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:

Yesterday I pulled into Wal-Mart and saw this off in the distance.  Unfortunately this picture was taken with the camera on my cell phone.

We participated in the Arthritis walk on Saturday.   Well, I do use the term "participated" loosely...  we showed up and put in the money we "raised" (as in Laura donated money) and got our official t-shirts and then left because it was raining and nobody in our group wanted to walk in the rain.  Hopefully we'll have a picture from the event too (supposedly will show up in email soon).  At least it was money for a good cause.  Here is the event page.

I really wish I had taken a video of her, but then that's kinda mean.  CB had her teeth cleaned yesterday.  Doesn't sound like a big deal to us humans, but apparently it is to a cat.  They put her under (might be more for the safety of the person administering the cleaning) so she was groggy when we got her home last night.  In addition to her normal hobbling around, occasionally her back end would go the opposite way from her front end.  Quite sad.

The one good thing from this is we found out she appears to be in perfectly good health, just is quite old.

We had our last soccer game on Sunday.  Turns out it didn't count toward the standing.  Sadly, we couldn't remember how many we won or lost this season, but we're pretty sure we are at .500 or above.  Yay.  Sadly, that's a first.

It's time to send out another group of cat pictures.  I have good ones of everyone but CB (Grandma).  I'll wait around to get a good one of her with her tongue out.

I think the one of George pretty much sums up how I feel most afternoons.

I've been wondering for the past several weeks now why there were two parking spaces at work taken up by two traffic cones.  Seemed odd, but they were right next to a tree, so maybe they needed to do tree maintenance and didn't want someone to block their access to the tree.  That would have made sense had it just been for a couple days.  This has gone on for weeks.  Finally today I parked near them to take a look:

S co-worker that gave me the scoop.  It's actually a goose nest.  And apparently Mama Goose would give people the evil eye, even if they parked a couple spots away and walked around the reserved parking spaces.  Now I wish I had gotten a couple pictures of her on the nest.  I'll remember for next year since I'm sure they'll be back.

So this season has been a mess for me so far...  I've missed a few games while traveling, etc.  We're pretty close to .500 we I don't know exactly.

I do know that the game we played yesterday in the rain (and mud) was a good one.  I think we played as a team and despite not having our goalie, we managed to do ok.  4-2 us.  Yay.  Especially against a team that usually runs the score up on us like 6-0 or 8-0.  Maybe it'll be a monsoon the next time we play them.