I am really tired today.

I got up around 5:30, Caligula alarm clock woke me up then. Took a shower, got Michael out of bed and while he was showering I got everything together for the second day of the Shaman course. We were out the door by 6:30.

It’s amazing how little traffic there is at 6:30 on a Sunday morning. We arrived in Malvern at 7am, sat and talked with some other members of the group until everyone else arrived.

Around 7:30am we got to watch and participate in the fire building ceremony for the sweat lodge. That was cool.

The sweat lodge was great. I made it through the whole thing! And apparently it was an especially long one, so I was really proud of myself.

During part of it I got very tired and saw some things, what I’d normally attribute to the “I’m about to pass out” feeling, but then I decided to take some of the things I’ve learned from my fellow students about visions and thought about these things I was seeing. It had amazing results, not only did thinking about what I saw pull my attention away from how tired I was feeling enough to get me through that round, the meaning I gathered from analyzing that vision was enough to carry me through the rest of the lodge. I let myself believe that what I was seeing was a spirit guide helping me through the ceremony.

This belief led me into a place that has always been dangerous spirituality for me. Nothing I want to discuss in public right now, and I don’t think I’ll have trouble getting past this now, but it will take some thought.

The morning sweat took up the entire morning, by the time we were entirely finished, had taken a dip in the pool and changed back into our clothes it was noon. We settled down for a nice breakfast for lunch, then gathered inside for more teaching.

The afternoon was spent discussing different things. We were all pretty tired from the sweat, but hung in there. Around 2:30 we went outside for a drum dance, which was fun and kept us all awake. When we came inside there was more talking and then a short journey and closing ceremony. We were finished around 3:30, and although we wanted to stay for the Crystal Bowl Healing, I was way too tired.

As part of our “homework” we’re going to get into the habit of journeying at least once a week, and writing down our journeys. Since I’m very inexperienced I’m going to try to do it more often than that. We also are supposed to try and keep a dream journal. I think I might put these together into some sort of electronic form, maybe a private blog? Filtered blog? We’ll see.

In all, I had a really good day, but it was exhausting. Having a sweat in the morning like that really is something else.

Going back to work tomorrow is going to be tough %)

Today we went to our first day of the Shamanic Life course.

We got there at 8:30, and it turns out there are 20 people taking this course, which is more than I expected. My psychotic shyness kicked in immediately. Plus all the names to remember! I felt slightly uncomfortable, I’m coming from a history of doing a lot of spiritual things on my own, and this group thing is a huge (and difficult) step for me.

During coffee people walked around and introduced themselves to one another, I kept ahold of Michael and that helped %)

The morning went well, I even talked some in that big scary group, people asked a lot of excellent questions. Everyone is really nice, and throughout the day I was able to gather up the courage to chat with a few people.

In the afternoon we did our first Shamanic “Journey” which I might go into detail about later. I felt somewhat unprepared because so many of the people in the group already had experience with this and I had only read about it. But my first Journey went well, since it was my first time I had a more experienced person journey “with me” to help me find my spirtual guide. Afterwards we both talked about what we saw, it was a really interesting discussion.

I keep almost elaborating on these things, but it’s so hard to explain without seeming weird. Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll be able to articulate this experience in a way that doesn’t sound crazy. Of course if anyone is interested I wouldn’t object to trying to explain it in a more private setting, just drop me an email.

For now I am just going to say that I’m pursuing this spirtual path because it feels right. Shamanism has been practiced all over the world for thousands of years, with very little variation from Africa to South America to Northern Europe. With this path I’m able to get in touch with my ancestor’s practices before they were taken over by Christianity, and practice the rituals of the natives of America, where I make my home today.

Today we also did some drumming, which was fun, but I’m horribly self-conscious about my lack of musical talent, I’ve got no rhythm! I am hopeful that practice will remedy this. I didn’t do bad though, everyone makes mistakes. Michael and I even stayed late to do a short drum dance, it was great!

Tomorrow we have to leave the house by 6:30 am so we can get to the class at 7:30 to build the fire and have a sweat lodge at 8:30 am. I’m sure tomorrow will be more exhausting than today, but I’m ready!

Now I need to go get my pajamas on and get sleepy %)

I am exhausted.

It was a busy day at work. For lunch I took a co-worker up the street to Greater India for their lunch buffet. I’d never been for their lunch buffet, it was pretty good. My co-worker was very impressed, and amused that the staff there knew me. I was so full when I left.

Unfortunately that took up more than my whole lunchbreak, and I wasn’t able to do the normal “clearing of mind” that I do during lunch. I got back to work and worked, worked, worked. By 3:30 I was tired, by 5 I couldn’t wait to get out the door. I had some errands to run before going home, which I figured wouldn’t take long.

I needed to pick up some stuff to make sandwiches, some bagels and cream cheese, and a couple notebooks. All of this is for the shaman course we’re taking this weekend.

So I swung by Kohl’s, they don’t have notebooks. Dropped by the grocery store in the same parking lot, got most everything I needed, but the tomatoes there sucked, and they didn’t have notepads. Arg. I figured I’d just stop at a pharmacy or something to get the notebooks, and a roadside veggie stand for tomatoes.

I stood in Eckerd for about 10 minutes staring at their office supplies section that look like it was hit by a tornado (oh right, school just opened) and finally was able to find a couple decent looking college-ruled notebooks (I hate wide-ruled!). Then I stopped by a roadside veggie stand, but all I had was a $10 bill, no ones like I thought I had. Doh.

I went back toward Harleysville and stopped at the Clemens to get a tomato. The whole parkinglot stunk, I don’t know what the smell was, but by that time I was tired and crankie, and it was after 6. I got my tomato and drove home.

Luckily Michael had dinner just about ready when I arrived! Chicken kabobs with mushrooms, pineapple, red and green peppers, and mushrooms with rice. Mmmm.

I won’t stay up late tonight. And we’ll be gone most of the weekend for the opening of the Shamanism course. I’m really excited %D We have to be down in Malvern by 8:30 tomorrow morning, will have lunch there and be doing activities all day, finishing at 5pm. Sunday we’ll be there from 7:30 am until 4pm.

I think I’m gonna go rest now. *yawn*

I had the best time coming home from work today.

I was driving up Route 73 from Skippack Pharmacy, and about halfway to Schwenksville there were some cop cars and a sign saying “All Traffic –>”

Closing part of 73 during rush hour? Madness! Must be something bad.

So I follow the detour, which is no fun for me since I don’t know the area all that well. I decided I’d just follow the person in front of me, since they seemed to know where they were going (a la Dirk Gently). When they followed most of the traffic and made a left turn onto a road I followed and ignored the big ole line of traffic exiting the road.

Driving down this little road, past a couple buildings and then I see A DEAD END! It’s a rounded dead end and everyone is turning around and getting into that big ole line to exit the road.

HAHAHA! I AM SUCH A SHEEP! WE SUCK! How absolutely amusing! I couldn’t help grinning while sitting in that line of traffic for 10 minutes, watching all the other people driving past me who would soon be in line behind me.

And then the traffic coming the other way stopped. I thought about this. Either: a) people stopped being sheep (HAHAHA) OR b) the detour is no longer there. So I figured that instead of following everyone again, making the terrible left out of that silly dead end road to follow the detour, I’d go right, back to 73 to see if the detour was gone.

My non-sheep brains were right, the detour was gone. I win!

But what down this road could have caused them to close Route 73 during rush hour?

I continued down 73 and it was closed down to one lane, passed a few firetrucks, police cars, and ambulence, then a tow-truck with a car on top that was crushed to about half of it’s original size. Ouch. But we all love to see a good accident.

And after all this I got home right when I said I would.

I was going to make this story fun, with pictures and much silliness, but my head started to hurt about halfway through writing this. Stupid allergies. Maybe some other time.

A Philly Soft Pretzel Factory store opened up 2 blocks from where I work. I knew this would be dangerous, I love soft pretzels.

Today I thought about going to get one after finishing my salad lunch (see, I’m trying to be good!), but I resisted the temptation.

Then a woman in the next department came in with a whole bag full to share. YAY!!!

Mmmm soft pretzel.

Then our big boss came by and dropped off a box of Ghirardelli Chocolates with Caramel for our department because we’re such great employees. Mmmm chocolate and caramel…

See, this is why I weigh more when I work in an office.

I launched the new Xelium website last night.

Behold!

network.xelium.net

You may remember several months back when we had a design contest for the site. That failed miserably and I ended up pulling together this design myself using an existing logo. It sat around for months, I was trying to bother my fellow admins for their input and pictures. Then I got busy.

As I mentioned in a previous entry I spent some time this weekend working on it and then just said “Is this ok? Good, I’m launching it.” Which is generally the best way to go in such situations.

The staff page was funny. Since only a couple of the admins sent in pictures I just went ahead and used the first google image hit for their nickname, which came out particularly amusing for Tech, and somewhat inappropriate for fLeSh (I cropped). LittleWolf lucked out though, his is super cute.

The faces of Xelium page was fun, since I got to have people on the network email me their pictures for me to crop and put up, and I had no clue what some of them looked like before this. Which reminds me, me and Time are the only ones from #13thHour with our pictures on there, so you #13thhour people give me permission to post your picture there please (%

The Linking page is new, but since adding a new server last night (and an EU server possibly on the way) I doubt we’ll be accepting new connections anytime soon if these work out.

The rest is pretty much just a copy of what was on the old page. I’ll need to update the modes section sometime, since we did a massive upgrade of the ircd recently. And of course I’ll have to update the servers page when/if these new servers actually work out (never fail, I updated the server map this past weekend because it had been out-dated for months, and two days later we’re adding another, ahahaa! I think my exact words this time were “Server? Like a new Xelium leaf? HOLY CHRIST I JUST UPDATED THE SERVER MAP!” and everyone laughed.).

Gosh, I’ve been doing a lot of website work lately o_o

Fansites are much more fun to run when it’s a cult thing and news trickles out every month or so, each tidbit an exciting morsel of knowledge.

With the release of the Wallace and Gromit movie I can’t keep up. Just this week I missed the news about the World Premiere! Had to post about it after it happened. I get emails from all sorts of people now giving me new leads about toys and books being released, and although I greatly appreciate their emails and attachments, it’s just too much. I wonder if I should have arranged for some of the people who email me info to write up some articles themselves so I could just drop them on the site as-is. Maybe setup the site to run on wordpress with the lj plugin so I wouldn’t have to update the site and community separately. Or somehow figured out a way to assign different sections of the site to different people so that my movie images section wouldn’t be so pathetic. I have new pictures! But putting them up takes time – cropping, resizing, uploading, linking – especially when more news is coming in almost daily and my entire day of computer time is limited to a couple hours after work. I have other things to do too!

OK, you’re right, I love it. But when I saw 10 WnG related articles in my inbox, plus 2 other fans emailing me last night and I didn’t have time to make updates until the time between my shower and driving to work this morning (and still didn’t get it all updated!) I felt flustered.

Apparently this near burnout on fansites is not terribly uncommon. There is a pull to think “Hey it doesn’t even matter, it’s just a bunch of fake characters, why do I work so hard on this?” and the “I love this! And hundreds of people read this site!”

Lucky for me this is just a passing moment. The flood of news isn’t as overwhelming as it might be for something more popular. I can’t imagine how those comic book fansite people keep up when their comic is made into a popular movie. Unless Wallace and Gromit explodes into US theaters, shaking the world and creating something phenomenal (which I doubt, you know how American audiences are), the busy times for my site will soon pass.

Once it’s passed I’ll probably get bored and wish it was back. Wallace and Gromit rock, and I love them!

Yesterday evening I picked up and we went out to the KOP Mall. As I mentioned in my last entry, I wanted to see if I could find some Wallace and Gromit toys. I guess I was really looking for an excuse to get out of the house. After this busy summer, having a weekend were we have nothing planned made me restless.

After getting slightly lost in Norristown (AHHH!), we made it to KOP around 5:30. Parked and walked around the mall for a bit.

Ugh malls.

I need to get tattooed on my arm “you don’t like malls” or something, since I hate them and yet I still see them as a viable option when I want to just hang out with someone. We only spent about an hour in the mall before I got annoyed with the people and screaming children.

I need a mall that doesn’t have any other people, or clothing stores. Just the stores I want, all close together.

Right, that’s why I have the internet.

We didn’t succeed in finding any WnG toys, not in the toy store, or the comic store, or a movie store. Very disappointing. We did see a poster for the movie though.

For dinner we headed to T.G.I. Fridays. It was nice getting to just hang out with , usually we have with us as the driver. But now that I have my own car I can go pick her up myself! We got to talk about all those great girly things that we can’t talk around with the boys around %)

Today is another planless day. I suggested that we head to Skippack and browse the little shops there this afternoon because it was so nice out, but Michael’s allergies got bad and he wasn’t feeling well %( So instead I prepared the new Xelium website for launch – just in time for one of our main servers on the network to go down, thus postponing said launch, d’oh! I also finally got cups working perfectly, turns out I didn’t have the cupsys-bsd package installed, which includes the lpr layer for cups, with that installed I had no trouble printing from firefox. I also finally got around to installing the google firefox plugin, which I only did so I could check out PageRank. And while redoing the Xelium site I decided I needed a more recent picture of myself, which I’m also using for my default lj icon now, slightly larger one is: here (yay Linux Cookbook!).

And now?

<@LeXy> i think im going to wrap up in a blanket and watch scifi or a movie with giant bugs

She’s got the right idea.

*grabs blanket and heads off to watch some bad scifi movie*

Yesterday was uneventful. Friday night we had Bob and over for movie night, unfortunately my allergies were acting up and I didn’t really enjoy myself. Michael suggested that I take some of the 24 hour Claritin D that we had (normal Claritin doesn’t do anything). We watched MSTed Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders and by the end of it I was nodding off – but still congested! Damn that Claritin D!

I was pretty much a zombie all day yesterday, stuck in the antihistamine sleepiness funk. I worked on a couple things, set up a syndication feed for 13thhour.net, here: . I did some updates to wallaceandgromit.net, spent time playing around with the CSS on princessleia.com (no progress made though). I tried getting CUPS working on my computer, but after messing around with it for 2 hours and still not being able to print a test page, I got tired of it and figured I’d finish later. Then I attempted to tackle the “playing midis in linux” problem, which has been bothering me since a friend asked me how to do it last week. It’s strange that I’ve never attempted to play them, and even stranger that I can’t figure out how, how-tos that exist either scare me with their talk of keyboards and sequencers (I really just want to play this little sound file!) or say “just use playmidi” … which obviously doesn’t work, or else I wouldn’t be searching for pointers. Arg.

In all, I felt pretty unsuccessful and useless, so I read for most of the day. Idly wandering upstairs to check my email now and then. I finally finished Life of Pi and read about 100 pages of Lakota Woman (which takes forever to get into). What else did I do all day? I don’t know, I was groggy. We didn’t end up going to the sweat last night because my grogginess probably wouldn’t have gone over well there. We’re starting the Shaman course next week, so we’ll be going to a sweat lodge then. I made veggie burgers for dinner and went to bed around 9:30.

I wouldn’t say yesterday was a bad day, or boring or depressing. I was in a decent mood. It was just slow, very relaxing.

Today I was more awake. mentioned on Friday that she was going to the Allentown fair today and if we wanted to join her. I seriously considered it, but I’m not really much of a fair person. Too many people, everything’s overpriced, and I don’t really enjoy activities at them. So what else was there to do today? Not much. Michael did his radio show from 4am until noon, so he’s napping right now. Which leaves me with more alone time all afternoon.

I got cups to print a test page after mentioning to Michael what a bitch it’s been. He gave me the notes he still had from the last time he set up and told me that it’s a particularly frustrating one to get working since it’s an old, cheap HP. Apparently the default HP DeskJet Driver I was trying to use for it wasn’t the right one, and downloading a ppd file from linuxprinting.org was the best route to go.

My next task is going to be getting other software to use the printer and print properly, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out quickly enough.

Around 5 I’m going to go pick up and we’re going to KOP for some window shopping. Mostly I just want to see if Wallace and Gromit toys have hit the shelves here in the US, I keep getting emails from fans in the UK about all the cool toys they’re buying, and since I don’t generally go to malls, I haven’t a clue what we have here.

*wanders off to get printer working properly*

On our way out of work yesterday I was talking to the woman in the next cubicle about Indian food. She’s never been to Greater India and we thought it might be fun to go during lunch sometime next week. While on the subject of food she mentioned a grocery store up the street called “Assi Plaza.” I’d driven by the store a hundred times, it claims to be an International Food plaza and I was always vaguely interested, but afraid it was going to be a dive.

“Oh no, it’s very clean, and they have lots of fresh fruit, fresh fish, a whole aisle of seaweed for making sushi. Oh you’d love it. Let’s go!”

Let’s go? OK.

She drove the both of us through the traffic of rush hour Lansdale, and we soon arrived at the North Wales Assi store. I was still skeptical until I walked in the store – it’s a real supermarket! The vegetables and fruit were shockingly inexpensive (left with 4 bags of very fresh fruit and veggies for about $10). And the fish, oh the fish! We’d always gone to Whole Foods for the freshest fish, and knew that downtown Philly is really where you go when you want the super fresh stuff, but my co-worker explained that the excellent selection and freshness meant that she doesn’t make that monthly trek down to Philly for fish anymore. The fish is priced quite reasonably, and they had lots of great looking squid. Mmmm! I got so hungry.

Then there were the huge bags of rice, the curry being sold by the pound. All sorts of brands of soy milk, almost an entire aisle devoted just to seaweed. Tempura flour. A whole lot of sesame, ginger and soy marinades, soy sauce by the gallon! Anything I could imagine needing for my Asian food cooking needs, including dishes, woks and other cooking tools. I almost felt bad that my co-worker had driven me, I could have spent hours in there, but I also wanted to show Michael. In addition to all the groceries, they had a separate part of the store with little cafes that made sushi, korean and chinese foods, and little stores that sold other asian products.

Wow.

The culture shock was quite something too, I felt so white. Almost everyone else shopping in the store was Asian (including my co-worker, she is from the Phillipines). The music was certainly not in english, they graciously labelled most things with the english names as well as the native language equivalent. The whole store just felt very non-american, with perhaps the exception of it’s supermarketness. My co-worker explained that it’s the only such market in the area, so people come from all over, often as far as New Jersey, to shop there. Gosh I’m lucky to work only a few miles from there.