Melyssa-with-a-Y

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Wouldn't you know it, we finally get some rain in Austin (and I mean RAIN... it was pouring when I woke up this morning!) and in the midst of the deluge, there's no water coming from the taps in my house. hunh? Chalk up another new experience - calling the utility company to see what the hell is going on! Turns out there was a water main break between my house and the house next door. D'oh! The utility guy stopped by as I was eating breakfast and promised that the water would be fixed by the time I got home tonight. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime, I have "Aqua Jog Challenge" at the gym tonight, so at least I'll get in a shower there if I can't have one at home. ;) Things I never saw from my kitchen window in VA: (well, ok, my kitchen didn't actually have a window) a family of deer - a mom and 2 does - trotted by while I was making dinner last night. :) Wasn't fast enough on the camera to get a pic, although I suspect opening the b...

I love this Onion headline today: National Organization For Women Turns 39 Again http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51848

Stolen from Stick The things I've done are in bold and blue. **NOTE: The RSS feed of this page for some reason hasn't un-bolded some of Stick's answers. (I do not have any piercings other than my ears, for example.) 01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink 02. Swam with wild dolphins 03. Climbed a mountain 04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive 05. Been inside the Great Pyramid 06. Held a tarantula 07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone 08. Said 'I love you' and meant it 09. Hugged a tree 10. Bungee jumped 11. Visited Paris 12. Watched a lightning storm at sea 13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise 14. Seen the Northern Lights 15. Gone to a huge sports game 16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa 17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables 18. Touched an iceberg 19. Slept under the stars 20. Changed a baby's diaper 21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon 22. Watched a meteor shower 23. Gotten drunk on champagne 24. Given more than you c...

I have really been enjoying Alton Brown's new Food Network show, " Feasting on Asphalt ." In tonight's episode, the poor guy fell down in the desert outside Las Vegas, and cracked his collarbone. It's hard to watch him trying to cook and eat with his arm in a sling. :( But now he's in LA, so I have to pay attention and see if there's anything I need to try when I'm out there for Thanksgiving! Ooh, he's having a breakfast burrito - something that is immensely popular here in Austin. Where is Hawthorne, CA? I feel like I'm almost as bruised as Alton... my trainer worked me to death tonight! I know I'm gonna be seriously achy tomorrow morning, but it's gonna be worth it, right? Right? I worked every muscle group and then some. ouch. Aleve is my best friend. :) The head of the center apologized to me for not spending as much time with me as he had hoped... but since he's busy writing a proposal for a petascale supercomputer, I supp...

This is so fun! It will look like nothing's happening, until you run your mouse around in the browser window. Voila! and when you click, it changes colors! http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

This entire day had good news/bad news written all over it. The good news was, I had organized my bathroom, bedroom and kitchen enough to be able to find everything I needed when I was getting ready for work, and I made it there in no time. The bad news was, I left the A/C at 76 degrees (instead of it going up to its balmy 82-degree setting for daytime when I'm not here). If I keep that up, it's gonna be an expensive electric bill. :( The good news is, I found the Wonder Woman calendar, which I'd been searching for all weekend! It was in the very last box we packed in Arlington, where I stuck the few random things that hadn't fit anywhere else: my MBA diploma, a picture frame, and my ice cube trays -- which I already replaced, but more ice isn't a bad thing when it's 100 degrees outside! The bad news is, as I was putting away the scissors, I cut a hole in my shirt! My blue Superman shirt that I got from the now defunct Warner Bros store many years ago! :( The go...

Here are a few pics of the place with my stuff in it... the living room here is much larger than my Arlington living room was, so I'm going to have to decide what to do with the extra space. (of course, in my old place, the living room also housed the dining room and the office... and all of those are now in separate rooms!) There's also a few feet of empty space to the left of the sofa, which you can't see in this photo. Must buy bookcases!! and, here's the bedroom. Since this photo was taken, I actually managed to empty out all but two of these boxes (or, um... moved one or two of them to the other bedroom so they were out of the way), and set up the stereo on top of the little dresser. (Can't unpack without music!) It's pretty much pitch black in the apartment when all the lights are out - my windows don't face the street except in the kitchen, or when they do they're covered by trees or overhang. I think I might have to get an unobtrusive night lig...

Yipppeee!! The movers appeared yesterday morning at 9:15am with my stuff ... amazing that all 132 of my items fit in the front section of the 18-wheeler trailer. They managed to get everything off the truck in about 2 hours and most of it made it into the right room(s). Here's what the place looked like *before* they arrived: This is the living room. --> Every room has a ceiling fan... it's awesome. If I measured correctly, the LR is about 15' x 12'. That's my front door, but I don't think I'll be using it much since the driveway/garage is right next to the kitchen door. But there is a gorgeous wooden porch out there, which I'll have to photograph later. This is the master bedroom (below). It's odd, the smaller bedroom has one large closet... the master has two smaller closets. The other oddity is that the air conditioning unit is literally directly outside my bedroom window. But the white noise doesn't bother me, it's actually what puts ...

This little blip was in the New York Times today , from a report issued in Science Magazine: In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked whether to respond "true," "false" or "not sure" to this statement: " Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science. Here's the graphic. See the US down there at the bottom? This is what happens when you have a president who believes in intelligent design rather than evolution! (although to be sure, he hasn't evolved himself much past the orangutan stage...ha ha ) I will admit, I always found it hard to reconcile the story of Adam and Eve and X-begat-Y-begat-Z in the Torah with what I had learned about evolution...

How many of the world's metro's have you been on? Here's my list. You can generate your own at http://metro.b3co.com Some of them are easy to recognize, like London (top left) and DC (bottom right). Others include Atlanta (MARTA), San Francisco (BART), Paris ( 3rd row, right end), Madrid (3rd row, diamond shape), and New York City (MTA)... pretty cool! -- If you mouse over the logo you should get the city name. Made from b3co.com !

Now that I found a place to live, I just want to MOVE IN! Of course, now is when time drags on as slowly as possible. I have started the process of changing my address with all of my various credit cards, magazines, airline memberships. (What in the world did we do about all this before the Internet?) It's so great to be able to log into my different accounts and change the address instantly. :) I will have to email everyone my new info soon, too. Austin is such an advanced community - I signed up for my new electric/water/trash service online, too! They sent me a nice confirmation email. I actually had to call and talk to a real person to get my cable/DSL/phone service from Time Warner, which will be hooked up on Monday the 21st. (I have to go almost a WEEK without DSL?!?!) Of course, that depends on when the movers actually arrive with my stuff. Still no word on that, although I found out yesterday that my (132) items have now been loaded onto a truck for transport. Baby steps, I...

There was a blog posting on the Washington Post website today about "Uncool Songs it's OK to Admit you Love." Tons of people commented and added their own lists - there is a range of music from the 60's onward... and most of my favorite 80's songs appear (multiple times). This list comes from a posting, toward the end, that made me laugh out loud -- many of these songs were played at my Bat Mitzvah in 1986! When I get an iPod (someday), I'll be putting a lot of these on there! Tarzan Boy - Baltimora (the DJ played this by request!) I Wanna Be a Cowboy - Boys Don't Cry Never Surrender - Corey Hart (oh no, we wanted to hear Sunglasses at Night) Don't Forget Me When I'm Gone - Glass Tiger And We Danced - Hooters (Yes, I was a HUGE Hooters fan!) Walkin' on Sunshine - Katrina and the Waves ( I still bop around the house when I hear this) Break My Stride - Matthew Wilder Jungle Love - Morris Day and the Time One Night in Bangkok - Murray Head Pass...

It was a very full weekend... I'm still recovering. On Saturday morning, I went to see the Yarn Harlot! It was arranged by Hill Country Weavers , but since their shop is actually quite small, she spoke next door at the Baptist Church. As she said (at the time, and again on her blog ), she's probably the first harlot to speak from the church pulpit. :) She's just as funny in person as she is on her blog. And she's cute! (I don't know what I expected... but I don't remember seeing a pic of her before so I was pleasantly surprised.) I think most of her speech was reading from her new book , but I don't have it yet, so I can't say for sure. I took my knitting bag with me, as did most of the women in the room. I made good progress on Sam's new sweater before and during Stephanie's talk.... that is, when I wasn't laughing hysterically! She told stories, and gave tips on how to spot knitters in a crowd, and sample answers to "Wow, you sure have...

On the way to work this morning, I was behind a Jeep with a bumper sticker that read: heh. Probably the simplest, best anti-Bush sticker I've seen! (...if you're a computer geek and know that it's written in html) :) Also on the roads of Austin: Last week, I was on my way to put down the deposit for my new place. I was driving along Lamar in front of a guy in a Jeep Cherokee, who was drumming on his steering wheel along with the music... which wouldn't ordinarily be odd, except he was *using drumsticks* (with both hands) while he was driving! Only in Austin. :)