The simple answer seems to be borax and white vinegar. One of our cats has been having bladder problems lately and relieved herself on Amelia's play mat and my shorts. In an act of desperation I tried soaking it in a mixture of Borax (20 mule team!) and white vinegar for a day (with water of course), then I put in the washing machine on the highest temperature setting.
Previously we had tried it on just the highest setting with only Borax...I think the soaking and white vinegar is the key here. At the least it doesn't seem to hurt.

So cat urine? Soak in a quarter cup of Borax and a quarter cup of White Vinegar overnight in a tub of water...then wash in hot/hot. You might just save some clothes...

Posted by Dennis Judd at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our mouse died yesterday. :(

No idea what happened, he would have been four years old this October. I guess that's pretty good for a deer mouse I found out on the sidewalk, but it still kinda sucks.

Hopefully if there is a mouse heaven, it's not right next to cat heaven. Although I like to think he lived like a king for four years, and even got his picture in a book. Not to shabby really...

Posted by Dennis Judd at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have now for at least 3 weeks....it's so annoying because there's nothing online or anything, but her recent wardrobe choices (or at least the person who is paid to dress her) all seem to be trying to hide the middle.

Of course only time will tell....isn't my life interesting? To clarify we leave Rachel Ray's 30 minute meals on for Connor to watch while Jen is making lunch. Don't believe me? It's true I swear!

Posted by Dennis Judd at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a cute picture I took this morning of Amelia. Yesterday was the start of my fall class (Algebra 112) so I'm not sure how often I'll be updating, but as Jen pointed out yesterday at least this class won't be as accelerated as all the past telecourse ones.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

if you own 5 cats and haven't put the stuff back in the cage for your mouse to hide in!

That was one hell of a close call, it's precariously balanced on the edge

yipes...

Posted by Dennis Judd at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My fall class starts monday the 18th, and I still haven't gotten an answer back to the two telephone calls (after they sent me an email telling me to call and check for availability) and the email I sent about books. It seems that because this is an online telecourse through my local college, there isn't a book but rather there's a CD you need to pickup. Of course the problem is every time I call to make sure I can come pickup the CD I'm told that the professor hasn't released them to give it out to people.

So here I sit, assuming that I can go pick it up Monday since that's when the course starts. I just love how they don't give any consideration to people who might need to arrange their schedule or take time off of work to come get the stuff. I mean I'm not taking an online course for the heck of it, maybe it's because I have a full time job, two kids, and the commute to get there one way is 45 freakin' minutes.

I just wish they'd give me a concrete answer, if they had just told them that I wouldn't be able to pick up the CD until the course started then I'd be ok with it. Instead I get promises to call me back, and my emails to the teacher haven't been returned even. The best part is I can't even make a big stink about it because I don't want to piss the guy off and get a crappy grade, even though I think everything I've said is legitimate.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had real high hopes for Naruto Rise of a Ninja on the xbox 360. The graphics loooked really good, and the reviews almost all said it was the best naruto game to date.

But after almost throwing my controller into the wall yesterday I just had to take it back. The graphics are great, and being able to freely roam the village from the get go was amazing, but that's where the good stuff ends. While the game has RPG elements, the battle system is pure 100% fighter....and if you are no good at fighting games (aka me) then your just going to get angry. I couldn't block right, couldn't get a jutsu off half the time, and when I did the button mini game usually meant I missed entirely.

Aside from my old hands not being quick enough, there were a few other issues. The enemy models were so limited, you ended up fighting the same guy 50x's. The tree top scenes were frustrating, and went so fast at the end I couldn't visually keep up. And let's not forget the voice acting....oh dear god.....did they even try to get the original actors? And if not then fine I under stand....but for the love of christ at least get somebody who can say the lead characters name right! And it's "sakura" not "sack-cure-a"......

This game had so much potential....it's such a shame really. At least on the other hand Bionic Command: ReArmed came out. The demo has me totally excited to buy this game, here's some gameplay:

Posted by Dennis Judd at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

found another field mouse today, but in our basement. Unlike ralphie I don't think I got to this one in time....so basically I'm just waiting around for it to die and I'm really kinda bummed about it.

for the record I was going to let this one go since it's older (ralphie was just a baby)...I am not trying to build up some kind of mouse army to take over the world with.

update: Looks like there was nothing we could do for the little guy. I know it was just a mouse but it sucks...

Posted by Dennis Judd at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

do want do want do want!!!!!

God I'm such a keyboard whore....but I want this stupid thing so badly. I'd probably never use it more than once, but dear god I must own it.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With my hard drive pushing 94% utilization on my main machine I decided that I needed to finally pull the trigger on upgrading it from 120gb to something a little larger. I picked up a pretty good deal on an OEM Western Digitial 500gb from newegg for $80 bucks. Now OEM means that it doesn't come with directions, cables, or any software...no problem I thought I already have cables, I don't need directions and generally you can download software for free from the website and burn it.

Now if I was just adding storage to my computer then I wouldn't even be typing this, I'd of just thrown the drive in my computer and moved on. However, I wanted to clone my hard drive from it's current 120gb prison into the 500gb promised land, which basically makes an exact copy of Windows XP (yay, no reinstallation of 100's of programs) on the bigger drive. Pretty simple, I mean I've been doing it since the 90's when working with 1gb SCSI drives was cutting edge for me (I also had win95 on a single zip disk back then too).

This is where it gets bad....short story is that I wasted two days trying to get the western digital lifeguard tools 11.2 to clone my drive properly and it wouldn't. I tried dos mode, I tried defragging and scandisking first, I tried everything I could think of and the best outcome from it all was I could boot to the desktop but my outlook couldn't be found, avast thought it was unregistered and so did smart sync pro. Nothing I did would work....so I downloaded a free trial version of Acronis Easy Migrate and it worked right off the bat and in half the time.

Maybe the fact that this computer is a Dell and had an extra partition in it had an impact, but you'd think a big company like Western Digital would know that and put that caveat in their software somewhere.

Posted by Dennis Judd at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)