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After work today I swung by Newport Market over on the westside for their Thirsty Thursday beer tasting. I just found out about these Thirsty Thursdays recently; they're every, er, Thursday from 3:30 until 6:00. Free beer! Can't go wrong with that.

Today it was a rep from Deschutes Brewery doing tasting of their two newest: Inversion IPA and Buzzsaw Brown. Both good, but the IPA was really good. So I picked up a six-pack of it, and then, to my amazement, found a bottle of Deschutes' Mirror Mirror, which I'd heard about but hadn't seen anywhere. I'm excited! But it's a big barleywine, so I'm saving it for the weekend. Or Friday night.

So remember—Thursdays at Newport Market.

Beep! Yesterday afternoon one of the smoke alarms started the intermittant beeping that indicates when the battery is getting low. These are smoke alarms that are actually wired directly into the electrical system of the house, but have nine-volt batteries in them for backup (in case the power goes out). No biggie, I knew we had newer batteries.

Beep! Well, a bigger task then I thought; I couldn't figure out at first which smoke alarm was beeping. We have a total of seven in the house, one down at the bottom of the stairs and six others upstairs. And due to the acoustics in our house, I was moving from one alarm to another waiting for the telltale beep, but everytime I'd get close to one the Beep! would chirp out, seemingly from behind me.

Beep! I finally traced it to the smoke alarm in my bedroom. Popped out the battery, replaced it with a fresh one. All good, the beeping stopped. Case closed. Had dinner, went to bed.

Beep! Wha—? Huh? I roll over in bed, echoes from whatever dream I'd been having shredding away in the onset of consciousness. Peer at the clock; 4:40. In the morning.

The hell—?

Beep! Oh, shit. Another smoke alarm is warning me its battery is too low. I do not want to get out of bed for this—

Beep! Beep! Uhhhh... If I'm not mistaken, that was two different beeps. Son of a bitch.

Beep! So for the next 30 or 40 minutes I'm stumbling around the house, tring to catch a smoke alarm in the act, failing miserably, swapping out fresh batteries only to find I don't quite have enough because I just know that all the damn batteries have chosen 5:00 in the morning to sputter out, and all the while Beep! Beep! and I can't figure out which ones are chirping.

Beep! Screw this, I get vicious and pull the batteries out of all the smoke alarms. They're wired anyway, and I'll just buy brand new batteries tomorrow to make sure I'm covered.

...Did it work? Did the beeps stop? Looks like I was—

Beep! No. No no no nonononononononononononono.

It dawns on me that we have a carbon monoxide detector plugged in to the wall in the hallway. It's supposed to beep when it detects high levels of CO gas... and I think there's a battery in it too.

Check it... sure enough, the damn thing says "Err" on it's tiny beeping fu—ahem, LCD screen. Okay, pull the detector, pull the battery, and...

Silence.

Ever notice how peaceful it is at 5:45 in the morning?

All this week (since Saturday, actually) it's just me and my son at home. My wife and daughter took advantage of spring break to head down to San Diego to visit my brother and sister-in-law. Sadly, spring break doesn't cover work or preschool/daycare, so we were left behind.

It's all good. We're having a good time so far, despite the logistics of being a single parent for a week. No big plans, otherwise, though.

Okay, just a little while ago I saw the creepiest, randomest commercial for Skittles ever... I won't even pretend to try to understand it...

Anyone else seen it? Basically, a guy with a weird, long (like, three-feet-plus long) beard is at a job interview, and the beard is moving like an elephant's trunk, feeding the guy skittles from the desk. The woman conducting the interview is trying to turn him down, and—

Yeah, freakshow—

—and the beard feeds the woman a Skittle and strokes the side of her face, while he just chuckles in a creepy way.

And that's it.

I can pretty much guarantee I'll never buy another pack of Skittles again.

...You didn't think I wouldn't give you a link, did you? Here's the video on YouTube.

I admit, when I first saw this skull, I would not have guessed what animal it ultimately came from. I mean, that is some crazy wicked toothwork...

So, who can identify it without cheating?

It's like my regular Lost Book Watch feature or something. Anyway, right there on the screen in your face, Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I don't know that it has anything to do with the overall theme or plot of the show; since Sawyer was reading it, I rather suspect the producers are just having fun with us.

"Us" being those people like myself who have nothing better to do than blog about the books that show up on Lost...

Heads-up, Bendites: The Paperback Exchange, which is one of the oldest used bookstores in Bend (if not the oldest), is closing! Right now they're having a huge 75% off sale on everything. I stopped over there after lunch and bought four books (for only $4.50, which would have been regularly priced at $18) and talked with the owner a bit.

They have to be out by April 30th, but will probably close a week or so before that to empty out the store. So, you've got about a month left to get there and get some great deals.

It's located at 184 NE Greenwood, on the corner of 2nd and Greenwood. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Over browsing at JCPenney this evening, and I saw that they had "Vote for Pedro" t-shirts for only $9.99. Some other good ones, too.

Just a heads-up to y'all. :)

If you enjoyed the Chuck Norris Facts site, and like the TV show 24, well then, this is the perfect mashup for you: Random Jack Bauer Facts. Same exact premise (some are even lifted from the Chuck Norris Facts!), and some are really funny:

The city of Los Angeles once named a street after Jack Bauer in gratitude for his saving the city several times. They had to rename it after people kept dying when they tried to cross the street. No one crosses Jack Bauer and lives.

If Jack Bauer was in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Nina Meyers, and he had a gun with 2 bullets, he'd shoot Nina twice.

Jack Bauer's calender goes from March 31st to April 2nd, no one fools Jack Bauer.

Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.

Funny mashup goodness! Now, I need to set about creating a similar ripoff mashup site with some other larger-than-life character...

For the mathematically-inclined, today is Pi Day. Because today is 3-14. Get it? Even better, the celebration begins at 1:59 p.m.

Curiously enough, today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Odd coincidence, considering.

My mom mentioned this yesterday, though I didn't see it online and I'm too lazy to do a deep search: there is now apparently one realtor for every 200 people in Bend, according to The Bulletin. Wow.

I figure this should be good fodder for the newish Bend, Oregon Housing Bubble blog.

There was a magnitude 4.5 earthquake off of Oregon's coast this morning. Interesting. Not a huge one—not enough to strike up a tsunami—but a good reminder that a big one could hit at any time.

I never did get any comments on my poll the other day...

Is this thing on? :)

It was a whirlwind tour of Portland, but we managed to make the most of it. We did some quick shopping in Gresham on the way in, stopped to visit with our friends for a bit (had to take over some of my pumpkin ale for a missed birthday), and then went out to lunch at the Horse Brass.

The Horse Brass rules. Seriously. It's an English pub, with a ton of beers on tap, real darts, English food, the works. We had a tasty lunch (never had a Scotch egg before—it was good), tasty beer, and when we were finished, we stopped in to Belmont Station and picked up some harder-to-find beers.

Afterwards, I was able to go to Powells for a little bit ("a little bit" is relative, because my ideal visit to Powells would quite easily be half a day), but didn't find anything I wanted to spend that much money on.

We checked in to the hotel, relaxed for a few minutes, met with our friends who were also going to the concert, and then went to BJ's Brewhouse for dinner. It was good, although slow, and the service was ditzy at best. I have to say, though, they're seven taster deal is amazing: seven five-ounce(!) tasters of beer for only $7.25.

And, finally, the concert. We walked to the Rose Garden, entered without fanfare, found our seats. A local Portland band was playing the opening gig (they won a contest), I didn't catch their name but I wasn't paying close attention anyway. We had to move around seats a bit because when the tickets were purchased, the available seats remaining were single seats two rows apart (of course!), and after playing musical chairs trying to figure out the best place to see (and—damn it—missing a good portion of one of the classical Bon Jovi songs that everyone is actually there to see), the usher got permission to seat my wife and me in the announcer box seats at the top of the section—otherwise roped off to everyone else. That was pretty cool, because the view was much better and we weren't surrounded by screaming fans.

As far as the concert itself, it was decent. Two songs they performed that they didn't do last time were "Runaway" (eh) and "Blaze of Glory" (cool!). And, Jon had a lot more audience interaction—the first song was from amidst the crowd in the back rows of the floor seats, and "Blaze of Glory" was amidst the crowd at our level one section over from us. The most amazing part? He wasn't mauled by the crowd. :)

Okay, this is getting long. I'll leave you with this writeup of the concert—with pictures.

On Sunday we'll be heading up to Portland to see Bon Jovi in concert at the Rose Garden. Yes, we've done this before (warning: I sound like a drooling fanboy in that post).

Anyway, we're casting about for something to do Sunday after we get to Portland... we'll be seeing some friends, probably, and of course my wife would love to do some shopping. Myself, I don't really have any real plan; I like going to Powells and I wouldn't mind hitting a brewpub or two, but I'm pretty open.

Would any Portland bloggers want to meet up? I'm not promising anything, but you never know. ;)

For that matter, any bloggers/readers going to see Bon Jovi too?

Since I'm tired of waiting on Simone for a new site design :), I thought I'd start playing around with it myself. It's just high time things got refreshed around here. So, I thought I'd run my early attempts by everyone, and ask a few questions.

The big change is converting the site to a stylesheet-driven design rather than a table-based one. I also want the clutter reduced, and to remove unnecessary features.

You can see a bit of what I'm doing on the project page and the archive page. So far the primary changes you'll see are on the sidebar, I haven't really re-worked the header much yet (but I will).

So, the questions:

• What do you think of the new design elements?
• Should I keep or drop the calendar at the top of the sidebar?
• I'm thinking of changing the header to some sort of revolving photo background. Thoughts?
• Any features I don't have that people would like to see?
• General comments/ideas?

Don't pull any punches, either. I can take it! :)

There's a whole bunch of stuff I'll bet you never knew about Chuck Norris.

Guns don't kill people. Chuck Norris kills people.

There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.

If you ask Chuck Norris what time it is, he always says, "Two seconds 'til." After you ask, "Two seconds 'til what?" he roundhouse kicks you in the face.

Chuck Norris can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves.

Chuck Norris originally appeared in the "Street Fighter II" video game, but was removed by Beta Testers because every button caused him to do a roundhouse kick. When asked bout this "glitch," Norris replied, "That's no glitch."

Chuck Norris CAN believe it's not butter.

Some people wear Superman pajamas. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.

Chuck Norris is currently suing MySpace for taking the name of what he calls everything around you.

If at first you don't succeed, you're not Chuck Norris.

Google won't search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

When Chuck Norris does division, there are no remainders.

Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse-kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn't stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.

Just had to point it out (even my wife noticed it): this week's book on Lost was The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

It's going on the list...