In the last 48 hours, my download of Veronica Mars season 2 has gotten through a whopping 2%. At this rate it'll be my birthday before I get to see any of them. Might as well just buy the DVDs now, I was planning to some day anyway....
Beth said about 2 days ago in a comment that she may have been in labour, but if not, a tentative induction was scheduled for 7:30 pm Sunday. It's now nearly midnight in her time zone and I just wanna know if it's all happened yet. Here's hoping Baby Prins decided to come out on her own before the scheduled induction.
I'm feeling strange twitches in my belly, usually when I'm sitting or lying still. Actually been feeling them for a week or two, but they're getting stronger now so there's no mistake as to what it is. And Darrin's jealous because he can't feel it yet. I don't know that it'll make much difference when he can, because they stop whenever I put my own hand over the spot they are.
Channel 10 is only showing Veronica Mars episodes about once every two weeks. At 10:30 or later at night. And sure, I'm feeling much better now than I was a few weeks ago, but still, I need my sleep. So I'm just going to download the episodes I haven't seen yet and try to keep up with the new ones as they come out in the US.
Apparently the Vegemite ban was a hoax. That, or whoever said it in the first place is trying to make like they never did. Whatever. Rove still had some funny stuff to say about it the other night.
By the way, we're not 100% certain, but the "Straight Outta Lynwood" tour may very well be starting in... New Zealand! We're hoping to play New Zealand and Australia in March, with a North American tour to follow in the summer. And I'd really, really like to work in a European tour next year as well... but we'll just have to wait and see how well the record does over there.
Um, yeah, as long as I'm not in labour that day, I'll be there...
Go to your nearest record shop or wherever you get CDs and buy Weird Al's new album Straight Outta Lynwood.
But don't listen to it in the car on the way home. That'd just be dangerous. Wait till you're home; then you can laugh all you want and not be a danger to anyone.
When I lived in the US, there was a radio show from the Twin Cities that I listened to called Garage Logic. And on this radio show, people rang up occasionally with bizarre things that they saw or heard or read, and the host, Joe Soucheray, would sometimes call these things an "End of the World." And then he'd play a clip from REM's song "It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)." Other times he'd just play the foghorn clip (basically an audible eyeroll).
Yesterday I heard about an almost definite End of the World.
It seems the US Government has banned Vegemite. Seriously. And why? Because it has folate/folic acid added. Which is currently only allowed to be added to breads and cereals. Link here.
Okay, people, basic nutrition lesson coming up. Folate is a B vitamin. The best source of B vitamins in nature is meat. Folate is something they tell pregnant women and women trying to get pregnant to have plenty of because it's said to prevent neural tube defects such as spina bifida.
Are they going to start banning meat next because it's not supposed to have folate? Wouldn't put it past them. Yeah, I know, it's only because it's been added in production, not because it occurs naturally. But really (and this is totally off the point)...adding vitamins & minerals during production takes them out of their natural environment, and in some cases, makes them unabsorbable. Not only that, but in the production of breads and cereals, they take a lot of things OUT of the grains and then add back in a fraction of what was there to begin with.
All that aside though, if folate is such a good thing, then why limit it to only breads and cereals?
We now have a new muffler - well, basically everything behind the catalytic converter is new.
The repairs we've done in the last month have surpassed what we bought it for. But that should just make it last a lot longer.
And the water is back on. So we can have showers whenever and flush the toilet EVERY time, instead of "if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down." And I can wash dishes again.
So. We just spent over $2000 getting our car into reasonable working order, because there were a few biggish things that needed work, and we figure we'll have the car for years yet, and we kinda don't want it breaking down when we have a kid in the back seat. One of the things we had fixed was a leak in the cooling system. It was just a seal they had to replace, but it took them three hours to get to it, and then another three hours to put it all back together. And it's been running great, except the temperature gauge kept creeping up. So Darrin was keeping an eye on it going to work & back every day, and filling it up just about every day, and noticing there's still stuff leaking out from somewhere. And then Wednesday morning he finally had a morning that he could be late to work and take the car in, so he looked at the radiator, and one of the hoses was JUST out of its...socket? Whatever. Anyway, that was the problem, and the guys at the car shop were happy to get it in right away AND NOT CHARGE US because they'd apparently knocked it out anyway.
So I picked it up after they finished, gave it a wash (it doesn't look like the same car anymore), got my beige shorts all dirty...ah well. Then I went to get Darrin at work. And as I was driving into the school over the speed humps/bumps, I thought the muffler sounded a bit loud. So when I parked I looked under the back, and it all looked normal. And I mentioned it to Darrin, and he said he thought it was getting loud too. So we went home, and about two thirds of the way home, somewhere up Lower North East Road, north of the Torrens, we stopped at the lights, took off again, and it sounded...well, Darrin said it sounded like a V8 (it's a V6); I thought it sounded more like a motorcycle. Loud. So we looked under it again when we got home, from the sides this time, and the pipe has come off the front of the muffler. And the old quick-fix of a tin can & an unwound coathanger just doesn't seem like it'll work in that spot. So the car has been sitting in the same spot since Wednesday afternoon. We're just waiting to see if Darrin's brother Craig has a spare muffler before we do anything. If Craig doesn't have anything, we'll take it back to the shop (which is conveniently just across the road, so not likely to get pulled over by any cops on the way there).
And then Darrin woke up Thursday feeling really spaced out, and decided to stay home. We wonder if it could've been carbon monoxide poisoning from the car slowly getting worse over the last few days/weeks. Anyway, he spent the day lying around, sleeping, watching movies, and he's back at work today.
But at some point while I was out getting groceries yesterday, the water went off. And it hasn't been on since then. We've still got some in the hot water tank, and there was a trickle coming in last night through the cold taps (apparently enough to refill the toilet tank overnight so we could flush it again this morning), but it's still off. So as soon as I post this, I'm going to have to go ask the vet out front if she knows anything about it, because all the outside taps are off too, and the main switch that controls our house is ON, so we don't know what's going on.
Update: The vet says she turned the water off because her hot water system is overflowing. She's tried getting in contact with the landlady but so far no response. So until something happens, we just leave the water off unless we need it for something, then turn it back off again when we finish. The vet's overflow just runs into a sink, so it's just a matter of wasting water and getting the landlady irate again about spending so much on water bills if it's left on.
