I’m tired today. I slept enough, it’s probably just the weather, heat really takes it out of me.

Michael and I went out for dinner Thursday night and I suggested we check out the new Skippack Ale House on Route 73. It use to be Samuel Eatons, and I went there with a few months back and was terribly disappointed at just about all aspects of the place (food, beer selection, service, atmosphere…). I hoped that the name change meant new management and a better beer selection, but that wasn’t the case. When we sat down we were waited on by a young man, we asked to see a beer list and he said they didn’t have one and then rattled off the mediocre collection of beers they had on tap – it wasn’t as bad as the usual Coors and Budweiser list, but it wasn’t terribly impressive either. We asked about bottles and he replied “We everything in bottles.” Oh really? Everything? BWAHAHAHA! We decided not to embarrass him or ourselves any more and scooted out the door when he left the dining room. We enjoyed a nice dinner at the Roadhouse Grille instead.

The weekend was a good one, in spite of the 90F+ weather.

Friday night was spent with . It was nice to finally see him, he’s been so busy with school and work lately it’s been hard to coordinate our schedules to meet up. We went out to dinner at a local beer bar and then headed back to our house to watch some movies and chat for a bit.

Saturday night we had Bob over for an enjoyable evening. He brought along his Sparc5, a few beers, and we had a couple growlers from Sly Fox. We ordered some food from the pizzeria down the street and chilled out in our air-conditioned computer room. Beer, computers, friends, hooray!

Sunday Michael and I got up and drove out to Cabela’s in Hamburg to get some camping supplies for our trip out to Central PA this weekend. It wasn’t a bad drive out there, only took us about an hour. Driving up to the Cabela’s store was an interesting experience in itself, you come around a turn on Route 61 and then you see the giant building and Cabela’s sign on top of this big hill, like some sort of shrine. Route 61 turns into four or five lanes, two of which are turning lanes to go into the Cabela’s “complex.” I wish I’d brought my camera. The store was fairly busy, as to be expected, and heavily decorated with a whole outdoorsy hunting theme, including dozens of stuffed animals, several of which were posed on this big fake mountain in the middle of the store. We ended up buying a large tent, an air mattress and an LED lantern for our camping needs.

After leaving Cabela’s we went to downtown Hamburg and had lunch at a sub hoagie shop that reminding me once again a huge reason why Americans are fat – I ordered a “mini” sub and it was 7″ long, I could barely finish it! But it was a good sub. We drove home around 1 and spent the afternoon hiding in the air conditioning.

Sunday evening we had Nita over, her birthday was last week and we wanted to take her out. We ended up going down to Ortino’s Northside beer bar (after making sure they had the raspberry lambic that she enjoys). It was a nice dinner, and it was great catching up with Nita. We made some tentative plans for heading up to north Jersey next month for wedding dress shopping.

And now it’s Monday. It’s supposed to be hot all week, upper 80s as the highs. I’m hiding inside my office enjoying the air-conditioning.

Yesterday Michael and I went out to Koehlers Jewelers in Lansdale to pick out our wedding bands. This is where Michael bought my engagement ring and he was very pleased with the experience (and I am certainly pleased with the result!). Shopping for the bands was made easy for us by an attentive jeweler pulling out a whole array of white gold rings as soon as I asked. We kept things simple, I got a band that is the same thickness as my engagement ring, Michael got it’s male counterpart which is thicker but the same very basic band. We were sized for the rings and put down a deposit on them, we’ll be going back a couple weeks before the wedding for final sizing and then to pick them up. I’m so excited.

The next big thing will be the clothes. As I’ve explained in the past, I have my heart set on getting a sari (saree? I see both spellings everywhere, dict seems to be happy with either). This means I need to find an indian clothing store that is good and attentive to a woman looking for something as serious as a wedding dress. I wasn’t impressed with the Indian store in New Hope. Nita was the first one to discover Iselin, New Jersey online for my shopping needs. According to wikipedia:

“The downtown area is made up mostly of shops selling South Asian (mostly Indian but some Pakistani) food, sweets, clothing (particularly saris), jewelry, music, and other goods.”
…
The South Asian culture of this downtown area is known to attract visitors from towns all over New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland

And this article further explains:

…is not your run-of-the-mill bedroom community. In the last decade, the downtown business district of this Middlesex County hamlet — centered at Oak Tree Road and Green Street — has become a thriving retail mecca for Indians, who flock here to dine on authentic Indian food and to shop in the many Indian groceries, jewelry stores and sari shops.

OH MY GOSH! I am such a sucker for Indian food and clothing, I’d want to go there even if I wasn’t shopping for a wedding dress.

The plan is to head out there some weekend in July when I can coordinate things with Nita. Michael will be driving us out, about a 2 hour drive, even if he won’t be part of the dress decision he doesn’t want to miss the perfect excuse for visiting this place.

So, have any of you been there?

Ok, so one of it’s parents ate all my cucumbers in my garden one year, but they can be forgiven because they provided us with two very cute baby animals to look at this season.

*squee*

Even better, Michael was the first one to spot them, and shot a video of them and Caligula chirping at them, I uploaded it to Google Video this morning:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4209150651868988797

*dies of cuteness*

On Wednesday I left home around 8:30 for the dentist appointment scheduled for 9AM. On Monday they told me that it would just be “a quick 30 minute visit to get two teeth filled” and since they all acted very casual about it all I figured I would get out by 10 and be to work by 10:15, all ready to conquer the day.

HAHAHAHA! Boy was I naive.

First of all, the dentist office doesn’t unlock its doors until 9AM, so my 9AM appointment was actually at around 9:30. When I got into the dentist chair I had to choose my filling type, and they eventually got around to giving me my first two novocaine shots, one on each side of the mouth near the cavities. The dentist said he’d leave for 5 minutes to let it take effect. He was gone for about 10 minutes; I could hear him talking to another patient who was also getting a filling.

Upon his return, he started drilling.

“OUCH!”

“You can feel that?”

“Uh huh!”

“OK, I’ll work on the other side first.”

“OUCH!”

“Alright, I’ll give you a couple more shots of novocaine and return in 5 minutes.”

Of course 5 minutes turned into about 15, he left me to complete the other woman’s fillings. The drilling hadn’t even started but I was already sweating, enough so that I was sure I’d need to go home and change before going to work, and feeling unnaturally anxious.

When he returned he took a pick and poked inside a cavity on the right side.

“AAaaarg…”

“You can feel that?”

“Yep”

“Not just the scraping? It’s a pinch?”

“It’s definitely a pinch.”

“OK, I’ll give you another shot of novocaine, this time in the back. This should put EVERYTHING to sleep.”

This final shot also hurt a lot, and still is sore this Friday morning.

He scraped on the left side and I felt nothing, so he proceeded with that filling. When he started drilling I became nauseated. Oh brother.

I toughed it out and got the fillings done, it was around 10:30 when I finally was able to leave the dentist office.

I felt terrible. I later learned that novocaine has a whole bunch of side effects and I was lucky enough to experience a couple of them. Not to mention the whole mouth numbing thing, the right side of my tongue was asleep (a fun experience) and I could barely talk. I decided that the best plan of action would be to take a sick day. I left a voicemail for my boss (which must have been an amusing thing to listen to) letting her know I wasn’t coming in.

I went home, complained on IRC for a bit, drank water through a straw so not to dribble it all over myself and eventually spent the day watching movies on the Myth box. There are lots of things I could have been doing instead (like catching up on reading people’s journals) but I just felt miserable. It wasn’t until 2PM that the novocaine finally wore off and I got to really feel the pain of the novocaine injection spots. I was hungry, having not eaten all day. When Michael got home he took me out to Sly Fox for some ravioli.

It was a fine meal for my hurting mouth and the beer wasn’t bad either. Oh geez, look at me, I took a sick day and then went out to a brewpub! Don’t tell my boss. We brought our laptops along to take advantage of the free wifi they offer and I was able to chat on IRC with and others about the evils of dental work and what a racket dental insurance is.

I went home and watched more movies. It was one of the most highly unproductive days I’ve had in months.

Things have been pretty mellow these past few days.

Over the weekend we barely left the house. I spent some time on Saturday downloading Solaris 10 for x86 to toss on one of our spare machines, only to discover that the old, lousy video cards in both our spare x86 machines are old and unsupported. I shelved that project until I get a supported card and Michael gave me some disks for other OSes to try.

I succeeded in getting BeOS 4.5 installed on our old Dell server, which was fun for about 20 minutes. Of course installing it was not with the intention of actually using it, or even learning how to use it (no reason to, it’s dead) but more for the historical (in?)significance. As others have said, it was a pretty decent looking unix-based OS for it’s time (1999), especially compared to its Linux sisters. Installing was a breeze. I am not as sure about functionality though, again the old graphics card wasn’t fully supported (black, grey and white BeOS – woo!). The NIC wasn’t supported either, so I couldn’t fully try out any of their networked apps. Oh and there were plenty of jokes about the lack of programs for the OS, so taking out networked apps and those that needed a supported graphics card (like Quake 2), there wasn’t much to play with.

One of my next projects might be getting a NetBSD machine running. Considering the popularity of the BSD family it is surprising that I’ve never even tried to install it anywhere.

I also spent some time up in the Magic Room organizing and reading some of the fantasy book my father was working on before he died. It’s been on my mind a lot this week, there are certainly some great qualities about the manuscript (which is close to 100 pages) and some things that need a lot of work. I haven’t decided if I’m going to take on the chore of continuing his work, but I am going to try to devote some time to typing up the entire thing so I have it in more than just paper form.

The next couple weekends will be reasonably busy. We’re getting together with a friend we haven’t seen in a couple months on Friday night for dinner. Saturday we’re planning on heading out to the jeweler to discuss our wedding ring options (glee!). Then we’ll be doing some shopping for camping supplies so we’re fully prepared for the Gaian Mind Festival we’re heading out to Central PA for next weekend (so excited!).

Tonight we’re eating hot dogs made from bison meat. That is all.

The last time I went to the dentist was in the spring of 1999. I don’t like dentists and I wasn’t insured during most of the time between then and now. Honestly I was worried that I’d fork out the cash for a checkup visit only to learn how terrible my teeth were and have to pay for tons of work that I couldn’t afford. What I don’t know can’t hurt me!

But now that I am paying for dental insurance I realized I really should go. Oh and one of my wisdom teeth decided to show itself a couple weeks ago.

My appointment was this morning.

Did I mention I don’t like dentists? Does anyone like dentists?

Lucky for me, I have fantastic teeth and I take good care of them. I never had a cavity while growing up, and the results from this dental visit were pretty positive:

– 2 small cavities in the back, to be filled Wednesday morning in a quick visit (woohoo my first cavities! …er)
– The X-Rays of my wisdom teeth look great, they’re coming in fine and I have enough room in my big mouth (!) to accommodate them for the forseeable future
– I need to floss more (yeah yeah yeah I know…)

Alright, so it wasn’t that bad, but I’ll be doing the regular dentist visit thing from now on.

Work was busy this week, but it was my own doing. I wasn’t in the mood to be bored so I kept bugging my boss for more piles of work. What an oddball I am.

Speaking of work, a woman recommended BirkenstockCentral.com’s Bargain Page a little while back and I ended up buying some sandals from there:

I am in love with these shoes. I was never much of a sandal person because so many pairs I’ve owned were uncomfortable. But these, oh these are amazing, I don’t even feel like I’m wearing them! The first day I wore them to work the women in the office were all excited (this was also the day I came back from vacation when I had my pedicure). The woman who suggested the website even gave me a sterling silver toe ring to celebrate my feet freedom, what a sweetie! They’re totally ruining me ;)

Also speaking of work… being able to listen to podcasts at work has been fantastic. I’ve really been getting into the Speaking of Faith podcast (thanks for the recommendation ! And thanks to all who gave recommendations, they’ll keep me busy for a while). The whole podcast thing is quite a revolution in information being pumped into my brain, I once again keep up with current stuff just by listening while I’m puttering away with work and it makes the day go by so much faster!

Friday night Michael and I headed up to Ortino’s Northside, where I enjoyed a bottle of Delirum Tremens (oh how I love that pink elephant covered belgian brew) and a delicious burger with mushrooms and swiss. The weather played nice and we were able to eat out on the porch at the restaurant and enjoy the evening.

Today was just a chill out day. It was 2PM before I knew it and took a nice long bath. Yesterday I went to Whole Foods in North Wales to pick up some fish for the dish Michael is making tonight: Mixed Grill of Mussels, Clams, and Shrimp (without the chorizo, and with fresh green onions from my garden in place of shallots). I’m really looking forward to it, we picked up a bottle of Sterling Chardonnay to go with it and some nice, crusty sesame bread – yum!

And my tiger lilies bloomed:

I know how boring gym entries are for people who don’t go to gyms (yes friend, your gym entries used to put me to sleep ;)). So go ahead and skip this entry if you don’t care, it won’t hurt my feelings.

I’ve been going to the gym for about a month now and it’s going well. I went to lunch with a former co-worker yesterday and she commented on how good I look and I hadn’t even told her that I joined a gym. It was a nice compliment to get.

I expected getting up early to get to the gym would be a particularly difficult task, but it hasn’t been that bad most mornings. It actually felt good to get out of bed Monday morning and head to the gym to spend a couple hours working out after not going all weekend. I think the key for me was setting achievable goals, like getting to the gym at least 3 days a week rather than going all gung ho about it and burning myself out in a month.

Going in the evenings hasn’t worked out for me. I am too tired by the end of the work day to have a very successful workout. I think the only time I’ll be going in the evening is if I want to attend a class.

I’m in a pretty set routine basic routine now at the gym:

1. Bike or elliptical (20-30 minutes)
2. Working out legs, arms or abs on machines or free weights (20-30 minutes)
3. Swim a few laps in the pool (as time and circumstances permit)
4. Shower

When I began going I was having some joint pain, which was pretty scary, I need my joints and I’m young! But I’ve been able to get a handle on it after learning and practicing a few things:

1. I want tone, not giant muscles. It is ok for me to use lighter weights (I’m not actually competing with Michael).

2. Form is very important. You get your form wrong even on the machines and hurt yourself. Read the signs on the machines and be conscious of where you are putting the pressure and what your body is telling you.

3. Some joint pain when you start out is not unusual, joints need to get used to working out just like everything else in your body.

My mp3 player is getting a good workout too. I’ve been downloading podcasts to listen to while on the elliptical and bike, I especially enjoy ones that are 20-30 minutes long because that’s the amount of time I like to spend on the machines. Science Magazine publishes a good podcast a couple times a month that I have been downloading, but I need more than 2 per month. I also have been hitting the NPR site to download all sorts of reports, including PBS stuff like Nova podcasts (yay!).

Anyone have other podcast recommendations? The trouble is not that I can’t find podcasts (there are plenty of podcast directories) but anyone can make a podcast and most of them suck. Science, theology, economics, and IT are all good subjects, but I’m open to any recommendations.

Yesterday Michael made the rare suggestion of going out to eat and then going to the movies. We don’t go to the theater often, neither of us like them much. We were thinking about going to see either X3 or Da Vinci Code, but after checking out all the lousy reviews for both I opened up Google Movies and checked to see what the highest rated movie was at the theater we were going to. It was United 93. I hoped that this wasn’t because people were afraid of the masses thinking they were some dirty, america-hating liberal if they said anything bad about a movie made about events on 9/11. Still, I was curious and we decided to catch the 4:35 showing.

So we went to see it.

Now, I may be a liberal intellectual who believes that the 9/11 attacks were blowback rather than something that “came out of nowhere because they hate us and hate freedom.” I know that much worse things happen all over the world every year. But that doesn’t mean I was emotionless about the whole 9/11 thing. I was living in upstate New York when this happened, I’d been to the top of the World Trade Center before, I was content in the security of living in America. This hit home. Watching the videos of the planes crashing into the towers is still scary and make me sad, planes aren’t supposed to fly into buildings. Of course I don’t let emotions dictate my actions, I didn’t want to sign away all my rights, I didn’t even think about ceasing to fly because of this event.

Because the emotions were still there, the movie was tough to get through at times. But I left the theater saying “this was a good movie” because of several things.

1. They didn’t try to add any stupid love story or something into it, it was tastefully done
2. Most of the movie was spent showing how confusing it was for all the agencies involved to respond to the hijackings
3. The cast was pretty believable and the acting wasn’t bad
4. I liked the format and how it was presented

Now, the first thing I do when I enjoy a movie is read the bad reviews. I do this in case there is something I missed, and to open my mind to the things that other people saw in it. The bad reviews I read over at Yahoo! this morning fall into a few categories:

It’s too soon to make a movie like this!

It’s been almost 5 years. I simply don’t agree that it’s too soon.

Hollywood is cashing in on tragedy!

Welcome to Hollywood. No wait, welcome to America… er Humanity… I mean, welcome to planet Earth. Welcome to life. Everyday, everywhere, someone or something benefits from the tragedy of others. I suppose you hate all movies based on actual events where people died, including every war movie ever made, documentaries and a zillion other things. This argument just annoys me.

This isn’t factual. $fact is wrong and $entity lied.

Yeah, the director forgot to consult the all-knowing oracle before making the movie. Any movie made about something as emotionally and politically charged as this will have people picking apart the details. The research done for the movie was pretty extensive, and sure, it took the government’s account of what happened which may be incorrect and politically driven, but it was the details they had. If they had gone the other direction and bought into one of the conspiracy theories it would have been an entirely different film.

It’s propaganda.

Sure it is, and history is written by the winners. Any film based on a reality where emotional and political elements are involved can be classified as this.

The good guy/bad guy line was too black and white

I don’t agree. If you had taken the time to watch the movie instead of fuming about how much you hate what this movie means and how they portray arabs as terrorists (forgetting that these arabs ARE terrorists) you might have noticed a few things. For instance, the “bad guys” were young and scared out of their wits. It’s a horribly sad thing to watch these very human young men deal with this, so intent on believing that what they are doing is right. I think the movie did a decent job of humanizing The Terrorist.

It wasn’t actually a movie you need to see in the theater though, there are very few movies worth paying $9.50+ to get into.

It wasn’t the best week I’ve ever had. Lots of work + excessive heat == not in the mood to get near my computer when I got home at night. Michael just left for the gym and I told him I needed to stay home and be alone for a while.

Not all was bad though, Michael sent me purple flowers on Friday, glee!

Photo doesn’t do them much justice, these are very pretty, very purple flowers <3

When the receptionist brought the flowers in to me I must have looked at her funny because I expected her to walk past my desk and it took me a few moments to realize that she was handing the flowers to me. It really made my week, with fiscal month I was pretty worn out and the flowers made all the difference.

It was hot this week. One of the things I hate most in the world is hot weather, and when it’s hovering around a high of 90 degrees with 80% humidity for 3 days in May I start seriously looking for real estate in cooler areas again.

There is air conditioning at work, at the gym and in my car, so I pretty much spent my days jumping between them. Home was more difficult, we ordered pizza one night, went to Sly Fox another, and managed to make dinner to enjoy at home the other two nights that were bad. Michael (my hero!) installed the window unit air conditioners in the computer room and our bedroom early this week, so we could camp out in those places. One night we ended up taking Michael’s laptop into the bedroom and watching some movies on it in there rather than toughing it out in the heat of the TV room. The forecast going forward is in the 70s, quite a relief.

There was a terrible thunderstorm Thursday night. We lost power for over 2 hours in the evening and a couple times during the night. On my way to work from the gym on Friday morning a light was out at Broad Street and 463 in Landsale, a pretty major intersection that had some temporary stop signs up to handle traffic. Apparently all the traffic and power outage problems that morning made it so the police were too busy to deal with the intersection further, but there was plenty of honking and a woman who wasn’t paying attention almost hit me (thank goodness I was so awake from working out!). People seriously need to learn how to use stop signs.

And so started out my Friday morning. It was a long day, I worked until a little after 6, when my boss said we’d probably acomplished all we were going to acomplish and sent most of us home. Thanks to the emotional lift I got from the flower delivery I was actually willing to work later, but perfectly happy to go home.

To top off my week, my mother called me last night. Two days ago she fell about 16 feet from a dam where her and her boyfriend were fishing. She had to go to the emergency room and came out with a broken left hand and elbow, twisted ankle, some knee trouble and a pretty significant gash on her leg. She’s now in a soft cast for her hand that goes halfway up her arm to also stabilize the elbow (which they said they can’t do much about but hope that stabilizing makes the minor fracture heal itself). We’ll see in about a week if she will need surgery to put a pin in her hand. She’s out of work at least until she can walk without help. In all, it’s a pretty crappy situation for her, but she admitted that she’s been working too hard lately and needed some time off, she just wishes God had given her a break in some less literal way. I hope she heals quickly, it’s a lousy situation and I’m sure she’s in a lot of pain %\