Random FFXI Caps

Just for fun:

– Chiriri and a Gobbue Farmer share some gardening tips.
– Malboro tells a stupid joke; Chiriri turns to leave (bad breath!).
– You know, in Windurst, that’s harassment!

Fire Safety

The fateful day had finally come. Today, I attended the mandatory employee safety orientation, lovingly nicknamed “How to Use a Fire Extinguisher”. I must say it was an interesting experience (and rather long, at 2.5 hours in length). Here are a few things I learned:

– There are special extinguishers for metal combustion. They are distinguished by the mark of a star with a D inside the star. I want to see one of these and know what chemicals they use. I vividly remember the safety video in highschool chemistry labs where they drop some cesium in water and the whole water tank explodes (COOOOOOL!).

– There is no kick in the extinguisher. Kinda disappointing, actually. I don’t know if I was expecting it to kick and make a loud booming noise or what, but it didn’t.

– The stuff in the extinguisher smells. After all 42 people had extinguished a small fire, we all had that weird fire extinguisher smell in our noses and the gritty taste in our mouths. Bleh.

– Wind matters a lot. There really is nothing quite like having a gigantic white cloud billow towards you, and getting a nice grainy taste in your mouth.

I’m sure the safety division would be proud of me for sharing this information with you all =). And on a completely different topic, check out these freaking cool, practical device concepts at NEC!

I Want to Take Great Pictures

All that talk of gardens yesterday got me to thinking: I’ve never lived in a place as beautiful as Williamsburg before; I should take pictures! I’ve been playing around with the idea of getting a nice digital camera for some time now. If I get one, Bunky and I will have a camera in each format (35 mm, Advantix, digital) between the two of us. Since I no longer have a scanner (my poor parallel port scanner is a bit obsolete, and I do all my drawings with a tablet nowadays), I’d like to have an easy way to share pictures. Plus I like to take lots of stupid pictures, but I don’t like to pay for lots of stupid pictures. Currently, my front-runner is the Canon PowerShot S400. I have $100 in gift certificates from Amazon for being fiscally irresponsible with my Amazon Visa card, so I am really being tempted to just splurge and buy this camera =).

Speaking of pictures, I grabbed a shot of Chiriri meeting some new friends. Orcs love a barbecue!

Finally, in case you ever wondered what sort of awesome weather you were missing because you spend too much time in front of the computer, try out WeatherBug. It sits next to your clock and tells you the temperature outside, and a simple click brings up all relevant info and even live camera shots of places in your vicinity! If you make sure to customize your preferences, the program isn’t even obnoxious (*cough* RealPlayer *cough*). I wonder why no one ever thought of this before…

I Only Read Books With Pictures Now

Recently, a Marshalls opened up near us. I don’t think this is that amazing, but Bunky is a huge fan of stores like this and T.J. Maxx. I guess they have good deals on nice clothing sometimes, but I usually just look at the crazy house/garden stuff that they throw in the back. I enjoy browsing through their cheap books, too. Last time I was at Marshalls I picked up two great books. The first was a gorgeous cookbook, titled East and Southeast. The pictures in East and Southeast are so delicious looking, I get hungry just thinking about it. The other book I got was Garden Design, by Margaret Crowther and Sue Hook. Both were dirt-cheap, and have scrumptious large color pictures on almost every page. I’ve decided that when I am rich and all, I want to have a garden in front (or behind, I’m flexible) of my big house. I’m not talking about a patch of dirt with some flowers in it; I have that already. I mean like a full blown garden with a path through it, a trellis or overhang with climbing flowers/vines, carefully trimmed hedges (OMG I would love a hedge shaped like a duck or something but that might be cheesy), and a pond/flowing water of some sort. With a little bridge over the running water in the garden. I realize this would be expensive, but it would be an awesome project to do.

I looked through the garden design book, and I noticed that a nice garden doesn’t necessarily have to be bursting all over the place with plants. That would be horrendous upkeep, and there would be the risk that your garden looked like a wild thicket. I want my garden of the future to be neat and trim. But I really really would like to have running water in it. Perhaps outdoor fish of some sort. And a few willow-type/flowering trees. If at all possible, it’d be great if it attracted song birds. That way I can get the most concentrated burst of happy nature during the few minutes I spend outside as a break from computer games =).

Part of my plan includes having a pussy willow tree/shrub. I love pussy willow catkins, and the tree likes moist soil with poor drainage and enjoys sun. Pussy willows are also home to the American goldfinch and other song birds. Naturally, this is a perfect choice to have near a pond/stream, since it will love the soil and also shade the water from gross algae. The birds are a bonus. I also like the dogwood tree. The trees would be around the pond towards the back of the garden (which you would get to by going along a path through a neat and trim arrangement of flowers and bushes).

Although this is all in the way distant future, I do get a glimpse of how great a garden would look every day. The cottage I live in now used to be the home of a gardener or something, and so there are beautiful flowering trees all outside. It’s like a flowering forest, with a large magnolia tree next to the window, and a beautiful tree (not sure what kind…) with large pink flowers by the driveway. And there’s a little garden that Bunky and I planted outside the other window. Add the plentiful birds outside, and the plentiful fish inside, and you have a lite version of my uber-garden of the future!

All this was made possible by a $5 book from Marshalls that was so unpopular I couldn’t even find any information about it online (even with the ISBN number).