Based on feedback, both online and off, I think I am going to go with a Flickr Pro account for my photo hosting. The Aperture integration is beautiful and the functionality is great. I’ll miss being able to pull up stats and the ability to mess with people who hot-link pictures from MySpace.
I’m waiting a week or two because the wildcard is Apple’s rumored upgrades to the .Mac service in a week. Their services and disk space have never warranted the $99/year price tag, but if they are able to significantly lower the price or significantly increase their service offering, then I might go that route. The rumors also point to better iPhone integration, which (depending on the feature set and price) would be nice, too. At the very least, I am waiting to see how this pans out.
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There was a bad TV show in the 80s. Well, there were a lot of bad TV shows in the 80s, but the theme song of one in particular has been stuck in my head for days. I wonder if you remember this particular show? The main character was a girl and she was either a young teen or pre-teen. She was half alien, living with her (human) mom in a fancy house in one of the “bay” towns in California (Morro Bay, Bodega Bay, something like that.) She had some kind of crystal cube, propped up on one corner, that (with the help of horrid 80s television special effects) she could use to talk to her dad, in outer space or whatever. I think she had some kind of powers, but I don’t remember what. Anyway, the theme song was this Frank Sinatra song “would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar?” I only saw it a few times, but either it was on all the time or my little sister really liked to watch it a lit — I don’t know which.
I do not think that knowing the name of the show will cause the theme song to exit my head, but it will be one less “on the top of my tongue” thing bugging me.
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Our house seems to be the hangout spot for all the cool cats in the neighborhood. And by cats, I mean cats. We are sort of next door to a concrete and asphalt apartment complex and the pointy-nose Siamese over there seems to find our yard much more fun and interesting than his place. Additionally, there’s a black and white fuzzy cat from a neighbor in the other direction that always wants to hang out at our place. There are several others, too, that we only catch glimpses of. The Siamese and black-and-white are the most chatty.
Exhibit One: There have been a few mornings where I wake up, stumble down the stairs, and glance over at the cat sitting on the kitchen windowsill. After a quick double-take, I look again at the cat sitting on the outside kitchen windowsill, looking in.
Exhibit Two: If we leave the door open and the screen door closed, throughout the day the Siamese and black-and-white will take turns coming to the door to talk to us. Yesterday, while doing work around the house, each one was at the door a dozen times throughout the day.
Exhibit Three: Bribery. While not intended to bribe cats to our house, we do happen to be growing (or maybe past-tense would be more correct) catnip in a little terra-cotta trough out front. This seems to have attracted the attention of all the neighborhood kitties. It is heavily grazed upon, often knocked over, and on a few occasions, has been uprooted and pulled from the pot, left several feet away. It’s dead enough at this point that it is no longer of much kitty interest.
Exhibit Four: The white picket fence separating the front yard and back yard has a very deliberate slat missing from it. We have dubbed this “the kitty highway” because of the number of cats that use it to get to and from the back yard.
Exhibit Five: The birdfeeder is similarly dubbed “kitty TV” because cats, both inside the house and out, spend hours staring at it.
The good news is that everyone is much less hissy now: our cats interactions with the neighbor cats and the neighbor cats amongst one another. One day, everyone will be living in peace.
The other good news is that I doubt we will ever have a rodent problem of any kind.
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I’d tell you to mark your calendars, but I don’t know a date yet. We will be having some kind of BBQ/potluck/housewarming party in a month or so. December, even though the white Christmas was nice, was not very conducive to a housewarming. In the intervening time, the state of (dis)repair of the house was not particularly conducive, either. But now, things are clean and stable enough that we can get away with having a housewarming we can be proud of. Keep an eye open for an email or phone call from Kim or I in the next week or so, as we figure out what weekend works best for her and her travels.
