I read a lot of books. Most mornings before work I find some time to squeeze in a few pages, some evenings I read myself to sleep. On weekends I usually spend a couple hours a day with my nose in some book.

But last night when I went to read I groaned.

Wait, brain, why are you groaning? You read all the time! You love to read!

Because nothing is interesting! My brain said.

That’s funny. I have a zillion books, have bought many more in the past few months. Fantasy books, Scifi books, computer books, history books, classic books.

But my brain is right, nothing has felt interesting lately. The Dragonriders of Pern Trilogy was the last great thing I read. It started off slow, but got better as it went along, by the time I got to the end of the third I said “wow this is great.. OH CRAP IT’S OVER!”

I picked up Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson a few weeks ago, looked good but I’m having trouble getting into it, even after 100 pages. And there are a few computer books that I’ve been reading, but I’m not really in the mood for them lately.

Last night I read a bit in Michael’s Shaman book, but just wasn’t as hooked as I had been when I picked it up last.

I’m sure it’s not the fault of these books, I just haven’t been in the right mood to take a book seriously.

I think I need to pick up some more Terry Pratchett or Dan Brown so my brain can take a break from seriousness and just have I-can’t-put-this-book-down fun.

Our tickets came today! %D

Last night I started to get a sore throat, then a cough.

Ugh, allergies. Hot weather always makes them worse.

I stayed in the air conditioning most of the evening, and around 10 decided to go to bed. I was feeling pretty crappy so I went to find the Benadryl.

We had none.

Arg. Ok, I’ll take some NyQuil, at least that’ll knock me out and stop the coughing.

No NyQuil.

Sheesh!

So I slept horribly last night. When the alarm when off at 5am I was already awake. Eventually dragged myself out of bed around 6.

Leaving the air conditioned bedroom was terrible! The shower I took was a relatively cold one.

And now I’m at work. I was miserable when I came in, but the dry cool environment here has helped my chest congestion, I’m not coughing as much, so my throat and chest don’t hurt as much. But I’m exhausted, I want to go to sleep.

We’ll pick up some Benadryl on the way home tonight, which I’ll take immediately and be a zombie for the rest of the evening, yay!

I’m glad this doesn’t happen often. The hot weather can leave now!

I am so beat, I want to take a nap.

On Friday afternoon I received some packages in the mail (it was quite a week for packages!). One was from my grandfather, a whole box full of papers, must be a couple hundred, that he’s written over the years with a focus on european roots and paganism. Very interesting stuff so far, but it’s going to take some time to go through. The second package was a couple CDs I ordered last week, I finally got Jonn Serrie’s Lumina Nights and the Mediaeval Baebes’ Worldes Blysee. My ears were very happy.

Friday night was fun, we had a couple friends over and watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I’d never seen. Great movie. Michael fired up the grill for beef and turkey burgers which turned out great. I love having a grill! I had a glass of wine, but it was just too hot out and my stomach wasn’t in the mood for drinking more than that. let me borrow her scanner, which was really nice of her, and kept me busy this weekend.

Saturday morning I spent getting the scanner going. It’s a nice canon scanner, that is powered by USB (cool!), but as far as I could tell, doesn’t have support in linux. I installed the driver in Windows, and then started looking for free OCR software. I discovered gocr, which managed to turn this:

Still wistful, I foresee an awakened heroic consciousness in almost any child unleashing

into:

Still wi8tfui, I fore8ee an awakened he,oic con8ciou8negg tn gimogt gny Ehi’ld yniegg

Eek. It’s a TCL script, and takes forever too, very disappointing.

I finally settled on SimpleOCR in Windows, which touts itself as “The only Royalty Free OCR API. The only free OCR application.” The version you can download is free and it’ll always read typed documents, but only gives a 14 day trial of their handwriting recongnition software (which sucks anyway, from what I read). Fine with me, all I’m doing is scanning typed documents.

What am I scanning? I might have mentioned a while back that I have a collection of short publications that my grandfather published in the 80s about European-Americans. Called “Heritage Trails” it was an attempt to revive European heritage in the US, and offered articles about European ethnic roots, ethnic recipes, and contact information for ethnic groups across the country. I was a great little publication, and before the internet came along, publications like this served an important role in bringing like-minded people together. But aside from glancing at it from time to time, I never paid much attention to it until recently when I started looking into pagan stuff again. These were some great articles! I must share them with the world!

And so started my quest to put these online. There are a total of 80 pages, only in paper form. I thought about just sitting there and typing them all out, but after doing this for two articles I realized how insane this was, and that’s when the scanner borrowing offer was made %)

Once I got SimpleOCR going I started scanning the Heritage Trails, page by page, and getting them converted into text.

In the late morning Michael and I went out to do some yard work. We continued clearing the weedy rock pile from the end of the driveway, and moving the rocks to border one of the trees in the back yard, but it was so hot out. I was barely out there for an hour when I called it quits. Michael stayed out there until about 3pm, and it showed, he got a ton of work done out there. He also decided to order some mulch, so we calculated how much we needed and were able to schedule a delivery for Sunday.

While Michael was still outside working on the yard, I chilled in the A/C and scanned stuff. I pulled out a bunch of family photos to scan as well to break up the day a bit.

After Michael was all indoors and showered, we decided to meet up with Bob for dinner (too hot to cook at home!). So around 4 we left for Unos. The meal was less than impressive, the drin
ks I ordered doubly so (can you put more than a drop of liquor in this, please?), but the company was good, and made for a nice evening. When we got home I hopped online. Michael opened a bottle of red wine and we worked on our computers until it got late. Around 11 I went to bed.

This morning I got up around 8, puttered around until the phone rang around 9. It was the mulch store down the road, asking if it was ok if he dropped the mulch off in 10 minutes. I said it was and rushed downstairs to wake up Michael and get dressed. The mulch delivery started our day of yard work.

I got to work on the garden plots, which I needed to weed, then mulch.

They look so much better, they were so overgrown with weeds, hopefully the mulch will keep that under control. I also spent part of my time out there putting mulch around a couple trees and mulch around the mailbox. I went in around noon, it was too hot.

Michael worked on the back yard, which was the difficult shovel and wheelbarrel work. He filled in all the rock-surrounded plots in the back yard.

It looks so good. Afterwards he did some weeding in the front and put a bunch of mulch in the empty garden plots in the front of the house. He didn’t come inside until after 3.

I finished my Heritage Trails scanning project, and got to work on the website. I already had a skeleton version of it up, but hadn’t filled in much content yet. The very much under construction page can be found here: http://princessleia.com/heritage_trails/

It’ll take some time for me to edit all the articles, SimpleOCR is good, but it still makes mistakes, and I’ll need to read through all of the articles and compare them to the hard copies for accuracy. Then I need to format them in simple HTML (just put paragraph tags around the paragraphs, the rest of the site is a php-driven template). Anyone want to help? %D

*Yawn* Now I think I’ll go start getting dinner ready, if I stay in this chair much longer I might fall asleep.

When I was up in Maine for my father’s memorial service we went through the storage place that was being rented. It had all the stuff from our old house, most of it was junk as far as I was concerned, but there were a few things I wanted. My Aunt Meg was kind enough to package it all up for me and send the boxes down last week. I received them today.

The first box I opened had the nice plates we always used on holidays.

Family Dishes

I don’t know anything about them. It’s hard to tell with my parents, some of the things my mother bought were pretty cheap, but back when my father was making the big bucks they bought a lot of very nice things. Or they could have been a gift, or they could have been something handed down in the family. They do bring back memories though, every holiday we’d get to use them, my father would handwash them (no dishwasher for these!).

Unfortunately some of the dishes were broken %\ The box with the dishes had been moved around quite a bit since leaving my parent’s house, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were broken even before being shipped. It’s a pity. At least I have 4 complete sets, 6 if the mugs aren’t included in the place setting. It’s all about sentimental value anyway.

The boxes also contained a few nice dishes, a crock pot, some old photo albums and a whole box of pictures, which included this gem:

Egads, why did my parents let me wear those? They’re huge! *grin*

I’m on a bunch of mailing lists, but since I started working full time I haven’t had the time to keep up with them all. This was annoying, I’d eventually spend a whole Saturday morning or something catching up, and then want to reply to something and notice that it’s a month old. Doh.

Now that we have SquirrelMail running I can check it during my lunch break. It’s great. Over the past 2 weeks I’ve kept up with almost all the lists I’m on! I’m glad, I was feeling so detatched from all the communities, and it was depressing.

Now I can read all the PLUG mails about comcast, threads which go something like this (leet speak, bad grammar and misspellings added for humor):

omgz comcast died on me again!!!11 wuts wrong?

lmao that sux!!!1

Ok I’m done.

We had just walked in the door, it was hot, I had worked late. I wasn’t in the mood to pick it up the phone (land line) when it rang. It’s just family that calls that line anyway.

Turns out it was my mother, she had bad news for me. She had to put Angel to sleep today.

Back when I was in high school my parents rented a house where we weren’t allowed to have cats. Instead we had all sorts of caged rodents. Chinchillas, rats, hamsters, gerbils, mice, guinea pigs. Our neighbors had outdoor cats, and we always enjoyed having them come over and hang out at our house, we’d feed them treats and give them toys, they always went home at night.

I don’t know what year our neighbors got Angel. I believe their daughter brought him home because he’d been hanging around her workplace, and they were generally willing to take in more outdoor cats, they always had 3-4 of them.

My favorite cat they ever had was Brendel. He was a Maine Coon that I got close to, but he was hit by a car. When he died I was hearbroken, it took me weeks to get over. That convinced me never to have an outdoor cat.

Then there was Schroder. He was an orange cat that had quite a lot of spirit. I spent a lot of time with him, and one time he even brought us a dead bird (which horrified me, I hate birds, even dead ones, but you know how cats are, they bring presents, but it’s the thought that counts %D). Schroder was great.

When Angel came on the scene him and Schroder didn’t get along. Angel quickly became a friend of ours, Schroder would still come over too, but more than once we caught them hissing at each other in the yard. After a few months they started fighting in our neighbors house, and then started spraying (they were both neutered). They needed to find another place for Angel to crash at night.

So we took him in. If our landlord asked he was our neighbor’s outdoor cat that visited. He lived with us for a couple years before I moved away. As far as animal-human relations go I was never that close to Angel, we shared a house and a family, but we never warmed up much. I devoted most of my time to my chinchillas.

When I moved out I wasn’t too sad to leave him behind, he was really my mother’s cat, and my sister Annette’s cat.

I saw him a few times after moving out. When I came to visit I always spent some time snuggling.

He was always a fat cat, and developed diabetes when he was about 10 years old, which is not unusual in older obese, cats. My mother was able to get him on a lower fat diet, which made him better for a while, even got to stop taking insulin shots for a while. But I guess over the past few months he hasn’t been doing well, the diabetes struck badly again, and he began losing a lot of weight.

In the message my mother left on the answering machine she said he was down to almost 12 pounds, that’s about half what he normally was. He was so very sick, putting him to sleep was the best thing for him.

Can’t help feeling sad though, he was part of that old life I had with my family.

Rest in peace Angel.

I wasn’t going to complain about the heat because I’ve been complaining a lot lately, but I can’t help it.

I hate hot weather. It’s after 9 and the temp is still over 80, humidity above 50%. Michael and I are hanging out up here in the computer room, where we have the A/C on. Mmmm.

At least I’m not sick. Michael hasn’t been feeling well these past couple days, allergies acting up and we’re pretty sure the rash on his arm is poison ivy, since there was poison ivy in some of the areas he was digging up this past weekend. It sucks %\

So monday, we learned for certain Apple is going Intel, something that would have sounded like pure blasphemy just a week ago. And Sarge went stable. It was a world gone topsy turvy! %)

I don’t think I’ll be getting a mac as my next laptop…

And I do think I’ll be going back to Debian. I like Gentoo, but I don’t even update anymore because it’s such a pain and I don’t have time to fix everything. And that’s bad %)

Today started off nicely, got this lovely email in my inbox:

From: LiveJournal <accounts@livejournal.com>
Subject: Gift! Paid account left-overs...
To: lyz@princessleia.com

Enjoy!

Turns out got a permanent account and decided to give his remaining paid account days to me. How’s that for a good morning? So far I’ve only used the search functions, but I’ll dabble in some of the other paid account goodies in the weeks to come.

Now I need to go downstairs and turn on the AC in the bedroom and try to get sleepy.

Perhaps I should turn on the AC.

We had quite a busy weekend.

Friday night we went over to a friend’s house to hang out. I had a nice time, had a couple fruity drinks (ice, vodka and strawberry daquari mix), late in the evening and I did a couple shots of Slivovitz, oh I do love that plum brandy.

Saturday morning I got up early, went back to bed around 9:30 and got up again around 10:30 when Michael needed to do some work. Mostly just puttered around for the rest of the morning. In the early afternoon we went out to the Home Depot to pick up some things for yard work the rest of the weekend. We planned on just getting the materials needed to make our compost area and a stopper and trap for the tub, but we walked out of there with a grill and a couple collapsable chairs as well.

So now we have a grill to go with the beautiful grill utencil kit that and gave us!

(Yes , now we can have a cookout!)

We didn’t get home from the Home Depot until almost 4pm. When we did the first duty was setting up the compost area. We bought 5 metal poles, and 20 feet of poultry wire, Michael started getting that together. Eventually I came outside to join him, and he dug the holes for each of the poles. It was awful, it was so hot and humid, and our soil is so unbelievable rocky. Eventually he was finished with it though. It’s not quite as round as we wanted it to be, but digging more holes in the rocky ground isn’t very appealing, and it’s on a hill, like the rest of our yard. It’s just a compost area afterall.

It was around 5 when we were finished. Michael was exhausted from the digging and needed a shower. We just wanted to relax. I called up the friend I we had plans with and cancelled, felt bad but I don’t think either of us would have been very good company. I hate the heat.

By 8pm the temperature had gone down quite a bit and we were feeling much better. We were hungry, wanted some place with good food and good wine. So we headed out to the Road House Grille in Skippack.

Dinner was amazing, probably the best I’ve had there so far, and that’s saying a lot!

Appetizer of their Road House Shrimp Cocktail with Tequila and Lime Infused Cocktail Sauce. That was some good cocktail sauce.

For dinner I ordered Baked Mahi-Mahi over buttermilk potatoes, with mushrooms and a lobster sauce. These are a few of my favorite things! Michael ordered a great looking chicken and shrimp dish.

Can’t forget the wine, we ordered a bottle of Rocca Bernarda Pinot Grigio. Yum.

It 10pm by the time we got home, I watched a movie and was in bed by midnight.

This morning Michael got up early to start working on the yard before it got hot. The job was to clear out the cluttered, unkept compost pile from the side of the house, and remove weeds and junk surrounding our trees, Michael spent all morning doing it while I stayed inside being lazy. He finished the compost area before I came outside. Around 11 I joined him and we tackled around the trees.

Moved a lot of rocks and put nice compost from the old compost pile within the rocks. I’m quite proud of our work, it looks great. The next step will be filling it in with mulch, which we’ll probably have delivered this week.

Around 12:30 we wen
t in for lunch. I then went for a shower and Michael finished up outside. I did some laundry, did the dishes and cleaned up a bit. Around 2 we were ready to go out to get some propane for the new gas grill and stop at the garden store for some herbs.

I had planted herb seeds earlier in the season, but we have an evil chipmunk that likes to dig up and eat all my seeds (luckily it just digs up the flower bulbs, those actually are growing into plants now). So I figured getting seedlings of herbs would be a better idea.

And before we left for the garden store I went online to find a list of plants that are poisonous to cats. I found a few but none were printer-friendly (wasn’t about to print a 36 page website listing them all..), I eventually found a site that listed both poisonous and non-poisonous very nicely, dropped the info in a spreadsheet, and knocked the length down to a managable 5 pages, first 3 are non-toxic to cats, last 2 are toxic. It was great to have with us, and I uploaded it to share nontoxic-toxic-plants-cats.xls.

The garden store was so hot, so I hurried and picked up a couple kinds of rosemary, a small oregano plant, and a small mint plant. We then went over to the houseplant area and got a calathea (non-poisonous to cats!) which looked nice.

After leaving the garden store we went up to the Sears Hardware store in Collegeville for a propane tank. When we entered the parking lot I noticed a Wine and Spirits shop, it was the Super Store that’s open on Sundays! So we went over there, picked up a couple of nice bottles of wine, and I found my beloved Slivovitz, finally!

After getting the propane tank we came home. I planted my herbs. Michael planted our new houseplant, then went inside to install the air conditioners.

And now it’s now. Time for dinner, going to try out our new grill by cooking some veggie burgers, yum!