VaxCave

A) Rake leaves
B) Open the bag and put it on the ground behind you with the opening facing your heels.
C) Put your left heel in the opening on the far left of the bag.
D) Put your right heel in the opening on the far right of the bag.
E) Use one hand to reach down and pull the bag open.
F) With your free hand, shovel the leaves into the bag.

If you do it right and keep the proper pressure on the bag, it will stay open and you can shimmy forward with it and bag an entire pile of leaves.

The neighbor kids all do this now after seeing me do it. It’s much easier than having to pick up the leaves and put them in a trash can. Tt removes the need to re-rake because none blow away while you are lifting them into a can.

If you can’t picture this, imagine emulating a dog digging a hole. The leaves go through your legs and into the bag.

TL;DR – Shovel leaves back through your legs into a bag that you hold open with your heels.

Mountain Dew Throwback

With real sugar. It’s pretty good, but it’s certainly a different taste than the stuff with HFCS.

I got this Toshiba DVD Recorder for Christmas and started recording some DVDs immediately. One thing that you must do that isn’t 100% obvious is that you need to be sure to finalize a disk once you are done recording. This will ensure that the disk will play in other DVD players.

One issue that I kept experiencing was when I looked at the title list there was a track called “Empty Title.” Before I finalized the disk I tried to delete this track but it wouldn’t allow it. Then when I burned a disk later in the morning the empty title wasn’t there. It was very confusing.

I then realized that the difference was that I was using different DVD types. It appears the the empty title doesn’t appear when I use DVD-R, but it does appear when I use DVD+R.

It’s too bad I have 150 DVD+Rs and only 50 DVD-Rs. Oh well, it’s not that big of a deal. It seems like an odd behavior for a recording device though.

My neighbor Mark got a kick out of Leela walking on the treadmill.