Our campsite last weekend was crawling with poison ivy, a fact I only learned after I had walked all through it in my sandals to put up my tent. I have never been good at identifying plants, and just didn’t realize what it was. 5 days went by following the trip where I didn’t realize that I had it, I just “have a few bug bites on my ankles” – but this weekend I showed the spots to Michael and he confirmed that the clustering pattern was poison ivy. It’s not a bad case, just a few spots on my ankles, nothing I’ll need to see a doctor for (I don’t think…), but it is my first time catching it and I’m learning a whole new meaning of the word “itchy” this weekend, aarrrg! Thank you neighbor Doug at the campground for pointing it out to us when we met and the other neighbor who loaned us some gloves so Michael could remove most of it, you folks prevented me from getting a much worse case I’m sure.

A couple years ago Michael had a severe case of it, covering half his left leg and much of his right forearm. I don’t know how he coped! He didn’t end up going to a doctor for it (I would have. Steroids ASAP!). This was from some very mature ivy in our back yard when he was cleaning up back there, I was lucky enough just to rub against some young ivy.

So, do you have a poison ivy story?

Friday night Michael suggested we head out to Marsh Creek State Park to do some kayaking over the weekend. Cool. A couple of friends with kayaks recommended the location, and after hitting the website Saturday morning to check out rental rates we packed up a few items to bring along for our day out.

We arrived at the park around noon, covered ourselves in suntan lotion and rented a 2-person kayak and headed out on the lake. I’d been kayaking before, with some friends way back in high school in the ocean (well, a bay), and this was Michael’s first time. Using a kayak when you’re not dealing with ocean currents is quite different from doing it in a lake, and I really enjoyed the calmness of lake kayaking.

We spent two hours on the lake, long enough for my arms to get quite a workout from rowing (even though Michael did most of the work). It was a lot of fun, next time we’ll probably go with separate kayaks, but the two-person one was a fun experience. Afterwards we put a blanket out on the grass under some trees and just hung out for a while and did some reading and relaxing. It’s a bit pricey to go out and do this, $50 for a 2-person kayak for 2 hours, and it would be $80 total for each of us to have a kayak for 2 hours, I guess this is why so many of our friends own their own, which is something we’ll consider if we really start getting into it. One thing we do want to go out and buy is a couple bikes to ride on local trails. We don’t want to spend a lot on bikes right now, and will probably just end up heading out to Target in a few weeks and picking up a couple $100 bikes to get us started.

Michael gave a couple friends a call to get recommendations on places to eat in the area and around 4 we took up one of their recommendations and headed to the Brickside Grille, which is owned by the same people who operate The Drafting Room, for dinner. It was a good recommendation! The shrimp we ordered as appetizers were great, brick oven pizzas we ordered were great, the beer selection was good. Unfortunately our service was lousy, our waitress didn’t write down our orders, so screwed mine up (offered to fix, but no discount on the bill, boo), she hardly ever came to check on us and I had to call her back every time she flew by to drop off food to get more beer or whatever, we never did manage to get her attention long enough to request a couple glasses of water. I’d go back though, having a Golden Monkey with my great shrimp and pizza was exactly what the day called for. Oh, and Victory is right in that area, but after our lousy food experiences the last few times we’ve been there I think we’re close to giving up on their brewpub entirely.

In all, a very good day. Unfortunately both Michael and I got some sunburn, patchy in a few places but I realized this morning that the places I was burned were the spots that got wet while we were kayaking, my right wrist and some on my left, my upper legs. The lotion is supposed to be water resistant, but we used suntan lotion from last year, I know I’d heard that you’re supposed to buy new lotion every year because it doesn’t work as well the next year, but I thought that was just a gimmick by the suntan lotion industry to sell more. It’s just that suntan lotion is so expensive and we never come close to finishing a whole bottle in a season. Sigh, I sure learned my lesson.

Today I have a bunch of errands to run and might round off the afternoon by heading down to the outdoor pool at the YMCA, new suntan lotion in hand.

My email has been moved a few times over these past few years, just ask my boss, I think two migrations happened while I was doing contract work before I was hired, he must think we do email migrations for fun!

Michael has been running qmail on a Gentoo machine for much of this time, but sometime last year he took Google up on their free beta testing of email hosting for your domain. Bevilacqua.us has hosted email by Google, and I signed up with WallaceAndGromit.net (which didn’t even have email hosting previously). PrincessLeia.com email has happily been run at home, with very occasional outages due to the DSL line being down, our migration to FIOS or power outages. Michael’s tried to push me in the direction of using Google to host email for it but I’ve been reluctant, mostly because I love mutt. Until this week, that is, when I finally resigned myself to admitting that making Michael maintain a whole email server just so I could use mutt was silly. Besides, gmail has pop3, if I hated it too much I could always fetchmail from that into mutt, everybody wins.

So I signed up for Google Apps for your domain which includes a free gmail service that is no longer in selective beta testing. I can add a bunch of users to PrincessLeia.com if I felt so inclined (I don’t) and have 2G of space for my own email account, which is PLENTY. Before we made the DNS changes I spent a few hours bouncing from mutt all of my archived mail, which amounted to 5 years worth, 176M (a whole 8% of the total space Google is giving me at the moment). I figure I can just go on using this forever, or until they stop doing it or start charging outrageous amounts for it.

I haven’t had a ton of time to do configuration on my spiffy new google-hosted email address, but I think I’ll be able to adjust. I’ll miss mutt a lot, and will have to run gmail in basic HTML on my laptop (otherwise it’s just too slow). I’ll dearly miss mutt’s threading (gmails “conversations” just aren’t the same), and folder hooks (automagically using my @ubuntu.com email addy for ubuntu lists, different signatures for different email addresses). Suggestions on how to adjust are welcome, Michael just suggested I check out keybindings so that’s my next task.

We’re migrating my email (hopefully for the last time EVER). There shouldn’t be any problems, it was a quick change to something we’re no longer managing ourselves and we’re just waiting for DNS to propagate. But if you email me and it somehow slips between the cracks between now and Sunday just give me a poke in IRC or send an email to my pleia2 at gmail.com address.

More gory details later (and oh, you’ll want to hear them). Right now we’re headed out for sushi with Michael’s mother. Yum yum.

Busy day yesterday.

I got up early and after some conversations had Desktop Debian on my mind, so I wrote about it: O’Reilly Linux DevCenter Blog: Desktop Debian Etch (and Ubuntu). Which reminds me, I need to drop a note to them to get my name changed…

Yesterday morning our PA Ubuntu LoCo Team was made an “Approved” team by the Community Council. Luckily a bunch of people were able to show up, so my input wasn’t really needed aside from me saying “I’m here for PA” (I was working, and didn’t want to take too much of a break for the approval meeting if I didn’t have to). This is exciting news, approved teams are recognized as Official Ubuntu Projects and are thus entitled to some nice benefits (including Ubuntu “stuff” and official CDs, woo!). It’s exciting for the team, we’ve been working hard and planning lots more events for the near future.

Joe Terranova was approved as an Ubuntu Member during the meeting as well – go Joe! He’s helped tons with the PA team (even though he lives in New Jersey). They had to cut the meeting short before another woman I joined the meeting to cheer was approved though. The membership approval requests are increasing quite a bit, enough so that the CC meeting is regularly running over 2 hours and still not getting everything accomplished, I expect a new process will be developed soon.

First off, Michael brought Simcoe to the vet last Thursday to get her sutures removed. It went as expected, snip snip snip and the sutures were gone without a struggle! The only problem was an infection in one of her paws, she was put on antibiotics and we asked Jane to stop in an check on them Friday as well as Saturday so she could get her medication. She appears to be healing up nicely. Yay!

I thought removal of her claws would mean she’d stop with her terrible habit of destroying toilet paper and paper towels that required us to keep the bathroom door closed for months. Not so. Yesterday I was cleaning something up, put the paper towel roll behind me for a minute, and no sooner I see Simcoe with her entire body wrapped around the roll tearing it to pieces. But you don’t have claws! How do you managed to destroy so thoroughly?!

This morning I woke up to a similarly destroyed toilet paper roll hanging in the bathroom. A quick search online for this behavior turned up this page which has a section on toilet paper, the suggestion of “You can balance a small paper cup full of water on top of the roll.” gave me quite a chuckle, until I realized I’d have to clean it up and she’s a cat so would probably manage to escape the deluge. I’ll think of something. Ah kitties.

We returned from the Gaian Mind Summer Festival around 4PM yesterday afternoon. I had a great time. The weather was perfect, it was all very relaxing, we met some awesome people and in all it was a lot of fun.

We drove out Thursday after a busy work day for me, ended up getting on the road around 6PM. On the way we stopped at Stoudt’s Brewery (because that’s what we do!), we didn’t order any beer (gasp) but I did order their decadent “House Pizza” which was: Wild mushrooms, artisanal blue, baby spinach, cheddar cheese, and roasted garlic pizza. – yikes! It was good, the perfect thing to send me off on our camping trip where we ate fruit, bread and granola for 3 days. By the time we arrived at the camp site it was around 11PM, we checked in at the gate and were given a pass to camp in the Members Area since we’d been to the camp before – score! When we got to the site had to pull the car in and shine the car lights at our camp site to put the tent up. It was around 1AM when we crashed onto our blowup mattress in the tent – and it got cold! I planned badly for the cold, having only brought a sheet and a couple blankets, but we survived. Oh and there was poison ivy everywhere that I walked all through with sandals on while putting up the tent, but I’m not itching yet so it looks like I survived that too.

Our camp

No reference point here, but Doug called this “Heart Attack Hill” when I walked with him to get coffee Friday morning, it’s quite steep but a nice shortcut from the members camp to the stone circle

Friday we spent chilling out. Met our camp mates, who included 4Quarters members Doug (from DC, whose son showed up during the weekend too), Tammy and Danny (from South Carolina). It turns out we were also camping with some neighbors! They live in the Royersford, which is about 4 miles from our home in Schwenksville. David works for Swathmore and his girlfriend Susan who works for a neat little company called Harmony Channel that makes videos with some amazing nature (and other) cinematography set to music work by artists such as Patirck O’ Hearn(!). We had some great conversations with these folks, and some other neighbors that stopped by our site to enjoy the campfire that we had going most of the weekend. It’s good to be the campfire tenders. Michael ended up hitting a sweat lodge, but I passed in favor of some alone time with a book and crackling fire. Friday night we got some rest before heading up to the Stone Circle to dance to some psytrance until the sun came up.

OK, so the Stone circle is WAY cooler (and more fun) at night when they have all the black lights on and crazy projections everywhere, but I can’t take pictures in the dark! So you’ll have to survive with just some photos in the daytime.

Saturday was similarly chill out-ish (that’s what I do when I’m camping!). We ended up going to a couple workshops in the late afternoon, both of which were busts. One was a “Discussion about sustainable communities” – I’m not sure what I expected, I guess since I was at a campground I was thinking about campgrounds as sustainable communities, that’s neat stuff. Implementing solar panels for power, growing food to feed campers who want on-site meals, all sorts of interesting stuff. The talk was, in fact, about communes, and people living on communes full time. Apparently “Sustainable Community” is the new term for “Commune” – and changing the name didn’t make them any better. I don’t have a problem with these self-righteous rich white kids who want to join a commune and live possibly without electricity per se, if it makes them happy – great! But they do annoy me. Their thoughts about how horrible the world is (I don’t happen to think the world is horrible), their grand plan to solve all these problems being in the entire world turning back into farmers (I think technology and progress away from everyone being a farmer is mostly good), cutting down trees is wrong and we should live in mud huts like the ones she visited when she went to Guatemala to see the poor people and live with them for a week(!) – and while holding all these beliefs – still saying things like using solar panels and organizing things using the Internet is good and important. Oh and when Michael showed up to the “discussion” with some Palo Santa wood to burn for incense she invited him to light it up, as she had just been burning some earlier sdf*(&FDS$fs%!! It’s ok to BURN South American wood as incense but not to build houses with North American woods grown specifically for that purpose?! Sigh, I guess this got personal, I went from “these commune people” to “that crazy woman” – oh well, she bothered me :) The second “workshop” we went to was the Festival’s key speaker – who was the same one as last year, Daniel Pinchbeck. The man is absolutely insane and has done/does far too many drugs, but sometimes such people are interesting to listen to. Not this time, it was the same talk he gave last year, and he managed to annoy me more this year.

The evening on Saturday was spent by the campfire. Lots of great discussion with our neighbors, I nearly finished my book. A sinus headache cut my evening short around midnight, while I greatly enjoyed listening to the music that could be heard as far as our campsite, I passed on the dancing that night. It was fine with me, I got my relaxing and “in the woods” time, so I was perfectly happy with the weekend.

Sunday morning we packed up, swapped contact info with our neighbors and drove home. Guess where we stopped on our way back? Stoudt’s Brewery! I ate a big burger, which tasted so good after a weekend of granola, bread and fruit and washed it down with an IPA, which was a bit more crisp than the Stoudt’s usually is, a nice surprise. As relaxing as I describe the weekend as, sleeping on an air mattress for the weekend isn’t the most comfortable thing and the sleep I got wasn’t the greatest, I was pretty tired when we got home. I’m still tired today but as the day went on and I got back into things at work I started feeling better, more refreshed. Even so, I’m going to have to see about taking off from work Thursday, Friday AND Monday next year instead of just Friday…

After much complaining about how DVDs suck, we finally broke down and bought a cheap Sony DVD player this week, the Sony DVP-NS57P/B Progressive Scan. I don’t care about xvid and region-freeness or any goodies. I just wanted something that would play damaged DVDs (like ones you get rented), DVD-Rs, and whatever other DVD-stuffs we wanted to throw at it. This replaces our PS2 and DVD-ROM drive in the MythTV box that were our two primary (terrible) DVD players. It still annoys me that we had to buy a machine specifically devoted to playing DVDs to get something that would actually work, but what can I do? I only paid $60 for this player, it’s worth it not to have the frustration anymore. Indeed, the DVD-Rs that just wouldn’t play on the other drives play flawlessly on the new player – success!

Simcoe is healing up. One of her paws concerns me as it’s not healed up as quickly as the rest, but Michael is taking her over to the vet tomorrow at 1:30 to get the sutures removed, they can look at her paw then. I mentioned this to the woman who will be watching her while we’re gone and she’s prepared, so we have our bases covered for a guilt-free weekend.

Tomorrow afternoon after work we’re heading out to the Gaian Mind Summer Festival. It’ll be nice to attend the whole festival this year (had to drive out Friday last year). Camping in a tent, no cellphones, and a cooler full of food and water to keep us alive for the weekend. The weather is looking great (much better than last year – so much rain and mud!). Music all night, dancing, sweat lodges, drum circles, swimming in the creek! I’m so excited, I really could use the break from everything (especially computers).

Well I let my disgust for the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) flow over into the work I do with Ubuntu. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but when someone added “Boy/Girl Scouts Computer Merit Badge Counseling” to our list of possible projects I had to let my personal objection be known.

For the uninitiated, the BSA is a private scouting organization in the US. Some would argue its existence is very much part of American culture and many American men have been involved with the group. The controversy? Somewhere along the way the BSA decided to become quite vocal about not accepting homosexuals in their organization. I personally know one gay Eagle scout who left the organization when the news broke, and many have since – either forced out when it was learned they were gay, or leaving on their own. OK, so they’re a private organization, they can do this, right? Sure, except they’ve been supported by public funds for years. Much of the direct contributions from the government have ceased, but public schools and buildings still offer them meeting space, portions of local, state and federal governments have worked out deals to lease land for events for the token amount of $1 – all at the expense of American taxpayers. I have a serious problem with this. If they didn’t get my tax money I’d still be opposed to them, but it wouldn’t make me so angry, but that is a tangent and doesn’t really have anything to do with this particular discussion.

Bottom line – I will never work on a project with the BSA. I don’t know the official Ubuntu stance on this (if any), so I won’t go as far as to say the team shouldn’t work with them. I pretty much just wanted to voice my objection.

Apparently I touched nerve. The team leader responded to my objection with this forum thread: Politics, Theology, and Ubuntu LoCo Teams. His intention is to reply to me (even if he misunderstood me) and try to bring the whole thing up for discussion and resolution. He made some excellent points that highlight the fact that it’s a complex problem. Since he wanted to make it a bigger discussion I posted a link to the Ubuntu-Women list with the OT header of “Ubuntu for All” (a mailing list for UFA was requested today in light of this). We’ll see where it goes. I honestly don’t think there is a clear cut solution unless the CC stands up and says “We don’t support discriminatory organizations” or “Spreading Ubuntu is more important than anything else” – I think discussion on a case-by-case basis is really the key. An objection from one person may be shared and an event just won’t happen if there isn’t enough support.

Discussion is good and I expect we’ll all come out of this more enlightened (I’d like to think we’re all friends), but I think my activism and “rocking the boat” does bother some people.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been pretty busy lately. A lot of stuff has come up in the F/OSS arena that I’m excited to be working on. I’m very glad that I realized recently that my capacity to take on more projects had ceased and so I wasn’t tempted to volunteer for any LinuxChix related things that have come up lately (I’m sticking around the volunteers list and channel so I am kept aware of things and can pitch in for small things, but no more volunteering for giant projects!).

Unfortunately all this has taken a bit of a toll on me mentally and physically. I am taking plenty of time to relax (reading, watching movies and going out with Michael), and while important, it’s not working as an exclusive form of relaxation. I went to the sweat lodge Thursday night and it dawned on me that I haven’t taken much time alone to completely detach and meditate, journey or do a rune cast in months, I even slacked off on going to the gym until I joined the YMCA last week. Days have been flowing into each other, I’m feeling all disconnected and my stress level has risen when it should be falling. By work day Friday I’m so wiped out that my brain sometimes doesn’t want to work properly.

The solution is not drastically cutting back on volunteer work. I can probably continue at this pace now that I’ve found my limits, afterall – I love doing this stuff and it’s very rewarding, or else I wouldn’t be doing it! But I do need to take more time out of my day each day to detach and get grounded. Even if it’s just 30 minutes of meditation after work, or going outside to sit in the grass for a while. This would be a much better use of time than unwinding by going to silly internet links and laughing about them in IRC or on mailing lists. Getting far away from the computer and all my projects off my mind is important and relaxing in a whole different way. When all is said and done I’ll probably end up being more productive.

So now I have a plan! Must execute now.