Here's a little list of what's been happening around here.

~~~There was a hummingbird feeder hanging from the porch eave when we moved in. I'm not sure but I think it's the same one that belonged to my dad when he was here. Yesterday I decided to put some sugar water in it to see if any hummingbirds would show up...

They did! Lots of them. I counted at least 6 at one time hovering near it, trying to bully their way onto one of the four perches. They are pretty possessive about it. When the lot of them aren't nearby there will be one who sits on the cable TV line and watches out. When another bird shows up to eat this one swoops down on it and drives it away. I figure he lets his "family" feed there while keeping interlopers at bay.

Last night I went outside and stood with my head no more than 2 feet from the feeder to see how easily they were spooked. Not very much, it would appear, as several of them came to eat. It was really cool how they would seem to float right in front of me, their wings flapping faster than the speed of light.

~~~I learned how to work with envelopes on the Acid program. FINALLY! All this time we've had the studio I've wondered about them. I had good idea of what they were for, but didn't have a clue as to how to use them. I guess I never had time to read the Help section where it lays it all out. Not that I haven't looked there in the past, but somehow the relevant section always eluded me. So it's only natural that I started yet another project. This one will have the distinction of being the first song to be completed on my laptop.

~~~Speaking of my laptop...I've spent way too much time on it since our network has been up and running with the Internet connected. Not the I waste all that time on the Internet... the music projects eat up a lot of hours. But I find that I am not reading books as much as I'd really like to, with most of my reading confined to web pages. I'm only about 150 pages away from finishing Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", yet I can't seem to get off of the computer long enough to wrap it up. And it's a very good book, too. I'll have to set aside a few hours in the next couple of days to get it done.

~~~I'm convinced that the greatest thing that's happened to the Internet since MySpace is StumbleUpon. Talk about wasting time! I can sit there and Stumble for hours. I have found some very interesting stuff in the process, but then again I've also waded through even more total junk. Like the current "Motivational Poster" fad. God, I am sick of that. And I must have seen at least 10 blogs featuring "How to Ruin a Photograph". I thought that one was mildly funny the first time I came across one...but the concept gets a little more stale every time I stumble upon one.

~~~We've got a brand new $1200 HDTV, a $600 home theater unit, newly installed Dish Network sattelite service and a couple thousand dollars worth of sofa, love seat and recliner to enjoy it all from. All of this is less than 2 months old. And what do I do? Lay in bed with a computer on my lap. I can count the number of movies I've watced on the DVD player on one hand: "There Will Be Blood", "National Lampoon's Van Wilder", "National Lampoon's Van Wilder 2: the Rise of Taj", "Wonderland" and "10,000 B.C.". No wait...I watched "Southland Tales",too. Make that a hand and a thumb.

~~~I've got a sore in my nose. I woke up last night and it was throbbing. I thought it had to be at least 6:30 and decided to get up and watch TV since the pain was keeping me from falling back to sleep. I was wrong about the time. It was 2:00 in the morning. Ugh. Still, I knew there would be no sleep for the time being. Stayed up for almost 2 hours until the agony subsided, then I went back to bed and slept.

The point being, I suppose, that I am one tired fool right now.

~~~Found a wireless mouse at Big Lots for 13 bucks. I needed one to turn the laptop into a music studio (as I mentioned above). Thirteen dollars doesn't seem like all that much, though I didn't compare prices with any other store. It works and it was cheap. That's all I care about.

Big Lots is such a cool store, IMO. You never know what you'll find there. I especially enjoy browsing their food section where you can find several items that never made it past the "testing phase". For instance, they've got 4 packs of Java Pop. That's right...coffee flavored soda pop!!! Who knows, maybe it's really good. Could be I don't know what I'm missing. Regardless, I can't help but think that one swig of this soda would have me puking in record time.

~~~On our way home from last Friday night's football game my wife and I stopped at Mazzio's in Choctaw. There we saw a couple of lovebirds sitting together in a booth hanging all over each other. UGLY lovebirds at that. I became convinced that they had met via an online dating service. You could tell by the way they were fawning over each other that a night of steamy sex was in the offing, the mental image of which, like the prospect of drinking Java Pop, filled me with intense nausea.

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