bobafred

Yesterday I took The Butt out to make number 2, like she likes to do from time to time. We went out the front door and down the steps of the front porch. We started to cross the front yard when out of nowhere something fell from the sky with a loud thud as it hit the ground. Whatever it was, it landed about 4 feet from us. It startled both of us.

We looked over and there was a squirrel lying on the ground. It got up, a little dazed, and dashed back to the “safety” of the nearest tree. We have giant old oak trees in our front yard, and the lowest branch on the tree it fell from is easily 30 feet in the air. I’m not exaggerating either. Our house has to be at least 15 feet tall, and it’s at least twice as high as the peak of our house. See look, I made a drawing on a photo:

After Molly realized what had happened, she lost it — barking, pulling, etc. This is probably the closest she has been to a real live squirrel without a window between them. She has this desire to eat squirrels. We think she might think they are mini-cats or something.

And, I don’t feel bad for the squirrel either, because:

1. Either this squirrel or one of his buddies throws spiny seed pod things at me when I walk under this tree sometimes. It would really hurt if I got hit by one.
2. The squirrels in our yard keep digging up our veggie garden. Assholes.

Anyway, it was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Tags: 9.8 m/s/s, fall, falling, fell, gravity, molly, not flying, oak, squirrel, tree

To read about the previous Secret Date Night, go here.

This time, I was the recipient of Secret Date Night, so that was awesome.

We began Saturday evening at Fritti. To start, we ordered the Calamari Fritti, which was light and crispy and delicious. There were super large tentacle clusters and perfectly tender rings. Really delicious. For my main I had the Frutti di Mare. It’s a cheeseless pizza topped with shrimp, scallops, calamari, and mussels. It was a little watery, most likely due to the water content of the seafood and the lack of cheese, but I loved it. Lori had the Crudo e Rucola, a pizza topped with arugula and prosciutto. Again, so good.

After dinner we headed across the street to Dad’s Garage for a performance of Song of the Living Dead. It’s a musical about love and zombies. The show was great — funny, bloody and totally inappropriate at times. Pretty much everything you’d expect. And who would have guessed that zombies could dance? If you get a chance to see this, you should. I had so much fun.

It’s awesome to have someone that knows me so well and can plan a perfect evening like this. I’m very lucky.

Tags: calamari, dad's garage, fritti, musical, pizza, secret date night, song of the living dead, zombie

I have a need to edit/update an MS Word .doc file. OpenOffice works mostly for this task, but I’ve found that when I save as .doc, it blows up the file size by about 100kbs. Also, some things just don’t seem to work right. For me, table dimensions and layout seem to not be saved correctly. I have a Windows XP partition with Office, but it’s a hassle to reboot whenever I want to do something Windows based.

Enter VirtualBox. I’ve been meaning to see if I could setup my already installed winxp partition in VirtualBox without too much work, so today I did some Googleing and found these resources:

Boot an existing XP (Physical HD) install with VirtualBox.
VirtualBox (virtualbox): How to boot from an existing Win XP partition under Ubuntu.

Follow them closely, especially the first one, and everything should work. Of course, if this destroys your machine it’s your fault and not mine.

A few things I found:

1. Don’t install what’s in the apt-get repos. You need the non-ose version. Get the .deb or whatever binary for your os from the VirtualBox Downloads Page.
2. Make sure to add yourself to the disk and vboxusers user groups. I missed the disk group at first and received errors.

Good luck.

Tags: 8.04, hardyheron, Linux, ubuntu, virtualbox, windows, xp