Holy cow. !!!

Last year when I was setting up this blog, I had a few go-rounds in trying to buy (rent?) this domain. I played cat-and-mouse with the .net form a couple of times–waiting for the company that bought it to give it up after five days when it didn’t make them enough ad revenue to pay for the domain fee–and then saw that the .com was going to break loose after thinking it wouldn’t be available till this year. Then, because it was a Network Solutions domain, I just paid SnapNames their scalp money to get the .com for me before non-SnapNames/NS people could try for it. Done and done. Then NS ticked me off and I transferred the registration. Mwahaha.

I looked up the .net today. It’s owned by a company I never heard of but the contact email is at SnapNames. Now here’s the fun part–it’s covered in ads, of course, but most of them have to do with The Lord of the Rings. “Anwyn” is not a Tolkien name by nature–I decided it sounded like a name a girl in Rohan would have, that’s all (Eowyn, etc.). But I guess TheOneRing.net’s Anwyn pages sat high enough in the search engines long enough to make whatever system sets up the ad pages think that Tolkien was the most likely thing people would be looking for if they searched on Anwyn.

Which is a tiny little feather in my Fifteen Minutes cap. Kinda cool for a piece of Friday trivia.

My Ten Fingers Stepper arrived today from Sippican Cottage Furniture, built, painted, and distressed just for me by Mr. Sippican himself.

Gorgeous solid wood furniture to take away my IKEA blues, with its own story attached, built by a guy who writes, and I mean writes, not just blogs, on the side? Sign me up. Not a minute too soon for this piece, either, as I spent the weekend hopping on and off chairs to reach my high cabinets containing the cakemaking stuff for The Little Bean’s birthday. The Bean and I will both get use out of this one for years to come.

Hello, Fred.

You don’t know that it’s a year closer to death, dude. It could just be a year closer to whenever they perfect time travel. Or teleportation. Or Ordinary Joe Goes to Mars at Near the Speed of Light.

Yes, all right, they’re all still one year closer to death. You’re so “glass half empty.”

Mosquitoes, meet Shelob.

H/t Dave in Texas at Ace’s.

Was the Hamster Dance always to Roger Miller’s Robin Hood music?

Cool.

Aside, the people who made this video have one heck of a DVD collection.

H/t Bookworm Room.

Thanks to this. And despite what it says, you can use butter if you prefer it to cooking spray (which I do). Just keep the heat low, like it says, and make sure to coat the whole bottom of the pan with butter. And the non-stick, shallow pan with rounded sides is key–as much as I love my cast iron, and I do use it to make plain scrambled eggs, it just won’t work for this.

Kristin Bell has finally been photographed, sans Veronica Mars, wearing something cute for a change

Bonus Fug Girls: Celebrity children do grow up. And get fugged. I always think of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis’s kids as, well, little kids.

Christa McAuliffe’s backup, teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan, blasted off aboard Endeavour this evening at 6:36 p.m. EDT. Extra cool: She is now a fully trained astronaut rather than a teacher and will help operate the robot arm for cargo transfer during the mission.

I couldn’t help wishing they had mothballed the shuttles after Columbia disintegrated, but it isn’t the American way to retire what we think we can fix. Space travelers and test pilots all sign up to take their chances with technology and God. Godspeed to the seven-person crew of Endeavour.

Ace is sharing the toys.

I love the Cubs, but ask me to pick my next favorite team and I have to go with the St. Louis Cardinals. Yes I KNOW they’re the Cubs’ traditional NL rival for Midwestern dominance. Yes I KNOW they won last year and so are even higher on the blacklist than usual. Yes I KNOW, I know, but who else am I going to root for, the American League? Please.

Besides, the Cardinals are cool. Bringin’ in the chicks with Stitch ‘n’ Pitch night, for practitioners of the needle arts, of which your humble blog hostess is one. Alas, though, it’s going to be a lot easier for knitters like Sarah than cross-stitchers like me, unless I were to gin up a small, simple, portable project rather than the enormous black hole of time and effort I’ve been avoiding working on for a year. Baseball and stitchery at the park–yeah, the Cards are cool.

“Well, fine, knock [your]self out.”

Clintons and Kerrys of the world, take note: That’s how you respond to the idea of people investigating you. If you want people to assume you believe you’ve done no wrong, that is.