We went drum shopping today. Real life shopping for Native American drums is one of those things that is somewhat hard to do because of the difficulty in finding local resellers. There are music stores in the area, but mostly they just have modern instruments. We went to a really nice drum shop in New Hope last year and figured that would be our best bet. A little after noon we hopped in the car and headed out there.

It was humid, and although the temperature only got into the mid 80s, walking around New Hope was sweaty work. We were unable to locate the drum shop, which we’re pretty much convinced has moved or closed down because it wasn’t where we remembered it being. We walked around New Hope a bit, visited a couple “Native American Trading Posts” neither of which had what we wanted, and what they had in stock had prices that scared us out the door (I was expecting to spend a few hundred for a couple drums and blankets, but not as much as they were charging!). We probably should have expected such high prices and tourist-oriented things (not real drum-circle type drums) in New Hope. Still, it was a disappointment.

We left New Hope and tried to think of other stores in the area. We were both tired and stopped at Starbucks before deciding to head to George’s Music in North Wales on the off chance that they’d have something. They didn’t, and the guy we asked had no clue what we were talking about when we explained “uh… definitely not in stock, but maybe something we could special order?”

At that point we had pretty much given up, we’d just shop online.

But it was disappointing, so I suggested we take a small detour on our way home and check out what the lovely shopping town of Skippack had. Our hopes weren’t high, but as we drove in we saw a sign for a store called Dreamcatcher. We stopped and parked.

What a wonderful store it is! It smelled lovely, and had a decent selections of the exact drums we were looking for! I picked out a big, nice-sounding, thin-skinned drum, and Michael picked up a smaller thicker skinned drum. We also wandered in back where they had some really pretty (and quite affordable) woven blankets.

So we walked out of there with 2 woven blankets, the two drums, and a couple drumsticks. Plus we picked up a couple fliers for drumcircles that they hold, and other special events. Nice! We didn’t know that Skippack had such a community, it’s only 5 miles from our house!

And now for pictures:

Caligula almost immediately claimed one of the blankets for himself

Large drum

Medium drum

Apparently the size and thinness of the large drum causes it to be particularly sensitive to humidity, oops. Within about 20 minutes of being inside our humid house the skin started to loosen. Michael assured me that this sort of thing was normal and that it can be put back into playing condition with a hairdryer, and of course he was correct, I looked online for other care tidbits and found this:

Natural rawhide drums loosen in times of humidity and tighten when heated. The native people heat the drums in front of a fire before using, to ensure maximum sound quality. The tighter the hide, the stronger the sound will be. In a modern setting, a hair dryer is the quickest and easiest way to dry a drum for
use. Simply start in the center and work toward the edges of the drum. It only takes two minutes, restores the hide to the proper tension and can be repeated as often as necessary to be enjoyed for many years.

Hopefully we’ll be able to attend a drum-making class in October, it’d be fun to make our own too.

I’m so excited!

Gosh it’s been a busy weekend. Going to veg out to some Red Dwarf now.

Today I finally went to the Philadelphia Zoo.

I like zoos. I know a lot of people have issues with them, but I don’t as long as the animals are well taken care of. And it means I can see cute fluffy things I wouldn’t normally be able to see. It’s all about the cute fluffies.

Like the firefox!

I met up with and around 11 and we went out for food, then drove into Philly to the zoo.

The weather was so nice, not too hot, and quite sunny. We bought our tickets and went into the zoo.

First saw a Red Kangaroo (so cute! but it lived with emus, ew), went into all the little houses, the reptile house was awsome, snakes and turtles are my favorite, and they had some amazing specimens. While leaving the reptile house we noticed that the sky had gotten dark and cloudy.

We figured a little rain wouldn’t hurt, so continued our tour of the zoo. Saw the hippos and when getting close to the elephants, the sky opened up and it started pouring. had brought along an umbrella (she’s such a girlscout! We didn’t think it would actually rain), but after a few minutes of the three of us squeezed uncomfortably close beneath it, and the start of horizontal rain, we put it away and figured it wasn’t worth it.

We got wet, but it was still fun!

The elephants were some of my favorites. The two asian elephants seemed to love the rain and took the opportunity to play in their pool. Swimming elephants are GREAT! They came pretty close to the edge of their enclosure (causing some kids to scream with fear of how close), and they’d dive in the water, splash around, and just be all around entertaining. It was great to watch, I’d never seen elephants be so unprovokingly playful.

Then we saw the primates, the best part being the gorillas, where the zookeepers had put identical crates on the gorilla side of the glass and the people side. Watching from above the similarites between young children climbing on the boxes and young gorillas what surreal. I’m sure this was intentional.

Then we got to see the penguins! Yay! They were happy in the rain too, swimming in a “flock” around their pool. I wanted to give them hugs %)

The rain was still coming down in spurts, but we got around to see the bears, a snow leopard (so cute!), 3 adorable cheetahs, and possibly my favorite animal in the zoo – the red panda (firefox), who was so cute in it’s little enclosure! His fur was wet, but he was so fluffy and cute that I wanted to give him hugs too. Unfortunately the big cats (lions, tigers) were living at another zoo while their enclosures were being redone, so we didn’t get to see them.

By the time we had finished seeing all the animals the rain was really coming down. About halfway to the main gate I realized that I was completely drenched from head to toe, and that we had no towels or anything to dry up with before getting into ‘s car and sitting on his leather seats, d’oh!

I had a really great time though, the rain managed to clear a lot of people out of the zoo, so it wasn’t as crowded as it would have been otherwise. And and put up with my wacky personfications of like, every animal we saw. They’re fun to go to zoos with!

And now Michael and I are going drum shopping! And it’s raining today too, but I’m bringing my raincoat this time ;)

My brain was feeling toasty (no, not from the beer, it was from the long boring week I had!). So I wanted a mind-numbing project. In order to get in the brain numb mood I decided to play some mahjongg.

I play the gnome version of mahjongg (in gnome-games package), because it works nicely. But the tilesets included are boring. I wonder if I could download more?

Have you ever tried googling for gnome mahjongg tilesets? It didn’t take me long to get annoyed and give up, I wanted to relax afterall.

I wonder how hard it is to make my own?

Not too hard. I opened the existing PNG one: /usr/share/pixmaps/mahjongg/smooth.png and edited it. It took me from…

21:24:48 <@pleia2|odin> cool, it seems pretty easy to make gnome mahjongg tilesets..

until

23:20:18 <@pleia2|odin> behold: http://princessleia.com/images/journalpics/caligula_mahjongg.jpg

Ok, so I chatted and goofed off too.

You can download the caligula mahjongg tileset here: http://princessleia.com/tools/caligula_tileset.png

You just drop that into /usr/share/pixmaps/mahjongg/ and start up mahjongg, then choose it from the tileset list.

When we first went to Ortino’s Northside both Michael and I had a good chuckle over the Monty Python Holy Grail Pale Ale from Black Sheep Brewery in North Yorkshire, UK. We didn’t order any though, since we figured it was all about the label and the beer would suck.

Tonight I finally broke down and bought a bottle.

And you know what? It was nothing overly exciting, but it was pretty good.

We also discovered that there is a gas station and little beer store on 29 about 3-4 miles from our house. Good to know. The beer store carries Victory (picked up a case of hopdevil) and a couple other good small brewery labels alongside the ever-present mountains of Coors Light and Budweiser. Apparenty they were pretty cleaned out because of the folk festival too, I’ll have to check back when they’re more well-stocked.

According to the 2000 census the town of Schwenksville has a population of about 1000. It’s probably grown in the past few years with the construction boom in this area, there are whole neighborhoods around our house that are shiny and new. But it’s still a small town, I’d certainly never heard of it before we looked at our house’s real estate listing for it.

But it does have a little claim to fame. Schwenksville hosts the annual Philadelphia Folk Festival, which starts today.

I’d never heard of this festival until we bought the house, but it’s big, and people come from all over the country for it. For about 2 weeks prior they set up tents, rope off area parks and fields for festival tents and parking. Signs go up pointing people to the festival, locals rent out space on their lawn for camping and parking. Hippies show up on the side of the road selling guitars. The festival itself only lasts three days.

I am not into folk music, I don’t like crowds, so I’m generally turned off by festivals in general, we won’t be going. It might be fun just to “check it out” but the $53 ticket to get in for a day is a bit steep.

Instead I think we’re going to go on a drum finding adventure. We want to get skin drums for the shaman course that starts in a couple weeks and there are several stores in the Philadelphia area that sell them, but the key is finding the right one. Should be fun.

As for tonight? No plans so far. It’s been a boring week.

So google has it’s lovely jabber server.

Talk to me: pleia2

During the first bit of my lunch break I decided to go for a walk because it’s so nice out. While on my walk I decided to drop into the Lansdale thrift store to check out their scifi book section (which has been awful lately, and was today too *sigh*).

While thumbing through a book I heard some guys giggling, which I ignored, until a tallish, uber-white, skinny one who looked to be about 20 came over and started to talk to me.

“This is gonna sound so dumb if I’m wrong, but is your name Lyz?”

“Uh… yeah…”

“Do you own PrincessLeia.com?”

“Yup.”

“Oh man! That’s so cool! I just used your Debian mplayer how-to this past weekend! This is so cool! I read on your site that you lived around here!”

His buddies came around the corner then too, and there was much “haha, I told you it was her!” and laughing. I politely said that I was happy my how-to was helpful but that I had to get back to work. Quite honestly I was freaked out by their excitement, and the fact that someone “in the real world” actually recongnised me. And I am not so good with people I don’t know anyway.

But in the end I guess it’s kinda cool, I’ve never had that happen before.

Friday night we had and over for movie night. Had some pizzas and beers, watched a couple movies. It was a nice relaxing evening.

Saturday I spent the morning taking apart hour. I’d finally finished with my extra 80 gig drive, so I wanted to remove it, and while I was at it I figured I could install the DVD drive. I have never been much of a hardware person, not sure why I was always so afraid of it, too many bad grounding stories perhaps. But I wanted this done, and didn’t want to be all girly and bugging Michael to do it. Besides, it’s just removing a drive and putting in a new one, right?

Well it wasn’t that easy. I had to change the whole drive configuration because the IDE cable wouldn’t go from the cdrom all the way down to the harddrive. I never liked this Dell case much (always afraid I’ll break it if I pull something too hard), but it’s all around bad design. So I ended up hooking up the drive to it’s own IDE cable, then hooking the DVDROM and CDRW on one. I wasn’t sure which IDE plug in place on the motherboard was 0 and 1, so I pulled out the Dell Manual. Big mistake. Not only did it tell me to put the jumpers on “Input Select” rather that master and slave, it labelled the IDE ports as “Harddrive” and “CDROM” … wtf kind of manual is this? It manages to tell you to remove the green sliders from the sides of the drive (duh) but skips small, important things you should be aware of when installing things.

Finally it’s 10:30, I’m on my 5th or 6th attempt to get things running properly when Michael wakes up and asks what I’m up to. I mope and say it’s not working properly as the boot hangs. And then it loads grub and boots into Debian! There are still errors though, so I try and investigate and really can’t figure it out. Then Michael comes over and clears the BIOS – something I had no clue about. It’s all working nicely now, and I have a DVD-ROM!

After this fun, I spent some time talking to and decided to drive down to her place. I have to take 422 to get to where her and live, and it wasn’t until I was getting on it that I realized it’d been a very long time since I’d driven on an expressway. Expressways are my favorite! Merging, passing, being passed, driving fast! I’d drive an expressway over a normal road any day, but my route to work doesn’t give me that opportunity and I really didn’t drive much before we had 2 cars.

I spent the afternoon eating and shopping with and . Was able to finally pick up a sewing set. I realized I needed one last week when Michael asked me if I had any sewing stuff.

“No, but you do.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, it’s in your desk.”
“Oh, right.”

He just has some needles and bits of thread, and I figured it was time to stop being such a shameful girl and get some sewing stuff. We found a Jo-Ann Fabrics that was going out of business and I was able to pick up a nice little sewing set for 40% off, yay!

So I was able to fix one of the pillows that ripped when the tag was removed.

When I got home yesterday evening Bob was over hanging out with Michael getting ready for his radio show. So we all had a few beers, ordered a pizza (more pizza!). I went to bed around 10:30.

Last night and this morning I spent some time working on getting DVD stuff going on hour. I’d just been through it all last week with R2Q5, so I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult. But Ubuntu has more non-free stuff in it’s repository than Debian does, so it was tricky. I went right for xine-ui. I spent over 2 hours trying to get it installed. Even changed my sources to unstable (xine-ui isn’t in testing) to see how many packages it wanted me to upgrade to get i
t going – too many. I finally got annoyed and apt-get installed totem-xine (which is in testing). It worked. This morning I played Toy Story the whole way through and was so happy that totem played it properly. Then it crashed when I was exploring special features. Dumb thing. When I tried to start it again it segfaulted. I went through all the local files it generated, deleted them all to make sure nothing strange had been set when it crashed the first time – no luck, still segfaulted. I reinstalled libdvdcss2, reinstalled totem, even rebooted. No luck. WTF? Google was no help, I don’t understand why/how it could quit working in such a strange way, I even tried a different DVD.

I installed mplayer this morning, so just went ahead and played a DVD with that (sans menus *sigh*), I figured I could get used to that as long as I got really good at reading the man page and turning things on like subtitles and the correct audio track. Then about 30 minutes into Toy Story 2 the sound went insane and it got all choppy and exploded. I was able to restart mplayer and fast-forward to that part again, but I don’t know what’s up with it, or if it will start doing such nonsense again. I’ll have to mess with it more later.

Now I am gonna go pay bills.

EDIT: Well I ran totem –debug and found that it couldn’t find the plugins because it was looking in the wrong place, I fixed it by soft linking one of the places it looks to the proper place:

ln -s /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.0.1 .xine/plugins

Now to fix dvd playback, it claims that /mnt/dvd is not in the fstab, when it certainly is *grr*

EDIT 2: OK, just mounted it manually before launching totem and it’s ok. I still don’t understand why it worked before and I had to do all this tweaking to make it work again. *kicks it* Now lets hope it doesn’t break again %)

I left work yesterday at 4pm. By 4:30 I was pulling up Woodland Ave when my cellphone rang.

“Hi, Beth[1]? I’m at your house.”

“Oh! I just pulled onto my street, be there in a sec.”

Michael came down when I pulled in the driveway (he’d been working upstairs) and greeted my aunt. The first news from her was that she had her purse stolen earlier that morning so she was thankful that we were putting her up for the night.

I gave her the grand tour of the house, garage and yard while Michael finished up some work. I think she really liked it, and apparently the pictures don’t do it justice at all, she said it was much bigger than the pictures made it seem.

We went out to dinner at Ortinos Northside, it was pretty good. We talked about family: the good, the bad and the downright wacky. It was good catching up, we’re all so busy and far apart that it’s rare that we get to sit down and talk about things.

After dinner we went back to the house and stayed up talking until around 10. I was pretty exhausted by then, it’s been a busy week. We let her stay in our room and set up a “bed” made of our spare blankets upstairs in the computer room. It actually turned out being fairly comfortable, and Caligula thought our blanket bed on the floor was the best thing ever, he was crawling through all the covers and attacking me while I was trying to sleep.

My aunt left around 6:30am this morning, among other things she needed to get a new driver’s license because of her lost purse, so wanted to get on the road early.

It was a good visit, and finally someone in my family has seen the house!

[1] Apparently I have nickname issues, different people in different parts of my life call me by different names. It can be confusing at times, especially when they get together and are all calling me by different names. Every time I sign an email I have to remember how I know the person and by what name they know me.

Yesterday evening when I came home Michael had the whole lawn mowed. It looks great.

Then he made dinner, chicken and veggie kabobs on the grill, yum!

He also did laundry and said he would do any other cleaning that needed to be done today.

Gosh I’m a lucky girl.