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July 12th, 2009
03:22 pm - Cosmic Cycler
So according to gmaps pedometer, I biked approximately 15.5 miles this morning, including nearly 300 vertical change (most of it several times) - Hillsborough is hilly. No wonder I'm tired.
Went through the big quarry off Eno Mtn Rd on my way up to town, dropped off a book at the Library, stopped in at the coffee shop for a while, checked out an old slave cemetery on Margaret road, checked out the relatively new Gold Park on Dimmock's Mill Rd. The park is reasonably nice, and the section of Eno riverwalk alongside it is awesome... for the minute it lasts. C'mon Hillsborough, pull this riverwalk thing together... you've got a bunch of little sections already.
Disconcerting moment of the trip: after Dimmock's Mill turns south across the Eno, it crosses 85 on a rather narrow bridge with not terribly high rails right where 40 is merging so the freeway is like 8 lanes wide. Leaves a biker feeling a little... exposed. Anyway, then I passed "New Goloka" which seems to be some sort of Krishna-esque commune, complete with an adobe geodesic dome house and tons of vegetables. Kinda cool. Later I took a wrong turn and ended up looping way further south than I'd intended. Ah well, I can use the exercise, even if the uphill in the full sun bits almost killed me. Hopefully I'll escape without too much sunburn. A little preparatory tan before the beach trip could be useful, actually.
Also, a few things nifty enough to double-post from twitter (still pending a better system for this):
Totally awesome: The Secret Origin of Ada Lovelace (RT from @ananthymous)
Man, if I was in Tokyo I would so be going to Macross Crossover Live
Also also, I totally fail at finding Kaela Kimura's first three albums anywhere. Alas.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/sad.gif) exhausted
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July 7th, 2009
03:35 pm - Genki
I've just been introduced to the music of Kaela Kimura: wikipedia, official page, bunch of music vids on YouTube.
She's so... genki. Especially her early stuff, see "Happiness!" and "Real Life, Real Heart", etc. Later on she branches out into some other styles which are also interesting. I may have to acquire some of her tunes. Unfortunately I hear she's only on JP iTunes, which kind of reduces the options to stupidly expensive import albums or piracy.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/energetic.gif) bouncy
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July 6th, 2009
02:08 pm - More meta
So, the twitter via LJ Feed experiment hasn't worked out so well. I wasn't really taking into account the fact that syndicated LJ accounts update at more or less completely random intervals, meaning it will often pick up a bunch of tweets at once. And then, the way the twitter RSS interacts with the way LJ formats RSS means every tweet is posted in the entry title, the entry text, and a link to the tweet itself. Ugh. This results in a pretty unacceptable amount of cruft, especially whenever my tweet volume is a bit higher than normal.
So. I was going to try out a new hack which would be closer to the "batch condense interesting tweets to LJ" option that got a number of votes in my poll. But one step of it involved LoudTwitter, which I've recently discovered is down indefinitely. Anybody seen any viable alternatives? What I really need for my purposes right now is just the summary-to-email feature.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/discontent.gif) discontent
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July 2nd, 2009
07:11 pm - Heads-up: TMBG in September
TMBG are hitting the road again, and they'll be in Raleigh in September. (In fact, that's the *only* stop in the SE announced so far. Win, for once.) They're at the NC Museum of Art on Sept 19th, at 8pm. (I dunno if anyone who reads my blog is local and has kids, but there's also a family show at 4pm.) Tickets are available here for $21; it looks like they might be $18 if you bought them at the museum. It's general admission with no seating, and I have no idea how big the venue is, so I have no idea if there's any point in buying tickets early. Actually, from looking at the Museum's FAQ, it looks like it may be an outdoor event, but I'm not really sure.
Anyway, TMBG fans mark your calendars or something. Depending on how many people want to go, we could probably set up a carpool.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/happy.gif) excited
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01:26 pm - Mysteries of the Facebook Oracle.
Today, Facebook has a friend suggestion for me.
It's Trish Ledoux.
...
I checked and we have no mutual Facebook friends. She currently lives on the other side of the country and hasn't attended any of the same schools as me.
Of course, I know exactly who she is, but I have no idea how Facebook knows that. I haven't even listed any interests that we might have in common. How mysterious.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/confused.gif) perplexed
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June 24th, 2009
04:06 pm - Off the Grid
Going on a trip to Asheville for our wedding anniversary starting tomorrow. Since this trip is supposed to be about relaxing, I probably won't get online much, if at all. Back Sunday.
Mmmmm, spa.
Current Mood: excited
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June 18th, 2009
02:59 pm - vs HOA 2.5, still indecisive
Since I've been out of town and/or busy (and/or procrastinating) I haven't actually sent off anything on my HOA lawn issue. The only substantive opinions I got on my last post were observations that if I'm trying to be relatively non-confrontational as long as I can, perhaps immediately going over the head of the person who sent me the initial letter isn't the best idea. Yeah, that might be a point. So.
If I send a letter to just the management lady, I'm definitely going to start out by listing all the improvements we *do* plan to make to the lawn (add a path down one side, expand mulch around trees on the other). Those will take care of the most scraggly/low-cover spots. And though we probably won't have the cash to do it all this year, they are things we were already thinking about, so I don't have to BS.
The question is on the part of her letter where she specifically requested herbicide for the clover: is it worse to ignore or contradict? Because I'm certainly not going to agree with her. My first impulse here is to try just not mentioning it initially, on the slim chance that if she's busy she'll just take any indication of intent to improve as "good enough" and let it slide. I wouldn't *count* on it, but if she does call me on my strategic misdirection, I'll just send a second letter with my heavily annotated argument as to why clover is the bestest thing ever (or at least a lot less wasteful than a monoculture imported grass lawn).
The other option is to include all that from the get-go, but I fear TL;DR territory. Any thoughts?
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/determined.gif) determined
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June 16th, 2009
10:32 am - Charlie, you wanna get me a 10-9 on that thing there?
Yesterday I was held up on my way home by a police "chase" on I-40. Doesn't look like it ended up being interesting enough to make the news - I suspect the suspect may have just been drunk off his ass or something - but it held up traffic for a while because he more or less "pulled over" in the middle of the freeway, and I think he'd been acting erratic enough that nobody wanted to drive in front of him. I was a couple cars back. He clearly wasn't cooperating with the officer trying to ticket him, and eventually started moving again and at first drove *into* the median wall, before making it back up to speed and finally exiting onto 54 with the cop following.
Also!
I mentioned this on twitter, but the Sushi restaurant across from my office, Sansui, is having a 50% off everything sale lasting through Friday. We should totally get people there for dinner sometime this week (but obviously not tonight due to COUP). This is the one on 55 just a block or two north of 40, on the right.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/working.gif) working
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June 15th, 2009
07:33 pm - I don't think I left anything in San Francisco
Trip report!
So. Friday I got up at ungodly:30 o'clock and flew to Oakland. Rented a car, drove to Addendum. Detour to see tiny, tiny foster kittens, then out to dinner with (let's see if I can get all this) ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) madmanatw, leora, darch, eirias, beth_leonard, jon_leonard, Vynce, and Ruth. Awesome to see so many friends. I then attempted to continue being social until I was more or less completely incoherent from having been up for 23 hours.
Next day I was introduced to Race For The Galaxy, a nifty board/card game, by Madman, Darch, and Darch's friend, all of whom I soundly beat. It was fun! :) Then drove down to Palo Alto, where my brother was graduating from a Master's program at Stanford, to meet him and my parents. We went to a reception at the swank President's house (which totally has clover in the exquisitely manicured lawn, I noted) and then to a delicious Swiss fondue restaurant where we were joined by several other aunts/uncles/cousins/etc. Also fun! Oh, and on the way there we stopped for an unusually clear view of the bay, the Golden Gate, and Alcatraz, since the weather was inexplicably sunny.
Sunday was the actual Stanford graduation ceremonies which took up most of the day. Hung out with Tom's roommates a bit, then went out to a nice Italian place where I got some purse-shaped pasta stuffed with mascarpone and pear in a cream sauce that was quite yummy. Then I caught a red-eye back through Atlanta (managed to sleep some, though of course not very comfortably) and went right in to work this morning (eh, it was closer than home). *Yawn*
Current Mood: tired
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June 10th, 2009
08:39 am - Twitter followup
My poll ended up with a pretty even running for and against feeding twitter into my LJ (and no ideas for a better condensing tool), so I've come up with an opt-in compromise. There now exists ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) kirinn_tweets, which s simply a syndication of the RSS feed of my twitter account. Add it or don't. Since, as mentioned, I average barely more than a tweet a day, it should only get slightly more traffic that a daily summary would, and this way I make it opt-in without having to keep track of a single-purpose friends group. (Also, since syndicated feeds don't have icons, short posts from them take up less vertical space in many layout schemes.) Everybody wins! Don't say I never did anything for ya.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/okay.gif) blah
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June 8th, 2009
11:45 am - Tweetcasting options
So a lot of my friends broadcast their twitter tweets to LJ daily using LoudTwitter. I know there are varying opinions on the utility of that, but I have an additional problem using it. I tweet fairly sparsely - my global average is just under 1.5 tweets/day since I signed up - so broadcasting daily seems like it'd have a really low signal to overhead ratio.
Yet I keep running into instances where somebody missed something interesting because I'd only said it on twitter. What I'd really like to do is something like a weekly round-up. I could do it by hand (and have occasionally), but it's tedious enough that I rarely get around to it. Ideally I edit it down to the most interesting stuff, but even an auto-weekly post doesn't seem too bad - I just haven't found anything to do it.
So I dunno, instead of just ignoring the problem, let's try (nonbinding) democracy:
Poll #1412883 To tweet or not to tweet
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllShould I broadcast twitter to LJ, and if so, how?
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/thoughtful.gif) contemplative
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June 4th, 2009
04:19 pm - E3 Impression Dump
Well, since E3 has been eating my productivity lately anyway, I may as well post about it. I vary on whether I bother following the big video game conferences when they're going on or just glance at the highlights later, but for some reason this time I got sucked in. So, things I'm either excited for or mildly intrigued by:
NDS:
- Picross 3D and Professor Layton 2 - are both definitely getting English releases. Hooray, I don't have to be tempted to import them and decipher the moon language.
- Zelda: Spirit Tracks - mostly a refinement of the Phantom Hourglass engine, but it looks like it has some fun toys (Indiana Jones style whip!) and new ideas.
- Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story - I haven't played the M&L GBA games, but I'm hearing good things about this one. Whether I'd have time/money for it depends on when it gets released, probably.
- Kingdom Hearts 258/2 Days - Eh, I dunno. All about Organization XIII, developed by some tiny studio. We'll see.
- Scribblenauts - Hey, this still exists, will be interesting to see whether it works. (This is the one that purports to let you write almost any word you can think of to get objects to solve puzzles.)
PS3:
- The Last Guardian - aka Trico, the game from the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus team. We've seen two minutes of it and it looks amazing and I want it now. Instant buy. Not 'til 2010.
- FFXIII - of ocurse I'll buy this. Also 2010. They're claiming early 2010 (and they've started on the localization earlier than they were originally planning) but I'll believe it when i see it.
- Assassin's Creed 2 - I enjoyed the first one, and this one claims more variety (good), takes place in Renaissance Italy (pretty), and makes you best buds with Leonardo Da Vinci, who builds you awesome gadgets (nifty).
- Castlevania Lords of Shadow - being developed by a Spanish studio and overseen by Kojima (of Metal Gear), which is pretty weird. Castlevania is tricky to get right in 3D, but maybe this time they'll manage. Will definitely keep a wary eye on. Narration by Patrick Stewart certainly doesn't hurt.
- Katamari Forever - Dangit Bandai-Namco, stop taking my money with your cynical remake sequels to one of my favorite games ever. *sigh* Will probably buy.
Then there are some other things that looks interesting but are academic due to being on platforms I don't own. Primary among them is the new Metroid being developed by Tecmo's Team Ninja (of Ninja Gaiden). Like the Castlevania, this is a weird pairing that could fail or be totally awesome. It's still being overseen by the guy who directed Super Metroid, though, and Jeremy Parish came out of an interview with them feeling optimistic, so it has reasonably good odds. If it turns out to be *amazingly* awesome I might have to borrow a Wii or something.
Also, I'm jealous that the Wii sequel to New Super Mario Brothers evidently has the Koopa Kids from SMB3 in it.
Current Mood: optimistic
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May 31st, 2009
03:54 pm - vs. the HOA 2: drafting
So I corresponded with someone I found on our neighborhood's online forum who'd had an issue with HOA rules-lawyering before. Unfortunately their experience was not encouraging. They said the actual board showed a tendency to want to defer to the management consultant, who encouraged them to be inflexible with the letter of the guidelines. Ugh. Still, the letter in this case is not 100% clear, so I might have an in. Really, though, I'd rather *not* make it all about rules-lawyering since I think there are tons of better arguments for my case. We'll see.
Anyway, my initial tack is going to be to send out a comprehensive and footnoted summary of my arguments with references. I don't want it to be tl;dr, but on the other hand I absolutely want to come across as having thought seriously about this, rather than just wandering in asking for special treatment because I said so. I've got a draft outline and collection of references up if anyone is bored enough to want to look it over and comment.
I'm torn on whether to send the finished product to the management lady *and* the board, or *just* the board initially. I definitely want to cut the board in on it right at the start; I get the distinct feeling that dealing with only the consultant would be like unto banging my head against a brick wall. Tracking down all their contact info may be interesting. I guess I have their physical addresses though - and considering some of them are older and the semi-formal nature of the appeal I'm making, I suppose maybe it would be a good idea to break out the snail-mail on this one?
Current Mood: determined
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May 29th, 2009
12:53 pm - vs. the HOA
So as some of you who read akiko's journal or twitter may have heard, we recently got a letter from a representative of our HOA saying that they took issue with the state of our lawn. Specifically, the fact that it's pretty much half clover at this point. They suggest a wide-spectrum herbicide followed by re-seeding.
Now, this is not something I'm about to do, for a whole variety of reasons, the main one being a distinct aversion to spreading poisonous crap all over my yard. Not to mention the fact that clover is good for the soil (nitrogen fixing), and that anything that's not a monoculture is going to be more resistant to drought and disease, and thus use up less resources and cause less pollution by needing less water, pesticide, and herbicide. Etc.
I'm pretty sure that the lady who sent the letter is a third-party hired to oversee the covenants as-written, so complaining to her would be pointless. I plan to look up procedures this weekend to see if I can find some by-the-book way of petitioning the HOA directly.
I think framing is going to be key here. If I were up against some faceless corporation, I would *totally* be framing this as me vs. the man, common sense vs. dumb bureaucracy, and ecological sensitivity vs. a machine that doesn't care. But the fact is, we're a development of just a few hundred houses, and I'm pretty sure that now that the original building firm has cleared out, ultimate authority rests with a handful of real people who are my neighbors. In fact, I think the nice old guy a couple doors down from me is on the board. So I'd prefer for this not to get antagonistic unless absolutely necessary.
Anyway, my plan is to gather up a whole bunch of legit resources backing up my points in the second paragraph and figure out how to present them. If anyone has any references handy or knows of something I'm likely to overlook, by all means please leave links in the comments. Hopefully something reasonable can be worked out and I won't have to resort to writing nasty editorials in one of the local ragingly liberal papers or something.
Current Mood: determined
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May 24th, 2009
08:35 pm - Also...
There was a con! It was largely fun. Though there were a few growing pains, the much *much* larger space of the Raleigh Convention Center was certainly a boon for Animazement. You could get around without running into people! Awesome.
It was pretty much the usual AZ schedule for me at this point - spend some time manning the video room, help out with Hell, troll the dealer's room and artist alley, generally hang out. About the only panels I've gone to in years are ones for a few of the more interesting Japanese guests, and since they mostly stayed home this year due to fear of quarantine, there wasn't much of that going on. But at least there was a fairly mediocre J-Rock visual kei band? Eh, whatevs.
Notable acquisitions included a plush Porco Rosso, a diorama with an Acguy from original Gundam, a 50th anniversary Shonen Sunday Lum figure, and a framed fanart print of Hugo from Suikoden III. Other than that, I mostly got gachapon figures which are small and cheap the better to accommodate somewhat limited budgets and shelf space. Man, I need to reorganize my room. Meanwhile akiko actually produced in addition to consuming, and sold several Haros and some other merchandise, which was cool. Next year - more crotched Kirby.
Also went out to a bar (twice) with lots of awesome friends, some of whom I hadn't seen in a while, so that was great. Other things at the bar that were great included the float made of double-chocolate stout, and the drink made from a combination of the same stout and Lindeman's raspberry lambic. Yummy.
Oh, and to tack on a followup to an earlier post, I spent $1100 on my car, which was a bit painful but evidently worthwhile. The electrical weirdness was chalked up to a combination of a failing alternator and a crappy job AutoZone did of installing my last battery, and evidently my water pump was in fact not far from dying a horrible death as well (which certainly would have been no fun on, say, the way to Atlanta or something). So hopefully I should be good for a while now.
Current Mood: tired
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06:45 pm - GameSpite x Game Boy
Those of you paying attention know I've been an occasional contributor to Jeremy Parish's GameSpite site. Due to the rather sad demise of gaming print media, Jeremy got the urge to do some homebrew publishing, so we're now putting out a quarterly(ish) genuine dead-trees product. The first issue is focused around a 20th anniversary Game Boy retrospective, though my main contribution is actually a piece on the most recent Castlevania game on Nintendo DS. You can read an article about the launch, or peruse the issue's full table of contents, or jump straight to the ordering page on Blurb. Note for the short of cash that all of the contents will eventually filter onto the website just like older issues, though the printed version is looking pretty sweet and is probably easier to read on the toilet (and ain't a bad price for 160 pages with no ads).
For anyone late to the party, you can also check out my GameSpite author page for links to previous articles I've done there, or dive into the Games hub page to check out the wealth of articles available on the site.
Edit: As pointed out in the comments, you can use the coupon code "hpfreeshipping" at Blurb to negate the somewhat steep S&H charges, which is highly recommended. In fact, I've just confirmed that it works on any shipping up to $10, which probably includes the second-day option for most folks.
Current Mood: accomplished
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May 21st, 2009
01:25 pm - Jinxed mah car.
I totally jinxed my car.
See, I had been commenting in some of the new-car discussion over in jnala's journal. He wanted something small and fuel-efficient. I told him I love my VW Golf. A bunch of people said, no, don't buy a VW, their electric systems are crap and it'll be nothing but trouble. I said, what are you guys talking about, my VW is almost ten years old and runs perfectly, the only substantial part I've ever had to replace was the A/C.
I'm sure you can see where this is going.
So first my battery light comes on. Manual says this is either unknown electric problems, or the battery's not charging due to a bad belt or alternator. Tests with a voltmeter confirm that the battery is only charging occasionally - bad news, need to get something (probably the alternator) fixed before I get stranded with no power.
Then on the way to my repair guy, on the freeway, I suddenly lose my entire dash - all lights go out, all guages go to zero, including RPMs and speed. (I didn't even know it was mechanically *possible* for the speedometer to read zero at freeway speed - learn something new.) I immediately put on emergency blinkers and get in the slow lane, wondering if I'm even driving anymore - but it soon becomes clear that gas, brakes, and pretty much everything is fine, I just have no dash.
I was at my exit anyway, so I get off the freeway, and as soon as I stop and accelerate again, everything comes back. Couple extra warning lights on due to things like ABS being confused by the reset, but basically everything's running fine. In fact, even the battery light isn't on anymore. Then I get to the repair place and we discover the battery light isn't coming on even when we disconnect the line that charges the battery - which shouldn't be possible.
So something is fucked up. Probably do need a new alternator, and maybe there's some other wiring issue. While I've got it at the repair place, I'm also significantly over mileage on my timing belt and water pump, which stop you dead (at best) if they go out on the road, so I'm gonna get those done too.
All in all, I'll be happy if I get out of this for under a grand. Oof. (Though, the bulk of that is simply from being well over 100k miles and *not* having replaced things so far, which I suppose is good.) Fortunately I have the savings to cover it without taking on debt or anything, but still, not a lot of fun.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/angry.gif) vaguely annoyed
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May 2nd, 2009
12:52 pm - Everybody's doing it
Ok, I now have a proper Dreamwidth account: Kirin @ dreamwidth. Not that by jumping in early, I actually have my name correctly spelled over there, as opposed to the extra letter (Kirinn) here on LJ (and Twitter, and everywhere else I didn't have an account in the first month of service or so).
I'm not planning on posting over there for now, just using it for reading.
(For the small section of my readers who haven't already been exposed to this through several other channels, Dreamwidth is a spin-off of the LJ code base, and the main reasons some people are considering it seem to be lack of ads and fandom-friendly (and generally communicative and not-in-russia) administration, plus a few icing-on-the-cake tweaks to the LJ code. I'm at wait-and-see if it can sustain enough momentum to be viable in the long term.)
Current Mood: calm
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12:18 pm - More than meets the eye
The other day on the way home from work I passed a cute little sports car (I think it was a Crossfire or something). It was a nice shade of very dark grey / graphite. That particular body paint made it very subtle that, right in the center of the back bumper, was a large black Decepticon symbol. It was the most tasteful display of total dorkitude I've seen in some time.
Current Mood: calm
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May 1st, 2009
01:27 pm - Back for more
As a public service announcement, the Japanese restaurant across from my office that closed down late last year has finally re-opened with a new name (Sansui Sushi Bar and Grill) and new staff. Other than that, though, it's pretty much the same place it was before, and the sushi is still delicious. No super-cheap 2-for-1 lunch special, but I had a feeling that was too good to last, anyway. Conni notes that the only drawback to the new arrangement is the lack of hot Japanese waiter guy. Also, no terrible Japanese hip-hop on the sound system, alas.
Anyway, people who were sadly denied by its closing earlier can come check it out now. Though you may want to wait another few days - their cash register PC apparently completely FUBARed while we were there, which made getting our check take a while.
Current Mood: full
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