No Time For Losers

A few things of note. You should take this survey. The world will be better off for it. Also, we're finally back from our trip to Montana. Holy crap, what a drive. Going up wasn't too bad. It was the drive back that routed through Boise to pick up my sister and her son. Missoula to Boise looked to be about six or seven hours but it took us about ten and a half, maybe eleven. Sitting in a van all day really takes it out of you, but I can't figure out why. As for the show, we stopped at Great Falls the first two nights and moved to Missoula for the next four days, or so. The shows there were very good. Toby won Winners Dog and Best of Winners two days. I know you don't know what that means, so here's the short break down. To finish a dog as a Champion of Record, you need 15 points. The only way you can get points is if you are Winners Dog or Winners Bitch. The number of points you get is based on the number of dogs you win over. A win of 3 or more points is called a major win and to finish as a champ you need two majors under different judges. The most you can get in a single win is 5. This might help explain it better. Unfortunately, we've only been to one show with a 3 point major so it's been hard to finish Toby without going to areas with more beagles. We didn't want to go to California or past Colorado. So we went North and found a five day stretch of shows that had 5 point majors every day. We won the second and third day, and we already had 5 points from previous shows so he ended up with 15 pionts and we finished. Toby is now a Champion of Record. We've decided not to keep showing him. After this it gets pricey and political. You really need more money and time than I've ever had in my whole life. So Toby is now retired. He seems to think that means eating steak every night and sleeping twenty hours a day. I think he sleeps that much already. Lazy little hound. We love him and we're very excited and proud of him. 5 point majors are rare and hard to win. That he did so back to back was amazing. Now that we're back I took a little trip down to the King's English Bookstore in Sugarhouse to listen to Todd Nuke'em read from his book RATED F. I have yet to read it so I picked up a copy and had him sign it. I'll give a full review as soon as I'm finished. It looks to be a quick read so it should be soon. I have to take a second to plug the King's English. I love book stores and I love local shops. This is the best of both and it has a lot to offer. They are not too big, nor too small. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable and if they don't have something it's likely they can get it fast. If you simply must partake of some kind of chain store while shopping local, there is a Starbuck's Coffee two doors down. You can have your vanilla latte and your local authors all at once. A few more things. I've been listening to classical music again while I work on homework. I'm quite taken with a string quartet called Bond. They put a modern touch to classical favorites. At times it's a bit too much. Classical with a touch of a modern/electronic sound is good. Electronica with a sample of classical is also good. But an equal mix is not. Most of the tracks are very good and it's only the occasional one that I skip past. On the whole I'm quite taken with them. To bad that all four of them are hideous to look at. Finally, I've been messing with a few new programs. The first is called LogonStudio. It's another Stardock app, so it's pretty good. Basically it changes your Windows XP logon screen to something not lame. I'm liking the free themes I'm finding but I'm looking at creating a few of my own. The other app is OpenOffice. I finally DL'd and installed it. So far I'm actually impressed. It's not the same as MS Office, but it's free. For free the amount of functionality is amazing. I'm hearing good things about the future 2.0 version. I'll be excited to see that develop. Well, that's it. I'm going to be working on some English homework and reading RATED F tonight and tomorrow, but things are no longer insane so I should be posting on schedule. I'm also sifting through pictures to post. Toby status: Champion! My friends are all so cynical, refuse to keep the faith