It’s that dark time of year where I don’t see the sun.

Today:

6:30 AM: Leave home for work
7:00 AM: Arrive at work
7:03 AM: Sunrise
4:37 PM: Sunset
5:00 PM: Leave work

OK, so this week is special because it’s month end and I’m working overtime (coming in early). And I do have the option of leaving the office during a 45 minute lunch break, which I do every day during most of spring, summer and fall. Now it’s getting too cold to walk and the traffic around here is so bad I don’t want to drive during my lunch break.

At least last year I had a desk next to a window. Now I need to walk down the hallway, make a turn and walk down another hallway to press my face against a window.

I miss the sun during this time of year.

On the bright side, the company I work for lets us decorate our office for the holidays and on Monday I dove into our stash of decorations at work and transformed the room into some crazy happy Christmas wonderland. I have some singing penguins and a Christmas Furby on my desk, others have a variety of cute noise-making things on theirs. I might be an atheist who doesn’t observe the religious bits of this season, but I love the colors, decorations and lights.

So what is there to do on evenings so dark? This weekend I downloaded the first 9 episodes of Heroes. It had been recommended to me by a few people, and there was a lot of buzz about it at the science fiction convention.

The short review: I don’t like it.

The long review: It has a format very similar to Lost, a series you can’t really jump into in the middle of and each episode unto itself doesn’t have a stand-alone plot, it’s one giant story. I don’t like this format at all (is there a name for it?). While I enjoy development of characters through the run of a series and sometimes a small plotline running through a series (a la X-Files), I want to have a complete story told to me during a single show.

Also like Lost, I don’t really care about the characters. Finally by episode 9 I was starting to feel something for a couple of them, but I don’t think it should take half a season to start caring.

But it is better than Lost. The story has direction and there are hints dropped along the way as to where it’s going to let your brain work a little while watching it.

We won’t be watching any more of it. There were cliffhangers at the end of episode 9, but I’m just not interested enough to want to know the resolution.

I’m so picky when it comes to television.

Thanksgiving dinner went well at my mother-in-law’s. I ate so much stuffing.

Yesterday morning I made waffles with our new waffle maker.

It’s a very nice waffle maker (thanks again !). And although making the batter for waffles is a bit more work than making batter for pancakes, the cooking process is really a no-brainer. No worries about burning them or not having them thoroughly cooked if you follow the specific timing directions.

The waffles turned out great. I’ll have to pick up some blueberries for next time and start experimenting with different recipes.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of starting to make the waffles before Michael checked his email for the morning (he had to work yesterday). He ended up having to spend a couple hours putting out fires on a server because of a datacenter screwup. No waffles for him :(

Around noon I got some paperwork together and headed over to the local Fast Tags office to file the paperwork to get my name changed on my license. It cost me $17 to do it through them, I’m not sure what the DMV would have charged me (if anything), but it’s worth $17 not to have to go to the DMV. After getting that done, I swung by the bank to change my name there. I then went by the local beer store to pick up a case of Wild Goose: Snow Goose Winter Ale that Michael had reserved earlier in the week.

When I came home Michael made a fire in the fireplace and we decided that we didn’t want to eat dinner at home. Michael called up David and Constance to see if they were interested in going out to dinner. Luckily they were! So we met them at our place and headed out for a fantastic meal at the Parc Bistro in Skippack.

Michael and I had been to the Parc Bistro while on the Skippack Strut this past summer, but never had gone there for a real meal. Their menu has all sorts of fancy dishes, as well as some wood oven pizzas. We all started our meal with some Lobster Bisque, which was good but I think it was a bit too buttery for my tastes. Our drink choices varied a lot more than our appetizer choices though, I really wasn’t in the mood for wine, in spite of their impressive wine list, so I got my hands on a Hopdevil from the tap, yum. David went with a bottle of the Grand Reserve Chimay. Michael started off with the Hopdevil and moved to a nice red wine that Constance also enjoyed. For dinner I couldn’t help but order from their wood oven pizza menu, boy do they make a good Buffalo Chicken Pizza(tangy buffalo sauce with grilled chicken, Longhorn Colby, celery and finished with creamy blue cheese dressing.)! Michael ordered the Day Boat Swordfish and Butter Poached Lobster (over creamy orzo pasta with mascarpone cheese, wild mushrooms, grape tomatoes, spinach and chive oil.), which I had my eye on but held off because we’re going to Maine in a month and I don’t want to spoil my craving for lobster before I get there ;D

By the end of the meal we were all too stuffed to have dessert (which is ashame, their dessert menu was IMPRESSIVE). I was also battling a nasty case of heartburn that snuck up on me, no fun. After dinner we headed back to the house and relaxed in front of the fireplace for a while, Caligula certainly was happy to have some friends over, he wouldn’t leave them alone. I don’t remember exactly when they left, but it was after 10 and I went to bed soon afterwards.

Today. At 9 this morning I called PECO to dispute a crazy natural gas charge on our bill, ten times what it usually is. I’m tempted to blabber on for a huge paragraph about how horrible the hour I spent on the phone with horrible customer service people was, but I’ll spare you. The charge is now “Under Investigation.” I blew off the steam from the lousy experience by helping Michael rake leaves outside this morning.

And now I am sitting on the couch with Caligula enjoying a quiet afternoon. Michael is making chicken and garlic mashed potatoes for dinner %d

The three days of work I had this week flew by, and now I’m enjoying a nice four day weekend. I wish I had more of these.

While I was away this past weekend Michael got to discussing our holiday plans (or lack thereof) with Morgana in Maine. She suggested that we come up for New Years again this year. I was hesitant at first, seeing as we JUST had a vacation, but in the end the possibility of heading up to Maine for some great company (and lobster) swayed me (ok, it was mostly the lobster).

I have off December 25th and 26th and was able to take off December 28th, 29th and January 2nd (couldn’t take off December 27th – it’s month end and there is stuff that needs to be done sometime that week). This will give us a nice string of days for driving and visiting with friends. I’m so excited! Even moreso when I learned that a friend who lives out by Erie, PA will be making the trek across PA on the 27th to meet us and ride up to Maine with us. It should be a fun New Years.

During a Doctor Who panel at Philcon the subject of Torchwood the series came up. TORCHWOOD THE SERIES? See, this is the problem with being a Doctor Who fan in the States – I had no clue such a spinoff existed! So on Monday night I grabbed the torrents for the 6 episodes that have been aired in the UK.

The verdict? It’s fun Scifi. I had to laugh at the whole “hot gang of investigators in leather and jeans hitting the crime scene!” cheese of it all, but it just can’t be taken too seriously.

Today is Thanksgiving here in the States. My mother called me this morning to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving and give me a status update on family stuff going on up there. It was nice to hear from her. This afternoon we’re heading over to Michael’s Mother’s my mother-in-laws house for dinner with the family. We’re bringing beer, some fresh beer bread and a pan full of cookies (cooked like brownies).

Mmmm so looking forward to turkey.

I was listening to the podcast of Marketplace Morning Report daily, which includes 2 daily shows that are each about 8 minutes long. Then I was listening to the ~20 Marketplace Takeout which had the “best clips” of Marketplace each week.

I love Marketplace, but I’m not sure any MP3 broadcast would make me sign up to Audible and pay to download them – there is too much other good stuff out there for free.

Well now the full ~30 minute evening broadcast is podcasting for free. YAY!!!

I had a nice time at Philcon this weekend.

I met up with Nita around 7 on Friday evening and we headed down to the Sheraton in Center City to check into our hotel rooms and sign in with registration. Unfortunately they somehow never received my registration – which means my check is lost. I had to sign up there and pay for registration again (will need to put a stop payment on that check too, sigh). I was slightly flustered after the whole thing with my failed registration, and there were a lot of people around, so I was happy when we headed back up to the hotel room to chill out for a few minutes.

Eventually we met up with and went into the first panel.

Friday, 9PM – What is Time – Is time the fourth dimension of space? Is time just another word for entropy? Does time really exist, or is it just an illusion created by our brains? What does physics say about time?

We got into this panel late, missed some important bits and they were in deep discussion when we finally arrived. I didn’t get much out of this panel, can’t say how good it was either!

After the panel mct and Nita wanted to say hello to one of the panelists they knew, and while we were standing around the doorway a guy came up to me, looked at my name badge, and said:

“I know you!”
“Really?”
“I’m Jim!”
“Hmm…”
“NegaWeapon!”
“Oh… OH! Hi!”

It was ! Who I know from #Deep13. It was strange, of all the #deep13 people to bump into there I didn’t expect to see him, there are a bunch of local deep13ers and he’s from over 500 miles away. He came with his fiance, , and a van full of other people they knew.

We spent the rest of the evening down at the bar hanging out and talking. I’m really glad we bumped into each other, it was really cool getting to talk for real and meet his fiance. Besides, Nita had run off to go to the PhilProm, which I was not at all interested in attending (there is a reason I didn’t go to my real prom!)

Around 1AM I decided I needed to go to bed.

The next morning I got up around 9AM, showered, and then Nita and I met up with near the registration stand. We all went out for breakfast and were back at the Con in time for some 11AM panels.

Saturday 11AM – Has Science Fiction swung to the right? – Or is this merely some liberal paranoid delusion?

My favorite thing about this panel was that the hotel had scheduled some Christian revival thing in the next ballroom – their Jesus music was making the walls shake during this talk. The talk itself often drifted off the topic a bit to the panelists political views, but I guess this was to be expected. I don’t seem to recall the question being answered very well.

Saturday 12PM – Revenge of the best films you’ve never heard of – Our annual look at some of the treasure of genre film and TV that American audiences may be overlooking. Bring your note pad

This was enjoyable, I was slightly worried that all the films would be crazy artsy-independent films that would annoy me, but there were some really interesting ones. I should have taken the suggestion to bring a note pad seriously! I don’t remember the titles of anything!

Saturday 1PM – What does the future hold for you know WHO? – Come join the dicussion of the evolution of our favorite Time Lord through the media.

This was really enjoyable. I have spent so much time over the past couple years convincing non-Doctor fans to check out the new series and no time with other fans of the old series. It was really cool to be in a room full of people who knew all about The Doctor – many of them knowing much more than I! The discussion was fairly free-form, but it was interesting and stayed pretty much on topic.

Saturday 2PM – All that glitters… Economies of virtual worlds – From MUDs to MMOs, money makes the world go round. Today we are seeing virtual gold sold on eBay and millions of dollars paid for forms of currency that are little more than 1s and 0s on a protected server. Panelists will discuss what effects online games have had on the world economy, from innovative to exploitative.

We went to this one for two reasons 1) There wasn’t anything else terribly interesting at this timeslot 2) I had met one of the panelists in the bar the night before and said I’d try to drop by one of the VR panels. The panel was my first exposure to Second Life. The panel was recorded and broadcast over Second Life and there was a big screen up showing the auditorium of strange-looking Second Life people. I think because of the whole Second Life broadcast the talk was centered around specifically Second Life economics – which would have been unfortunate had it not been such an interesting and well-documented economic system!

Saturday 3PM – Why do people believe in “weird” things? – Although there are more scientists alive than ever before in human history and the benefits of science are evident everywhere, large numbers of people believe in non-scientific theories such as channeling, the Bermuda Triangle, etc. Why is this and what is to be done about it?

They really ended up focusing on organized relgion as the “weird” thing – so a panel full of agnostic “porn”! It was unfortunate that they didn’t define “belief” because there were several versions put forward throughout the discussion that made it impossible to comment on. I didn’t really enjoy this panel.

Saturday 4PM – Principal Speech – Charles Stross

Honestly? I’d never heard of Charles Stross. But it was interesting to listen to this interview with him where he discussed his personal history, how his writing has grown and progressed, and where some of his ideas came from.

After this “speech” had to head out and I met up with Nita, who had met up with one of the authors at the con, David Louis Edelman. He wrote Infoquake. I also got to meet a couple people from the SciFi book club that Nita is in, Lee and Denise. After some discussion all six of us (Nita, mct, “The Author” David, Lee, Denise, me) decided to head out for some pizza. We hit Rex Pizza, which was just a block from the hotel. The pizza was pretty good, Lee was nice enough to treat Denise and I to a pie the three of us shared. During dinner the subject of beer came up (the subject of beer always comes up when I’m around!) and it turns out that Lee is really into beer! He then suggested heading to Monks Cafe (nationally famous beer bar) after we finished dinner.

Lee told us that Monks was only about a block away, but it turned out to being more like 5 or 6 (for which he was mercilessly teased). Monks was crazy busy, and we snagged 4 seats at the bar when they became available. I bought a round of drinks and we all enjoyed some delicious Belgian ales they had on tap. I am now in love with Philadelphia’s giant ban on smoking – Monk’s was crowded but the bar wasn’t thick with smoke! How wonderful!

We left Monk’s after we finished our drinks and headed back to the hotel. David needed to drop his stuff off somewhere and Nita offered to let him drop his stuff in our room (hahaha Nita is kidnapping the author!), but he ended up dropping stuff off in his car and going off to chill out away from us for a while (we suspected at first that we had scared him off, but he was quite friendly the next day, apparently he was just exhausted).

Then Nita brought me to a couple late night panels that some people she knew were involved with.

Saturday 11PM – Scarlet G 2 – Now with more singing! How well do you know your movie quotes? Well, we’re gonna find out. Come pit your skills versus your fellow fan. May the best person..ah hell, everyone for themselves!

I’m sure this would have been fun if I was more awake (mct told me I looked like a zombie) and if I had seen more movies, my repertoire of movies is pretty sad compared to the other SciFi people who were there.

Saturday 12AM – Versus II : The Revenge – The late night horror continues. So what TV/Film characters would you like to see together? What would it look like? Present them to the panel and find out.

I probably should have gone to bed after Scarlet G, but I decided to tag along with mct and Nita for this panel too. It was a pretty geeky thing, but it was funny. I ran off to the room to crash after this was over though.

Sunday morning Nita woke up at 8:30 to have breakfast with a friend. I laid around for a while until I decided I should get up and get dressed. Nita was off doing her own stuff in the morning so I decided to head to a couple panels.

Sunday 10AM – Holocaust and After in Science Fiction – How has the holocaust influenced genre writers?

I went into this one about 20 minutes into it, by accident. I had actually intended to go to the panel in the next room, but once I sat down and realized my mistake I didn’t feel like leaving… but I should have. It wasn’t a very good panel, rather than talking about Science Fiction, they focused on talking about the Holocaust – a subject that I’m sure anyone going to such a panel would be well-versed in! It really would have been interesting to hear more thoughts about what the real panel topic. Plus, I wasn’t impressed with their lead speaker at the con, Charles Stross, being on his PDA for more than 10 minutes during the discussion – while he was on the panel! He should have given that his full attention!

Sunday 11AM – Sam Will Kill Him If He Tries Anything: Blogging and SF – Some of today’s hottest SF&F writers actually publish several short essays per week, and even per day… online. Whether on MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, or their own websites, authors, artists, and other creators, and their fans, are using web-logs to reach out to other fans. Find out more about this phenomenon, and hear from some of the most popular bloggers out there.

This panel was a disappointment. I wish they’d stay more on topic – talking about blogging and SciFi. Unfortunately it degenerated mostly into a few “popular” bloggers talking about themselves and their personal blogs (I might argue the “popularity” factor of some of the panelists, hundreds of readers is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s relatively small in blogsphere terms). Yeah yeah, you have hundreds of readers, yeah yeah people have copied your posts to other places on the internet, now all of you tell us about why you got into blogging, blah blah blah. I think many people who would attend such a panel are reasonably popular bloggers themselves and stories like this are familiar and are not at all interesting. It was mostly a public bragging-about-my-blog session.

After the panel I called so we could arrange meeting up for lunch, which we scheduled for 1. I then met up with Nita and we went up to the hotel room to crash on the beds for a half hour and then lug our stuff out to the car and check out of the room.

We had lunch at Rex Pizza again (I said it was good!), talked about Doctor Who and the future of projects related to Deep13.org and the wiki. After lunch we headed back for some more panels.

Sunday 2PM – How Would a Galactic Empire Really Work? – Faster than light travel is only the beginning. How would you process the information from a billion worlds?

I enjoyed this panel. The moderator really kept the panel on topic and some ideas came up in the conversation that I hadn’t necessarily thought of. I wish it had been longer!

After that panel we met up with the rest of ‘s party and headed into the last panel of the day.

Sunday 3PM – Mansquito vs. Boa in the Alien Apocalypse: What Happened to the Sci-Fi Channel? – Are we losing the sci-fi on the Sci-Fi Channel to wrestling and police shows? Discuss with panelists the future trend of the Sci-Fi Channel. Will Friday night programming, shows like Eureka and Sci-Fi Pulse be the answers to save the Channel even after cancelling Stargate SG-1?

This was a cool panel. I haven’t had cable in three years now, so I hadn’t seen SciFi’s move to wrestling and other horrible programming, but I’d heard it was bad. A lot of interesting points were brought up. The panelists were pretty well informed about the status if the SciFi channel and their internal history (with the exception of one panelists belief that MST was cancelled because it was too expensive). So it was nice to hear their thoughts, and they actually reached a nice conclusion – the SciFi channel is dying because SciFi has entered the mainstream and lots of money is being pumped into primetime network television SciFi shows.

After that panel I said goodbye to , and the rest of the gang (who invited me up to their hotel room to hang out for a while but I had to decline so I could go home at a reasonable time). I found Nita, and after attending the “Grip session” about problems the con had, we left to go back to Nita’s place around 5:30. Nita got me an invite for a late night dinner with her, some of the big convention organizers and the guest speaker guy, but I had to decline – the invite was for a 9:30PM dinner and I was really wanting to go home – I missed Michael and Caligula!

I didn’t buy anything at the con, but Nita got me an early Christmas present of a signed copy of Edelman’s Infoquake – which is very cool, since I was planning on buying it.

I arrived home around 7PM and Michael had some dinner ready and a roaring fire in the fireplace. I spent the rest of the evening just talking with Michael and playing with Caligula, and went to bed around 9:30.

I got my new social security card yesterday, the government now knows I’m Elizabeth Bevilacqua. This morning I went into HR with my new card to get my name changed with work stuff. I then updated my voicemail and made sure all the proper work orders were put in to update my email and everything. Now that I have the card I can also move forward with all the other things in my life I need to change my name on, hopefully it’ll all be squared away by the end of the year. I spent a little time this morning making new little “business cards” that I like to give out to people I meet and want to swap contact info with (something I was inspired to do after meeting people at beer events – at the end of the night all you have are beer-stained napkins to swap contact info on, hah!)

This evening I’m meeting up with Nita to head down to Philcon. We managed to get a hotel room in the hotel where the convention is being held, yay! So we’ll be able to attend all the crazy late night events we want to without having to worry about agreeing when to head back to Conshe each night to crash. I can sleep when I want to!

It should be a fun weekend. And surprisingly only the second time since Michael and I moved in together that we’ve been separated for more than 24 hours. The last time was over three years back when I flew up to New England to visit family and Michael couldn’t time off because he had just started a new job.

Oh and the internet connectivity situation at the hotel is still unclear. suggested there might be some free hotspots in the area if I really needed to get online for some reason, and you can pay something like $10/night extra per night for wireless internet access. I can probably survive the weekend without it ;) There is free cable in the hotel room and that will probably be sufficient to entertain me during down time. But I’ll bring my laptop along so I can at least do some writing while I’m there if I feel compelled.

Wednesday – Normal day, worked and stuff, was feeling a bit achy

Thursday – SICK! A slight fever and a flu-thing kept me up most of Wednesday night and I stayed home from work. Headache was too bad to do more than to email Michael to tell him I was staying home, call my boss, sleep and zone out in front of the TV.

Friday – Feeling crappy in the morning but went to work because I didn’t have a fever. Noonish I was feeling better, by the time I came home I was just feeling tired. Had dinner and relaxed with Michael until we got a call from Constance and David asking if we wanted to go out to Ortinos Northside. We got there around 7:45 and the parking lot was packed, turns out they were having a Troegs Mad Elf tasting – 2004, 2005 and 2006 Mad Elf on tap. We waited about a half hour for a table, where it came out that we’d actually met Constance before, at and housewarming party – we didn’t remember each other, but it came up in conversation that we knew them and knew and the last time we’d seen him was at the party. We enjoyed the Mad Elf night, they didn’t do samplers so we were forced to order a full glass of each Elf ale. While all good, the 2004 won at our table for the best, it ages very well. Around midnight we called it a night and headed home.

Saturday – It was a beautiful day out, in the low 70s, sunny. We decided to take the opportunity to get some seasonal work done outside. We got all the icicle lights hung around the house, which was not a small task, Michael spent some time climbing on the roof. Later in the afternoon I went out to run some errands (which included picking up a couple Red Gouramis for the fishtank!) and Michael cleaned out the gutters. In the evening we enjoyed a couple beers and watched the first DVD of Arrested Development (which neither of us had seen, but had heard so many good things about) and then a horrible SciFi movie called H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (I was in the mood for horrible scifi).

Sunday – The weather took a turn for the worse, it was pretty gloomy out today! But that was fine, I spent the morning backing up onto CD a lot of photos I had sitting around on my desktop, going back a few years. I then backed up all the stuff on the Debian side of my harddrive (a whole 5 gigs) and decided to install Xubuntu – but that’s a story for another post. This evening the plan is to chill out by the fireplace with our laptops, a beer and a pot roast dinner which has been cooking in the crock pot all day and smelling delicious!

What a nice weekend.

1. The pool was closed at the gym today “Due to a power outage on Sunday.” Boo!

2. After a lousy night sleep last night due to post wood-piling soreness, I think the trip to the gym this morning helped work out some of those sore spots. Yay!

3. Is anyone who reads this going to Philcon this year? I’m going with Nita, but I don’t want to be stuck to her side all weekend and it’d be fun to meet up with some people at the con.

4. I voted.

5. I updated fish.bevilacqua.us now that we have a camera that can actually take good pictures of the fast-moving fishies.

One of the best ideas Michael had for “wedding stuff” was making a Wedding Celebration Ale. I made printed the labels.

It was the first all grain batch, and I believe it was his first one with Belgian ale yeast. In preliminary tastings, Michael said it came out a bit sweet. We handed out the beer at our wedding, with the beerstill needing a week of fermenting, we were pretty confident that it came out well.

Yeah, pretty confident.

So we tried the beer this week. Wow! It’s good! Still pretty light (needs better gravity), but the taste was good! It wasn’t as home-brewy as some of the previous batches had been, I think the all grain bit is really the key, even if it’s so much more work.

Speaking of food, my boss got me the sweetest gift for my wedding (we received a lot of cool/amazing gifts for our wedding, but this isn’t a “look at the loot we scored!” post, I just needed to share the penguins!):

They’re made with Belgian Chocolate and inside each hollow penguin (they came as a pair) there were little chocolate penguins. It’s very good chocolate. Mmmm chocolate penguins.

Friday I went with a co-worker to get a manicure during lunch. I hadn’t been to Breathe Nail Spa in Lansdale since January (just haven’t wanted to devote the time to it, I was doing my nails myself), and they surprised me with their continued dedication to taking time when they do your nails AND they added the nice bonus of a short hot rock massage while your nails are drying. It was a nice treat, the work week felt so long, it’s so hard coming back from such a fantastic vacation.

Saturday was mostly spent cleaning up leaves in our yard. We were expecting a delivery of 2 cords of firewood (which is a lot of wood) and were planning on spending most of the afternoon stacking it, but when the contractor delivering it showed up he only had a quarter of a cord. Apparently they had a lot of deliveries, one of their trucks broke down, and they were backed up, they promised to deliver the rest on Sunday morning. At least we had firewood for a relaxing Saturday night. After the leaves were cleaned up neither of us felt like cooking, and we headed out to Victory for some pizza and beer. We also picked up the Victory Brewing Experience DVD and a Golden Monkey shirt (for me!).

So Sunday morning we got some more wood delivered, and had a significant amount put away by 11 when the contractor showed up again to drop off more – he even gave us slightly more than 2 cords because it took so long. I’m very pleased with the quality of the wood this time, the last place we got wood from wasn’t nearly as high quality. We finally had all cords piled up around 3 this afternoon.

I’m tired :) But we’re now relaxing in front of the fireplace, it’s so nice.