I am so exhausted, can hardly stay focused enough to write this *yawn* and it’s only 8pm! I can’t go to bed yet.

Yesterday I started raking the leaves, quickly realizing that it’d be quite a chore. It’s great living with lots of trees, but man, when the fall comes, you can’t even see our driveway or lawn! Raking, raking, raking. I came in after a while and Michael suggested getting one of those leaf vacuum things. Turns out they aren’t terribly expensive, so we looked at some reviews (bad reviews for all, what do people expect from a lightweight leaf vacuum?). We ended up going to the Home Depot and picking up the Black & Decker Leaf Hog. By the time we got home from the Home Depot it was time to start getting ready to go to dinner and a movie with mct and Nita.

We met at mct and Nita’s place, and got to play with their new kittens for a while, yay kittens! We were going to have dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, but when we got there around 7:30 the wait for a seat was 2 hours. 2 hours! We ended up eating at Bennigans, then going to the theater for the 9:20 showing of The Incredibles. We met b2s and Baerana there, and all 6 of us got into the last 6 seats together in the front row of the sold out showing.

What a great movie! You should all go see it if you haven’t already. Pixar is wonderful %) And I got to see the Episode 3 trailer on the big screen (had only seen it as .avi previously).

We didn’t get out of the theater until after 11, it was a little after 1 when we got home, was in bed by 1:30.

I woke up at 6:30 because Caligula was sitting on my stomach. I got up and fed him, and I couldn’t go to sleep after that, so I figured I’d stay up. I ended up spending some time this morning putting together and update page about our house: here. Now it’s not the real estate listing photos! I put this together primarily to send to my Aunt, who hadn’t seen any of my house pictures yet.

Spent some time today cleaning, then went outside to clean up leaves. The leaf vacuum is a neat thing, we might try to find the attachment so it empties into a trash barrel instead of it’s small bag, but it’s light enough for me to use for a while, and does it’s job well %)

Now I am tired and Michael should be home with cookies soon, yay!

*wanders off*

My journal has been sadly devoid of computer fun entries lately. I just haven’t had time to play with my computer so much, I hadn’t even customized xfce4 since my reinstall a few weeks ago, and that’s sad! Well I remedied that, and did a few other fun things this morning.

I was sick of launching all my programs from the Run prompt, and finally got around to putting them in my xfce4 control panel, which now looks like this:

For full screenshot, see here.

I have xfce4-weather installed, so I have current temp (and whatever other readings I want, in the summer I go temp and humidity, in the winter I go temp and wind chill). And lauch buttons for aterm[1], xmms, mozilla, gimp, gnumeric, logjam and liferea, then the volume control (green thing) and clock. I’m sure I’ll think of more programs that I use regularly, but that’s most of them.

Yeah, I installed liferea. I really loved using firefox + sage, it was everything I wanted in a feed aggregator, and it looked great. But I go so sick of firefox being bad, each time I upgraded there was a new problem, least of which was reinstalling all my extensions each time. I was patient with it, I could handle the find tool not working, and various other annoyances, but this last time I installed it, it’d seg fault each time I pressed enter after putting something in the addressbar. I couldn’t take that. So I unistalled firefox and decided I needed to find a new aggregator. I installed straw, but I don’t think my system has enough Gnome love for it to work properly. So I went with liferea, and it works fine, even if I don’t love it as much as firefox and sage.

I got around to changing my website‘s favicon today. If you go to my site in a browser that supports it you can see it’s just a little leia head, much better than the silly flower I had before (which was designed with a way old site layout in mind). I also gave a favicon to caligula‘s website. I was discouraged to find that when I opened up mozilla the icon didn’t show up, but then wondered.. “does mozilla ever show them? I think it’s only sometimes.” It turns out that mozilla removed automatic support for all of them, preferring to only show them when this was in the <head>:

<link rel=”SHORTCUT ICON” href=”/favicon.ico”>

So first I added that, then I went in search of a solution to it not automagically showing all favicons, and found it here:

Mozilla no longer reads /favicon.ico images by default although Mozilla still reads page icons defined with the <link> tag. Set the following pref to turn the feature back on.

user_pref(“browser.chrome.favicons”,true);

So, you’d first close mozilla (editing text files while it’s running is silly, since they’ll just be overwritten), then you open the ~/.mozilla/default/orojbmpz.slt/prefs.js file and drop in that user_pref. Yay now I have favicons everywhere in mozilla!

Now I need to go outside and rake leaves. *groan* Owning a house is so much fun!

[1] aterm -tr -bg black -fg white -tint magenta -sh 25 +sb -fn ‘-b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-*-*-m-*-iso10646-1’

Our algae eater eats cucumbers because there aren’t any other fish in his tank, so it doesn’t get dirty enough to keep him fed.

During the party last weekend I looked into the fishtank and saw a green stick with what looked like a cucumber seed on the top of it. “That’s strange” I thought, and didn’t come back to it the next morning, when I realized that it was a growing cucumber plant growing in the middle of the water.

It was amusing, but such a thing can’t last.

Now there are at least 4 such sprouts in his tank, I’m curious to find out what happens, the biggest looks like this now:

Yay my fish is a farmer! I wonder how much they’ll grow…

I’m so glad it’s Friday, it’s been such a long week.

*wanders off*

I thought about not writing my feelings about this election. My views are either shared by you (making my mutterings nothing new), or you will completely attack every sentence I put down as some crazy liberal ranting. But then I realized that there was too much going on in my head to ignore. It’s my journal afterall.

For most of the day yesterday I was in shock. I really should have expected this Bush victory, but I couldn’t bring myself to fully accept it, and when it happened I was left feeling… well, this article, shown to me by says it well:

…well, simply staggering. Mind blowing. Odd. Gut wrenching. Colon knotting. Eyeball gouging. And so on… You want to block it out. You want to rend your flesh and yank your hair and say no way in hell and lean out your window and scream into the Void and pray it will all be over soon, even though you know you’re an atheist Buddhist Taoist Rosicrucian Zen Orgasmican and you don’t normally pray to anything except maybe the gods of really exceptional sake and skin-tingling sex…

(I thought it was worth reading the whole article, if only to fume and say “yes, exactly!” at the end.)

So I was upset yesterday, then got drunk last night. I went to bed hoping that I’d wake up and it would have all been a nightmare. Instead I woke up with a hangover, it was raining, and I had to go to work.

I did some thinking. Maybe I should move to Canada, get a hunting shack, hunt moose and brew beer? Nah, moose are too cute to eat.

The conservatives I’ve talked to since Bush’s victory tell me that they’re sick of us complaining about the loss, claiming that they wouldn’t be so bitter and sore if their side had lost. It might be true, but in my case this loss was more than just the loss of some presidential canidate, it’s the scary direction that our country is going in, and will continue to go in.

Recently Bush said something like “We don’t want courts to decide, we want the American people to decide,” which was followed by loud cheers. That sort of talk is terrifying! There is a reason for the courts, so that things are fair, even if a majority of eligible voters think that slavery is good, women shouldn’t vote, and gays shouldn’t marry, the courts can say “No” (eventually).[1]

Our White House is full of war monger neo-conservatives who think that it’s best for the country to run up the deficit, alienate our allies, illegally invade countries, legislate our bedrooms, and interfere with the progression medical science.

And they seem to have this assumption that we will always be a Super Power. We won’t. I think we’re making a mistake letting our power hunger get the better of us, and that’s not going to be good down the road.

I think our founding fathers would be ashamed.

I’m also frustrated because I wanted to think better of the American public. I chat with a bunch of anti-american Swedes, and from time to time I’ll try to interject comments about how not all of us are bad. In one fateful conversation I even claimed that there was no way that Bush could be re-elected, because the American people now know that they were lied to, we’re not THAT stupid. HAHAHAHA! I WAS WAY WRONG!

Anyway, this will be my last politicalpost for a while. I’m too tired.

[1] EDIT: I thought about this paragraph after posting, and I realized that the message was unclear, and made it sound like the courts step in an decide everything in a timely manner and that they did in these cases. The point I was actually trying to make was that our country was often quite divided over issues in the past, issues we take for granted as going one way or the other. The court system is in place to decide if something is constitutional or not, so that even if a majority of the country thinks that, say, Protestantism should be the national religion, the court can say “HAHA NO WAY.”

Ugh, what a mess.

It’s election day here in the States. I must admit I’m a bit anxious, and worried. Especially after talking to a Bush supporter last night who seemed to regurgitate everything I’ve ever seen in pro-Bush media and commercials. He claimed that I shouldn’t try and debate him (not that I wanted to, but these things just happen in IRC) because he keeps winning debates he has with people. I quickly learned that the only reason he thinks he “wins” is that it’s so infuriating to talk to someone who is so misinformed.

I need to go to work now. Happy Election Day my fellow Americans!

Happy Halloween!

We had our party yesterday. A couple guys we knew from Michael’s old workplace came by, as did our friends b2s, , , , and . So it was a smaller party than we had anticipated (2 others had a death in the family, 2 were sick, 2 were unable to come at last minute…), but we made the best of it. We had all sorts of yummie beer and fruity drinks and played a lot of old UT (which kept acting up on a couple XP systems for some reason).

And I have pictures!

Livingroom, b2s, Pete and Bob

lost1 and pleia2 playing UT

mct and lost1

mjoesph playing UT, Time at turntables

I have more, all of which are on a page on my site: http://princessleia.com/October3004.html.

After game playing we all hung out in the TV room and watched some MST3K. It was a fun night. I woke up hurting a bit this morning (French Vodka is something else!), but some Advil and a cup of coffee took care of that in about an hour.

Moving on, I’m officially sick of campaign talk. The breaking point was an interview with Bush on the 6:30 evening news, I don’t think he answered any of the questions put to him, it was like he was having a completely different conversation. It’s not just Bush, it’s Kerry too, and the local guys, it’s all just making me crazy. Stop lying and stop avoiding tough questions dammit! I’m to tired of it to even rant about the things that bother me, I just want it to be over already. Bah. So when the Dateline Election special came on at 7 I came up here and played with mplayer and decided to write this.

I have a few things to get done now. *wanders off*

I should be sleeping, but I woke up and couldn’t fall back to sleep. *yawn*

Last night we went out to get some party stuff, and I thought I’d get some additions to my witch costume for the party. We went to Wal-Mart, since they’re the closest store to our house that’d have everything (yeah, Wal-Mart sucks, they’re evil, I know). When we walked in I saw lots of children’s costumes in the middle of the main walkway, and I thought “oh, how nice, they moved some things to the front for easier access.” Then I saw someone marking them down “Oh neat, a sale before halloween” then we went to get all the party foods. Then I tried to look for their Halloween section, as far as I knew they always had a few aisles dedicated to it. I went to those aisles that Wal-Marts usually keep their holiday stuff in and saw Christmas stuff. Hm, Christmas? Walking further takes you into a whole addition to the store with Christmas things.

So I walked back to the costumes in front and asked a salesperson if that was all the halloween stuff they had left “Yeah, we had a lot before, you should have come then.” Ouch, so much for pleasant Wal-Mart salespeople, but I’m sure she must have been asked that 452534 times already, as I couldn’t be the only person buying Halloween stuff on October 29th.

Maybe Wal-Mart is a cheap fluke, I could probably find Halloween stuff at a Pharmacy.

Rann’s Pharmacy, privately owned in Harleysville: Marked down, hardly any selection.

Rite-Aid: Chain, marked down, hardly any selection.

ARG!

I gave up.

Is getting rid of all their stuff 2 days before Halloween really make up for all the last minute people who will come and who might be willing to pay twice as much for something? Especially when Halloween is on a Sunday, Friday night and Saturday are prime times for selling stuff!

Either way, it pissed me off %) They put their Halloween stuff out in August, and keep it until before Halloween, when they replace it with Christmas stuff.

My costume will still be ok without them.

Otherwise, plans for the party have been coming together nicely. We moved the couch into the TV room, and it’s a bit cramped in there, but now we have lots of comfy seats in there for movie watching. We picked up a long table from Michael’s mother’s yesterday. Of course we got snacky foods, and from work I was able to pick up a couple salads (Pasta Broccoli and Lobbster Salad, 5 pounds of each!) for free, yay free!

I have Doom3 installed. UT installed and sound working with it (needed to load the oss module). Windows is all updated and should be working right. Just need to make a few mroe tweaks in Linux and then I can get started with other things.

Yay for Halloweenish parties!

*wanders off*

The word “Geek” was used as an insult at work yesterday.

I must be losing perspective.

I socialize with geeks, I used to work with geeks, I party with geeks, I work on projects with geeks. Somewhere along the line I came to believe that geekiness was the norm in the world. It’s not, and I found this clearly obvious at work. They don’t get my geeky sense of humor (witty, punny, sarcastic), and it wasn’t until a silence followed by “O.K.” that I realized how geeky “None shall pass” sounded when one woman couldn’t get past a pile of papers I was filing and I said it with a smile.

Oh well, at least I still know I’m as geeky as I ever was.

We’re having our Halloween/Housewarming/LAN party tomorrow, been getting together the plans all week. I’m excited, it’s been over a year since our last party, and this’ll be the first at the new house. Last night Michael picked up some Achouffe and Glow-In-The-Dark Rogue Dead Guy Ale, yay! We never did get to the liquor store to pick up vodka or tequila, I’ll have to make a note to doso today. Right now I’m installing UT on my linux partition, I’ll have to install Doom3 on my Windows drive before the party too. Gosh, I should have gotten my system up to speed *before* today %)

Today at work people are dressing up for Halloween. I am dressed as a witch.

Now I must head off to work. Yay it’s Friday!

I’m tired and I’m going to go snuggle with Michael, but first I had to post about our pumpkin carving tonight.

Every Halloween since we’ve been living together, Michael and I have taken pictures of us carving our pumpkins. Last year I noticed our 2002 pictures ended up being the first google hit for: pumpkin carving pictures (I discovered this after doing such a search for design ideas, imagine my surprise… and frustration!). This year I found that yet again I am the first hit, but this time it’s my 2003 pumpkins up there. So we couldn’t stop a google-worthy tradition!

Our pictures are located here: http://princessleia.com/halloween04.html. At the bottom of that page there are links to the previous years as well. Enjoy!