Crazy was up here last weekend for City Stages.  He rented a car so he could run around town.  Funny that he flew in from Texas just to get a rental car with a Texas license plate:

I'm almost certain I've seen this car out on the road since then with a new driver.  Strange that it would happen in a city of about a million people.

And while we're on the subject of Crazy, I got an email from him the other day that was hilarious.  It had this picture in it:

And here I am giving him the benefit of the doubt thinking he was drawing on a sheet of paper and using his laptop as a desk.  Well, unfortunately, I was not correct.  Apparently Rakesh had his laptop in one hand and a dry erase marker in the other and decided it would be a good idea to draw on it under the premise that he'd be able to dry erase it later.  Wrong.

So one somewhat boring friday afternoon Laura finally convinces me to leave work a couple hours earlier than I probably should have.  I should have been afraid.  Very afraid.  When I opened my garage door, these two nut jobs came running out.  I think this picture pretty much sums up the evening:

We called a few old friends and said hi:

Still not sure why Christian had the sweeper vac out.  Also not sure why Chris is trying to kick it.

And in his normal form, Christian tried to kiss another guy:

And what does this picture of Laura have to do with the guys visiting?  This is a picture of her taking a picture of Chris with her phone.  Where is she?  The hospital.  Why is she there?  See in a minute.

Yes, that's right, this picture was taken with a camera phone in a hospital:

And here is the real reason Laura was at the hospital....

Chris broke one of the bones in his hand.  Punched one of the support beams to our deck.  Oops.

Despite all the pain and suffering of the night before, we still managed to head into Anniston to see little Adon.  Good to meet the little guy finally.

We received these letters on the same day:

Let me explain why this is even worthy of a post...

Over Memorial Day weekend when Doug was here, he apparently lost some of his business cards and club memberships out of his wallet (not sure how he lost part but not all of his wallet).  He sounded like he'd want them back, so I put them in an envelope with $0.39 and sent them on their merry way.

Laura's mom was trying to send something to us.  Not sure if she even knew the USPS rates had gone from $0.37 to $0.39 for a 1oz letter.

But surprisingly, the letter up top is the one with just $0.37 postage on it and was delivered to us from Huntsville without a problem.

The bottom letter shown was the one with adequate postage for its weight ($0.39) but it was returned telling us we needed $0.13 more postage.  I'm assuming this is the non-machinable surcharge since their machine probably didn't take it without choking.

Madness I tell you.  Grrr.

I finally got a decent picture of an example of a local fire department (which shall remain nameless) doing something that really annoys me...  they needlessly block off lanes of I-459 at 5pm just because they feel like it.  The cause of all this madness is two cars that probably bumped each other in traffic (probably in a very similar situation to all the cars that are piling up behind the mess caused by them blocking off a lane) that are now currently completely off the side of the shoulder.  Not just on the shoulder, but OFF THE SIDE.  So why then would you park a fire truck in one of the traffic lanes instead of at least on the shoulder if not off the edge of the shoulder?  I have no idea.

This brings me back to a year and a half ago when I got in a wreck at almost this same place (just on the left shoulder).  This fire department apparently is having to justify its existance by responding to every emergency call possible on the interstate.  It was very obvious to me which department had this section of the road since I got a fire truck, and ambulance, and an entire fleet of trainees.  How did I know they were trainees?  They had t-shirts that literally said "trainee".  Go figure. 

Unfortunately, even though I knew which fire department we were serviced by, it was a little bit of a grey area as to which police district needed to write up the accident report.  We were right in-between Hoover and Vestavia Hills, so either police group could have responded.  We were in Jefferson County, so the sheriff could have responded.  But no, we got stuck with a State Trooper.  It took the better part of an hour for them to show up (in the middle of a city no less) to spend 10 minutes to write up some paperwork.  The ENTIRE TIME we were waiting on the trooper to show up the fire truck was blocking the left lane of I-459 since apparently once someone responds to an "emergency", someone must stay there until the call has been resolved.  Oh joy.

How did CB get a grape?  I really don't know.  I figure it was left behind by someone at our last party.  It was starting to get a little squishy and had loose skin.  Kinda fitting CB had it, isn't it.

So I finally decided it'd be a good idea to chop down the forest of weeds we had in our back yard.  Unfortunately, I had to do it all by hand:

Also decided to pressure wash part of the back sidewalk with Max's pressure washer (thanks Max!).  I still need to do the driveway.  Hopefully I'll get around to that sometime soon:

And finally...  Laura thought she met her maker the other day...  a wasp flew in the house and she was very afraid.  I came home early that day to remedy the situation, but when I got there, there was no sign of the wasp at all.  The next day when I got home from work, Laura had found it and it was doing the backstroke in a puddle of wasp spray in the foyer:

Laura found the littlest butterfly:

I found a little lizard that had climbed most of the way up the house to sun himself:

Wilson stayed with us for almost two weeks around Memorial Day:

Bella in a basket:

Tongue:

Caitlin went a little nuts with the letters from a craft project:

Monkey on a motorcycle?

Why were there ducks in our front yard the other morning?

George voted:

Lizard mating call:

The Force on the Ramblin' Wreck:

George and Bella do laundry:

This weekend I think we accomplished what Rob wanted us to do...  party hard:

Christian and some friends came over from Atlanta and partied hard as well:

Brian showed up for the third consecutive time, further backing up his story that he shows up when he's invited:

Rob hung out with all the ladies.  I've never been quite sure why they put up with him:

Fun was had by all:

And there was only one minor incident...  do you see what Christian is standing in?

That would be most of a 10 pound bag of CB's cat food.  And what's the best way to pick up 10 pounds of cat food off of a flat floor?  With a flimsy paper plate of course:

I'm still trying to figure out how it was that Jennifer went from standing in the previous picture to laying down in cat food in this one.  I would say she was rolling around on the floor because she was laughing so hard, but I think it might have actually been that she slipped.

Anyway, Dave is confused by the lack of efficiency with which Christian is cleaning up the mess:

But before he can act, Max swoops in to the rescue:

So all in all, I think everyone had a good time.  Even little Poo had some fun:

I think Doug has the right idea. 

Over the years, Christian has always managed to steal my camera whenever we were on a trip or having a party.  The problem is he likes to take pictures of himself.  What better way to honor this tradition than to immortalize it by putting it on the web.  Here is a photo montage (from oldest to newest):

I must say that this is the scariest one so far. 

Where have you been my old friend?  You used to keep me company at night with a blinding amber light that never wavered, never blinked.  I must say I've missed you and yet I haven't missed you.  I saw you the other day and now you're gone again.  It's amazing how frequently you can just drop by and bring so much enjoyment to my life (swearing, wishing I had somehow invoked the lemon law, wanting to let Laura actually use the axe on it).  Now please stay away.

Got a few funny pictures of Wilson over the weekend.  He's been with us for the past two weeks and will probably be going home this week.

So over the past couple days I've been replacing boards on our deck that have cracked over the last 2 years of its existance.  The most important part of the process though is that I'm using screws to fasten the boards down instead of nails.  Some of the boards look like the guy with the nail gun was either high or being pushed over with great force.  There have been a few nails that missed the joists completely.  And one where someone must have been trying to release some anger (it either missed one joist by 8" or it missed the next joist by 8").  I know you get what you pay for and it was probably the lowest bidder, but come on.

On the bright side, the staircase and about 1/3 of the deck floor has been strengthened.  I hope to get the rest of it done soon as the new boards I am putting down probably need a few weeks/months to dry out before we can stain/seal the deck. 

I've been using MS Visual Studio 2005 for a few months now and I must say it's way better than the 2003 version.  I still very much miss using IntelliJ, but what can you do?  I ran into this error message this morning.  I was trying to expand the list of contents of a project in the solution explorer.  Seemes like a trivial task.  I appreciate that they tell me something is stuck, but if they know something is stuck, why don't they un-stick it?

Trooper is the black lab that Laura's parents have.  He is very good at eating anyone that shouldn't be in the house (not quite literally, but his bark will scare you pretty well).

Apparently this weekend they noticed a chunk of his ear missing.  They have no idea of how it happened, but they went to the vet who said he should be fine and bandaged him up.  I always joke that I want to see an animal in a funnel, but really truly, I want an animal to be not hurt even more.

So I mentioned the other day that Lyle and Heather were alive and well...  Lyle sent me some pictures last night that I thought should go up here.  The first is just Lyle being very Lyle.  Do you think he bought the numchucks just to take this picture?

The second is Heather with Buzz Aldrin.  I think you might have some competition, Lyle:

And finally, the happy couple together:

So out of the group of pictures he sent me, the one I find the most disturbing (even more disturbing than him following a little girl around a grocery store making bunny ears on) is the one he described as "burying people".  I would think he's actually serving a community service term for something, but Heather's there with him:

What better way to make your friend happy he sent you pictures than to post them on a blog and make fun of them?  We love you Lyle!

So Rob showed up for a little bit this weekend.  He will be back next weekend (he is working "remotely" this week which is an understatement since he'll be in Cullman) to hopefully stay a little longer.  Sadly, this is the best picture of him we got while he was here:

So one thing I think is funny about the pictures I post up here...  most of them are taken with a 6MP camera.  Occasionally there will be one with a 1MP camera.  Some of them are my camera phone (which by the way, I found out last night I had it in "night" mode which explains why the picture of the rainbow the other day was so horrible).  These next two are with Laura's new phone.  The resolution isn't super high, but it takes MUCH better pictures than my phone and she has it with her when we're out, so maybe I can get some better non-posed pictures in the future. 

In honor of Rob, Doug and Brian were hanging out with us at 5 Points Grill.  Doug still somehow thinks that hiding his face from pictures will keep his picture off of some FBI file.  I have news for you, Doug:

And then there is Brian, who so far is 2-for-2 on showing up when invited.  There was a rumor floating around for the past two years that he wouldn't show up, even if invited.  Either that rumor is incorrect or he's turned over a new leaf:

I was told over the weekend that my wildlife pictures weren't as boring to the rest of you as I thought... 

I do wonder what happened to Bud & Emilia...  their domain registration is up in October, so I hope they're close to a computer.  They haven't seemed to do much since they made it to California.

And here's something we've been seeing more and more of while we've been seeing fewer and fewer frogs.  Maybe there's a trend there:

So this weekend Max and Jennifer were both out of town...  we were taking care of their little Pomeranian named Spunkey.  He's about 7 and is totally nuts.  Being a dog though, he's very much a people person and we felt bad just stopping by to let him out to use the bathroom, so we brought him back over to our place.  Here's the little fellow... keep in mind he weighs in at about 2/3 of a Bella, so all of our cats are much larger than this dog:

Having 4 cats in the house at the moment, he was almost immediately noticed.  It didn't help that he insisted on barking loudly and wanted to chase the cats around (this is what he does to any animal, humans included).  Wilson disappeared entirely (we think he went under our bed).  CB ran halfway up the stairs for shelter but stayed low enough she could still see what was going on:

George got "puffy" (his tail is normally about the diameter of one of his legs):

And Bella being the cautious but curious one made sure to stay behind him or at least at a distance and would watch from afar, following him around the house.  She is the only one that ultimately didn't run away and hide.  Go Bella.

I think Laura might want to keep him since he might fit into one of her purses and he coordinates with her hair color.  Just kidding, Laura :)

So I've seen just about everything in our neighborhood on top of one of those realtor signs...  "Builder Pays $1000 of Closing", "New Listing", "Tray Ceilings", "Lake Lot", and a very popular one: "Sold".  I think this one is the strangest one yet:

It's probably been more than a year now, but Lyle actually IM'd me.  I was shocked to say the least.  I should have asked him his mother's maiden name or last for of his SSN to make sure it was actually him and somebody hadn't just hijacked his account.

It sounded like he and Heather have been doing well in LA.  Lyle is supposedly about to change jobs to one that doesn't take 100% of his time.  We'll see if he uses any of his new found time to communicate with his friends.

He is actually about to go to the airport to fly to Iowa of all places.  Apparently that's where his frield Lloyd is getting married. 

In an amusing parallel, Heather contacted the alumni group of her sorority (KKG I think) and within a few weeks was voted their president.  Crazy stuff.

I am trying to get Lyle to send us some pictures of what they've been up to recently (they apparently bought a digital camera recently), so I'll post them or link to them if he comes through on that front.  (supposedly he wrote himself a note)

All in all, it was very good to talk with an old friend.  I really hope it's not another couple years before I hear from him again.

PS - for those of you that don't know Lyle...  he's the one in this picture about to me traumatized by Christian:

There isn't much content to this posting...  just a bunch of pictures I liked that came off the camera.

First of all, we're taking care of Wilson over the next little while.  I noticed him stalking something the other day...

Here is his prey up close:

There were also some baby ducks out near the lake the other day:

The rabbit I took a picture of last year is back again...  hiding in the middle of our nicely overgrown backyard:

And something I had never seen before... smaller than a dime...  a tiny, baby praying mantis:

And speaking of wildlife...  here is Spunky (Max and Jennifer's dog) after Max got after him with the clippers:

And finally, a few of the cats.  Here is Wilson trying to hide from Laura:

Here's one of CB/Grandma/The Goat:

And here's one of her in the closest thing she'll ever be to "in action":

Bella being Bella:

And last but not least...  an action sequence of George that pretty much sums up George: