It seems my measurement from the top of the roof was inaccurate because of all the wind, we got at least 16 inches, probably closer to 20. Michael wrote this yesterday talking about the Thundersnow that we got, I slept through it.

Caligula isn’t quite sure what to think of the snow. When we were outside shoveling he was meowing to come outside, but when given the opportunity he decided it was too cold out to explore the strange white stuff.

Sunday went by too quickly. Michael spent some time migrating our email to a new server and I got mutt reconfigured and mail archived. Other than that I didn’t get much done and we spent the later part of the day snuggled in blankets watching movies.

I gave myself plenty of time to get into work this morning, it took about 10 minutes longer to get into work because of the state of the roads. Several times during my drive in I encountered spots in the road covered in ice. No fun. The traffic was minimal though, a lot of people must have decided to stay home.

I spent the morning today just doing email and things, my sister Heather bought her wedding dress and emailed me some pictures, its nice. We chatted some about her wedding plans, and about mine.

I checked my gmail account this morning and found that the Google Talk thing within gmail had been enabled for my account – neat! So I bothered DarkSol a bit to try it out:

Google Talk in Gmail “popped in” browser
Google Talk in Gmail “popped out” of browser

It’s pretty neat, but not worth anything beyond the novelty of it.

Eventually I got to cleaning the house while Michael went out to the grocery store (no, we weren’t stocking up on bottled water for the storm, we just hadn’t gone shopping in two weeks and the only things we had to eat in the house were potatoes and strawberry jelly).

The flurries started shortly before 2PM and we decided to go out to The Roadhouse Grille in Skippack. It wasn’t busy, we ordered a bottle of Charles Krug Merlot and I ordered Crab Bisque and the “Jumbo Lump Crabmeat, Shrimp & Scallops with Fresh Basil and Cherry Tomatoes in a Rich Roasted Red Pepper Cream Sauce over Black Fettuccine.” For dessert I got the “Chocolate Damnation” cake, which was very good. Yum yum!

While eating dinner I brought up the topic of embarking on some new perl project. Michael wisely suggested I take a look at Perl/Tk and get myself familiarized with writing a GUI.

We got home around 4 and bundled up for the storm, outside was looking like this by 5:30PM:

I spent the early part of the evening playing with Perl/Tk, which is pretty fun and much simpler than I expected. The plan is to take R2D2’s irssi Weather Script and make it into a GUI weather application. I got myself familiarize with text placement and alignment, and after about an hour I had an obnoxiously colored app whose only functionality is quitting. The obnoxious colors are due to my playing around with text placement and needing to see where things landed when I messed around with it. I’ll work on it more tomorrow, it won’t be difficult to edit R2’s current script into a subroutine that can be easily plugged into the app.

And now I’m sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace with Michael enjoying a bottle of Tröegs Nugget Nectar Imperial Amber Ale. They say we’ll be getting about a foot of snow with this storm. I love snowstorms.

I had the creepiest dream last night.

Michael and I were living in a large house on a lake, we had a dock and friends would come over all the time to use it for their small boats and swimming.

I came home after being out and when I walked into the house Michael was very upset. He told me that a close friend of mine had been swimming outside that afternoon and went missing. He said she was probably caught in the undertow that was very bad about 15 feet from the dock, and was pulled under.

For whatever reason, I decided to go out and investigate by jumping into the area where the undertow was bad. I was immediately pulled down to the bottom of the lake, and stuck in the mud. I struggled but couldn’t move. Then my dead friend walked past me, her skin was rotted and her hair was green.

Then I woke up.

That image of that dead woman (not someone I actually know) walking on the bottom of the lake stuck with me all morning. *shivers*

Earlier today I was walking through the office when a woman I work with stopped me and said “You look good, have you lost some weight?” This is the third time in the past week someone has said that, yippee!

We don’t own a scale, partially because I don’t want to get wacky obsessive about weight loss, but I knew I had lost some. Michael said he could tell, and last week I was easily able fit into the pants I wore when I started doing the office job thing in September of 2004.

It’s actually pretty surprising that I was able to lose enough that people are noticing, since it’s only slight diet changes that I’ve made (not starving myself), and I’m still not exercising like I should be.

I’ve been really good at avoiding bad snacks around the office. I’m only eating when I’m hungry (no more “it’s time to eat $meal because that’s what you’re supposed to do at $time) and sticking to smaller portions. I have granola bars, instant oatmeal and fresh apples at my desk for when I get hungry. I enjoy a fairly light lunch (but not too light, salads make me hungry too quick). Dinner hasn’t changed at all, but Michael and I eat pretty healthy anyway.

I haven’t backed off enjoying myself while eating out, when we go to a brewpub I drink the beer and enjoy something delicious and packed with fat and calories – perhaps even eating a dessert! But this is maybe once a week and it satisfies my cravings for all that bad stuff.

I’m still not down to my “look-hot-in-wedding-dress” target, but I am feeling good enough about myself to start shopping for dresses. Getting into an exercise routine and having the weather get nicer so I can take walks at lunch again will be important, as I know these first few pounds I lost are the easy ones.

Last night we did the Superbowl thing.

We hadn’t planned on it, but at 5:55PM Michael said something about it and suggested we head up to Sly Fox to watch.

It was chilly out, which immediately put me into an agreeable mood. We arrived at Sly Fox around 6:30. We got a couple beers and some nachos and watched the game at a booth in the bar area.

I am not into sports, and don’t particularly like football or commercials. But you know what? I had a lot of fun. It was the perfect excuse to get out of the house and chill out.

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.