On our trip to a family friend’s house I noticed a rather interesting looking spider on their stainless steel grill. I started taking pictures and noticed that the spider seemed to be doing a little twist whenever I moved the camera closer.

Curious, I zoomed in and noticed that this little guy was really turning to LOOK RIGHT AT ME! Gagh… the only thing scarier than a spider is a smart spider!

Being the manly man that I think I am I kept taking pictures. This was a big mistake.

Approximately 10 seconds after snapping the above picture this gigantic, hairy, soon-to-be-airborne spider launches itself at me with all eight legs sprawled like the face suckers from Aliens.

Needless to say I did the only thing a real man would: I squealed like a little girl, dropped the camera, and stumbled into the picnic table behind me. Good times, good times.

My beautiful silver RAZR cellphone has been missing for the past three days and I fear that it may be gone forever. Not having a cell phone was easy for a day, but now I’m itching to have that lovely little piece of technology back in my pocket where it belongs.

Susan, Shannon, and I have searched the house and cars completely yet it is nowhere to be found! It’s sad to lose such a nice phone. To be honest I am more worried about Verizon, who are probably salivating over how much money I’m going to pay them to get a working phone line again.

I’m still checking my messages which has led me to a strange quandary: is it sadder that I lost my cell phone, or that no one has left me a message over the past three days.

My Dell 1100 laptop’s charging cable developed a short again recently and I had to order a replacement. This is the second time that I’ve had to replace this laptop’s charging cord; it’s tough to work on your laptop when the cord is making crackling noises and smoking (not to mention the fact that it was not charging my laptop’s battery at all). Piece of crap!

Anyway, I am using this as an excuse for why the Maine albums haven’t been posted. All of the images are on my computer at home waiting to be synced to my laptop. I could technically SSH into the home box and do it all over the command line, but I’m a bit too lazy for that.

Despite a large majority of the public supporting stem cell research, President Bush stubbornly stuck to his anti-science guns today by using his first presidential veto. The bill, named HR 810, would allow federal funding agencies to support the development of new embryonic stem cell lines derived from unused frozen embryos created by in-vitro fertilization treatments.

These “embryos” (more accurately “clusters of cells”) are already being created and destroyed by the tens or hundreds for each couple undergoing such fertility treatment. It seems incredibly wasteful to NOT use these cells for some utility after a chlid has been successfully conceived. But Bush continues to bow to crazies in his party that demand control over science based on their interpretation of a 2,000 year old book.

The Hi-Lite 30 is an old drive-in theater about 1 kilometer from our home. It stands in disrepair, mostly because the owners of the land have only leased it one year at a time for the past ten years to the current theater operators; they have had no incentive to renovate property that they did not own. Despite it’s current condition tens of thousands of residents still flock to see movies each summer as they have for the past 50 years. But not this year.

The story is exceptionally convoluted, but it now appears that the theater will be torn down in the name of “money for schools.” School District 131 stands to benefit if (and that’s a big IF) they can sell the 8 acres donated by Bigelow Homes. Not coincidentally, Bigelow Homes is also the developer who proposed to expand it’s existing communist commune HomeTown Aurora by 240 homes where the theater stands today. Big surprise.

You can follow all the drama at the excellent Aurora-based blog OpenlineBlog, specifically this entry which talks about the public hearing Shannon and I attended last night (you might have been able to see us in the picture if it were not blurred).

The whole situation makes me ill. I feel bad for all of the “concerned parents” who were fooled into believing that the hypothetical 1.3 million dollars the donated land was claimed to be worth could help their schools. The problem is that this estimation comes from the developer (who gets a tax write-off for the “value” of the land) and there are no current buyers for the land (in fact there are multiple parcels of land in the area that are currently on the market and not being sold, much less for the per-acre cost used to estimate the land’s value). Money is not going to solve their problems: the East Aurora High School (the only in District 131) already spends $2,000 more PER STUDENT than the surrounding districts. City Hall is not who they should be protesting - they should be protesting outside of their own school board’s meetings. Besides, with the addition of 240 homes and the accompaning children that come along with that influx of people, do they really think that’s going to help their already over-crowded schools? Morons.

I am against violence, but these people need to get their faces smacked with a heavy gauntlet of truth and common sense. About 85% of the people who spoke at the meeting supported the Drive-In, many passionately and with excellent supporting arguments backed by facts. The other 15% lived in HomeTown and appeared to be ignorant of the actual issues surrounding the drive-in. They spoke, for the first time in this months long debate, “because we care about our kids education.” Great! But this wasn’t the place to do it, you naive wastes of carbon, and you sure as hell don’t have a clue about what damage you did last night to you, your children’s, and Aurora’s future.

To the moronic few: Thanks for destroying a wonderful landmark (something unique in the western suburbs), removing cheap family entertainment (now we have to drive elsewhere to spend our money), and driving our property values down with shoddy housing and cheap strip malls (which will go unsold if they have the same luck as the half-empty strip mall 2 kilometers down the road).

This is why I hate stupid people.

current twc: 14,467

Shannon’s beloved 1996 Honda Accord has travelled to some exotic locations in it’s life: over the past 140,000+ miles it’s been to Alaska, San Francisco, DC, and Chicago. But today it wasn’t even able to make it out of our driveway.

Unfortunately we had to disturb a nice AAA tow-truck man on Memorial Day (nicknamed Mr. Man-Boobs because he was a spitting image of Meat Loaf from Fight Club). I felt slightly bad after he mentioned that we were his first call of the day (it was almost after noon). Hopefully we were his only call that day.

We fear the worst for the Honda: I fear that we will need to buy a new car, Shannon fears that I will try to force her to keep driving the old one :). I’m sure it’ll all turn out ok in the end.

current twc: 10,763

[note: This post has been backdated to correspond with the date of the events described]

… must come to an end. We lost our free cable channels tonight. Damn you, cable people, DAMN YOU!

The backstory, for those of you who don’t read regularly, is that a little over a month ago we got cable for the first time in literally years. At the time I slipped the installer a twenty dollar bill to “give us the works” even though we were signed up for only basic service (he prompted the deal, as I wouldn’t have the testicular fortitude to ask him).

Tonight, during a rather entertaining episode of “House“, we lost our cable. Sirens were coincidentally heard about the same time and fearing something big had just hit our cable line I skipped out of the house to investigate. I ran into a cable guy who was bent over our cable box checking out the wires and holding a clipboard. Worried, I asked him “did you just cut the cable to our house?” and he answered “No, you should have cable again shortly.” Sated with this response I skipped back into the house and sure enough we were soon back in business. It wasn’t until Shannon tried to change the channel to her precious FoodTV that we realized our channel lineup was now back to the basics.

I guess we deserve it - I mean, we were getting something we didn’t really pay for (which is a nice way to say we were stealing). But I am surprised if he had been sent out here just to “fix” our cable line, as I do not believe the cable company can detect the presence or absence of the special decoder “tubes” used to enable the higher channels. Anyone care to enlighten me if this is even possible for them to detect from their center offices?

Our beloved camera (Canon S230) is broken, so those of you wondering why pictures have not been posted recently can stop worrying that we are dead. While it can still take photos the focusing mechanism is very unreliable, so we come back with a lot of blurry shots (made even more frustrating since we cannot tell the shots are blurry when taken due to the small camera LCD).