Coming back long enough to complain: I got up this morning to find out our house has a termite outbreak. That's going to be some expensive fun there. This goes with the forty-foot piece of gutter that is hanging off the upper story and waving in the wind, which I still have to have fixed, before it flies off in a storm and ends up in the neighbors' living room.

stabbity, stabbity, stabbity

therienne has important links about the recall of dry pet food here and the recall in general here.

ETA: and amireal is collecting info here.

Yesterday we went to the Antique Rose Emporium, looking for trees to replace the two that died in the heat last summer. Our criteria was simple: cheap, and small enough to be crammed in the back of a prius, but we didn't find anything. That was pre-termite, of course, when life was simpler.

A while back I found Murder Rooms: the Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes is on DVD, released last year. I mentioned it and the books by Davie Pirie here.

Luckily I ordered Murder Rooms last month before I found out about the termites. We watched "The Patient's Eyes" last night, which is as good a starting point for the series as the first dvd, Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle.

Quotes:

"Life may be stranger than fiction. It is also more terrifying."
Doyle's opening voice over

"Now you just listen to me, laddy, these are serious matters and they involve people, not toys."
Dr. Bell

Lulu.com is forcing all books with retail distribution agreements to raise their prices, claiming that people were "confused" by the fact that the Lulu Marketplace price was lower than the retail prices that Amazon and Barnes and Noble charge. Yeah, right, people always become horribly confused when different retail outlets have different discounts on products. If this is their real and only reason for doing this, it's bizarre. I've emailed a complaint, which I'm pretty sure they'll ignore. All this is going to result in is lower sales for the books.