My holiday weekend off ended up being nice and relaxing.

It began with being let out from work an hour early on Friday, always a nice treat. Saturday was my mother’s birthday and I ended up giving her a call and talking for a while, but otherwise spent the day reading and doing stuff around the house.

Christmas Eve we went over to have the traditional Seven Fish dinner:

The fish dinner tradition began hundreds of years ago when the Church required fasting (no meat) and purification as preparation for Christmas Day.

Italians, in response, created “spectacular” (but meatless!) meals that followed the letter of the law, but “successfully avoided the spirit,” Vincent Schiavelli wrote in his memoir of his Brooklyn childhood, Bruculinu, America (Houghton Mifflin 1998). Some Italians chose a dinner of seven fish courses (signifying – depending on your source – the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Virtues, the seven sacraments, the seven days in the week before Christmas). Others chose nine (a multiple of the Holy Trinity).

Ah Italians. Whatever the meaning, I love fish. The fish is gathered by some men in the family via the annual pilgrimage to the fish and cheese markets in Philly, and it’s all quite fresh and delicious – the eel is a personal favorite. We ended up spending the better part of the afternoon and into the evening there.

Monday, Christmas, we went over to my brother-in-law’s house for a turkey dinner and 24 hours of A Christmas Story. We exchanged gifts with my mother-in-law and scooted out after a couple hours to come home and relax.

Tuesday I also had off from work – yay! Michael had a fire going in the fireplace early in the day, so Caligula spent the entire day sleeping in front of it. In the middle of the day I headed out to do some errands. I was able to pick up some nice kitchen things we needed at Le Butler’s Pantry in Skippack. I also took advantage of the “Christmas present” from my mother – any family members can use her employee number to get a 20% off at Petco, sweet! Caligula got some of his favorite treets and a new pair of grooming gloves.

Wednesday I worked 10 hours so I could take off the rest of this week (a month ened week!) without too much guilt.

I took off the rest of this week so we could go to Maine for New Years, unfortunately circumstances changed and we aren’t able to make it up. Well I wasn’t going to let that take away from my days off!

Instead we have a couple of friends come up, Azi (who came up once with some Swedish friends) and who Michael invited yesterday. They just arrived a couple hours ago and had dinner.

Versus

Don’t worry, no one was hurt, Caligula is a merciful housecat with no claws.

Our house was built in 1945 as what we believe was a hunting shack with a single fireplace to heat it. Over the years bits were added to it, it was expanded out the front and back for a kitchen and bathroom and laundry room. The upstairs was finished, an addition was put off to the side for a couple more bedrooms.

The basement is an unfinished area were small animals from outdoors routinely sneak in, but we’d never had a wild animal get into the main portion of the house.

Until this morning.

Caligula was acting weird when we got up this morning, very jumpy and strangely obsessed with the underside of the living room radiator. Upon inspection Michael discovered the root of this fascination.

“THERE IS A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE!”

And the mouse promptly fled into the laundry room – perfect for catching it!

So Michael and Caligula spent the next 20 minutes locked in the room with the mouse (I stayed outside with the camera – have fun boys!).

Searching for the mouse

Searching more

It’s under the drier!

It ran behind the litter box!

I’ll get you!

Caligula was able to get his paws on the mouse at this point and chased it around a bit, Michael sat ready with a bucket to catch it in, but alas…

The mouse made an escape.

It found a hole in our wall at the juction of a doorway, we’d never even noticed the hole. From the draft coming up through the hole we’re pretty sure it leads down into the basement, which makes us believe that’s how the mouse got into our house as well. That will need to be patched.

Mouse hunting is hard work.

I haven’t written much lately, I’ve been a bit out of sorts, but it’s nothing a little time off of work won’t cure! My company gave us off Monday and Tuesday of next week, and I’m taking off Thursday and Friday, Monday we have off and I’m taking off Tuesday. Only one day of work interrupting what will be a nice chunk of time off.

Truth be told, I haven’t been up to much of anything interesting. I downloaded the second season of The Office (American version) and watched that with Michael throughout the week last week. It has its moments, and Steve Carell is a riot.

This past weekend I puttered around the house and on Sunday Michael and I had a late lunch at Max & Ermas before catching a 3:35 showing of The Departed. The Departed was enjoyable, even if it didn’t stand out as being anything spectacular or memorable. The only reason we decided to see it was because it is the highest rated movie playing at the local theater, which certainly says a lot about the movies this holiday season. Oh and there is no way we’re going to see Happy Feet on a Sunday afternoon.

…and what happened to matinees? Do they still exist? We paid $9.75/ticket for a 3:35 showing!

We’ve been keeping up with watching Torchwood, which is still mostly cheesy and delightful, but the last two episodes (9&10) certainly had their moments when we’d look at each other and say “Why are we watching this?” – I want more aliens! Less boring humany emotional stuff!

And I’ve been reading some. I hate to say it, but I’ve been reading the same book for almost a year (with only a few quick reads throughout the month to keep myself occupied). The book? The Great Book of Amber. I’m about 800 pages into this 1264 monstrosity, and I’m determined to finish it because I know it will just sit on my shelf and taunt me until I do. It’s not like 1264 pages is too big of a book, I read 10 of the Wheel of Time books in about a year and they’re from 700-1200 each, it’s just not a book that has sucked me in and held my attention. I think the story is just too complex conspiracy-wise and there isn’t enough action. It’s all a matter of taste though, apparently there are zillions of fans of Amber.

Finally, I got a new cellphone. Our 2 year contract had come up and Verizon was really pushing the Razr phones, so we each got one very cheap. I got the pink one (squee!), and after about 2 weeks of waiting it finally arrived. Unfortunately Verizon locks down pretty much all the features that this phone has so they can make money – you can’t access the storage space on the phone without some hacking (I’m not even sure that is possible anymore with the current software version). This means you can’t get the pictures off without paying Verizon $.25 each to email them to you, and you can’t put your own ringtones on it, you have to buy them from Verizon. The picture thing I’m opposed to simply out of principle, honestly 25 cents is quite a reasonable sum, but because that is my only option when I know the phone is capable of transfer via USB makes me crazy. The ringtone thing wouldn’t bother me either, but the ringtones they put on the phone by default are horrible! About a dozen “ding” rings (which I probably wouldn’t hear) and then a half dozen really annoying songs. I ended up picking one of the less annoying songs so I could actually hear it.

It’s an idea we’ve knocked around for a while, figuring Caligula could use a little sister, but we weren’t seriously looking into breeds and local breeders. Then a woman at work happened to mention that her mother-in-law breeds siamese – bingo!

I’ve known a few siamese, they have temperaments all over the board but they’ve always been lovely animals. After a bit of research into the breed, I was becoming more and more convinced that a siamese would be a good companion to Caligula.

So on Friday I called up my co-worker’s mother in law. She has two litters of kittens right now, born around Thanksgiving. One litter is blue point and the other is lavender point, both litters have females that aren’t spoken for! They will be ready for a home in mid-january, so the breeder is going to give me a call then so we can arrange a time for us to come up and pick out one. Yay!

…of course I wouldn’t agree to this without seeing pictures of them.

Kittens!

Kittens!

Cats!

:D!

Caligula has a zillion toys, so this year we just decided to get him one toy, some cat grass and a delicious tuna dinner.

Ooooh is that for me?

Yay new toy!

Attack!

Rawr!

Then Michael “prepared” a delicious plate of Eukanuba Morsels in Sauce with Select Tuna.

Hey food!

Eating!

Happy 3rd Birthday Caligula!

Just posting this as some notes as to getting abcde and lame setup on my machines.

/etc/abcde.conf

Uncomment:

# Paths of programs to use
LAME=lame

# MP3:
LAMEOPTS="--preset extreme --vbr-new --nohist -q 0 -V 0 -m s"

(options taken from the brain of Mischa, who regularly does releases for #gamemusic)

launch abcde: abcde -o mp3

I set this up on two of my machines, my primary desktop and the HP P3, both of them have been ripping this afternoon. Why? Because once upon a time we thought we thought it was a good idea to rip all our music as oggs to avoid all the patent issues and whatever with mp3s. Then we got mp3 players that don’t play oggs (we knew they didn’t play oggs, ogg playing mp3 players are rare and expensive!). Now we need mp3s, and our music better organized.

This is going to take weeks!

This morning I spilled coffee on myself, down the front of my shirt and onto my pants. I rock. I smell like coffee and the Tide instant stain-remover pen.

Last Friday was the company holiday party. I had thought about not going because of the disappointment of last year (not enough seats for dinner, lousy food) but we were assured that last years fiasco was a thing of the past and this year would be better. We arrived at Normandy Farm around 7:15 for the party and were not disappointed! The room reserved was larger than last year, there were plenty of tables, the food was much better. Unfortunately the entertainment, a band made up of some people in the company, was pretty loud and it was hard to talk to anyone. But they didn’t start playing until after we had finished eating so we could scoot out shortly after they began.

The weekend. Saturday we drove up to Varners Tree Farm in Trappe. The plan was to cut down our own tree like we did last year, but when we reached the tree farm we realized this would take way too long, the place was mobbed! We should have expected that, I took a half day off of work last year to get the tree, an option that wasn’t available this year because I don’t have time available to take off. They had live trees there, and spoke to someone there about purchasing one, but decided against it when she explained that they could only be inside your house for about a week – eep! I want my tree up for a month! Eventually we just decided to grab one of the pre-cut trees, it’s a tree farm, they pre-cut ones are very fresh too.

Our tree is nice, but I do like the adventure of going down to cut our own. Next year I’ll be sure to get that half day off from work.

Saturday evening we drove up to Quakertown to spend the evening with Michael’s family. At some point in the evening it was decided that it would be fun to get out the old 16MM films from back in the 40s of weddings and babies. It was all so Italian-American. I drank a lot of red wine.

Sunday I was dealing with the consequences of the red wine, haha! Actually I was fine by 10AM and went out to Dunkin’ Donuts to get bagels and coffee for Michael and myself. The day was pretty laid back, I did some reading, finished Infoquake which I really enjoyed. In the evening we decorated the living room and the tree.

Caligula helped

…actually Caligula mostly got in the way

Yay Christmas tree %)

We’ll be sending out Holiday Cards this year again.

If you want one drop me an email: Lyz@PrincessLeia.com

Please include:

Real Name and online nick so I know who you are
Address (including country)

Michael spent some time this weekend working with eon, the little Sparc32 and HK-47, the SGI O2 we received as a wedding present. Eon is running Debian Sarge and set up with the proper Perl modules to run my irssi bot R2D2. The O2 is running Debian Etch and is set up for Michael to use with his ambient music radio show setup, now that it’s up and running with the SoundBlaster card. Very nice.

Eon is now on my desk, under my monitor.

As for me right now, I just stumble upon crappy x86 machines that need homes ;)

The last one I aquired, an old 366mhz Dell laptop, bit the dust this past week. We were able to salvage some of the pieces for use in my slightly younger Dell laptop. My test box R2Q5 has been acting up as well. So this week when a co-worker asked me if I wanted her old computer I said “sure!” All I knew about it was that she bought it “about 6 years ago.”

So I brought it home on Thursday night. I plugged it in and booted it up (just to see if it would work). It had Windows 98 installed. It loaded up the background image on the desktop – which looked horrible and made me slightly concerned that the onboard graphics card was toasted. I couldn’t do much with the computer because I quickly discovered that while the mouse worked fine, the keyboard didn’t. Rather than keeping myself up half the night trying to sort out what other problems this monster of an old HP machine had I decided to leave it to this weekend.

On Friday I asked my co-worker whether she ever had problems with the keyboard, she said “No, but the mouse didn’t work toward the end.” I figured, one of the PS2 ports was dead.

First I tried the LiveCD of Edgy, since I had it around. The machine didn’t like that much, it froze up before completing the launch of the installer. Then I found my Breezy CD and popped that in for a normal text install just to get it running and assess what I had. The Breezy install took about 40 minutes.

Once booted into Ubuntu, I was happy to discover the graphics card was fine – better than fine, the default resolution was at 1152×864 – not bad at all for an old onboard card! Windows 98 probably had a zillion viruses and other wonderful things that make it look so bad. It’s a 533mhz box, 128M ram, 40 gig harddrive. Aside from that faulty PS2 port, everything was working fine with it. I think my only complaint is the form factor of the case, it’s short and fat, making it not fit very comfortably next to my more standard-sized Dell.

Now I’m just trying to figure out whether this will be my new Debian test box (we certainly don’t need another production box around!) or if I’m going to keep R2Q5 around for that. I love R2Q5, but he’s certainly got his share of issues, weird behavior of the ethernet card and cdrom which are no doubt both due to the motherboard going bad. It does have the added bonus of an AGP slot, which this new HP lacks, but the HP has a CDR! Yes, I could put the CDR into R2Q5, but the weird behavior of the cdrom extends to ANY cdrom I put into it, wouldn’t be fun for it to die in the middle of writing a CD.

Ah computers.