We were supposed to go to a Buffy singalong tonight, but my brilliant sister-in-law didn’t go to buy the tickets until Thursday night, and of course they were sold out. So we’re going to see the Harry Potter movie instead. I also finally redesigned my Sidekick 3 skin; the first one came out really bad and satisfaction is guaranteed so I wrote to them, mailed back the bad one, and got a coupon for a free replacement. The front is going to look like this now.

Also, we went to the Original Pancake House today and had yummy pancakes - I got Chocolate Chip and A got buckwheat with pecans. I had never been to the Falls Church location; tikva and I went to the Rockville one a couple of times. I took some Alli before the pancakes; I’m giving it a try. A’s been using it for a little while but I am not sure if I will want to do it forever.

• I took A to the metro station today; she and her mom caught an 8:00am bus from Union Station up to Bayonne, where their cruise leaves from. I am going to miss her a lot! I plan to keep an eye on the ship’s webcam just for fun.
• I can’t believe I just figured out “Knockturn Alley” this morning. I got Diagon Alley a while back, but this one eluded me. DOH! So far, I have read up to the first trip to Hogsmeade.
• There is a brightly colored - lots of bright colors - SUV that parks at a house on my street advertising Verizon FiOS. Not knowing what it was, I went to look it up. It turns out to be some weird new broadband offering from Verizon; for kicks I put in my phone number to see if we could get it - and we can’t. So I have this gaudy billboard vehicle in my neighborhood advertising something we can’t get. Argh!
• Oh. My. God. I only just figured out how to use slices for images. Photoshop even writes the HTML for you. Where have I been all these years?! Now I can do things like this and this! Yeah, I need to work on the graphics a bit, but I did do it!
• Yes, I have done that “tell us about your interests” meme. But the post has vanished from where I think I saved it, and I don’t feel like doing it all over again just now. Perhaps I should do a mini-project in which I explain all my interests - all 150 of them.
• Whoa! My bottle of soda just got me, my shirt, my chair, and part of my cube wall all wet. I hadn’t even shaken it, it was just sitting there! Too bad it didn’t go all over my desk - that’s easy to clean up. But thank goodness it didn’t get into the keyboard, that would have sucked. At least I had a whole ton of napkins here, too. But I didn’t even win a freebie!
• Squick Warning! This has an extremely high squick factor. If you really want to know, paste the garble here, then come back and click the link (which is not garbled, but rather clickable). Note: this is not worksafe, so I have not even clicked the link myself.
  Vs lbh pyvpx urer lbh zvtug or noyr gb frr n cvpgher bs na nobegrq srghf. V unir abg pyvpxrq gung yvax zlfrys, ohg V jnf ybbxvat sbe gur snzbhf srghf cvpgherf sebz Yvsr zntnmvar, naq gung pnzr hc va gur Tbbtyr Vzntrf erfhygf. Vg vf ubfgrq ba n Ehffvna fvgr, urapr gur “zvtug or noyr” - sbe nyy V xabj vg’f na vainyvq yvax, Tbbtyr Vzntrf unf n ybg bs gubfr. Naljnl, V xabj fbzr bs lbh ner fvpx shpxf, fbzr bs lbh ner phevbhf glcrf, fb V’z funevat gur yvax. Sebz jung V fnj bs gur guhzoanvy, guvf vf rkgerzryl tencuvp. (Lrf, gung zrnaf “erpbtavmnoyr” va guvf pnfr.) Qba’g fnl V qvqa’g jnea lbh.

I had better hurry up and finish reading Devils on the Deep Blue Sea quickly! I just went to renew it and on the same page I happened to notice that I am now #2 in the queue for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I was approximately #600 when I signed up about four to six weeks ago. I’m glad I stayed strong and didn’t buy the hardback when I saw it numerous times in stores - now I can read it for free! (I haven’t re-read any of the Harry Potter books.) Has anybody noticed there hasn’t been as much hype over this one as there was for Order of the Phoenix? I remember people were climbing over each other in bookstores for that one, but Half-Blood Prince seems to have been easy to find since it came out.

Also, I spotted an interesting adopt-a-highway sign on Purcell Road near the intersection with Dumfries Road in Prince William County. It said the highway was adopted by “Republic of Koznia.” At first I thought that was the country of origin for Tom Hanks’s character in The Terminal, but that turns out to be Krakozhia. The nearest other reference I can find is a Justice League plotline involving Kaznia, which a single poster on a Justice League message board spelled as Koznia. So what’s up with this adopt-a-highway thing?