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!

I was browsing a friend’s website this morning and followed a link to buyblue.org. Within two minutes I found myself reading an article about how evil Wal-Mart is, and laughing to myself about it because I know how evil they are.

Then it hit me.

I’ve been really bitter lately.

So many posts about how I hate things and people annoy me.

So much talking in IRC about things that suck.

It doesn’t feel healthy and I’m sure it’s not fun to read about every day.

Sorry about that.

I had the biggest craving for a chicken cheese steak hoagie for lunch. Only trouble was that it\u2019s raining today and the Pizzeria is 4 blocks away.

Then I remembered I have a raincoat with a hood. So I called up the restaurant, placed my chicken cheese steak hoagie order, and put on my raincoat for a drizzly walk downtown.

It was nice. For once there weren\u2019t annoying kids running down the street and bikes nearly running me over on the sidewalk. The only other person I saw on my walk was the mailman.

I got my hoagie, came back here to work, and ate it while checking email. Yum.

I\u2019ve been swamped with work today since it\u2019s our fiscal month end today (my first one in this department!), but I\u2019m in a great mood.

is picking me up from work to go over to her place for movie night, should be fun, even if Michael is going to the men\u2019s sweat lodge in Malvern and won\u2019t be around %\

And our plans for the rest of the weekend?

Looks like it\u2019s going to rain tomorrow, not so much a yard work day. Maybe we\u2019ll spend that day shopping for when we do need to do yard work, Michael is planning on making a compost bin, so we need to pick up some poles and chicken wire for that. Tomorrow evening we\u2019re planning on spending some time with friends who want to play some D&D, which I haven\u2019t played almost 4 years (still have my dice though).

Sunday will be yard work day, assuming the weather is nice.

And now my lunch break is over. Only about 3 more hours until weekend %D

It’s been a pretty good week so far. I haven’t slept as well as I normally do, but it hasn’t seemed to bother me any.

Tuesday after work we went grocery shopping. When we got home Michael got out his drill and we hung the ropes along the side of the garage for our hops, some of which were getting tall and really needed to start climbing something. For dinner we had Morningstar Farm burgers. We spent the evening just relaxing downstairs, didn\u2019t even touch my computer.

Wednesday morning I woke up at 5am, an hour earlier than usual, it gave me time to catch up on email and things I didn\u2019t do the night before. It was strange being up so early though.

Work day went quickly, I breezed through my work.

Michael picked me up at 5 and we decided to head to a Chinese place that some friends had recommended, Yantze in Lansdale. Trying new Chinese food is always scary, I can\u2019t handle much MSG, so I\u2019ve spent my share of evenings in the bathroom after bad Chinese place trips. But I love Chinese food, so it\u2019s usually worth the risk. I was surprised when I walked into the restaurant, it was pretty nice for being in a shopping plaza. It was a bit different than normal Chinese places, I didn\u2019t even see Sweet and Sour chicken on the menu, they had a lot of good looking dishes, took me forever to decide. Eventually we each ordered a dinner (which came with soup, egg roll and ice cream for dessert), Michael got the sesame chicken and I got a hot seafood dish. It was good, and I didn\u2019t get sick, yay!

When we got home I spent some time online, explained \u201chow domain names work\u201d to a friend who was looking to buy one but didn\u2019t \u201cget\u201d how they worked. After explaining it I realized I wasn\u2019t really in the mood to be online. I ended up spending the evening reading and watching TV.

I got a few books in the mail for the Philly Chix, part of a series called \u201cSpring Into\u201d which I was expecting to be more \u201cnewbie learns $subject\u201d books, but so far have surprised me with their smartness. They\u2019re aimed at professionals and people already familiar with IT who want to venture into new subjects, the Spring into Linux book doesn\u2019t have the cutesy stories and text boxes everywhere insulting your computer intelligence. I\u2019ll write a full review of the Linux one soon, but so far, I\u2019m impressed.

And now it\u2019s Thursday and I\u2019m on my lunch break. Four day work weeks are good.

I’m not depressed anymore.

It’s good to feel normal again %)

I’m going for a walk.