You may or may not have heard that Adobe Software is buying Macromedia (in fact, if you're lucky, that sentence is completely meaningless to you). Here's a translation of the press release into plain English.

It came up on chat again, so I must share, and you should share with your friends: celery + gravity = art.

I just called a couple of friends of mine who have a kid, and for some reason I was really confused to get a babysitter answering the phone, presumably some random girl from the neighborhood. It brought to mind a discussion I was having last weekend, about when we should give up and stop referring to ourselves as "young". It's not a question of feeling young, or deciding that suddenly we're old and our lives are over, or anything silly like that; just that when we turn 35 and there are all these fully-functional teenagers running around, saying we're young will get to be kind of silly. So far it seems to just happen organically, particularly around age 30. At 28, I'm probably pushing it there. A friend at the dojo suggests the cutoff point be when I consistently wake up sore from doing aikido the previous day.

We're going to look at a couple of properties tomorrow. The agent called yesterday to say that the really nice one already has three bids on it, and they'll probably accept bids through Monday. Which is great, except we've been wanting to see if anything worth buying came up, so we're not pre-approved for a loan and hadn't necessarily gotten to that stage of readiness. Today he calls again, to say that because the structure on the other property is a double-wide trailer in bad shape (the list said it was a double-wide, but it looked okay, and what the hell, we can work with stuff), a lender would most likely make it a land loan, which gets higher interest rates and probably requires a 50% down payment (right, like that's gonna happen). Oh, right, and the listing said to not drive down the nearby private road, because "the neighbors might react unpleasantly"; well, silly me, apparently that's code for "the neighbors are kind of nutso". When the real estate agent doesn't discount the possibility that they might be the kind of neighbors who might shoot at you if you wander onto their property, maybe that's a signal. I'd hate to cancel on him on such short notice, but the more I'm thinking about it right now, the more I question whether it's worth the 90-minute drive. Certainly doesn't feel like it right now.

I'm tired. I think maybe I just don't have any energy for the House Project right now, certainly when it's such a pain to go look at stuff and there's nothing good on the market. Maybe it's time to veer off into my long-awaited sideline as a war profiteer. I hear it's patriotic these days to make a shit-ton of money off the blood and suffering of third-world countries we've invaded.

Huh. I'm crabby this evening. Frustration hangover from Wednesday night, maybe.