Before going out of town for five days over Thanksgiving I placed masking tape over two little holes in the floor of our laundry room. The holes were originally drilled for pipes on our hot water heater. One hole was no longer used so I taped over it completely. The other hole is still used so I just taped around the pipe. I should probably use some of that insulation foam at some point in the future though. Thanks for the tip Ethan. Anyway, I thought the holes were way to small for a rat to get in through but we noticed absolutely no droppings when we got back from our trip. Score one for the humans! Of course, the rat is now eating the tomato plant we have growing outside so there's still some work to be done but at least it's out of the house.

I don't really watch the show but this is a pretty funny clip.

For Thanksgiving we're driving to Oregon to be with some of Emily's family. This will be our first long road trip with the kids. We have a van with a DVD player so hopefully that will keep the kids entertained for a good portion of the trip. However, I can't imagine they'll be interested in videos and movies for the entire eight hours. This should be interesting.

The rat is back. Fortunately, it's confined to the laundry room. Still, that's where we wash our clothes and the kids walk through that room to go to and from the back yard. I put down eight glue traps the other night but they didn't do any good. I actually saw little paw prints on one of the traps. I'm not quite sure what to do now. I had pretty much pinned all my hopes on the glue traps. We're going out of town for Thanksgiving and don't want to let the rat have run of the laundry room for five days. I'm considering getting some poison pellets and sprinkling them around the laundry room. It's a method the rat hasn't seen before and won't suspicious about. The downside is that we don't know where he hangs out during the day and that's where he'll likely end up dying.

Last week we noticed some of the fruit on our kitchen counter had tiny little bite marks in it. After a bit of investigation we discovered mouse droppings behind certain appliances. Further detective work performed over the course of the week revealed the mouse was making his home in our small laundry room. He even had a little mouse hole behind our dryer. My solution was to run out and buy 12 mouse traps and place them in various places on the laundry room floor. Considering the tiny size of our laundry room this would pretty much guarantee a catch. I had originally wanted glue traps since they don't leave much room for error and I don't have much sympathy for rodents who nibble at our food and poop all over our floors. However, the drug store only had the traditional snapper traps. So on Saturday night I ended up placing 8 traps around the mouse hole. We played World of Warcraft late and went to bed around 1:30 AM. At approximately 2:00 AM we heard a snap from the laundry room. I went to investigate. The little creature wasn't caught in the trap but was clearly stunned just sitting in one place between our washer and dryer. It wasn't a small mouse either. It was a fairly sizable rat! To make a long story short, I ended up chasing the rat around the laundry room for a while until he took up residence beneath our hot water heater. We had quite a long standoff with me trying to flush him out into a bag by various means for almost an hour. Faced with defeat I went back to bed and vowed to get him in the morning. Morning comes and there's no sign of the rat. After a few days of observation we still notice no signs of the rat. Hopefully, our little show down scared him off for good.

After watching the South Park episode on World of WarCraft my wife Emily decided she wanted to try it out. So I did what any good husband would do and immediately ran out and bought two copies of the game. After getting through the lengthy install process and extraordinarily frustrating account signup process we were in the game! We picked Uldaman as our realm since it was PvE and had a relatively low population. Emily created a Night Elf Rogue named Elorin and I created a Night Elf Warrior named Sandmoose. I guess we both just like killing things with blades. What can I say? We've had a lot of fun exploring the Night Elf starting area and learning how to play the game. We play about 1 - 2 hours each night so we're definitely not hard core. We've been playing about a week and a half and we're both at level 12. It'll take us a good long time to get up to level 60. That doesn't matter though since the fun for us is exploring and discovering new things together. The longer the journey lasts the better. We got my brother -- an experienced player who has level 60 characters on another realm -- to create a character on Uldaman. He got up to level 12 in just over a day. It's definitely a different experience playing with him. Where Emily and I are very slow and methodical together, playing with my brother is more fast-paced and seemingly reckless. Although I didn't die at all last night while questing with him and rarely had to fight more than one enemy at a time. Both styles are enjoyable for different reasons. It's nice to get the instant gratification of leveling up and knocking out quests but it's also nice to slow down, get into the story and be a little more in control. Anyway, while I've looking forward to Guitar Hero II so much this year I now wonder if I want to get it at all when it comes out next week since that'll take away from my World of Warcraft time.

This is absolutely hilarious. What would you do if you had a car with a bomb in it set to explode in less than four minutes. Horatio Caine from CSI: Miami decides to get in the car and drive it to the beach. Here's the ending of that little jaunt. Remember, there's a bomb in the car about to explode! I love how he takes his shades off after he stops the car and then puts them back on as he's walking away. Seriously though. Do they even have writers on this show or do they just let David Caruso make everything up?

I was curious about this so I counted how many songs from each decade appear in Guitar Hero II. This only include the 40 songs in the main set list and not unlockables. 1960's - 1 1970's - 13 1980's - 9 1990's - 11 2000's - 5 Obviously 1970's are the most representated decade. This may be due to the fact that many classic memorable songs come from that decade. They've simply had more time to sit in our consiousness and rise in value over more recent music. It's going to be a blast to play some of those songs. I do think there's a lot more Guitar Hero worthy songs from the 80's than what we've been in both games so far. Songs that go beyond the standard hair-metal party songs and power ballads. Why only 5 songs in the 2000's though? Granted, this is the decade that gave birth to and nurtured Nu-Metal. Not exactly Guitar Hero material but surely there's more than 5 fun guitar-based songs to have come out in the 2000's. At least the unlockable tracks contain more modern tunes.

Remember when milk came in two different varieties? Regular and skim. And nobody bought skim so it was really just one kind of milk. Now when you look at the milk shelves at Safeway there's about a dozen different kinds. You got your various percentages, whole, and vitamin D in both organic and non-organic versions. I just want to buy some milk!

GameSpot now has cleaner URLs for user profiles/blogs. www.gamespot.com/users/MichaelLuton Isn't that much nicer? They're not case-sensitive either so 'MichaelLuton', 'michaelluton' and 'miCHaellutOn' all work the same. Also, one of the other developers here mentioned not being able to get GameSpot blogs into the Technorati directory. I don't know if the URLs have anything to do with it but I just submitted this blog (using the clean URL) to Technorati and it seemed to get in just fine. I added the tag 'sandmoose' to my blog profile in Technorati and was able to search the directory and find my blog immediately.