Happy birthday, Peter!

We had an early birthday lunch at La Casita on Friday, but happy birthday again anyway!

Delgadillos on Ellen DeGeneres Show

Audrey Delgadillo and her sisters will be on the Ellen DeGeneres Show today, talking about being home alone while both parents are in Iraq:

Then, Ellen meets the remarkable 20-year-old Audrey Delgadillo from Hesperia, CA, who shares her story of taking care of her three younger sisters while both of their parents are serving in Iraq. Ellen has a special surprise for Audrey and her family they won’t soon forget. Don’t miss it!

Hollywood continues to call here for the girls as well, specifically regarding movie rights. I wouldn’t be surprised if their story showed up on Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel sometime next year.

• Update: There were actually two surprises. First, Ellen did what Good Morning America could not, and set up a live remote from Iraq for the Delgadillos’ parents. Second, when the show does a week of shows from Universal Orlando in Florida, the show will be taking the girls along as guests.

Level 70

Almost two months to the day after the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade expansion came out, I got my main World of Warcraft character to level 70.

That’s a little fast for my tastes; I had even opted-out of rest bonus experience for the last few weeks. I didn’t play every day, nor always for long stretches, but I wouldn’t have minded if it had taken me until May or so to reach this point.

Still, there’s still lots and lots of content left to do, and a good thing, too, since getting my faster griffon mount is going to take a lot of money.

Hotel bed at home

So, taking advantage of a certain someone’s nesting instincts — and the pre-move desire to toss out old crap — we got rid of a rather tattered quilt we’ve been sleeping under since before we were married and some sheets from a “discount superstore” that mostly cause me to break out and have anything but a pleasant night of sleep.

Jenn, in bargain-hunting mode, asked me what my dream sheets and quilt would be. I explained about high thread count and dragged her to Bed, Bath & Beyond to feel the difference between low thread count and high thread count sheets. (“What was the thread count of our old sheets?” “They didn’t say, which tells you how good they must have been.”)

So off she goes, virtually, to Amazon, where she finds a $300 quilt marked down to $70 (it may have been even cheaper when she bought it) and a 600-thread count sheet set that I’m totally unable to find on Amazon now, but which was marked down from more than $100 to under $60.

Years ago, I figured out that, if you’re going to spend money on shoes, they might as well be good ones that won’t wear out on the way out of the store and will actually be comfortable. Now I’m figuring out the same thing about bed linens. It’s like staying in a fancy hotel at home. Combined with the new mattress set we got last year, it’s awfully hard to get out of bed in the morning now.

If you’re in the market for new bed linens, look around for marked-down high-end stuff after Christmas. Totally worth it.

HesperiaStar.com update

So, yeah, I haven’t been posting much here. We’ve been working on the new HesperiaStar.com, and with one or two remaining major changes, the end result should be pretty good. Expect the new site either early next week or the week after, depending on when the changes are made.

It’s not entirely the site I’d create, if I was building one from scratch, but this is part of a company-wide rollout of a standardized site design (and advertising pipeline), so there are certain elements of it that are going to be immutable by us out here in the field.

But that’s OK.

I forget who said “you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want,” but I’m pretty sure that war they went to turned out A-OK.