Posted on December 10, 2005 by Ching under Babies, Toys.
This is our new 6-foot multi-level cat condo. I won it from eBay a few weeks ago. I’ve been eBaying like mad lately. I’ve purchased more things from eBay this year (remember, that’s how I purchased my phone) than I have my entire life. I think it’s all because of the sugargliders. That’s what got it all started.
But I digress.. We decided to get the cat condo for the cats because we’d been buying various things for the suggies and we didn’t want the cats to be totally left out. So they get one big present this year. The cat condo.
These things are actually pretty expensive. For a hundred dollars, you can usually only get a small one at the pet stores. How fun is a small one? Not much fun especially with three cats who will be fighting to use it. So I looked to eBay to see if I could find any good deals on cat condos.
I found the going rate on the auctions to be about $100 to $160 with shipping. That’s over a hundred dollars in savings compared to the pet store prices. So I started bidding.
I lost several of these because I missed the auction close or the price just went above my budget. I was getting really frustrated and thought I’d never be able to win one.
I decided to visit the vendor’s web site to just try to order it from there but the price of the model I wanted was $159. I had seen some of these go on the auctions for as little as $100 so I wanted to try to get a better deal. Thus, I continued to try to win auctions.
The last auction I bid on had an ending time of around 9:40 on a Monday night. I couldn’t focus in class because toward the end I was just watching my auction. With about a couple of minutes left to go, I placed my final bid. Just as the class was being dismissed, I received the auction ended message and I won. Everyone in the class thought I was strange because I was jumping up and down with glee. My cat condo only cost $115. If you got that good of a deal, you’d be jumping up and down too!
Anyway, the cat condo arrived about a week later and Brian assembled it as soon as it was delivered. He said the cats started climbing all over it as he was putting all the parts together. They were playing with their condo even before it was completely assembled. He said he had to keep pushing them away so that he could assemble it and he felt bad for doing so because he didn’t want them to think that it was off limits. He just didn’t want to keep getting interrupted during the assembly process.
Brian said that putting the pieces together was pretty simple and the cat condo was fully assembled in minutes. The cats were all over it, jumping between the tiers. They were playing with the dangly toys and even broke a couple of them off even before I got home. Okay so the quality might not be that great on the dangly toys, but the rest of the condo itself is pretty sturdy. Brian and I figured that we may need to re-upholster the tiers in a few years when the fuzzy covering wears out but we figured that wouldn’t be too big of a deal because the parts are easy to assemble and disassemble. We figured we’d just go to a carpet remnant sale.
Anyhow, I’m happy to report that the cats love their new condo. The only disappointing thing is that after almost two weeks, they’ve yet to try the hammock. I purposely chose this model because I thought they would totally dig the hammock and fight over it. Our cats have yet to figure out how great it is. They have not gotten past the shakiness off, I guess. I think once they figure out how awesome it is, they’ll be spending most of their time sleeping in it. I don’t know how to get them in there, though.
The other day I tried to pick Oscar up and put him in but he wiggled away from me as soon as one paw touched the shaky hammock. I’m tempted to put catnip in it just to get them to try it. The crazy thing is I could’ve gotten a cheaper hammock-less cat condo. Had I known that they would not like the hammock, I would’ve been able to save some more money!
Anyway, I think we’ll give it a few more weeks before we intervene. Hopefully our cats are smart enough to figure this out.
Posted on December 8, 2005 by Ching under Babies, Toys.
Remember that Visa giftcard that Brian gave me over a month ago? Well, I totally forgot I had it. Then Brian remembered it the other day.
He’s like, “Whatever happened to that giftcard?” I go, “I still have it. It’s here somewhere.”
It was next to my computer monitor under some bills. I had totally spaced it out.
Anyway, I’d been thinking of what to use it for and I just couldn’t come up with anything. So today, I told Brian that we could use it to buy a tent for our suggies.
While at the store, we ended up getting a sleeping bag (for the floor of our tent), a couple of soft fleece pillow and a couple of fleece throws to furnish our tent. We ended up spending about $60 (we only got a small, two-person tent) so we had to pay some money from our checking account. Most of it was covered by the giftcard, though.
Of course, I had to point out that whenever I get a giftcard it usually goes toward something we both will enjoy but when Brian gets a giftcard it usually just ends up getting spent on video games. Naturally, he just pouted and said “It’s my giftcard dammit! I get to spend it on whatever I want!”
It’s a shame I can never think of what I want when I have money and I always seem to want everything when I’m broke. Why is that?
Posted on December 1, 2005 by Ching under School.
Our fruit store project is officially done! As done as it is going to be anyway. It meets all of the basic requirements I think so that should be enough to get full credit. I’m putting the finishing touches on it as we speak (as I blog?). I actually thought that this part would take me all weekend to complete. It actually only took about three hours (dinner included). Four hours if you count the shag break I took with Brian. I am a coding machine! Kidding aside, it’s mostly knowing what code to recycle. So call me a copy-and-paste master. LOL! I don’t care. I’m just happy I’m doing well in the class. This is probably the only class that I will get a decent grade in this semester. Although, I probably shouldn’t be counting my chicks yet. Final exams are still to come. Â =P
Posted on November 29, 2005 by Ching under School.
There’s nothing like the feeling of accomplishment you have after completing what seems like an insurmountable task. I just finished Homework 6: Simple Tax Calculation Using Session Variables and Session Array for MIS 610. I’m so glad that is out of the way. That is the final homework we have for that class by the way. I would say I’m free except I’m not quite off the hook yet. We still have to finish our fruit store project. That and the final exam. One of the guys in class got my hopes up last night when he put the idea in my head that the final exam would be optional. No such luck. I like to do things one at a time so I hadn’t even started thinking about part three of the project because of the homework that was due. Now that my final homework is done I can at least start thinking about it. Naturally, I can’t even start thinking about the final until after the final part of our project is done. It’s just never ending! School is so depressing. I can’t wait until the end of the semester when I can at least have some chill time.
Posted on November 27, 2005 by Brian under Life.
Well Friday morning I did the unthinkable. After almost a week of saying NO to my wife’s bantering about going shopping after Thanksgiving I was sucked into getting up early. She said that she wants to experience the whole after holiday shopping experience. I said fine, we’ll get up so she can see the horror that is known as “BLACK FRIDAY”. So first we go to Wal-Mart, here we would be faced with the insane “I’m going to push the limit of shopping” folks. These are the people that go into the store with the sale adds and have everything they are wanting already circled and the line that says “Limit of X amount” highlighted and fill their baskets with more than this limit with hopes that the check out people will be in too big of a hurry to remember that their was a limit. I walked past the line that was waiting to get into the electronics section. I was looking for something specific and didn’t feel like waiting. While wondering thru this mess of people I witnessed two separate arguments with two separate security guards both threatening to kick out the people they were arguing with because they were trying to buy more than the limit set in the add. Everyone knows that they are not Christmas shopping. They are buying this shit to sell on eBay to all the desperate fucks that don’t do the whole store shopping experience and will pay 2 to 3 times the amount for it. We went to target after this, and believe me this was not nearly as bad. Except the sales were not all that much better. All in all it wasn’t that bad of an experience (that I would rather not repeat). We got our whole family bought in one day and even picked up a few things for ourselves and came in $100.00 under budget. I can’t complain really except that we got up at 6am on a holiday, had to wade threw messy dirty people and try to maintain my patience and dignity.
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