptop seems to be fine now, it just looks a little strange to see an extra wire in a laptop.

Lily seems to think she's a monkey:

Brie purchased some sort of "Moon Plant" at the Helena ACE Hardware a while back.  It gets its name since it only blooms in the evening or at night.  It has little pods of seeds that it drops periodically.

Everyone got together for Brie's birthday...  even Emily and Jeremy came down to celebrate.  Laura and friends planned it out as if it was Brie's 6th birthday instead of her 26th...

Even Brie's sister Jade came to see her.

Water balloon toss:

Laura, Lauren, Brie, Steve, and I went to the 2007 Brewfest at Sloss Furnace sponsored by Free The Hops.  It was quite an interesting experience, especially since we had an opportunity to taste quite a few different beers. 

I must say though that there was only one beer that stood out as amazingly horrible.  That award would have to go to Rodenbach Grand Cru.  It was fruity and not at all what a beer should be.  Most of us poured it out on the ground.

This is Beans.  It is Brie and Steve's newest cat.  He's not quite a month younger than Lily, so as you can imagine, they're best buds.

We went to The Grape at 5 Points and Bell Bottoms.

Remember the Freak Moth?  I'm sure this isn't the same one since it's been so long, but it sure did get the cats attention.

Mr. Fred (my father-in-law) took me down to Montgomery for a Biscuits vs Barons game.  They have a pretty cool stadium that is built out of an old train depot:

The biggest question I have though, is what's up with their mascot?  It doesn't look like anything I've ever seen in nature before.  It's not too far off of a Snuffleupagus.  I really expected it to be named "biscuit eater".  But alas, it's just "Big Mo".

Ever seen a squirrel shimmy up the post of a bird feeder?  I think this is impressive:

I relized that I haven't posted about Lily yet.  She is our latest addition to the zoo.  She is 1/2 Siamese and 1/2 Black Cat, but she looks entirely Siamese to everyone.  She is an insane little kitten.  I belive she was born on March 17.

More Lily:

This sequence is amusing to me since George is doing his best to sleep in one of his usual spots, but apparently Lily wants to play, so she climbs all over him biting him.  He is amazingly patient, especially with her:

And then when he's had enough, he grabs her and subdues her:

And then holds her down and cleans her.  I'm pretty sure that's not what she had in mind.

Brie and Steve joined us for Helena's annual Buck Creek Festival.  The main section of the festival was a lot of booths for food and arts & crafts type businesses.  It was interesting to walk around, but wasn't really my scene.

We entered the rubber duck race, which was amusing to watch.  Here they are trying to "launch" all the rubber ducks.  As you can see, there were quite a few of them.

Once the ducks got to the spillway, they couldn't always make it over the edge, so quite often they'd just sit on top.  Amusingly, you can see in the picture how the water on the left side is flowing freely while the water in the middle has almost completely stopped flowing.

The one big downside that I saw to the Buck Creek Festival was that after the race, several hundred people had to walk back to the main part of the park.  All of them had to funnel down to a single-file line as the "bridge" to get back over part of the water was a 2' wide piece of steel.  A lot of folks got fed up (like the kid in the lower left) and just walked through the water. 

What do you think it means if you go to a restaurant and get a fortune cookie that doesn't have a fortune in it?

Ok, so I know the correct word for a baby goose is a gosling, but I couldn't help it.  Here is one following its mother (I assume) in our parking lot at work. 

After celebrating Laura's birthday, several folks were surprised to see one of these on their cars when they left.  I realize the city of Helena passed a law making it illegal to park on the street.  I also realize that it is very inconvenient when other folks park on the street.  I just don't know what the comprimise is since most houses only have places for about 5 cars. 

The girls did a spectacular job of decorating for Laura's birthday.  The theme was a black and white movie-type thing and everyone pitched in to decorate the house while I distracted Laura.  Even Emily and Jeremy made the journey down to Birmingham.

We went to a Barons game a while back for Thirsty Thursday.  They had pepople in life-sized Oreo and milk costumes.  I've been trying to decide for a while now if that is the coolest costume ever or if that'd be the worst job ever...

This has to be one of the strangest stuffed animals I've ever seen...  it's label says it's a "crocodile", but I've never seen a crocodile with long, floppy, Easter-bunny-ish ears.  Get yours now at World Market!

Laura, Christa, and I went to see Carrie sing with the Birmingham Concert Chorale back in April...

Just in case you can't make out which one is Carrie, she's in the upper left...  here is a zoom.

A new Whole Foods opened up in Mountain Brook and we took a shopping cart for a spin.  How ridiculous is it that they have a built-in cup holder for your Starbucks and your bagel?

another batch of boneless "chicken wings".

George was outside the other day and was stung by a bee.  This picture was taken after he'd been to the vet to get a shot to help him out. 

LAuren was kind enough to take us up to North Georgia Wine Country back in April.  On the way up, we stopped at an Applebees before we got too far away from civilization.  As it turned out, they were having a special on beer for $2.  The ladies ordered margaritas at about $8 each.  Who do you think go the better deal?

Here is Lauren sneaking a taste of my beer through a straw (I believe on a dare just to see what would happen).

This is the woods outside where we stayed...  The area up there was absolutely beautiful.

On the way back out of town, we stopped an got gas...  it was a little scary as this was the only store we had enough gas to get to:

We had Easter at our house for a bunch of our friends...

We did secret-Santa style easter baskets.  Steve drew my name and in it there was a Yard-O-Beef.  Here's a picture relative to a DVD case, so you can see it's not quite a yard, but it's certainly large enough to beat someone with.

How many of you remember Dan Quayle?  I saw this the other day in Publix.  Apparently Dan isn't the only one that mis-spells potato.

Laura and I met Steve and Brie at Superior Grill before heading out to Jeremy and Emily's bachelor party.  It ended up being a bad idea, but it sounded like a good idea at the time.

The margaritas were quite nice.  The beer was incredibly small and was almost the same price as the margarita.  We put one of the hot sauce bottles next to the beer for a size reference.

We were all distracted when the Wienermobile drove down 280.  It stopped in a parking lot and we took a few pictures:

Then everyone piled into my car and headed to the party:

Laura loves this article as it justifies what she's always known.  I like it because it says she has a "defect" :)

And just in case the image doesn't come through clearly:

It used to be that "only your hairdresser knows for sure" whether you color your hair, but redheads can now include their anesthesiologist.  A recent study showed that natural redheads need 20 percent more surgical anesthesia than do women with other hair colors.
Dr. Daniel Sessler, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Lousiville, said he and his colleagues scientifically proved what anesthesiologists long have noticed in the operating room: that redheads seem to require more anesthesia.
To test their theory, Sessler and his co-workers induced general anesthesia in 20 healthy women - 10 with naturally bright-red hair and 10 with dark hair.  They then observed how the subjects responded to a pain stimulus.  Depending on the pain response, the anesthesiologists raised or lowered the dose of desflurane, a common inhaled anesthesic, until the ideal dose was reached.  Redheads needed significantly higher doses than either the dark-haired subjects or the few blondes the researchers tested.
One explanation why carrot-tops need stronger anesthesia is that they possibly have greater pain sensitivity.  They have a defect in the "melanocortin-1 receptor," which makes red pigment instead of the normal dark pigment (melanin) for hair.

So it seems that just about every bank under the sun right now is trying to tighten up their security online.  I can understand it to a point.  I thought one bank took the cake by requiring me to type in an 8+ character password using a graphical keyboard on the web page (not allowed to use the keyboard).  Bank of America gets the award for most amusing implementation.  I thought it'd be funny to pick what appeared to be a cracker as my SiteKey.  And of course, to complement it, I used the word "cracker" as the image title.

That's right, "Your SiteKey Image Title cannot contain profanity."  Cracker.  Really?!?

A different bank got it right and didn't think "cracker" was profane.

I think this is the most I've seen at once so far...  they're about 6 inches across at most.  Four turtles on a log in our "lake":

Christian scored us tickets to the home closer for Georgia Tech...  it was vs BC. 

He brough Emily along to enjoy the game:

Amusingly, at halftime, the soundsystem guys were having problems, so instead of dancing, the GT dance team stood in this position for about 3 minutes while no music was playing (or the beginning of the wrong music was playing).  They got huge applause when they finally left as I think everyone knew just how embarrassed they must have been having never been able to perform their dance:

Howdy.

Back in February, Jeremy, Ryan, Steve, and I went up to Nashville to see a Predators vs Red Wings game.  All of them are pretty big Red Wings fans (they all had jerseys and the like). 

On princilpe, Jeremy has to buy a "40" of beer whenever he goes to a state that sells them:

Steve and Ryan robbed an ATM on the way to the arena:

Inside the arena:

During the game, there was a little girl sitting next to Steve that must have been about 5.  She knew more about hockey than he did.  I believe that drove him to drink quite a few beers.  When we got back to the hotel (and before we hit downtown Nashville), Steve passed out in the chair, still holding a beer.  His hand didn't know it was removed:

So sad:

When we came back from the various places downtown, he had managed to crawl into bed: