We switched to cloth napkins last week. Paper napkins are one of those things that were always in my house growing up and it never dawned on me until recently that they weren’t the most eco-friendly things in the world. Since we go to the gym everyday we’re doing laundry at least every other day, so buying a dozen cloth napkins to keep in a rotation works out great for us. I wish we had done this sooner. Next step? T-shirts we retired will become rags so we can stop using paper towels for cleaning.
I’ve been reading a lot lately. Finally finished Guns, Germs and Steel and will be ordering the DVD next week. I’m following up this non-fiction book with Drawing Down the Moon, a classic in pagan circles that I’m finding quite enjoyable. I started reading Moby Dick, which I’ve been meaning to get around to ever since Penn Jillette first went on about it being his favorite book. In spite of what I’ve heard people say about the dullness of the opening, I’m thoroughly enjoying every page, which certainly speaks to the Mainer in me, I love sea stories. Finally for times when Moon or Dick are too heavy, I began reading a version of Arabian Nights, which has to be one of the best collections of tales I’ve ever read. Not a challenging read by any means (in fact, this version even has pictures every few pages and I laugh at myself for reading a kids book) but sometimes you just need some fun and it’s nice to pick up on all the references in todays culture that come from these stories.
Now for the big news of this post, I now have my very own TekTonic VPS running Debian! Michael and I have been tossing around the idea of completely retiring the noisy, power hungry Sparc64 for a couple months now, but it wasn’t until a nice promotion by TekTonic last month that Michael finally made the choice to move. He bought one for himself to “see how it would go” and within 2 days bought one for me too. This was a good move, I now have the experience to set up and manage my own server (indeed, I had Apache set up for all 4 of my sites within about 10 minutes) so relying on him to install packages I need and do things like set up logrotation for me was getting to be a bit silly.
A nice chunk of my mornings over these past few days has been spent migrating my sites over. PhillyChix.org was done in a matter of minutes. PrincessLeia.com and 13thHour.net were running a version of WordPress in gentoo that is a “legacy” branch, which I was able to upgrade to the 2.2.2 version with no problem. Which reminds me, after reviewing the WordPress package in Debian I decided to roll my own install of WordPress, I can keep up with security updates and I think it’s worth my time to stay with a current release version. WallaceAndGromit.net was the biggest challenge, I’ve wanted to migrate it to WordPress for a while now but again with the “must nag husband to set stuff up for me” thing. This was the perfect opportunity to do the overhaul myself! So I got WordPress installed with a spiffy theme, threw together a new logo, spent about 2 hours Sunday morning plugging in all 108 of the posts from the launch of WallaceAndGromit.net back in 2002 into WordPress. I themed all the rest of the pages to sync up with the WordPress theme and finally had a sie to launch! I am very very happy with it. The only thing left to migrate is mailman for PhillyChix, which I don’t even know how to begin on and I’m too tired to think about it now. There are still some tweaks that need to be completed on the machine, but it’s running great so far.
I have photos and things from our daytime activities over the weekend, but posting those will have to wait, I need to spend some relaxing and snuggling time with Michael.