Some of you may have seen my frantic post on Facebook about my missing Threadless package. Well, I found it, and you’ll never believe where.

This shrub looks perfectly innocent, right?

Up close, still looking good…

But wait, what’s this?

Did they chuck it into the shrub? This is a really sturdy plant, by the way. I was able to rest my camera on it, and the camera stayed upright. You’d have to either hit that gap exactly or apply some kind of force.

I’ve been passing this sign for months now, maybe longer, and I finally decided it was time to get some photographic evidence. Don’t ask me about the “defence” misspelling. Perhaps they’re Canadian expatriates?

And they even take Discover!

Last weekend, my mother delivered a belated birthday present: she reupholstered my couch cushions! In typical cat fashion, Sasha snuck into the shot. I didn’t notice her until after I uploaded the photo to my computer.

The Sieve of Eratosthenes, quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen all day. It’s a technique for visually selecting prime numbers very quickly.

Because the person with my username on Twitter is not me!

I was doing a search on my username/domain name (diastelo) on Google, when I unexpectedly got a hit on a Twitter account. Sure enough, diastelo is taken on twitter.com, and it’s not me!

(I run a search on my username a lot because it’s a good way to find people that are leeching my images. Image leeching is when someone links to an image on your website instead of moving the image to someplace like Flickr. I did find a leecher, by the way. Someone on some Twilight fan site *shudder* is using one of my images as the background for their forum posts, so that EVERY SINGLE TIME someone looks at one of their posts, it downloads the image, all 1024×768 pixels of it, from my website.)

My username is fairly unique and I’ve had the pleasure of using it for several years unhindered. It’s my web address, several of my email accounts, screen names for various chat programs, forum sites, etc. If you search for diastelo on Google, most of the 30 pages of hits come back to me. The rest are Google’s helpful attempts to rearrange my spelling or spacing to try to match more hits. The exception is the twitter account.

So, in conclusion, if you try to follow me on Twitter, and you can’t figure out why I’ve apparently gained the ability to speak Spanish (or is it Portuguese?), never fear. That diastelo ain’t me.

It’s been five days since I left my house (and counting!)

From Blizard of 2010

Bastards smashed the passenger side window and stole my GPS. I couldn’t care less about replacing the GPS, but I’m pissed as hell about the broken window. It was parked right outside my house, too!

And I just got the photos last week. Here’s my favorite! (Yes, I’m biased!)

Some of you may have heard of mint.com. It’s brilliant! It tracks your finances, both through your bank and credit cards, and even keeps tabs on things like retirement plans (like 401k plans) and just about anything else financial that you can access through the Internet. (Depressingly, it also keeps track of the value of your house. My net value goes down every week.)

It’s also a little…uhmm…distressing. I always tried really hard to budget my spending on books and other such things, but, since December of 2007, I’ve apparently managed to spend $685 on books, $1200 on yarn, fabric, patterns, and craft projects, $313 on web hosting, $1100 on eating out, and a whopping $2,147 on gas ($5,791 total on my car, including service, repairs, and insurance). Sadly, since my bank isn’t supported, NONE of this includes things I bought with my debit card. Which I used to use all the time and still do for grocery shopping.

I was happier not knowing, but at least I know where my problem areas. I mean, seriously, I spent $2400 in two years on hobbies? Yikes! At least I’m single!

Or rather, 12:34:56 7/8/9. The first one came in the wee hours of the morning.

In other news, I’m on kitten watch. A friend of my mother’s has a cat that recently gave birth to kittens. Once they’re old enough to go out into the world, I have a reservation on a little boy, white with gray patches. I’m very excited about this. I told my cat all about it, but she just blinked at me. I fully expect her to fly into a jealous spat as soon as she’s introduced to her new “brother.”

Otakon countdown commencing…