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.

Michael’s mother gave us So What’s the Difference? by Fritz Ridenour for Christmas. It was very thoughtful of her, she knows we’re really getting into religious studies. I tend to enjoy books that explain differences between religions, so I thought this could be a good addition to that collective.

I gave Ridenour the benefit of the doubt, he might be a Christian but there are plenty of Christians in the world who know about other religions and can discuss and write about them in an intelligent manner. Unfortunately I quickly realized that he’s either ignorant or he’s really into pushing Christian propaganda, and quite possibly both.

Now I realize that it might be slanted toward Christianity, and the Bibilcal references that contradict what other religions proclaim are perfectly appropriate since the book is about looking at other religions and comparing them to Christianity. I understand that in a book of this size you can’t go in depth about anything.

But it is completely inexcusable for some of what he says about these other religions to be COMPLETELY FALSE. It’s inappropriate for him to throw around the word “Cult” which so obviously has negative associations in our culture – I follow a definition of “cult” that drops every organized religion into it, but in an objective review of other religions I won’t start saying so, it just upsets people.

This book has had “Over One Million Copies Sold” – since the target market is fundamentalist christians, I’d say most of the buyers actually believe what is presented here. I don’t think I’d be stretching too far to say that many of these people might not even look further than this book (or exerpts read to/shared with them at Church) for understanding of other religions. Just reading the Amazon.com reviews shows me a bunch of Christians who say how great this book is for “Witnessing to others” and how it’s such a great teaching tool.

Sigh. It makes me sad to see such misinformation be so popular.

I’m wireless! *glee*

I have a Belkin F5D6020 Version 2 wireless card. I bought it about 2 years ago for my Compaq, I’d done my research and was convinced it would work fine in Linux. Of course when I got it home I learned that it was harder to get working than I thought. Never did get it working in Debian, Michael got it working in Gentoo, but then the laptop died. The card has floated around the house since then, I groaned at the prospect of trying to get it working again.

After some searching in the Ubuntu forums a bit I learned that it should just work out of the box. Really? That’d be amazing! So I poked around with it, but since our wireless network is secured in multiple ways I had to wait for Michael to help me with that bit. He took a look at it this evening and said “I think you just need the atmel firmware… but I’m not going to do it for you, you have to do it yourself, I know you can.” Meep.

But he was right. It turns out that Ubuntu has an atmel-firmware package in multiverse. It was as easy as `apt-get install atmel-firmware` – and it all works! I am crazy excited.

So far I’m very pleased with Ubuntu’s hardware detection. I’m not as happy with all the junk it installs, this laptop only has a 3 gig harddrive and with little more than the base install I’m up to 2 gigs. As soon as I got it up I installed XFCE4, but I’ve since uninstalled it and loaded up Gnome. Gnome has nice little tools for doing things, like getting on a wireless network, I think I’m geeky enough to have earned some lazy points on this laptop. I even loaded up Synaptic this evening to browse packages – gasp! ;) I’m sure I’ll toss Gnome once I get used to things, I might even drop Ubuntu entirely and install Debian someday, but for now I just want a clicky happy laptop that works in Linux, and that’s what I have. Thank you Ubuntu!

After a slow start this morning, Michael and I got out of the house around 11 to have some driving lessons and do some shopping.

Driving lessons?

I can’t drive a manual transmission car. Never even tried. When we bought the Civic with manual transmission I was scared! But Michael is willing to teach me, so today we went to an empty church parking lot.

Michael kept me to the basics, I stayed in 1st and neutral the entire time, but I did well! I only stalled it a few times when I let up on the clutch too quickly, and managed to keep the ride relatively jerk-free. I even managed not to be nervous or overly self-critical. I’ll have to practice again soon in a bigger parkinglot so I can practice changing gears and going up hills.

Then we stopped at Linens-n-Things to pick up some curtains for our bedroom. When we bought the house every room had normal plastic blinds. They’re not bad, but they aren’t terribly pretty, curtains would help.

Now curtain shopping is not our favorite thing, our last experience was terrible. This time things went well. We picked out some nice light brown curtains and a couple curtain rods and were on our way. I had to frown at the price though, curtains are pretty simple things, I could probably even make them myself if I had a sewing machine.[lj-cut]

Once we left Linens-n-Things I suggested heading over to Lowe’s with the gift card we got from Michael’s father for Christmas. We only planned on getting a new toliet seat (exciting huh?) but ended up stumbling into the lighting area and decided to get some new overhead lighting for the bathroom and laundry room.

We got home around 2:30 and got to work.

First it was the curtains, Michael got them up in about 20 minutes.

Much better!

Then for the new lighting. Doing anything electrical, even something as simple as replacing overhead lighting, is a foreign thing to me that I think should be a complex art only practiced by professionals. Michael continues to prove me wrong. In about 40 minutes he had both awful florescent lights removed and replaced with the nice, new lighting.

Old, cheap, plastic, florescent lighting

New, glass and metal, incandescent lighting

The difference is amazing, even with one 60 watt bulb in each they are a much brighter than the old florescents. Man I hate florescent lights, the last ones to get rid of are those in the kitchen. Maybe during the next trip to Lowe’s.

Then Michael got the new toilet seat put on, but I didn’t take a picture of it because that’d be weird.

And this is Caligula while we worked. Useless animal! ;)

And now we’re just going to chill out. I’m making spinach lasagne for dinner and we have a bottle of Cavit Pinot Grigio to enjoy this evening in front of the fireplace.[/lj-cut]

I have an upset stomach %(

I called out of work this morning, slept a bunch and now I’m sitting here with my laptop.

“Hey, maybe I can do something useful like get my wireless card working while I’m home with this free time!”

No go. My head hurts and I feel too lousy to use my brain x_x