Thoughts of the Lady in the Tower

2004-07-05 - 2:12 p.m.

Weekend Update

I went to the animal shelter on Friday. 230 guinea pigs were picked up from a home in La Plata, MD, and the shelter's been overwhelmed. I feed, watered, cleaned, and handled guinea pigs for 2.5 hours. I enjoyed it, but was tired from moving all of those cages around.

Afterwards, I met Kaolin and she followed me to the house to help unpack stuff and just hang out. On the way over, my dad called and asked me to stop by their house to pick up some stuff.

Kaolin followed me, and when we got there she left the car running (thinking we'd just be there for a moment). Dad told her to turn off her car so he could 'take her for a ride'. We looked at each other confused, then he brought out the Segway.

We rode around the culdesack for a bit to try it out, then went on our way. It was fun, but I don't have enough use for one to spend the money (Amazon has them for $5k).

As an aside, Amazon has a new statistic: "Customers who viewed this page ultimately bought:" 51% who viewed the Segway page bought one. That's more than I would have guessed.

Things are proceeding along at the house. On Friday, Amalia, Kaolin and I tinted the windows in the front of the house. It's pretty amazing, I can really tell the difference in the upstairs rooms.

We met up with Jonathas to go see Harry Potter. This was my favorite of the books, but not my favorite movie. Richard fell asleep!

Saturday we puttered around the house, and Sunday we went out with Jonathas and Amalia. The plan was mini-golf, but it rained. We browsed through Springfield mall, ate dinner, then introduced them to Dangerous Beauty (the movie about the Venetian courtesan).

In the middle of the film, we took a break to walk up the hill to see Indian Head's fireworks. They were decently nice, though J&A decided that they like Charles County's fireworks better. I think I'll continue to prefer Indian Head's fireworks even after I see Charles County since I can walk from my house to the Pavilion. After the fireworks were done, traffic was Just Crazy. It's always like that after firework displays, and I REALLY ENJOYED not having to deal with that.

Of course, as I explained to Richard, I'm used to a lot worse traffic than what we saw last night. When I was growing up we would to take our boat and watch the fireworks on the Ashley River (Charleston, SC). The problem with that is the bottleneck at the boat ramp to get the boat OUT of the water, and that at least the parks try to keep people from drinking. It's a lot harder to police boat operators (though they did start trying there at the end of the period I attended; I think part of that had to do with the party boat that cracked the piling of the James Island Connector).

Today is shaping up to be a bit of a lazy day. More puttering about the house, getting stuff put away, hung up, or otherwise dealt with.