I pulled the second drawer out again to put the bulbs in the third drawer. It looks like the side panel is warped at the very back, and pushing inwards. And that's why once he got the drawer to budge, it came out relatively easy after that.

Alright then. Next time I'm getting one of each.

Here's a program called speedfan. It will let you monitor temperatures and control fans.

ah tytyty

happened to a guy i worked with on his first day at work when the whole team took him out for lunch, right down the front of his suit.

i'm gutted, because i realised the next logical stage in the trolling-atakbirdnerd game, which is testing him on bird-calls, but unfortunately I think i deleted all the mp3's I had of bird calls about a month ago (don't ask)

I appreciate this post since it reminds me that, contrary to some ppl's perceptions, i only rate a medium on the misanthrope scale

this makes much more sense

I encourage you to go in to a full daycare in the middle of the day sometime (not during sleep time), and come out and tell me that BBQing in the rain is not preferable

i've actually been in a few of late since we're choosing one. They're not that bad imo.

Sleep times are hilarious though. This one daycare, the woman walked us through this room of sleeping kids, half of which have rolled off their matresses and are sleep in one the floor and loads are sleeping in the funniest positions imaginable, usually involving squishing their heads into weird spots and so on.

Strange but true light bulb story. My roommate a long time ago brought home a grocery bag full of light bulbs he got from who knows where. I put one in the lamp I have by my bed. I use it almost every night. It's been working for 30 years now.

My wife & I are planning to take the kids to Disney next year, either end of May, beginning of August or September. We were looking at prices today, and Disney makes it damn near impossible to get laid if you go there with kids. Until you get to the high end resorts - like, $1000/night of vacation for the 4 of us - they all have one room with two beds. I mean, they could at least have one teeny tiny bedroom and a living room with a pullout couch or something

You don't know how to have quiet sex?

That will never happen

Not so much the quiet part as the "with the kids in the room" part

you have one year to teach your kids to sleep really soundly, then you just need to wait for them to fall asleep

sleeping pills imo

for the wife, (its obviously her that won't do it with the kids in the room)

Oh come on...

Two options: Bent over the bathroom sink or out on the balcony.

I would push for the balcony sex.

I love you Zurvan but I fail to generate sympathy with the idea that you may not get laid one weekend in a year and a half.

Checked into the new apartment today. It's in an older area and the building looks like **** on the outside. The street is mostly cobblestone and has trolley tracks running down the middle. Still should be plenty safe but I get the feeling that if I go for 2 AM walks I'll be seeing a different sort of folk out on the street.

The rep from the apartment agency was the same guy who checked us in in August. He recognized me and somehow remembered that I spoke Spanish, which may have been a false memory that just sort of happened to work out for him because I don't think we made any effort to try to speak Spanish at all when we checked in the first time. The new landlady was almost giddy about this and said that the tenants for the past 3 months didn't understand a single word. Then for some reason the rep proceeded to go over everything in English with me and she'd sometimes tell him something to translate for me even though I already understood what she said. Overall a solid improvement over the last landlady who kept her back turned towards us the entire time, even when speaking.

When it came time to pay, I told them I was a little short because the ATM wouldn't give me as much money today as usual (it seems that it was out of 100s and didn't want to spit out 3500 pesos in 50s). I said I'd have it tomorrow and the guy was just like "oh no, we'll just take it out of the deposit (ie, make the deposit less)." Um, fine with me. After I'd pulled the money out and counted it and it was 400 pesos short, I then checked my wallet and found 200 more pesos aside from various small bills that I might actually need for the rest of the day, but the guy wouldn't take them and insisted on just lowering the deposit. Okay...

Took over a bunch of my stuff at 1 AM which must have really confused the security guy. He's like "Which floor? [me: six] 6th 32? 6th 32? 6th 32? You already have everything? the keys? ..... 6th 32?"

The building has 15 floors with 4 units per floor, and for some reason there are 3 elevators, with each elevator having its own button. So you just guess at which one would be fastest. Or push all of them. *shrug* Apparently there's a washing machine on the top floor. Hope my wi-fi reaches that far....

I wasn't posting for sympathy, so much as pointing out the pure evil that is the Walt Disney corporation. I always wondered why somebody would spend $10G for 5 days in Disney; the answer is so they have a shot at getting laid.

Mark K would have been in the bottom percentile of poggers i would expect to post this.

To be fair to Z, holidays/weddings away from home are pretty well known as being the only times married people (esp those with kids) actually get to have sex. Together, at least. About 50% of the tourism industry is built around that point.

Totally unrelatedly (and the above doesn't really apply to me, at least for now) the boy and his mother arrived in Tokyo this morning.

But, also, i'm pretty sure not giving sufficiently large hotel suites lies outside the top 50 reasons that WD is evil.

Zurvan,

I recommend that you try a hotel outside the Walt Disney complex. When we went the last time as a family, which admittedly was about 15 years ago, it was much cheaper overall to stay outside the resorts themselves and rent a car + take Disney shuttles. And my parents were able to get a separate room in the suite where they could have all the hot sweaty sex they wanted.

Now I'm going to try to stop thinking about my parents having hot sweaty sex. Ewwww.

lol

When we went for our honeymoon, we stayed outside, and it was fine.

The big reason we want to stay inside is because Owen will be only about 2 years old, so will need to nap during the day, and it's just more convenient that one of us can go back to the hotel with him for that. Parking there is a nightmare, and most of the shuttle services are less than convenient if you aren't spending all day at the park.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Grabbed a Coke that said "retornable" (which means the same thing in English if you change a letter) because the others next to it were 3L and that's a bit much for me. Cashier says I can't buy that one because I didn't bring one in to exchange. Now I don't actually want to be returning them so I was happy to get it swapped out for a different one from the fridge, but how am I supposed to get one to return if I wanted to? At least with beer bottles they just rape you for an extra $.50 or something if you aren't returning one.

But anyway, I got all that figured out in Spanish without too much trouble, and I went through the entire check-out process in Spanish, so I feel like I must be getting somewhere with it. The only thing I didn't quite get was when she was naming all of the stuff that was missing or broken, and I'm like "ok the wine glasses, a cup, a plate, the water damage, more water damage... wait, more stuff? and more stuff? no no stop, I don't know what all this stuff is that you're saying." She didn't even comment on the fact that there were close to 20 light bulbs that I didn't bother to replace, lol. And somehow I got back most of the deposit, which didn't even seem right based on the numbers she was telling me, although she was giving prices in pesos and giving me dollars so I'm not quite sure exactly was going on with that. She was actually pretty friendly this time. When going over the number she said she was splitting the costs on some of the stuff. Funny language thing though, she was calling the deductions to my deposit "discounts". And in counting the money again, it seems she only gave a $230 discount, when I'd previously been concerned about whether I'd get any of it at all, so it seems great to me. Now I actually feel kinda bad about not pointing out that the toilet seat is broken. =/

Also, it's kind of striking how many people have no idea how to communicate with a non-native speaker. If I don't understand something, the most common result by far is that the person will repeat exactly what they just said, at the same speed, and then give up if I still don't get it. Even if I ask for something said more slowly, it's very rare that anyone will make more than a token effort to speak more clearly when repeating themselves. A lot of people will not bother to try to find other words to say the same thing. Recently I got the wrong food at Burger King and when I brought it back, the girl told me that she'd bring me my food to my table. I heard clearly " ........ to the table" but whatever verb she was using in there was something I have never heard before. Had she just used "traer" I would have understood, but instead she's running all over the place trying to find someone to translate (amusingly, two people "sort of" spoke English and none of them could help her, even though I could have done the reverse translation halfway through my first year of Spanish in high school). When I finally got her attention and just told her to say it slowly for me, I realized what she meant from her hand gestures combined with a bit of common sense.

And this isn't just a post about Argentines. In the US I can recall people clearly struggling with English and the people they talk to make no effort at all to slow down or simplify their sentences. Always struck me as being kind of odd when that happened.

Weird. I always talk to foreigners like they are ******ed even if they are from England.