Last night we got home from our trip to New England. I was exhausted, but I found enough energy to wash the new sheets we got from L.L. Bean.

We left home on Wednesday morning. First drove 202 through New Jersey, which wasn’t so bad. Then up 287 to 87 to 84. Ugh, I-84. 84 goes up through the major Connecticut cities, and so the traffic on that most busy travelling day of the year was a nightmare. We didn’t arrive at my Aunt Meg’s house in southern New Hampshire until after 6:30. My aunt had our beds ready for us though, and we were able to get to bed early.

Thursday we went over to my Aunt Elaine’s house and Michael got to meet some of my other cousins. We couldn’t stay long, but it was nice seeing them.

We went to my cousin’s apartment for Thanksgiving dinner, got to see my grandparents. My grandfather is 85 now, and starting to show his age, he doesn’t talk nearly as much as he used to. But he and my grandmother are still doing well, it was very nice to see them. It was great to see everyone, and introduce Michael to this much more sane and intelligent portion of my family. My sisters also came down for dinner. Annette is crazy!

sister Heather, aunt Meg, sister Annette, cousin Melissa, Grandmother, Grandfather

We got back to my Aunt’s house around 8 pm and went to bed.

Friday morning I got up at 3:30, intentionally. We left my Aunt’s house by 4:30 and drove up to Freeport, Maine. Freeport is the outlet store capital of Maine, it’s almost always swarming with tourists. So we figured that if we’re going to go to such a black hole of commercialism on Black Friday we should probably get there early. Our only destination was L.L. Bean. We were there around 7 and there was no crowd, yay! We ended up buying a couple bags of clothes and some new bedsheets and a big goose down comforter. I love that store. We left a little after 8 to head down to South Portland, Maine to see my sisters.

We met up with my sisters at my father’s place. Since my father is in the hospital they stayed there together (Heather normally lives down the street, but Annette lives 2 hours north). It’s not a bad little place. After talking for a bit we all headed over to Maine Medical Center, where my father was.

My father does not look good. I was glad that my Aunt Meg had prepared me, and happy to find that he’s stilly clear-minded, even though he’s quite tired. It wasn’t easy though, so I made sure that we’d be spending a lot of time with him. Throughout the day we stopped back at the hospital every few hours to visit with him.

That evening he got very tired around 6pm, and we went up toward Grey, Maine to meet our online friend, Morgana. Maybe we didn’t know as much about her and her husband as we should have (like a last name? their age?). But hey, we’ve talked online a lot, she’s very nice, a linux geek, and lives in a house in Maine! So we drove up to their place, and wow. Wow. They live in a huge old farmhouse that they’ve completely renovated. It’s beautiful! And they have something crazy like 120 acres of land. Their kitchen is beautiful and Morgana is an amazing cook. So we had some delicious crab cakes, then some very tastey steak and mushrooms, potatoes, spinach… yum! We talked and then watched a few episodes of Coupling until late. Best of all, Morgana and her husband are amazingly cool people. It was an excellent (I am going to break out a thesaurus in a minute to find more synonyms) night, and a great break from all the family stuff.

Morgana, Bob, pleia2, Michael

Saturday we met He
ather at 9:30 at the hotel Michael and I were staying at. My mother showed up too (and caused some unwanted trouble that I won’t get into here) with her boyfriend. We all then drove out to the storage facility where things from the house were being kept. We hat to go through it to find out if we wanted anything, see what could/should get thrown away, etc. I got a few boxes of nice books (perhaps I’ll write an entry about the stuff I got at a later time) and an ocean painting that hung above our fireplace when I was growing up.

We stopped and saw my father at the hospital around 11, then went out to lunch with my mother. My mother and Annette left to go home after lunch (apparently my mother had to work in the afternoon), so Michael and I headed back over to the hospital. We spent the day there. My father suggested I leave when he felt tired, but I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time to spend with him, so I picked up a Reader’s Digest and sat by his bed while he slept. If he wanted to talk I was there. I’m glad I spent that time there with him, I got to do a lot of thinking. Eventually my father got his dinner and we decided that it’d be best if Michael and I got going (we needed dinner too, and my father was quite tired for the night). It was hard leaving, knowing how sick my father is, but it was getting late.

It was Saturday evening and we still hadn’t had our lobster dinner! We wanted to go somewhere nice. Surprisingly, many of the lobster places around Portland cater to families, which means they’re relatively inexpensive and crowded with kids. We didn’t want that. So I suggested the Snow Squall, a nice place that I’ve been familiar with since I moved to Maine (we actually lived in the attached apartment/condo complex when I was very young). So we got there, sat down, and looked at the menu. No lobster. Ack! The waiter understood our disappointment, and we thought we’d try somewhere else. We left and went to one of those family-friendly places. When we went to sit down a paper football landed about 6 inches from my foot. Guess what? We left! Lobster or no, the Snow Squall had atmosphere we needed that evening.

We got back to the Snow Squall feeling quite silly. The waiter was very nice about it, and we started looking over the menu when the waiter came by and informed us that they had a couple 1 pound lobsters in back if we were interested. Nice! (yes the waiter got a huge tip) So we ordered a bottle of white wine and each got our lobster. It was a perfect dinner. For dessert I ordered a crazy “cheesecake” dessert that was flavored with Creme de Cacao and Kahlua. Ever gotten tipsy from a dessert before? Hehe. It was great. After dinner we went back to the hotel and went to sleep.

Sunday morning we got up and left by 9 am. The ride home was nice, we didn’t take the way through CT and NJ. Instead we took 95 t0 495 to 290 to the Mass. Pike to NY Thruway, to I-88 to I-81 to the Northeast Extension on the PA Turnpike. Mile-wise it’s longer, but there was barely any traffic (except when passing the I-84 exit, I hate that road!) and it was nice and scenic. We got back home by 7ish. Went out for dinner, then picked up Caligula from Michael’s mother’s. We got home and snuggled in our brand new flannel sheets and down comforter.

It was a good trip.

We dropped Caligula off at Michael’s mother’s last night. *sniff* I miss him already!

Now we’re finishing our packing and getting to leave for New Hampshire.

I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving! I’ll be back late Sunday night.

I had a fun day yesterday. I woke up and did some playing with Perl, then messaged me on IRC to see if I wanted to do anything. Yay! We ended up going out with . We ate at Fridays, then wandered to the Quarkertown Market where I picked up a CD and some toys for Caligula. Then we went to the 2 Dollar Movies to see Shark Tale. We had a fun time, even if Shark Tale wasn’t the best movie on the planet (Pixar still rules all!). Shark Tale was just too pop, in different ways than the Shreks, but still will show it’s age in 10 years.

Today I spend the day fiddling with R2 some more. I’m using hashes for the first time, and that was neat to learn about. I wasted a lot of time trying different methods of parsing the data I get from the IRC server, simply to go back to what I started with %) In the end my biggest acomplishment was taking R2’s old 300 line script into several smaller scripts. He’d always had a separate weather script, and google script, and seen script, but he also had a huge central script that was always a mess. So I broke down his central script (which still includes some junk I was too lazy to split up for now). Now he’s made up of about a dozen scripts, which can be taken apart and used on other IRC bots. This is great news for people who want his scripts, I no longer need to chop up a main one, or give them the massive script tell them they’re on their own.

Once I finished launching my new modular R2D2, I threw together a website with all his scripts on it: Modular R2D2 irssi Bot

Yay fun! It’s so nice to have a few full days of computer playtime.

I had a mostly lousy week at work. It dragged on, and with a holiday call schedule we were all going nuts. I’m just glad I won’t be there next week, when things are such to be much more insane.

Well it’s over now, and even though I was crazy busy at work yesterday, I was in a great mood when I finally left work last night. We ended up going over to ‘s place to hang out with him, Baerana and b2s for movie night. Drank some beer, had some pizza, enjoyed some Futurama episodes that I hadn’t seen. A typical movie night, much fun!

We did end up seeing b2s and Baerana last weekend too, at their place. Watched the Shrek movies (which are a bit too pop for me I’m afraid), and I got to see their bunny and borrow a pile of books. A friend of mine recently sent me The Mists of Avalon miniseries, and I hadn’t read the book, so I borrowed that one and started reading it this week. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it, being a fan of Once and Future King and afraid of cheap imitations, but this book is really good, putting it down has been a struggle %)

Last weekend I went to install RealPlayer in Gentoo. I’d had it installed in the past, it’s masked so I had to put it in /etc/portage/package.unmask. Then I went to install it. It seems that they make people directly download the package instead of having portage grab it. No problem. Except that the version was not the one in portage, hmm… So on to Gentoo forums I went.

I found this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_RealPlayer10Gold. Interesting that it used the rpms, but I don’t care, it worked great. Even includes the mozilla and firefox plugins without extra work.

I thought I’d explore more into in browser streaming media stuff. And was pleased to discover mplayerplug-in, a movie plugin that I’d never tried before. I played with it for a while, and unfortunately it still has trouble with some streaming media (won’t play the stuff on Yahoo!), but I was able to watch quicktime movies on apple.com, and that was neat. Then I went to pbs.org to see if it’d conflict with my realplayer plugin. It does. The movie won’t play! Arg! I am sure with more tinkering I could get it all figured out, but for now I uninstalled mplayerplug-in.

Maybe I’ll try again in another 6 months. Silly streaming media.

Since I’m not working again until the 29th, and we aren’t leaving for our trip to Maine until Wendesday I have some time to do some computer stuff, yay! I think my first order of business will be starting to rewrite my IRC bot, R2D2. Some of his scripts don’t work with newer versions of irssi, so if we upgrade the server he’s on he’d be all broken. When I started going through his script I said to myself “Wow this is ugly Perl!” So I figure that if I’m going to update the script to make it work in new irssi, why not revamp the whole thing? This is all just a bit excuse to play with Perl.

It’s such a nice gloomy day out.

*wanders off*

Yesterday was a stupid day.

One thing after another at work, lousy news regarding a job prospect when coming home, weather and traffic were too crappy to go down to Media to spend time with friends, THEN I got home realized I hadn’t defrosted the spinach for dinner (ok, sometimes having a microwave would be a good thing).

I put the frozen spinach on the counter and went to cry for a bit. I hadn’t cried in a while and it seemed to help (especially since I had Michael there snuggle to talk to).

Once I was feeling better I was able to defrost the spinach stuff under some hot water and make the Cheesy Chicken Florentine. It’s one of the new meals I’m trying out in an attempt to broaden our menu. Was it a success? Well, Michael said he liked it, but I am not so sure I did, I think it was too dry for my taste.

So I spent the evening watching TV.

Now was on, and there were some really intersting reports. One was an interview with Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Nun, who is known worldwide for her books and lectures. She’s quite a woman! A very intelligent Catholic who has views that I can respect and even agree with. With all our talk of “Morals” in this country, why do more people care about abortion than the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the war in Iraq? How can you call all people who are anti-abortion “Pro-Life” when they don’t want to spend their tax dollars on making sure these mostly unwanted children grow up in a healthy, nuturing environment? These people are simply “Pro-Birth”

She made a lot of other great points, and that brought me over to nationalcatholicreporter.org to sign up for her article email alerts.

Yeesh, who would of thought I’d be agreeing with a Catholic? I might head to the library and pick up a book or two of hers.

Today the weather is better and traffic on the blue route shouldn’t be insane, so we’re rescheduled our “Movie Night” for today, yay! Today should be a much better day.

*wanders off*

The other night we went to Fins, Feathers, Paws and Claws to pick up some catfood and check out their fish selection. We left with a bag of catfood, 2 tins of cat treats, 4 toy mice (Caligula’s Favorite), some tropical fish food, and two angel fish.

The tank is quite a bit more lively now, Angel fish are fun. We probably won’t be able to put other fish in there (except more algae eaters), since angelfish are semi-agressive, but that’s fine, they are pretty enough to keep us happy.

Caligula likes them too.

I finished reading “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran today. The book was recommended by my cousin, , and I picked it up from the library last week. Wow, what a book! Just a whole lot of wisdom in those 94 pages, I am going to have to read it again… and again. Ok a lot of times, it’s wonderful.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

I’m going to need to find a nice copy to add to my library. It’s an older book, and the full text is available online: http://www.columbia.edu/~gm84/gibtable.html, but holding it in your hands while quietly sitting in a happy place is oh so nice. Why hadn’t I heard of this book before? Apparently it’s quite popular.

Going to put my pajamas on now. *yawn*

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.”