Sunday, July 13, 2008

Hitting the Pause Button

Some one of these fine days, I'm going to take a vacation that's really a vacation. It'll be one of those trips where everything is strictly voluntary: no deadlines, no place to drive to, and nothing else to do at sunset but open the chardonnay. Sounds sweet, doesn't it? Pardon me a second while I note that in my calendar so I'll be reminded to relax sometime in the near future.

Not that Dinah and I didn't have a good time on our last dog-show trip, but we didn't really have time to do a lot of sight-seeing, or even relaxing. I can't believe I even went past both of Mary Maxim's locations (Canadian and US) and didn't stop by to look for bargain prices on sock yarn.

Anyway, you can read about our road trip on my other blog. Let's catch up on everything else here.


Still, No Knitting


The knitting trough continues. It's hard to get up the desire to pick up needles and wool when the temperature is 87 degrees out with 97% humidity. Maybe things are looking up, though. I've started lusting after sock yarns in catalogs again.

From World's Fair to Mid-Air

The Second Life 5th Birthday (SL5B) celebration went very well for Greg, who was able to chat with musicians, music lovers, and anyone else who stopped by to visit his exhibit. When Dinah and I left for Canada, he was still running 4-5 simultaneous chat windows and muttering about streaming.

After the exhibit concluded and he left his thank-you graphic on the communal plot, he couldn't help but feel a little sad. He'd been wildly busy, sure, but he already missed the chance to hang out and talk music all day with people. He wasn't sure what to do with the exhibit building, or with any of the media he'd set up.

Marie, whom we met in real life in Portland a while back, recently gave Greg a plot of virtual land the exact size of the exhibit. (Actually, she sold it to me for $0, since I have a premium account and can own land.) The land is not situated in the right orientation for the building, so Greg made it into a skybox and stuck it 350 meters above ground. There's a teleport at ground level to take visitors up into the sky. The view of the mountaintop is lovely, as long as you shorten your draw distance to block out the ad farms and space junk. Hey, we can't gripe about the price, and the neighbors we've met are very nice people who also lament the ad farms. Giving us a plot of land was an easy way to preserve a little green space.

Frankendoggie Begone

No one is happier than Charlie that he's healed up from his last surgery. The sutures are out, he's growing some hair over the shaved parts, and now he's back in the dirt and having himself a good time. The vet reported that all but one of his lumps were cysts. The last one was what he referred to as a "spindle cell tumor," but he thinks he removed it with good enough margins so the chances of its growing back are low. Those tumors tend to be slow-growing and pretty much encapsulated, which is good news.

Now it's time to clip Seamus down. The poor little guy has a beautiful, long, thick coat, but the little princess has been systematically ripping out all the hair on the right side of his face so that he's become a semi-Beardless Collie. Maybe after a summer of having nothing to pull, she'll learn to leave him alone.

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