Musical Cars, Musical Moms, and Sad Kitty

My car is back in the shop again for the same phantom over-heating-but-not-really-overheating-but-instead-over-revving issue. My dad's mustang is in the shop to get inspected. My sister's car that my dad owns but my mom is paying for and that my grandmother has been driving is now in my possession so that I can still get around town while my car is in the shop. My dad is driving my mom's car and my mom is driving my dad's truck in order to take back some picnic tables in the back of it, and all of this is driving me nuts.

My sister showed back up at my parents' house last night after being AWOL for 1-2 months. So the boys have their mom back home if at least for a short while. We really wish she would just turn herself in and get her prison time served and over and done with.

I think I may have lost my favorite black sweater yesterday. Possibilities are: It fell off my waist inside one of the gifts shops while I was too busy looking at pretty, shiny things. It fell off while walking to the car. I left it in the car, but I don't completely recall having it when I loaded into the car. I left it at Sol's Taco Lounge after dinner. It fell off while walking to my car after being dropped off from dinner. I've called all of the usual lost-n-found suspects, but the sweater has not yet been located. This makes me a sad kitty. Obviously I'll survive, but it really does suck to loose something that you absolutely love and wear almost every day.

Tut Update

Pixel Pieces of Doom!

Tut Update

OCD? Me? What on earth ever ( gave you that idea? )

Tut Update

Tut Defined - in case you missed it

material: Ministeck
(One site noted that this toy was quite popular in the 1970-1980's, and another person's comment on Flickr was "IT CAME BACK!")

Each ~5" color "stick" (see pics here) holds 42 pieces of this 10,400-piece pixelated puzzle (128x160 pixels). This particular puzzle comes with 258 total sticks in 23 different colors. The pieces have to be separated from the plastic bars that they came on. The pieces are square, rectangular, or l-shaped and represent anywhere from 1 to 4 pixels of space. Each pixel of the puzzle is just under .5 square cm in size (read: exceptionally tiny). They get placed on plastic peg boards (for lack of a better description) until the whole image is filled in.

This is a cross between a jigsaw and a lite-brite/Lego/blocks/Tetris fill-in-the-space game. In fact, many people use the very thin Legos to create similar pixelated images, but the first one I ever came across was this Ministeck puzzle, so that's what I'm sticking with.

Here's a great step-by-step Ministeck of the Gauss bill being created.

EDIT: There is great temptation to use the PicToBrick program to find the correct Ministeck dimensions for creating a Zero Wing mosaic. After all, it's pre-pixelated.