Raving Amicks

Hey y’all. Mindy posted some pictures of our new wine glasses a while ago and it’s high time I ’splained ‘em.

These wine glasses are the sequel to our fantastic beer glasses and they use the same serious-business, full-body tempering (apparently using heat and not chemicals). The tempering requires an increase in glass thickness, but results in strong and stable, long-lasting glassware. They’re extra short for stackability, which also adds a bit of stability. I like ‘em, and Mindy’s even warmed up to them.

I conned Mom and Dad into getting a set of 12, cuz I had to order ‘em by boxes of 48 for $200. I found the best deal at ReStockIt.com with free shipping and some sort of discount (they have sales a lot). I’m going to give the 6 of them I have left over to Dieter. Hopefully these will hold up to the harsh realities of Dieter’s roommates. I’ll be bringing them down the next time we come to visit, hopefully in the next week or two.

With Tyler’s help during President’s Day Weekend (he had a three-day weekend back then), I reupholstered our dining chairs that he had picked up for $10 years ago. They originally had dirty and cracked white vinyl on the seats, plus they were really hard and uncomfortable. Now they have high-density foam seats covered with beautiful white leather, and our butts sigh with delight each time we sit on them (or maybe it’s just the leather sinking into the foam that sighs). One of the chair seats isn’t quite as taut as the other (surprisingly, the second one we did), but they’re still infinitely better than before. Now I just need to strip and re-stain them during a summer dry spell and we’ll be dining in style.

Osa also approves of the new seats:

The snakes were enjoying the spring rays today.

On the same note my friend Adam McRae and I came up with a name for dad’s snake the other day. We’re calling him Neville which seems to pair with “Benji” the other snake pretty well. It only took about a decade to name two pets but I think the wait was worth it don’t you?

I convinced mom and dad to get out of their comfort zones and take a cross country ski class with me on Mount Hood. I’m still shocked that they actually agreed to do it, but in the end we all had a lot of fun. The class was only 2 hours long but we managed to take away quite a bit of knowledge. We even journeyed out by ourselves after finishing our beginner’s class exploring a few different trails.

Well, we’ve had the puppy for a little over a week now. I guess Tyler and I were just too lazy to take pictures, upload them, and write a post. Oh yeah, we were also busy reorganizing the apartment. And later Tyler was busy with battling what was potentially the swine flu. It was a flu anyway—a flu that he conveniently came down with 48 hours after attending a video game expo where there was a swine flu outbreak. All those video gamers not washing their hands and then eating lunch makes even me feel sick.

So now we have a cute, fluffy puppy that loves people and loves to snuggle. But oh the whining. Oh god, the whining. This is the whiniest puppy I’ve ever met. I feed her food, she scarfs it down—while whining. I give her a walk, she bounds around happily—while whining. I look at her, she whines. I hold her, she whines. All I can guess is we’re simply not giving her enough attention. Or maybe she’s just pissed that we haven’t given her a name yet.

On the flip side, she makes a really good bookend:

I have a big pile of media equipment under my TV, so when Dieter suggested that someone try out the Belkin Conserve, I got all excited and started running around the house plugging random things into holes. The Conserve is designed to force electronic devices – which usually continue to slurp and gargle power even when they’re off – to truly dislodge and leave the power in the wall where it belongs. We have one 26” Samsung flat-screen TV, as well as an Apple TV, an electric sheep, and five video game consoles (Wii, PS2, N64, Super NES and NES), which means we have ample equipment with which to test out the Conserve. (more…)