Those darn short electric cords

I think that the guys who decide the length of electric cords must be a. clueless or b. sadistic. I haven't decided which quite yet. Why do I say this? Electric cords are always about a quarter inch too short. I have several surge protectors in the house, always a good thing when you have multiple computers in the house. Now, are these cords long enough? Of course not. The length is just right to force you to do your best Cirque du Soleil impression as you hang over the back edge of your desk (which is too heavy to move on carpet) trying to reach it to plug in the computer, monitor, speakers, Nintendo DS recharger cord, iPod recharger, desk lamp, phone base, and lightsaber night light.

I nearly had this conversation with my kids:
Me: Hey kids!
Kids (giggling at Mom's feet dangling off the edge of the desk): What do you need?
Me: Sit on my legs so I don't flip off the desk and get stuck doing an involuntary headstand behind the desk.
Kids: (fall over in laughter, imagining Mom getting stuck)

My biggest beef today was my coffee bean grinder. Whoever designed this a. does not know the first thing about kitchens and b. must not drink coffee. The cord, I kid you not, is 11.5 inches long. The outlet on my counter is about 8 inches above the counter top. This leaves me about 8.261 inches from the wall, give or take a few thousandths of an inch. Every try to reach across a counter at 5:30 in the morning with a scoop of coffee beans without spilling them? It's not happening for me. I have to do my finest Elastigirl impression in order to even reach the the grinder, much less use it conveniently.

Perhaps I'll plug in a surge protector by my coffee pot. That should give me about 2.23 more inches to work with.

You Know You've Played Neverwinter Nights 2 a Little Too Long When....

Weird things happen when you play a computer game for awhile and then Skype with a Nemesis a little too late, like really strange dreams. This all started yesterday when I played Neverwinter Nights 2. In my current campaign, I'm playing a female Sun Elf wizard and my PC casts spells a lot--well, pretty much all the time. For those of you not familiar with the game, when you play some of the spellcasters in the game, you choose your spells from a large list to fill up slots in your 'spellbook'. You can change the spells in your spellbook as needed to adjust to the situation at hand. Once you fill up your slots, you then 'rest' to activate them. This means that you can pick a bunch of nasty fireball and lightning spells to take out all the bad guys. When they're all dead, you trade the spell out for one to unlock all the locked treasure chests in the area if the rogue isn't handy. Then you rest, unlock all the chests with your unlock spell (which, for some reason I can't fathom, is called 'Knock' in the game instead of the more sensible 'Unlock'), scoop up all the goodies, switch back to the killer spells, rest, and go on to the next area of monsters.

So, I spent a good while doing just that in order to get to Act 2 and meet up with Sand, who is hands-down my favorite NPC in this game. He has an acerbic wit, and the game developers gave him some of the best lines in the game. His quip when you encounter a red dragon in the fire giant mountains made the price of the game worth it alone. Anticipating more witty comments from him since I planned on keeping him in my party more this playthrough than my first, I played quite a bit yesterday to get to the point in the game where he joined my party.

Then I finally took a break from the game after dinner and Skyped with Trusty Nemesis Emperor Devon for awhile about the existence of God, debate styles (and my lack thereof), and general Lucasforums gossip, not necessarily in that order, but definitely far too late into the night. I finally went to bed and got about 6 hours' sleep when Jimbo, husband-god that he is, brought me a cup of coffee. I was still in that twilight stage of sleep where you dream for awhile just before you wake up, and the coffee woke me up the rest of the way.

Me: Honey, you are a husband-god for bringing me coffee.
Hubby: Thank you. I like being called a god, you know. I didn't want to wake you up too soon, though.
Me: That's OK, I was having a really weird dream.

Hubby scooted me over on the bed a little to sit down next to me. Apparently he thought 'weird' meant 'bad-dream-nigh-on-nightmare' and was prepared to comfort me. He didn't quite understand that in this case when I said weird, I meant 'really, truly, it's weird'.

Hubby: So tell me about this dream.
Me: Really, it was weird.
Hubby (soothingly): I understand, dear.
Me: Well, I dreamed I was in the bathroom, and I had to blow my nose. I had two spells--stoneskin and 'blow-my-nose', and I had to use the 'blow-my-nose' spell to, well, blow my nose.
Hubby: You had a spell to blow your nose?
Me: Yeah--isn't that weird?

At this point, hubby, who has played Neverwinter Nights 2 and knows about the stoneskin spell and the general workings of the game, started howling laughing. Thank goodness he had sat down, because I don't think he would have been able to stand laughing that hard. It was like he'd turned into a giant muscle spasm.

Me: So I blew my nose, and it was really gross. If my sinuses had been that bad, I really would have needed a spell to get all that stuff out.

Hubby continued laughing so hard he could hardly breathe.

Me: So I got all the stuff out. then I changed the spell out for a new one--don't remember which one--and rested on my knee in the bathroom to activate the new spell.

Hubby was now lying on the bed twitching, past the point where he could make much more than squeaky sounds as he laughed.

Me: I'm not quite sure why 'blow-my-nose' was a level 4 spell. I mean, it was ranked right up there with stoneskin, for heaven's sake. I think at the very most it should be level 0. I was also amused that I had the foresight to change that spell out and rest. Not sure which new spell I picked.

I finally had to stop talking and drink some coffee so Jimbo could recover.