November 3, 2001

Well, we managed to spend a little bit of time out on the Seneca Wine Trail today. We only managed to hit about four wineries but we had a good time and it took us all day. We started off at Bloomer Creek and had an early lunch there. It was very nice, they had some nice tee shirts there too so I stocked up on those. Altogether, I think that we bought about 2.5 cases of wine. One entire case is the Champagne for New Years. We got some really good stuff. The weather was really nice this morning, it got a little bit dark and dreary towards the end of the day but overall, it was a great day to be out on the trail.

Tomorrow is one of the last practices before Josh, Nate, Joe and I head off to march in Toronto. We all play in a marching band and Toronto is our biggest show of the year. I think that this is the band’s ninth time marching this show. So we will be marching outside tomorrow in Caledonia.

I attempted to plant my first hydroponic plants today. Three orange bell pepper plants. I am starting them from seeds so we will see how well this works. Maybe tomorrow I can get the next six planted. I am trying a couple different things to see if I can figure out how to do this. Hopefully this will work, I really like orange bell peppers. The orange bell pepper was developed right here in Ithaca at Cornell, you know.

My friend Sara discovered that the Datil Do-It Sauces that we love so much are actually available through your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart! I am very excited about that. Now I can really stock up. She found them at the Wal-Mart in Big Flats just off i86.

Loopy is working on his first video game to send into development studios as a demo. He has made a couple of things before like a PC game called Looptris that was essentially Tetris and Space eVaders which was a Space Invaders style game that actually ran on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Bob, Josh and I have Game Boy Colors and Loopy has the Game Boy Advance. I am still impressed by how well these systems fair compared to all the crap that is always coming out on the regular console systems. I will get a GBA when more stuff comes out for it. For now, my GBC is great and I have really cool stuff on it like Deja Vu I & II, Dragon Warrior I & II, Shadowgate and Tetris. How cool is that? I am a big time lover of the old adventure games from the late 1980’s and I think that it would be the coolest thing ever if games like the Bard’s Tale, King’s Quest, Tass Times in Tone Town and The Faery Tale Adventure were ported to the GBA. I would run out and buy them all. Deja Vu was one of my all time favorite games on the Amiga back when that was my main computer in 1987. I had a pirated copy back then but I eventually bought a real copy for the Amiga and one for the GBC. So, they got their money from me!

Josh and Dana decided to leave early because they are poopy heads. We were in the middle of watching Shrek (which you must see if you have not seen it yet) and they didn’t even finish it. Speaking of movies… the Llama house went out and saw Monsters Inc. last night here in Ithaca. That was a really good movie. Everyone really liked it. The computer animation was right up there with Shrek and Final Fantasy. FF is still the best that I have seen, though. There are moments when you might mistake it for real film! I also had the chance recently to see Memento. Phil has been trying to get me to see it forever. I can’t tell you anything about it but I suggest that you run right out and rent it because it totally rocks.

Other news includes Loopy and I deciding to be vegetarians five days a week to try to make our diets a little bit healthier. Loopy has been doing pretty well at it. I have decided to switch to at least six days a week and I have been doing pretty well at not eating meat at all. I thought that I was going to get cravings like I have gotten in the past but I have been eating a lot of soy and I have not been getting the cravings. So I am very happy. It has been for more than a month now since we started. Loopy’s sister Dana is also vegetarian as is Dominica’s roomate Sara. Dominica is eating an almost meat free diet in support of everybody. I will have a real challenge next week, though, as I am in DC and South Carolina and they do not support vegetarians very well there.

I bought my first Harry Potter book today. I guess I am going to give it a try. I am still skeptical. So, I will let you know what I think when I am done with it.

Ok, for any of you that have actually taken the time to read through our archives are painfully aware of my theories on sleeping. As you know, I sleep on the floor in as cold of an environment as I can get to reasonably. Well, I have discovered another really cool thing that I can do. Because I am sleeping on the floor and I keep my room cold, I normally have my heat registers closed or covered. Well, one of these registers got part way uncovered but only by part of my bed. The heat vent ended up filling my bed with warm air and making for the neatest sleep heater yet. The bottom half of the bed was toasty warm while the room was cold and the top of the bed was cool. It works really well. You have to set it up just right or you end up blocking off the vent altogether.

Ok, I think that that is enough of an update for today. Check in with us tomorrow and see what Llama excitement is happening! Also, I am expecting to be doing another hardware upgrade (a fairly big one) to our main web server in DC while I am down there next week. You may notice another performance increase on our site. Maybe not, but it isn’t costing us very much to do the upgrade so we are taking advantage of it. – Scott

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