Melody is still on Mom's schedule

It amazes me how much my mom's dog Melody has retained Mom's daily schedule. For example, when I get up, she asks to go out as soon as I get downstairs in the morning. Then around noon or so, she'll hide behind the bed, because this was when Mom would have lunch or get bathed (or whatever). Then around 2:30 pm, she'll ask to go out, because that's about the time the aide would let her out. Then again at around 4:30 p.m., because this was the time another aide early on when she came in the afternoon would let her out. Melody still asks for her food in the morning and at 5:30 in the afternoon, as well as hiding behind the bed downstairs during the 6 pm hour which is when Mom would have supper. And then again around 9 pm she asks to go out because Mom would be going to the toilet during her evening programs, usually missing the first half of the 9 pm show in the process only to come out and deal with her medications afterward.

She has retained Mom's schedule almost perfectly.

Finally had a dream about my mom

I finally had a dream about my mom. She was sitting on her chair in the
bathtub, wearing that purple thing she used to wear. I had to ask her to
move her head out so I could see her. It was if she was waiting for me
to see her. When I said to her "It is you!" She got up, walked out of
the bathroom like I remember her being able to walk, even though it was
kinda slow due to her injury and all, and I gave her a hug.

I wonder if this means she's finally come home and is going to send me
more messages.

My older sister

There's talk about my older sister possibly moving back to our state.
This is not the best thing she could possibly consider. There are no
jobs here while she has a job now where she is. She needs to be told not
to do this. There are things I can do to add to the discouage part of
this. She better not come back at all. It will end in tragedy.

She doesn't respect others. She doesn't respect my space. I have the
right to lock up my space and the right to not have her in it. If the
worst happens, I will need friends and supporters more than ever to
stand up to her to tell her to GTFO.

DO NOT COME HOME. I DON'T WANT YOU HERE AND I DON'T NEED THE BULL SHIT
YOU WILL PULL IF YOU ARE HERE. WE ARE SICK OF YOU. NOW IS NOT THE RIGHT
TIME, NOR WILL IT EVER BE.

YOU HEARD ME.

Dealing with animal / urine smell

I'll admit that our house has a slight animal urine smell to it. You
canna miss it coming in the door!

At least I have found ways to fight it, some of which work.

Nature's Miracle is expensive and frequently works. I have lots of
square inches to cover so I can't always rely on that.

White distilled vinegar, cheap at about $2 a jug, appears to help quite
a bit. I've found you have to saturate the area you're wanting to treat
or nothing happens.

Another bit I've been using is oxygen cleaner and lemon juice. The
peroxide part of the cleaner is the important part of removing the odor,
but the topper is the citrus smell in the lemon juice, supposedly cats
don't like the smell of lemon or even orange juice or citrus smells in
general. Also that lemon juice and vinegar are mild acids, which help to
break up the chemicals in the urine. Do not use ammonia. Bleach might
help but only if the carpet color isn't affected. (Ours was.)

My grandfather's cat is getting cantankerous and from time to time I've
caught him pissing in places he knows he's not supposed to but does it,
which gets swift punishment. Thankfully, I've been finding the spots and
have begun removal.

There's a spot under the desk where my mom had her feet on the carpet
while using the computer. Her feet sweat a lot and fermented sweat in
the carpet doesn't help things, especially when it builds up. I kept
bitching at her to wear slippers and she for the most part ignored me or
refused, but as the spot got soaked (and Griz began peeing on it), the
smell grew and was just unable to be ignored. Putting a rubber-backed
mat on the spot didn't help. Griz just peed on that, too.

I did some of my first treatment with the cleaner and lemon juice and at
first checking seems to have done some good.

I've had to block off my room and one spot in the kitchen as well as a
few areas in the main room downstairs to "encourage" Griz to use the
litter box. He's getting old so I expect him to expire some time soon.
He outlasted my grandfather by 6 years so far, and we have no idea how
old he was when my grandfather got him.

But I digress

I really should look up Digress because I think people use it when they
don't know what it means.

Anywho, Right Stuf licensed Dirty Pair TV.

It will be interesting to see what they use for their releases. I have
tapes of raw episodes off original laserdiscs which I got from a guy in
a computer club I used to go to. They have, before each episode: A title
card indicating which episode it is and title, a preview teaser, then
the episode itself.

VHS fansubs I got from a nice person who dumped them in favor of
digisubs that were floating around some time ago don't have these bits
before the episodes, which leads me to believe there were more than one
Laserdisc release or they worked from VHS tapes. I don't know.

If my situation permits me, I will support Right Stuf's releases.

Then I saw someone talking about this and brought up an obvious point
that to me showed some lack of understanding.

They were making a comment about "Frame Rate" when they really meant to
comment about "Cel Count."

Frame rate is a measure of frames per second, in one manner I consider
it. FPS is something like 24, 25, 29.97, 30, or even 60.

Cel Count is not the same as Frame Rate. You can have 24 frames per
second, and you can have your cel count equal to or less than that. I
think most animators understand this.

So if you have a high cel count, the animation could be better than a
lower cel count, as it would be more fluid instead of stiltingly jerky.
I imagine Ghibli movies have a high cel count while still having a frame
rate of 24 FPS.

But I digress.

Whatever happened to giving kids straight answers?

March 17th, other than being a pseudo-holiday, is my grandmother's
birthday. Well, one of them anyway.

But the thing is, as a kid, I had to figure this out on my own after
asking my mom when this day was. I still remember asking her one day
when my grandmother's birthday was one March years ago.

Instead of the direct answer I was hoping to get, I got told "In the
middle of the month." What the hell kind of answer is that?

It just so happened that I took that literally, and thankfully March
17th was the precise day "in the middle of the month" on the calendar.
For some reason, that stuck with me, a useless bit of info on someone's
birthday. I barely remember the birthdays of people I know and of those
still alive, but yet I remember March 17th.

I still feel annoyed by the fact that my mother at the moment I asked my
question couldn't spend an extra couple of seconds to give me a direct
answer. "In the middle of the month" is not an answer, it's somethng off
the top of your head to get rid of someone. It's a dismissive answer.

Since then, I've tried to do my best to give kids direct answers. They
want that. They deserve direct answers.

"Allied Interstate" calls

So now, in the past 2 weeks at least, I've gotten 3 phone messages left
by a recording from Allied Interstate, which as you will find out is a
debt collector company. I will not respond to any of these calls because
they don't say for whom or for what they're abusing the phone line
about. I have done some research about them. They're essentially a scam
operation that has tried with loads of people to get them to pay off
debts they don't owe in some way - as in they paid it off without
problems already.

So until they start saying why without the use of a recording, they're
going to be ignored.

Where are the pretzels again?

You'd think one big sign would be enough.

Recipe I might try

I keep wondering where my mom got all her recipe ideas that she had me make over these past few years, and while checking her email recently, I saw one of her emails from Betty Crocker and got this one for a Beefy Italian Ramen skillet dinner. I printed this one as I'm always looking for creative uses for ramen noodles.

Hard coded subs figured out

What you need is a package I found called AVI ReComp. I used version 1.5.0.

If you have anything other than an AVI, like an MKV, you need to pull out the audio and video streams as an AVI. I was trying to use Media Coder to do this as well as hard code the subs, but it kept giving me problems. I used something else to grab my video file out. MKVToolsNix can viably pull out the streams. I did it once before, but it looks like I'll have to relearn how to use it.

Get your sub file extracted or just ready. I wanted to preserve not just the fonts, but color and styling as well, and AVI ReComp does a 2 pass method that did exactly what I wanted. It takes a while, but when the results are as you expect it, it's worth it. The sub file I worked from is a Advanced Sub Station alpha file.

Once you have your AVI and subtitle file, open AVI ReComp. Specify your input AVI, the output destination, then under Additions, you Enable Subs and the file that you are using. Go to Queue and add the job to the queue, after which you can Start.

During install, the AVI ReComp installer tried to put in Xvid, but I have a version of that already. When it came to one file it had an issue with, I told it to Ignore the problem and I still got results.

The end result is an AVI with hard coded subs that I don't have to worry about anymore as an MKV, which is good because I have a few MKVs with sub streams I have to deal with.

Wabi sabi

Moss on bricks - wabi or sabi?

Last unknown song finally identified!

The last unknown track from my Mystery CD found in 2004 while in Toronto for Anime North, found during an excursion to Chinatown while parked in the garage at Dragon City, was identified as a track by Koizumi Kyouko called "Harukaze no Yuuwaku" but as you can see by this Youtube link, the poster of that video didn't spell the romanized title the way I would have and had trouble finding the video.