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.

I’ve been listening to economic commentary about the rising prices over the summer. Besides the drop in SUV sales, the general public hasn’t been too upset over the prices so far. Polls have indicated that people aren’t changing their driving habits that much.

It’s been a grand debate as to when the prices would get to a point where people do start screaming. I heard a commentary recently claiming that they’ll climb past right $3/gallon without a whimper. When I heard it I generally agreed.

It seems we were wrong. What was today’s hot office topic?

“On my way to work I saw a gas station selling regular for $3.05 per gallon.” Saturday I filled up the Rav, it was $2.61.

Two separate conversations were overheard about changing driving habits “Maybe I can share the car with my wife, I’ll just take the bus home at night” “I should carpool with $co-worker, we live in the same neighborhood, it’s silly for both of us to drive in.”

If this is happening in my small office, it’s probably happening all over the place. I’d say we’ve hit the critical point, people really are going to start changing their habits if prices don’t come down soon.

*cheers*

Disclaimer: Don’t think my happiness over the change in habits is mindless happiness that doesn’t take into consideration the serious economic issues in industries nationwide because of this. And I’m not insensitive to the people who barely make ends meet and will be severely hurt by these rising prices. But it was inevitable, and I hope that this spike can hit the industry and government hard enough that they’ll wake up to the reality of how dangerous our dependence on a non-renewable natural resource is.

I was combing my hair before my shower when I looked in the mirror and saw a big, dark spider up in the corner above the shower stall.

Ugh.

I don’t mind spiders much, but this one was big, with giant fangs. But it was up too high for me to practically reach it before a shower. I figured it would stay in it’s spot and I could get a glass and let it go after the shower.

It didn’t stay in it’s spot.

I am not sure why it decided to move, but it walked along the wall, and as the wall got wet from the condensation it sometimes slipped, and would fall a few inches on it’s spiderweb thread. Each time scaring me. So I continued with my shower, and as soon as the soap was out of my hair I got out.

Then I got dressed and got the camera so I can share it all with you:

Haha! Now you can have nightmares about giant shower spiders too! I didn’t measure it, but I’d say it was at least 2 inches long.

And rest assured, I did eventually get a glass and released it outside.

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.