If you haven’t seen Weird Al Yankovic’s video “It’s All About The Pentiums”, I recommend watching it, then you will understand the where I got the inspritation for today’s title. You can view is video on Youtube at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos.

As you might have guessed, I got the 55″ HDTV I won last week installed. I hung it from the ceiling in the sunroom next to the treadmill. We actually had to do a major reorganization of the treadmill area to make it all work. But now we have a well hung, 55″ monitor in the sunroom. We also cleaned the sunroom really well. Laurie washed the covers on the couch, cleaned the windows and trimmed the bonsais and other plants in the sunroom on top of cleaning and reorganizing. All of it was a lot of work, but it’s all worked out very well.

Laurie got the urge to do a drive-by photo of the construction project on Coors Road, north of Paseo Del Norte. She took my camera a got a few shots as we were rolling past the construction.

I think there is a thin layer of smoke in the air that makes it impossible for me to get a really clear photo of the moon. Three different cameras and lenses all produced the same results. — a soft moon.

Laurie got some photos of our spider lilies. Puck decided to be the background for one of the photos.

Our cats are superstitious. They won’t go out either door if Lola or Osric (both black cats) cross their paths.

While out touring the garden this afternoon, I noticed a mama fly catcher with her two teenagers perched on the power line.  Mama would fly out catch a bug on the wing, fly back, and then give it to her nagging teenagers. There are several photos of her in action after bugs. I never once saw either of the teenagers lift a wing to go after a single bug the whole time I was out there.

I saw a tiny butterfly fluttering around and followed it until it landed. It was no bigger than a fingernail, but very pretty.

While I was photographing the butterfly, I could hear a bird chattering in a dead cottonwood. I looked up to see a beautiful red bird singing at the top of its birdie lungs.

Now that it’s the middle of July the June bugs are out.

Traffic was terrible on Alameda tonight. It took us an hour and a half to get home after I picked up Laurie at UNM at 5:30.

I got spammed last week by one of our lighting suppliers who had a “lighting Roadshow” today. I called our rep last week to give him a hard time about getting multiple emails about the event. He insisted that I drop by and check out the lighting, so after I dropped Laurie off at UNM this morning I went by and checked out the lighting. There was a lot of really cool LED lighting. I talked to the vendors, picked up some catalogs, registered for the door prize and went to the office.

Just before 5:00 pm this afternoon my rep called and said “Dude, you won the door prize!”  I said “Nah, you’re pulling my leg,” — he can be a joker. He told me that I really won the door prize. “Hmmm!” I said. “What was it again?” “A 55″ Samsung LED TV and Blue Ray player.” he replied. “When can I deliver it?”  We finally decided it would be easiest for me to pick it up on my way into work tomorrow, but now I need to figure out where to put it. A 55″ screen is huge. We haven’t had a TV in nearly 30 years so I’m not sure how to deal with a giant TV. Oh well. I’m not going to complain, however.

While I was out surveying the garden tonight, I noticed a spider hanging out at the entrance to its web tunnel. While I photographed it, a fly landed on it’s web and in an instant the spider pounced on the fly, but the fly got away. The spider stood there disappointed long enough for me to get a few more photos before it ran back in its tunnel.

I got spit on by the clouds on the way home tonight, but not really any measurable precipitation. At least the “quatro gotas” cooled things off quite a bit. The problem is, the wind brought smoke with it.

The hibiscus was blooming first thing this morning. The tree goes through a cycle of getting ready to put out blooms one day, and blooming the next day. The blooms close up for the night that night, and fall off the following day as the new blooms prepare to open by coming out as orange-yellow tubes that unfurl into full blooms the following day.

I drove through a brief downpour this afternoon on the way home from pick up Stretch’s water boarding supplies at the vet.

While I was mixing up Stretch’s “desert” tonight, I was thinking about how pet food companies make cat and dog foods in flavors we humans can deal with, but not necessarily the flavors kitties and doggies would really like.  I suppose people would have a hard time buying flavors like rat, mouse, bird, reptile, etc. for their cats. Maybe if they gave them names like rat salad, mouse mousse, parakeet parfait, lizard l’orange and snake surprise people might go for them, but I doubt it.

I’m not sure how dog food would go over — road kill ratatouille, dead duck delight, smashed squirrel saute, stinky skunk stew. It’s making me hungry just listing them.

When I got up at 4:15 this morning to irrigate, the raccoons were the only critters out. I haven’t seen the porcupines since I traumatized the baby by shining a flashlight on it a couple of weeks ago.

While I was getting ready to go out and get Stretch’s supplies, I heard Laurie out on the deck yelling. Turns out a horde of teenage raccoons came running toward the deck and then scrambled under it. She said the runt was tagging along several feet behind. We haven’t seen or heard from the mama coon. Apparently, the kids got away from her.

I worked out in the garden all morning thinning catnip, cutting dead branches out of the chitalpa, deadheading roses and making repairs on the drip system. I also got a series of photos flies and bees.

Thunderheads rolled over earlier in the evening, but it didn’t rain. From what I could see of the mountains they might have gotten a little rain, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

The coons were under our deck most of the day wrestling around, with the mama coon growling at Laurie moving around on the deck during the day, and both of us tonight. The hoard of coons finally ran off about 8:30 leaving the runt behind. It chirped and cooed under the deck for awhile before it came out and made a few attempts at trying to find its rotten family that abandoned it.

It would start to  walk out from under the deck and then run back under it. At one point it got up on the deck and acted very pitiful. I ran it off the deck, and it promptly ran back under it. Laurie and I watched it as it waddled out about 25 feet from the deck, questioning if it was okay, but then all of a sudden it came running back to the deck and shot under it, so we decided the issue with walking funny was psychological from being abandoned. It finally made it’s way of to the thicket of elms by the shed, but apparently mama didn’t come to get it after an hour or so, so now it’s taken refuge under the deck again. I’m tempted to offer it free counseling.

We have Lola taking up residence on the east side of the house and the mystery black cat taking up residence on the west side of the house, making five black cats on the property. I think Lola’s been sleeping on the roof under the trumpet vine. She’s come out off the roof and jumped off the top of the catio the past two mornings. The catio is 10 feet high from where she jumps down. It’s an impressive jump. She was attempting to loll around on the table tonight. Even though we call her a lol cat, she doesn’t know how to loll around like our cats, but she’s getting better.

Stretch seems to be doing much better. He resists a little bit when I get him for his treatment, but I think he knows it makes him feel better so he’s putting up with it. He was being down-right sassy a few minutes ago.

A year ago today I had my first treatment for lymphoma. A year goes by quickly these days, and a lot has happened during that time.

There’s an email going around that explains there are five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays in July 2011 — that’s said to happen every 823 years. The email also notes that if you take the last two digits of your birth year, add your age you will be this year to it, the total will be 111 “for everyone in the world.”  Well not exactly. Only “everyone in the world” born in the 20th century will come out with 111 using this technique that I’ll call the “century trick”; however, anyone born in the 21st century will come out with 11, and anyone born in the 19th century will come out with 211. Actually, if you calculate the age of any famous person born in the past 2000 years, and run it through the century trick, the total will be some hundred eleven. Here’s a possible trick question: If you add the year Christ was born to how old he will be this year, what number do you get?

As interesting as the century trick is, I decided to take some arbitrary values together with 111 and see what I would come up with. First, I took the total number of friends I have on Face book, multiplied that number by 111, subtracted the date the Declaration of Independence was signed, then divided the total by the last two numbers in the year of my birth — lo and behold, the number came out to 111. How weird is that?

Wait! Wait! There’s more. I took the totals of our three black cats’ ages using the century trick above, multiplied that total by the product of the caliber of an AK-47, subtracted the year Queen Elizabeth signed Mary Stuart’s death sentence, then divided that total by 111. Guess what it came out to? The number of friends I have on Facebook. Who would have thought?

Now I know these apparently random outcomes seem arbitrary, but somehow the above results have something to do with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Affairs, the Bilderberg Group, and Google. Notice how I wrote 111 six times. A coincidence?