Lightning (and stuff)

Okay, so I'm sure you are all wondering, "why hasn't Randoogle posted anything new for so long?" Well, as you may know, I have this thing that I like to call the "Randoogle Greatness Barrier" which allows me to not post stuff unless I deem it worthy. That's totally not why I haven't posted anything, BTW. If you must know, and this may come as a shock to some of you avid readers out there, I'm quite lazy. On top of that, I think I must have ADD or something, cause I never can seem to get anyth...

Okay, so there was this totally cool episode of Eureka on, but now I'm back. Anyway, I promise to post some more stuff that has been going on (at least the stuff that some of you may be interested in--for the rest of you, sorry, out of luck, try the next blog). For instance, we bought our first house this year, and I'm sure you would like some photos of that, or maybe at least the address so that you can stalk me. Also, we got us some cats, which, as we all know, is what the interweb is really interested in anyway. One of them is totally a lolcat.

But for now, I hope you will be satisfied with some of the shots I got during the most resent crazy lightning storm that came rumbling through St. George and Washington. So here they are:

My clear favorite of the night

I kind of tweaked with the lighting on this one, and forgot to set it back, but I don't think you'll mind.

My second favorite shot of the night

BTW, if anyone is interested (and they happen to have a compact Canon digital camera), I took all of these shots with a motion sensor script installed on my camera using CHDK. I totally just turned the camera on and pretty much just kicked back while the camera took all the shots for me (which is in keeping with the whole laziness thing).

Pet updates

Okay, so it's been a while since my last posting. Why, do you ask? Well, if you know me at all, you'll know that I generally like to post about funny/weird stuff. I have told myself, though, that I must post about our little ratlings again, and I've been having a hard time thinking of anything particularly funny to say about one of our rats in particular, so I probably won't. Anyway, here's the pet updates:

Mei (or May, if you want to be all American)

In January of this year, one of our little cuties died. This is a tribute to her cuteness, behold:


This is when we first got her in July. One of her favorite things to do was to chew on everything. She was pretty good at it. On the left you can see her wheel. She's the only rat we've had that has ever liked using it.


Mei was pretty lethargic, which is where she got her name from. You'd have to be a fan of Avatar to know what I'm talking about. Okay, technically, her name should have been Mai, but I like the Japanese spelling better than the Chinese one (we're also big fans of Totoro).

Mei and TyLee were the best of friends. Here we see Mei loving on TyLee.


New Rats

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Suki

After Mei died, TyLee was all kinds of lonely, and so we decided to get another rat, Suki. She's pretty cute too:

Despite what you see in this video, Suki is much less lethargic than Mei was. She and TyLee were able to combine forces to lift the latch on the top of the cage. A couple of escapes later (Suki was really hard to catch when she got loose, but that's probably a story for a later post). We realized that we needed to get a new cage--so we ordered a new one. The new cage was huge, and we thought it would be nice to add a couple more rats--so we did.

Koko and Eva

Okay, so we ran out of Avatar names (well, I guess we still had Azula, but nah--and Katara, that's just too long for a rat). Anyway, Koko was just too pretty not to get her, and Eva was fairly personable.

I'd go into more details, but you're probably already tired of hearing about rats, so I guess, until next time...

Okay, one last video. We haven't paid tribute to TyLee, so check our the crazy eye thing she does:

We researched it and found out that rats will sometimes do this if they are really content. /:) We just think it's hilarious.

Cooking Disaster

Okay, so sometimes I can be pretty dumb, and this was one of the dumber times. Bethany and I were getting dinner ready (some kind of cheesy potato stuff in a casserole dish). The potato stuff called for boiling water and so I started up a burner (or whatever they're called when they're electric). Well, it seems that I started the wrong burner by accident, and it was the burner under our glass casserole dish. I noticed my mistake after about a minute, and promptly removed the casserole dish and put it on another empty burner. About ten seconds later, it exploded all over the place! I don't have a picture of the point of explosion, but I think this will help illustrate:

I did manage to get a picture of the aftermath of the explosion. Shards of glass were all over the place. We're lucky we didn't get any in us. It was pretty crazy.

I guess there's a lesson to be learned here. For me, it's to always make doubly sure that I'm starting up the right burner. I think the other thing I'll take from this is to be careful not to rapidly change temperatures on glass cookware (that, or completely avoid glass cookware).