Quotiddlywinks

As threatened, we ate at the Crab Shanty on Friday, then came home and watched the DVD of "Pirates of the Caribbean." We have played the music from that in several band concerts now - it's got a great baritone sax part! - and so we wanted to see what it was like. Pretty funny, and the music was as good in the film as it was in the 7-minute medley.

Sunday evening, band concert in Bel Air. They have a nice band shell - the Humbert Amphitheatre, officially - but what we really needed was a stiff breeze, which we didn't get. Scott let his granddaughter conduct for a bit - she's a year old or so, I think...

Progress is being made on the animal front. I got a cooling tile and a locking crock food dish for the new chins, since they had managed to dislodge their old food bin from the nest of wire their previous keeper had fastened it with, and throw it down several levels of cage, noisily, late at night. They sure love timothy hay, and it is so much fun to watch them eat it with their little hands holding it!

Rehearsal this evening was rather lacking in air conditioning, leading to a certain lack of energy on the part of most of us.

Tomorrow's agenda: rip up carpet.

It's time to thin the magazine herd again.

Stacks of science and other magazines sitting around, that should have gone into the paper recycling bin a while ago. So:

Science, June 3, 2006: Bipolar kids misinterpret facial cues as hostile. When viewing expressions, they read faces that the adult researchers and that normal kids though were neutral, as being hostile. Emotional centers in their brains lit up more, too. Hmmm, perhaps those charts of facial expressions that shrinks give a lot of depressed, bipolar, and otherwise somewhat-off people to study might actually be worth the study, to retrain those bad habits of misinterpretation.

Scientific American has a blog on its website. Here's a sample of it.

Skeptic, Vol 12 #2 2006: (1)Mentions the Ig Nobels. You can view the most recent Ig Nobel awards ceremondy at http://www.improbable.com/ig/ . (2) An article about a creationist "scientific" conference by James Rosenhouse, who is the editor of EvolutionBlog (formerly at http://evolutionblog.blogspot.com/, where you can read back stuff, and now at http://www.scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/ . ScienceBlogs looks like it will probably have LOTS of stuff to read. (3) An article about the Dover trial shows a pic of a couple of the attorneys with "Professor Steve Steve" of the weblog Panda's Thumb (pandasthumb.org) "Professor Steve Steve" is a stuffed toy panda. If you aren't sure why naming the mascot Steve Steve is funny, you need to read more!!

OK, that takes care of part of the pile. More later. The really tough part is getting rid of Sing Out because the number of albums I want to buy based on their reviews, and folk festivals and camps I want to go to, is completely impossible and I want them all and I can't, waaaaah!!!

Gaaaahhh. What were they thinking?

So, I had purchased a few boxes of stick-on tiles, as a temporary cover for the spare bedroom/pet room floor (the real spare bedroom, like for guests, is in the basement) because I wanted a solid floor surface I could easily clean, not the taupe wall-to-wall carpeting. And today, I started pulling up the carpeting. And you know what? I don't need the tile! (I'll have other uses for it, believe me, so it wasn't a waste of money.) Do you know why I don't need the tile? Because there's perfectly good hardwood flooring under there! Yes, hardwood floor, in decent condition, ready to be swept up and have a couple of plastic desk-chair strips thrown on it directly under the cages, so that any accidental litter box misses don't seep through the wood. Taupe cheap carpeting, over perfectly good hardwood. Gaaaah!!!

I got about 2/3 of that room done, enough so that I can bring up Gizmo's and Chippy-n-Chili's cages tomorrow. Then remove the rest of that room. Knowing that's hardwood, though, I don't know if I'm going to be able to stop. I suspect that foot by foot, I will keep ripping up carpet up the hallway to the living room, and then, who knows?