holy smokes...

It's the middle of August already!!! How the heck did THAT happen?

Nothing new here, although I did have 2 porch adventures in the last week.

The first was not so good - the cats started acting really weird (around 1 am) so I left the lights off and went over to peek out the window onto my porch, and found that there were people - scraggly looking men I did not know - sitting on my porch swing and rocking chairs and talking, just like it was their porch and they were shooting the breeze. Be proud - my usually non-existent common sense reared its ugly head and I called the police to chase them away instead of stomping outside and confronting all four of them with nothing more than righteous anger and a screwdriver.

The second was kind of funny - I was out watering my flowers around 3 am ('cause I do things like that) and I dumped water into a hanging basket and SOMETHING flew out at me. I shrieked and stumbled backwards, and the poor drenched rudely awakened little finch, who had been peacefully sleeping, bounced off a couple of walls and flew into the darkness. Sorry little bird, but you scared the CRAP outta me.

That actually leads me to another incident from a while ago, which just goes to show that you never know who's watching... I was wandering around my house at 2 in the morning in a t-shirt when it occurred to me that I needed to water my plants. I almost just went out in the t-shirt but decided that there were too many scary wandering people in my neighborhood for that (and that was BEFORE the freaky porch people) so i went and changed, and watered as usual. A couple of weeks after that, I was talking to a neighbor and she said something about telling a story of what she'd caught me doing - which made me try to think back and remember everything she could have conceivably caught me doing. Turns out that one night, she and her husband slept downstairs with the windows open 'cause their air conditioning wasn't working - and they ended up watching me water my plants at 2 am... so it's a good think I wasn't wandering around outside in a t-shirt. You just never know...

Good news - I finally bought a laptop, which should be arriving the end of this month so I'll be online again shortly. Yay! Work was kind enough to block ALL popups, which is making many things more difficult - including using the company computer to search for my next job. So, I got a Dell Studio 17. Anyone have one already? Thoughts? Also, I'll be attempting to set up my wireless, with some form of password protection or something so I should spend some time REALLY upset with the evilness that is do it yourself IT stuff. Should be entertaining from a safe distance.