It was a busy week, so I’m just now taking the time to sit down and write about last weekend.

Saturday we ended up heading down to French Creek State Park to do a bit of hiking. It didn’t quite work out as we would have liked, as is often the case with these state parks sorting out our orientation on the map and then figuring out exactly where you’re supposed to get on trails was a little tricky and we wasted a lot of time time on unmarked mini trails. Once we got our bearings and got on a nice trail we were disappointed to find that it was poorly marked. We ended up turning around and heading back to the car.

In spite of these things, we spent a good half day at the park. It was nice to get back in touch with the woods even for a bit, and I got some pretty pictures.

After the park we headed up to Kimberton Whole Foods. We’d never been there before, and since it’s less than 25 minutes from our house it’s a nice alternative to the bigger natural stores in the area that are so much further away. Not really a great place to find exotic cheeses, but for the basics it’s great.

Then we finished up our day with a trip to Victory! The food was actually good too, which was a nice surprise (it’s been lousy lately). The beer was as good as ever, I started out with the V-Saison, which they had fresh on tap, and then moved to the old standard Golden Monkey. After dinner we sat at the bar and enjoyed some more beer before heading home, and Michael got a picture of me at the bar with my Golden Monkey.

Sunday we headed out to Chaddsford Winery for their annual Labor Day Weekend Jazz Festival. We packed up some of the goodies we got from Kimberton Whole Foods along with Michael’s famous salmon roll-ups. At the door you pay your $20 to get in and get a wine glass (to keep and use for tastings) and a little info about the event. We quickly met up with our friends who had reserved a big table and along with a bunch of their other friends had filled it with yummie-with-wine snack foods, to which we added ours.

And now to the wines! In spite of a friend of ours wincing when we said we’d hit a local winery event, there were actually some good. The event had tasting stations nicely spread out on their lot, the whites at tables outside and the reds were inside where they stored barrels and had the bottling line. I was really pleased with the setup.

Station #1: 2006 Spring Wine
I don’t remember what any of these seasonal or reserve wines were, unfortunately. This was a sweet one though, but not too sweet that I disliked it. I wouldn’t choose this wine, but I wouldn’t say no if offered.

Station #2: 2005 Pinot Grigio and 2006 Proprietors Reserve White
The Pinot Grigio was pretty good, the Proprietors Reserve was not.

I’m not really into whites so these not being to my taste was probably more due to that than an actual lacking in quality.

Station #3: 2005 Proprietors Reserve Red
This was my favorite of the day, not too heavy or oaky, just a nice clean red.

Station #4: 2005 Merlot and 2002 Merican – Cabernet Blend
The Merlot was my second favorite of the day, heavier than the Reserve but a good solid wine. The Merican was a favorite of our friends, there were a couple bottles of that floating around our table later in the day, it grew on me.

Station #5: 2005 Sunset Blush and 2006 Niagara
Total bust. These were super-sweet, fruity wines that I couldn’t stomach at all. There certainly is a market for this kind of thing though, I saw several bottles being consumed around the festival.

We had the option of taking the tasting tour as many times as we wanted, but were satisfied with the single trip around. Michael hit the store and picked up a bottle of the Reserve Red and Merlot to bring back to the table. The rest of the afternoon was spent eating, drinking, chatting with the people we met at our table and toward the end we even got a bit of dancing in!

It was a really fun time. Our friends David and Kathy have been going every year for 14 years and don’t plan on breaking the tradition anytime soon, so it looks like we’ll have friends to go with next year too!

As for the rest of this past week, the only notable thing was that we went to dinner with Michael’s friend Rebecca and her boyfriend on Thursday. They live out in West Virginia and were in the area for work, so Michael invited them out to Greater India. Michael dated Rebecca several years ago, lost touch for a few years after he and I got together, and recently started communicating again. I vaguely knew her in passing through communicating in IRC, which Michael invited her to while they were dating, and we’ve talked some on IM these past few months. I’d be lying if I said anticipation for such a meeting wasn’t a bit stressful (those irrational “oh no, how do I compare to an ex?!” thoughts), but it turned out to be an enjoyable evening.

Last night Michael ended up going out to a Men’s sweat lodge and I stayed in to unwind and let out all the little stresses of the week. I ended up ordering from the local pizzeria and settling down with a bottle of wine, my laptop and a few episodes of the West Wing. It was a nice evening.

This weekend is our only entirely free weekend of the month (and here I thought things would slow down in September!) so we decided to devote it to doing house stuff that we never got around to, and if we get bored of that we’ll drive up the street to the Green Lane Scottish-Irish Festival. We’ve never been to this festival, but it’s so close, admission and parking are free and it actually looks like it’ll be a lot of fun.

We switched to cloth napkins last week. Paper napkins are one of those things that were always in my house growing up and it never dawned on me until recently that they weren’t the most eco-friendly things in the world. Since we go to the gym everyday we’re doing laundry at least every other day, so buying a dozen cloth napkins to keep in a rotation works out great for us. I wish we had done this sooner. Next step? T-shirts we retired will become rags so we can stop using paper towels for cleaning.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Finally finished Guns, Germs and Steel and will be ordering the DVD next week. I’m following up this non-fiction book with Drawing Down the Moon, a classic in pagan circles that I’m finding quite enjoyable. I started reading Moby Dick, which I’ve been meaning to get around to ever since Penn Jillette first went on about it being his favorite book. In spite of what I’ve heard people say about the dullness of the opening, I’m thoroughly enjoying every page, which certainly speaks to the Mainer in me, I love sea stories. Finally for times when Moon or Dick are too heavy, I began reading a version of Arabian Nights, which has to be one of the best collections of tales I’ve ever read. Not a challenging read by any means (in fact, this version even has pictures every few pages and I laugh at myself for reading a kids book) but sometimes you just need some fun and it’s nice to pick up on all the references in todays culture that come from these stories.

Now for the big news of this post, I now have my very own TekTonic VPS running Debian! Michael and I have been tossing around the idea of completely retiring the noisy, power hungry Sparc64 for a couple months now, but it wasn’t until a nice promotion by TekTonic last month that Michael finally made the choice to move. He bought one for himself to “see how it would go” and within 2 days bought one for me too. This was a good move, I now have the experience to set up and manage my own server (indeed, I had Apache set up for all 4 of my sites within about 10 minutes) so relying on him to install packages I need and do things like set up logrotation for me was getting to be a bit silly.

A nice chunk of my mornings over these past few days has been spent migrating my sites over. PhillyChix.org was done in a matter of minutes. PrincessLeia.com and 13thHour.net were running a version of WordPress in gentoo that is a “legacy” branch, which I was able to upgrade to the 2.2.2 version with no problem. Which reminds me, after reviewing the WordPress package in Debian I decided to roll my own install of WordPress, I can keep up with security updates and I think it’s worth my time to stay with a current release version. WallaceAndGromit.net was the biggest challenge, I’ve wanted to migrate it to WordPress for a while now but again with the “must nag husband to set stuff up for me” thing. This was the perfect opportunity to do the overhaul myself! So I got WordPress installed with a spiffy theme, threw together a new logo, spent about 2 hours Sunday morning plugging in all 108 of the posts from the launch of WallaceAndGromit.net back in 2002 into WordPress. I themed all the rest of the pages to sync up with the WordPress theme and finally had a sie to launch! I am very very happy with it. The only thing left to migrate is mailman for PhillyChix, which I don’t even know how to begin on and I’m too tired to think about it now. There are still some tweaks that need to be completed on the machine, but it’s running great so far.

I have photos and things from our daytime activities over the weekend, but posting those will have to wait, I need to spend some relaxing and snuggling time with Michael.

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.