I got a nice 4K/HDR TV for myself as a Christmas/Birthday gift to go with the PS4 Pro my wife got me for Christmas. The trouble was the TV sat kind of low on the end table I had to put in my office, so I was using some game boxes to elevate it. My Mom and step-Dad had other plans, and my step-Dad went above and beyond with the wood working. He built these really nice little box/shelf deals for me, so I have a place to also store my 3DS and games, and my PS4 library as it starts to grow as well, all while elevating the TV to the perfect level for optimal viewing. Very nice. Just in time for Horizon Zero Dawn!
Gorgeous. That’s amazing work.
That is good work! Nice job matching the stain, too.
Oh they’re so adorable.
They’re amazing!
Both the kitties and the wooden TV things! This thread is delivering :)
Ohhh they are so adorable!!! Wants to give them hugs and cuddles :)
Those kitties make a great pair. They look like they traded socks and snouts. Very stylish.
Both cats are adorable, but something about Luke’s face is just amazing. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s just his expression in that photo, but it’s one of the best cat faces ever. What kind of cats are those?
I like the woodwork.
Cats freak me out and I don’t like them. Looking at those pictures I have a perfect mental image of the kitten saying HISSS and waving its claws at my face. Even worse, cats seem naturally attracted to people that don’t like them and constantly want to snuggle me.
I’m exaggerating a bit in terms of the distaste, but they’re not for me :).
They’re rag doll cats (at least partially). I hadn’t heard of it either until we saw them at the shelter, but it’s a breed created in the 60s. They’re supposed to be very dog-like and love hanging out with people.
They’re part Himalayan from the coloring. The Himalayan I have is very loving of people she trusts, buy very scared of people she doesn’t. Hair also becomes a problem as they get older with lots of knots. I’ve found getting her groomed with a lion cut twice a year to be best, and she really enjoys it as well. However it’s hard to find a groomer that grooms cats, especially difficult cats that don’t want to be groomed by a stranger.
If they’re ragdoll as well, that’s great. Ragdolls are docile and don’t mind being manhandled around. Great for kids.
My in-laws have a ragdoll that avoids us whenever we come visit. He’s pretty docile but runs away from our daughters as much as possible too. Might be a defective member of the breed. Poor thing is a bit cross-eyed also.
Ok, this is going to sound like shilling, but so be it. It is the most interesting thing that’s happened to me lately by far – and long.
I now work for a cruise company located in St. Louis, that famous seaside port. We do Caribbean cruises – theme cruises. We did six cruises in 2017 and have seven scheduled for 2018. I just got done working our 80s Cruise and it was an AMAZING amount of fun. I am still grinning when I think about it, and I was working on the ship – at least during the day. Most fun working EVER!
We had Cheap Trick, Belinda Carlisle, Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins), Colin Hay (Men at Work), The Romantics, Howard Jones, Morris Day and The Time, Men Without Hats, Information Society, Debbie Gibson, and Berlin with Terri Nunn. We also had a great 80s cover band, Jesse’s Girl, and another great cover band, Trial by Fire. We had a great stand-up comic in Alonzo Bodden. We had music going from 1 pm until far into the night.
Then when the night was almost over, it wasn’t. We had a great DJ spinning records in the Revelations Lounge until I guess people dropped from exhaustion. I was there until 3 am one night and there were still a good 50 people on the dance floor.
We also had the old MTV veejays Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter and Nina Blackwood hosting interviews with the bands and doing some other things. We ran game shows. We had giant Twister. We had 80s trivia contests. We had artist-led short excursions on the port stops. We showed 80s movies. We had a video game lounge with standup arcade machines like Pac-Man, Galaga, Centipede, Donkey Kong, and a vintage NES system for Super Mario, all free to play.
The artists were walking around on the ship, going to lunch, dinner, etc., posing for photos and talking with guests. I remember sitting at the poolside bar the second night on the cruise, just chatting with a fellow cruiser, and we were commenting on how much we enjoyed Tom Bailey’s show we had just seen and up walked Tom Bailey and we chatted him up! It was fun! When we stopped in Cozumel I decided to stop in a port side bar before re-boarding the ship before it sailed, and struck up a conversation with a guy who turned out to be in Information Society, Zeke. Totally cool guy completely into comic-books and Star Trek.
The hit of the cruise was Terri Nunn and Berlin. She electrified the audience. She was amazing. She even sang what she said was her favorite religious song ever as her last song before her encore, Highway to Hell. And then her encore was Jefferson Airplane’s Somebody to Love and she was a young Grace Slick when she belted it out. Just great. Everyone was buzzing about her. The next day people were still talking about her. “I’m having a great time but did you see Terri Nunn last night!?!” That kind of thing. We immediately began talks and were able to sign her up for next year’s cruise. She was not only good on the stage but also so kind in how she mixed with guests.
I’m still excited by the whole experience. It was so much fun. I’m going on vacation in a few weeks in Italy for a week, seeing Rome and Florence, and only touching the tip of the iceberg of things to see and experience there, and I know it will be great. It will be. But I can’t imagine it will top the sheer fun I had on this 80s cruise. Everyone walked around so happy. I was very proud to be a part of the company that made it happen.
Next cruise up for me is January on our Star Trek cruise. I expect that to be great fun also. But a different kind of fun.
(Sorry for the length of this. I try to be concise these days, but still excited by this a week and a half later!)
That’s awesome Mark. I always love reading stories like that.
Can you provide a link so I can look into these cruises? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
In a similar vein to Mark’s trip, there’s the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise each year featuring a ton of amazing metal acts doing live music all day long. One of our number went this year:
These “theme cruises” seem like a really awesome thing to me. Since I’m not so much for beaches, swimming/snorkeling, or tourist traps, if you were gonna somehow sucker me into a cruise at all, you’d need to leverage something like this.
Glad that you enjoyed the trip so much, @Mark_Asher, and I hope that means that you like work just as much!
If it was a normal cruise, I would have had to order the full alcoholic drink package or contemplate jumping off the boat around Cuba. Snorkeling in Haiti near Tortuga was cool though. Next year is Turks and Caicos, so should be a fun place to visit.
Here’s the parent page that shows our cruises. There are all kinds of other theme cruises available too. For example, Turner Classic Movies did a theme cruise six years running before discontinuing.
I do. I work with individual reservations and group stuff, and I enjoy the work. It really has been a fun experience. We’re a small company full of good people and we all work well together to get stuff done, and we get input into a lot of different things. And at the end of the working year we get to go on Caribbean cruises. It’s a nice reward for a year of good work.