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.

It’s been a rainy weekend.

Friday evening I went out to get my hair cut. I also uncharacteristically stopped at a couple department stores for some idle shopping. I ended up buying a bigger purse (which I needed) but also browsing some other departments. It was nice to just be away from work and home alone for a while.

Yesterday was spent playing with computers. Michael is redoing the MythTV box, the Gentoo Unstable install on it has been somewhat unstable for the past few months, and he wanted to move it over to stable, compile it with DVD support and install another harddrive.

I spent the better part of the day working on my laptops and generally goofing around with other little things. Michael brought home some old laptop harddrives that I tried out to see if they still worked – alas they were trash. I spent some time fighting with my wireless card in Ubuntu Dapper, and finally gave up – but I was helped by the fact that a bug report exists for my problem (thanks to Romana for finding the link to that report for me). Hopefully it’ll be remedied before support for Breezy ends, but for now I’m still using Breezy on these laptops so the wireless will work.

So I grabbed the Breezy CD and installed the server version on both laptops. Once that was completed, I apt-get installed the following packages (plus all their dependencies, which were many):

xserver-xorg
xinit
xfonts-base
xfce4
atmel-firmware
ssh
gnome-system-tools[1]
firefox
aterm
gimp

And the laptops were ready to go! Wireless runs great on both of them.

I made their desktops very basic looking:

– R2A6
– R2B1

I grabbed the background images from this site, which has reasonably high res photos of droids without other stuff in the image.

[1] When I first checked out standard Ubuntu I discovered the network-admin tool, included in the gnome-system-tools package, which is a happy-clicky-gui tool that I use to find and connect to wireless networks. If anyone has a better recommendation for what I should use for this purpose, PLEASE let me know, I haven’t really looked around.

We had a nice weekend with DarkSol (Ian).

He arrived Friday evening around 6PM, the drive up from VA took him about 6 hours. After chilling out for a bit we all piled into the Civic and went over to Sly Fox for dinner. Ian isn’t much of a drinker, so after a bottle of pilsner at home and a pint of Route 113 IPA at Sly Fox he was pretty much done for the night. We got our growlers filled and went home to watch some MST3K, I ended up going to bed around 10 (I’m and old lady).

Saturday morning Michael made a delicious rosemary French Toast breakfast, and we spent most of the day just hanging out in the computer room, talking and working on our computers. In the evening we went out to Ortinos Northside for some food and beers, I was dying to have some of the Delirium Tremens (my FAVORITE beer!) that they had just tapped. We weren’t disappointed, the food and the beers were delicious, Ian even got to try a lambic. When we returned home we sat out back around the fire pit for a couple hours.

At 10 that night Michael and Ian did a join radio show on AKA Radio. I stayed up for some of it, but ended up hitting the sack around 11:30.

Sunday was similarly low-key, Ian and Michael slept in past 10. We actually woke Ian up (we’re terrible hosts) to offer him some breakfast around 10:30 – he had a bit of a hangover, oops! But not surprising, since he had at least 5 reasonably high alcohol content beers Saturday night, quite a bit for someone who doesn’t normally drink.

Instead of going home Sunday evening, we insisted that he spend the night again and leave on Monday morning. The picture below was taken Sunday afternoon, I wanted to get a better one after I saw Caligula’s glowing eyes in this one, but the boys loved it too much.

So the only sights he saw were of some great PA beers, but I think a nice relaxing weekend was what we all needed.

Of course less than a week after Michael spends lots of time to detail all the machines on our network, I bring home another to add to his list :)

I’m friendly with some of the IT guys at work, and the other day one of them was cleaning out one of the “old computer junk” closets. I happen to notice that he’s throwing a bunch of Dell laptop docking stations into a box, so I stopped to ask what was going to happen to all of them.

“We just throw out the docking stations, why, do you want one?”

“My personal laptop is old, but I’ll bring it in tomorrow and see if one of these stations will work with it!”

On Friday I brought my laptop in and went into the warehouse where the piles of old computer junk was piled. Alas, all the docking stations I found were for Dell Latitude notebooks, not Inspirons. Dejected, I walked passed the IT office, said “nope, only Latitude docking stations out there, no Inspirons.”

One of my IT buddies got up and pondered this, “I think there still might be one in the other building, wait here.” So he went to the other building, and came back with a Dell Port Replicator II, the docking station for the Inspiron! ROCK!

“Do you need a power supply too?”

Sure.

So he goes and gets the power supply, and returns with a power supply in one hand and a laptop that looks very similar to mine in the other.

“Here’s the power supply, and this is an even older Inspiron than yours, but you might want it for parts?”

It was a Pentium 2, I don’t need more old computers!

“Really, if you don’t take this we’re going to throw it away. I think it’s got a 4 gig harddrive in it that could be used.”

I was persuaded, my Inspiron only has a 3 gig harddrive, I figured that even if it was too old to be useful I could pop out the harddrive and use it in my laptop.

I spent some time on my lunch break pulling up the specs on this Inspiron 7000 and found this site – it’s a pretty decent machine! 366mhz, 128M ram (only can upgrade to 192). It was slightly beat up, doesn’t lock closed properly when you close it, but if this machine actually runs it could be a perfect machine to set up with a wireless NIC in the magic room.

So after confirming that I wouldn’t get in trouble for walking off with company propery (“Nope, it’s been off the books for years, we didn’t even realize it was still around”) I brought it home.

This morning I put in the Ubuntu Dapper Server install CD in and installed it. Got it running with XFCE4 and all. It runs great, these old Dell laptops are great! And even better, it doesn’t have a 4 gig harddrive – it has a 10 gig harddrive! So I’ll probably be putting this harddrive in my laptop to replace the 3 gig one. The only disappointment is with Dapper itself, it still isn’t seeing my Wireless NIC – a flaw I hoped was fixed since the official release, looks like I’ll be sticking with Breezy on my laptop until I find the solution.

I totally scored.

And now DarkSol is sitting next to me using the laptop :) I’d hate to make his visit a side note on an entry about computers, so I’ll blabber on about our weekend with him visiting later %)

I’ve been taking walks at lunch these past few days because it’s been nice, but today it’s a bit more humid than I’d like so I get to finally write in this. Besides, MorganHorse needs something to read when she’s bored at work.

I’ll start with beer. This week I tried some new beers, two of them ended up being quite good.

First was the Three Floyds Gumballhead. Michael talks about it here. It’s a wheat, but it’s dry-hopped, which gives it much good hoppiness. Crisp, a little sweet and goes down easy, very good summer beer. It was on tap at Ortino’s Northside and we brought home a couple bottle-conditioned bottles, I’m not sure which I like more, I’m actually leaning toward the one on tap because it’s sweeter.

Second was the Sly Fox Pub Ale. While IPAs and Belgians are on the top of my list as far as beer styles go, I do enjoy the occasional English-style pub ale, Boddingtons is a favorite and so is Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale (which I bought as a joke, but have since had in bottles AND on tap – it’s good!). This Sly Fox Pub Ale ranks right up there with these favorites as far as I’m concerned. It has “little bubbles” from the nitrogen that’s pumped in while it’s being poured (a la Guinness and Boddingtons), and has a finish that seemed similar to a Maibock, very refreshing for a pub ale. I don’t order dessert every time we go out, but I couldn’t resist pairing this beer with a slice of carrot cake.

I also tried the Shipyard IPA since it was on special in bottles and I’d never tried that Maine brew. It wasn’t very good as far as IPAs go, watery and pretty weak overall, but at $2.50/bottle I wasn’t expecting much from it.

Now audiobooks! I have been hitting the library for audiobooks these past few months, and early this month the Lansdale Library got in a whole pile of new ones, hooray! I decided to pick up Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. Anyone who knows me probably knows that “chic-lit” is not my style, but I guess it was curiosity that drove this choice. This was a highly acclaimed novel in the genre (with several sequels) and addressed a shopping addiction that I can’t relate to at all. As you might expect, I hated it, but I listened to the whole thing. This week I picked up The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova which is about a young woman who is tracking down Dracula, it’s cheesy in an “I’m trying to be dark and serious” way, still not generally my style, but it’s turning out to be fun to listen to.

Now movies! We watched What the Bleep Do We Know!? last night. It was recommended by some people I like and respect as a good film attempting to unite Quantum Physics and Spirituality, so I went into it expecting it to be pretty good. I was horribly disappointed. There were glaring factual errors that even I could pick out, and even some of the things that weren’t outright lies were presented in a misleading way. The leap they made from Quantum Physics to Spirituality was just that, a LEAP. I remember when I first learned about Quantum Physics, by reading Discover magazine in High School – I got that “OH MY GOSH I CAN WALK THROUGH WALLS… wait, I can’t *ponder for 3 years*” But then you get over it because there is not enough evidence to draw conclusions about the nature of reality and all that; this movie didn’t get over it and drew all sorts of wacky conclusions. I’m not trying to say that the movie was all off-base and wrong, it certainly had good moments, but I tire of people trying to link science and spirituality in such a poor manner – it makes them both look bad.

Fabric, there is a fabric outlet within walking distance of my job. I never paid much attention to it because I didn’t care about fabric until I got my sewing machine. I went there earlier this week, and wow! Lots of fabric! Much of it is $1-2 per yard, the nicer stuff is closer to $5 and up – these are not bad prices for fabric I think? I just ended up spending a few bucks on a pile of fabric remnants ($3.50), a pile of buttons ($1.50), a 6″ zipper ($.25) and a package of purple lacing ($.75) – all stuff to practice with. I’ll be making clothes for my stuffed animals for months – hahaha!

Oh, and this week Michael updated Bevilacqua.us to showcase all our computers, Check out the Clockbot Network here.

Finally, (DarkSol) is coming up tomorrow %D I’m excited, between work and family events this week things have been a bit stressful so I needed something to look forward to.

Since I’ve been lazy, stressed and tired all week, there is a bunch of stuff I need to get done this evening before DarkSol arrives tomorrow. Quick cleaning of the house, laundry, mending a fitted sheet to use with the spare bed (with my sewing machine!) and probably half a dozen other things I am forgetting about. Michael is hitting the grocery store today so we’ll actually have food here when he shows up (thank goodness, Michael also mowed the lawn yesterday <3).

And now my lunch break is over *back to work*

Friday night we met up with Michael’s friend from work Juliana and her boyfriend at Triumph Brewing in New Hope for a late (9PM) dinner. I’d never been to Triumph before, it’s pretty far for us to drive (almost an hour) and the only time Michael had gone was on his way home from an event he attended in New Jersey with Bob.

The atmosphere was pretty typical for a hip, modern, brewpub. The clientele was almost exclusively 20-30-somethings, and they ID us at the door (which later struck me as odd, in the table area there was a family with kids – hmmm). They had a band, which playing pretty typical “rock” stuff, it was pretty awful ;) Luckily after finishing a beer at the bar we got a table outside under the stars, the evening was cool and beautiful. We enjoyed their Bengal Gold IPA, which was a pretty average IPA, hoppy and a bit citrusy. We hung out until around 11:30, they talked about going to another bar/club in the area, but I was pretty tired from yet another long week at work and was TOTALLY A PARTY POOPER and said I was tired and wanted to go home. So we got growler of the Bengal Gold IPA and headed home.

We now have 7 growlers, this is our first clear one.

Yum yum, growlers.

Yesterday was a pretty mellow, lazy day. I worked on some tutorials for a while. I also did my first fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper. The LiveCD+Installer thing is a very interesting idea. A pretty fully functioning Gnome session comes up, you click on the Install icon on the desktop to start the install, then you can play games, surf the web, do whatever. Of course having gnome running is pretty heavy overhead if you have an older machine, the install went pretty slow on my 450mhz P3 with 256M ram – and there is no option on that disk to do a text-based install, boo. Apparently you have to download the “Alternate install CD” if you want the text-based install or to do anything special. I wasn’t about to download and burn another ISO for that, so I just went through the typical install.

My main reason for doing this fresh install was Ubuntu-Women support related stuff, I want to be as helpful as I can to people who drop by with more typical installs than what I have on my laptop. Plus, one of the tutorials I’m working on will work best if I have directions and screenshots from a basic Ubuntu install. I also wanted a list of all the default packages installed on a pretty typical Ubuntu install – everyone I asked for such a list would point me to the list of all packages in Ubuntu, or would try to teach me how to install packages(!). So now I have a list (returned by dpkg -l after the install was completed).

Yesterday I also aquired the Pimsleur Spanish Levels 1-3. I’ve been playing with the idea of brushing up on my terrible spanish since we considered a trip to Peru earlier this year. I took spanish from 4th grade – 11th grade in school, but it wasn’t taught well, there was no organization to it, so we learned the same grammatical rules several years in a row, had teachers that were from Mexico, Columbia, Spain… very different spanishes in those different places. Living in Maine we had no exposure to real spanish speakers, at the time there wasn’t even a spanish television station in the area. It’s amazing that I took spanish for so long and still can rarely follow a conversation in spanish, let alone speak it myself.

Anyway, I figure it’s about time I get back to learning that. It’d be nice to visit Peru and have a clue what the signs say and how to get directions from natives. Plus, it’ll be really useful when we finally make it over to Europe, spanish is so similiar to Italian and Portuguese that getting around in much of southern Europe would be greatly aided by knowing how to speak spanish. Pimsleur is an audio-only method, but I did learn plenty about pronunciation of letters and words in spanish at school so reading it won’t be a problem once I gain the ability to speak conversationally. I’ll be tossing a few lessons on my mp3 player.

Today we don’t have plans, but it’s beautiful out so I’ll be spending some of the day outside.

I don’t want to be buried when I die. I have a bunch of reasons why, but there are 3 major ones.

1. It is a waste of time and money to go through the embalming process, my body will be a chemical-filled mess when it’s put in the ground and won’t break down naturally.

2. Even if I believed in the religious stuff surrounding the importance of being buried, my body will probably be dug up eventually, either for “progress” (graveyard in perfect spot for commercial development) or “science” (archeologists digging up bones). Doesn’t this eventuality sort of make being buried for some religious reason silly?

3. It just seems weird to bury people, I’m a bit freaked out by it. My father was cremated, as was my grandfather. I’m going to continue that tradition when I die.

Feel free to disagree, I don’t mean to offend. I realize that there is a lot of closure for families when they see an embalmed body at a wake, or that traditional coffin going into ground thing.

But this entry is about reason #2.

When I moved to this area about 5 years ago we lived in an apartment near Montgomeryville. Route 309 in Montgomeryville has a mall, hundreds of big stores, shops and restaurants. In the two years I lived in that apartment they expanded substantially, cutting down trees, building more buildings, I’d say the area grew at least 20% in two years. It’s even more developed today; the gym I go to regularly is one of the newer buildings that they cut down trees to build.

In the middle of all this commercialism was a quaint little, white church. It was across the street from Montgomery mall, nestled between Route 309 and a Burger King and had a little graveyard out back. I always felt sort of bad for that little church, and made an offhand comment more than once that I “don’t want to be buried because I know I’d end up next to a burger king and my poor body would reek of hamburgers for eternity.”

A few months back I drove by this little church, and saw big Caterpillar trucks in that graveyard. What on earth are they doing? They aren’t digging up the graves are they? They wouldn’t…

A few weeks later I noticed that all the gravestones were gone. By this point I was pretty sure they hadn’t taken them away to be washed, they had moved the graves. Gross.

A couple weeks after that there was a sign on the property saying something like “Join Burger King! Move your business here!”

A couple weeks ago I was leaving the gym and saw this:

Guess what used to be where that pile of rubble is? The church!

And this is the former graveyard:

(The pictures are somewhat deceiving, I took them early in the morning and tried to not get cars in the picture, 309 is a very busy route in this area, two lanes going each way where this picture was taken.)

This made me really sad for some reason.

Maybe I’m remembering the cute little white church in my hometown that looked similar to the one that used to be here.

Or maybe it just kills me to see any sacred places torn up and developed.

Or maybe it just depresses me to be living in a society that believes in burial but feels it’s ok to just dig up those bodies and relocate them when enough money becomes involved.

Michael and I went with some of his family members to a Reading Phillies game last night. Game recap here, they won 4-1.

I’m not much of a sports person, as if that’s not obvious. In fact, this is only the second baseball game I’ve ever been to in my life. The first was when I was a teenager, I went to a Portland (Maine) SeaDogs game, which they lost. But the weather last night was beautiful and I wasn’t about to give up free tickets to an outdoor event. It’s pretty amazing how those high powered lights can make the whole stadium look like it is still daylight out, after remarking on this Michael said that we really should hit a Philadelphia Phillies game sometime, since their stadium is HUGE and very impressive. The company I work for often has free tickets in their own box at that stadium, I might try to snag a couple next time an email goes out giving some away.

The game itself was just a baseball game. I enjoyed myself, didn’t eat too much terrible food (just some French Fries and Twizzlers), and soaked in the cool weather. There certainly were a lot of advertisements peppered throughout the entire production and little side games for spectators to keep people interested, they threw a lot of stuff into the stands for people to catch too. I guess this sort of thing is just part of baseball today, and certainly did its job keeping people excited about the game, even if there still was a bunch of people leaving after the 7th inning (a Reading win was pretty obvious by that point).

We got home around 10:30PM. I actually managed to get out of bed on time this morning so I could get to the gym shortly after 6AM. Unfortunately when I got there the parking lot was almost empty, there were a few people milling around the doorway. I got out of my car as a couple women were walking toward their own cars.

“It’s closed. We’ve been here since 5:30 – nothing! We give up!”

How annoying! I am wearing my gym clothes! I need to shower and dress for work! I dragged myself out of bed to get to the gym this morning and they are CLOSED! ARRGG!!

So I sat in my car and read a book that I had stuffed in my gym bag (thank goodness) until someone finally came in at 7AM to open the gym. 7AM? Sigh. They didn’t even bother swiping people’s cards as we came in, there were about 20 people waiting and they “had to wait for the computers to come up” which apparently takes 10 minutes or something. I did manage to get on the elliptical for 20 minutes and the machines for another 20 or so, but I really didn’t do enough, I’ll have to go back tomorrow morning. What a waste of my morning. I’ve been drafting a letter to the gym in my head all morning about how pissed I am, we pay a decent amount of money for a gym that will be open when they say they will be, and the gym is not on my way to work, gas isn’t cheap. I know, I know, this is just once, there was probably some emergency and the person who opens it couldn’t come in, blah blah blah. It just threw off my whole morning.

I’m sitting here at lunch eating some leftovers from dinner last night. Michael made pasta and falafel balls.

Falafel … is a fried ball or patty made from spiced fava beans and/or chickpeas. It is a highly popular form of fast food in the Arab East, but is also made as a snack food for the youth. Falafel is very common in Greater Syria and it is the most popular daily food in Syria. The word “falafel” comes from [an] Arabic word … meaning pepper.

I’d never had falafel before, but he figured we should try it as a substitute for meatballs (which I don’t particularly like). He made a good choice, falafel balls with pasta and tomato sauce are yummie!