It was such a beautiful day out yesterday that spring fever was really kicking in. We decided to take a walk up to the library.

The library is about a mile from our house, it was a nice walk. I picked up some books to read on rainy days, requested a copy of Women Don’t Ask from another library, and piled the books into my bag. Gosh that was heavy. Then we ventured to the antiques store in town so browse for a bit. I’m looking for a dresser (don’t have one at all right now), and we found a nice one for $225, but I’ll have to think about it some more, we should really get ourselves to some funiture stores to check out new stuff too.

We walked around a bit more and got home around 1pm to eat lunch.

After lunch we brought Caligula outside on a lead and harness to play for a bit. Then we headed up to the big, beautiful garden supply store down the street, Ott’s. It’s an amazing place with beautiful displays that you can walk through, I wish they had a website, I’ll have to take my camera next time I’m over there.

I picked up 10 mixed Nanus Gladioli bulbs, and 10 pink Large Flowering Gladioli. To be honest I don’t know much about them, besides that they looked nice on the package :)

We also picked up a spider plant, and a pot and hanger set so we could hang it in front of a window in our livingroom. And a pot full of white caladiums, which we’ll be enjoying in the house for quite some time (perhaps moving some outdoors if they get too big to manage). Unfortunately we discovered too late that the caladiums are poisonous, and needed to find it a place in the sun and out of Caligula’s reach. It’s now sharing a spot next to our printer.

I also picked up some herbs: Catnip, Rosemary, Spearment, Oregano. And a package of bush beans. See.

After potting the houseplants, I went to work planting my flower bulbs. 18 of them went in my big garden plots, and I put a couple out by the mailbox. It’ll be a few weeks before they bloom, but I’m hopeful that they’ll turn out nicely. I thought about getting some annuals, but that would be a big job, seeing as I have so many plots to fill. I figure I’ll see how the bulbs look this year, and maybe I’ll start earlier and plant some annual seeds next year.

In the evening we sat down with a couple beers, some Moringstar Farms burgers (which really are great, Boca Burgers can’t compare) and watched a few episodes of Carnivale.

It was a great day.

Today is another beautiful day. I was going to get started on planting the herbs, but I’m not sure we’re out of the danger zone for frost yet so I might hold off for a couple weeks. I think I’ll just work on weeding the rest of the garden.

I also need to deconstruct the veggie garden. It was a nice try last year, but I just don’t want to spend the time on it.

And lest I be accused of ignoring my computers, this morning I decided to upgrade my ubuntu box from warty to hoary. I updated my /etc/apt/sources.list to replace warty with hoary, and then

elizabeth@r2q5:~ $ sudo apt-get update
elizabeth@r2q5:~ $ sudo apt-get upgrade
538 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 266 not upgraded.
Need to get 263MB of archives.
After unpacking 15.7MB of additional disk space will be used.

538 packages upgrade, hehe. I was surprised to discover that it was really fast (maxed out my download speed), just yesterday it was so slow it was timing out. The enti
re upgrade took about an hour. I’ll have to dig up a keyboard and mouse later today so I can actually see what I’ve done ;)

But for now I am going to go make some blueberry pancakes.

Last Friday our friend Bob gave us an old loveseat of his. It was beat up, but solid and comfortable, so earlier this week Michael ordered a sofa cover for it.

I admit, I was skeptical, sofa covers I’d seen in the past we’re pretty cheesy looking. But Michael managed to find a very nice looking suede one. It arrived yesterday and it looks really great! I’ll have to take a picture.

But lets back up to the subject of this entry. When we got the couch we put it in our TV room and were dismayed to realize that it didn’t fit. It stuck out too much and the whole room just looked crowded with furniture. We thought through a lot of alternatives, but it just wasn’t working out, the position of the radiator along a good wall was completely throwing it all off.

“Let’s just switch the bedroom and the TV room.” Michael suggested. The TV room and the bedroom are identical except for the placement of the closet and radiator.

“Hmm, yeah, then we can put the TV in the closet.”

“Huh, that’s a good idea.”

That’s what we did. Because of the radiator being along a different wall it worked out great. Both chairs and the loveseat fit nicely along the wall facing the tv, which is in the closet. Putting the TV (and stereo and myth box, and ps2 and vcr…) in the closet really worked out nicely.

We did this all Wednesday night after work. Boy was I tired after that.

Thursday evening we decided to do some cleaning. Our house never gets very dirty, but we’re neat freaks, and the past couple weeks we’ve been lazier than normal about keeping everything sparkly. We wanted it looking great for movie night tonight.

Yay movie night is tonight. Only 3 more hours of work.

The past few days have been beautiful. Weather in the 70s, low humidity, and a nice breeze. Being stuck inside all day is torture, so I’ve been spending most of my lunch breaks walking through downtown Lansdale.

Downtown Lansdale is a sad place. It has the potential to be a really nice downtown area (and probably once was) but today there are a lot of “For Lease” signs around, cheap stores (Checks cashed! Cigs at state min!) and discarded 7-11 cups. Between the empty buildings and thrift stores there are a few cute shops that I’ve ventured in to, but there aren’t many. Maybe before my next adventure through Lansdale I’ll fire up Google Maps and see if I can find anything interesting around here.

Crappy downtown atmosphere aside, the walks are nice. I love this time of year, my allergies haven’t started acting up yet, the weather is not too hot, and I just a 30 minute walk makes my body feel so good following my lazy winter of chocolate and beer indulging.

But now I’m back in my cubicle, and the only breeze I feel is from the air conditioner *sigh*

I was going through the mail on Monday and found a postcard for Michael from the Gatherings Concert Series. When I flipped it over and saw Jonn Serrie’s name on it I gasped with delight.

I saw him in concert a couple years when Michael took me to the Summer Solstice Spacemusic Spectacular in Harrisburg, PA. That’s when I learned that I liked his music so much. His set was last, after Jeff Pearce, Robert Rich, and Steve Roach, Jonn Serrie’s performance was my favorite.

And now I’ll get to see him again, here in Philadelphia for The Gatherings Concert. This will be a good chance to pick up a copy of Lumia Nights and get it signed, woo!

It’s on Saturday May 14th at 8:00pm at St. Mary’s in Philadelphia. Who wants to come with? %)

Boy I was in a crankie mood yesterday.

Mondays are yucky. Spring Mondays after the clocks change are yuckier. Plus, it was beautiful outside and I was stuck indoors doing work, I want to move my desk to the parking lot.

When the work day was over and Michael picked me up I got into a better mood. We did a big grocery shopping run and bought a lot of interesting things, including a bag of 50 clams to steam. Michael discovered recently that our Black & Decker Flavor Scenter Steamer Plus can steam clams! I love this steamer, everyone should have one. It makes rice, veggies, and clams! And it’s only $30, we’ve had ours for over a year now using it at least twice a week.

I recently decided that I really do need to limit my dairy intake. I’ve known my stomach was sensitive to it for years, but I love cheese and milk, so I didn’t fully want to admit it to myself. I figure I can deal with limiting my dairy intake, even if I can’t eliminated it entirely (and I can’t, a life without cheese would be sad). The first step was looking for a milk replacement. Last week we tried some Lactaid, but that stuff sucks. suggested I try 8th Continent Soy Milk, so I picked some up while at the store. I wasn’t expecting it to be good, I’ve tried soy milk in the past, but I was pleasantly surprised! It’s pretty good! Not milk exactly, definitely doesn’t have the thick body of milk, but I can tolerate this.

Because of my lessened dairy intake decision I can’t have bagels and cream cheese in the morning either. So I picked up some bread mixes and bread pans and decided to try some out. This past weekend I also got a bread cookbook so I hope to start making my own as well. We’re also seriously considering getting a bread maker, I’ve heard great things about them.

We didn’t finish grocery shopping until almost 7. Got home and made dinner. I made the Deviled Steaks and Michael got to work on the steamed clams. We were able to settle down for dinner by 8:15, and what a delicious meal it was! The steamer did a great job with those clams.

Yum. I should have taken pictures, but I couldn’t wait to eat those clams.

After dinner I cleaned up and made up one of the bread mixes, cranberry and orange bread. As soon as that was in the oven around 9pm I crashed in front of the TV to watch some MST3K with Michael. I’ll need to play around with the heat of my old oven when making bread, the bottom was darker than I’d like, the middle was perfect, and the top was a bit light. Tastes good though, I had some for breakfast this morning.

Saturday morning took me out to do some shopping. It was fun, I don’t get to go girly shopping often, and Bae is great company.

Probably the most amusing part of the trip was when we were in the mall and a woman at a kiosk offered to give me a demo of the nail product she was selling, Bae said it worked so I gave in and let her show me. Basically it was just buffing your nail to make it shine, but the woman selling it was blabbering all this nonsense about how the silk works with your natural nail minerals to make it shiney, and to top it all off, a lotion was included in the bundle “Have you heard about the Dead Sea?” she asked (had I heard of the Dead Sea, what the hell?) “Well it has a lot of salt and many healing properties.” Oh brother! Still, my nail is shiny, like it has clear nail polish on it, that’s neat. If she wasn’t spouting all that nonsense I might have actually bought the product. I think I’ll look into this, I’ve never been too girly about my nails, but maybe I should start, shiny nails without polish is cool.

Last night I just hung around the house with Michael drinking a few beers. We ordered some hot subs (er… hoagies!) from Moccia’s Train Stop which were very disappointing, we need to learn to just stick to their amazing pizza and sides. But I had a good night anyway.

This morning when I got up I frowned at all the scraps of paper on my desk with recipes on them. I kept meaning to type them up and put them online in some reasonable order, but I haven’t been in the mood. I decided to finally tackle it. I dusted off the Keeping House section of my site that I hadn’t touched since October, moved all the “Journal” entries I had there to the archive and replaced it with all new food stuff: Spinach lasagne recipe and pictures, Tandoori Chicken recipe and pictures, Mushroom-crust Quiche recipe and pictures, and the recipes for Deviled Steaks and Chicken Manicottis. My next step is going to be expanding the cooking section to include all the recipes in plain text and Word Doc format. I also need to get a binder and print out these recipes for myself so I have a nice place to keep them all, my current scraps of paper method is just a mess %)

After finishing up the work on the site, I decided to fire up my Ubuntu box. Gentoo has really been driving me up the walls lately, every single time I update something is broken, and I need to hit the forums to find a fix. This has lead me to two habits when updating:

1. I don’t update often, probably once a month

2. When I update I make sure I have plenty of time to fix things

So, Ubuntu. I don’t like Gnome much, so I thought I’d figure out how hard it was to get xfce4 installed. I was pleasantly surprised:

apt-get install xfce4

Kickass. It works perfectly. I’m using warty stable, so it’s only 4.0, but any xfce4 is better than Gnome.

And now it’s time to stop geeking out, we’re having company soon.

*wanders off to get looking more presentable*

Last night when we got home Michael headed inside to make dinner while I got out my gardening gloves and gardening tools to move my tulips.

The first thing that was obvious is that I should have moved them earlier, the roots had gone down very far, and I fear I might have cut some of them when digging them up. I hope the all survive. But now they’re all properly placed in the garden plots closer to the garage, and the beds they were in are all freed up for veggies/herbs!

The only things I know for sure that I’m planing in those plots are green beans (they are easy to grow and very yummie) and rosemary (we’ve recently discovered a love for this).

I thought about growing green onions again, but we just don’t eat them quick enough. I have a whole bunch of herbs on my shelf, but none that I use a lot. Oregano perhaps.

Last night Michael suggested that I grow Cascade hops. That would be cool, he could create beer from my super-fresh, home-grown hops! I’ll definitely look into that, see if I reasonably could grow enough for a batch of beer. Yum.

I was planning on working in my garden this weekend, but it looks like the weather isn’t going to cooperate, it’s going to rain and there is a flood watch until Sunday.

And now I go back to work, yay it’s Friday!

My family is holding the memorial service and spreading of ashes for my father at the end of next month. I spoke with Michael and we decided it’d be less tiring and cheaper all around if we just fly up and rent a car.

The first thing I did was to check out orbitz.com for the cost of a round trip plane flight from Philadelphia to Manchester, NH. I was surprised to learn that the ticket only cost $83! Apparently they’re trying to promote the Manchester airport. In fact, it’s now cheaper to fly into Manchester than it is to Boston ($133 to fly into Boston). That’s crazy. But good, since my family lives very close to the Manchester airport.

Then my family started telling me their plans. we’d arrive on the evening of Wednesday the 27th, spent the night at my Aunt’s. On Thursday or Friday they’d hold the memorial service, visit the storage facility, sometime I’d visit with family.

Now, both the memorial service and the storage facility are in Maine, which is about a 1.5 hour drive from where we are staying with family. I figure we’ll spend wed-fri with family and then friday we’ll just stay up in Maine.

I spoke with our friend Morgana, who we visited with last time we were in Maine, and worked out that we’d stay at her place Friday and Saturday night, sweet!

I looked into plane flights out of Portland, Maine, since I thought it might be better flying out of there on Sunday morning than driving back to Manchester. I was surprised with the results:

First off, even the cheapest rental car from Enterprise offers unlimited mileage within New England, no need to worry about putting too many miles on the car.

Secondly, and more importantly, it’s crazy expensive to fly out of Portland! The only non-stop flight costs $530, one way. The cheapest flight is $192, and goes from Portland, ME to New York, NY to Raleigh, NC to Philadelphia, and it takes 8 and a half hours! That’s nearly as long as it takes to drive!

So it looks like we’ll be flying in and out of Manchester, renting a car there at the airport. I’ll be making the reservations this weekend.

I’m engaged! *glee* Sorry, I’m still excited.

I came into work this morning and got to show everyone the ring and try to actually get work done instead of sitting around smiling at the ring all day %)

I spent a lot of time yesterday telling people, I guess I know more people than I thought. And of course most of them asked the same questions:

So, when’s the big day?

Not sure yet.

Right now we’re focusing on finding someone to do the ceremony. Since we want a traditional ceremony and neither of us are particularly religious we need to find someone who is flexible, understanding, and who we’re comfortable with to do it. A friend suggested speaking with a Quaker minister because they are flexible in such situations. But we’ll see, pretty much all our other plans depend on this (what sort of place he will preform ceremonies in, if he’s willing to drive a bit to marry us…).

I’m an ordained minister in $strange_church, can I marry you two?

No %P

Am I invited?

Probably not. We’re thinking of having a very small ceremony, quite possibly confined to us, the minister, and two witnesses (best man and maid of honor).

Will you have a reception for everyone who wants to come?

I highly doubt it.

Pictures then?

Absolutely. We’ll have a professional photographer at the wedding. The pictures will be all over my website and we’ll have lots of hard copies for ourselves, family and close friends.

Have you stopped smiling yet?

No! *grinning*

I had the day off today, so I spent a lot of time going through all our vacation pictures and putting together a little site:

Our weekend in Maryland and West Virginia and our engagement!

Of course there is a whole page devoted to just the proposal itself.

This morning Michael took me down the the Jewelers to get the ring resized (it was a little too big) we’re picking it up this evening.

Yay!