Last night we ended up going over to ‘s place to hang out for a bit. The only time we’ve been seeing him in the recent past is at philly-chix meetings because he drove his former girlfriend to them. Now that she’s moved to Ohio we had no excuses to visit! So we just made up one. I made brownies, and mj had beer and pizza. Besides I had never seen the inside of his place.

We got there a little bit before 7, I took mapquest’s directions which took us through downtown Norristown, oops (on the way back we made sure to take Germantown Pike, much easier!). I got to meet mj’s cat Boots, she’s so cute and loving %) He also showed us the MythTV box that he’s putting together, it was pretty cool, now I want one %) We had yummie pizza and great beer and brownies that I added too much water to when I was making them (doh! Fine introduction to my cooking! They were ok though). Talked for a while, and had a really nice time. We need to just “hang out” with friends more often.

It’s been a hot yucky day today. I hate hot days.

*hides in the air conditioned rooms*

Today I spent some time with cygwin. I’d say it’s a great attempt at putting unix stuff in Windows, but it’s far from perfect. The tool for installing it and adding packages is neat, but I ended up with some version problems after I installed screen and irssi. screen and irssi started up fine, which was pretty neat to watch for a few minutes, but when I detatched from the screen I couldn’t get it back, then I started up links, quit links, and my screen session died. Hmm. Strange things. I suppose if I were willing to devote more time to understanding how it all worked I would be happier with it, but right now it’s not terribly important.

I got into a conversation recently about how good those horribly buttery biscuits from KFC were, and decided to do some googling to find out of there were recipes out there to make similar ones. There are all sorts of recipes out there for “Fake KFC Biscuits” so I was looking through them, until I found this KFC Press Release, which is about a book released that had recipes of all sorts of “top secret recipes” and the article includes a recipe for making “Kentucky Biscuits.” I figured from how basic the recipe was that it was not the real KFC biscuit recipe, but it seemed basic enough to give a try.

Well they definately weren’t KFC biscuits, but they were pretty good! And all that I needed to make them was flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, milk and vegetable shortening. So I figure I made 9 biscuits for about 25 cents. It’s not too much work to make the dough either, just mix all the stuff together and knead it for a few minutes, flatten the dough out and cut out the biscuits. Oh and they are heart shaped because I don’t have biscuit cutters, just cooking cutters, hehe. Yum yum biscuits.

Unfortunately I spent a better part of the day doing it. The biggest problem I had was figuring out how many colors you really could reasonably use (16) and what colors you could use for the text. Eventually I found these out and didn’t have any trouble throwing together a boot page:

Someday when I’m feeling creative I’ll make a better one.

But I did have the time to write up a how to, to explain how I did this!

Installing a Custom Lilo (Bootsplash) Bitmap Image

BTW: If you feel this intense need to comment and tell me all about the wonders of grub, save your time. Really, I was all excited about this and everywhere looked I had clowns telling me to use grub. I use lilo, the end.

While I was at it I also took a picture of the custom bios screen (this is an option on my Asus p4s8x motherboard), you can see it here.

Didn’t do much else today, never even bothered to turn on IM. I wasn’t feeling so great, and a sore throat I had last night has carried into today.

I think I’ll make rice and veggies and biscuits for dinner.

*wanders off*

This weekend was pretty good. It wasn’t hot, so Michael and I got a lot of stuff done. The roof is almost completely patched now, only need a bit more super heat resistant roof caulking stuff to patch up the remaining hole around the chimney.

I’m finally getting a new network card for my silly old laptop. I looked at corded cards, one identical to my old one I can get on ebay for about $30 shipped, and for that price we decided that going wireless would be the best option. So I looked through a big list of cards, some USB, lots of pcmcia and cardbus. To my disappointment many of the pcmcia cards (no cardbus on my laptop) were either expensive or just not carried by major sellers anymore. I found a few that were good and being sold by NewEgg:

Netgear MA 111 USB Device, $36.99 (and $10 mail in rebate). – I seriously considered this, but I read a bunch of reviews of crappy windows support. Why is that so bad? Because if I were to get a USB wireless card, I’d want to use it on my workstation too, probably for lan parties, and at lan parties I’m in windows. If it works crappy in windows that wouldn’t be so good. Wasn’t sure we wanted to deal with USB lan in linux either *shrugs*

Belkin F5D6020 PCMCIA card $38 – This is good for a pcmcia card, and I found a few how-tos online, even for different chipsets it might have.

Microsoft MN-520 PCMCIA card $37.99 – Shockingly, this card has great reviews for it’s linux compatibility, and it’s pretty cheap.

In the end I decided to go with Belkin, on principle. I don’t want to give Microsoft more money than I have to. So yesterday Michael ordered the card from newegg. Yay!

A local friend of ours has a linksys router he wants to get rid of, so we’re planning on meeting him on friday night. We’ve never actually met, he dropped in #13thHour one day a few months back, so we’ve communicated via IRC and email for a while. Should be fun, I think we’ll go to a brewery or something. Yay for meeting new people!

I was sitting in my bed yesterday evening, reading a new Linux book, when Caligula ran into the bedroom and jumped into the window, all puffy tailed. He was watching something that was in my garden, I assumed it was a bird, or a bug, or a chipmunk, squirrel maybe? But he kept examining this creature, so I got up and looked out the window.

A big fat groundhog.

EATING MY CUCUMBER PLANTS!

I was a bit annoyed, but then thought to get my camera, because even evil garden-eating groundhogs are supercute.

I got a picture of him running away.

I’ve looked a little online for some animal repellant stuff, most contain rotton eggs. The trouble with rotton eggs is that my garden is right next to my bedroom window. I’ll keep looking at my options, maybe there is some non-nasty stuff I can find at the Home Depot or something.

It feels so good to write pretty html and css for website, and have all sections validate properly on the first try. Especially when validation is the last thing on your mind when writing it. I think the contract work I did this year helped push my html and css skills further than anything in the past 5 years.

This week I started putting together a little website about housekeeping and stuff. It started out as just a bunch of text files in my home directory so I’d remember how long to boil eggs and bake potatoes, but I figured it’d be nice (and fun!) to make it into a whole website that I can share, especially after a friend of mine said she’d be interested. I still have a bunch to add to it, but it’s beginning to come together: here. I used some clipart from this wonderful clipart collection that I bought so many years ago, it’s great how beneficial this $20 purchase was.

I looked in downtown Schwenksville a little this week for the possibility that there might be some place hiring that I would be willing to work for. No go. This town is so dead. According to Yahoo! Yellow pages there even used to be more shops in town, but they’re gone now. No doubt because of the growth of this area, there’s now a Wal-Mart and a few Super Markets within reasonable distance, so local places don’t have much of a chance. On the bright side I might have more contract work to do in the near future, yay! Having beer money again would be wonderful!

Back when I was a senior in High School I had an old Ti-82 graphing calculator. A friend of mine online showed me how to write basic programs for it and I had all sorts of fun with it. So while sitting in IRC the other day, and an acquaintance mentioned that he had a graphing calculator emulator. The emulator is called Virtual Ti, and unfortunately it’s a Windows program and requires calculator ROMs (which you can either download illegally if you don’t actually have the calculator. or get by hooking your calculator up to your computer). I had a ROM, perhaps this program runs in wine? Oh yes it does! Screenshot. This is pretty neat. I then started poking around ticalc.org a bit more, and found that it’s a pretty cool site. I’m not sure what sort of practical application having a graphing calculator emulator on a much more powerful computer is, but it was good for nostalgia %) And running a calculator emulator within an emulator gets all sorts of geek points.

Last night we finally saw Caligula (1979). I’ve heard various things about this film (and our choice of a name for our cat), including:

“Uh, that film is quite pornographic.”

“I think that Caligula film was connected to Penthouse magazine.”

“omfg – you’re going to watch Caligula! thats a crazy movie”

“You named your cat after a porn movie?”

So I guess I should have known what I was getting myself into. It seems more people than I suspected have seen this movie, it made all sorts of waves when it was first released. I opened up the netflix envelope, pulled out the dvd, “Penthouse Video” *groan*. Ok, so porn doesn’t bother me, but for the most part it bores me. But I thought that maybe with Caligula the porn scenes would at least have something to do with the plot. Boy was I surprised. Many parts did have to do with the plot, but there was still quite a bit that didn’t. From what I’ve read now, it seems that the original intention of the film would have been something more like my idea, but in the editing room Bob Guccione put in more porn, and some scenes and closeups that had nothing to do with the plot. And then there were some scenes which were just gruesome, gah. I probably would have enjoyed and respected it more if there was less unnecessary porn. I guess there is a rated R version too, which might conform to my expectations more.

Crazy movies.

Last night I attempted to make “potato stuffing.” Vehicle00 had suggested it a few days before, and we needed something to eat with our corn on the cob, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Mashed potatoes + toasted bread cut into cubes + diced onion + diced celery, oven heated to 400F and cooked for an hour (40 minutes covered, 20 minutes uncovered). It sure smelled good after those first 40 minutes %D I’d say it was a success, even if it was a bit dry, maybe if I mixed some chicken broth in with it before baking, or created some sort of gravy. I’ll probably eat some of the leftovers for lunch, leftovers! How grown up of me to have leftovers.

*wanders off*

Cargo Kitty and Caligula seem to have sorted out their differences as the weekend progressed. They still scared each other from time to time, but they never hurt each other and seemed to even be calm while in the same room. At one point they were both sitting on the couch with me (Caligula glaring at me with his green eyes while I patted Cargo). Neither of the cats stopped eating, or had any troubles sharing a litter box. This makes me very hopeful if we someday decide to get another pet, Caligula seems able to adjust well. He’s such a perfect little kitty, I’m so happy we have him! Oh and I put more pictures in the gallery of Caligula and Cargo, here.

Michael got half the roof patched this weekend. It rained all day Sunday without any more noticable leakage on that side, and we’re waiting for the forecasted heavy thunderstorms later this week to see if the patching job works, I’m hopeful! While Michael was on the roof fixing things, I was on the porch getting tools and holding the ladder when he needed me to.. and while I wasn’t busy doing that I had my nose in the paperback copy of Angels & Demons that let me borrow. I could hardly put that book down! It was exciting and interesting and I finished it in 2 days. On sunday I started reading The Da Vinci Code, I’m halfway through it.

Today I spent most of the morning cleaning, Cargo kitty sheds so much more than Caligula does! I made some egg salad for lunch, it’s been a while since I had egg salad… I think I added too much mustard to it. It was tastey anyway. While at the grocery store this weekend we picked up ingredients to make lasagne, so I’ll probably make some of that this week. Oh, and we got some baking pans! Somehow we didn’t own any, which decreased the amount of things I could make, now I have all sorts of baked meals I can consider %)

*wanders off*

Michael brought Cargo Kitty home from work yesterday. I’ve only introduced cats to each other a few times in my life, and it was always with very quick, positive results. When I was young our cats Garfield (neutered, about 1 year old) and Night (a young unneutered kitten) were buddies after a single evening together, without *too* much growling and hissing.

I probably should have expected a worse time with two young male neutered cats (Cargo is 1.5 years old, Caligula is 7 months), especially since the younger of the two is the one whose house this is.

Cargo was let into the house for a couple minutes to sniff around, then Caligula and I came downstairs. Then they saw each other! I had never seen Caligula so fluffed up in my life, then he made very weird “wop wop wop” meow noises that were just so funny. Eventually Cargo ran off and hid in a window sill, but when we approached him he hissed at US. Caligula was calmed down a bit and was never agressive toward us like Cargo was being. The rest of the evening was spent with them hiding from each other, then Cargo coming down and Caligula chasing him around the house. They still hadn’t stopped growling and hissing at each other when I wanted to go to sleep last night, so I brought Caligula in our bedroom to sleep with us.

And now it’s another day and they’re still being brats. I did a quick search online and most of what I’ve read stresses “Take your time” … which isn’t really possible when Cargo just stays for a weekend! All we can really do is wait, give them both lots of attention, and see how they do. I’m hopeful that even if they don’t end up getting along this weekend, at least they won’t hurt each other. And we don’t have anywhere to go this weekend, so it’s not going to be difficult to keep an eye on them.

Silly kitties!

*wanders off*

It’s been very stormy this week. On Tuesday we got a thunderstorm so bad that there was a river in my yard. Last night we had nice size hail and decided to cancel going to Delaware to hang out with John because it was just too nasty out.

Last night we also learned that our roof leaks.

In five places.

Fuck.

It could be much worse, we’re hopeful that some sealent we picked up last night will do the trick, as the shingles are pretty new (the outside of the roof was redone in 2000, obviously badly). But we really didn’t need this. It’s like each time I’m getting close to being comfortable with everything fixed and working nicely something new goes wrong! It can be very frustrating and depressing.

Today I let it get to me, I think I just needed a good long cry, then a meditation session. It’s healthy just letting all stress out with a few dozen tears from time to time, and these sorts of intense depressed moods always have me coming out feeling much better and determined to fix things in my life that I DO have control over.

This past winter was a bit depressing (for a variety of reasons), and I picked up a whole host of bad habits. I eating chocolate and a lot of snuggling in blankets and reading when I got depressed. This is bad! I put on 6 pounds this past winter, and I’m not happy about it. I haven’t fully recovered from this slip into bad depressive habits, I need to keep working toward being a healthy self again. I need to start exercising more, I need to eat better, I need to get more into gardening. And I definately need to use my time more wisely, perhaps have plans for each day and what I want to acomplish, that way I have a goal to work towards.

I’m seriously thinking about getting a part time job, any job. The company I do contract work for hasn’t called me in over a month, so although Michael assures me he’s very happy with me playing “housewife” for now, I always feel guilty when I say we can’t afford something. Since I don’t have a car and there isn’t public transportation I’ll need to find some place in town to work. On monday I’ll take a walk into town and fill out some applications.

Bleh. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow, I don’t need any sympathy, just some time to look at what I’m doing with my life and reflect.

*wanders off*