The Cage Of Non Doom!

Really late guinea pig update!!!!

I did indeed get around to creating a little piggy nirvana for the guys, actually quite some time ago. I looked up a site online that had suggestions/directions on how to do this and didn't seem too tricky to manage. Basically you get some organizational grid things, they're the sort that have corner connectors and you snap them together to make cubes or what not. Instead of cubes you just build a rectangular enclosure with those and then have to make a base to hold bedding materials.

That part was slightly more tricky. The material recommended is called corrugated plastic or coroplast. Essentially this is plastic cardboard and is used quite frequently in the sign making business. Unfortunately the first place I tried to acquire this material tried to steal my dollar signs, quoting me a price at least 5 times what I was expecting it would cost. I think it's possible they just misunderstood what I wanted, in that I just need a sheet of the plastic and not a sign made, but I had made that pretty clear I thought some I label them douchebags.

I was able to acquire the sheet from an alternate vendor for a little over 20 bucks. I had to steal my moms minivan to transport it home and that night began the long arduous and painful task of measuring and cutting and scoring and bending and folding until I formed what equates to an upside down plastic cardboard box top. I then slid that down into the rectangular cage and that was basically it.

I didn't exactly stop there tho. I wasn't satisfied with just making a bigger house for the fellas, I wanted to make them an awesomer living space. I made them a small second level sort of L shaped in one corner, they have a food and water spot on both levels. I bought them some hiding places, a small hutch for upstairs and some little tunnels they like to run through and gnaw on. I bought them a hammock which I was worried would lay unused but I've seen them both hop up and just chill in there. I even bought them a lounge chair.

I've also upgraded their diet, while i still give them plenty of hay and food pellets, I quite regularly hook them up with some dill and parsley. They LOVE that stuff, if they hear me with the bag or smell the stuff they start squeaking all excitedly, good times.

Long story short...too late! I spoil the hell out of my guinea pigs. This really shouldn't surprise me, because I always tried to spoil our dogs too. I don't see why my animals shouldn't have as awesome a life as they can.

A Blog Resurrected

So I suck. Seriously it's not news. I'm a slacker and lazy bum with no real ambition. It's cool though because it works for me. I haven't posted in awhile not for lack of substance however, and should my return to the blog world last longer than this posting we might have plenty to talk about.

So the summer started and it's been pretty good to me. There's been an action packed summer movie season, saw a lot of really good movies in the past 2 months. I've been going swimming a lot more recently, which is great. I've always loved swimming, ever since I was a kid and we had a membership to a relatively close pool. I kinda got out of swimming tho for a number of reasons. Lack of a affordable accessible pool was one of them, along with growing up and getting fat and being uncomfortable with my shirt off. Also while swimming is one of the very few forms of exercise I can tolerate, it's only really fun to go to a pool with people, and I guess I didn't have people to go with. So I've been really pleased with being able to do that this year with Becky. Lots of fun in pools can be had for sure.

In other brief summer news I turned 27 a little while ago. It's not so bad I guess, I don't feel old at least. Just another year gone by and another thousand hair follicles lost. My birthday extravaganza comprised of hanging out with my three friends at a pool hall and getting a little tipsy. It was good times and I certainly can't complain about having gotten the night off, but it woulda been nice to spend it with my girl as well.

Thus ends my re-inaugural post, stay tuned for updates.

Fuzzy Bundles Of Joy

I don't really my first pet experiences. I think we probably had some sort of dogs that I don't remember from when I was quite young. I've seen pictures of dogs in my moms scrapbooks, but don't recall names or memories of them. The first one I remember was a little boy cocker spaniel named Copper. I never considered him mine tho, he was the family dog really. But then a couple years down the line we got another cocker spaniel and named her Sugar. I don't think she was specifically meant to be mine, but that seemed to be the way it worked out. I loved her and she back and for a long time she spent practically every night in my room. She even cared enough to never make a mess in there. I make messes in there all the time, but not the way she might.

After they both passed on we went without for awhile until picking up a beautiful Samoyed named Slick from my dad's sister. I may have had other pets throughout the years, a fish or two perhaps, but never anything pet-able that I recall other than the three dogs. Slick eventually passed on and since my parents were planning to start remodeling the house for eventual resale it was decided there were to be no more dogs. This of course left me saddened to some extent. I didn't think about it all the time of course but on occasion I would reminisce about the old days of having a nice pet to come home and say Hi to.

So a couple weeks ago my girlfriend came into some extra cash and we went to a Pet Store to pick out a fish for a friend of hers. We were wandering around and saw an absolutely adorable little guinea pig, and she persuaded me into getting him. She actually bought him for me and a nice little edible house for him, while I picked out a big cage/starter kit. We brought him back to his new home and he seemed to fit in nicely. He's a bit shy at times but once you have him nice and steady on your lap or chest or something he is awful friendly and cuddly. We named him Snuggles.


Since having a guinea pig was a new experience for me, I did a lot of reading on the subject and a common theme throughout was that they are very social. Since we had a somewhat large cage I decided to buy one for Becky to keep at my place. After positively confirming Snuggles' gender and searching a couple local stores we found another guinea pig that could compete in adorability. Becky loved him and we walked out delighted. After some thought she ended up on the name Patches.


They seem to get along great, there was no real fighting when they first met. Sometimes they might try and shoo the other away from hay they are eating, but I've also seen one peacefully grab a piece of hay from the others mouth. They fucking love eating hay, tho they love eating carrots, lettuce, parsley, apples, bananas and who knows what else. They seem very happy, they run around and chirp and wurble and are tremendously entertaining to watch at play. I want to build them a really big cage/playhouse so they can just goof off and exercise whenever they want.

I still miss my dogs, it was nice to have a pet that waited and greeted me when I got home. A pet that didn't shy away from me a lot, and that I didn't have to pick up to let play. But I dare anyone to tell me that these two guinea pigs aren't cute as fucking hell.

What You Play?

Somewhere in blogland a theme was suggested. A theme of I had no problem addressing. What am I playing this week? Two things and nothing new.

I am still plugging along in the World of Warcraft. Slowly and steadily my hoard of gold rises and hopefully soon I can go broke quenching my need for speed. The thrill of flying faster than a speeding bullet pulls at me quite incessantly. I got a lot of time in these past two days for various reasons and have made good progress, but the game still feels quite lonely. I still don't think i'll quit completely, it's only 13 bucks a month or so and it's nice to have it there waiting for me if I want it.

I have also been getting in some good gaming time on my PSP. I know a lot of people knock it, but I've never understood why. It has fun games, you can play it in the bathroom and you can watch porn on it. Whats the beef? At any rate recently I found my copy of Burnout Legends and loaded it up to fool around. I hadn't completely finished the game, I still had one crash event I needed to get a gold on, and a couple road rage and race events. Some of those road rage ones were really tough. It's quite hard to believe that "I" would have a problem with the road rage ones, but when you need to take out 8 cars per minute it's not easy.

I finally got all those done, only to realize this only technically takes me down to 89% complete with the game. Apparently I still need to do a couple signature takedowns, and several trophies. Some of these are easy such as get 2000 total takedowns or get 2 bus takedowns in a race. Both will come with time, right now I'm focusing on get 40 takedowns in a single race. I don't know why I care so much, it isn't as if I get a nice Gamer Score like on Xbox live for all my friends to see. I just like having a goal sometimes I guess.

In other news JaxJaggyWires got a new horse and buggy, and we demand a blog about it.

Living the Viva Local

For those of you who weren't aware, this past Monday was Memorial Day. Honestly I would totally fall into the category of unawaredness but for the simple fact that I get the day off. Days off as I'm SURE you are aware simply rock. It was a long weekend and quite fun and fantastic. I got a lot of things accomplished and had some good times, some of which can be discussed at a later time I suppose.

So to celebrate the holiday I dragged myself and Becky out of bed at the godforsaken hour of 2 or 3 oclock. We got dressed and headed out to Viva Vienna. It's your run of the mill Town Festival. It has some kiddy carnival rides like the twirling rope swings and spinning dragon teacup ride and mini coaster. Theres also carnival games for prizes, we were hoping for skeeball but no dice. Theres Plenty of yummy treats like cotton candy, deep fried oreos, candied apples. There was real food there too, but we weren't really hungry. We did get some smoothies tho.

The rest of the festival is mostly vendor type people. There are a jewelry displays, clothing vendors, purses, woodwork, pewter figurines, wind and suncatchers. There's also people advertising for companies by handing out flyers or having raffles. I got a pen and keychain from Navy Federal Credit Union. I'm already a member but I like free stuff. There was a Golden Retriever Rescue with a tent there, some people trying to drum up support for a Tysons Corner metro stop, maybe some other causes I didn't much pay attention to.

The vendors are probably the big draw, I bought Becky a nice necklace with real flowers in it, and we got her a really beautiful amber ring. There was also some live music and maybe some other things. The Festival actually lasts for three days, though the vendors aren't there on Saturday. It was a hot day tho, so I think my personal favorite attraction was one of those tents that blow a cool mist on you.

Tales of a (recovering?) W.o.W. addict.

I used to play World of Warcraft a lot. It didn't start off so bad, I'd play a couple hours a night, get some levels have some fun. It started to take away from some of my console gaming, which wasn't really a bad thing. I play video games a lot, so it wasn't like WoW was making me waste more time than I normally would, just that I'd be wasting it differently. It was something to keep me entertained through my long nights after work and was certainly enjoyable. It wouldn't be the top MMO on the market if it weren't fun.

My brother got me started on the game. I had only played one MMORPG game previously (Earth and Beyond) and didn't really stick that one out very long. But he had picked it up and it came with a free trial he passed along to me. He stayed long enough for me to get hooked before jumping servers and (I think) eventually quitting completely as did his friend who was the only other person I actually knew who played. I soldiered on, I had met people I enjoyed talking to and playing with so I didn't feel completely alone.

I wandered from guilds falling apart to raiding guilds to playing solo or with a friend. When my xbox360 broke and I was too lazy/annoyed to get it fixed WoW pretty much became my pastime. I would come home, log on, take a food break and log off around 6 or 7 am. I went on some raids, plowed through tons of dungeons made some gold and formed relationships with friends. I knew I would never be the elite of the wow world, but I was comfortable with my progression and always felt there was something left to do that I could accomplish.

I was really excited when the Burning Crusade expansion pack came out, but I started to play less. I had some guild drama that irked me and I lost some friends to play with. Also I met an awesome girl around the same time, which cut down on my playtime(probably not a bad thing.) I still log on sometimes when I get home, but I never seem to have quite the drive I used to. I almost never have the time for a full instance run, I've only been to two of the expansions dungeons once each, and they were the very first/easiest. I did finally manage to hit lvl 70 with my mage, but I'm slowly starting to wonder why I bother.

I'll never have Elite gear again, it's just not going to happen. I don't really care about pvping enough to make an arena team or grind honor. I've accepted the fact that I will never get my precious polymorph turtle spell from ZG. My guild is full of alts and unambitious people which is fine for me I guess, but not all the people in it as they keep slowly leaving for bigger and better things. Right now my only goal is to acquire enough gold to buy my epic flying mount. After that, I don't know what I'll have left to play for.

Going To The Movies, Gonna Eat Me A Lot Of Popcorn

On this weeks episode of People Who Suck, we will discuss those who do their sucking at the movies. I went out to see a movie(The Invisible) over the weekend as I am want to do. I don't have much to say about the film, it was somewhat interesting, the concept was nice, but I hated some of the characters and there was some lameness throughout. Also I thought it was odd that there was a "scene" in all the commercials for the movie that both I and my girlfriend are 99% sure was not in the movie.

Back to the suck. A lot of this boils down to talking during the film. Now I'm not a total dick, I know you want to do more than just sit there with a blank stare gazing up at the movie screen for two hours. Some minor interaction with your friends, compatriots, lovers is perfectly acceptable. But there are limits, I'm sure I crossed a bunch of them when I was in high school and going out to see films with my friends and causing a ruckus. I regret my rambunctiousness to a degree and while it might aggravate me when it happens, I feel a bit hypocritical when I do.

People who have to explain things in the movie suck. I don't know if they are telling their friend because they think he/she is too dumb to figure it out. Maybe they just cant process their thought without their mouths moving and they just naturally force the air out to speak it. It always happens during the simplest most easy to understand scenes too, where the director is just forcing the explanation down your throat to the point where no one over the age of 7.166666 repeating should have trouble understanding it. Just shut up!

Idiots suck all the time, but at the movie theater they suck even more. They also seem to congregate and are possibly contagious. In this movie, one of the characters was wearing a t-shirt that said "Gluten Free" 3 women sitting near me kept tittering about his Glutton Free t-shirt. Another time, I was seeing the movie High Fidelity and I swear whenever a scene came on and both Joan and John Cusack were in the same room, people would break out with whispers of "It's his sister!!!"

Other people who are at the movies full of suckishness is those who horribly violently react to jump scenes. I understand it was totally intended to shock you so jolt a little, shake and tremble, take a quick inhalation of breath or scream slightly if you must. But when you jump 2 feet out of you chair with such speed and voracity that I sitting next to you get more freaked out by you than the movie then I have a problem with you.

In short try not to suck at the movies. Sit back and enjoy the movie, talk to your friends quietly and try and be funny like the guys from MST3K before Joel left. Either that or just make out with your significant other, I can watch that too.