Saturday was spent at our Shaman class. A lot of interesting subjects were touched upon, it turned out to be quite an enjoyable meeting.

We came home and were feeling somewhat restless. While we were sitting around the livingroom trying to figure out what to do I took a look in the fishtank to find the yellow angelfish (it’s always hiding and I look for it often) – only to discover that it was dead! Oh no! This was quite a shock, it was always quite a runt and never ate much but there was no indication that it was sick %( Poor fishie.

We decided just to head to the video store and pick up a couple movies. I’d never seen “Naked Gun” (yeah I’m a FREAK!) so we got that, and got “Kentucky Fried Movie” since it’s a bit of a comedy cult classic and I hadn’t seen it. We also picked up a case of Hopdevil and a pizza and some wings on our way home.

The evening turned out to be nice and relaxing. I didn’t even end up having any beer. I got tired around 10:30 and went to bed. Michael spent the night doing his radio show.

Sunday was more productive. I got up at 7:30 spent the morning puttering around on my computer as usual. When Michael got up around 11:30 (he’d been up past 4AM for his radio show) I headed outside to get to work on the yard.

I was able to finally tackle my gardens, chopping down all the dead flowers so it was back to just mulch and ready for winter. Then it was time to clean up leaves. The leaves are still falling, I should have taken pictures of the leaves falling there were so many each time the wind blew. I got to try out the new attachment for the leave blower/mulcher that puts leaves directly into a garbage can rather than the small bag that it comes with. This was very nice. When Michael joined me he got out the lawn mower (which also mulches) and we worked together to get piles together and mulch. We spent about 4 hours out there.

I was tired at the end.

For dinner I made some veggie burgers and fries, and finally got to enjoy a beer. We finished watching “Kentucky Friend Movie” and then watched The West Wing. The West Wing was horrible, it was their “live debate episode” which was – you guessed it – a live debate. I am already quite well-versed in this country’s politics, and watching fictional characters debate today’s issues was strange. Not only strange, but stupid. It’s like the show has become the director’s private podium for political comment, and that’s really not what the show was originally about, the actual issues used to be secondary to the characters and engaging plot. ARG!

Now it’s Monday. This evening we’re meeting with another ordained minister, she was recommended by someone we really respect too, so I am hopeful that it will go well.

As I mentioned earlier this week, Michael spent some time working on the Magic Room this week. I finally was able to enjoy it tonight, and took a picture.

Yesterday night Michael helped me make my journeying mask that we were asked to make for the Shaman class. We don’t have pictures of that process, but it was messy! To make the plaster of paris mask you first cover your face in vaseline, and then have someone start applying the strips to your face. Michael applied the strips and I just lied on the floor. It took about 20 minutes for him to complete it, and then I had to wait for 20 minutes for it to dry. The mask has no eye holes and no mouth, so I just had to chill out for a while. Took the opportunity to go on a Journey.

The mask is supposed to dry in 24 hours, but it hadn’t completely when I got home from work. So I popped it in the oven for a bit (following directions on packaging – 200 degrees for 15 minutes). Then it was ready.

I painted it green.

I let it dry while checking email and getting things squared away on the computer for the evening. Then I took the project out to the Magic Room.

I added ears to it (still need to work on how to secure these, I used glue but it doesn’t seem to be holding very well)

And then for the really fun part, painting designs on it! We journeyed for this during our last evening class, and this is what my spirit guide showed me:

Reality was a bit different.

I’m not much of an artist, but I’m proud of it and I had fun!

I did get my quiet time too. Michael went to the men’s sweat this evening so I really got the place to myself. Was able to journey, do a runecast and some meditation. I’m feeling good.

But now it’s bedtime.

The absurdity of it all aside, the daylight savings time change has never really “bothered” me. Until now.

Maybe it comes with age?

Maybe it is because I’m on a more normal sleep schedule?

Maybe it’s not the time change at all?

Whatever it is, I’m sure feeling weird this week.

Not really a weird I can put my finger on either. I’m not depressed, not particularly unmotivated, not restless, haven’t had a problem sleeping, not feeling moody, not tired.

I’m just… disconnected.

I think what I need is some meditation and quiet time. That’s not happening tonight though, we have many good plans!

During my lunch break I’m headed to Michaels to pick up some Rigid Wrap plaster cloth and other decorating stuff for the masks we need to make for our Shaman class on Saturday. October went by too quickly, this class came up fast.

At 7PM tonight we’ll be meeting with a minister to discuss wedding stuff, see if he’s the right type of person to marry us. I have high hopes, he was recommended to us by someone we really respect and has done many non-christian weddings.

When we get home we’ll have to get going on the masks since they generally take 24 hours to dry before you can decorate them, and they’ll have to be ready for decorating Friday night.

But then after all that decorating on Friday I’ll have some quiet time! Michael spent the evening on Tuesday cleaning up the Magic Room above the garage, putting down some carpets and bringing a bit of furniture and some blankets up there. I haven’t gotten a chance to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but he tells me it’s a wonderful place to go and reconnect.

Last night we attended a “Dia de los Muertos” party in Malvern at Jim Frank’s house. It was fun, we met some new people.

We arrived around 7PM, brought some breaded chicken that Michael made, yummie! It went well with the chips, dips, salsa and quesadillas that were provided when we got there. Mmmm quesadillas.

About a dozen people showed up, the first couple hours were spent just chatting, eating and listening to mexican-style music (with some James Brown mixed in because it’s “good party music”). We also decorated an alter with candles, confetti, flowers and trinkets and photos from people that have passed. I didn’t bring photos or anything, but it was meaningful anyway, and really beautiful once it was all set up.

The big event of the evening took place at 9PM when we made our “tombstones” and buried ourselves. The “Tombstones” were just pieces of paperboard that we cut out and stapled to sticks, and then we wrote on them. The variety of what was written was interesting, some people were serious, writing their favorite quotes or dates of life-changing events, others were funny. I couldn’t help being part of the latter group, since I’ve done quite a bit of thinking seriously about mortality lately and I was using this night to celebrate with laughter and happiness. My tombstone said:

Elizabeth Ann Krumbach

“Oh no! There really is a God after all!”

*flames at the bottom*

Hahahaha! I crack myself up.

Once the tombstones were complete we went into the room with the alter and told each other what we could do “in remembrance of us” and then went out to stick our tombstones in the ground out front to “bury ourselves.” It was all very interesting, more so because none of us really knew what to expect when Jim said the plan was to “burying ourselves” and everyone was able to make up what they wanted it to mean for ourselves.

We left around 10:30. I wish we could have stayed and visited longer, but I was tired and I had to get up for work this morning and all that.

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.