Yesterday it was hot and humid, apparently we’re in the middle of the worst heatwave of the summer. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the cats though:

Snuggled on the couch when it’s over 90F out and humid? Crazies. Speaking of cats, Caligula appears to be almost all better, hooray! The tail injury must have just been a bad bruising.

Michael is away this weekend. A couple weeks back he decided to head up to Maine to meet up with a friend of ours (whose wife is in Sweden for the summer) to do some hiking around Mount Washington. Unfortunately the plans fell through when our friend dropped him a line to say he’d been ill with a stomach flu for a few days and wasn’t sure he was up for hiking. Not wanting to impose, Michael cancelled his plans and decided to head out to Four Quarters for an event they’re holding this weekend. He left Friday morning and should be coming home sometime tomorrow.

So I made my own plans for the weekend. Last night I met up with a few women I used to work with at my Accounts Payable job for a low-key evening in at Jane’s house. It was a nice evening, and Jane was even thoughtful enough to pick up some belgian style microbrew for me! It’s nice to be keeping in touch with them, hopefully has the summer winds down and all our schedules stop being so hectic we’ll be able to plan more such get-togethers.

Today I’m planning on hanging out with Nita. I was waiting to see what the weather would bring, and it’s another day of oppressive heat so it looks like we’ll be doing something in an air conditioned place. Wandering around the KoP mall? Catching a movie? We’ll see.

I need to learn PostgreSQL. It’s been on The List of Things to Learn for a while now. I keep finding myself bumping into it, most recently at work when I faced installing Nagios with PostgreSQL. After beating my head against the wall for about a half hour I was lucky enough to snag devdasb in IRC and he reviewed the error messages I was getting and directed me to the proper config files to edit to allow the connections I needed. It was all quite involved and I’m not sure I would have figured it all out on my own, even with other systems on the network at work as a reference. Everyone keeps telling me that it’s easier than MySQL once you get over the initial hurdles of sorting out how it works and learning placement of config files, so I should tackle this sometime soon. But not this weekend…

…because this weekend I’m doing stage two of my computer overhaul. A couple weeks back I got my disk usage under control (from 33G down to 16G, without deleting anything important, it was a mess). This next stage of overhaul? Getting services under control. A few months back I installed Kubuntu and regular Ubuntu on top of my Xubuntu install so I could learn all three and be more helpful with our Kubuntu clients at work, and with users of both systems with my LoCo team work. This never really worked out, I don’t have time to learn everything about Gnome and KDE, so I uninstalled them. Unfortunately this left a bunch of silly services I don’t need lurking around. Yesterday I was doing some work and my computer was really acting up, I checked my RAM usage and it was at 1.2G – egads!!! Restarting X (which was using 16% of my 2G of ram) and shutting down a few services brought it down to 300M. I also shut off Composite in XFCE (as pretty as it was, with 75 xterms it gets a bit sluggish). A quick review of my process list showed things like python, NetworkManager and xscreensaver running, none of which I ever use. Sheesh.

And now I will leave you with another picture. I was in the kitchen this morning getting some breakfast when I looked out to the back yard and saw a deer. This was an everyday occurance where I grew up in Maine, but in spite of the obvious deer population in this area (I see them while driving often) I’ve never seen one in our yard. We live in a steep hill with several other houses, and while you’d call our lot a “wooded lot” it’s not like there is a forest here. Very unusual for deer to make the trek here, so I took a picture that turned out to be unfortunately big-footesque, since I didn’t want to scare him.

The last thing I need is another social networking site (so I haven’t signed up for facebook) but lately I’ve started using my LinkedIn account. So I might as well flesh it out, lets link up: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethbevilacqua

We had a few friends over Saturday night, and somewhere in the conversation mct mentioned that he used a firefox plugin called It’s All Text! so he could use vim in place of web browser text fields. Wicked. I used his suggestion of launching a script as my editor, so I have a ~/bin/its-all-text script:

#!/bin/bash
exec xterm -fg white -bg black -cr magenta -fn 9×15 -e vim -X “$@”

It works quite well so far, I’m writing this in WordPress via vim :) The only weirdness so far is with gmail, each time I open It’s All Text! in a Compose Email screen vim has to Recover for some reason, all I have to do is choose the Edit Anyway option and it seems fine. With the WordPress text box it’s fine. Hooray for the continued ability to be obsessed with vim!

I also learned this week about FireGPG. It adds real buttons and menu options to FireFox and within gmail to handle GPG – signing, encrypting, decrypting… Very cool, I really was missing mutt’s integration of this stuff. I haven’t put my key in yet though, this IS third party software related to a webapp, afterall. Have any of you heard of this/used it/confirmed it’s not evil?

Caligula appears to be feeling much better. He was walking around yesterday with little trouble and finally able to move his tail, even if it is still leaning to the left. I’m so glad it wasn’t something worse.

I’m still in pain though. What? Oh yeah, sunburn. It’s feeling worse today than it was yesterday, I slept badly last night because each time I rolled on my back I was woken up. I really need to stop being so dumb about the sun.

And now for pain no one in the house has – but could have! On July 20th I read this Pool infections in Limerick:

The Montgomery County Health Department has issued a warning about a parasitic infection linked to the Spring Valley YMCA in Limerick.

The health department confirmed three infections of the gastrointestinal ailment cryptosporidium, which is caused by microscopic parasites that invade the intestine and pass in the stool. Recreational pools have been known to be a source of this type of infection, which is usually contracted by accidentally swallowing water that has been contaminated with fecal matter.

The Spring Valley YMCA closed its facilities and treated the pools last week, spokeswoman Harriet Morton said. The pools have been reopened.

The Spring Valley Y is the only identified common source in these three cases. No new cases had been reported.

Yep, that’s my YMCA. Yep, I regularly go in those pools – but haven’t lately because when I’ve been going in the evenings lately there have been thunderstorms that closed to pools. Since that June 20th article there have been Montgomery County Health Department signs posted all over saying if you’ve been sick within the last 2 weeks, don’t use the pools, and when I went on the 26th they had a sign up explaining that a couple more pools were closed due to a child having an “accident” – ugh. I’m not one to be all wacky and fearful because of these things, the odds of me actually becoming sick with this is pretty low, but I don’t mess around where my stomach is concerned. I’ve been steering clear of the pools lately.

Been busy lately, and free evenings have primarily been spent just chilling out with Michael and a movie or two.

Thursday evening was spent at a PLUG West meeting, where Amul Shah did a presentation on HD and Linux. He’s obviously done TONS of research on the subject, as his slides were packed with links to a variety of valuable websites on the subject and HD in general. Both Michael and I enjoyed the presentation and soon afterward were plotting the purchase of all this equipment for the move to HD. It also made it painfully obvious that the final switch from analog to digital that is scheduled for 2009 is far too close, and I expect it’ll be pushed back again. If techie people like myself are still so uninformed about the switch that does not bode well for the rest of the public, comments were made at the meeting about mobs with pitchforks. After the meeting we headed over to Flanigan’s Boathouse with about half the crowd of the meeting for a couple beers, we met a couple new people and got to catch up with some other friends and learned that a good friend of ours is moving to San Francisco in October. The second friend this year to leave for SF! Sigh. Happy he’s gotten the opportunity though, it should be pretty awesome for him.

Friday, System Administrator Appreciation Day, Michael and I celebrated by taking each other out to Greater India. The dinner was amazing as usual and highlighted nicely by a nice bottle of Italian white that we discovered a few weeks ago. I love that place. After dinner we headed home to watch some Rifftrax. Michael made a list of all the ones we’ve seen so far, and after this weekend Casino Royale and The Wickerman can be added to that list.

Saturday morning I skipped out to the gym in the morning, spent most of my afternoon reading (I’m now about 100 pages away from the end of Cryptonomicon). Around 4PM Bob dropped by and shortly afterwards we headed out for the Brew at the Zoo, a brewfest at the Norristown Zoo. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I certainly wasn’t disappointed. The $35 ticket included admission to the zoo, all the beer tasting you wanted and food provided by several local shops, which is pretty great for a beer festival. We met up with several friends and after monopolizing a table for about an hour with food and runs to beer tables, got to explore the zoo. The format was great, the entire zoo was set up with tables for the 20-30 breweries they had there, tables for tasting spread throughout the facility. The weather was warm, enough that we were sweating, but not intolerable once the sun started setting and the breeze picked up. As far as beer went I was unadventurous and stuck primarily to breweries I knew about, the glorious exception being the Keystone Homebrew table, where winners of a recent homebrew contest each had 5 gallons of their brews. A fellow named George Wyatt made an IPA that was quite hoppy and enjoyable, but in my opinion the gem of the contest was Wardell Massey’s Raspberry Tripel, which identifies me as totally giving in to my girly love for fruity beer. I also got to try Weyerbacher’s Imperial Pumpkin Ale, which was an extraordinary brew, Weyerbacher just keeps impressing me. In all, it was a fantastic time, and we’re definitely going back next year. After the brewfest Bob, Nita and mct came back to our house to hang out. We had a few more beers, watched some movies and spent until 3:30AM just hanging out and talking. It was a great evening.

Sunday morning I woke up far too early for the 4AM bedtime. As I was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes Michael was saying good morning to Caligula and noticed he was acting a little odd. He was flopped down on the floor and very cranky about moving. When we did get him to walk he seemed off-balance, and his tail was all floppy and off to one side. Oh no! Michael felt around the base and felt a bit of a lump that when touched made Caligula get quite upset. The verdict was pretty much that he’d injured in somehow Saturday when Michael was giving both cats a bath. Caligula’s been in a lousy mood all week (heat probably) so I didn’t think much of it when he was acting miserable right after the bath, but looking back he was unusually reluctant to clean himself off and seemed more uncomfortable than usual following bath time. Naturally I called the vet as soon as we determined there was a real problem, and got an appointment for 11:15 that morning. I was pretty worried. The wait at the vet was pretty long, the vet we go to doesn’t have regular visits scheduled on Sundays, so their limited hours are only for injuries and other timely care and one of the critters that came in before Caligula was pretty sick. When Caligula was finally seen he was very very upset. Hissing, growling, and the doctor actually asked if he would bite (!) and called in a tech to help hold him while he did the examination. The verdict? Probably a bad bruising or sprain, the base of his tail is quite swollen but probably wasn’t broken. Phew! He was put on some pain medication and we were sent home with instructions to keep an eye on him and contact the vet if his condition doesn’t improve within the next 3-4 days.

We arrived home from the vet around 12:30 and I called Michael, who was on his way to a sweat lodge, to let him know the status. That’s when he convinced me that I had time to hop in my truck and head down to the sweat as well, so I did. The sweat was at the Birdsong Peace Chamber, and the first one at that location that I’ve attended. It was almost identical to the Malvern Sweat Lodge, as the owners both had the same teacher and are close friends themselves. It was a hot day for it though, I wore my usual sweat lodge getup of a bathing suit and cotton shorts, and was sweating before the lodge even started! Of the four rounds of the lodge, I ended up making it through three of them, which was pretty good for me. Michael stuck it out for the whole thing, as is usual for him, but it was universally agreed that it was a pretty intense lodge. I have to say that I handle the wintertime lodges much better. After the sweat we got to take a dip in the pool and then enjoyed a community meal where I met a few people Michael knew from the Sun Moon dance he worked with a couple weeks ago.

When I got home after the sweat I took a shower and noticed I’d managed to get a pretty nice sunburn on my shoulders. Ouch. I hadn’t really thought about it while at the lodge, and in retrospect I’m not sure there would have been a good time to apply suntan lotion anyway. I would have sweat it all off in the lodge, it would have been washed off by the pool… and so I am in a bit of sunburn pain now, ouch again. After the shower I promptly went upstairs with the air-conditioning and took a much needed two hour nap. When I finally woke up Michael and I watched movies for a couple hours.

And now it’s Monday morning. I’m still a bit tired and ran out for a cup of coffee this morning, will no doubt turn in pretty early this evening.

It’s been a pleasant weekend. The weather is hovering in high 70s, low 80s with very little humidity. I ended up filling my mp3 player with podcasts yesterday and spending 3 hours tending to my gardens. Afterwards I cut up a bunch of fruit we had around the house and was feeling so domestic that I baked a loaf of banana bread (used this recipe, it’s quite good). I then spent the rest of the afternoon with my nose in a book. Lovely.

In the early evening I headed down to Lansdale to hit Vidalia Marketplace for a few beers. I ended up with sticker shock, they’d increased the prices on all their beer 10% or more since I’d last visited! Apparently they realized what a gold mine they were sitting on. Please PA government dudes, take a hint and take us out of the alcohol dark ages! I picked up a couple lambics for myself and some pilsners for Michael.

Speaking of beer, after a couple exhausting weeks of work and hot weather, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner down at Ortinos Northside. They recently redid their beer menu and added several beer coolers so now they actually have most of the beers on their list. Shocking. I ended up taking up the suggestion by to check out Brewery Ommegang‘s Three Philosophers Quadrupel:

The essence of wonder is a unique and masterful blend of strong malty ale and authentic Belgian Kriek. Our philosophers deduce that this powerful marriage of cherries, roasted malts, and dark chocolate will only achieve more wisdom and coherence as it broods in the dark recesses of your cellar.

According to the label on 2004 bottle of it that I enjoyed, they actually use Lindenman’s Kriek. Oh nice, but this was no girly beer. This was a malty Belgian with a kick-you-in-your-throat strength of aged fruitiness that bordered on a liquor flavoring. I loved it, but just like with the Allagash I had a couple weeks ago I think I’ll plan to share the next bottle I get. It was pretty awesome with the mussels and pasta I enjoyed as an entree.

Anyway, for dinner on Saturday Michael grilled a couple salmon burgers, which were surprisingly fantastic. Michael picked them up fresh at Landis (yes, like the cycling guy, Landis is a big name in PA) and when he inquired about ingredients to make sure they weren’t made of crazy preservatives the seafood fellow assured him that it was all natural ingredients. Cool. After dinner we watched Daredevil+Rifftrax (Rifftrack?), good stuff.

Other misc stuff:

The cup of coins on the roll of toilet paper thing has been successful to ward off Simcoe’s destructive advances so far. She only knocked it over once, and that was over a week ago. I think she’s even afraid to go into the bathroom, which is fine with me, as long as I don’t need to keep the door closed forever I’m happy. I’m still not claiming victory though, and I suspect this is one of those training exercises that will go on for a while, coins > scared > remove coins > attack after forgetting about the coins > coins > scared…

A fellow I know from PLUG recently brought up the suggestion on list that Philadelphia host the 2008 KDE aKademy. I’m not a KDE user, but seeing such a conference come to the States would be cool, even better if it came to Philadelphia! There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but the guy who is heading up the effort has a lot of time to spend on it, so I’m pretty confident that a team of us could pull it off. I’m holding off on my involvement for a while though, I really don’t have the time to put much work into such a thing. Perhaps after we’re confirmed as the location I can make the time.

Much IRC dramaz over at #deep13. Rob posted yet again about how dead the channel is, and then made the executive decision to shut down the channel. I objected, because quite honestly I was pretty pissed that after all the work I’ve poured into the website and the channel over the years some Grand Deep13 Ruler would have the power to end it all at his say-so. Maybe I am just hanging on to something that’s dead and should just give up, but it’s so sad to see a channel that’s been around for a decade be forcefully shut down even when it still has regulars, ya know? Probably I shouldn’t care at all, #13thHour is my real home, we talk about MST and Rifftrax more there than in #deep13 anyway. Yeah, I convinced myself, I don’t care about #deep13 anymore, I’ll be handing in my keys to the website today.

And fun news, Michael and I went to see the new Disney and Pixar film Ratatouille on Thursday night. I had my reservations, I never even ended up seeing Cars because so many friends said it was lame, and I feared the golden age of Pixar had come to an end. I’m happy to say that Ratatouille changed my mind! This movie was a delight! Clever, funny, original. You should go see it.

Sunday I did end up having a couple friends over. It was fun, they brought their Wii and after some failed attempts by myself to play Tennis we switched to Mario Party 8, which was so dripping in cute that I fell in love. Alas, I will not be searching all the local stores to try to get my hands on one (apparently they’re still a bit tough to get), I really don’t have time for console gaming these days. I’m happy with my little pink DS.

I picked up our tickets for the Philadelphia Folk Festival in August. This is perhaps the only thing that ever happens in our lovely town of Schwenksville and we’ve never been to it. Every year there was always something, we were otherwise engaged, I couldn’t get the time off, we couldn’t afford it. But not so this year! We made plans way ahead of time and even bought the tickets before the 10% discount for early purchase ran out.

And speaking of fests, we’ll be attending the Brew at the Zoo 2007 on July 28th. A couple beer-loving friends of ours told us about this last year and I was pretty upset about missing it. I am not missing it this year! The microbrew lineup is really impressive. And you can’t beat the venue! Apparently the Elmwood Park Zoo is a pretty small Zoo (unlike the nearby Philadelphia Zoo), but they have cute, fuzzy things like sugar gliders and a jaguar so I’m happy.

And now it’s time to complain about the weather. The highs have been consistently in the 80s this week (up to 89 today), which would be tolerable except for the humidity. The humidity absolutely kills me, yesterday evening I was even feeling a little sick and skipped going to the gym. I shouldn’t even have to have my A/C on right now but it’s just so intolerable without it. And rain does nothing to clear out the humidity (like it did in Maine), I think it just makes it worse. Yuck. I hate the summers here.

Thanks again to everyone who commented on my entry asking for veggie recipes, we got some good ideas. Too bad most of the recommended books are out of print! But I guess that’s how it goes with cookbooks. It looks like I can snag most of them from Amazon resellers, and those I can’t are added to my used bookstore list.

I’ve been able to get more reading in lately, not nearly as much as I have in the past as I’ve been reading the same two books for 3 months now. I finally started Cryptonomicon, which was recommended to me about fifty thousand times but I never got around to. I’m about halfway through now and it’s been quite enjoyable. I’m also reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which is easily now in my top 5 as far as historical books go. It’s absolutely fascinating, and I find myself talking about it more often than I typically talk about books. Once I finish it I’ll be picking up the PBS Documentary version that I caught a clip of a couple years ago which led me to the book.

Aside from one little outing, my plans for the weekend are pretty much: Find air-conditioned place. Read. Yeah, I could use a relaxing weekend, I’ve been busy lately.

Oh the horror. I just checked my neglected Satellite News box in my @gmail.com address and was shocked to find the following email:

From: Chris Cornell
To: mst3kinfo@topica.com
Subject: MST3K Info: Blobfest

And a reminder…
If you happen to be in the Phoenixville, Pa., area and are a fan of the
movie The Blob, you may be interested to know that Mary Jo Pehl will
be attending this years’ Blobfest. The event will take place on today
and tomorrow at the historic Colonial Theatre.
To learn more about it, visit:
http://www.thecolonialtheatre.com/html/BlobFest.html

And if you see a guy wandering around wearing a blue cap that says
“Sampo” on it, say hi!

Sampo

It ended last night.

Oh no, no no no! Phoenixville is like 20 minutes from my house!!! I’ve never gotten to meet Mary Jo Pehl!! AAAHH :(!!! I think I’m going to cry. I’m on call this weekend but I could have popped out for an hour for something so important! Oh sadness, such sadness.