Lewies Blog

Last year I thought I was rich. I always get impressed with the assessed value of my house when I receive them in the mail. Today I heard about a website called Zillow. This website gathers public information about houses and makes it easy to find out how much your house is worth.

It turns out that my house on Zillow is currently valued at $352,690. I thought it was a mistake, because last year my house was assessed at just under $250k. I originally purchased the house for $156k a few years back. Looking at more data, I found that houses around my neighborhood generally sell for that amount.

They have a lot of little features on the site. One feature shows how much ($2,658) my house went up this week. They have charts for 1, 5 and 10 years that you can compare with the average value of its zip code, city, county, state, and the country. One interesting feature is that I can get email updates on my home.

I’m a third of the way to becoming a millionaire.

I filed my federal taxes this past weekend, so my wife and I should be getting a refund any day now.

I discovered that one of my tires was down so low that some metal threads were exposed and even broken on the edge. A trip to Guaranteed Used Tires solved the problem before I had any serious trouble. A new set of wheels for the car is one of the items on my to-do list with the tax money that we get back this year.

Another item on the agenda is rabies and distemper shots. I have eight cats, and limited room in the car. We are looking into a veterinarian that does house calls for our little colony. I think our youngest cat, Bandit, is not old enough for the rabies shot just yet.

I got a violation notice in the mail from the county about my front handrail. One of the bolts came off and the bottom corner of the steps cracked off. In response to the first violation, we took the handrail off and put it on the side of the house. It seems that our solution wasn’t a good idea since we got a second violation on it. It appears that I’m going to have to invest in some bolts and learn how to make cement, or try my hand with lots of superglue.

We didn’t listen! Scientist have been predicting that the Mad Bird disease could mutate and spread to humans everywhere. Several groups from the WHAT (World Heathens And Terrorists) had claimed responsibility for the outbreak. The U.S. is still investigating as to authenticity of the beta max tapes received from the media network OverZhere.

As to what the mad bird disease is exactly, researches have broken it down. Terrorists have combined the Mad Cow Disease Strand #p38 with a mutated version of the Bird Flue TX-780. They synthesised the results on a DANDY 8088 computer. The problem was that the first Mad Bird strands couldn’t infect other systems other then the DANDY on a Thursday at 5:15 in the afternoon (GMT).

Early intelligence reports were gathered about this terrorist conspiracy. Scientists stated that the threat was imminent if the strand would be able to mutate. The warnings were played down through politics, bureaucracy, and animosity . Politicians are blaming the recent changes to the Metacare system and calling for a bipartisan committee to determine if investigations should be started. The rest of us are looking around confused as to what all the fuss is about, but emotionally playing that we care.

At 5:16 on Thursday of last week, the strand mutated. It spanned all over the internet taking over systems. The WHAT has disclosed the virus causes global warming. Members of the WHAT were available for comment, but we choose not to ask out of spite.

In an effort to safeguard it’s population, China as well as a few libraries in the red states have closed there borders to almost all internet access filtering out keywords such as “Mad”, “Bird”, “Disease”, “Flu”, and “Gay Marriage”. What the people don’t know can’t hurt them and will keep them safe. China is known to be an exporter of 95% SPAM mail to the US and will continue to allow its message to be heard, regardless of the outbreak.

“Ouw citizens must be heawd.”, claimed a non-important political figure that no one has heard of. “We awe allowing ouw citizens to send messages to the outside wowld. This is in obsewvance of the Fwee-Speech wites in the U.S. Fiwst Amendment. This is done to pwomote a healthy welationship between ouw two countwies.” Meanwhile, sources estimate that China is reponsible for the speedy spread of the epidemic due the massive amounts of viruses attached to its outgoing SPAM.

Crashing in Second Life isn’t so bad usually, as you just start up the client and go. Some crashes in SecondLife are annoying though. I can simply log in, but my internet worm detection software kicks in and prompts me roughly twenty times if I want to permit a remote system to access second life.

Maybe it is a problem with my internet worm detection software. I wish there was an option to permit or block all access. Instead, I have to manually click through each dialog box. I even tried setting up some filters for IP blocks so that any IP from there location isn’t blocked. I still had problems.

I’ll just pull my hair out for a while until I can get through all of these messages.

I woke up on Friday morning to the horror of watching my cat choke on a hair ball. The horrible part was that it was from him licking his own fur that hadn’t detached from his skin. I was able to pull the hair out slowly. It was wedged down his throat pretty far. I held him against me and petted him until he was purring for a while.

The only thing I could do was to cut the part off that had caused him some trouble. I had to go into work and think about it throughout the day. The poor guy is a long haired cat and is trimmed every year. He isn’t matted up just yet, but it is getting close.

I was able to trim most of the hair below his chin. I can’t get too close to the skin, because scissors can end up cutting his soft skin. My wife and I tried a grooming kit, but that didn’t work out well either. I could hardly cut any hair. My cat is a trooper though. He will sit steady for a while and let you do your thing. I guess he figures it out first though, that we are not making any progress and then he gets upset.

We have agreed that he will have an appointment soon with a groomer. In the mean time, I’ve done what I could with safeguarding hair around his neck. Long haired cats are high maintenance, but they are really good at being cute.

Traffic.  Sometimes you just got to hate it.  I had taken off work yesterday because I was sick.  I feel really guilty any time I take off work and was determined to go today.  I got into the car and took off.  One problem with the HOV lanes here in Northern, VA is that you can not exit until you get up to Springfield.  Add a little slow traffic and you really start to have problems.

On my way in, I started having bowel problems.  The kind that come in waves of painful pressure that you can fight off.  It got so bad that I was putting all pressure into my left foot against the wheel hub.  I didn’t think I was going to make it.  I thought I would be driving back home in a mess of myself.

I was able to stop by the Springfield mall.  As I stepped out of the car, my foot immediately felt weak.  No time to pay attention to that, I stumbled my way into the mall.  With every step, I was fighting the urge to go rite there.  I took my pants off about five feet from the stall and turned around.  No time to put the seat down or close the door.

After spending some time to recoup from all the pain and pressure, I was able to leave and get to work where I immediately had to go again.  I just felt weak throughout the day from the experience.