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One day I will write a book about home servicemen repair. Or at least create a website for them.

Our fridge has been on the fritz for probably two months. We didn’t notice for a month because we didn’t have any food in it. We finally did start to wonder if something was wrong when our ice cream wouldn’t freeze. We tried cleaning out the coils, which did help a bit. But the fridge never really got as cold as it should. So what did I do? I called Sears.

30 seconds and 65 bucks later the guy tells me I need a new fridge. “Compressor’s shot,” is what he really said. He said this after taking 3 steps into my house. He did open up a back panel to give it a glance, but I think he did that to rationalize the tab he was about to stick me with.

The biggest pain about replacing our fridge will be finding one the exact size we need. When we moved in the fridge wasn’t under the cabinets like in most homes. It was off to the side of our kitchen counter, in an inconvienent place. We wanted to put it underneath our cabinet but it required us to shave part of our cabinets away. So now we have a very tight spot for a 66-inch by 29-inch refrigerator to fit. Anything larger just ain’t gonna work.

Well, the new DSL speed increase happened this morning sometime between my shower and getting to work. I can’t really tell much of a difference from work though. My line should handle 1.5mbit down /1mbit up but I’m getting somewhere around 970kbit down / 400kbit up. Still a two-fold increase from my line before. I’m just at a loss as to what to download first.

UPDATE: Last night I was able to max out both my download and upload pipe. All is well in the Motylinski compound.

In the following entry I shall replace the phrase dog poop with the word flowers.

I woke and went down into L1R1 Sunday morning like I normally do most mornings. Shortly after I sat down at my computer Dottie, our dane, walked up. This was out of character for Dottie. Usually she’s the last one out of bed. With both Courtney and Sid still sleeping I couldn’t help but wonder what got Dottie up so early. She looked at me, mumbled a bit and was wagging her tail profusely. I put two and two together and let her out. When she came back to the door she and I went back to the bedroom.

I laid down on the bed. Dottie stood by the door, not laying down. She started groaning a bit and continued the crazy tail wagging. Sid woke up and was stirred into a tizzy by Dottie’s anxiety. So I moseyed both dogs outside again, where Dottie dropped some kids off at the pool. She had now done both deeds, we were set for some nappytime.

Back in the bedroom again Dottie would not lay down on her bed. She continued to stand at the foot of our bed moaning and groaning about something. I was all out of guesses to what this dog was trying to tell me until I looked at her bed. A dark spot was on her bed. I investigated and discovered a few flowers on her bed. Dottie has never had any problems with flowers in the house. I cleaned them up and told her to lay down.

No go. This dog was smart. There was no way she was going to lay down where she had just put two flowers. Now I was stuck. Confused, I woke Court for some advice with the situation. Court suggested throwing Dottie’s other bed on top of the flower-soiled one. It was such a good idea that Dottie was finally convinced to lay down on her bed.

So it is true. Dogs don’t sleep where they poop.

For those who asked, our cruise pictures are available now online. The summary of the photos is: I took a bunch in Puerto Rico, a few in St. Kitts and then stopped shooting for the rest of the trip. So I only captured 3 of the 7 days. Here’s the trip summary:

We started off by spending two days at the Westin in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We arrived on Sunday. The hotel was great. Our rooms were gigantic 3-room suites. I would say the suite was just a tad smaller than our entire house. It was truly amazing. The Westin was tucked away, though, from the rest of San Juan so we really didn’t get out to see much of the city. We spent our time at the resort ordering 8 dollar drinks and eating ridiculously priced food. The food was so ridiculous that on Monday night I got sick from some sushi (see prior journal entry). While I wallowed in pain on Tuesday Courtney enjoyed some jetskiing on the ocean. She also managed somehow to get me on the boat later in the day.

The boat was cool but small. We cruised on the Radisson Navigator. It is supposed to be the second best cruise ship in the world. I would give it 3 out of 5. Our rooms were nice, but because of it’s size and the amount of people on it there wasn’t much to do. We pulled up next to a Royal Carribean cruise liner in St. Maartan. Our ship was half as high and half as long as the Royal Carribean. The first night on board took a bit of getting used to. You could feel the boat listing from side-to-side. This wasn’t good for Courtney and her motion sickness. Combined with my sushi situation we decided to call the night early and hit the sack.

Our first port of entry was St. Kitts on Wednesday. We ventured off the boat and walked parts of the town. It felt and looked much like Ocho Rios in Jamaica. Streets were dirty. Animals were just out walking around. Everyone was trying to get a buck from you for some reason. At one point I actually wondered why we stuck out so much like tourists…*cough*. In the afternoon we had a tour of the island on ATVs. Let me just say that the ATV was one of the most fun things I’ve done in a long time. I’m now trying to figure out how I can get one of ‘em.

After having a so, so experience in St. Kitts we thought that maybe our best bet would be to make our own fun on the boat. So Wednesday night we hit the town!….on the boat. We found the only bar open at 1am and spent the evening drinking away the minutes. So many rediculous things occurred that I can’t even do them justice. Plus, what good are drunk stories if you weren’t there?

Our prior night’s escapades made for a very late morning on Thursday. So late that we didn’t even make it to shore on Thursday to see St. Barts. We had a good time, nonetheless, sleeping the day away.

Friday we docked in St. Maartan. St. Maartan was a 180-degree difference from St. Kitts. It was clean and beautiful. Also it was owned by the Dutch AND French. We took a catamaran to a deserted island. Well, the island turned out to be populated with a few naked people. But they moved out of the way when we pulled up. Courtney and I snorkeled for a bit until we saw a gigantic nasty looking fish with teeth. Then we were done snorkeling.

St. Thomas was our Saturday trip. It was much like St. Maartan. More commerical. More american. Except that they drove on the left-hand side of the road with steering wheels on the left-hand side of the car. What a bitch to drive. We went to Magan’s Bay which is supposed to be the 8th most beautiful beach in the world. It was beautiful but I had had enough of beaches by that point.

Sunday we disembarked from the ship in San Juan. We had a short and sweet tour of some old fort in San Juan. Our tour guide was friendly, intelligent, and helpful but unfortunately most of us just wanted to sleep.

I left out some details here and there, but I think you get the general gist of the trip. It was good, fun, and relaxing. I need one every month.

Courtney and I got back on Sunday from a Carribean cruise which took us to San Juan, St. Kitts, St. Barts, St. Maartan, and St. Thomas. I won’t bore you with the drunken details. No one likes to hear stories of drunken debauchery. But I will tell you about the sushi incident.

Since I hadn’t yet figured out that sushi does not agree with me I decided to eat some yellow tail in San Juan the night before we boarded the cruise ship. An hour after I ingested the roll I was back in the hotel room dying. I wasn’t sure how the sushi was going to re-manifest itself. I did know that it felt like it was tearing apart my guts trying to get out. I ended up spending most of the evening in the bathroom on the floor. It took me to noon the next day to realize that I had the same reaction to yellow tail in Minneapolis a week before. Why must I be damned to only eat cheap lousy sushi from Lund’s?!

Incidently, I had to look up how to spell debauchery and found it’s dictionary definition interesting:

1.Extreme indulgence in sensual pleasures; dissipation.

If you are wondering about pictures, they’ll be up soon. I want to wait until I have my new web server up and running first.