Year: 2003

I hate to do things that make me look like a jerk, but I had to. If you directly link to any of my images from somewhere else, you’re going to get an image that looks like this:

I had to do it, because in the first few days of the month, I’ve gone through as much of my bandwidth quota as I normally do in an entire month. And, after nicely requesting that the person who was stealing my bandwidth simply copy the image to his/her own server, that person instead linked the same image in a different location – like I wouldn’t be able to find it. Hello? Referrer logs?

Anyway, the plan was just to do it for that one referrer, but since it kept changing, I did it for any requests for my images that don’t come from my server. Please let me know if for some reason this messes up the images on my site – as far as I can tell, it hasn’t. And if you ever want to use my images, copy them to your own server, link back to me, and everyone will be happy. (And if you ask me first, I’ll be even happier.)

I’m still feeling icky, so I ended up spending the weekend crafting, drinking green tea as though it were going out of style, and watching movies (I’ve watched almost everything on the Tivo already). I did manage to get outside long enough today to finish some gardening. And no, the pool isn’t open yet. Grr.

But check out all of the progress I made on the christening gift! And my new project has a page, too.

Guess what? It’s June 1st. Which means…in 20 days Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out!!! I’m so excited I can hardly stand it! I actually pre-ordered the book, and only Denis’ sanity – and the fact that I’m getting too old to stay up that late – will prevent me from standing in line to get the book at 12:01 AM. (Yes, I know, this makes me a total geek. So what?)

The fence plans are actually no longer stalled! A few more details to iron out, including getting a call back from the village code enforcement officer (sounds so…official…) about what’s allowed and what’s not. The earliest they can schedule the work is early July, which is later than I wanted but earlier than I’d hoped. In the meantime, I’ll keep my fingers crossed. :)

Either my allergies exploded, or I fell prey to a terrible (but thankfully short-lived) head cold yesterday. Ugh. It was the kind of sick feeling where you can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, so I didn’t even manage to do very much crafting. I pretty much sat in the chair and watched Tivo all day.

And I missed rehearsal for band – with the concert two weeks away, that’s bad.

You know what? Even a five-day-long weekend isn’t long enough! I had very ambitious plans, most of which didn’t even get started. Oh, well. At least most of the gardening is done. I still need a handful of annuals and I’m going to have to do some back-breaking labor to clean out the back garden and fill it with something other than weeds. I managed to gain a little control over the weeds out by the pool – since the landscaping I want done is very obviously not going to happen before we open the pool, I decided to make it look at least marginally better. We didn’t open the pool, since it rained most of the weekend. At this rate, we might manage to get it open before the end of the summer.

And I started another craft project. But it’s for a Christmas gift, so that makes it ok, right? (No more frantic knitting the night before gifting something – that just takes all the fun out of it!)

…to me (and Denis)! We’ve been married for four years – seems like longer…er…you know, like we’ve known each other forever…um…I’d better stop before I dig this hole any deeper! ;)

We had a “date” day today. We both took off from work to do “first-date” type things. First, we went to breakfast at IHOP. Then we went to Chase-Pitkin (ok, so home improvement stores aren’t typically first-date places, but what the heck.) At this point I had to stop into Wegman’s for a single-use camera…I foolishly left my camera home. Then the real fun began: a game of mini-golf, followed by skee-ball, air hockey and pinball. We won enough tickets to get a slinky-dog keychain! (And I beat Denis for the first time ever at air hockey!)

After the arcade, we went to see the new Matrix movie. Eh. I liked X-Men 2 better. After eating pancakes and popcorn for the day, we decided a walk along the canal path with the pups would be a good idea – and found out that Murphy is ok with regular bikes, but scared out of his wits by bikes with trailers and jogging strollers. :) Other than that, they both did very well, and one little kid commented that Murphy looked like he had a tuxedo on, because of the white streak on his chest. Very cute!

Finally, we went to Mario’s via Abruzzi for a lovely dinner. They had someone playing piano, and the owner came around with roses for all the ladies there. Mmmm. Such a lovely way to end the day!