I slept in this morning. Sleeping in is somewhat unusual for me, but for some reason I’ve had a very difficult time sleeping lately, I’ll take what I can get! Once I got up I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my desktop from 8.10 (Intrepid) to 9.04 (Jaunty). It went well aside from a change in menu structure that made all my custom menus for logging into servers at work go away. Sigh. I haven’t quite found a way to fix this aside from writing .desktop launch files for each one and manually hacking at the menu config files. I don’t quite know how I’m going to handle this yet, but it sure is annoying. Word on the street is that a new menu editor will be available in the next XFCE release, but that doesn’t help me a whole lot now.
I also decided to fiddle around with the laptop hooked up to my TV. It’s an old Inspiron 7500 and I was considering reinstalling it because I thought I could squeeze some more speed out of it. Upon thinking about this I decided to take the 120G harddrive out of my (possibly) dying Compaq laptop. I thought the Compaq was dying because of the weird behavior it was exhibiting, and “it can’t be the harddrive, it’s only a year old!” Well, I think that was a foolish conclusion, it looks like it is the harddrive. I looked up the purchase date – over a year ago, warranty? 1 year. Darn it! Instead of any reinstallation at this point I just popped the old drive back on the Inspiron and did further manual tweaking of settings.
It’s been raining all day, so I decided to skip heading down to the Sly Fox Goat Race, in spite of Lew Bryson’s great post about it that really made me want to go back this year (I missed it last year too). Instead, this afternoon was spent doing boring things like dishes, shopping and running other errands.
Yesterday when returning from the Philly Jaunty Release Party I remember remarking about a “weird smell” in my car when we got into it after the party. I didn’t think much of it until this afternoon when I got in my car to go out – it was a very strong stagnant water smell. I started looking around, and found a nice big puddle on the floor behind the driver’s seat. GREAT. It’s been suggested that it’s related to the A/C, possibly a clogged drain pipe that backed up into the car and settled in the lowest point. I’m actually sort of hoping this is the problem, because it means that getting my A/C problems addressed in general will help solve this problem too, and it’s not an additional problem as I had feared upon discovery.
Speaking of brokenish things… the record-breaking heat last week gave me a taste of what summer is going to be like here in my apartment and I was not impressed. The temperature has gone down to be more seasonable, but it was still getting quite hot in here until Stephen let me borrow a spare window fan. It’s nice and cool in here again :) Hooray for fans!
Right now I’m just chilling with some project stuff and Angel (already seen them all, watching again as background noise!). Aside from finishing Angel last month (while I was in England, with the person who got me into Buffy in the first place!) I recently finished up watching the second season of Burn Notice – fantastic show, described to me as “imagine james bond and macguyver had a kid. now imagine that kid is friends with bruce campbell…” how could I not check it out? I’ve also been watching Dollhouse. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it at first, but it’s grown on me, even if it’s still a bit of a guilty pleasure rather than Very Good Television.
I still mostly fail at cooking, but I’m getting better. I picked up some crab-stuffed salmon and made some mashed potatoes for dinner tonight. It was good, and in spite of how simple it was (already prepped salmon put in oven for 20 minutes, potatoes boiled and mashed), it was cooking! And since the salmon was on sale it was a very good dinner for about $5. I guess in general I’ve been less hard on myself lately for not cooking, the fresh prepared foods at the grocery store that just require tossing in the oven can be quite tasty and healthy (at least, healthier than frequent take-out!).
I have been quite lonely this weekend. I was talking to my 20 year old sister Annette last night when the subject of her coming down to visit came up. Huh. She currently doesn’t have a job and a round trip flight from Portland to Philadelphia is only about $150. I’m now thinking of flying her down for a long Memorial Day weekend (bring her down Thursday morning, I have to work Thursday and Friday, but Sat-Mon I’m off and she goes home Tuesday). We’ll see how things go, but it’s been over three years since I’ve seen her and I think she could use the break from her normal life, I hope it works out.
Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 22:34
Nice post! Over the past few years living alone, I’ve learnt how to prepare simple, cheap, ready-to-eat dinners. Many a times, it’s pre-cooked rice and veggies that I have to just put in boiling water, or “heat-n-eat” Pad Thai, or my current favorite – the delicious “dal lentil burgers” from Whole Foods (I am a vegetarian).
But once in a while when I’ve had enough of ready-made dinners, I go through the culinary rigmarole – chopping and cooking veggies, preparing black bean or chickpea soup, cooked aromatic rice with cilantro and herbs, tortillas and freshly chopped salad. It’s time consuming but definitely worth every second.
Btw, is that Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine ?
Ciao,
pitzl
Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 22:49
Very rarely these days I’ll get excited about some recipe and give going through the whole cooking process a spin. It usually turns out pretty well! But after a 30+ minutes of prep I find myself finished eating alone within 15 minutes and it hardly seems worth all the effort.
Ah yesm, Portland, Maine! It seems obvious to me because that’s where I grew up, but the other one is bigger so I probably should have specified :)