Yesterday was a total waste, spent until 4PM in bed with an upset stomach. I think it was something in the food at Crabby Larry’s that didn’t agree with me. My stomach is way too sensitive, this is the second time this summer I’ve gotten sick after eating food that was perfectly fine for everyone else at the table. So I don’t want it to make it sound like I’m saying that Crabby Larry’s is horrible and dirty, I’m sure they’re fine, I don’t eat Chinese food because of my stomach and normal people don’t have trouble with it.

We went to Crabby Larry’s on Thursday night and met up with Bob (who works just down the street) because I was in the mood for a beer and we wanted to check them out ever since a brewfest that we missed left people raving about some of their new brews. Dinner was far too filling, not helped by the fact that I ordered a cup of soup and the entree came with a salad, I ended up taking half my entree home with me. The IPA was pretty standard issue, hoppy and nice. The treat of the evening was their “Lambic Raspberry Wheat” which was nice and bitter, but had that oh so nice raspberry flavor, according to their site this was one of the hits last year of the brewfest we missed. The other beers that we tried were nothing to write home about, so I won’t.

Friday night we called up David and Constance and headed down to Ortino’s Northside to meet them for dinner. While we were waiting for them we sat down at the bar for a few minutes. That’s when one of the regular bartenders lamented that we didn’t have any Belgians on tap, since she knew I liked Belgians, and said that I’m the “Elephant Lady” … I’m the ELEPHANT LADY?! Of course I instantly knew she was referring to my love for Delirium Tremens, which has a pink elephant as a mascot, but gosh, she could have phrased it better. I suppose since she didn’t even consider it an offense that I can take that as a compliment, clearly someone who looks like I do couldn’t ever think she meant anything other than the beer reference and take offense to it (except that I’m part of the 95%[0] of women in America who have image problems – elephant lady, weep!). In all seriousness though, it was funny and we had a good laugh when we told our friends.

The dinner went well until I was finishing up, that’s when my stomach started protesting and I couldn’t finish my delicious meal. Even worse, I couldn’t finish my second Double Simcoe IPA! It was only 9PM when we wrapped things up, and we were invited to follow our friends back to their house and check out the work they’ve done on their house lately, so we spent the evening back at their place, Michael had a few more beers but I stuck to water as my stomachache got progressively worse. There was much good discussion about religion following Michael’s invitation to David for a sweat lodge next week. Unfortunately I was feeling so lousy that around 2AM I made Michael take me home, bringing the discussions to an abrupt end.

That brings us to my useless sick day on Saturday. Around 4:30 on Saturday Michael made some pasta and his amazing homemade pesto, which my stomach was feeling OK enough to handle. After dinner I went upstairs in the A/C to spend the evening watching movies. Michael ended up heading out to attend a 6 mile moonlit hike at Valley Forge that we’d been planning on doing together, I was really looking forward to going with him, but decided that staying home and resting was the smart thing to do. We did learn that Valley Forge grounds are open until 10PM though, so Michael and I can take a moonlit hike ourselves some evening, hooray!

I’m feeling much better this morning, good thing too since I’m meeting up with a friend for lunch. Need to shower now and give her a call soon.

[0] I made up this statistic

Michael and I went to the Philadelphia Folk Festival this past weekend. Both of us took off Friday and we headed down in the afternoon to check out the opening acts. Our plan was to walk there, since it’s only 2.5 miles from our house, but on our way walking there a very nice couple stopped and offered us a ride – thanks again Zieglersville neighbors!

Friday at the festival was a blast. The artists were diverse and very talented. David Holt‘s afternoon performance was quite a treat, he played an assortment of instruments, including a washboard. The evening concert was also a lot of fun, I really enjoyed all the performers. Back of the Moon was amazing, and we ended up buying a couple of their CDs. I particularly enjoyed The Quebe Sisters (their websites have a couple mp3s to download, check out “Shame on You” and then tell me I’m losing my mind for falling in love with such old, traditional country music), unfortunately by the time I got around to buying CDs on Sunday they had already left and taken their CDs with them. I enjoyed The Lovell Sisters too, and perhaps the most “wow famous and awesome” part of the whole festival was when Doc Watson played, finishing up the concert for the night. The night itself was beautiful too. A beautiful sunset, a clear moon over the stage, and during part of the evening performance a lightning-filled storm cloud hovered to the far right of the stage and made for quite a spectacle, but never came close enough to rain on us or send lightning our way. Too bad we didn’t have our camera that night!

One thing we did have Friday night was a rough walk home. Two and a half miles walk is cake, but aside from being windy and hilly, it was 12:30 at night and there were few lights on the road, more than once we had to jump to the curb to avoid crazy middle-of-the-night drivers. We decided we’d drive the next two days.

Saturday we met up with our friends David and Kathy to head to the festival. We grabbed some fair food (Kathy has the batter fried vegetables every year and doesn’t consider her trip to the festival complete if she doesn’t have them). And then watched a few afternoon shows, including the XPN Local Stars segment, which was… interesting :) The afternoon concert at the main stage was a bit of a disappointment, a bit too much rock mixed into the folk/country for my taste. We headed out shortly before 6PM and headed out for a nice sushi dinner with our friends.

Kathy and David

The Main stage Saturday afternoon – beautiful day!

Michael sitting at our spot on the hill, he looks so good in that hat.

Me, finally prepared for the sun and wearing my new llama hat!

Sunday it rained, but that wouldn’t keep us away – what’s a little rain going to do to us? Going back was well worth it. we attended the Beyond Celtic presentation at the Camp stage which featured Back of the Moon, Baka Beyond and Zan McLeod. They put on a great show that turned into an unforgettable one when people started dancing and the bands invited everyone to dance in front of the stage. So in the rain and mud there were over a 100 people just jumping up to dance to the Celtic and Scottish music that they kept calling to be sped up. I had a blast, and was dancing during the crazy part, but was able to catch a 6 second video clip of it while it was a bit more calm (but still fun!) see it here. And took some photos.

We bought some CDs and an umbrella and grabbed some food later in the afternoon, but after sitting and watching the afternoon concert for an hour and becoming even more drenched by the pouring rain that we finally resigned would not go away, we ended up packing up our things and heading home. When we got home Michael made a fire in the fireplace and we spent the evening drying off, reading and just chilling out. A perfect way to wrap up the weekend.

I’ve been so busy, and now I’m squeezing in a few moments before heading back to the Folk Fest to write this!

The Ubuntu BBQ wasn’t the only thing I was doing last weekend – quite the contrary, which is part of why I’m so busy :)

Saturday morning we packed up the truck with old computers and monitors we’ve needed to get rid of and took them to the nearby middle school which was holding their yearly electronics and hazardous waste recycling pickup. It was great, I drove my truck up, opened all the doors, and a bunch of volunteers hauled the equipment out in about 2 minutes, then I drove off to the BBQ.

I came home from the BBQ, sunburned (oops) and tired, and spent a couple hours getting the house ready for guests. Michael had spent the day working outside handling, among other things, a funny smell outside which turned out to be a dead groundhog in our neighbor’s compost pile – ick. and a disposing of a yellow-jacket nest in our back yard – double ick.

Our friends Kati and Kenny came over late Saturday evening and we spent the night chilling out by the fire out back and enjoying a couple of beers. Michael also made us all a fish dinner around 11:30 pm – yum!

Sunday we all got up, enjoyed some French toast I made with fresh bread Michael made the night before. Due to Michael’s recent cholesterol results I ended up making them with Egg Beaters, which actually turned out to be a great alternative to eggs when making French toast at least. After breakfast we all piled into the truck and headed out to Marsh Creek for a day of kayaking! We had a blast, as I expected, and this time I was smart enough to wear suntan lotion – so no more burns!

After kayaking (and the late night previously) we were all pretty exhausted. Kati and Kenny ended up heading back home and after I took a 45 minute nap Michael and I headed down to the Malvern Sweat Lodge for their New Moon sweat. Unfortunately the sunburn I earned on Saturday at the picnic did not mix well with a sweat lodge (hot steam on sunburn – ack!) and I only made it through one round, but it turned out to be a lovely evening of fellowship in spite of that.

Finally, the bad thing and good thing that came in my paper mailbox last week. The bad was the latest issue of Linux Journal, they ran the QSOL ad again. Apparently not enough people complained, and that apology from Doc over at LJ? I don’t want to think badly of him as people speak so highly of him, but it’s unfortunate that he apologized and then they went ahead and ran it again. The good thing? Well it was so good that the QSOL thing didn’t ruin my day! Remember the Brew at the Zoo festival I went to last month? It was put together by the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation, a non-profit. It turns out that $15 of each $35 ticket ordered online prior to the event is tax-deductible as a donation to a non-profit! Awesome, tax-deductible beer drinking.

Now, back to the Folk Fest for me!

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.