Buy My Crap - More books! BOOKS! BOOKS!!!

I'm attempting to clean out my room a bit. See, I thought I had reduced my sizeable book collection to two bookcases - The big giant one that I struggled to put together a couple months ago, and a smaller one [right] that I could use to put books I currently had up for sale on Half.com. However, I popped my trunk the other day and found TWO boxes of books that I had neglected to move into the house, and thus, they somehow must fit on the bookcases.

(Note: Yes, that is a Maxim magazine on the top of the small bookcase, the aforementioned subscription that I can't risk canceling. I don't know what to do with them. I am a bit of a packrat when it comes to books and magazines, and I feel odd just throwing them out. I think I might put them up on eBay to see if some poor desperate soul wants them, and then I won't ever think again about why some dude would want 24 old issues of Maxim. ick.)

Anyway, I don't really have anything too fascinating for sale. There were some minor items of interest - an anthology of Super Mario Bros. cartoons, for example - that moved quickly, but most of the books are selling sluggishly.

But hey - Don't let that dissuade YOU from purchasing some :) You can check out my Half.com storefront here. And to you, gentle readers, I'll extend the same deal I gave to my friend Kristi - If you buy anything more than $1, I'll throw in any other books you want that cost under $1. I'm mostly looking to clear my room of clutter here, as opposed to making a ton of money.

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.

Steve Around The House - Cleo The Cat

This is Cleo the Cat. In the past, I've blogged about Minnie, who I refer to somewhat derisively as The Kitten. This is because Minnie is still a kitten, and as such, she doesn't realize that it hurts when she bites me, and scratches at my ears and the back of my head.

(At least, I don't think she realizes... When I was playing Guitar Hero the other week, she did jump up at me and scratch hard enough to draw blood. I'm now worried that, like any B-movie, that she has acquired a taste for it and will be unable to stop attacking me as she gets older. Then again, The Kitten also tries to lick from pots of boiling water, so it's an open question how much longer she'll have all of her nine lives.)

Anyway, I don't talk much about Cleo because, well, she doesn't really do to warrant talking about. All she does is hide around the house, sleep in my bed, cuddle with me and get harassed by The Kitten.


This and the first shot in the entry are the only two photos I have of Cleo that came out relatively OK. See, her fur is so dark that she blends into practically anything. In the picture to the right, she's actually in the middle of that quilt. But you can't see crap.

Because of this, Cleo basically hides wherever the eff she wants, whenever she wants. I've found her under my bed, under my roommate's bed, on the top shelf of our closets, behind my computer desk, under my covers, on every chair and windowsill in the house, and on my DVD shelf, which is also black. She uses this to her advantage in the middle of the night, as she sneaks on to my bed while I'm sleeping and curls up on me.

This camo serves her well against her biggest danger in this house - The Kitten. See, Cleo is de-clawed, but The Kitten isn't. Meaning, The Kitten will pounce on Cleo and cause her discomfort. (The Kitten finally caught on to the fact that Cleo doesn't have claws.) Also, Cleo is like seven or eight years old, and much like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, she's too old for that shit The Kitten is into. She has no interest in being chased at 2 a.m.

She does still love to attack spiders though. This is her greatest passion in life, even beyond sleeping, hiding, and falling asleep in her hiding spots. Once a night, she creeps into the living room and carefully watches the door to the cellar, where they climb up from. She stares at it intently, for hours sometimes, although sometimes The Kitten will chase her away. Finally, she pounces, kills and eats.

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!

Steve 1, Bookcase 1

The other day, I was having a horrible time constructing this cheap, $25 five-shelf bookcase that I got from Walmart. For an example of this wonderful product, you can check it out here, since I'm sure you're so psyched to get one after hearing my description. When I got it home, I noted that some of the wood was a bit split, but it still seemed sturdy enough to construct.

Two days and about three hours later, I have finally triumphed. Ugh. When it comes to construction, I have two right thumbs. (I say right instead of left because I'm left-handed.) You can now see the glorious product as it sits in my room:


I'm doing my best to slowly fill it with stuff, making sure to put the heaviest stuff on the bottom to serve as an anchor of sorts.


The tippy-top just has a Red Sox World Series hat, followed by empty N64 boxes on the top shelf, Playstation 2 and Jaguar and NES cases on the second shelf, miscellaneous crap on the middle one, and books on the fourth and base shelves. I still have about half a dozen boxes to go through, at which point the whole case will probably be full. I still haven't really touched my movie DVDs, which are going on a separate three-shelf case in the living room. However, it feels good to be productive and to unpack all of my stuff, finally, after three weeks of living in this apartment.

(Note: This is only for me to be leaving for business on Sunday night, but that post will have to wait until Saturday afternoon, officially. CLIFFHANGER!)

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.)