The Wildcat's Den

I'm going to be traveling the next couple of days, so I wanted to get this up before I left - in celebration of the 4th of July, a video of two of my favorite movies about the American Revolution (okay, one's actually an HBO miniseries, but it's awesome and I don't care) -



I love the score for "John Adams," by the way.

Also from "John Adams" - Congress approving the Declaration of Independence and reading it out for the world in epic fashion -



Happy Independence Day, folks!

Oy... it's been a crazy past two days.  First off all, I got back to the ranch on Thursday and began spending some quality time with the Lappy... except the poor Lappy was making the infamous loud whirring sounds that indicated she was about to crash.  Which she just about did the next day (Friday).  There were tears and cursing and general "I'm sooo pissed off at you right now!" going on, but I couldn't do too much about it until this morning.

Well, actually, not this morning because I woke up to the weenie dog's incessant yapping at something in my brother's room (my brother who is currently in Argentina on his mission).  Come to find out, our patio door blew open in the night, letting one extremely fat and feral tomcat into the house which had taken up permanent residence under my brother's bed where Scout had cornered it.  We spent a good chunk of our 4th of July morning trying to coax this creature out from under the bed and out the window without getting terribly maimed (I came close - I nearly had it by the scruff of the neck before it took a swipe at me and darted off.  Lucky I was wearing gloves).  It took a while, but we got the thing out.

Back to the Lappy - I finally got to where I could reinstall my operating system (I'm anal about backing up my files - I've had this computer for six years, but it's gotten worse since I got home from my mission last year).  I have most of it back and running, which is good.  I would have had it done except we had my sister, her husband and the in-laws make the trek out to the desert for a visit, plus our neighbors had a barbecue (which, that was fun - they were also celebrating their dad's 50th birthday in conjunction with the 4th, so there was plenty of cake and sugar to go around).  I'm still working on getting the rest of it up and running (iTunes, Media Player updates - that sort of thing).

I have a pretty good student loan next semester that I'm praying will cover tuition, fees and books and leave some left over for a new laptop.  My mom's desktop in town is a beautiful sight to behold, but I want to have my own computer that I can take with me to class because it's so much more convenient to have a laptop in this program.  I don't want to take this one into Salt Lake with me precisely because it's so slow and outdated and it would be more of a hindrance than a help.  I did take it in once and I think all the other laptops were laughing at it.

ETA: Okay, I'm really, really, REALLY annoyed.  Because I have to install all kinds of service pack updates for my computer.  Since I bought this thing practically in the Stone Age of computer technology, the vanilla stage is severely outdated.  And does Microsoft just let you download and install service packs?  Ha!  Of course not!  I have to wait for the automatic updates to run through six years of updates so I can install iTunes and the DivX codecs.  Normally, I wouldn't care, but you guys - I STILL HAVE THE FINAL EPIC 2-PART SPECIAL OF "DOCTOR WHO" TO WATCH!! And I can't watch it until all this stuff is updated!!  (my downloads are all DivX .avi files, which the 2004 edition of XP apparently can't handle -_-').  Oh my gosh, this is annoying!!  As sad as I will be to bid farewell to my beloved Tenth Doctor, I just really want to be caught up to the rest of the Who-verse (part of the reason I did the whole vanilla-wipe thing anyway was because it was taking so long for my video files to load yesterday, which makes zero sense since I'd been watching DW episodes on this thing the day before yesterday).  So now, I am still just waiting.  Unless, of course, I go back to the house in town sometime this week and use the computer that I know my files work on (speaking of making zero sense...)

I just need a new Lappy.  That's all.