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Hello time traveler. You've found the REALLY old stuff.
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Last week, Andrew and I went exploring around Charlotte. During this excursion, we found the historic downtown of Waxhaw, NC, which is about 20 minutes southeast of us. While there, we visited a wonderful dog shop, reminiscent of those we frequented in Chicago. We didn’t have Oreo with us at that time, so we made a point to go back with him this weekend. We also brought the camera along for good measure. The store is appropriately named The Furry Godmother.
The woman who owns the store truly loves dogs. She also has a great selection of unique treats and accessories. We walked away with plenty of chicken drumsticks and a woven squirrel toy that Oreo is joyfully tearing apart as I type.
After filling up on treats, we explored the downtown that is really, really cute. There were tons of antique stores and decorator shops…
And, an old fashioned ice cream parlor that just happened to sell pistachio ice cream. We fell in love with pistachio ice cream in Europe, so this was really special for us.
We ended our outing with a trip to the local park only a few blocks away. I don’t know who had more fun there – Andrew or the dog.
I'm still amazed at how resilient the weather is down here. We never get more than 48 hours of nasty weather before the sun comes out again. This is a pretty extreme contrast to Chicago, which offered several weeks of grey at a time. I will say that fall in Chicago is the best, but the winters are brutal. Don't forget to sleep in an extra hour tonight. Speaking of resilient, I read an inspiring article this week that was written by Dilbert creator Scott Adams. He permanently lost his voice 18 months ago... and recently found a way to get it back.
This weekend we're not up to much. Since leaving the house means a 99.9% chance of spending money, we may just be shut-ins for once.
I have a new Interweb hero. Click here to see his video.
Youtube is fantastic for all kinds of time-wasting amateur videos. You've got everything from a Shrimp running on a treadmill to American Gladiators to the Guiness world record for most T-shirts worn. Most of the videos are short to appease your short attention span, gentle reader. In my own special random contribution to the world, I got bored this week and bought a beta fish and dropped into a huge brandy snifter (got it at the Pineville antique store for 5 bucks). I also clipped some plants growing in an old flowerpot in my backyard and added it to the mix. No, I won't be sending a video of it to Youtube.
It's pretty much the same plant/fish deal that I setup earlier this year. Now on to something that actually bares importance -- my nephew Will, is able to remove his oxygen tubes this week This was a huge win for Will, who had to wear the tubes temporarily because of the high altitute where he was born last month.
The domain prospecting continues!!!!1
Artemenko.us is mine... along with Salary-Jobs.com, reallysimpledesign.com and truthidentity.com -- and these are the "good" ones that I own. Seriously, the .com names are going fast! Hopefully this won't land me on a street corner in 15 years holding up a sign that says "Will sell domain names for food." In contrast to that dreary scenario, maybe I'll dole them out in exchange for huge sums of money that will pay for my children's private education some day. ... neither seem very plausable. OK we're off to the vet with Oreo for his standard check up. We gave him a bath and brushed his teeth (with rubber finger brush) as a courtesy to the doctors.
Another great episode of The Office aired tonight. My personal favorite scene was when Michael took a nap duing the middle of the day, using a koosh as a pillow. In related news, my Dwight Schrute bobble-head arrived from NBC Universal yesterday -- and it is constructed of suprisingly good quality!
I stumbled upon a pretty sweet site today called Alexadex. Alexadex allows you to wager on Internet traffic rankings like stock options. If the Alexa traffic ranking of an individual site goes up, it has a proportional effect on share value. Naturally, I loaded up on cheap shares of Artemenko.org, and a handful of lessor-known, high-volume ad servers that might make me a few virtual dollars in my Alexadex portfolio. This weekend will be a good chance to catch up on the NBC show "Heroes," a lot of people in the office have been talking about it...
Nascar was awesome.
We tailgated for 7 hours before the 4 hour race. Nothing says "Honey I love you" like spending 12 hours with your friends at the race track. It's OK, Laura bailed on the race because she had a plane to catch early Sunday morning -- so I went solo and snapped a few pictures along the way.
See how my forehead is about the same color as the Budweiser pit station? Yeah, that hurts today. I don't know who those people are next to me. We were really lucky to get a pit pass to walk around the inner track area. We even got to walk along the actual track -- which has a 30+ degree grade around the turns.
We had great seats to watch the race, with headsets and tranceivers to intercept radio dialogue between racers and the pit crew. It was also fortunate that we had seats inside. Sitting outside can get loud and cold -- but that didn't stop people coming out in thousands to see the event.
Oh and there has been some pretty serious resistance to the advertising again: Ezrider0: how much are you really making Let the record show that I am not doing this website for money. More than anything it's a curiousity of what it's like to be on the selling side of online advertising, even if it's on a super small scale. The ads will probably come down relatively soon, I'm making about $1.50 per day. :\
Adam snapped some pictures (with a camera phone) of the plane that crashed in New York City yesterday. It's pretty crazy that he could see the accident from the balcony of his apartment building. I'm getting a kick out of the different ads that Google is trying to match with Artemenko.org. Last I checked, the advertising on display was for "Body Armor" and "ATS Tactical Gear." Earlier today it was for "Wedding Presents." I think the computer program scanning the content of our blog picked up on the terms related to Laura's anniversary present, and the scary shooting range behind our house. I guess there are advertisers out there for just about anything. We've got a fun weekend ahead of us. Mexican dinner with our neighbors on Friday and a Nascar race on Saturday! We are pumped. If you're bored try out this old-school NES quiz. I scored 1200, some of these questions are impossible. Gyromite?
Two years ago today, Andrew and I were bound together in the ties of marriage. For better or for worse, 730 days later we are here, celebrating our second anniversary. For me, it’s been the best two years of my life. I feel really lucky to have someone as wonderful and thoughtful as Andrew -- just look at the great gift he got me...
That’s right, Andrew actually bought me a piece of jewelry that I approve of…unfortunately, now that we are married, this lovely bracelet was purchased out of OUR bank account. I still love it and can’t wait for year three! This weekend, Andrew and I did something crazy. We jumped the fence behind our home and found out just what South Carolina had to offer.
What we found, was something…unexpected. After fighting through a jungle of trees, weeds and Lord knows what else, we came to a clearing. And in this clearing we found the road. No, it was not the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, but the Pabst Blue Ribbon road to a homemade shooting range and scary house with the large barking dogs in the distance.
That’s right, shooting practice is happening right behind our precious home – I’m used to this – I’m from the South. We found everything from tin cans to old computer monitors to washing machines back in those woods. Andrew insists the bullet holes are from a BB gun, I’m still skeptical. I pulled one of the PBR bottles out of the ground. No, this wasn’t a path laid years and years ago, this trail of libation was born in 2006…based on the beer's expiration date . Now, along this path was a barbed wire fence and on the other side there was more adventure to be found. The most exciting mention, this old shed.
It contained all sorts of fun things like old lawnmowers, lamps, cans, and large, I mean huge, containers of gasoline. Needless to say, we came back over the fence a little wiser and we will definitely be locking our doors and setting the alarm from here on out! Ok, I have to get back to my precious husband! I’m going to leave you with this special picture from our wedding. Yes, that lovely lady is my mother and we all know who that chin belongs to...;-)
The Office was great tonight. The best part of the episode was the very end when Michael made Dwight stand on a desk with a sign around his neck that said "Liar." As Adam pointed out Dwight's blog aka "Schrute-Space" has been updated, you should check it out. Oh and you might see some advertising popping up here and there (but not literally popping up, that is so 2002). I am experimenting with relevant ad programs, you might just be blow right out of your chair by their relevance. Since my family uses the Kodak EasyShare Gallery to share photos, I decided to promote their product line first. I chose them over Smugmug and Snapfish, which are apparently very popular photo sharing sites (both rejected me as an advertiser, a likely result of tha 'org's mind-rocking visitor statistics). Oh well -- Kodak EasyShare is the one the Artemenko's use, that and Flickr. My brother Peter has been using Flickr a lot lately, and unless I'm going crazy, it makes the pictures look nicer? Must be some sort of compression algorithm or something. Right now I'm tinkering with the website, and Laura and Oreo are watching Grey's Anatomy. Oreo is a good dog to be watching the show with her, I'm sure he'd rather be running around eating his own burps and rolling in mud. Holy cow I almost forgot. Has everyone seen Little Superstar yet? That kid can probably steal your wallet while doing the moon walk and chewing a pack of gum.
Here we are, one year after starting Artemenko.org! It's safe to say we are in a completely different place back when we started, 9,132 visits and 20,134 pageviews ago. Below is a list of Top Ten moments from the first year operating the website: 1. Buying our first house together in July and moving in. That about sums up the last 12 months, they are going to be hard to top now that we have ventured into suburbia -- but we'll try to keep things lively! It is also encouraging to see that other people have started up blogs too. The latest one I'll add to the 'blog friends' section of Links is by Steven Furtick, pastor of Elevation Church. One of the reasons I personally like the guy is that he is 26, and has grown his church congregation from 90 people to 700 since January. Looking for old stuff down here? Other places you can find traces of our Netizenship: Myspace
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Update 10/29/06
Update 10/28/06
