The Halloween party on Saturday was a lot of fun, you should read Bae’s entry because she has pictures.

We spent the day cleaning the house and gettings things ready for the party, then carved our pumpkins. By 5 we were ready for guests, and got our costumes on. Around 6 and showed up with little in tow. was wearing an adorable lion costume made by ‘s mother. Around 6:30 and came by. We all filed into the TV room to play Tv edition Scene It?

Playing Scene It? was fun, even though I was terrible at it. Amazing how little popular TV I’ve watched in my life, I was absolutely ignorant about so many things that others took to be obvious. We played this all through the evening, taking breaks for pizza and stuff. dropped by for about an hour before he was called back to work (stupid dumb being on call!), but it was nice that he came by, things just wouldn’t be the same if he didn’t.

At some point we decided to make popcorn. We don’t have a microwave, so and picked up a popcorn popper for us (so sweet!), which turned out to be more fun than it should have been. I don’t know who designed it, but it has a horrible tendancy to throw popcorn all over the kitchen rather than getting it in the bowl. A napkin to guide it into the bowl will fix this problem, but it was still pretty funny. I’ll have to practice with it by making more popcorn ;) At least it’s healthy because it doesn’t have butter and all the junk JiffyPop stove top popcorn has.

and came by too – with cupcakes! makes the most amazingly tastey cupcakes, and she decorated every one. Such talent! I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like that %) She also brought us a gift of some soap she had made – apple soap shaped like a skull, yay so cool!

Late in the evening our neighbors from across the street came by to see if we were interested in going to their party. Michael did the neighborly thing and accepted the invite, joined him, but I stayed back with our own party and enjoyed some Simpson Halloween episodes with everyone.

I didn’t end up “drinking” much, the guys had beer, but I was perfectly content with my Cherry Pepsi. I ate so much pizza and chips though, and probably 3-4 cupcakes.

Michael and came back from the neighbor’s place around midnight so Michael could do his radio show. We spent the rest of the evening watching movies and talking. It was much fun! People left shortly after 2AM.

Sunday was uber lazy day. I don’t think I got anything acomplished. Instead we enjoyed the cool fall weather by snuggling on the couch with a big blanket and some horror movies. It was a good day.

Tonight we’re headed to Malvern for the Dia de Los Muertos celebration, should be fun.

I should write a big ole post about how much fun I had last night, but it’s a chilly fall day and we have a few horror movies downstairs to snuggle in blankets and watch. The writeup can wait, this is just a quick post to give the link to our pumpkin carving Pictures for the year:

Michael (Time) And Lyz’s (pleia2’s) Pumpkins 2005!

As planned I spent Sunday working on PrincessLeia.com. I’m quite pleased with the work that was acomplished.

• Went through files in root website directory and removed old/unused files
• Went through CSS, greped all files to figure out what CSS goes with what pages, moved CSS files to own directory and updated pages accordingly
• Edited CSS on index.php and menu pages so the links are easier to see – and pink/purple!
• Used .htaccess to prohibit linking of images and sounds from specific trouble sites (myspace, migente)
• Used .htaccess to set up rules to direct .html requests to .php if .html does not exist and .php does
• Removed custom 404 that pointed to missing.html

Going through the files was not so difficult.

Going through the CSS was a pain in the ass that I’ve been putting off for months.

Setting up the blocking of hotlinking for certain pages was fun. I didn’t want to block all hotlinking, as that means I can’t point people to a princessleia.com/image.jpg, which would suck, and I would be restricted myself as to where I could post my images, having to edit my rules all the time when I want to post somewhere else. But some people steal a considerable amount of bandwidth, like the users on myspace and users on migente who think it’s appropriate to hotlink wav files that play as the page loads *groans at bandwidth usage from that* I redirected image requests to a small image file saying “This image is hosted by princessleia.com hotlinking is prohibited” (I thought about putting up something more perverse, but these people are generally just ignorant, not stealing bandwidth on purpose, and I’m not mean. Besides, I don’t want that practice associated with me). Sound file requests are simply forbidden from certain domains.

Setting up the .html to .php apache redirect was fun too. This will be a great help for when I’m moving all my pages to .php. No broken links! No army of softlinks! Just a little bit of apache rewrite magic. I hope to undertake the site wide move to .php in the near future, site-wide redesigns by just changing a CSS file will be a wonderful thing.

The removal of the custom 404 is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. The trouble with it is that when you type something wrong it redirects you to missing.html, which doesn’t allow for you to fix the typo in your address and get to the correct page, this is very annoying. Besides, I had to take the cute penguin image off the custom page because it was a waste of bandwidth so the page wasn’t terribly exciting anyway.

Plans now? The site-wide conversion to .php that I mentioned. General work on a few sections on the site that were neglected and some not even linked (Heritage Trails project, Family photos project, getting more of my writings from LJ to a home on my site). And I NEED to update my resume in the very near future.

Last night was a very powerful night.

I was able to get out of work early yesterday for the ceremony, so Michael and I were able to arrive at the lodge at 4:30PM. I was somewhat concerned about the rain, which had been pouring down for most of the day, but the lightened to a drizzle by the time we got there to make the fire.

Michael was the firekeeper, and laid the first logs. We all went around to lay down the rocks. Over the next couple hours we sat around and talked out there by the fire with the rain drizzling down. Some people brought out drums and it was a wonderful community time.

I brought some pictures and copies of some writings my grandfather did, as well as some herbs and 3 Runestones for the alter set up just outside the lodge.

To my delight , and Bob showed up to share the evening with us. It meant so much to have friends come along, I’d been so worried that no one would. In addition to these 3 friends, 6 people from our shaman class showed up for the ceremony, which was really wonderful. There was a total of 12 of us when it was ready to get in the lodge at 7PM.

Michael brought the rocks in for the lodge and brought the rocks from door of the lodge to the inside. During the lodge I was asked to share things about my Grandfather. To my surprise this all came very easily, I had been somewhat concerned about I’d be too quiet or speak too quickly, but Michael said I did fine. Another woman in the lodge also shared about her grandfather, which I felt was very powerful and beneficial to the entire lodge.

When the lodge ended we had the usual potluck dinner. Michael and I brought cheese and bread, which were simple things that my grandfather enjoyed. I laid out some of my grandfather’s papers for people to look at, and went through them with a couple people, which prompted comments like “Is there a great book somewhere among these papers just waiting to be published” to which I could only reply “Perhaps!”

We left around 10PM. It was a good night.

Note: I hope to write a more in depth account of this over on shaman.princessleia.com when I have a chance to devote the time it deserves.

Michael and I don’t tend to buy each other gifts for special occasions unless it’s something that strikes us as appropriate. This is why I am getting a birthday present nearly a month after my birthday. Plus, it takes a while to get something shipped from the UK.

Behold, what Michael got me for my birthday!

YAY!!!

Shaun is a bobblehead (which is SO perfect for his character). Feathers McGraw is a clock – very nicely made, I just want to hold it because it’s so neat. Yay a penguin that is a clock!

I’m not leaving the house today. In fact, I’m going to lock upself up here in the computer room all day and spend some quality time with my computer.

I’m not much of a “do stuff” person, and lately we’ve been doing tons of (great!) stuff. Each month I say “things will calm down by $next_month” and they don’t. It’s been weeks since I was able to sit down with a computer book and hack away at something. And how long have I been saying I was going to overhaul the back end of princessleia.com? Over a YEAR? All my computer time lately has been spent doing community things – email, wallace and gromit stuff, IRC – and even these have not gotten the attention I want to give them. Plus, with so much on my mind I haven’t been sleeping well this week. Wednesday night I was woken up by a nightmare that ruined my night.

This all leaves me feeling very tired and ungrounded. I need to get back to my roots! That’s what the “plan” was for this whole weekend.

Then Michael emailed me friday afternoon and asked if I wanted to see Harold Smith, Steve Turre, and Badal Roy at the Glencairn Museum. How could I pass up seeing a didgeridoo player and a tabla player, being hosted in one of those huge, stone buildings I love so much? I couldn’t of course. I got home from work Friday night and we drove to Willow Grove to have dinner at Natural Village (best chinese and vegan chinese in the area, sucks that it’s so far from home) and then arrived for the concert at 8. It was an amazing concert, the room it was in (picture here, but this picture does it no justice, the room is very much like a cathedral and the design on that arch is all done in little tiles) was specifically designed with having concerts in mind, so the sound is great. I’d never seen a tabla player in person before – besides Michael! – so that was pretty neat. Unfortunately as 10PM crept up I was feeling exhausted and crankie. It was close to 11 when we got home, I immediately went to bed.

Saturday morning I had to get up to take the Rav4 into the shop. The passenger’s side headlight had gone out and the orange light on that same side was acting funny (wouldn’t turn on when I started the car, but would come on eventually). I was hoping it wasn’t some electrical problem, those can be stupidly expensive to diagnose and fix. The appointment was at 8AM, so I got up like I would on a normal work day. It was rainy and dark out, and me with my single headlight decided to just take the main roads that I knew rather than the shortcut that Michael had suggested. I was at the dealership from 8-9:30 – how long does it take to change a lightbulb? I hope nothing is wrong! Luckily nothing was wrong, the blub in the headlight had just gone out and the orange one was loose or something so they replaced the bulb ($2 for that, phew!).

I wanted to go to bed when I got home around 10, but we had things to do. I did some cleaning and Michael went down in the basement to do some concrete work. Then we needed to go grocery shopping and run a few other errands. Grocery shopping was successful, but I was too tired and not in the mood to get my haircut, and I didn’t get to make digital prints for my grandfather’s sweat lodge because some woman was using the digital photo machine to scan and print a pile of 32432 pictures.

We went home and I had a beer.

I was able to get a few minutes to analyze the access logs for princessleia.com. I think the real reason I hate myspace is that 2% of the hits are from people hotlinking my images to display on their pages. I guess it’s because it’s so popular, but saying that the users of myspace are a bunch of evil, bandwidth leeching idiots is more fun (Oh crap, I’m being mean again!). So I started reading up on apache rewrite rules to ban certain sites from linking. I’m pretty sure I got it all sorted out now to display a simple “hotlinking is prohibited” image on myspace, but I need to grab Michael so he can enable rewrite
stuff for my site in the global apache config.

I also did a tree(1) of the princessleia.com root directory. The result?

250 directories, 5104 files

Egads!

A vast majority are images, and most of those are images I want to keep on the site because I use them. But there is a lot of work to be done to sort out how the site is organized and what pages use what CSS sheets, etc etc etc. What I’d like to do is change all .html to .php and use PHP to write includes so every page looks the same and changing the style is easy, but that isn’t going to happen. Too many of my pages (including my mplayer how-to) are .html and they’re linked all over the internet. Breaking those links would suck and redirects to the new site would make more clutter. I haven’t decided if more clutter is worth it. But I can spend the time to redo the CSS. And I know I’ll spend a bunch of time deleting stuff on the site I don’t use anymore.

This post has degenerated into me thinking aloud. I need to just stop typing and get to work.

On Monday evening I started looking for a Halloween costume. I’ve been a witch for halloween for like 6 years, so I figured it was time for a fun change.

I started out at disneystore.com – the costumes there were way discounted and I want to be a princess! ;) I started looking at Sally costumes (Nightmare Before Christmas). They didn’t have my size, so pointed me to buycostumes.com, which had some neat costumes. I contemplated getting a Sally costume, but it just wouldn’t be the same without a Jack, and the Jack costumes are pretty awful. So I browsed the site for a bit and naturally ended up in the Star Wars costume section.

That’s when it hit me.

I’ve never been Leia for Halloween!

BuyCostumes.com didn’t have the Leia costumes in stock, so I googled a bit, was very disappointed with the quality of costume sites. I ended up at starwars.com.

I figured starwars.com would be a good place to buy from, no worries about the site being a fraud or scary forms, that’s worth the extra couple of bucks I’ll pay for it. The normal ground shipping is supposed to ship within 48 hours and from there it takes up to 8 business days if you’re on the east coast. Great! That’s enough time to get it by the 29th. I placed my order for the Leia Costume.

I still hadn’t gotten the shipping confirm by Thursday morning, I started getting worried that they were being lazy and wouldn’t get around to shipping it until too late and then I wouldn’t get it in time! So I emailed them to see if I could change the shipping terms. The first email I got back didn’t answer my question, it was really lame, I was upset. The second email said: “Unfortunately we are unable to make any changes to your order as it is already processing. If you do not want this item please leave a note for Fedex saying that you refuse all items from Lucasfilm.” Damn. Perhaps I should consider alternatives in case it doesn’t arrive on time?

This morning I finally got the FedEx order tracking number, and guess what?

Estimated delivery Oct 26, 2005

Yay!

I love getting myself worked up over nothing.

“I’m skinnier in those pictures.”

“Yeah, you are, why?”

“Because I work in an office now.”

According to statistics, I’m not overweight. I’m within the acceptable range for someone with my body type. I never eat fast food (pizza isn’t fast food!). But in the past year I’ve put on 15 pounds. This gain has not only been a hit to my self-esteem, it’s made my stomach problems worse, and made me more tired than I should be for a healthy person my age.

There are several factors that have contributed to me putting on weight, and a majority have to do with my job.

When you work in a typical American office you have access to donuts, danishes, cookies and other sweet things quite often. Just this morning there were a couple boxes of delicious looking donuts in the kitchen that I managed to avoid (yay me!). When I worked at home, or didn’t work at all, I didn’t have access to the temptation. I didn’t have to walk by a box of donuts every time I went to the bathroom, no need to constantly exercise willpower when avoiding sweets is as easy as skipping that aisle in the grocery store once a week.

For some reason I’m hungrier when I actually go somewhere for work. I’m not entirely sure how this works, but I can get up at the same time on a weekend, spend all morning working on projects, clean the house and not feel hungry until 2PM. Then, if I go to work and don’t eat breakfast my stomach is complaining by 10AM. I suspect that part of the problem is being bored.

And when you work full time away from home the time for exercise is cut. I try to take walks during my lunch break, but any sort of exercising at home is difficult after a hard day at work. I suppose I could try to get into a routine of doing exercise in the morning, but when I’ve tried that in the past it just made me grumpy.

Similarly, when you work full time away from home you don’t have time to spend on creating elaborate, healthy meals. So often I am wiped out from working all day and tell Michael to order a pizza or take me out to dinner where I’ll eat something that’s terrible for me.

Eating when I’m depressed is a problem too. I find excuses to buy goodies, get a bagel loaded with cream cheese on my way to work “because it’s a monday” or buy brownie mix “because work was rough this week.”

What I have to drink might be an issue too. Damn PA only allowing us to buy beer by the case! I love beer… and soda, soda good! Yum!

Over the past month or so I’ve begun to tackle these issues. My stomach issues are calming down again, I’m hoping as I get back into healthy eating patterns that my energy will come back too. Getting into my favorite jeans has been easier too ;) Yay!

A big help has been Michael helping out with dinners. When I was only working part time or not at all I wouldn’t let him near the kitchen. But now that we’re both working all the time he’s put a lot of effort into cooking and I’m proud to say that his cooking horror stories may be a thing of the past! Since he works from home 2 days a week he’s been able to prepare some nice dinners for us when I’ve just been too tired to attempt it. He even made a loaf of bread yesterday! With yeast and everything!

The eating when depressed one is something I can handle, I have in the past. It is directly related to my general eating habits. If I’m eating healthy in general I won’t need as much sweets to improve my mood. The problem occurs when I’m eating sweets often, so cheer up sweets have to be bigger.

Beer will be a hard one to tackle, I love beer. But soda is not so hard, we haven’t been buying it much, water is what I drink mostly these days. Soda is back to being a treat when we eat out or have pizza.

I’ve also worked on willpower. This is a hard one %\ Damn this office and it’s delicious sugary pastries!

Exercise? Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe I should jump on the bandwagon and get a DDR mat and game for my PS2.

I think the next thing I need to do is work out what I should be eating for breakfast and lunch. I’ve been eating oatmeal at work lately for breakfast, which lasts long enough to get m
y stomach to lunchtime. I’d like to get away with munching on salad for lunch, but I always end up hungry again in the late afternoon, and then the plate of cookies down the hall is that much more tempting. I need to find food that will keep me satisfied and not be bad for me. Turkey sandwiches are probably good, I just need to cut down on the mayo (oh how I love the mayo!).

Any suggestions?

Annette just called me on my cellphone to tell me that Merlynn died. She was 8 years old, chinchillas generally live as long as cats, so while this isn’t “young” it isn’t old either. My sister didn’t give details, but she must have gotten sick.

This is sad %(

I’m so tempted to go into a big ole blurb about my first chinchillas and how important Merlynn was to me and to her mate, but I’ll keep it short.

Merlynn was the first chinchilla we ever bought from a breeder. We bought her after the loss of my first chinchilla, Eve, who I was very close to. I have a whole page about chinchillas and the ones I’ve owned here. They were a big part of my life for a few years in high school. When I left home in 2000 I was not in a position to take her with me, chinchillas don’t travel well and I didn’t have a stable home. It was heartbreaking, I missed her and Dweezle so much.

I’ve only seen them a couple times since moving away, but I still feel a loss…

Rest in Peace Merlynn, you were a dear, may our paths cross again.

It took me a while to realize that I made a connection between writing and immortality. PrincessLeia.com is a monster of randomness. Sorting it’s contents was incredibly difficult because the subjects are so varied. Very often I’ll take up a new thing, even something that seems normal like learning how to cook and keep an orderly house, and make a website about it. Going through the steps I took, spending a great deal of time to design and develop a page that will preserve that knowledge in some form. Why do I have this drive? Who is it for? I wasn’t sure until this past weekend.

The loss of my grandfather is difficult, the world lost a great mind when he died. But I’m comforted in the fact that we did not lose all his knowledge and ideas, he wrote down a great deal of what he thought about and we have much of what he has written. When I want inspiration from him I can still pull out one of the several papers, letters or articles that he’s written and read it. And I have the Heritage Trails project where I’m attempting to bring some of these things to the internet for a whole new audience.

The loss of my father is not comforted by a wealth of writings. He went to college for journalism, and spent some time writing, but not much survived over the years. All I have is a paper he wrote in High School. An aunt collected some papers (mostly fiction) of his that he had and was writing shortly before he died, and should be sending me them soon, but it’s not much. I’m absolutely heartbroken that I have so little to tap in to. The death of my father really hit me when I was cooking something and thought “hey I should call up dad and ask him $method/$tip” – and realized that he was dead and the wealth of information he had about cooking was gone.

And so, while my memory of my father’s ideas may shift and become unclear over time, my grandfather’s ideas are right there on paper. In 30 years the world will still have an accurate snapshot of my grandfather’s mind, but my father’s will be lost in time.

So why do I have this drive? Because I want to live forever, I have the natural want not to be forgotten. And I’m a writer my thoughts will swirl around in my head until I and let them out by writing them down.

And who is it for? Everyone, but mostly me. It’s all a self-preservation exercise that happens to have the side effect of being helpful to other people. If I didn’t have the internet I’m sure I’d have reams of paper with thoughts and ideas, and journals that I just wrote for myself all over the place.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot from several angles.

Is this all very selfish?

Am I too prolific when my journal is taken into account for anyone to ever want to spend the time and access my thoughts?

Is this a bad habit? Should I spend less time cataloging my life and more time living it? recently brought this up, and has since stopped writing so much in his journal.

And so many other questions.

Then, this past weekend, a friend mentioned that I should “Do something” with something that I had written because he thought it was good. And this morning, I received an email from a fellow who thanked me for the cooking section of my site, said the Debian mplayer how-to was very helpful and that he now understand how to use screen(1).

These things quieted my mind a lot.

With all that I have written and put together I’ve created something wonderful and helpful that I enjoy!

That’s what matters.

But I think examining this was important. I may shift my focus back to preserving (on PrincessLeia.com) some of the more important things I write about, lest they get lost on this journal between entries about weekend activities and work.