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Malls

Sunday, May 24th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

My sister’s flight finally came into PHL Friday night around 11:30, so by midnight we were taking 76 through the city to head back to my apartment. I had planned on pizza that evening, but arriving back around 1AM left us with the options of a local diner or Wawa. Wanting her to have the “Philadelphia Experience” we headed over to Wawa and touchscreen-ordered ourselves a couple hoagies.

Yesterday we slept in a bit and eventually made it out the door around 11:30. First stop was right down 422 a few miles to wander around the Philadelphia Premium Outlets. The temperature was still nice enough to walk around the open mall, but by 1PM it was getting warm and we hopped back into the car to head down to the blissfully air-conditioned King of Prussia Mall. We snagged a quick lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon there. Around 4:30 we decided to head back, with a quick detour to hit the grocery store and a salon to get our eyebrows waxed. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a girly day.

Once back at the apartment we settled down in front of the TV to play some MarioKart on the Wii! She had never played, but being the cruel sister I am I threw her in the deep end and we logged onto WFC to play a match against some friends. I was quite pleased with how quickly she picked up the controls and after a couple hours of playing she was really holding her own in the races (read: beating me). We then played a couple little games from Wii Play and ordered a pizza. The rest of the evening was spent with movies.

Today we’re heading down to wander around Philadelphia. It’s going to be another hot day, and the chance of showers this afternoon isn’t particularly impressing me. But we’ll throw caution to the wind and wander around South Street and Penn’s Landing anyway :) Plus we’re meeting up with a friend who is in town visiting from San Francisco, he used to live out here and knows the city far better than I do, so my sister won’t be stuck with just clueless me for a tour guide ;)

So far the weekend has successfully kept my mind mostly off my unfortunate inability to go to UDS. Still, reading about everyone’s travel plans has made me mope a bit! Hopefully I’ll get to go to the next one.

Filed under: family, life, philadelphia

Delayed flight, fixed car

Friday, May 22nd, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I am supposed to be returning from the Philadelphia airport right now, with my sister. Instead I’m still at my apartment, refreshing the USAir Flight Status page to see when her 6:19PM flight is actually going to leave – right now they estimate it at 10PM, ouch. It was on time when she arrived at the airport, mechanical problems pushed it to 7:05PM… next I knew it had been pushed to 10PM. I feel bad for my sister, she’s had to sit in the dreadfully dull Portland airport all evening. For me this just means I have all this unexpected time this evening to work on things, and write in my blog!

Hopefully this super-late night won’t put too much of a dent in the weekend. Planning on just chilling out, possibly hitting the mall and meeting up with some people tomorrow. Sunday is Philly day (South Street, Penn’s Landing). Monday we were invited to a BBQ. Should be a fun weekend.

Oh, and Blinker is fixed! It’s amazing how satisfying this repair is. Since I bought this car a year ago (wow, it’s been a year, just renewed my registration tonight) it’s been making a noise related to the compressor, the complete failure of the A/C is only the latest manifestation of this ongoing problem. But now the noise is gone! Blinker runs beautifully and quietly! Well, as quiet as a 9 year old car with 150K miles on it will run :)

My sister’s flight finally departed at 10:04! Estimated arrival at 11:24PM, so I’ll be heading down pretty soon.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Wii, TV, Blinker and Smartphone

Monday, May 18th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I bought a Wii this weekend. It’s been on my “want” list for quite some time now but I kept putting it off due to financial considerations. I still had those considerations on my mind, but I needed some retail therapy. Nudge me via email to swap Wii and MarioKart codes :)

I ended up snagging the used Wii for $200 at GameStop, and since I had $60 worth of trade-in games I walked out of there with the Wii for $140 – not bad! Along with Wii Sports I snagged Mario Kart and Wii Play (extra controller!). I then spent the entire weekend playing games and watching TV. It was a good weekend, I needed the down time badly. And now I have a shiny fun console for when my sister arrives on Friday (I have a PS2, but few multiplayer games).

Now that I’ve finished Burn Notice and have watched the Dollhouse season finale (hooray for it being renewed!!) I needed something else to watch. I ended up watching all of The Big Bang Theory last week and watched the entire first season of Dexter this weekend. Both great shows. I really lost faith in the quality of television a few years ago, but I’m either lowering my standards lately or the quality of programming has improved significantly. I’m also very pleased with the availability of programming. The networks (and PBS!!!) now offer much of their popular programming for free through their websites, both hulu and youtube offer significant amounts of programming for free. Cable? Don’t even remotely need it, and quite honestly unless all of it is available on demand it would be pretty useless to me, flexibility is too important to me. Rushing to the TV at a certain time to catch a program? How quaint!

I’m bringing Blinker (my 2000 Pontiac Grand Am GT) to the shop tomorrow. I’ve taken it to a couple places for diagnosis and the consensus is that it’s got a bad A/C compressor. Estimates have been from $700-1000 for replacement, which is unpleasant but I’ve budgeted accordingly, the shop down the street gave me a quote of $770. The shop is helpfully within biking distance (walking too, it’s only 1.5 miles away) so that’s convenient. I made sure to stock up on things this weekend so even if it takes until Friday to be completed I’ll be alright without a car. And if all else fails I can ride my bike down to Wawa.

I’ve been looking at smartphones lately and finally decided upon the Nokia E71x with AT&T. This is the culmination of piles of research and a bit of “settling” for something less than perfect. The truth is that perfect doesn’t exist. The G1 came closest, but it’s a bit pricey and t-mobile is not a great option in my area, this Nokia is a nice second. I’ll be getting it in the next few weeks – yay! No more stupid phone! Oh, and pink covers and face-plates exist, that was a vital part of my research.

Spent this evening with a bit of Season 2 Dexter, a giant chicken burrito from a local Mexican place and then an Ubuntu Learning Team meeting (I’m now on the team board, hurrah!). I think I’ll be turning in early tonight, sleep is nice and I have to be up early tomorrow.

Filed under: life

Git, Star Trek, firewall fail and sister

Friday, May 8th, 2009 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

Wednesday night I skipped down to Philly for an amazing pollo y papas burrito at MexiCali Cafe and then over to PLUG for Kyle Burton‘s Intro to Git talk (slides are on his talks page). Great presentation, and in an interesting twist of fate, while sitting at the meeting I received an email from my co-maintainer on webcalendar saying that he’d like to switch our repository from svn to git. I really need to buckle down and learn Git now!

After the presentation we went out for the standard after-meeting hanging out at the Best House down the street. Unfortunately the sky opened up and rain poured out of the sky in buckets shortly after we arrived. By 11 it hadn’t let up and we decided to wander back to our cars, resigned to getting soaked. And getting soaked we did! The drive home in that was a bit slow and I didn’t get back until after midnight, by which time Pottstown at least was only suffering from a bit of drizzle. There was too much rain this week.

Last night I was able to snag an IMAX ticket for the new Star Trek movie, woo! It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to an opening of a Star Trek movie. It was a fun opening night audience, and the movie itself was a lot of fun. I love the characters from the original series, so seeing them re-imagined was a treat, and Simon Pegg as Scotty? Hilarious, brilliant!

I came home shortly after midnight and sat down at my desk to check IRC and email before bed, no internet connection. Lights? Check. Wires? Check. Log into firewall server to see what the deal is? Fail. I snagged a keyboard and plugged the firewall into my monitor – nothing on the screen, no response when I hit keys. I did a hard reboot and halfway through the filesystem check the screen filled with harddrive errors and timeouts. Sigh. I should have expected this, the drive made some clicking noises earlier in the week but they went away and I was busy worrying about other things. Yes, I was helpfully reminded this morning that “denial is not a good hardware maintenance plan” :)

So it’s almost 1AM and I have computer parts all over my living room as I’m scheming a way to get a working firewall without a spare IDE harddrive. I ended up popping the NIC out of the machine with the bad harddrive and putting it in my Sparc Ultra10. The plan had been to retire the sparc this summer because it was becoming more of a power-drain liability than an asset (“yay a sparc!” has been fun, but ultimately it just ran my IRC bots and did some backups). Why not turn it into a firewall? It took me an hour or so to get the machine up with the second NIC and the same bare-bones configuration restored from backups so I had DNS and dhcp. This morning I was able to finish up the configuration to get ipsec back up, and it’s all restored with the exception of bind for internal addressing, I still need to rewrite my zone file (backups of /etc? of course! backups of /var/cache/bind? oh bother!). I’ll rewrite that in the morning. It’s working great so far, I’m pleased with the result, even if I’m now starting to worry about the reliability of the sparc’s harddrives.

I mentioned in my last entry that I might bring my sister Annette down for a few days around Memorial Day. I spoke with my mother yesterday to confirm the dates and times when she would be would be available for driving Annette down to the Portland, Maine airport. When I finally got around to buying the tickets today I was disappointed to discover the prices for flights less than 2 weeks in the future had jumped significantly (oops, this seems normal, next time I’ll know better). So I adjusted the dates a bit and bought the tickets. She’ll be flying from Portland on the evening of Friday the 22nd, spending the long Memorial Day weekend here, and going home Wednesday morning. I’m excited, it’s been far too long since we’ve seen each other. I figure we’ll head down to Philly one day (museums? south street?). I’ll take her to the giant KoP mall one day, perhaps take her out to New Hope. We’ll see based on the weather.

And now since I was up half the night last night restoring my firewall and then worked all day, I’m beat. Going to call it an early night.

Filed under: computers, family, life

Misc life thingys

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

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.

Filed under: life

Women in F/OSS (and why the Ubuntu community rocks)

Thursday, Apr 30th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I’ve been feeling good this year about the status of women in F/OSS. The percentages are still low (in spite of the Google bursary, the number of female attendees was abysmally low at the UKUUG spring conference) but there are a number of factors contributing to my optimism:

  • Hey cool, female computer scientist Barbara Liskov was awarded the Turing Award for 2008! How inspiring!
  • Ada Lovelace Day was an outstanding success. While I didn’t take part (was busy!), hundreds of other bloggers, men and women alike, did. Wow! I read some amazing posts and learned a lot that day.
  • On a personal level, I much less frequently encounter people who are surprised to see a woman involved
  • In a similar vein as the last, I encounter far less discrimination as I once did
  • The number of women on the Ubuntu Women Mailing List and IRC channel continues to grow steadily, as do the number of women involved with Ubuntu in general
  • Without trying, I’ve found myself working on F/OSS projects with women much more frequently

For the first time I am starting to feel accepted and not out of place within F/OSS communities.

Then the situation with “that Ruby presentation” came about and reminded me that while we’re on the right track, we’re not there yet. For those who aren’t aware of the situation, Audrey Eschright wrote a fantastic blog post about what happened and how she felt about it: Dear Fellow Rubyists. She articulated many of the feelings I’ve had over the years when it comes to scantily-clad women being used in presentations at conferences, of which I’ll only post a snipping of here:

Women are a tiny minority in the Ruby world, and we know it. Even before someone says, “hey, it’s cool to see women working with Ruby”. (These sorts of comments are often heard as “holy cow, there’s a chick in this room.” It’s not an issue of intent. It’s that we already felt like we have a blinking arrow over our heads.)

And since we’re a minority, and we often encounter awkward responses to that, we feel marginalized. We also tend to feel marginalized when we encounter sexualized images when we’re in a room full of men we don’t know very well. Even women who like porn can feel that way. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether we like sexual content, it’s whether we’re okay with seeing it in a professional context. Some women may be fine with this (especially if they know the presenter), some may find it tacky and awkward, and some may have the immediate urge to flee the room and be anywhere else right now.

I was also pleased with her follow-up which worked to address the situation: So now what? To me, this screams “We’re not helpless victims and we are not content to simply complain. We want to actively fix things.” Bravo! I’m not involved with Ruby (I’m not even a programmer, I’m a sysadmin!) so the blog entry storm addressing Ruby and the fallout within the community haven’t really interested me, but in the general Women In F/OSS arena there have been a few blog posts that have stood out these past few days:

  • Selena Deckelmann’s What works? Getting more women involved in open source. and her follow-up success story: What’s changed? Portland as an example of increasing women’s participation. I can only hope that female participation in Philadelphia continues to grow similarly, I certainly work hard to implement these same techniques and encourage others around me to do the same.
  • Hackety.org: A Selection Of Thoughts From Actual Women. It was excellent to read such a cross-section of thoughts from women on the situation. Predictably there were women who were all over the board with their thoughts (women are just people, after all, and we all have our opinions). The general consensus tended to be that most of us aren’t specifically offended by porn being included in a presentation at a professional conference, but that we didn’t feel it was appropriate in that setting and that it tends to make us uncomfortable.
  • Catherine Devlin’s right to complaint. I think her first sentence sums of what was most striking to me about her post: “It’s not that the community needs to ensure offensive content never happens, or that the community needs to find a single standard of what is appropriate.” Absolutely. In any community there will be a few folks who are going to be out of line, but it’s the reaction within the community to poor behavior that is vital. It makes me hand out this link often: Dorothea Salo’s What Some Folks Can Do, If They Choose which explains how important it is when men within the community speak up when they see disrespectful behavior.

Guess what was on my mind on Wednesday evening as I was finishing up preparations for my Ubuntu Open Week presentation on Ubuntu Women? I was so nervous! The last time we had an Ubuntu Women presentation for UOW was back when Gutsy was released and we had to moderate the channel. While there were some good questions, the whole session was very stressful. The next time I was approached to do an UOW session on the project I declined.

So 23:00 UTC rolls around last night and I start my presentation in #ubuntu-classroom. There are lots of people in #ubuntu-classroom-chat piping up with discussion. The session went amazingly well. There were fantastic questions, there were no issues that even made us consider moderating the channel, people were engaging and overwhelmingly excellent. A full log of the session is up now: MeetingLogs/openweekJaunty/UbuntuWomen (it’s a shame -chat wasn’t logged, because the discussion there was great).

Following the session we moved the conversation over to #ubuntu-women and continued going over key project points in a discussion where there were dissenting views and opinions but everyone remained polite and open-minded. At the end of the evening I believe disagreements remained, but everyone chose to respect each other and our different opinions and part as friends.

So…

Thank you to the members of the Ubuntu Women project who came by to be supportive and help me answer questions.

Thank you to the members of the US Pennsylvania LoCo team I’m part of for coming and lending their support.

Thank you to everyone who attended the session and asked such engaging questions.

Thank you to those who couldn’t attend but offered words of support.

Thank you to those who had differing views but chose to express them in helpful, polite and constructive ways.

Thank you to the Ubuntu community for making the Ubuntu project a place I can be genuinely proud of being a part of.

You all rock!

Filed under: plug, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Open Week: Ubuntu Women Project

Tuesday, Apr 28th, 2009 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

Tomorrow, April 29th, at 23:00 UTC I’ll be doing an Ubuntu Open Week session on the Ubuntu Women Project in #ubuntu-classroom (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions and discussion).

I will be focusing on:

  1. General intro to project
  2. Why we feel such a project is important
  3. Project resources

Aside from the basics of above I’ll try to put emphasis on our commitment to not being separatist or exclusive, as this is a subject I’ve been encountering a lot lately.

Following this introduction I’ll open up the session for Q&A. So if there is anything you wanted to know and wish to ask about the project, please join us!

Filed under: events, plug, ubuntu planet

Heat, test server, vlc and thunderbird

Sunday, Apr 26th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Today was hot, it appeared to have peaked around 91F, matching the record set in this area 19 years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced 90F degree weather in April before, this is the second day of it and it looks to be lasting through Tuesday. My apartment is retrofitted for A/C, which means there is a big window unit in my living room wall that at full power cuts the temperature in here down to the low 80s. Low 80s indoors is still a bit warm for me, but mostly tolerable for the hopefully infrequent 90+ days. Mostly. My stomach is on the queasy side this evening and I think the cherry Rita’s waterice was my dinner.

The A/C in my car has stopped working. This is something I was anticipating and starting to budget for since the diagnosis a couple months back that my A/C compressor was dying, I had just hoped it would wait a few more months, sigh!

I mentioned in my last post that I brought my “test server” with me to the Trenton Computer Festival. It occurred to me that I never posted about this! The new test server is a $159.99 Refurbished HP DC5100 Combo (specs here if that site goes away). I maxed out the RAM for about $50 and am considering swapping out the hard drive for something bigger than 40G. I installed Debian Lenny with a Xen dom0 kernel and have deployed a few VMs on it. It’s been a great little machine, and during the TCF I just ran OpenSuse off of a LIveCD. As for the other machines on my network… I’ve mostly retired my old test server, the P3 1U, and I will probably be shutting down the sparc Ultra10 once I get the services it runs offloaded to a VM. Retiring the sparc makes me sad, but at this point the novelty and actual usefulness of it no longer outweighs the power and heat concerns.

There are a couple software notes that I’ve been meaning to blog about in some form too…

First: VLC! I’ve been a VLC user for quite some time, but always defaulted to mplayer on slower machines due to some perceived notion that it would run better (maybe because it lacks GUI controls?). Well, I was wrong. On my old Inspiron (650mhz P3, 256M RAM) that is connected to my TV I have to run mplayer with an 8K cache to get movies not to be too choppy, and even this isn’t enough for larger files. So one day when I was trying to play something and it didn’t work, frustrated I tossed on VLC and not only did it work, but I didn’t have to set any caches or change any video options, the movie ran almost flawlessly! So it’s VLC on the old laptop now, sorry mplayer.

Second: Thunderbird. I have a pleia2 gmail account which I don’t often access via the web interface and at work we have some clients using Thunderbird on Ubuntu. Hmm, maybe I should be checking the gmail account with Thunderbird so I can learn how to use it and have the added benefit of actually checking my gmail account? I configured this about a year ago with POP w/o deleting stuff from the server, before they offered IMAP. I don’t like POP, and having everything organized locally on Thunderbird caused a crazy mess when I logged in via the web interface. I kept saying I’d switch to IMAP and get the mess under control and finally did that last week. Annoyingly though, Thunderbird’s default settings for IMAP only have it poll the Inbox during it’s scheduled email checks, folders that had stuff automatically sent to them server-side were not polled. I found a fix for this in the Thunderbird FAQ:

Check all IMAP folders for new mail
Thunderbird can download mail from all accounts when you start the program. Just open the Config Editor, search for the preference mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new, and change its value to true.

Hooray!

Filed under: computers, life

PLUG at the Trenton Computer Festival

Saturday, Apr 25th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Today I woke up at 6:30AM (oh, is that why I’m so tired?) to head out to the Trenton Computer Festival where I was running a table to promote PLUG. I was accompanied by friends Stephen Nichols and Mike Edwards. Upon arrival things were a bit confusing – but within about 20 minutes we’d finally found the appropriate person in charge of the special exhibition tables and were able to get our table set up alongside the table for the New Jersey LoCo Team.

We set up the table, I brought along my test server which I decided to toss the KDE version of OpenSuse 11.1. Why OpenSuse? Because I had the DVD! And I wanted something other than Kubuntu to show off KDE, we’re a LUG after all, don’t want people thinking we cater to just Ubuntu even though that and Debian are my particular choices. We also had some Linux magazines so people could check out some of the cool things being done with Linux, but I might consider stickers with “Demo copy only” on them next time so people don’t try to walk off with them. We also had some printed out slides of past presentations that people could browse through, and handouts detailing the PLUG locations and giving some basic info about the group (I have some thoughts on improving these, but my pile of about 120 was reduced to about a dozen by the end of the day, hurrah!).

But the star of the show? My mini9.

I guess I hadn’t really experienced much of the netbook craze first-hand before, but people really love these things, and communing with other mini9 owners is loads of fun – yes, the mini9 owner who decided to come up and show off his running Windows Vista. I even found myself taking the bottom panel off a half dozen times to show off the easy access to RAM, SSD harddrive and wifi card.

In all, a hopefully very productive day! It would be great to see some new faces show up at PLUG following this. And a huge thanks to the NJ LoCo team for hooking us up with the extra entrance bracelets for our volunteers! I hung my hat up for the table at today’s festival close, but tomorrow Kam will be at the festival doing a talk and manning the table.

Oh, and it was also quite hot today, flirting with 90F (32C) at the peak. In April? Really? Ah weather on planet Earth. Indoors we felt none of this until going outside, but moving the computer stuff across campus to the car after the festival was more of a chore than I had planned. Luckily when I got home my 3rd floor apartment didn’t get too terribly hot over the course of the day, here’s hoping the trend continues tomorrow, it’s supposed to be another scorcher.

Filed under: computers, events, plug, ubuntu planet

“One’s never alone with a rubber duck”

Tuesday, Apr 21st, 2009 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

I moved into this apartment about 6 months ago. I can’t say that I was ever particularly excited to be living alone, at first I was reeling from the divorce and coming to terms with living alone for the first time in my life. I’ve been able to enjoy the novelty of living alone during these past few months, but I fear that’s wearing off. Evenings especially lately are tough, and going out with friends hasn’t helped as much as I’d like it to. It turns out that the freedom and pink castle shower curtains aren’t enough, I really don’t like living alone. I quite like sharing my life and space with someone. I still would like to enjoy spending my evening in IRC meetings, blogging and writing up handouts for the PLUG table at the TCF this weekend, I’d quite like to be doing that sitting near someone I care about. I have no doubt that I’ll have that someday, but until then I suspect I’ll have a few more raining evenings like tonight when I’m pining for it and listening to cheesy old Heart songs (hey, be glad I didn’t go as far as breaking out the Patsy Cline).

Filed under: life
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