Last night Caligula seemed to be feeling better, when friends came over for movie night he came out and slept in the livingroom to be with everyone instead of hiding in the closet. Then he spent the night on the couch in front of the fireplace.

This morning he was still very tired, but he did manage to eat a little. He tried to jump up on one of the chairs he usually sits on when we’re working upstairs and didn’t have the energy to get up. In the early afternoon when he was sleeping on the couch Michael mentioned that he felt warmer than normal. Sometimes he feels warmer when he’s sleeping because he’s all snuggled up, but I figured I’d give the vet a call anyway to see if we should be concerned.

They told us to bring him in soon so he could be looked at.

We got to the vet and there were dogs in the waiting room, which made him hiss and growl like usual. Once in the exam room he was more mellow than usual (but growled a lot), and kept wanting to crawl back into his carrier. They took his temperature and it turns out he had a fever. Oh no!

The vet wasn’t terribly concerned, but he gave him a Benadryl injection which should bring his fever down. He said it was probably a reaction to the flu vaccine, The cat flu shot that Caligula got contained live (but weakened) virus, and the vet said that some cats do become slightly ill from it. He told us that he’d probably still be sluggish for a couple days, but should be fine by Wednesday, and if not to call them. He also suggested that the next time he gets his flu vaccine we should give him some liquid Benadryl a couple hours before he comes in to the vet.

Poor kitty, I hope he starts feeling better soon,

In better news. I am really loving Ubuntu. Synaptic is much nicer than I remember it (it’s been a while), but I’d definately still go command line for updates and installing, especially on the slower computer I’m using for testing. Still, even using Synaptic, the system runs reasonably well. And since it’s debian-based dependency resolving is all done for you, and it works great. There are lots of how-to’s on and linked to the official Ubuntu site, and the forums are very active and helpful, so the community is there for supporting you, and it seems like the popular packages that aren’t in apt have been dealt with by someone, so finding instructions for that isn’t hard. So I’m impressed, and it’s definately going to the top of my “Recommending to Newbies” list. Yay Ubuntu!

Hopefully tonight we’re going out with some friends to see Robots. Yay!

Now I must go.

Last night we took Caligula to the vet.

They wanted a relatively fresh stool sample, so I cleaned out his litter box on Tuesday evening, assuming he’d go again before Thursday night.

Nope! As disgusting as it is, I ended up grabbing old Tuesday litter bag out of the trash and getting an older “sample” figuring that would be better than nothing. Yuck.

As always, Caligula hated the car ride and meowed a lot. Then, about halfway there, a horrible smell came from the back seat where his carrier was. He had finally given us a stool sample, in his carrier. Double Yuck.

So we pulled over and I threw out the old sample and cleaned out his carrier and put some of the fresh stool in the bag. I’m just glad we had tissues in the car to wipe it all up with and he hadn’t stepped in it before we were able to pull over and clean things up. Cats are gross sometimes.

We finally got to the vet and he was weighed.

11.6 pounds.

Eep, isn’t that a lot?

Eventually we followed a vet tech into the exam room, and passed a dog on the way, which made Caligula start hissing and growling. Oh brother. He hadn’t calmed down much when the doctor came into the exam room, and promptly growled as soon as he touched him. Most of the exam went this way, poor Caligula was very unhappy about the whole thing.

He got his 2 year rabies shot and a cat flu shot, which he took fairly well. The vet also emptied his anal glands (cat’s have anal glands? Apparently.) because we mentioned that he sometimes rubbed his bum on the floor and it was slightly irritated. The vet didn’t seem concerned with this because the irritation didn’t look bad.

About his weight, the vet said it is not a problem right now, but it could become one if he kept gaining. He suggested that we make sure he only gets 3/4 cup each day and bring him in to the vet in 6 months to be weighed and make sure he’s not continuing to gain weight. No more cat milk for Caligula!

It was about 6:30 by the time we got home. The vet warned us that cats often act a bit “off-color” for 24 hours following these shots, and we shouldn’t be concerned unless it lasts longer than that. He acted fine when we got home, but some time last night he crawled on top of my clean clothes in our closet and went to sleep.

This is strange behavior for him, he never sleeps there, he usually sleeps on our spare blankets, a pillow on the couch, or in our bed with us. When Michael saw him on my clothes this morning he moved him to a pillow on the couch, but he immediately went back into our bedroom to sleep on my clothes. Very odd indeed. He didn’t move from his place on my clothes when I filled up his food bowl this morning, which he usually runs to investigate. I’m glad Michael is working from home today and can keep an eye on him. Poor Caligula.

For years Michael and I just ate the same veggie burgers, Flame Grilled Boca Burgers. Boca tries to be like real beef, complete with “grill marks” on some. They fall short of this (meat eaters tend to run away screaming), but I like them.

But after eating the same ones every week I was starting to develop a taste aversion. When we were shopping a couple weeks ago I decided to pick up a different brand, Amy’s Kitchen meatless burgers, Chicago Style. Unlike Boca, Amy’s doesn’t try very hard to taste like meat, and soy is not the largest component (mushrooms and other vegetables are).

The verdict? They’re good! They don’t taste like burgers, I said they tasted like mushrooms and Michael said they tasted like stuffing, I guess it’s a mixture of the two. Very tasty. They aren’t as greasy as the Boca Burgers tended to be, so I need to cook them with the lid on the pan to retain as much moisture as possible, but otherwise I’m very happy. I think we’ll switch off between Boca and Amy’s Kitchen burgers from now on.

Amy’s Kitchen Meatless Chicago Burger

Last night I installed Ubuntu on R2Q5, no more Fedora!

Install attempt # 1 – 4:00 pm

The install started out going fine, but then I ran into a bunch of errors when installing the base system. I logged onto forums to see what the trouble could be, but when I tried the fix they suggested I ran into more errors. The problem? It seems the cd-rom stopped responding during the middle of the install. Stupid old thing, it’s done that before. So I had to do a complete shut down for a few minutes and then bring it back up and hope the cdrom was seen by the BIOS again. It was.

Dinner break from 5-6:30 pm

Install attempt #2 – 6:30 pm

The install was going fine, but once again I was hung up at installing the base system. The error led me to believe the CD was at fault (“try burning at a lower speed,” it said), but since burning an ISO is such a PITA I refused to give in. On a whim I went to the next step in the install to install all the rest of the packages, and hope the installer would be smart enough to see that the whole base wasn’t there. And it worked! The base system installed without a problem. The rest of the install from the CD went flawlessly. Then I got to boot into the new install.

The first thing the new install seems to do is pull up apt and finish installing by updating packages and things. Apt downloaded 80+ packages and I had to sit around and wait for it to install them all, it took about an hour. No GUI, just text on my screen zooming by for an hour. Eventually that was done and I log into my new system!

You set up a user which will have sudo privs (root account is disabled by default), and use that. It uses a nice GUI login, and dumps you into Gnome. It looks really slick! I started poking around and I noticed that it was much nicer than the default desktop that Fedora gives you, and it just looks so much nicer. I went through the menus and noticed that it doesn’t install as much as Fedora did, but that’s perfectly alright, Fedora installs too much.

By then it was about 9pm and I was getting too tired to play with Ubuntu, so I haven’t started checking out how apt works with it or anything. The package management system is really the key for me, Fedora has come a long way, but the up2date GUI still freezes up, Fedora’s yum is painfully slow, and Fedora’s apt is clunky and imperfect at resolving dependencies.

I’m optimistic though, Ubuntu might very well take it’s place at the top of my “to recommend to newbies” list.

Yesterday it got up to 65 degrees F. When I left work I said:

“Haha! And it’ll probably snow tomorrow!”

I shouldn’t joke like that.

IT’S SNOWING.

My salad was definitely not enough for lunch, I’m still hungry, it’s going to be a long afternoon. At least this time I carried the dressing separate so it didn’t get all soggy.

I got quite a bit of computer time this weekend, so much that I had to consult my “To Do” list to find something to occupy my Sunday afternoon.

I decided to work on R2Q5.

As I’ve mentioned in this entry I was having trouble with R2Q5 locking up. It looked like a RAM problem, and after mentioning it to Michael he said that he had the same problem when he had tried to install Windows on it. Definitely a RAM problem.

So I finally got around to debugging that. I opened it up and took out the ram chips to see if something was obviously wrong with any of them. There wasn’t, but one was not as tall as the other two, so I took that one out. That motherboard has always been weird about ram that isn’t completely identical, even if they are all 128MB chips, maybe one is pc100 and the other is pc133 and it gets all cranky.

After removing the chip I booted up and did some updates and played around for a couple hours using as much ram as possible, which was not hard, it’s only got 256 now. I then left it on while I went downstairs to watch a movie. It was still running when I went to bed. When I woke up this morning I checked on it and it’s still up. No freezing in over 12 hours, yay! Success!

Now I can really start testing other distros without worrying about hardware issues.

Which reminds me, I want a tv capture card now. We were over at ‘s place on Friday and he showed us a new feature on Myth that allows you to speed up recorded shows 1.5 times, cool! It was really smooth, I was impressed, you could watch a show that way if you were willing to pay attention. And the commercial skipping has gotten much better.

Since we had the Myth Box running we decided to watch some shows he had recorded. We missed the pilot of Law and Order: Trial by Jury because I was just too tired to stay up and watch it Thursday night, so we were able to watch it. Not a bad show, and it’s the show that Jerry Orbach was working on before he passed away. He looked really old, it was a bit sad to see, since he looked fine at the end of his last season on the original Law and Order.

So even if I don’t have cable to record a ton of shows, I could at least record Law and Order, The West Wing, and Nova. And I’d like a DVD-rom for our Myth box, the PS2 really is a horrible DVD player (as we were reminded ONCE AGAIN last night when the stupid thing wouldn’t finish playing the Harry Potter DVD!).

And now it’s time to get back to work.

Lots of things have changed since gimp went 2.0 and beyond. At first I said “oh neat” and then when I started using 2.0, then 2.2 a few things jumped out at me that were really good or really annoying. I thought I’d use it for a couple weeks and see if it’s just my brain saying “change is bad!” so I didn’t like things, but there are some good and bad things that still linger:

Bad

• “Create a New Image” dialog – I liked it much better when the “Advanced Options” didn’t need to be clicked on, since I almost always edit these.
• When you save images it’s not nearly as intuitive as it used to be. “Browse for other folders” and “select file type extension” should be open by default like it used to be.

Good

• Last modified date when opening images, better support for “thumbnails” without actual thumbnail directory existing (I HATED that and always turned that option off)
• Zoom options embedded in image windows, this is nice since I’m always zooming.
• Crop shading, this went from “oh neat but I don’t care” to “this is actually pretty nice”
• File, Edit, etc menus embedded in image window (right click still works)

Unfortunately the bad is outweighing the good in my opinion, it’s just not as user friendly (with the exception of my last “Good” thing). I can get used to these changes, but I think it will make it harder for someone new to the program to learn things.

While compiling these lists I was doing quite a bit of image editing, first going through a whole bunch of fish pictures to find a few that could go on our new subdomain for our fishtank: http://fish.bevilacqua.us. The layout is the same as it was for Munch’s site, but the content has changed. Content… gosh there isn’t much. I’m sure we’ll think of things to put on it eventually.

I was also editing images I took when I went on a walk to the library yesterday. I wanted to get the “feel” of an old, small north-eastern town in the US, and Schwenksville personifies that well.

I’ve put all the good pictures I took up on a new section of my website: Downtown Schwenksville.

But I couldn’t help thinking while walking down the road taking pictures of public buildings with my digital camera “I hope someone doesn’t call the cops and think I’m a terrorist!” You may laugh, but in the past month I’ve heard of two similarly silly local stories where someone saw someone “stranger” taking pictures of $a_public_building and called the police to investigate. Really, there wasn’t any other evidence that something bad was happening, just some guys taking pictures. And don’t even get me started on all the Grand Central Station pictures nonsense (oh noes I’m a terrorist!). As if I don’t have enough real things to be afraid of, but I digress.

After the nice walk yesterday I wanted to have a nice dinner. So I went to make some more of my oh so delicious mushroom-crust quiche. It all came together nicely, but I decided to use a glass dish instead of a metal one. I am not sure why, the glass one looked nicer I guess?

Well it was a huge mistake.

After cooking for 30 minutes (out of a 25-30 minute cook time in the recipe) in the oven it was starting to get crispy around the edges and I removed it from the oven. It looked good, but when I flipped it over to cool on the cooling rack it came out as a drippy mess. Noo! The egg didn’t seem to cook all the way! I was pretty upset, I was really looking forward to eating this quiche and it smelled so good. It was after 6, I was hungry and so we decided to go out. First thought was chinese, so we looked up a local chinese place, printed out directions and went out.

T
urns out this chinese place revolved around take out (complete with one of those light up menus over the cash register). Groan. We left.

We went to a plaza right off the Royserford 422 exit and saw a Steakhouse “Great!” we thought. But when we got in there it was packed and there was a 100-110 minute wait. Gah!

By this time I was pretty hungry, and Michael really wanted steak, so we headed over to Skippack to the Roadhouse Grille. Yum! It was a bit more crowded than I would have liked, but the food was delicious. I got some Alaskan Cod and Michael got a Steak special and a couple glasses of wine (I didn’t feel like drinking). I finished my meal with a slice of chocolate malt ball cake and Michael had a cognac. He had both wine and cognac? Yep, and I drove home. As I got into the driver’s seat I realized I’d never driven with Michael in the car before! I’d followed him home when returning rental cars a couple times, but never in the same car. It was a strange feeling

We were home a little after 9. And I was exhausted.

And now it’s almost 3pm on Sunday. This weekend is going by too quickly.

I called Annette last night, since it was her 16th birthday. She wanted to go out and get mexican food at her favorite restaurant with a friend, but I guess it was too far away and my mother didn’t want to drive there. They went to McDonalds instead, poor thing. That’s worse than my 16th birthday.

During the conversation I did learn something very interesting though.

My other sister (Heather, 21) is engaged! She went to Alberta, Canada to see her boyfriend a couple weeks ago, and while she was there he proposed, with a nice ring and everything.

They met online and have been together since fall of 2001 (shortly after Michael and I got together), she’s made a few trips up to Canada to see him, he’s come down to Maine to see her a few times (stayed for almost a month last summer). I haven’t met him, but she seems really happy, and that’s what’s important. From what my mother says, she’s planning on moving up to Alberta to live with him, and getting her Canadian citizenship (I’ll have to look into and talk to her about getting a dual citizenship, which I’ve heard you can get if you have family in the US).

At first I thought “Moving to Canada, on the other side of the country? Insanity!” But I guess it’s not so bad, at least she’s finally getting out of Maine.

I’m happy for her.

Mmm Friday.

It’s my youngest sister’s birthday today, she’s turning 16. Egads, 16! This is a big birthday for her because in Maine you can drop out of school without your parent’s consent when you’re 16, and she’s been claiming she would for a couple years. Because of her recent change of schools and tutoring I’m hoping that she’s changed her mind, but I can so easily see her getting upset and annoyed one day and quitting on a whim. I’ll give her a call tonight to see how she’s doing.

The week slowed down a lot for me after tuesday, which is great, I’m not feeling mopey or stressed out anymore. I’m really looking forward to movie night tonight at ‘s place. Michael is going to stop by the beer store this afternoon, and hopefully swinging by the liquor store as well to get me a bottle of wine. I’m in a wine mood.

Which brings me to another subject, Pennsylvania’s liquor laws.

Pennsylvania is a “dry state” which basically means they have stupid alcohol laws.

All “Wine and Spirits” shops are state run, and often have strange hours. Just last year they opened a few on Sundays, which was quite a radical change.

You can only buy beer in restaurants that have a liquor license (and there are plenty around here that don’t) or at a “Beer Store” where they only sell beer by the case. Many establishments have skirted the law a bit by opening “restaurants” that sell cheap take-out food and have TONS of beer by the bottle and six-pack, but those are mostly in the city.

It’s all very strange. I guess they established this model because they are against drinking, thinking that if you limit the places and times people can buy it at you might limit their drinking somehow. I think it’s done the opposite, at least in our case. When you buy beer you can’t just buy a six-pack to enjoy for the evening, you need to buy a whole case (and now that I have a whole case in my fridge you better believe I’m going to drink it!). When we drop by the liquor store we stock up because going to the store when it’s open is a pain and who knows when we’ll have the time to come back?

I should look around for alcoholic statistics nationwide (most of what I find just deals with under-aged drinking), taking into consideration rural vs city areas (because we all know that there is nothing to do in rural america except drink </sarcasm>). Does Maine have a higher rate because you can buy hard liquor in some grocery stores? Do Pennsylvania’s crazy-feeling laws actually make fewer people drink?

We should just abolish these silly laws, and the drinking age. I think they often turn out doing more harm than good. I drank much more before I turned 21 than I do now, and I know that’s true for most people.

The other day we were listening to the radio and a brilliant young musician said he had a lot of trouble reading sheet music because he is dyslexic.

What the hell, is half the world dyslexic? Why do I keep running into and finding out about people who are? Is this the neurological equivalent to ADD/ADHD? Is every late bloomer dumped into the “dyslexic” category?

When I was in elementary school I was diagnosed with dyslexia. Both my parents were dyslexic, so it didn’t come as a surprise to them. For a very long time I never questioned this diagnosis. I was put into special ed classes, and it took me a few years to get up to speed with my peers as far as english language skills go. Then, when I was in 8th grade, I won an award for doing far above average in a state-wide reading comprehension test.

Today I read all the time (my love for books borders on obsession), I write all the time. For a while I assumed it was because the special ed teachers were properly trained to deal with my condition and did very well with teaching me in the proper learning methods for dyslexics. I thought I had gotten so good at using these techniques that it natural to me. But now I wonder. Why are so many people diagnosed with this? Do I even really have it?

I’ve been doing some research and I am starting to think I don’t. I found a list of “Common Signs in Adults” here. It doesn’t sound like me.

# May hide reading problems. I no longer have reading problems.

# May spell poorly; relies on others to correct spelling. I am not a poor speller.

# Avoids writing; may not be able to write. I love writing, even considering it as a career.

# Often very competent in oral language. Nope.

# Relies on memory; may have an excellent memory. Nope, I have to write everything down.

# Often has good “people” skills. HAHAHA!! No!

# Often is spatially talented; professions include, but are not limited, to engineers, architects, designers, artists and craftspeople, mathematicians, physicists, physicians (esp. surgeons and orthopedists), and dentists. This is rather broad.

# May be very good at “reading” people (intuitive). Nope.

# In jobs is often working well below their intellectual capacity. Ok, that’s true.

# May have difficulty with planning, organization and management of time, materials and tasks. Quite the contrary. I have excellent time management and planning skills, and can be sickeningly organized when I want to be (which is not often, I’m lazy).

# Often entrepreneurs. Nah, I tried, but it was too stressful.

Other sites have said things like “dyslexics learn better by hearing” but it’s not at all that way for me. Give me a book, some dry examples, google and a goal and I’ll be able to tackle whatever you throw at me. Explain it to me aloud and I’ll be scratching down notes as fast as possible so I have a record of it to refer to.

So now my only excuse for having a hard time learning to read is that I’m a late bloomer (there is probably a cool sounding techical term for this). I can live with that.

The past few days I’ve been feeling weird.

I think it comes from a bit of stress over the weekend. It’s not even a lot of real things, I just have a horrible tendancy to blow things out of proportion in my mind and freak out about them[1]. Usually I can go through some meditation and relaxation techniques and make my brain feel better, but I just had so many things on my mind this weekend that *something* would creep back into my mind each time I started feeling a bit more clear-headed.

Luckily everything that was on my mind has been resolved in positive ways!

So I should feel better now.

But I don’t.

Perhaps I need cake.

[1] This is a problem I’ve been dealing with for years. I’m much better than I used to be. In high school I didn’t know good meditation and relaxation techniques so I’d let everything build up until I’d break down in an exhausted mess. Now I’m able to control most of my worries, unless there are too many.