I haven’t been in the mood for writing much, that emo mood I wrote about on Wednesday stuck with me through Friday. I never ended up making plans with anyone Friday night and Michael was at the men’s sweat lodge. Once I got home from work I realized that it was probably too late to make any plans, since people wouldn’t get here until 8ish, and I’d have to kick them out around 11 because I needed sleep for the Shaman class Saturday morning.

So instead I headed over to Moccia’s Pizza and got some chicken fingers and fries, along with a 6-pack of Yuengling Black & Tan. Greasy food and beer in hand, I sat down in front of my computer and chatted with (who was similarly eating pizza and drinking) and the rest of the folks in #13thHour. We had fun.

Looking back, Friday would have been classified as a good day if not for my mood. The weather was unseasonably warm again and I went for a nice long walk during lunch. During the walk I stopped into the thrift store to check out the books, there were a bunch of scifi books and I picked up about a dozen. When I got home from work there was a check from a recent contract job and a letter from my pen pal in England in my mailbox. Much good stuff and yet I was still mopey!

Saturday we went to the shaman class. Jim had some guests there to teach us, John Cooke who is a native american a Presbyterian minister, and his friend Owen Owens, a retired Baptist Minister. They had a very interesting presentation that was about a Native American healing ceremony. The ceremony was captured in the book COYOTEWAY: A Navajo Holyway Healing Ceremonial, which is out of print but you can read most of it online with many more pictures than the book had. John Cooke was the Navajo interpreter for the ceremony captured in the book and had much to say about the ceremony and how universal it is.

Late in the day we were having a break and Owen asked me what I was thinking about since I “was so quiet” and he likes to know where everyone is coming from. Of course I’m always quiet, and told him so, and then explained that I’m an atheist and am trying to come to terms with the God stuff they were presenting. He reflected upon this and we had a nice little discussion about it, it was refreshing to talk to a Minister (and a Baptist one at that!) without the judgmental vibes I usually get from such people. Eventually we started talking about books and he suggested I read Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn, I think this is one I’ll grab from the library.

Today we don’t have any plans, Michael just informed me that he wants to make french toast and omelettes for breakfast – yum!

I think I’m done being emo.

I’m feeling very “emo” this week; I wish I owned some good drama films that would make me cry. Maybe I’ll find someone to drag along to Brokeback Mountain Friday night.

I think I’ll blame the weather, my lack of projects and President Bush on this mood.

It was one of the warmest Januarys on record, and I really pine for those frigid winter days. I heard one woman in the office complain this morning how it was cold out and I idly wondered what winters she is used to, since it was in the 40s this morning. I want cold, I want snow, and I want to wear my pretty new winter coat damn it!

The lack of projects thing I can actually do something about, I think it would solve my warm winter woes if I were absorbed in something at home. But what? Nothing has really jumped out at me lately, and for the first time in a long time my To-Do list is short, only including regular maintenance stuff.

It’s Bush’s fault because I listened to part of the State of the Union last night and it annoyed me. I did the usual annoyed eye rolling until he got to the first (only?) time he used the world “evil” in the speech and I rolled over in bed and stopped listening. I hate when he uses the word “evil” to describe his enemies. And that got me thinking about my views on “evil” in general and I realized that I don’t know what I really think. It was a subject during one of our shaman classes, but I couldn’t quite pin it down there either. Whatever my definition ends up being, I know it won’t include people who believe they are doing Right.

Yesterday was a pretty mellow Sunday, it rained pretty much all day.

I went out and got my haircut, did some grocery shopping, made some veggie burgers for dinner and finished off the last bit of our final Victory growler. Then we watched the next bit of Bleak House on PBS.

Today was a beautiful day, and of course I was stuck inside at work. I did manage to get out during lunch to run some errands, had the car windows open and it was so refreshing. Car windows open in January – madness!

When I got home Michael was in the kitchen making a sushi-like dinner, you can see pictures and grab the recipe in his entry here (CaligulaWantsNow.jpg makes me laugh, he looks so evil begging for fish).Perhaps needless to say it was a very good dinner.

Tonight I spent some time reading COYOTEWAY: A Navajo Holyway Healing Ceremonial for our shaman class. It’s very interesting, but I doubt I’ll finish it before class on Saturday, and i really should copy it into a terminal so I can read it as white on black – much kinder to the eyes than the website itself. Too bad the book is out of print and so hard to find, I am not the biggest fan of reading things as long as books on my computer screen *itches eyes*

I wanted to spend some time making my desktop on my laptop prettier, it’s mostly just the default that comes with Ubuntu. But I got side-tracked after reading one of ‘s posts that mentioned the new Opera browser – and then OF COURSE I had to install it. It’s really neat that Opera’s linux download page lets you choose binaries for lots of different distros, I was able to download a .deb for Breezy Badger (which had “etch” in the filename so I assume it’s the same one as for Debian Etch). Opera 8.51 seems pretty nice, it launches faster than Firefox on this old laptop and uses less resources once running, both very important. Once I bound opening new tabs to alt t (rather than default of alt n) I started getting pretty comfy. We’ll see how it goes.

Now I am very tired. Bedtime.

I’m sitting here in our TV room with my laptop, a beer, the new sweater that a friend of ours knitted for me and Star Wars on the TV. Could I ask for more?

Friday night we held movie night. The usual crew of , and came over and we were joined by , who had spent the day driving up from North Carolina. We watched The 40 Year Old Virgin and ordered some pizza. The night went too quickly though, it was midnight before I knew it and people had to head out. and I stayed up talking until a little after 1, when he decided to leave so he could get to his hotel in Center City.

This morning we mostly just chilled out, made plans with at Sly Fox for lunch, which was great. We got a picture (even if it’s not the best one ever).

After lunch Michael and I headed back home. I spent the afternoon reading and Michael was outside splitting wood. It was a beautiful day out, we even turned off the heat and opened a couple windows, which sure made Caligula happy.

Around 4 we headed over to see our friends Barry and Rae. When we got there Rae said she had a couple gifts for me. Gifts? Apparently Michael knew about it, one of Rae’s biggest hobbies is knitting and she actually knitted me a Wallce and Gromit sweater! Oh my gosh!

I’m wearing it right now, it’s so snuggly warm! Caligula seems to like it too, he keeps trying to snuggle with me (but I have a laptop on my lap, silly kitty!). Also, when they were in Ireland recently they found a Wallace and Gromit watch – I should take a picture of that too, it’s adorable %D They rock!

We ended up going out to Houlihan’s for dinner, and afterwards headed over to Barry and Rae’s house to hang out until about 10.

And that leaves me here, it’s almost 1AM now, I’m gonna have a glass of water and go to bed.

Well I got my beer last night.

Michael took me out to Victory. We brought our growlers along.

With dinner I had a HopDevil and a Golden Monkey, both of which are very good. We got to talk a lot, and it was a very relaxing evening. We ended up leaving the brewery with our two growlers filled with HopDevil and a jug (which is like our “growler” from slyfox, but Victory calls them “jugs”) filled with Golden Monkey.

This morning I woke up feeling good, refreshed and ready for work %D

Tonight we’re planning on doing movie night at our house. As a wonderful treat, is going to try and stop by, since his vacation route takes him through the area, yahoo!

Things are good.

I won’t be sad when this week is over.

A beer tonight would be very nice!

This evening I decided to clean out the middle drawer in my desk. I’ve attempted this several times in the past few months to do this, but I always ended up taking everything out, looking at it, getting bored, and dumping it back in. D’oh. This time I thought I’d take pictures and plan to write a journal entry about it, it turns out that is great motivation because I was successful!

First, here is a list of some of the amusing things I found:

• a cassette tape (what is on this?)
• a litty tiny cellphone from my Scully toy (as well as Mulder’s flashlight and Ryoko’s lightsword and Esmeralda’s earring)
• an x-wing
• TWA chopsticks
• a letter from Michael from 1999 (we were friends in IRC and he sent me a photo of him to scan *hot*)
• pink shoelaces
• my old glasses (ack! I can’t seeeee)
• receipt for my geforce3 (dated 12/24/01 it was my christmas present the first christmas Michael and I were together)

Now on to the pictures! In the picture of lots of stuff I didn’t reduce the size that came off my camera, so they’re big so you can see detail, because I know you are all that interested.

the beginning, it was completely full[lj-cut]

after removing about half the stuff

Neat, the bottom of the drawer is off-white

All the stuff removed and piled on my desk

It is complete and neatly organized now!

And now we place bets on how quickly it gets filled up with junk again.[/lj-cut]

I was getting ready for bed last night when I heard a crash that shook the house.

“Michael? Was that thunder?”
“Yeah, I just saw a huge bolt of lightning too.”

I don’t think I’d ever experienced a thunderstorm in January. It was pretty intense with plenty of rain and freezing rain. By the morning it had all cleared up except for the patches of ice on the road.

Feeling disconnected today. Would have been more than happy to spend the whole day snuggled in a pile of blankets and pillows. As it was, I didn’t get out of bed until the latest possible time.

I was in a down mood last night too, and Michael took me out for Chinese food at Mr. Lee’s down the street in Zieglerville. It was good and I am enjoying the rest of my “Phoenix and Dragon” dinner right now for lunch.

When we got home I did the email and IRC thing for a bit, but it wasn’t keeping me interested, and neither was the TV. I ended up going to bed shortly before 10.

I think what I need tonight is some quiet meditation time.

Yesterday I mostly just chilled out in front of the fireplace with my laptop.

I tested the battery life, it lasts just under 3 hours. I learned the hard way that suspend isn’t working properly, I closed the lid and when I opened it again all I had was a blinking cursor. Oops. If I alt+f1 I could see a virtual terminal for a second, could even navigate my way to the X sesson, but it always brought me right back to the blinking cursor before I could do anything. I did some searching of ubuntu forums for his behavior, but all I’ve found so far is “suspend works for me!” I checked the BIOS settings, and as far as I can tell it’s all set up properly, I’m sure it’s an OS thing. I’ll poke around when I’m in the mood again, for now I just leave it open when it’s running. Everything else on the laptop is working great.

In the evening Michael and I headed out to Sly Fox for dinner. It was delicious.

We got home and watched The West Wing, which wasn’t bad this week. I thought “Hey, maybe it’s getting better!” but then learned today they announced it’s being canceled after this season. D’oh. I guess I’m not that sad about it’s demise, the show had a good run.

Then we watched the first segment of Bleak House by Charles Dickens on Masterpiece Theater. We don’t usually watch Masterpiece Theater, but I read an article yesterday afternoon about the production of it and was interested. In all, the miniseries is 12 hours long, 2 hours per Sunday for 6 weeks, and they claim to have cut very little from the book but I haven’t read it so I wouldn’t know. It started off slow, with many complex characters to introduce, but after the first hour I found myself really getting into it. Gillian Anderson plays a great role, she might come off as a complete airhead in interviews, but I’ve always enjoyed her as an actress.