Zoo Pictures

Here's a few of the pics we took at the S.F. Zoo.

Just Hangin' in Silithus

I’m sitting here with WoW on in the background waiting for AQ to open so I can take screen shots for Luci. There are so many people here (don’t these people have school or jobs? I really doubt they’re all stay at home parents) its super laggy and annoying. I’ve been hearing that some monster comes out and kills everybody. If that’s the case, Luci is going to pay my repair bill.
We went to the ‘bane over the weekend and went to the S.F. zoo. They changed it a lot since the last time I was there years ago. They have a nice lemur enclosure. The lemurs woke up the sleeping baby Sage. She didn’t seem to mind, though. I have some pictures, but they’re still on the camera so I’ll have to post them another time. The baby liked the prairie dogs in the children’s zoo. Roan liked riding the train and the carousel. The little steam train is a fun ride. My mom knew the guy driving it. He let us ride for free and my mom got to ride up on the engine with him. He also gave us a bunch of ride tickets for the merry-go-round.
We went to dinner later that night for my mom’s birthday. The food was good (Italian). I had a cappuccino after dinner and it was really horrible. It made me not feel so bad about the sink shots I had been making on my machine. I put a bunch of sugar in it and drank it anyway.
I didn’t have time to post this before the AQ gates opened in Warcraft. The server went down about 4 times (at least). Pretty funny. Some giant Egyptian looking dog-headed guys came out and started stomping on people. Level 62 elites. A couple of them are dead now. The lag got better after a lot of players got killed. I still have it on in the background. Not that exciting at this point, though. Not nearly as fun as running the Deadmines last night in a four man group.

Would This Freak You Out?

So, last night, after the kids went to bed we watched “The Exorcism of Emily Rose.” I should mention that movies with possession tend to creep me out a lot. I thought this movie was fairly creepy. My state of mind wasn’t helped by having eaten an early, but large dinner to be topped off later on with some popcorn a vanilla latte, a slice of peach pie a la mode and a pint of water. So I was a little sick to my stomach after the movie. I let the movie freak me out a little more than I should, but soon got over it and went to sleep, no big deal.
So in the movie, a lot of the demonic bad stuff happens at exactly 3:00 am. What time do you think baby Sage decided to start crying and wake me up? I woke up, looked at the clock, 3:00 exactly and then the clocked clicked to 3:01. You know what else freaks me out? Strange coincidences. I tried to go back to sleep for awhile, but then I gave up and watched a tivoed “Skating With the Stars” (go Swanston!) Then I watched half and episode of Nova about amber and the stuff that gets stuck in it. After that I watched the E! true Hollywood story about Tonya Harding in it’s entirety (two hours). At 7 am I went back to sleep. I probably could have fallen back asleep by the bug amber show, but I think I was just being stubborn at that point.
So was it a freaky coincidence? At least when I woke up I didn’t smell anything burning or hear doors slamming. I kept expecting to hear the cat knock something over to freak me out more. Aghghghhhh....

Snow Day

We’re gonna drive up to the snow in about an hour or so. Should be fun. Roan has never been in the snow. Yesterday, we rode to Land Park with the plan of feeding the ducks. Land Park ducks suck. McKinley park is much better for ducks, probably because there are a lot of geese there. Geese are always fun.

Roan keeps saying “Happy Valentines Day.” Also, my printer is fixed and ready to be picked up. It was broken the in the most ridiculous and annoying way. The last time it printed something it sucked the cord from my headset (that I use for WoW sometimes) and it got stuck in the printer. We tried to get it out, it wouldn’t budge. The best thing is the printer guy was pretty sure he could fix it under warranty, even though a cord stuck in it wouldn’t generally qualify as an under warranty fix. I felt so incredibly stupid when it happened. I was pretty mad about it and didn’t even like thinking about it. Hopefully the thing will work as good as it did. I hate it sometimes when stuff gets “fixed” but is never quite the same.

How about this weather, huh?

This weekend has gone by fast. Amazingly, I didn’t end up playing much Warcraft. I did play my lowbie druid for a few hours last night with Tubbo and Hexo and it was fun. There’s this Valentines celebration/game type thing going on in Azeroth lately. It’s way too complicated to explain, but I was having fun going around (wearing perfume, of course) Ironforge giving little heart tokens to the guards and getting either a prize or a broken heart in return. A broken heart can only be cured by someone giving you a “friendship” bracelet or when the broken heart timer runs out (one hour). I think my heart was broken about five times, but some kind strangers fixed it for me. Some ass also came up and “licked” me, as well.

The three of us (Drewella, Tubbo and Hexo) also got into battlegrounds for a little PVP action. It was fun, even though I never know what’s going on. It’s technically a “capture the flag” game, but I just run around and try to kill horde. Good times.

Yesterday we rode our new Target bikes to the park with the kids in a bike trailer we got on Craig's List. It was fun, even if I am really out of shape and my ass hurts. It was fun to ride though the neighborhood and look at all the junk people were putting out for “neighborhood clean up day.” They just came by a few minutes ago to pick up our pile. It was also fun to watch the people go around scavenging through the piles. Luckily Davey didn’t find anything this year.

I also got a good deal on a kick ass espresso maker last week. Unfortunately I still haven’t figured out how to get anything consistently drinkable out of it. Friday night I got an okay shot, of course no one else was around to try it. I tried again yesterday and I gave up after about 4 lousy shots. So if you want some really bad espresso, come on over. I know it is supposed to take some time to get it right, so I’m still hopeful. I got a burr grinder and at least when I make regular coffee now, it’s A LOT better. Making espresso is pretty fun. I like the look of exploded coffee beans all over my kitchen.

Anyone know of a good hangnail cure? I have a bunch of them and they’re driving me crazy.

Link and Boring Warcraft Talk

Link has started getting freaked out by the stupidest noises. He has always been afraid of thunderstorms and fireworks. Pretty common dog phobia stuff. Then awhile back, I noticed him getting freaked out by the low battery sound that the smoke detectors make. It’s just an intermittent “beep.” Then one night my cell phone was making the low battery noise and he started freaking out. Right now he’s being super clingy, panting and just generally annoying because one of the cordless phones wasn’t sitting in its cradle just right and was making a short, melodic beep noise every few minutes. I really don’t know how this developed, but it’s really annoying. He probably just needs more exercise. He’s annoying the eff out of me right now and is about to get put outside.....he’s out.

In our World of Warcraft exploits we attempted a raid in Zul Gurub (I have know idea if I spelled that right, in game it’s just referred to as “ZG”). We had baby sitters on Saturday, so we were able to try it. You need a group of 20 people to do it. We spent about three hours and weren’t able to kill even the “easiest” boss. It was really fraaken hard. When everyone gave up on the 20 man raid. We ended up doing a 15 man at Upper Blackrock Spire (UBRS). Clobberella finally got some new pants! No more thigh-high plate armor leggings for Clob. So after about 6 hours playing that game sitting in front of the computer I felt like total crap. I can’t believe some people do that almost every night. I could see playing a couple hours or so a day, if you have the time, instead of watching T.V. (I’m sure that even sounds insane). Anyway, I’m pretty sure I will never be able to go on a Molten Core run. Those take 40 people and are supposed to be fairly hard. And just forget about Black Wing Lair. I don’t even think a 20 man raid is all that fun. It almost feels like a job. I miss the 5 man instances. This is just what happens when you hit level 60. Raid, Raid, Raid.

I couldn’t even figure out what we were doing wrong in ZG. The raid was well organized and we got the super annoying snake boss down to about 1% health before the party would completely wipe. Perhaps, it’s just a matter of we needed better gear. A lot of us had/have not the best stuff, maybe that would have made the difference. It still would have been really hard though. It sucked not to be able to kill one boss, because Luci (that’s Davey’s new name btw, to many Daves) and I probably won’t be able to do ZG again anytime soon. Since the raids usually start before the kids go to bed.

Special Agent Man

So, the special agent thing turned out to be a lot of nothing. The dude was a “special” agent for the U.S. Treasury Inspector General. He’s like an accounting cop. A couple months ago, a different “special agent” left a really crappy looking card in my mailbox with a note on the back saying “please call me” with two phone numbers neither of which had a 916 area code. The card looked really fake, especially since it said “special agent.” It wasn’t even on “real” business card stock and it looked like it had been made on a copy machine. So I ignored it. I figured if it was for real, they’d get in touch with me another way.

So Monday afternoon a different “special agent” shows up at my door. He was talking to me and said he needed to ask me a few questions to see if I know some people. He wanted to come in the house. I said “not a good time.” I didn’t know if this was a scam or not. He showed me his fancy I.D. and special agent badge. (How the hell would I know if it was fake or not). He gave me his card. This one looked like a “real” business card. I told him to come back on Tuesday.

We googled him and he appeared to be legit. His name turned up in a Fresno Bee article about some guy he busted for bankruptcy fraud, among other things. He also showed up on a BYU alumni page thing (saying he took a position in Sacramento as “special agent’).
Then I found two different announcements (from different sources) for some seminar he was in charge of and it had his name and the same phone number he gave me. I figured if he was some guy posing as this special agent guy, he would not give me the real guys phone number. This was while I had my dad telling me to call the FBI and my brother telling me to call the cops. My mom’s friend of a friend works as an IRS investigator and she looked into it and said the guy was legit and that sometimes if it involves your social security number, the agents just come to your house as part of the investigation.

So, he came over asked me if I knew some people (I didn’t know any of them). Or if I knew anyone who worked for the IRS in Fresno (I don’t). I’m still a little confused as to what was going on, but I think an IRS employee was pulling up my name (actually involved my maiden name) and it looked suspicious. The special agent guy thinks it was a fluke. So, not very exciting (luckily). I told him about the other guys business card (I actually showed it to him, because I still have it). He said they have to pay for the fancy cards. If they don’t buy their cards, then they print them out on the computer. Then he actually called the guy and jokingly told him to stop using the cheap cards and that’s why no one calls him back (true) because they look fake.

Here’s a link just posted on the chick list. It’s cute. Slo-mo dogs and techno music.