Angela Law

animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 

the others

I’m going to have to stop reading movie reviews before I watch movies. I was all pumped up for this one, but it didn’t quite deliver. The movie was ok. It had a cool twist at the end, that’s for sure, but I wasn’t quite as impressed as everyone else, I guess. And, it got a little slow in the middle. So slow, in fact, that I started to read the owner’s manual for the new freezer I bought yesterday (finally, I got a large freezer. now, all I have to do is fill it up with food. that shouldn’t be hard since all three of my current freezers are overflowing.) Not only was I doing that, but I was also surfing the internet and drinking a margarita in addition to watching the movie (I tend to multi-task) and I still didn’t miss anything.

Alas, the plethora of pseudo movie reviews will be coming to an end. I am cancelling my Blockbuster video subscription next weekend. Not that I didn’t enjoy every minute of it, but spring is sort of here and I’m not going to have time to be watching movies a couple of nights a week anymore. Not only that, but The Sopranos is starting up again this Sunday and a promising new series called Big Love is debuting on HBO. Plus, HBO’s re-running Six Feet Under. I’ve been wanting to catch that series again (at least the first two seasons, anyway) But, I digress…I enjoyed Blockbuster Online so much that I plan on signing up again next winter. I always say, if only I could get my groceries delivered to the house, I’d never have to leave home.

he loves me

He loves me not.

I seem to be the marginal “favorite human” of Marley, the demon cat. He kind of likes me most of the time (well, as much as he’s capable of liking anyone), but it’s not something you can count on. I was the first one to get him to purr, though. He still hisses at Lizzy a few times a day, so I don’t know that the two of them will ever get along. Considering the fact that Lizzy and Ariel have been living together for a number of years and still aren’t on friendly terms, it’s probably a safe bet. Marley hasn’t attacked Brian in weeks so Brian must now be on his good list as well. Jake is slightly above Lizzy on the Marley-scale. So much for him having his own cat. I guess he can get one when he moves out in 16 years or so.

We haven’t formally introduced the two cats yet, but anytime they’ve seen each other they haven’t been impressed. I’m thinking about doing the formal introduction this weekend (during regular vet hours, of course). I’m sick of having pets living on three levels of our house. Two levels would be more than sufficient, I think.

bathroom

Brian took some pictures of the house recently so I thought this might be a good opportunity to show you all our recently remodeled bathroom.

vanity 1
vanity 2
tub

As you can see, the vanity still needs drawers. And, the ceiling still needs trim, but other than that, it is done. I don’t know why he didn’t take a picture of the toilet area. I can only surmise that since our bathroom is so small, he couldn’t get a good angle on it. Nothing exciting there anyway–just a toilet, magazine rack, toilet paper holder and our cool Gashlycrumb Tinies poster hanging above the toilet tank.

primer

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but our two year old living room television conked out the day before the Super Bowl. Great timing. After $100 in repairs, we got it back this week. So much for my high opinion of Sony… Luckily we have backup televisions throughout the house so we didn’t miss any of our regularly scheduled programming.

Last night, we got to watch our first movie (in a month) on the “big” screen (as compared to the 13″ tv we’ve been watching, our 20″ tv now seems quite luxurious). Primer was the flick. It was a little too ambitious for my tastes. I don’t like having to think quite that much in order to be entertained. The fact that the film was made for $7000 and all of the actors in it were in their first roles was a little impressive, though.

The movie was about these engineers who invent a time machine. They get a little greedy and things go down the shitter for them from there. Here is a good description of the movie’s convoluted timeline (in case you happen to watch it and didn’t get everything–like me).

i have a need for speed

Our internet connection seemed to be lagging a bit lately. So, I did some research into the current plans AtlanticBB has to offer and compared it to what we currently have. It was a real eye opener. We were grandfathered under a plan from the previous cable company, Charter, and had an internet connection so slow that it wasn’t even offered anymore. After discussing our options, we decided it would be worth the money to upgrade to their middle-tier internet offering. I made the call at lunch and they’ve already made their adjustments and now we’re blazing. I had to tweak some of the settings on our side to get things working properly, but it wasn’t difficult.

Here are some useful tools: This url allows you to test your upload and download speeds. I noticed a definite improvement after AtlanticBB made their changes, but we still weren’t getting the results we should’ve. I then went here and ran the test listed in step 3 (from speedguide.net). Some of our numbers were off and this was causing our internet to run slower than it should. I used their recommendations and changed the settings with DrTCP, which I got here.

Tweak away…