I was so tired this morning that I put on the wrong shoes (old sneakers instead of the nice shoes I usually wear).

Best of all, I didn’t notice until just now.

One day we were driving and I saw a Lukoil gas station. Lukoil? Who the heck is that? I didn’t think much of it.

Then saw another.

And another.

They were popping up everywhere, seemingly overnight! It started to get really weird.

When I mentioned it to Michael, he speculated that they were the big Russian company, and that they seemed to be replacing the Mobils.

So this morning when I got up I had a little talk with Dr. Google.

Michael’s speculations were absolutely correct.

Lukoil Replaces Mobil Stations in Philadelphia Area

Red-and-white gas stations are popping up everywhere, displacing one of America’s most familiar brand names in the Philadelphia area.

Lukoil does not own all the sites. It supplies about 470 under contract with independent dealers.

Well, we didn’t end up going to see March of the Penguins, Michael got stuck doing work. It sucked, much moreso for him than me, of course. We’re thinking that we might go down to the city sometime this week after work, shouldn’t be difficult to make it to a 7:20 showing and get home at a reasonable time.

So instead of seeing penguins I grabbed R2Q5 (450mhz test machine), brought him downstairs (Michael was working upstairs) and reinstalled Ubuntu on it. The CD-ROM died halfway through the install, AGAIN. It just does that sometimes, and until now I thought it was the drive. Usually I just turn off the computer and in a couple hours it magically works again. But this time I didn’t want to just sit around for 2 hours, so I unplugged the cables from the drive, and took the drive out. Then put it back in. Still not working. Then I unplugged it from the motherboard and plugged it back in. It worked! Now, since I’ve had similar issues with other drives in the past, I think it might be a motherboard problem. Not surpising, since the motherboard sucks, but it’s annoying. Silly old machine. *pats R2Q5*

So I watched 101 Dalmatians and eventually got Ubuntu installed from the new Hoary disks that I got in the mail. The install went well enough, apt got a little funky, but I think I managed to solve that just by doing what the error messages told me to do. It all seems to be working now. And now I’ll be able to better help those people new to linux who I keep telling to use Ubuntu %)

In the late evening Michael decided to take a break from working and we went out grocery shopping. Spent a couple hours doing it, as we needed to go to the normal grocery store and the Whole Foods market to get everything we wanted/needed for having Michael’s family over today.

We didn’t get home until after 9pm, neither of us were very hungry for dinner so we just steamed some clams that we bought and had them with bread and some melted butter and oil. Yummie!

After dinner we cleaned. Serious cleaning. The kitchen from top to bottom, Michael tackled the bathroom and laundry room. It was almost 1am when I finally crashed into bed. But the house looks great %) Now just need to clean up the TV room, where I’m sitting now with R2Q5, it looks pretty messy.

This morning I finally took the time to review Carla’s Linux Cookbook. Which, if I haven’t mentioned before, is a great book. You can see my review here. And now hopefully the folks at O’Reilly will be happy for another couple of months, I’ve been so bad lately about writing reviews %\ I also post my reviews to my Blogger book review site, so when I was browsing old reviews this morning I noticed that the author of Learning Perl had commented on one review, thanking me for recommending it (the review wasn’t even for his book, it was for Perl DBIbut I mentioned Learning Perl as a good book to use when learning perl). Cool.

This afternoon Michael’s parents, his brother, his brother’s wife, and their two young kids are coming over. Only Michael’s mother and brother have seen the house, so we’re looking forward to showing it off to the rest of the family. And it’s beautiful out today, so we’re doing the BBQ thing, with snacks that I thought the kids would like too (something Michael kept forgetting “we need soda? we need chips? we have cheese and beer!” “kids don’t eat cheese and beer” “Gah! Kids!”)

Now I should probably stop playing around and finish up cleaning, and put R2Q5 back upstairs where he belongs.

March of the Penguins opens today in Philadelpha. I was excited to go tomorrow with the usual friends, but they all suck (hehe) and are busy. I can’t believe they are too busy for penguins!

The only place it’s playing at is the Ritz 5 at 214 Walnut street (see here). The showtimes are 1:20, 3:20, 5:20, 7:20 and 9:20. If the weather is decent we’ll probably be taking a train down and walk to the theater for a 1:20 or 3:20 show, maybe get some food down there too.

Anyone want to come with?

Come on, I know I have lots of Philly area friends who we never hang out with.

Join us for penguins!

I went to my first sweat lodge last night. Michael picked me up from work and we drove down to Malvern to get there a little before 7.

As a whole it went well, I was being my usual “anxious and not talking” thing that I do whenever I am around a lot of people I don\u2019t know, but everyone seemed nice, and I was OK. I think the final number of people in the lodge was 24, which made us a bit squished, but apparently the more people in the lodge, the less you feel the heat, and their record was 27.

After 3 rounds we all left the lodge to lie down on the grass for a bit, and I decided not to go back in for the final round, it was getting a bit hard for me to breathe in there and my body said “enough!” Surprisingly it wasn\u2019t as exhausting and dehydrating as I expected, it was actually quite refreshing. Hopefully I\u2019ll be able to make it through the entire time next time we go.

When everyone was out of the lodge we got to swim in their big pool. That was nice, I love pools and it felt so good. We all then got changed out of our lodge clothes and ate food that everyone brought. A numerologist was there, and offered to give Michael a free reading because it was his birthday, which was fun (even if it was mostly inaccurate).

Toward the end of the evening Michael asked if I wanted to speak with the lodge owner about his upcoming shaman course. Michael is taking the course and when he expressed my interest to the owner the owner said he\u2019d like to meet me. Now of course I\u2019m mad shy, and walking up to someone I don\u2019t know to talk to them is not the sort of thing I\u2019m comfortable with doing. But I calmed myself down and was able to go inside with Michael and have a conversation with him while Michael went off to help with dishes. Turns out, this guy is really nice and friendly, very welcoming, calm and peaceful. I pretty much asked for an overview of the basic beliefs that he held and would be teaching in the course and explained in short where I was coming from spiritually.

So will I take this course? I had a lot to think about on the ride home last night. I am not sure I agree with the “everything is alive” Native American view that seems to be held with this course, but I\u2019m not sure. We are all “made of stars” who can say what a soul is exactly?

I finally decided that I do want to take it.

Over these past few years I\u2019ve read plenty of books and articles about religion and spirituality, done meditation, worked with rune stones, but it\u2019s all been a solitary journey. I\u2019ve become overly analytical when it comes to religion/spirituality, and I have a difficult time getting excited about it because I have so much fear of my emotions getting the better of me and clouding my judgement. Unfortunately I believe this has become a problem, I have reached a barrier spiritually because of my inability to budge from my analytical approach.

I think getting involved with a group will be an important step in my spiritual growth. This group is one I believe I can get involved with, there aren\u2019t any fundamental basics that I disagree with, and there is something about this path that has really sparked my interest. Going to sweat lodges, drumming sessions, crystal bowl healing, exploring the inner consciousness through meditation, and learning methods of self-improvement.

No Almighty God, no politics, just working to become a better person and properly react to the world around me. Yes, that\u2019s what I want.

Love you myn (%

I came into work this morning and frowned at all the stuff I had on my desk. Spent most of the morning going through it and waiting for the morning mail to come so we could move on with our normal daily work (yay for fiscal month end). Now my desk is piled with so much stuff to do, and it seems like everything I process has some sort of problem that I don’t want to deal with. Dammit people, do things right! Learn how to count.

And it’s hot in here. They were having electrical problems this morning, no air conditioning, probably won’t be fixed until tonight or tomorrow. It’s still cooler in here than it is outside, but it’s just as humid, yuck.

I walked downtown to the gift shop during lunch where I knew they would have the gift I discovered this past weekend that I thought Michael would enjoy for this birthday. Unfortunately the shop is closed until July 11th! The owner is on vacation! Aah! Crap! His birthday is tomorrow and all the other shops in Lansdale suck and wouldn’t have what I am looking for anyway! Now I feel bad. I should have planned better.

*puts head on desk*

I’m exploring firefox extensions.

What do you use and why do you love it?

The weekend has been productive. Saturday was spent doing a lot of cleaning the house and organizing our bedroom and the new dresser. Michael spent the day outside working on the yard, finally got rid of the rest of our big mulch pile. He also attempted to clean the huge old rug that we had in the bathroom, but we ended up just throwing it away because it was too unmanagable.

In the evening we went out to Bed, Bath & Beyond to pick up some new bath mats. They are so nice and soft on my feet! While I was brushing my teeth Caligula walked into the bathroom and stopped on the first mat and started pawing and digging in it, it was adorable, I forgot how much he loves rugs of that kind. For dinner Saturday night Michael grilled some fillet mignon that we had picked up at the Whole Foods market, accompanied with a bottle of Francis Coppola Merlot, it was a delicious dinner.

Sunday was a beautiful day, and I didn’t want to stay home, so I hopped on IRC and asked some friends what their plans for the day were. said he wasn’t busy until the evening, and invited us over to her apartment. had plans to play D&D with friends, but the plans fell through and he was able to spend the day with us too.

I got to stop at CVS before lunch to make some prints of photos at one of the kiosks. I’d read about the Kodak kiosks, and there is one at the pharmacy next to where we grocery shop, but I’d never used one before. I’m impressed! They’re easy to use, and you can get photos from all sorts of different kinds of media, and it prints the pictures right away, the whole process only took about 10 minutes – most of which was just me clicking through the photos on the disk and seeing which ones I wanted and how many. Now we finally have some prints to give to our mothers!

Went out to lunch at Bennigans, then stopped at Trader Joe’s, which is a nice store, but I still prefer Whole Foods. We went back to the apartment and hung out all afternoon, got to play with Nibbler, who was in a great mood. Around 7, when had to leave for a baseball game and Michael invited us up to our house to enjoy the firepit. So drove me back up to our house, and we spent the evening at the firepit talking, had some grilled chicken for dinner. It was a great evening. Around midnight I left the guys to the fire to go to bed, it had been a busy day and I was so tired.

And now it’s the 4th of July. I emailed some friends to see if they had interesting plans, but haven’t heard back. So for now our plans are just to hang out at home and relax. Fine with me.

I love 3 day weekends.

While we were at Whole Foods the other night browsing the cheese section, I saw an oven thermometer. The temperature on our oven is off, usually about 50 degrees over, but it changes with what temp I set it at, very tricky, especially since I’m not the most experienced cook. Several people have suggested that I get an oven thermometer (or new thermostat), but I always forget when I’m at the store and never made it a priority. For $7.99 I couldn’t pass up buying this one.

When I used it the following night the results were amazing.

I made the buttermilk biscuits that I always make, but they came out perfect! No burnt bottom, no half-done insides, just perfectly browned all over.

After this success I decided to make a loaf of banana bread. I make breads often for breakfasts (yummie!) but up until now I had to be very careful when baking them, since the temperature was so goofy. Almost every time I ended up with a burnt bottom to the loaf.

My bread came out perfect!

I’m so happy! I think I’m going to tackle some more complex baking projects now that the temperature is sorted out, until now I was even afraid to bake a cake from a mix.

The other purchase was a dresser. It’s a used one, little beat up, but it wasn’t expensive and has a nice big mirror on it. And I needed it, right now my clothes are piled inside and on top of some plastic storage containers, and beside looking awful (even if they are in the closet where only Michael and I see them) the clothes piled on top sometimes are too appealing for Caligula to pass up at naptime. I hate finding furry clothes when I get dressed in the morning %) And I’m starting to get too many shirts for this method of storing to be reasonable, wrinkly clothes aren’t good in the morning either, I hate ironing, and would rather re-wash a shirt than iron it.

I figure we’ll keep this dresser until we get around to buying a whole new bedroom set, I’ll be nice to have a new bed too, but there are more pressing house expenses in the near future.