I switch between drinking coffee and drinking tea every year or so. The last switch away from coffee was part of a diet thing – I can drink earl grey tea straight without sweetener, whereas coffee I have to add cream and sugar (I won’t use artificial sweeteners). The other issue is caffeine content, I don’t typically drink more than one cup of coffee, and I can drink two cups of tea.

Lately I’ve been drinking 2-3 cups of coffee. I love sugar cubes, in spite of them being completely impractical, they don’t mix into the hot coffee as quickly as plain, granular sugar does, but they’re much more fun. I’m sleeping a bit less, which has led to a tolerable level of sleepiness during the evening but sometimes I nap and have enjoyed much more productivity, staying up working on projects. Living alone has afforded me a more flexible sleep schedule, no worries about keeping someone up or not coming to bed at a reasonable time. I’m on IRC too much and in too many channels, but I’m grateful for the companionship there and I don’t expect this total IRC junkie status to last forever, just while I’m feeling lonely.

Cranberry apple juice is the best. Some of the ones I’ve had in the past were too sour but Apple and Eve’s Naturally Cranberry is fantastic. I discovered it while Michael was recovering from surgery and was told that cranberry juice would help with some of the post-hospitalization recovery.

Wicked Danita
Originally uploaded by radio_free_rlyeh.

I was at WickedFaire over the weekend with Nita. I ended up not completely cropped out of this photo of Nita. Not the best picture of me online… but at least one exists, I had fun that day.

…even if I felt overdressed. I never wear shirts like that one (oh my gosh – low cut on me?!) but most of the women there, well, were dressed more like Nita.

EDIT: And here’s another picture! Thanks Nita.

I haven’t been in the mood to write lately, so you get a list of stuff instead.

A couple weekends ago I spent the weekend hanging out with Nita. The Friday night was spent catching up and I hung out while she, her sister and brother in law played in their bowling league. Saturday started out by meeting up with Nita’s friend Heather in Lancaster. The plan was to hit a mall and go shoe shopping for me. Somewhere along the way they decided that I needed to get my hair done, so I did!. Wow, me with curly hair? It took a can of hairspray and a half dozen bobby pins to get it to stay like that. They also helped me buy some new clothes. It’s nice to go shopping with a couple of women for a chance, I tend to be completely hopeless when I go clothes shopping. That night we grabbed dinner and then spent the rest of the evening… in a bar in Lancaster. It was a bit silly, but I did learn about a new drink – the Irish Car Bomb (pint of Guinness, shot of Baileys, drink as fast as you can). What a weekend, it was awesome for Nita to take me out like that.

Last weekend I went over for a little get together down in Philly with a few friends (most of whom I’d only known on IRC, and met a couple completely new people). It was fun, did a lot of geeking out, played some Munchkin.

This weekend I’m going to Wicked Faire with Nita, should be fun.

…and I’ve done lots of other things, and have lots more plans, lots of computer stuff (there are 4 computers in my office now – oh my!) but I’m too tired to write about them now.

Michael mentioned that he moved out a week ago, so I figured it was OK to say this. We’ve separated. It wasn’t due to some horrible blowup or catastrophic breach of trust, just a lot of issues that piled up over the past couple years and came to a breaking point.

We saw a marriage counselor for the first time on Thursday. The good news is that the therapist said that we’re handling this properly, we really do need some time apart to think and work on taming some of our own demons.

However this ends we both have issues that have been problematic to maintaining a healthy relationship and need to work on getting them resolved.

I received my passport yesterday. Seeing as I just applied for it on the 8th and did a standard application (no rush) getting it so quickly was quite a surprise.

Now I can go to any cool IT conference in the world I want!

This morning I was looking up how to do some filtering in gmail (specifically – how to get it to stop ignoring square brackets, no luck, I don’t think it’s possible).

I did manage to wander around enough to learn something I really didn’t care to have taking up precious space in my brain. Paris Hilton’s shoe size.

I have no idea how I went to square brackets to Paris Hilton.

Thank you Internet.

(It’s a size 11 by the way, which is quite large, and the same as mine. You’re welcome.)

I applied for my passport yesterday. Watch out world!

The weather was gorgeous yesterday, sunny and mid 60s. I ended up opening the windows in my office.

This morning I looked out my window and just the tiniest bit of the sky as the sun rose was filled with a magnificent red. When I went out to get coffee I was able to see the sunrise in it’s full glory, the thin line of red sky with huge red sun and the rest of the sky full of clouds and rain. I wish I’d been in a position to take a proper photo. Seems like the clouds won though, very gloomy out now.

Mmmm coffee.

2008 marks me using Linux essentially full time on my desktop for six years. In spite of that, I’ve kept a dual boot system with Win2K then WinXP that entire time. For a while it was so I had a backup for things that didn’t work properly in Linux (cd burning was a pain for a while, I forget what else). In the past two years or so I’ve been able to solve every issue I needed Windows for, so I came to a point where these were my lingering reasons for keeping Windows.

These reasons are no longer good enough for me to continue to devote 40G of harddrive space to it, so tonight I finally rid myself of it. I now have a 40G /data partition on my desktop, and no more Windows. I feel so much cleaner now. Yay!

I haven’t been writing much these past few months.

The truth is I’ve been going through a very rough time lately. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t like posting when I’m depressed because my posts end up filled with negativity. In this case it’s that coupled with the problems I’m going through not being things I want to share with everyone on the internet who happens to read my site.

So over the next few months the public posts I make will be less about my life specifics as I try to sort out what I’m doing with it. I need to ramble about this in my head and in private journals some before talking about where I come out with it all.

Wish me luck, and here’s hoping 2008 will be significantly better than 2007.