This is how the bottom of my car looked after the $200 steam clean.

Why?

Well, on the way to Panorama for the heli ski trip, we hit a deer. Ok, we didn’t hit it, we ran over it (it was already dead), and it was relatively small (although we definitely felt it under the car). As it turns out, we brought some of the deer with us, all the way to Canada, and back to the US (see Joe’s lengthy post for more details).

When I brought the car into the shop for some repairs, they called me an hour later, and told me that they were going to have to take it next door to the detail shop and have the undercarriage steam cleaned before they can work on it. Now I know why.

Cost of a 4 day trip with 2 days of heli: $1900
Cost of 4 extra runs over the two days: $400
Cost to remove dead deer from undercarriage: $200
Cost to fix damage done by deer: $1260
Was the trip worth it? Hell yeah.

Luckily, the shop took some disturbing pictures for me.

Warning: do not click through unless you’re prepared to see deer flesh caked on the bottom of my car.

(more…)

1. Love this chair from Sprout Homes, and at $36, quite affordable.
2. I’m guessing that slightly less affordable are these Roman shades from Hunter Douglas, although they do look nice.
3. If you can’t afford those, why not hang your own curtains with some ingenuity?
4. I’ve seen this site around for a while now, and love it as a resource. But I can’t help wonder why they spell it with a “u” in the URL, but use “color” throughout the site (especially since they also own colorlovers.com).

1.  Need to separate some space?  Dvider comes to the rescue.
2. If you’re like me, you have a couple of snowboards, and what better than to put them on display?
3. Or, if you don’t like the vertical mount, you can use this to orient it however you want.

1. One of the all time greatest dialogs (in my opinion) from the Kubrick classic Full Metal Jacket, presented in an interesting (militaristic) typeface, along with other illustrations.
2. For the designers out there, and those who are interested in typography, Helvetica the movie takes an interesting look at possibly THE most successful typeface that’s out there today.
3. The sergeant from Full Metal Jacket is a pretty mean boss, but here’s an essay from Paul Graham (a founder of YCombinator, seeder of startups) on why you shouldn’t have a boss.
4. My old manager just went through the YCombinator program, and here’s his startup, see if you can figure out what it does.

1. Someone made an edible version of the Kindle, but I’d still want the real thing.
2. Since I don’t yet have a Kindle, I still have read books old school style, which is why I find this bookmark particularly interesting.
3. There are usually a lot of text in books, which can all be used when creating this ASCII curtain (oh I want one).
4. That curtain can come in useful when you’re in Stage 6 of drunkenness (or maybe even Stage 5).

1. Although the Irish bishops moved St. Patrick’s day to the 15th this year, today is still the official celebrations, and what better than the leprechaun “spotted” in Mobile (this is from 1 1/2 years ago, but always funny) to remind us of the Irish traditions.
2. If the leprechaun isn’t enough, here’s another green monster named Gertrude for you.
3. Maybe the leprechaun used this awesome RC plane to get into the tree (the website looks like it’s from the 90’s, but the product is new, and make sure to watch the videos).
4. Speaking of trees, I’ve always wanted to live in a tree house, and now this community in Costa Rica is allowing you to do just that, and they’re selling 2-5 acre lots starting at $49k US. Who wants in on a lot with me?

Update: I just saw this t-shirt, and thought that it was hilarious.

This is what two grand buys you. It’s more addictive than drugs.

1. The superclean!!! It uses steam to clean anything! I need to get one of these to clean our bathroom.
2. While I’m buying stuff, I should go back and look at Chris Jordan’s photographs of american consumerism on a massive scale.
3. But what is art without fiction? After the likes of James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) and Misha Defonseca (Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years), yet another critically acclaimed memoir - Love and Consequences - by Margaret Seltzer (under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones) was outed by her own sister after a glowing review appeared in the NYT.

1. Studio Erwin Olaf, some interesting and couturish portraits.
2. Speaking of boy scouts, Dick Cheney was a boy scout, and now he (and GWB) can’t go to Brattleboro, or Marlboro, VT, since voters there approved to instruct police to arrest George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for “crimes against our Constitution,”.
3. But that’s okay, since they can just download this screensaver that shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide to satisfy their thirst to surveil everyone.
4. The windows version of that screen saver is written in C#, which has closures, but Java does not. Here’s a proposal for closures in Java.

1. fishbol, a workshop-based studio established in Canada.
2. AmazonMP3 downloader now supports Linux.
3. Check Out blog - from Wal-mart to you.