(as suggested by your friends at IRS and Toyota)

Since everyone's talking about the hybrids and taxes [inlink]jason,74[/inlink] [inlink]dan,65[/inlink] [inlink]uncutsaniflush,2[/inlink] I thought I'd agree and add a handy link to the instructions on how to claim the credit and which cars are eligible.
(provided by your friendly IRS)



$2,000 bucks. That's a big deal. But buy this year since it decreases to $500 next year and who-the-hell-lknows after that. Though I suppose with Georgie at the helm we just might get $5000 if we wait till next year but buy a hybrid-SUV instead. Got my hybrid Escalade with a whopping 25 mpg in the city, instead of the normal 11 baby!! (Anyone remember the "loop" which let owners of the giantest of SUVs get a break for having cars big enough to be eligible for a credit originally intended for farm equipment?) Tax Code length is getting out of hand with all these spendthrift Republicans throwing credits around like candy.

we got to go skiing today. We vanned on over to Allegany State Park (take 90 to 219 S until Salamanca and follow the signs) for some much needed exercise of the cross country variety. (e:matthew) and I were still debating whether we were going or not when Mr. Dave Doyle himslef appeared with his magic van and said, "get on in, we're a'goin skiing." So ski did we. It was only (e:matthew)'s 2nd attempt and I felt bad getting pretty darn lost at every other bend. You'd think that at a place with so many trails and people (must have been 20-30 cars in the lot) it would be difficult to lose your way, but somehow we ended backtracking twice. Ended up being a good mix of evertything that makes skiing fun, a little exciting downhill, a couple extended up-hills for warmth, a fast jaunt down a paved road, and the perfect idyllic trail wandering around and above beaver dams. The weather was perfect, no wind and blue skies, I didn't even wear a coat. To me X-country is such a good sport because it worls you out all over real good, and, if you can stop staring at your feet for a moment, when you look up and pause you see the beautiful side of winter shimmering and bedazzling. I love when just a little slice of pool or stream manages to break free of encrusting ice; the contrast between white-white snow and darkly moving water is so perfect and somehow serene.

(e:Matthew) should have some pictures before too long, so check his journal.

I took some pictures of the fish tank. They turned out okay considering how small everything is and how poor my photography skill is.

Here are a couple of shots that I stuck all together in a vague approximation of where they are in the tank. Upper-left and right are some mushroom-anemone things with some feather-duster worms. The middle-top shows the "pinkies" as we call them, they're a type of Gorgonia that slowly creeps along and encrusts the rocks with buds that become new polyps. Bottom left is the brain coral which had it's tentacles out, though you can't really tell in the pic. Middle-bottom is a bubble coral that is slowly regaining it's health after nearly dying. Lastly is a blurry pic of the coral-banded shrimp, he's the big boss of the tank, and menaces everything else with his giant claws.



This is a coral thing too. Some kind of tree coral or something. We forgot to look at the name when we bought it and it kinda looks like a couple different varieties. It shrivels to a little-bitty thing every night and slowly becomes erect as the light increases.

least that's what I think when I read the newest essays about what the universe is. Strings twirling about spawning multidimensional particles which appear as waves. Or is that the other way around? I'm pretty in to how reality can be interpreted through physics. I can understand up to a certain point and then my mind just starts travelling among all these possibilities of what reality is. I try to put strings through what I know. I wind tauruses (tauri?) through reality. I think of cubes within cubes, 10-dimensional cubes?

Just yesterday I was watching Dragonball Z (auf Deutsch) where this guy from the future comes and messes with the present and then comes back later to find that the present (his past) is very different from his experience. Yeah, deep. It made me think of this idea of time as a wheel which keeps spinning, and if you were to backtrack you couldn't do it by reversing, but rather by jumping to the next nearest wheel of possibilities. Thus you could go back in time, but it would never be your time. You could change all you wanted there, but everytime you went back to your own time it would be the same.

I haven't read anything "physical" for awhile so I'll imitate our resident ozone-making genius (e:ajay) and read The Fermi Solution. [inlink]ajay,251[/inlink] I just put in a request to our beleaguered library system and should have it soon. Bis dann leute!

when I wrote that little rant below. Huh.

Welcome to new user Spinyuwhatsit.... er, Spinalyakist... um, okay sorry (e:Spinuyashagc) I'm only making a little fun cuz you asked us not to. And I have a couple straight girls I could let you hang out with if you promise not to hit on them. [inlink]spinuyashagc,1[/inlink] Just plain hitting them is fine though. (e:lilho) for example, or (e:tina). They like it nice and rough. K, nuff trouble for the morning.

I stopped eating the beef over a year ago after the whole BSE scare. A couple years before in Germany I stopped eating beef because of their Mad-Cow scare. Now, apparently I will have to stop eating goat too. Admitedly I don't eat a whole lot of goat, normally just when I have Carribean/East Indies food at Palm Tree (MAP TO: 69%20ALLEN%20ST) or Steel Drums (MAP TO: 1410%20MAIN%20ST) but it's so tasty when I do eat it.

Perhaps I should just cut all "hooved" animals off the food list. Stick to just birds for the meat. And maybe a little bacon here and there. And sea creatures, no problem there. Should just go veggie, but it would never work with my emaciated roomates: they'd just shrivel up and die.

Goodbye, dear goat.