Many looking closely at it say it was mainly Roberts who screwed up, but I say they both did, and I agree with the comment on Balloon Juice – “Clearly, this means that the inauguration is not valid according to a strict interpretation of Article 5 of the Constitution. I believe that, technically, this means that Ted Stevens is now acting president ‘until such time as the oath is properly administered’.” Ha. I’m sure they will get right on that. :-)

From Balloon Juice yesterday, John Cole says:

And while I am at it, let me also grump about the experience I had at several stores this morning. I don’t know if this is because everyone is cutting back employees because of the economy, but every store I went to this morning, I had to stand for 15-20 minutes waiting for help. In every case, I stood by a register waiting for someone to show up, in two cases after paging the help, no one showed up, and I said “To hell with it, I will order it on Amazon.”

(From Letterman, via Huffington Post)

So Saturday I got a comment on one of my recent blog posts. It seemed to be completely unconnected to the post itself. Since I’d had a comment spammer I had to clean up within the last few days, my immediate thought was, oh no, not again… It said:

http://dustsettler.wordpress.com

Not much on it yet, but it’s a start :) See page for explanation.

Thinking to myself, I don’t want any Viagra, I clicked on the link with fear. But I had no need of fear, it was a good thing:

Our First Trip
(brightviolet, Until the Dust Settles, 9 Jan 2009)

For some time, we had toyed with the idea of randomly choosing a trip destination by throwing a dart at a dartboard. However, our lack of a dartboard (or darts) had stopped us from doing so, until recently. As we sat in our friends’ house in Florida over the Christmas break, I decided to google “random vacation generator”. That search led me to a forum where people were discussing precisely that idea. One person added that he had created a “Spot Tool”, and had in fact taken a number of trips using this method already. (See the link to the left)

Sam Minter’s tool seems to allow for setting parameters, but as we could not figure out how to do this, we just gave it a shot. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you’re aware, the world consists of a loooot of water. A few failed hits later, we hit a location. A tiny island in the middle of nowhere, that was apparently U.S. territory, but uninhabited by anyone but birds. Okay, obviously not a possibility!

This made us realize that we needed to set some limits for each trip, and then we should keep trying until we found a location that met our parameters. Since we were looking at a spring break trip, with only 9 days off, and of course limited resources, we decided on the following:

…

Perfect: The first three locations that met our criteria were all within range of each other, and allowed us to plan out a perfect trip for 9 days. This trip will go as follows:

…

We will leave in March of 2009, so check back for updates!

I remain saddened that various factors have continued to push my own next random vacation to Chacchoben, Quintana Roo, Mexico into the far future. But it seems someone else is taking up the mantle! So thank you to BrightViolet… and I’ll be watching for your updates!

Dog Pillow
(Scott Adams, Dilbert.com, 2 Jan 2009)

Few things are more soothing than sleeping with a warm puppy. I decided to use the dog as sort of a little pillow for my snout. It felt wonderful to snuggle my nose in between her ear and her neck area. She was totally unconscious so she took any position I assigned. It was great, but perhaps one more adjustment would make it perfect. I decided to put one arm around her and slip my hand under her head, just to get extra comfy. But there was just one problem.

HER HEAD WAS MISSING!

Click through to read the full thing and surprise ending. :-)