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?