Bailey Anne Bravely

We had a frozen pipe in the apartment last week. I was the hero who saved the house. I came home from work Wednesday night to find the temperature in the apartment was 57F. We'd left it at 62 for the day, as we always do when we're not at home. House rules from the landlord state that we can't set it below 60, so we're always within the rules. We've lost heat once before, but it turned out all that was needed that time was to reset the gas: flip the switch off and on and voila. So, I tried that. Hard reset the gas, hard reset the thermostat and cranked it up. Then I waited to see if it was going to heat up any. 45 minutes and nothing. Still cold. Called the property manager, who called the plumber who set up the system in the first place, but nobody picked up. So the property manager left messages with the plumber, then called me back to give me the plumber's numbers in case I didn't get a return call, and he instructed me to call his cell as well if I...

Movie Poster from Wikipedia Internet ads! Usually people actively ignore them. Usually I have my ad-skeptic-filter at such a high setting that even ads for things I already know about have no click-inducing power. My brother and I used to play a game with TV ads: who can guess what it is about first? And then we'd go into a session of making fun of the ad and talking about why it was so pointless and awful. This honed my resist-the-actual-intent-of-the-ad skills. However, I must confess I was caught by an internet ad recently. The text: DISCOVER THE NEXT MIYAZAKI. If you know me well, you will know that this caught my attention. Miyazaki is a Japanese genius, well known for directing amazing animated movies. I grew up renting My Neighbor Totoro enough times to have bought it several times over before we finally found somewhere to buy it. Then followed the magical years when we found out he made other films, and every year at Christmas there would be another Miyazaki film ...