I have ruined oatmeal. I started bringing a box of instant oatmeal packets to work about a year ago, a quick and yummy breakfast I could prepare here at work with just some hot water. But now I’ve started to associate this yummy cinnamon apple oatmeal taste with work. It hasn’t been a terribly appealing thing to eat these past few weeks. Not wanting oatmeal is not good, if I don’t want to eat the oatmeal I’m more tempted to stop and get a bagel. I need to find a new, healthy breakfast food.

Last night I purchased the plane tickets to Phoenix for our honeymoon. I didn’t just jump on the cheapest ones available because the departure times just wouldn’t work for us. I wanted as much time in Arizona on Monday as possible without having to leave Philadelphia at *too much* of an insane hour. And I wanted the flight out of Phoenix to be reasonably late in the morning – to allow for 4 hours of getting to the airport, check-in, strip-searches, and whatever else you need to do to get on a plane – but I didn’t want to get back to Philadelphia too late in the evening, considering the time difference and all. Unfortunately meeting with Phoenix folks won’t be an option this time because of the logistics of it all, but after all I’ve heard about Arizona I’m sure this won’t be our only trip out that way :)

I also reserved a rental car for the week.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I was too wound up for some reason and then my allergies started acting up. I don’t remember having allergies this bad before, I’m probably going to have to drag myself to the doctor next year if it’s this bad again. I actually tried some over-the-counter Tylenol Sinus medicine last week at the advice of a co-worker (who was quite concerned about how sniffly and sneezy I was). It’s daytime formula, but still made me feel a bit spacey and didn’t as much as I would have liked. Someday I’ll find an allergy medication that works in the day and doesn’t put me into a coma!

On the plus side, I have bright pink tissues.

My sister Heather and her Husband Randy are back from their honeymoon and sent me a whole bunch of pictures last night!

She wrote about the wedding and honeymoon here (hey sis, couldn’t you think of a happier title for your wedding and honeymoon post? ;)).

I’ve posted all the photos she sent me over in an images directory here.

I picked out a few that I especially liked for this entry.

Wedding

Heather and Randy walking down the aisle. When I spoke with her on the phone after the wedding she said she doesn’t remember the ceremony, she does look like she’s in a bit of a daze here!

They got to ride around in a limo after the wedding (oh my gosh, she looks like our mother in his picture)

Woohoo! Cake!

Honeymoon

They spent their honeymoon in the canadian rockies, very pretty!

More pretty.

What a beautiful place!

I had to include this one, I’m a sucker for waterfalls, very nice.

They also saw some deer things.

…and a dragon. I don’t think there are dragons in the Canadian Rockies, so I suspect this photo was from when they were visiting the mall.

I’m so happy for her %D

I’ve been searching for a good Mexican place in Pennsylvania since I moved here. I’ve tried:

• TexMex in North Wales – Not bad, but a little too Tex for me, french fries just don’t go with mexican
• Tortugas in Collegeville – I’ve gone here twice, but it’s really not all that good (in spite of good reviews)
• Mexican place in Kennett Square – Good! But Kennett Square is an hour from my house, a bit far to drive and I’m rarely in the area

Last night Michael surrendered to my want of Mexican food and we tried El Cactus (what a horrible name!) in Souderton. It got good reviews so we though it would be decent. Unfortunately it was basically another Torugas, meh. Clearly people in PA don’t know Mexican food. The guacamole was good and fresh though.

Nita tells me that Coyote Crossing in Conshohocken is pretty good, I’ll have to drag her there someday when I’m at her place visiting %)

I really wish the Margaritas chain extended down here to PA, it’s sad that you can get better mexican at a chain in New England than you can here. I’ll have to hit the one in Nasuha, NH the next time I’m up there visiting family.

But this blabbering about lousy mexican food in PA was only an intro to the real news of this entry – we decided where we are going for our honeymoon!

I know, this is generally something planned months in advance, but we just weren’t sure what we were going to do. Should we just do another hiking and B&B trip around West Virginia and take a more extravagant honeymoon later? Should we just wait on the honeymoon altogether until we can afford a trip to Europe? Should we go with the suggestion of a couple we met at a beer-tasting and check out the Grand Canyon?

The Grand Canyon! That’s where we should go! It’s in the US, so we don’t need to get passports. The flights inside the US are still reasonable (under $300 per ticket out to Phoenix from Philadelphia and back). With all the Native American studies we’ve been into it’d be interesting to finally get out there, as neither of us has been to any of the states out west.

So I told my boss on friday that I’d be taking the week off after my wedding, and I started browsing travel sites for the area. Of course browsing travel sites is a horrible thing to do, since they’re all trying to sell you something and it’s horribly overwhelming.

Very lucky for us, one of the couples we’re inviting to our wedding owns a house in Sedona, AZ (their primary residence is in Maine, we visited them for New Years last year). So I hit up our friend for some tips and advice about the area – must see spots, good places to stay. She insisted that this couldn’t be discussed over IRC (too much to say!) and wanted to call me.

I spent the next half hour on the phone with her, a conversation that began “First of all, we decided you should stay at our house in Sedona.” SQUEE!!! How fantastic!!! How sweet of them!!! Then she went into all sorts of places we should visit, asked about what we wanted to do. We narrowed it down to staying in Sedona for most of the week, and taking a quick trip out for a day and night at the Grand Canyon. Later in the day she sent a .txt file detailing a possible outline of each day of our trip, lots of information about places in the area, tips about where we’re going and all sorts of fantasticness. Wow! It was so awesome of her to take the time to do that. We’re so lucky to have such good friends.

So we’ll be flying into Phoenix on Monday morning, renting a car, driving to Sedona, spend a couple days there relaxing and hiking. Head to the Grand Canyon probably Wednesday and spend the day and the night there, maybe some time Thursday too before driving back to Sedona. Relax/hike/shop more in Sedona on Friday. Drive back to Phoenix Saturday to catch our flight home. Spend Sunday recovering from time difference so we can go to work on Monday. I wish we could spend more time there, but I don’t have enough vacation time to be gone much longer.

Not bad for only planning a month in advance. I’m so excited! Buying plane tickets today.

Last night Michael and I watched Night of the Living Dead (1968). I downloaded it from Archive.org’s directory of feature films – a resource that I found via Romana’s blog entry mentioning it. This is a really great site. Lots of old classics that I haven’t seen are available for streaming or direct download, Night of the Living Dead was available for direct download in three quality levels:

64Kb MPEG4 (109 MB)
256Kb MPEG4 (247 MB)
MPEG2 (4.1 GB)

I grabbed the 247 MB one, the quality was pretty decent, but I still might grab the 4.1 GB one and re-encode it. The download speed was decent too, last night I was grabbing the movies at between 150-200 KBPS.

Mostly I’m looking forward to going through their horror films. I love watching old horror movies around Halloween, and since getting rid of cable I’ve really missed this yearly tradition. Now I can do it again! Hurrah! Although I think we might skip hosting a Halloween party with friends this year, with the whole wedding thing happening the weekend before.

Speaking of the wedding, we’ve made some progress with plans and things.

• Confirmed that our friend Juliana can do the photography (she went to school for it)
• Received new camera, Canon Digital Rebel XL 8MP EOS Digital SLR (it’s very nice)
• Received wedding invitations we ordered (they look great!)
• Made final payments on location (we’ve also secured the 3 room Cottage for Saturday night)
• Made the Wedding Celebration Ale

We need to send out the invitations, finish buying wedding clothes (this is stressing me out a bit, we REALLY need to get this done ASAP so alterations can be made if needed), pick/write our vows and tend to other details of the ceremony itself. Still, I’m pleased with where we are right now in planning, I haven’t freaked out too much about anything yet.

I got my first video game console in the late 80s. My parents never wanted us to have one, they rotted the brain and all that, but after spending a month one summer with my cousins in New York I couldn’t imagine going home and being without Super Mario Brothers 3 and Tetris. My aunt and uncle sent me home to Maine with my own Nintendo Entertainment System. Woohoo!

Over the years my sister Heather and I collected dozens of games for it, picking them up at flea markets and garage sales. We had the console repaired in the mid 90s and as far as I know, Heather still has it and plays with it.

That NES was the only console I ever owned while living in Maine, we couldn’t afford to buy any of the newer systems. Heather eventually got a GameBoy, but I went the way of computer gaming, indulging in Loom, the Monkey Island series, Doom and Rebel Assault.

When I was 18 I moved to New York. My console love was reignited by the discovery of Final Fantasy on the PlayStation. The PlayStation2 was about to come out, so I saved up the $300 (not an easy task, I was supporting myself working as a gas station clerk) and was able to get my hands on one of the coveted machines when a friend who was lucky enough to reserve one was unable to pay for his. The one of the fantastic things about the PS2 was that it was backwards compatible; I got all those Final Fantasy games that came out for the PS and could play them on my nice new machine.

In 2001 I moved in with Michael. My video game love was still intact, and we hosted LAN parties at least twice a year. Again my gaming habits were moving away from the console and games on the computer that I could now play with opponents.

But in the past year or two I’ve grown away from any sort of gaming. Getting Diablo 2 and Doom 3 running in Linux was a fun task, but then I really didn’t feel like playing it. I’ve had my Debian system installed for over a year now and I still haven’t gotten around to installing UT. Michael and I used to play WarCraft3 often, but now I’m not even sure if we have a copy.

I started to think I’d grown out of gaming altogether, and I didn’t have time for video games anymore anyway. My free time was now spent working with Debian and the Ubuntu community, being a mentor to a couple people learning Linux at any given time, offering tech support via IRC and mailing lists, writing documentation and how-tos, organizing local LUG events, keeping up with the fan sites I run. I was being quite productive with my time, and it felt really good for a while.

But lately some of this work I’ve been doing with my free time has felt more like a chore and less like a labor of love. While I know I never will stop contributing to F/OSS or doing many of those things I enjoy doing, I’m going to get burnt out if I don’t take it easy. And with my full time job being so busy I just want to come home some nights and veg out. I greatly enjoy spending time with Michael watching the latest television show we grabbed from BitTorrent, but some nights it’s just not satisfying and I feel lazy. But what else is there to do?

Then my grandmother sent me a puzzle in the mail, which I received after a particularly tough day at work. I was exhausted, but sat down on the floor with it, waiting for Michael to finish up his work so we could go out for dinner, and completed the difficult puzzle in about 20 minutes. This made me feel GREAT! I missed doing puzzles! And puzzles were a big element of what I loved about my favorite video games.

Then made a post where he mentioned the upcoming release of the pink (and black) Nintendo DS. Pink? Oh goodness. I remember when I was living in New York and they came out with the pink Game Boy Advanced – I wanted a GBA pretty bad, but financial issues prevented me from getting one. So I started looking into the DS. Besides being cute (grin), it is backwards compatible with the GBA games! I could get those GBA games I was drooling over back in 2001. And the games for the DS itself are pretty appealing as well, many of them sequels and continuations of the GBA games I wanted. Oh and I miss all those Nintendo characters, getting some of the legacy games that were released would be pretty cool too.

So last night while Michael was working on his latest batch of homebrew, I dusted off my PS2 and fired up Kingdom Hearts (which is actually ‘s, he borrowed FFX from me and I borrowed Kingdom Hearts over 2 years ago and we never unborrowed them – HAH!). I quickly breezed through the part of the game I’d been stuck at and spent about 3 hours figuring out other stuff. Figuring out puzzles for the sake of figuring out puzzles, what a delight!

I think this is what I’ve been missing. I haven’t really grown out of video games. They’re a fantastic escape that my brain still needs.

I’m going to go ahead and get that Pink DS for my birthday. Obviously I’m already working on a game list, but anyone have more game recommendations?

Kitten Caligula stares out window
Originally uploaded by PLeia2.

I don’t remember signing up for Flickr, but I did for some reason a couple months back.

While going through a ton of images on my desktop this weekend I decided that there were some previously published and unpublished photos that I wanted to keep in an accessible place. I could use my Flickr account!

So I did, it’s here.

I am really liking Bloglines. I now have my account set up with about a few blogs feeding into it. I also discovered that I can use it to keep track of podcasts, previously I was just opening up the raw XML and digging out the mp3s – obviously using some sort of front end that can parse the xml for me AND tell me which ones I haven’t listened to is a much easier way to do it.

There’s even a bloglines feature to make your blogroll public, which I did. I’ll probably be adding a bunch more when I remember/come across other blogs that are out there that I want to read. Oh and if you once told me that you had your own blog on your website but aren’t on my list – remind me!

I took the day off from work today. Work has been really burning me out lately and I needed to take a day to just chill out and get some errands done. I spent the morning quite productively.

• Cleaned out the Rav4 – I keep my car very neat, but it needed a visit with a vacuum and some Windex
• Paid bills
• Went to the driver’s license place in Harleysville to get my new license
• Took the Rav4 to the car wash
• Stopped by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription
• Folded laundry
• Did dishes

My new driver’s license picture is not too bad:

There was a security guard at the DMV facility where I got my photo taken whose job it was to tell people coming in to take a number and have a seat. After my photo was taken I heard snoring, he’d fallen asleep in his chair. Nice.

The rest of the day has been spent with little things. I’m cleaning up the home directory on my primary desktop – fun fun. I’d let it get a bit out of hand and it was up to 20 gigs when it really only should have had about 12 gigs of real stuff. I’ve slimmed it down even further now, hopefully I’ll be able to get it under 5 so we can automate regular backups again without it taking forever.

My little sister Heather got married yesterday!

I spoke with her last night, she was attending her reception held at her in-laws house. There were a few snags in the day (including a bit of a snafu with the cake) but she seemed happy and ready to leave the family behind to get going on their honeymoon. They’re going camping in the mountains for a couple weeks, and rounding off their trip by going shopping and browsing at the West Edmonton Mall, which includes a water park, amusement park, over 800 stores, a couple hotels… I’m sure she’ll have a great time.

I don’t have pictures yet, she gave my mother a digital camera during the ceremony to take pictures, and they did the disposable camera thing for guests. I’ll put a bunch of them up on my website when she sends them to me in a few weeks.

…and I’ve never met her husband Randy. In fact, I didn’t even know his last name. It seems very strange that I didn’t know his last name, and I’m sure it gave the impression that we are really out of touch. We’re not, we talk often! But trivial things like last names sometimes don’t make it through. His last name is Day, so now she’s Heather Day. That’s a nice name, and certainly easier to spell and pronounce than Krumbach (well, I don’t think Krumbach is difficult, but it’s amazing how people can mess it up).

I’m so happy for her %D

I updated my Debian MPlayer How-To yesterday for MPlayer v1.0pre8. I’ve been meaning to do that since pre8 came out back in June, and I’ve gotten about a half dozen email in the past month asking when/if I was going to update it. I ran into one problem when compiling, which made me feel quite silly, especially after google couldn’t help me and I had to find the missing .h file myself ;) MPlayer v1.0pre8 is nice, I’m glad I made the upgrade, the first noticable difference was while encoding an .avi for a fellow who emailed me about his trouble with it in pre7, an upgrade to pre8 made a significant difference in quality.

I also set up a Bloglines account yesterday. I know a bunch of people who have blogs that I don’t read just because they’re not on LiveJournal or Xanga. I used to have rss2email set up but then sort of neglected that and it died a quiet death. I’m hoping that by putting all the stuff into Bloglines I’ll finally keep up with it. And it’s the best online reader I’ve found out there, I never could get used to the interface of Google Reader.

And finally, I’ve been in a bit of a crankie mood. I noticed it last night when I was reinstalling XP Home onto my computer (no, I don’t actually use it! We like having XP installed somewhere at home, and my desktop is the only one fast enough and available for the purpose). Windows always puts me in a foul mood, but this was worse than usual. Then grub didn’t want to play nicely and I just got pissed off. Michael is helping me restore the whole system (read: doing it all himself and explaining to me what he’s doing, I get -100 geek points, SEE I’M NOT REALLY SO SMART WITH COMPUTERS</insecurities>).

This morning I made blueberry pancakes, that helped my mood some. Hooray for oodles of natural sugar! But my allergies have been driving me nuts for the past week, not fun.

We have some plans for later today (Labor Day in the US, no work!), but for now I’m just chilling out here with Caligula.

I finally got home from work last night around 6:30, which wasn’t too bad, I was the first one to leave in my department because my boss told me I had done enough and sent me home. After being there for over 10 hours I wasn’t going to argue.

Michael was finishing up some work when I got home, so I sat down and solved a puzzle my grandmother had sent me. I love puzzles, and solving them after a long day of paperwork is so relaxing. I like jigsaw puzzles too, but I worry that if I start one Caligula will steal the pieces, chew on them and hide them all over the house.

Around 7:30 we went out to Sly Fox. To our delight, they had just tapped a couple new beers:

Simcoe IPA
Black Raspberry Reserve

Oh My Gosh. THESE ARE AMAZING!

We didn’t notice the Simcoe IPA on the menu until later in the evening, but after a sampling of it we brought it home in a growler. I’d never heard of Simcoe Hops, apparently they’re the hot hybrid hop in brewing right now. There is a good article on Philly.com about them, and according to the article “Dogfish Head Brewing’s Sam Calagione said his brewers were using Simcoe before it even had a name, when it was known only as “Experimental Hop No. 555.” That’s great.

I had two glasses of the Black Raspberry Reserve with dinner, and I’m still shocked that it is over 7% alcohol. I’m going to need to do some research into the difference between raspberry wheats and raspberry lambics – based on taste alone, I’d call this a lambic, but they called it a wheat ale, and the label says fruit ale. The smell is very sweet and full of raspberry, but the taste is much more bitter, which is what I love in raspberry beers. It finishes cleanly and doesn’t have any weird tastes to it. I brought two bottles home, and cursed myself for not bringing along the second growler so we could get that filled up instead (would have been cheaper, but I do love these raspberry reserve bottles so I’ll survive ;))

Ah month end. I’m sitting here on my lunch break writing this, taking a break from the mountains of paperwork I have on my desk. It’s been the roughest month end I’ve experienced here to date. We’re still short-staffed, I’ve been working at least 9 hours per day all week – which will be nice when I get that overtime pay, but is just making me tired right now.

Wednesday morning I woke up at 5:30 with a stomach ache – a very bad stomach ache, it hurt to move. I spent a couple hours going back and forth from my bed to the bathroom. Finally around 8AM I woke up and moved, and my stomach didn’t hurt! So got showered and dressed and went to work late. Upon arriving at work all I heard was “Is it morning sickness? *giggle*” and then “Oh yeah, there is a stomach bug going around, I had it, $co-worker had it, $co-worker2 had it, the worst of it only lasts for a few hours but boy does it HURT!” The new hire seems to have caught it now, she came into work late this morning (imagine our relief when we got the call from her, she didn’t quit, she’s just sick – phew!).

Last night, after a 10 1/2 hour day at work, Michael made a delicious dinner of breaded chicken and mushroom ravioli, which I greatly enjoyed. I then took a nice long bath. Around 8 I plopped in front of the newly installed Mythbox and watched a couple episodes of Dead Like Me with Michael. One of the temps that was working here recommended it after she saw it on SciFi and so I grabbed a torrent of the first season. It’s not a bad show. It is sad and funny, very reflective and introspective about death without getting preachy (quite a feat). The apathy of the main character gets on my nerves sometimes. Some episodes we’ve watched have dragged, but there have been some great ones too. I went to bed around 10.

I got myself out of bed at 5 this morning to get to the gym before work. The weather has cooled down significantly from the height of the summer heat, which has made going to the gym so much easier. No more humidity! No more sweating before getting to the gym!

The remnants of hurricane Ernesto are scheduled to hit us this afternoon, I didn’t pay much attention to the forecast until I got to work and everyone was talking about it, so of course I didn’t bring my raincoat. It’s going to be a soggy weekend. I am not too broken-hearted about it, the only plans we have are attending a wedding reception for one of Michael’s co-workers and that’s an indoor event. My sister is getting married this weekend too (!!!) but the forecast for where she is in Alberta is calling for sunny weather all weekend.