The beaver is a proud and noble animal

Those people who know me well will probably have snarfed at that headline.

However, this time, it's perfectly innocent (well, ok, maybe not that innocent). I'm basking in my day off. Got up at a decent hour, and spent a good part of the morning cooking. Made myself pancakes for breakfast, and then a batch of my artery-clogging chocolate muffins for myself and miss ashre79, who's staying at my place for the next two days.

Today promises to be a clear, chilly day. Perfect walking weather, so I'll probably go walkabout downtown with the tourist.

Went to have lunch with moonlightjoy today. I firmly believe I was channeling the essence of eniran, cause man, I was in fine form perviness-wise. To the innocent statements of “I feel like eating something fishy today” and “Man, I get stuffed so easily” made by J, I could not resist giving a chuckle :) Actually, I was good. I didn't say anything, just let her know that she'd left herself wide open just now :P I “redeemed” myself by ordering just the right amount of sushi goodness, which hit the spot quite nicely.

While we were chatting away, I told her about my plans to bring ashre79 to a strip club sometime during her stay. I have a feeling that this will turn into a girls night out in short order, with me being named an honorary lesbian :P

British Lawnmower races
This year's race was dubbed 'The Weapons of Grass Destruction' and 35 teams battled overnight from 8 p.m. on Saturday (July 31) to 8 a.m. on Sunday (August 1) to claim top honours in the most prestigious race of the Lawnmowerracing season.

Three different classes of lawnmowers race: traditional with seat; buggy; and mini-tractors. The overall winner is the team completing the most laps.

It takes months of work to prepare the finely-tuned machines. For safety reasons, all the blades are removed. Each team has three drivers who swap periodically and there is a pit lane where teams refuel and carry out the inevitable repairs.

Hot and dry conditions made the race a real endurance test and the 0.8 mile (13 km) track was fast and bumpy. All the mowers passed scrutineering to ensure they were race worthy and met the strict safety and modification rules.At 8 p.m. the race was started in typical Le Mans style.

As dusk turned to night the mowers continued to race around the circuit, which became increasingly hard and bumpy. Periodically the track was watered to try to keep the dust down. The pit lane became a hive of activity as mowers came in for refuelling and driver changeover. After a painful 12 hours team No. 1 — named Cupid Stunts Racing — took the Chequered flag, having completed 286 miles (457 kms).

http://tv.reuters.com/ifr_main.jsp?st=1091551262968&rf=bm&mp=WMP&wmp=1&rm=1&cpf=true&fr=071204_123527_2bb514xfdacffb7a5x37dc&rdm=67718.68136426218
China to hold Miss Plastic Surgery pageant
BEIJING (Reuters)- China is giving the beauty pageant a surgical makeover with plans to anoint its first Miss Plastic Surgery this October, state media say.

Open to women from any country, the only requirement in the made-to-order competition is proof of inauthenticity — in the form of a doctor's certificate of cosmetic surgery, the China Daily said.

The idea for the pageant came after one woman was barred from a traditional beauty contest because she had spent more than 110,000 yuan (7,138 pounds) on plastic surgery that gave her a whole new face, it said.

The recent rise of China's “man-made beauties” has been attributed to a common sentiment that better-looking women find better jobs and marry wealthier men, it said.

Chinese people spend about 20 billion yuan a year altering their looks, the newspaper said.

Communist China, which once considered make-up and beauty contests as bourgeois, has increasingly latched on to pageants and played for the first time to the Miss World competition in 2003.

Last month, China announced plans for a beauty pageant for the elderly, with contestants aged 55 and over competing in the Zhen'ap Cup National Contest of the Beauty of the Gray-Head Group.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=856&ncid=856&e=1&u=/nm/20040803/od_uk_nm/oukoe_china_pageant

I bought 3 tickets two friggin' months ago for myself and 2 friends. I've been chasing them since then to get the money back for their tickets. I finally got one yesterday, and today the other one sends me an email telling me, dang, I can't go.

So now I'm stuck with a kick-ass 100$ ticket. So here's the lowdown:

who: Rush
what: 30th anniversary concert tour
when: saturday, august 21st, at 8pm
where: Bell Center, Parterre Nord (BB-20)
how much: $97.30

I forgot my laptop power supply at home. I have 30 minutes of battery power left. This will be a problem.

Today was heads and shoulders better than yesterday. Even though I did get a lot of good work done on LJ.NET, yesterday was a boring, muggy day (for the most part). Today was better. I got some housework done, and I went to ikea with montreality and sbourge. I got a pole for the drapes I wanted to pu t up in the living room to get rid of some of the glare when we were watching TV in the evening.

A short time later, a friend called me to invite me to go play a new board game the boys bought, so I spent the evening doing that, eating burgers on the BBQ and smoking up. A nice end to the weekend.

So now I'm home, watching a bit of TV before going to bed. Cat is being a pain once in a while – when he's not purring away next to me. I so don't feel like going to work tomorrow. That, more than anything else, confirms that I need a new job. The fact that raspberrysalmon and eniran won't be there to relieve my boredom in the afternoon really doesn't help.

I need a vacation.

I'm still working on my custom version of LJ.NET, and having a really good time of it :)

Edit: so it's now two hours later, and I got a lot of cool stuff done.

…which is good in a woman but bad in a city.

It's muggy, it's damp. It's been raining since yesterday night. Normally, I like the rain, but today, it's too damn humid to do anything. I spent the day indoors, trying to keep cool with the fan in my bedroom. Results were mixed.

Got some busy-work done, like dishes and laundry, but overall, today was spent fixing my computer problems. I re-installed my desktop, but I realized in doing so that I lost all the documents I had on it. I'm pretty sure I have my documents backed up on CD, I just need to find them. I still need to reinstall all the applications I use for fun stuff too, but at least I can connect to the net again.

I also got my wireless working again (typing this from my laptop in the living room). I think the DHCP server from my wireless is acting up, because once I switched to static IPs on my home network, everything is hunky-dory. The high point of this day was the unexpected conversation I had with raspberrysalmon. My laptop was happily wireless again for less than 5 minutes when I got a happy surprise. That made my day (thank you muffin! Hope you have a great time in Zurich!!!!)

Now, I'm going to go make myself some pancakes, cause I really don't feel like making anything more elaborate for dinner.

This is what happens when your contrast suddenly goes haywire on your webcam:

I spent a good 3 and a half hours chatting with raspberrysalmon this afternoon – and it was after business hours, so it's all good. I finally remembered to bring my webcam to the office, so that was really fun – even though I spent the first half hour blushing, for god knows what reason.

She's leaving for Zurich for a month.

I'm going to miss her.