my back is KILLING ME right now. trying to stand up straight is a painful process. what’s worse is that it is a slow process because it hurts so much to stand up. this only prolongs to pain. ugh. i don’t know why it is hurting so bad, either. i don’t think that i did anything that would have hurt it except sleep funny.

yesterday we had a puppy play date. four dogs in all were at the house. they were running around outside and playing in the house. by the time all of the dogs had left the house i was exhausted and fell asleep.

ebay does have all sorts of good deals on things that you cannot get cheaper elsewhere, but i’ve always been a little nervous about buying things on ebay. i use it as a last resort. i guess i have a general mistrust of people on the internet, you never know what you’re going to get! still, i try to buy from reputable sellers and so far every ebay transaction i have ever had has gone by quite well.

so i ordered two replacement dell power supplies for the ones that koda (bad dog!) chewed up. they still haven’t arrived, but they are coming from hong kong i think so i figure it will take a week or so to come. it’s been around a week, though, so hopefully they will come any day now.

i’ve been trying to purchase the transformers blu-ray disc on ebay as well. my firm rule is that i will not buy any blu-ray discs over $15. so far i’ve lost every auction i’ve tried to win because people are willing to pay more than $15 for the movie. i think i’ve lost 8 auctions so far. =P

went to a wedding over the weekend where margaret and ritchie tied the knot. it was the first filipino catholic wedding i’ve been to and it was long. =P lots of prayers, standing, kneeling, sitting, and the like. there were primary sponsors, secondary sponsors, a unity candle lighting, blessing of cords, blessing of veils, blessing of coins, and all around lots of blessings and well wishes.

this will be the last wedding of the year for us. goodbye, wedding season.

on sunday, i cleaned the carpet in our living room. the carpet cleaner actually worked quite well for the most part. most of the traffic stains were cleaned up well with the carpet cleaner. there were some other pesky spots that weren’t cleaned up after the carpet treatment. i’m not sure if it is because i didn’t use enough of the carpet cleaning solution or let it soak long enough or what, but there are still a couple of pesky spots that i’ll have to deal with later.

what is the best way to clean a carpet anyway?

ever since i’ve upgraded my ps3 to the 2.50 firmware, video playback via the DNS-323 DLNA server will have occasional pauses. the ps3 will report that a network error has occurred but will eventually recover. i really hope that this will be addressed soon, but i’m really disappointed that such an issue could come up if it is really a firmware issue…

i was just surfing on the web and i think that i’ve found the new gadget that is missing from my arsenal of gadgets. i don’t really have a PMP. the one that i have my eye on is the archos 5. it looks like a pretty impressive little package with wide support of media types.

the only thing that is preventing me from pulling the trigger immediately is that it is my secret hope that the iphone 3g will prevent me from needing to get a separate PMP. my big concern is that the video support for the iphone 3g is limited. i haven’t done the research yet, but i’m going to guess that only quicktime is really supported. whatever the case may be, i will bet money that a downloaded tv show from bittorrent will not play on an iphone. that could make it a bit of a pain to use…

not my homework, my power cord. last night after we got back from volleyball, we found that the dog had finally learned how to escape his pen. this, in itself, was not horrific. it was only mildly alarming. what started the horrification of my night, yes, that’s right HORRIFICATION was that there was a large puddle of pee on our kitchen floor. still, he’s a puppy and puppies do what they are wont to do. so i would assume that motivated by his need to pee, he scrambled out of his pen and relieved himself.

i’m not sure if i should thank him for not peeing on the carpet, but thank goodness he did not pee on the couch or laptops nearby.

what was truly horrifying was that he chewed up my laptop’s power cord. completely chewed it up into pieces. it’s a wonder that he didn’t electrocute himself while doing so. this is the second laptop power supply he has ruined. ugh. stupid puppy. it’s a good thing that he didn’t get to the chocolate chip cookies that were on the coffee table. all of those chocolate chips would not have been good for him.

i ordered replacement power adapters so hopefully they will arrive soon.

we arrived in rome via munich via philadelphia via SFO. let me tell you, that’s a lot of travel before you finally reach your destination. our first task was to get from the airport to our hotel. i wasn’t quite sure on the details of that, but the hotel offered a shuttle service from the airport to hotel for a whopping $75 per person. i figured we could find other options.

from the airport, we took a train that would take us to the main train station in rome. we had a lot harder of a time buying tickets to this train than i thought because we couldn’t find the ticket counter. it turns out that the rome train terminal is much, much larger than i had thought and where i thought it ended was actually where the rest of the terminal was. once we got situated, we took a bus from the termini to somewhere near our hotel.

it took a little bit to figure out that newspaper stands sold tickets to the buses, but once that was figured out we were on our way. i had looked at the bus routes before we left home so i knew which bus to take and i knew our hotel was near the pantheon, so we took a bus that dropped us off near the pantheon…sort of.

from there we stumbled around looking for our hotel. the actual hotel was not far from the bus stop, but we had a hard time finding street signs. we realized that the street signs were actually on buildings along the street and eventually found our way to the first hotel. we rested a bit and headed off to do some sightseeing.

we checked out the victor emmanuel monument on the way to see the colosseum. we had our first meal at a little cafe near the colosseum.

i had the world’s FLATEST lasagna (or so i thought) for my first meal. i didn’t think that there really were any layers, but it turns out that there were 5. 5 very flat layers. it turns out that the two times that i had lasagna in italy, they were both about this flat. i wonder if this is true throughout italy or if i just happened to get two flat ones.

we strolled around gawking at the old and new structures next to each other. rome is full of scooters and cars and crossing the street was actually a little scary at first. just make eye contact, walk at a regular pace, and you’ll be fine. that’s what the tour book said. we tried, but that’s still a lot of faith that you’re putting in the driver’s hands. we got in pretty late in the day so after a little walking around, we headed back to the hotel for the night.

i’ll see if i can actually remember what we did each day, but here’s the rest of my rome pictures.

i went to eric and ivy’s place last night to check out their newly remodeled home. it’s been a couple of years since i’ve been to their place and though it feels like it’s been about that long for their remodel, the house is completely unrecognizable! it’s amazing how much it has changed and the amount of thought that has been put into the house is cool. it sure took a long time, but it sure is pretty amazing.

seeing their “new” house certainly does give me ideas about wanting to remodel our house…but i don’t know if we can really do that much…it does seem like a lot of work…

ask me a year ago if i had thought that the bank rates of around 6% interest on a 30 year fixed mortgage loan was high and i’d say that it seems like it was high compared to what my friends were getting. ask me if i thought that the rates would go down and i would have said that it probably would.

i hopped on to wells fargo’s site to check out what 30 year mortgage rates would be, in case it might be a good time to refinance…heh, HARDLY. i was shocked to see that wells fargo has an advertised 9.75% rate!! they are certainly more conservative than other banks, but man…who would be insane enough to borrow at that rate? i can’t even imagine what the interest is going to be like.

man, tough times for anyone who is looking to buy or refinance now.

in italy, restrooms are called WCs…short for water closets. what’s cool about these are that when you flush, there are usually two buttons that you can choose from: a bigger one or a smaller one. the smaller one flushes a smaller amount of water so that you can conserve better.

my parents just remodeled their bathrooms and they got toilets that operate in a similar fashion. i think that’s pretty cool. i wonder why it took so long for that to move over to the US market…