Steve Around The House - The Great Driveway Flooding

I really enjoy my new place. My roommate is awesome, and I'm glad she puts up with a smelly boy like myself, and her cat, Cleo, is awesome, as I've previously established.

However, one looming issue is the huge puddle in my front yard. Every time it rains, the driveway floods, as you can see above. That picture is from Friday afternoon, and it's still here today, Tuesday night. ick. At its deepest point, the water gets mid-calf.

I'm not sure if things will get any better in the winter, either. Sure, it will freeze over, thus preventing my engine from water damage. But since it'll be ice, I'm sure there could be bigger issues. Like me accidentally parking in the puddle, and coming out the next morning to find my wheels frozen in the middle of a puddle. That... would be bad.

A side benefit of the puddle in the front yard is that my basement is dry. Our neighbor has no water in his half of the driveway, but in contrast, his basement gets flooded after even a tiny bit of rain. Then again, our basement is so musky and gross that a pool of water down there might help matters. When we moved in, the only things down there were a dehumidifier, a couple beer pong balls, and some rat poison.

I have a kitten.

I have a kitten.

Although, to be perfectly honest, The Kitten belongs to my roommate. Minnie (the name of The Kitten) is a little less than a year old, so as a result, she loves to stay up late at night with me, and sleep through most of the day. As a result, I feel like I do have to take some ownership in the cat.

So, yes, I have a kitten. By continually repeating this statement, it invokes in my mind the beautiful "I have a dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. However, The Kitten is more like a consistent, nagging nightmare.

Don't be fooled by how cute she is in the photos I've attached - she is vicious. Lately, her favorite thing to do is to bite and scratch at my toes while I'm playing Starcraft 2 in the living room. This is doubly annoying, since 1) it messes up where I am in the game and 2) the little effer has sharp teeth. She managed to draw blood the last time she bit. What a savage!

Beyond biting at my feet, she also likes to dig her claws in whenever I try to move her from someplace she's not supposed to be. You know, like on my laptop computer. The other week I got a nice gash in my thigh for my efforts. She also likes to do cute things like climbing on top of the couch, jumping on my shoulder, and then clawing at my ear.

Lately, she has also taken to biting the computer cord to my Macbook. On one hand, a dark part of me kind of wants to see what would happen if she bit through it. But, this probably wouldn't go over well with the roommate, and besides, it still is just a cat. (We're both hoping she mellows out as she gets older, which is what happened with my roommate's other cat, Cleo, who is now six or seven years old.) I'm probably going to look into some Apple Bitter or another, similar product to get her to knock it off.

Speaking of the other cat, The Kitten LOVES to chase her. By "chase", I mean that she will try to chase Cleo, who will then hiss at her and smack her in the face. Even though Cleo doesn't have front claws, she's a bit bigger, and just generally more intimidating than The Kitten, who can't meow, just purr.

So anyway. That's the story of me and The Kitten. I'll be back to the regular entries on Baggage on Monday, and switching back to the more normal Monday-Wednesday-Friday production schedule for the game for the rest of the month, hopefully. Lates!

In lieu of Baggage, please enjoy When A Kitten Attacks

Sooo. Originally, I planned to review some Baggage episodes by watching them online. Since I moved to my new place, I hadn't set the DVR up to record the show. Unfortunately though, it looks like the streaming video on GSN.com is down for the new season. Therefore, I won't have a Baggage entry until Friday. Sorry folks!

As an apology, please take this humorous photo of Minnie the Kitten:


Obviously, at some point while I was at work today, she decided that the paper towel holder MUST die. I found it on the floor when I came home from covering the fair this evening. Sigh! Luckily though, it was all paper, so I was able to easily chuck it in a bag.

Speaking of the fair, I'll add that it is incredibly odd to cover a huge event in the area 1) you grew up and 2) you work two different jobs in. I was doing constant double takes because I saw people I knew, or I thought I knew them from my various travails. So yeah, that was weird.

(Also: Someone tapped my car at 5 m.p.h. while I was about to make a turn. There was no damage to my car, so I figured "meh", and neither of us called the police, since we didn't want our rates to increase. However, it was then weird because we were both going the same way, and she inadvertently followed me for 35 minutes. At this point in the story, I think it's supposed to take a turn on to Sexy, but unfortunately, this was not Skinemax, and she was like missing three teeth.)

Weather-related maladies

Man - I had an odd day because of the weather, which is why this entry is actually coming after August 5. However, I'm backdating it because I would have posted it earlier, if not for the ridiculous weather.

The fun started at 9 a.m. I just finished submitting my latest story on court hearings for a local woman accused of killing a man with her car. You can read a brief of it here. Also, just like last time, my family noticed that I landed in some video clips again. I came in at about 1:50, blinking like I just stole the crown jewels of England.

Anyway, after submitting that story, I took the next five minutes to relax and unwind. I got up from my desk, walked out to the small kitchen area of the paper, got some water from the Poland Springs dispenser, and used the bathroom. Just your everyday sort of thing.

But when I walked back into the newsroom, there were literally buckets of water pouring out from the ceiling. See, early Thursday morning, Westerly got hit by severe flash thunderstorms, and it was also under a tornado watch. Apparently, the leaky roof from earlier in the year wasn't quite fixed completely, and something had burst in the roof. All the weight of the water focused on two ceiling tiles, which snapped and came tumbling down.

Of course, the affected area was right near my desk, about five feet away. One of my co-workers unfortunately got the brunt of it, as it mostly hit her area of the partition wall that we share. However, the water soon seeped across the floor to the rest of the newsroom, and by the end of the morning production run, the newsroom was down to six computers that could be safely used, as opposed to the normal 16.

The whole scene was madness. Workers from the on-site print facility came rushing in with pushcarts. These are normally used for paper disposal and recycling, but today they held dozens of gallons of water. The thing that surprised me the most was the sheer noise of the event - The water was loud, and it was surrounded by two to six yelling workers at all times, followed by a noisy vacuuming and cleaning effort. In this cacophony, the editors managed to get the paper out, which was a small miracle.

Anyway... That's how my day started. I left work early to instead do some stuff out of the office, since they had to clean-up and what not. Proving the old Rhode Island adage correct, if you just waited 15 minutes (times four), the storm passed, and in its place was 88-degree heat and ridiculous humidity. The feel-like temperature according to Weather.com was 102 at one point, so I didn't really get a ton of work done. (Damn my Irishness!)

The fun wasn't over for the day though. Thursday night is trivia night at Casey's, a local restaurant / pub that my friends and I enjoy. We were minding our own business, eating delicious meals before the fun started shortly after 9 p.m., when the lights started to flicker. They came back on, and then, VOOMPH! Complete darkness. (Photo to the right, taken by my roommate Becca.)

I've seen this sort of thing happen in bad movies, and thankfully, there was no mad rush or screaming as people tried to flee in terror. Everyone kind of just sat in the dark for a minute, and quietly murmured to their friends. The staff came around to tables and said that a conductor on the street had probably blown, and that we could stay and drink if we wanted to and what not.

We (my roommate Becca and her friend Julie) decided to stick it out, because we're awesome like that. The power snapped back on in about 20 minutes, following by trivia, which we totally dominated and won! Woohoo! Two weeks ago, we won with the glorious team name The Stephanie Pratt All-Stars, but this week we kept it simple with the inside joke name of What's Your Deal?

So, yeah. I'm officially not a fan of this god damn weather. But at least winning trivia at the end of the night softened the blow a bit. (Also, I stole a bunch of mints on the way out from Casey's, which is always a good thing.)

Restaurant Review: Seven Moons

So tonight, I'm hitting up Seven Moons with my friend Becca. As a result, I'm kind of half-butting this entry off the top of my head right now, before I go. (As a reminder, entries are time delayed; I don't actually type them all up right before 7 p.m.) I'll have another entry today about the awesome episode of Community that was on this week, and the other Thursday night shows I watch, The Office and Parks and Recreation.

Anyway, Seven Moons is the best restaurant of one type of Asian food - Good food. This is in contrast from places like Chen's, Bali Village and New Dragon, which tend to have cheaper food in greater quantities. In contrast, Seven Moons has sushi and tempura and other better, higher-quality food.