I was able to get out of work at 2PM this afternoon so we could go to Varner’s Farm!

We learned about Varner’s last year when I was talking to a woman at work about how we used to cut down our own Christmas tree when I lived up in Maine, she informed me that you could go to Varner’s and cut down a tree yourself. Varner’s is only a 10-15 minute drive from our house, so it was welcome news. Unfortunately, last year I didn’t have a job that was flexible with hours, so we weren’t able to get out there in the daylight, when you could cut down your own, and the weekends were insanely busy. We ended up getting one of their cut trees, which was still fresher than most you’d find elsewhere.

This year I REALLY wanted us to cut down our own. We left for the farm as soon as I was home from work, and with the wind gusting and clouds threatening to rain we geared up to cut down our tree. We rode on a large wagon behind a tractor out to the tree field and went to look for our tree.

It didn’t take long, we browsed the rows of Blue Spruce, Fraser Firs, and Douglas Firs. We decided on a nice Fraser Fir.

YAY!

And yes, we get it early in the season. I love having a Christmas tree in the house (and so does Caligula). They’ll last for at least a month if you cut them fresh. Now we just need to get a half cord of wood and we’ll be set for a snuggly December.

Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, I spent the morning working on PrincessLeia.com. I had been saying I’d redo the CSS and convert it all to PHP for a very long time, but I was never motivated enough until now. I was able to get a majority of the site moved over to PHP that morning, so now each page has:

<Title variable defined in PHP>
<Link to standard Header>
CONTENT
<Link to standard Footer>

The pages exempt from this are ones that have their own navigation and style – sites unto themselves, like some of our vacation photos, the Star Wars sections and such, I haven’t quite decided how to tackle these, if I will at all.

As I mentioned previously, I’m using apache rewrite rules so that when someone goes to the .html page that was removed it automatically sends them to the .php page.

This is all very good, I am able to change the look of most of the site with simple changes in CSS and/or header/footer changes. I hope this will be the last overhaul of the site for a long time. It’ll be so much easier to maintain.

Yesterday evening I finished up the work on this, and with a small change in a CSS file set the theme of the whole site for Christmas. Yay!

After the website stuff on Thanksgiving, we headed over to Michael’s mothers. I didn’t want to stay long, as I knew I had a busy weekend ahead of me, but these family things always manage to take a while. We spent from about 4-7PM at Michael’s mother’s enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with her and Michael’s brother’s family. Then we headed over to Michael’s brother’s new house that they had just moved into, spent a couple hours there. By 9PM I was really dragging and we finally headed home.

Friday morning Michael wasn’t feeling well, so I ended up going to the Medicine Wheel and 12 Steps workshop in Malvern by myself. This was the first time I’d ever done anything there without Michael, so it was sort of weird, but also a good thing. The class lasted from 9AM until 5PM.

At 5PM I gave a call to let her know I was still up for coming over if she wanted me to. ‘s linux geek friend Matti (I hope I didn’t just butcher the spelling of that!) was in town from Boston, and I do love meeting more geek chicks, but keep managing to miss her when she’s down. So I headed over to Bae’s and met up with all of them. We ended up driving to Kennett Square for the best Mexican in the area. I had a really nice time, Matti is a cool chick. By 9:30 we were back at Bae’s house and I decided to head home and go to bed.

Saturday it was day 2 of the workshop in Malvern. It was a long day, after the class itself ended at 5PM we had a sweat lodge. It was after 9PM by the time I was on the road to come home.

Sunday was the final day of the workshop, it went from 9AM until 4PM, and at 4 they had the weekly Crystal Bowl Healing session, which I decided to stay for since I had planned on being there until 5PM anyway and had never attended a session. It was an interesting experience, but didn’t really do much for me, I think I fell asleep during part of it. At 5PM I headed home.

In all, the workshop was very good, and I’ll have to talk more about it when the knowledge has settled a bit. There is a lot going on in my brain right now.

Michael was feeling better when I got home Sunday evening, had made chili for dinner (yum!). I puttered around most of the evening, but was too tired to get any real work done. I kept getting distracted – “I should update my site for xmas.. with christmas tree clipart.. christmas trees! we should get our christmas tree this week I should check the budget to see how much we can spend… hey I need to balance the check book… why do I have this clipart book out again?” After a few cycles of this I gave up and went to zone out to some TV.

In all, a very productive long weekend, I’m glad I did everything I did, but I’m really looking forward to some relaxing time after work this week.

A year ago today I saw my father alive for the last time, we’re 10 days away from the first anniversary of his death.

It seems somewhat appropriate that I’m spending the long weekend at Jim’s The Medicine Wheel & Twelve Steps Workshop. The further insight into serious addictions and alcoholism that he’s providing in the workshop are invaluable to finally understanding my father and working toward forgiveness. And most importantly, I’m learning a lot that helps me directly.

Today is the last day of the workshop. To be honest, I’m exhausted and I really want some wind down time that I’m not going to get (back to work tomorrow!), but it’s worth it.

I was at work on Tuesday and a woman came over to our department (she only came over to our department because she went to EVERY department, we’re just A/P and have nothing to do with her email problems).

“I got an email from the government, I’m not sure what I should do. Do you think it could be real? Should I call someone?” She was telling everyone, quite concerned

“It’s a spam or a virus, don’t open it, delete it,” I automatically advised.

“But what if it’s real? It’s from the CIA I don’t think I am in any sort of trouble, but shouldn’t I tell someone?”

“You can tell IT if you want, since it’s probably just a virus or spam. If you were in trouble the CIA wouldn’t contact you via email,” I said.

She wasn’t convinced, talked about it all day. On Wednesday she got another and called IT around the time that the news had started coming in about Sober X.

I think this is one of the most amusing things about working in a normal office. When you work so far detatched from “normal users” as I have in the past, it’s sometimes hard to believe that there are so many people out there that would fall for these and cause the continued spread of them. But now I see how worked up people get, it’s very interesting, and sad how virus spreaders are able to prey on ignorance and fear.

I had a bad dream, so I got up and got a glass of water. While in the kitchen I looked outside – could it be? Is it SNOWING?

Yes!

I love snow.

Today, a co-worker gave me the most evil gift. A box of brandy-filled chocolates.

“Not for work,” she advised with a grin.

She had picked them up while visiting family in Canada this past week, said she thought it would be a nice gift since she knew I enjoyed chocolate and brandy. I’d never thought of mixing them though.

Ah, the holidays. Now who is going to come over and help me eat these?

I had planned on crashing when I got home last night, but when I pulled into the driveway there was a Prius there. Azi hadn’t left yet!

When I walked into the house the entire place smelled of hops, they had spent part of the afternoon home brewing the HopDevil clone that we got the ingredients for this past weekend.

“Want to go to Victory Brewpub tonight?” Michael asked.

Ignoring my exhaustion again I replied, “YEAH!”

Azi enjoyed Victory beer, but had never been to the brewpub.

Then I realized this would be the 3rd brewery we’d been to in 3 days. Crabby Larry’s in Chalfont Saturday, Independence Brewpub in Philadelphia Sunday and now Victory in Downingtown. Sheesh. To my defense I didn’t drink beer while at Independence (but that’s only because they were out of the pale ale).

So we made the trek down to Victory.

Azi was adventurous with his beer selections, but they were all good. I started off with a HopDevil (always extra yummy on tap), and then went I ahead and pretended I didn’t need to go to work today and got a 750ml bottle of V12, their 12% alcohol belgian style ale. The food was good, the beer was good, the conversation was good, the service was good, but they had terrible live “entertainment.” Can’t have it all, I guess. We spent about 2 hours there, and I successfully finished my bottle of V12 and could still walk.

We tied up our meal by ordering Victory Growlers to take home, Azi got 2. So we walked out of there with 2 gallons of beer. Woo! I took pictures of all this beer, but was too tired this morning to bother with getting the pictures off the camera.

When we got home I drank a bunch of water and we all sat down to watch the MST3K Prince of Space episode. I promptly fell asleep. I think it was about 12:30AM when I finally went to bed.

I feel surprisingly good today, just a bit tired and hungry. This evening we need to go grocery shopping, bleh.

I was driving in to work this morning and heard this: This I Believe: There is No God by Penn Jillette.

I knew about Penn’s position on God, but this was a nice, short essay (even better if you listen to it, he’s an enjoyable speaker to listen to, but the whole transcript is up to read right now).

I had a really great weekend.

Meeting of Swedish friends!

Clockwise from top left: Azi (from Western PA), , me, , Morgana (from Maine), Sand (from Sweden), and Grifter (from Sweden)

DC Linuxchix-PhillyChix meeting!

Not sure why this turned out so grainy, hopefully someone got a better picture. From left: Erin (Philly), (DC), (DC), Steph (Philly), me (Philly), (Philly)

Sunday morning I got up before everyone else and did some cleaning up of the beer bottles and dishes from the evening before, and then got to work on making pancakes for our guests. The Swedes had never had pancakes for breakfast before, and were shocked when we put butter on them. It was an amusing breakfast, and everyone was stuffed when we piled into cars to drive down to Philadelphia.

Morgana and Grifter rode with Michael in the Civic, and Sand, Azi and I rode down in Azi’s Prius. The idea was that one local would ride in each car to help if we got lost, but I don’t know anything about the city and I just wanted to ride in the Prius ;D The Prius is a great car, the whole dashboard display of gasoline engine/electric engine/battery usage was so cool. It also tells you how much gas mileage you are getting, so Azi was able to show off his coasting ability that he’s refining that uses as little power as possible. Nice. I want one.

We arrived at the Constitution Center around noon, parked in the parking garage right by it (probably a mistake, since it was so expensive to park there). On our way in the bottom of the cars were searched with a mirror on a pole to check for bombs or something. Azi and I were somewhat surprised by this, but our Swedish companion just said “I thought you’d be used to this sort of thing by now.” Sigh.

It was a beautiful day for this meeting. We all waited in front of the center to meet with the LinuxChix. We decided to go out separate ways once we all got together. Michael went with Morgana, Sand, Grifter and Azi, and I went off with the LinuxChix.

Amusingly, we both chose to have lunch at the same place, the Independence Brewpub near Market East station. Disappointingly they were out of their yummy pale ale %( but the food was good, and so was the conversation. It’s fun to meet up with LinuxChix, you always get such a great mix of smart people!

After the long lunch us Chix went to visit the Liberty Bell (this is where I apologize to for going to see it without her – I’m sorry!). This was quite an experience, Erin said she’d write an essay about it and I’m considering writing my own. They now have security, metal detectors and x-ray machines that everyone has to go through to get to the bell. It’s absurd! The detectors are so sensitive that you need to take off belts, watches and anything that even has the smallest bit of metal. We all decided that this security nonsense is not worth it, people need to stop being so scared. Once you go through that and put your clothes back on, you walk through this building that has lots of informative displays, complete with lamps shaped like the liberty bell. It all had the post-modern feel that I’m not a big fan of. Eventually we got to the bell. Erin took a couple pictures of some of us in front of it (we’ll be swapping pictures soon, so I’ll post a link to them when I have it).

After seeing the bell we walked outside through gates, and were stopped in a “gate pen” with a bunch of other people and spoken to by a park ranger dude about the buildings across the street. I couldn’t help feeling l
ike herded animal while he blabbered on about the buildings where our freedom and democracy were etched out. See why an essay about this all is begging to be written?

By the time we saw a couple buildings it was close to 4PM when I was due to meet with Michael and company again. I said goodbye to the Chix and we went our separate ways.

Michael had a nice time too, I’m no sure where they all went, but he got this nice picture of Morgana, Sand, Grifter and Azi in Philadelphia:

We left Philadelphia shortly after 4PM and went back to our house. I heated up some apple pie that we got from Whole Foods, which went over very well, there wasn’t any left by the end of the evening. dropped by around 7:30 to meet everyone. Soon after Morgana and Grifter were tired so they went back to the hotel they were staying at in Quakertown, but Azi and Sand were sleeping at our place, so we all stayed up until about 10 watching MST3K.

By then I was beyond exhausted %) I didn’t even bother with the dishes.

And now I’m back at work, Michael stayed home this morning to see them all off. The two cups of coffee I had this morning hardly put a dent in how tired I am, but I can function well enough, it was so worth it!

I’m going to bed so early tonight.

Mmmm coffee.

More later.