Author: cosmo

What the…?

I’m bored tonight and scrolling through my Google+ feed, and suddenly there’s a post from the White House!

I don’t have many Google+ friends– I don’t do the whole social networking thing– and I’m positive I never “friended” the White House. What the heck are they doing in my feed? And why do I care at all that Keb Mo performed a “bluesy rendition of ‘America the Beautiful'”?

Is “bluesy” even a word?

Tonight is the quietest Fourth of July I can remember. There are absolutely no fireworks anywhere in the city. Usually things are popping for the first few days in July, culminating in virtually non-stop explosions throughout the evening of the Fourth. Most years the fireworks continue well past midnight, and of course we sleep with the windows open at night so we can hear all of them. The quiet is kind of unnerving.

It’s for good reason, though. The entire day was hazy– you couldn’t see more than a couple of miles because everything was cloaked in a grey haze. It didn’t smell like smoke, but this evening the wind must have shifted because now we can smell it. I’m not sure which wildfire we’re smelling tonight, but it’s a somber reminder of the troubles in other areas of the state.

On Tuesday, I took Alex and Zack to Lyons Pinball, which is a little hole-in-the-wall place in Lyons (about 10 miles west of Longmont).

They have maybe 40 pinball games and a few old arcade games as well. We each had five dollars’ worth of quarters and managed to get an hour of entertainment out of them. It was a lot of fun to play some old-school solid-state pinball games as well as newer ones that were electronic and had a lot of effects and “missions”.

Growing up, my good friend Aron had a pinball game in his basement and we had endless hours of fun playing it on poker nights. I always thought it would be cool to do the same thing.

Tonight, the boys and I went over to Roger’s house. He has three pinball games in his almost-renovated basement. The nice thing about them is they don’t require quarters, heh. So we played for about two hours and had a great time. Now Zack keeps asking when we’re going to get a pinball game of our own. He’s really quite good– some kind of knack for it. Alex doesn’t do quite as well so he gets a little frustrated, but I think he’ll catch the bug if we play a few more times.

Now I’m off to Craigslist to see what might be available…

I found another hilarious sad woman meme:

Yep, summer is definitely here.

Laralee bought some peppers and I thought the vibrant colors were pretty fun.

The rats all enjoyed Kyra’s bowl of Rice Krispies.

This cracked me up.

The new office is finally complete.

Yesterday the glass was frosted, and that finishes the series of contractors I’d hired to do various things. Now all of the office walls have a four-foot-high frosted strip, with regular glass the rest of the way up.

There’s been some joking about no-pants days, since you will no longer be able to see beneath everyone’s desks.

The break room has the fridge and some nice tile. We moved the foosball table in there because we needed room for the ping-pong table, and also because the acoustics are much better. When you slam a ball into the goal it echoes very nicely and sounds appropriately awesome.

And the conference table– all twelve feet of it– is pretty sweet. It doubles as a “duck and cover” fallout shelter in case of nuclear attack, because it’s the single heaviest thing in the office.

All in all, I’m really happy with the way things turned out. It was a tedious (and expensive) process but it’s a great work environment.

By now most of the internet has heard of the Orvillecopter. Some guy had a cat named Orville (named for the Wright Brother) and sadly Orville passed on to the Great Litterbox in the Sky. Some pet owners would bury their cat. Others might have him stuffed so they could always be reminded of their fond times together. But this guy turned Orville into a helicopter.

Working with a taxidermist, he inserted a bunch of model helicopter parts into Orville. His four paws are splayed wide, with a rotor on each one. Landing struts hang from his belly. And yes, he does fly.

Of course there are many people who are thoroughly upset about this, claiming that it’s disrespectful and exploitative. Whatever. I think it’s hilarious, and tons more fun that a plot in the back yard or a stationary stuffed cat to tuck in the corner and gather dust.