Today is Amy’s 36th birthday (gasp!)… I know! I don’t think she looks 36 either! Send her a little note wishing her well. She’s at Amy dot Lutz at the gmail dot com. She’d love a little consolation today. 🙂

Happy birthday, sweetie!

I’m stuck in Vegas all week. Yuck. I don’t like Vegas. Too plastic, too shiny. Too many sad people, too many broken people, too many people trying to fill a hole that can’t be filled with money, sex, food, power, whatever. Too many lost and wandering souls in Vegas, staring slackjawed at the blinking lights.

The only redeeming quality of Vegas is Red Rocks. And I won’t be able to make it out there on this trip.

On the other hand, I did have a very nice $50 steak dinner last night, so why am I complaining? 🙂

Well, those belts never really lit a fire under anyone, but my watch sure did! Straight into the adoption fund, I think. Well, maybe a few bucks will go into the tattoo fund. Heh heh.

I posted that watch last night and this morning a dude emailed me privately asking to buy it offline for $450. I probably would’ve done it, but he’d already placed a bid on ebay and I couldn’t turn off the auction. Well maybe I could have–I didn’t really take the time to figure it out. If there hadn’t been a bid, I probably would have taken his offer. Glad I didn’t. 🙂

Oh yeah…I remember this.

…for Jones Soda to whip up a fresh batch of tantalizingly tasty Turkey Soda! This year, they have some new flavors for the whole family: Cranberry Soda, Mashed Potato & Butter, Green Bean Casserole and Fruitcake Soda. Mmmmm!

Darryl pointed me to a great roundup of (liberal-ish) post-election graphics. Go look, it’s pretty good!

Back in college I worked at a sporting good store, in the rock climbing section. I was poor and I climbed a lot back then, and the employee discounts were key to gear accumulation. When it was slow on the sales floor, I used to make belts for myself and for friends out of tubular climbing webbing and fastex buckles. They were super cheap and super durable–just what climbers needed. Of course, now you can buy similar belts in any decent outdoor shop–they’re totally commoditized.

A few months ago Tru needed a belt, and I remembered the ones I used to make. So we took a trip to REI and bought some 3/4″ flat webbing and a couple of plastic buckles. I made a belt for Tru and one for his cousin Benjamin. Benjamin can’t find his, but Tru wears his all the time. He loves it because he looks like a big guy with a belt, and he can buckle and unbuckle it by himself. I like it because it cost around a dollar to make each belt–and that was paying retail for supplies.

This evening I was talking with my sister, Benjamin’s mom, and she was asking me about the belt. She said that she knew a couple of other people who wanted similar belts and jokingly mentioned that I should start selling them. I figured why not? So I’ll try ebay and see what happens. I think Amy and I will make a few during the evenings and drop them off at local shops, just to see what kind of response we get.

Yesterday I went to bed at 3:30am and woke up an hour and a half later. That’s because I was busy making the presentation I had to give, which I wrote about on Slacker Manager. So I was feeling a little weird all day. We had lots of leftover food at the conference, so I brought home a bag of eats–that was nice.

Later in the evening, Amy had a meeting and I was giving Tru a bath. Came out of the bathroom and there were two gallons of milk on the kitchen counter. I was a little freaked out that there was some kind of milk-ghost in the house. Amy told me later that she was expecting a friend to drop of the milk–guess she just came in, dropped it off and left. When Amy got home, she had a free loaf of bread from her meeting. Lots of free food yesterday.

The new blog is doing nicely and getting a couple hundred visits a day. Not bad for being less than a week old. This evening I bought a textad on Metafilter (only $10 for 10,000 pageviews), so we’ll see if that drives any traffic over there. The AdSense ads are weird–all about blogging, but I don’t really talk about blogs. Not sure what’s going on there and I hope it changes. Also, looking at the referrer logs this evening, I see that I’m one of the top results for the search paired ranking. Weird.

This evening Truman is watching Godzilla. He said it’s his favorite movie and I can understand why. Big dinosaur-monster. He loves it. Amy had the movie for one of her classes and Tru turned it on when we got home and is just digging it.

Finally, be sure to go check out Jared’s writing over on Simple Subjects. He’s kinda writing about the stuff I wanted to address when I talked about the ‘Right Living’ blog. Go look, it’s good stuff. And help a brotha’ out–click a couple ads for him. 🙂