Playgroup

While I’m walking my dogs I see a guy walking his dog a lot of mornings. He had told me that he goes down to the park near the pool and lets his dogs go and other people bring their dogs and do the same. I never had time to go down there when I would see him, but last week I ran into him and had enough time to stop by the park. Katie and Clio weren’t sure what to think, though they always like being off of their leashes. They’re used to going somewhere and now we were just stopped. They played with Lucy (the guy’s dog; no relation to Penny/Lucy) some. She is young so she loves playing with everybody. Then a woman came up with her dog so there was kind of playgroup.

I didn’t go again, plus it’s been so cold lately. But this morning I took the four dogs (Susan’s dogs stayed with me a couple of days) down to the park and right after we got there Lucy and her owner arrived. It’s a good thing we went, because he reported that the two other people who had been bringing their dogs had to change their morning schedules and couldn’t come anymore. So playgroup was five dogs, but I brought four of them. Everybody played more than the first time, so I think I will keep going and maybe we will pick up some more people eventually.

Meanwhile, last week Susan met a former co-worker who she found out is also a nearby neighbor. The co-worker said that they have a dog playgroup at the school in the evenings. So now Beacon and Belle will have a playgroup at their house too!

Brominated Vegetable Oil

I was reading through some ingredients today, this time on a can of Sparkling Black Cherry Fresca. I came across one called “brominated vegetable oil”. Concerned after my last experience, I went to Google to find a Wikipedia article about it. Although it is apparently banned in some countries, it doesn’t seem harmful except in their example where a man drank eight liters of Ruby Red Squirt (containing “bvo”) a day and came down with a case of bromoderma which turned his skin red. Given that many servings of Squirt, it seems lucky that’s all he came down with.

Fresca is an amazing witch’s brew of other funky ingredients. Sure there are the regulars: potassium citrate, potassium benzoate, and EDTA, but it also has carob bean gum, glycerol ester of wood rosin, and acacia, though I imagine most soft drinks refer to these only as “natural and artificial flavors”.

Color Wheel

I have inherited webmaster duties for a DOT employees organization. For the most part the site is very neglected, somebody put a lot of effort into it one time and then nothing really came of it. It also uses frames. The problem I have with frames is you never really know where you are and in this case there are eight different local branches of the club, plus the statewide organization. The colors and buttons are kind of simple. I thought using I could use a format kind of like what the blogs use where there are two columns, one for links and one for content. But I’m terrible with colors and didn’t just want to use Vicksburg Olive like my blog does, even though I like the way those colors work together.

I found a neat website that offers a color wheel. It may be in different places because they guy says he will let you put the source on your own page (with ads), but this is where I found it:

Colour Scheme Chooser

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Nick Lowe

This past weekend, Susan and I saw Walk the Line, the movie about Johnny Cash (it got a good review from me). As such things do, it got me doing some research about Johnny Cash. I had been kind of disappointed with the greatest hits CD I had gotten several years ago. It had “Ring of Fire” and “Boy Named Sue” (which I don’t even like, though it’s a good story), but seemed lacking. A lot of the songs in the movie were from his earliest days at Sun records and were more appealing to me. So I went off looking for some of that music and bought a few songs from iTunes, plus a good duet with June Carter they played at the end of the movie. Then I decided to make a virtual CD in iTunes of the new stuff from iTunes and the good stuff from my CD, filtering out songs I wasn’t crazy about. I was trying to figure out what would be good from my old CD and in the liner notes saw that one of the later songs was by Nick Lowe with Nick Lowe on guitar. I don’t know if I’d never made it that far on the CD, but I’d never noticed it before and it was a pretty good song (“Without Love,” the CD also has Cash doing a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman” which Jeb would probably like, but didn’t make my cut). I’d seen Nick Lowe’s name come up a lot before and I just had to figure out who he was.

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Sony MDR-EX81 Headphones

My review of my new headphones on Amazon.

Four stars

I read the reviews here, and decided to get these headphones anyway. Essentially they are pretty good: they are comfortable and sound good. I hoped for more though.

The sound can be good just by itself, but on the iPod I have to crank it up to about 80% for it to sound its best. While I disagree with people who said the buds have no bass (they must not have the fit worked out), I do agree that especially with rock music the sound can be tinny. Using the iPod equalizer setting called Treble Reducer seems to help, but then if you play the iPod over a car or home stereo you have to remember to turn the equalizer off again or the iPod sounds muddy.

mdr-ex81.jpg

The buds are very comfortable, but they do go pretty far in your ear. They block out a lot of noise (I couldn’t hear my cell ringing until I got to a silent part between songs), but not everything. I’m not sure the ear hooks are even necessary since the buds fit in the ear pretty snugly. Plus the hooks tangle like crazy, catching on every cord they come across. I didn’t like the asymetric cords until I realized the longer cord was supposed to go behind your neck instead of under your chin. That way if you need to talk to someone you can take the earbuds out and they hang around your neck. That’s a nice feature.

I can’t strongly recommend these, but I don’t know that I would recommend avoiding them either. And they are certainly better than a lot of things you will find out there.