broelan

Maybe I'm just not very observant, but I've only just realized that the Dragon smiley is green in Goo, but red in all the other skins.

Y'know, I switched to alabaster yesterday for a brief bit because I was tired of seeing blank spaces where smileys should be, so I went to the smiley gallery to see what I'm missing. I do remember vaguely wondering why the dragon was red, because I thought that seemed odd.

Now I know why

Okay, so that was only ONE discovery, not discoveries - plural. Maybe I'll discover something else later...

..."Wouldn't it be cool if a hurricane hit while we were here?"
- as we were passing the hurricane evacuation route signs on our drive to the North Carolina coast last month.

My answer, of course, was "Ummmm, no. That wouldn't be cool at all."

And, of course, I was right. (Not to blow my own horn, but I usually am).

The cousins we were staying with in Moorehead City evacuated to Raleigh. They've gotten a few reports from home, and I expect they'll try to return today.

The beaches we walked and played on are completely under water. Much of the area is inaccessible due to water and sand over the roads. The house we were staying in has taken some minor damage, I think they said the roof is leaking in a few places and the power was out. Cell towers are overloaded so communication is hit and miss. And the pier we walked on our last night has been mostly destroyed. It was the last one on Atlantic Beach.


On a similar weather-disaster related note, I noticed that the one house visible from highway 70 that was completely destroyed by the Good Friday tornado was finally torn down last Wednesday. I kept driving by it every day wondering when they were going to do something with it. All of the other damage visible from the highway has seen noticable improvement except for that one house. There have been reports on the news lately about homeowners that have gotten burned by contractors over tornado repairs. There were a couple of really poor neighborhoods that were hit, and there are families that still cannot live in their own houses.

That was the tornado during which mr b famously said "hit the house, hit the house!" The tornado missed us by about 3 miles, and was only an EF1 in our area. (It became an EF4 by the airport where most of the damage was).

Hey, Hyp... how is Joplin faring these days? I've been wondering about that; there's always so much media attention right after the fact, then most people forget about it weeks later while the clean-up and rebuilding will last for months and years.

I have a job interview tomorrow!!

(No, I'm not out of w**k, I'm trying to move departments)

A couple of months back I had posted on facebook that I had purchased a pair of jeans that were a size smaller than the pair I was wearing at the time - going down a size for the first time in, well maybe ever.

I still only have the one pair, but I've jettisoned all of my oversize jeans - the ones I bought because they were cheap ($2 a pair!) and because I needed jeans. They were to the point of falling off me instead of just being big and baggy.

This morning I put on one of my favorite pairs of jeans that I've had for a little over a year. They were snug when I bought them, but denim usually stretches a bit after you've worn them a few hours and so these did. I still don't wear them often - partially because I don't want to ruin them at work, and partially for that brief period of uncomfortableness when I first put them on. Plus, they're low-rise, and people of a certain weight just shouldn't wear low-rise no matter how much I like them, *especially* in the morning when they're snug

I put them on this morning - and for the first time they WEREN'T SNUG!!

...that every time I buy a new Weird Al album I am freshly impressed by his sheer genius wit.