(no subject)

Apparently, there's a gas leak many blocks away from our office. The wind is carrying it through all of downtown KC. We're being gassed here. The air smells and tastes like chlorinated pool water. Not going to make for a pleasant work day.

(no subject)

I am pleased to inform you that the accidental chemical strike on downtown KC has ended, and the air no longer smells of noxious, potentially fatal gasses. This is a good thing. I like good things; they tend to make life enjoyable, much in the way that a lungful of toxic chemicals do not.

Other good things I can report:
- We got our grill cleaned up, re-propaned, and inagurated with bratwurst in celebration of the grilling season. tesstrosa does most of the grilling work on weekdays, but I'm looking forward to doing at least some grilling myself over the summer.
- We finally have a copy of the Samurai Champloo soundrtrack (or at least the first one; I'm sure more will follow later). Interesting blend of hip-hop and house grooves, which works really well on shuffle, especially as one is playing WoW. Once a second soundtrack is released, I'll have to rip both and set up a WoW random playlist.
- Katamari Damacy is now in our possession. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, it's a cute-yet-surreal (or possibly surreal-but-cute) game where you roll around a small sticky ball on Earth, randomly picking up anything small enough to be grabbed -- although as your katamari grows, you can pick up bigger things, like people and cars -- in an attempt to replace the stars in the night sky, which your emotionally abusive father inadvertently destroyed while dancing. If that last sentence made absolutely no sense, don't worry. You don't have to understand the plot to enjoy the game. The soundtrack is wonderful, with tracks ranging from jazz to J-pop to hip-hop to electronica. It's also a great short-time game; the longest time limit I've seen is 12 minutes, with most in the 5-10 minute range, Do a level, make a star, save, all in 15 minutes.

Tonight, though, I have to go to a town meeting. A developer wants to put a road through our side yard about 15 feet from our house, which would make it against city ordinances. Of course, we're not the owners of the property (yet), but the current owner is aware of the situation and is none too happy with the city. Hopefully, this can all be resolved with a minimum of legal wrangling and/or bloodshed. :P

You can fight city hall...

...or at least, you can fight the developers who try to use it.

The meeting tonight was packed. Lots of concerns being raised, mostly involving how the new subdivision would have affected roads, drainage, traffic, etc. No one was really happy with the plan, although no one really had a problem with the subdivision itself. Rather, we were all upset about the ripple effect the subdivision development would have on other people in the area. Also, John, the guy who's leasing/deeding the property to us, wrote a clear, consise letter to the city council explaining his feelings on the matter -- a letter that had apparently been distributed to all the city aldermen. Finally, it didn't help the developer's case that to even consider the parcel of land developable (at least, in the manner that he wanted to do it), he absolutely had to have at least 3 exemptions/variances from city ordinances for each of the 83 lots he was planning on building.

The rezoning request was shot down unanimously by the city council. Our yard is safe for now.