Mike Pirnat

Things that are bad:

• Being super-crazy-busy at work.
• One fiasco after another at work.
• One fiasco after another at my wife’s workplace.
• Having to pay sales tax on haircuts.
• Having to pay sales tax on my DirecTV bill.
• Having to pay sales tax on all kinds of asinine things. Hey, UP YOURS, GOVERNOR TAFT! Way to stimulate Ohio’s economy by giving me less money to spend on Ohio business. Asshat. When the heck are we gonna vote this kook out of office?
• Massive papercuts on one’s tongue — curse you, Citibank envelope of Hades!!
• Being up too late.
• Being too tired to work out.
• Not having time/energy enough to post much.

Things that are good:

• New carpet…still!
• Working out, when I’ve not been up too late.
• I got the Matrox framebuffer tweaked all (mostly) nice! I have a very pretty text console! La-de-flipping-da!
• Mmm, good cooking lately.
• Hey, we’ve got TOMATOES! And they’re bright red, perfectly ripe, and damnably delicious! (Quite lovely with a spot of salt, pepper, olive oil, basil, and balsamic vingear… mmmmmmm….)
• Geek porn, aka the latest Mac World magazine (lots of pretty pictures of Panther and the new G5’s, *drool*)
• Dealing mercilessly with work fiascos and emerging victorious, huzzah! Bask in my issue-resolving glory!
• Having a creative out-of-office auto-reply message.
• Dad’s Bose noise-cancelling headphones… though I am enough sold on them that maybe I should recategorize them as “bad things.”
• Being on VACATION!
• Road trip to Canada, starting tomorrow, to go see lots of plays. (Remember last year? I do!)
• Other things too numerous to mention…. yeah.

food, garden, geekery, health, house, politics, stratford, travel, work

As promised, I have new pictures of the garden destruction/improvements.

Removal of the nasty dying bushes

Bushes are GONE!

Natty-looking azaleas have been moved, and we’ve got another flat of marigolds planted! Yay, marigolds!

The front garden area, cleaned up some more

Scraggly bushes by the front door have been replaced with red and white impatiens (which kind of go with the red geraniums, and when the front door is open, they match our Snoopy piece nicely.

Another view of the front garden area, showing the hostas that were relocated from the herb garden

The herb garden has really gone nuts — check out the giant cilantro (front, slightly to the left of center)! The tomato plants (along the back) are also turning into monsters, and seem ready to challenge the sage for dominance.

I thought the sky and the evening light in the trees looked rather beautiful.

garden, photos

I keep forgetting to upload pictures of Liz and her adventures in the Front Garden of Doom. I’ll see if I can get to that tomorrow evening after work. The devastation is really quite a sight to behold.

I’m making good progress on my goofy RSS parser and related utilities, so much so that I think I can back-burner coding on that for awhile. I have a silly bit of code to write for utterly cosmetic reasons, which I may do as a really simple CGI or a bit of JavaScript instead. When the time comes, you’ll know how silly it is. (Trust me, it’s silly.)

Oh, and about that mix CD that I thought I’d be done with sometime last August? It’s got master CD’s, cover art, disc labels, empty jewel cases, and a fresh ink cartridge. So it might actually be for real sometime very very soon. Was it worth the wait? I guess we’ll all have to wait just a bit longer before we can find out.

garden, geekery, liz, music, python

Something tells me it might be easier to dispose of a dead chipmunk if, in fact, the chipmunk in question is actually dead.

I threw on a shirt and some shorts, grabbed a pair of good gardening gloves, and headed out back to see about pitching our fuzzy little corpse into the compost pile in the wooded area out back. I inhaled the delightful morning air, cool and ripe with possibility. I surveyed the scene.

And that’s when he started twitching around and really freaking out.

With a surprising amount of calm, I turned right back around and went to get some scissors, then went back out to cut him loose.

If you ever have to cut a chipmunk loose from bird netting, make sure you have good thick gloves on, because the little blighter is not going to be terribly cooperative, nor is he really going to be happy about his predicament. In short — look out for the chompers. Luckily, he didn’t break through my gloves at all, which is why I’m posting this now instead of after a visit to the hospital. (Guess whose tetanus booster has long expired?)

He had done a great job of getting tangled up, so it was rather a challenge to get him loose without him taking off one of my limbs in the process. I wasn’t able to get everything from around his neck, since he was pretty sensitive about where the scissors were going.

But I did get him free, and off he ran, hopefully to be a smarter chipmunk in the future. Granted, he’ll probably choke to death from the netting that’s still around his neck, or be the new poster boy for environmentally abused rodents, but I did everything I could for him, so I’m not going to spend any energy feeling guilty about it.

Besides, the little bastard was after my strawberries. It’s hard to feel any pity for thieves, no matter how cute and fuzzy they may be.

garden, nature

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here, and I figure it might be nice to just talk about some of the good things that have happened lately instead of carping about the state of the world, my misadventures with strep throat, and so forth. So, without further ado, here are some recent things that make me happy:

• Dinner with friends (hi, Angie!)
• Our Smurf-murderingly blue bathroom…
• …which now has a new light fixture!
• Down With Love (rotten but delightful)
• The iTunes Music Store
• My car-window Totoro
• Wine dinner at Chez François
• My cat and all the crazy stuff she does
• Our herb garden (now featuring catnip, kitty drug of choice)
• Hammocks rule.
• Pretty hanging plants
• Pretty things are in bloom in our yard.
• Marigolds rule too. They’re quite excited just to be.
• “Patriot Red” geraniums in happy new pots on the path to our front door
• More red geraniums by our front door
• Strawberries — they’re starting to get big!
• Three-day weekends away from the office… w00t!
• My lovely wife Liz, what a sweetie she is!

cats, food, friends, garden, health, house, liz, movies, music, paint, photos, weekends