It’s Caligula’s 6 month “birthday” today. We gave him some kitty milk this morning to celebrate.

I hope he enjoyed it all, tomorrow he goes in to be neutered.

Michael cleaned the gutters yesterday, I helped a little by holding the ladder and bringing the hose around. The gutters had these “gutter guards” which we discovered to have many uses:

1. Providing a home for mean bugs
2. Making sure water doesn’t get into the gutters
3. Providing a wonderful sunless environment for all sorts of interesting ecosystems

So these gutter guards suck. They made the gutters completely useless in the job they were intended for. There would be so much junk that did get through the guards that the water would simply run off them and land on our heads while we left the house. I think the bugs were the most annoying discovery of all. From now on we’re going to keep our gutters the old fashioned way! Keeping them open and cleaning them yearly. It’s not a huge house, and our ladder can quite easily reach every gutter that needs to be cleaned.

Last night my head was feeling ok, so we decided to go to the Moody Monkey with , Kelly and a friend of Kelly’s. I had a nice time talking with them, and although the service was pretty lousy their beer list was extensive, and even included a bunch of belgians. I ended up getting some Lindeman’s Framboise (a raspberry lambic) which they had on tap, it’s always so wonderful to find places that have it on tap. It was close to 9:30 when the pain in my head started coming back (probably moving my face a lot while laughing or something) and I poked Michael and told him we should get going so I could put some ice on my head (which I had been instructed to do “4 times a day for the first 3 days”). Just before leaving the restaurant I noticed that a bit of the lambic had dripped onto my lovely NRAO t-shirt, seems our lousy waitress had neglected to wipe the bottom of my glass before serving it *sigh*

When I got home I scrubbed the shirt a bit and then started a load of laundry. The washing machine was acting weird, it kept stopping at the wrong points, just was having tons of trouble. This morning I checked it and it never even finished the load. So Michael decided to take a look at it. And he was able to fix it %D! Yay! I was a bit worried that the old thing was dying (as if we needed another unplanned expense this week!). No worries though, I was able to do laundry without trouble today. Right after fixing the washer, he decided to take a look at the dryer, which had a bit of a squealing problem, and he was able to bring down the noise it makes a lot.

Munch (the Oddworld name we decided on for the fish, suggested by n-tropy) is eating now, yay! So hopefully he’ll survive. He’s very scared though, he’ll swim around and be a happy fish while we’re not around (or he thinks we’re not around) but as soon as one of us walks by his tank he retreats into hiding behind his castle. Silly fish, hopefully he’ll grow out of it once he’s more used to living with us.

That’s about it. *wanders off*

My head is feeling a bit better this morning. It’s just a dull ache as long as I’m sitting still, hurts when I squint or yawn or cough, or do other things to move the muscles around it. Michael picked up some antibiotic gel that contains some pain reliever, so I’m sure that’s doing a lot to help it. No sick feeling or headaches beyond just the cut itself, and the cut is looking much better since I was able to shower and clean it a bit last night (ouchie!). Everything seems to be healing properly %) I called the doctor’s office in downtown Schwenksville yesterday afternoon and made an appointment to get the stitches removed on tuesday, no plans to leave the house before that either, unless I put on a hat.

And for everyone that wants a picture, this is all you get.

Michael was so great to me yesterday. He took the day off of work (not just to take care of me, he didn’t get to bed until almost 4 am friday morning!) He jumped up to get anything I needed, even went outside and mowed the lawn (I had been planning on doing that this weekend). Caligula stayed home too, we changed his appointment to Monday because getting him to the vet hospital between 7 and 8am was pretty much out of the question (he has no clue how lucky he is!).

One good thing did happen yesterday while I was lurking around IRC and complaining about how my head hurt (I did take a nap, but all that was on TV was Reagan’s Funeral and I had nothing better to do). My friend offered me a gmail account! They aren’t so horribly rare since this week, because it seems that everyone on the system got 3 invites, and even new users are getting invites (so I was able to give Michael one too). Of course I generally use my princessleia.com address for my mail, and I’ll continue to do that, but I also have maintained a pleia2@yahoo.com address since 1999, I use that for newsletters I know will be spammy (webmd, bizzarre news), html emails (comics, starwars.com). I also like to have an email address outside of the clockbot network so that I can test things. Gmail has some good ideas, I’m excited to see how it progresses %)

I got the photo from the phillychix meeting off my camera last night:

pinkee and pleia2

It was pinkee’s last meeting (she’s moving to Ohio) and our one year anniversary. Too bad more people didn’t show up. And that photo was taken about 3 hours before my little accident. It sort of morphed into a pseudo-meeting since both our boyfriends were lurking around on their laptops, and we both felt fine about letting them join the conversation.

We don’t really have plans for today, probably just putter around the house doing little things. The weather is nice but I’m not really up for outdoor adventures this weekend.

*wanders off*

The short story: It was late, the bathroom floor was wet, I slipped and hit my head on the bathroom floor.

the long story: Our new fish wasn’t doing so well, so after getting home from the philly chix meeting Michael decided to change a bunch of the water in the tank (maybe we had been overzealous preparing the water? maybe some of the funk from the radiators was still in the hose when we filled the tank up?). It was my job to get Caligula out from under his feet, so I went to play with him in our bedroom. Around 11 I got tired and decided it was time to go to bed, but I had a little bit of a sinus headache (oh the irony), so I got up to get some advil. I didn’t have my glasses on, and was in my pajamas in a sleepy mood, and when I stepped into the bathroom I slipped and fell on the slimey floor.

Head hit, scraped my elbow, bruised my knee. At first I felt ok, put my hand to my head and Michael came in and was like “Oh my god! You need to go to the hospital!” I told him that I thought I felt ok. He told me I’d need stitches, and I nearly cried because I’d never had stitches before, tried to insist that I was fine. Then I felt nauseated and dizzy, when I got up to put some normal clothes on I nearly fainted so I had to sit down. Michael was running around grabbing things so we would be ready at the hospital, we scrapped the getting dressed idea, didn’t bother to wash off any blood (it was still bleeding, head wounds are evil like that). So I went in my pajamas. A few minutes after I got in the car my nauseated feeling went away, a few more minutes later I noticed that my elbow was hurting, then the cut on my head made itself known and that hurt a bit.

We got to the hospital and mostly just waited. We were there from about 11:30pm til 2:30 am. Everyone was quite nice, but having the shot for the local anesthetic didn’t feel nice, that was the first time in the whole ordeal that I cried, and said to the doctor “That doesn’t numb, that hurts!” The doctor was asking me star wars trivia when he was putting the stitches in (I had a ROTJ t-shirt on). I was tired and not really in the mood for that *sigh* Still it wasn’t an altogether horrible experience.

I never did get to see my cut while it was open, good thing too because I probably would have gotten sick if I looked at it right after it happened (when I was still feeling nauseated), and although I was curious I’m sure it would have hurt more if I knew how bad it really was.

Other stuff happened yesterday too, had my regular doctor’s appointment in the morning, went to work with Michael because it was silly to drive home, had the PhillyChix meeting in the evening (don’t really feel up to getting pictures off the camera right now).

I graduated high school 5 years ago today. I was going to write a rambling entry about where I’ve been these 5 years. But I don’t feel like it now. The numbing from ice I put on my head earlier is wearing off, and the advil isn’t doing much for the pain, so I’m going to go lie down and watch movies all day or something. Going to lie down now. *wanders off*

We picked up a bunch of fish supplies the other day while we were at the pet store. Some stuff to make the tap water safe for fishes, some other stuff, and a testing kit to test all sorts of chemical and ph levels in the water. So last night the water was looking good and we decided to head to the store and get a fish. We pretty much decided on getting one, big, “Real Pet” fish. At the store we really liked the Red Oscar, so decided that he would be our new pet. We also bought a castle for his tank and some ph lowering chemicals (our ph was a bit higher than the petstore, so they suggested we bring ours down a bit).

He’s about 6 inches long. Apparently they grow to 14 inches at most. He doesn’t have a name yet, but we’ll think of something soon enough.

I booted into Windows today to play with LiteStep a bit. I installed it about a year ago, and had it on my win2k partition. It worked good enough for what I needed it for since I wasn’t in windows much. This time I wanted to play around with it to see if I could possibly install it on my computer at work and use it there (less painful than normal windows perhaps). So I downloaded it and installed, no trouble, the default theme is much different than what litestep used to use (new default theme), it’s pretty cheesey. I tried about a dozen themes, all of which had special “modules” to download, most of the time the module downloads didn’t work, so the theme broke. It got pretty annoying, only one out of all the extra themes I tried worked, “Zerobox” which looked like one of the *nix *boxes (fluxbox, blackbox..). It loaded up fine, but then the fonts in the menu were too small, so I got annoyed and just uninstalled litestep. I’ll just use windows the way it is.

While I was in windows I was able to install the gimp. I am very pleased with how easy it is now, you really don’t need *any* knowledge to install it.

So for all my Windows friends who want to install or just try out gimp, a wonderful FREE image editor, first go to: http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/.
Click on “Stable Version”
Download GTK+ 2 for Windows
Unzip, Install.
Download The Gimp for Windows
Unzip, Install (using the defaults on all options is fine, I took a screenshot while installing: see here

And that’s it! I played around with it a little, and it’s definately different than the linux one, but the reasons for the differences are understandable. And I took a screenshot.

It’s hotter out today than yesterday, it’s in the lower 90s right now, I’m hiding out in our air conditioned computer room. Saved Caligula from the heat earlier, so he’s sleeping behind me on the chair.

*wanders off*

After a couple friends decided to redo their own websites, I took a nice long look at princessleia.com and decided to take another stab at redesigning it. I pretty much scraped my entire old design. Since the site started out as a php nuke site (late 2001 as princessleia2.com)) the design kept being a morphed version of that three column layout. As I added more content I just added another things to my increasingly massive “main menu.” There really was no way of shuffling that main menu to a usable state. The last time I tackled this redesign project I thought about creating an extra page for each subsection, but then got stuck on how to design that subsection. I eventually dropped that idea and redid the design, which looked pretty cool but I had once again fallen into the “too dark” trap! This time I think I did much better. Implemented the sub-page menus in a nice way. Dare I say I’m happy with this new design? Well I’ll say it fits my needs at the moment, and I like it much better than the old design! You can actually find stuff now %)

While I was finishing up some parts of my site before making it live this morning the phone rang. We’re on a no-call list, and our relatives don’t call much (certainly not during the day), so I assumed it was for “Linda” or “Frank” I was right, apparently they have an overdue video at Hollywood Video. As if Verizon didn’t give me enough to complain about, it seems we got someone’s old phone number. We first learned the extent of this after getting a few calls for them, and then when we called up the local pizzeria it turns out this couple was still listed on caller ID for our number! We made sure this was quickly remedied, but, ugh, stupid Verizon! These days our phone rings about once a day for “Frank and/or Linda” and I have started telling the callers that this must be their old number but isn’t anymore. So far it hasn’t slowed down the daily calls.

I hate phones. But Michael did get our static problems fixed! The wiring for the phones in this house is pretty old, so with DSL using the phoneline, even with a filter, the static was sometimes so bad that you couldn’t talk on the phone. Once I even quit IRC so that I could call up the vet to make an appointment for Caligula without IRC traffic cluttering up my conversation. So Michael spent a bit of time going through some of the phone wiring in the house, removing extra bits that we didn’t need. Then on monday we recieved our new cordless phone that we ordered after seeing it on spoofee. This new phone sounds much nicer than the old cheap corded phone we picked up for a couple bucks at Target after our old one died. And this new one has an answering machine, which is nice since my family gets very annoyed by my lack of one since I’m “never around.”

Caligula went to the vet last night. It was a pre-surgical exam since he’ll be six months old on sunday and needs to be “fixed.” We went to the Limerick Animal Hospital and the vet was wonderful. She was pretty excited to see a Mau, since she is so used to dealing with regular tabbies all the time. She was very pleased with his health and said that we could make an appointment as soon as we’d like. So on friday morning Caligula goes to the vet for surgery. Poor guy, he gets extra treats and snuggles this week.

I was sitting in #Support on xelium the other day, and one of the people I know there asked me about linux (it’s actually just IRC support, but it was more of a friendly request). I started talking about the different distros and after a few minutes he said “Ok, now in english?” Ack! I was always quite good at switching from “advanced” to “medium” to “newbie” user knowledge in my brain when explaining linux stuff, but this time my brain got stuck on medium. That’s the second time it’s happened recently. I still don’t have much trouble switching to “newbie” if I stop for a moment and actually THINK about who I’m talking to. But the furth
er away I get from my Windows using past, the more difficult I’m finding to find parallels between things in linux and windows to help me explain things.

It’s hot out, I’m going to turn up the a/c and chill with Caligula for a bit. *wanders off*

I started playing Kingdom Hearts last night ( let me borrow it last weekend). And I must say, wow!

Before Kingdom Hearts was released, a close friend of mine was always sending me screenshots and I got pretty excited about it. Then I picked up Final Fantasy X, because I loved Final Fantasy games, they are a majority of my PS(2) game collection. I played about 6 hours into FFX and completely lost interest. Not just losing interest in FFX, but all of Final Fantasy, and all RPGs! I stopped playing video games often, mostly just when a new game came out or when I was at LAN parties. I figured it was because I had “grown out of” gaming, something that was pretty sad for me to admit. I simply assumed that FFX just happened to be the game I was playing when the love for gaming spark left my life, I didn’t think it had anything to do with the game itself

So last night when I put Kingdom Hearts into my PS2 I didn’t expect to be swept off my feet. I started playing through the intro, got to start playing the game and realized that I was having a blast! Each time a new Final Fantasy or Disney character came on the screen I’d get excited. I’m playing with all my most favorite toon characters! This is wonderful!

I quickly realized that it wasn’t gaming and RPGs that I was sick of, it was the complexity around games like Final Fantasy X. It was the stupid sphere system that I despised. I like Final Fantasy for it’s story and it’s characters and battles, FFX took the leveling up and abilities complexity too far. And I HATED blitzball, so that part of the game was a serious drag for me. I don’t want to devote my life to a game just to finish it, I want to sit back and play, to enjoy it, to fall in love with the characters. Kingdom Hearts is great for that, since I already hold a special place for these characters. *wanders off*

I started playing around with NES emulators again the other day. The last time I did it was probably over a year ago, and I was using debian stable versions so I never found one that was good AND had sound. I was looking through portage though, and discovered TusNES which has been working pretty good so far. Yay for 8-bit!

Other than that I spent a lot of time yesterday cleaning up home directorys on boxes I rarely use. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a complete slob when it comes to home directories, and I have yet to find a solution to this. I need to discipline myself more to put things in logical places, and actually delete things I don’t need (yay for being a packrat!). I still have the win98 install for win4lin in my home directory. Why? I don’t know! I should delete that right now! I need to get my backup scripts running again. We had nightly backups at the apartment, but then we moved here and I reinstalled my system (debian to gentoo) and I never got around to setting mine up again o_o.

I think I’m going to attempt an overhaul of princessleia.com again. I realized that I spend way too much time worrying about the implementation of a new design, and whether it will suck or not, that I don’t get to try new fun things, AND I get stuck with a design that I’m really sick of. So I just need to stop being so weird about it.

Last night we had some yummie Indian food, then went out to the local pet store to pick up some cat food and look at some fish. I’m not sure if I want to get lots of little fish or one big fish. The fish that most caught my interest were the Oscars, so this morning I did a bit of research online and found so many varied claims as to tank size, companionship and care that I’m a bit frustrated. One claims you must have at least a 40 gallons of water per Oscar, another says 50-80, one says they like living in schools of 6, one says they are best living alone. I’ll have to keep looking, the tank is 50 gallons and I want to make sure it’s big enough for whatever we choose to get. Anyone have any fish recommendations? %)

We don’t have plans today, and that’s perfectly fine, there are things around the house we want to get done. *wanders off*

Well I’d say that today was one of my most productive computer days in a while. I’ve been so caught up on spring cleaning and other projects lately. It feels really good.

Michael left me an email this morning telling me that he got the camera working in linux. Well damn, I really had meant to recompile my kernel and get that set up on my system. So I decided I’d do that this morning. I’d never recompiled my kernel in gentoo, and I quickly realized that my notes for doing it in debian would be somewhat useless. So I asked , who happened to be lurking in #13thHour at that time. He was very helpful so I was able to do things in the proper place (which is very simple actually, but I have a tendancy to make things complicated for myself by asking too many irrelavant questions). Michael helped me figure out the minimum I had to enable in my kernel (which was a bit different from his, since he has a USB mouse and keyboard, and I had absolutely no USB support). So I had to recompile about 4 times, but I finally got it working properly, installed gphoto2, recompiled my alsa module (yes, I know I should switch to 2.6…) and got everything working very nicely. I can now get photos off my camera in linux! No more going to icky windows, yay! It only took 2 hours.

Caligula got a bath last night. This is the second actual bath (more than just pulling him in the tub) that Michael has given him, and this time he wasn’t too horribly annoyed by it. He meowed, but actually walked around in the water on his own a little and decided it would be best if he didn’t try to tear Michael to pieces. After he got out of the tub I took some pictures, which I put on his website here. As I was updating his website I thought again about RSS feeds. Caligula’s site is a perfect place for me to play around with xml feeds! So I browsed some RSS feed creation tutorials, looked at the rss feed context of some rss feeds that are in my rss reader, and I ended up writing by hand a pretty basic feed. I might go further with it sometime in the future, but I’m happy with it the way it is. It’s located at: http://caligula.bevilacqua.us/rss.xml

*wanders off*

On Memorial day we finally got that bedroom painted. Yay! There are still some touchups that need to be done, but I’m already amazed at how great it looks. We’re not entirely sure whether we’ll make that into our bedroom again, and now that I know how great a room can look after being painted I’m quite tempted to tackle the second bedroom rather than just touching up the paint. We’ll see.

We also got out to the grocery store, and I finally got an onion, which I required for my potato salad, also picked up more potatoes, since the previous ones had molded. So yesterday I was able to start my potato salad. I used the following recipe:

I ended up using about 3.5 pounds of potatoes, and didn’t add black pepper because we don’t have any (nope, not even in a pepper shaker). My parents used to make a few batches each summer, I remember peeling and slicing the hot potatoes when I was younger. Well they don’t get any easier to peel! The skin comes off easy enough, but they are hot to handle, and you need to peel them when they are warm so the marinade gets soaked into them the way I want it to.

This morning the potato salad was finished marinading, so I was able to put add the mayonaise. I had some for lunch, yum! I am very pleased with it. And it still gives me heartburn, just like I remember. I definately made too much for just the two of us.

I’ll need to keep this recipe in mind for next month when we have our lan party (shooting for July 3rd btw). And deviled eggs, now that I know the secret to my mother’s (using brown mustard rather than yellow).

My next cooking project will probably be a cake. I’m actually quite a good baker (used to make cookies, brownies and cakes from scratch), but our oven is an old (from the 1970s) gas oven, and the temperatures are a bit off, honestly baking anything more sensitive than chocolate chip cookies scares me.

After finishing up the potato salad I decided to clean the kitchen floor. I usually mop it every week or so, but that didn’t seem to be getting it clean enough. So I spent a little over an hour scrubbing the entire thing. Caligula watched me do most of it, he seemed quite interested until he’d get too close and his paws would get wet. Unfortunately when I finished (with a bit of an aching back) I realized that it wasn’t terribly noticable. Ah! Oh well, at least I know it’s clean.

Caligula has gotten much bigger. I looked through the pictures of just a couple months ago, and oh my he’s grown! He’s all cat sized now. I got a quick picture of him sitting on the chair near my desk this morning.

*wanders off to pay bills*

I woke up yesterday morning after less than 6 hours of sleep. That’s when I wrote that last journal entry and got the pictures off the camera. I’m quite sure I still had a bit of alcohol in me as well because I wasn’t thinking so fast, and I know that wasn’t simply because of the lack of sleep.

So I took a shower and around noon Michael got me off the couch (where I was finishing Ender’s Shadow) and we started work on the house. It was a long day.

We got a bunch of work done spackling and sanding the bedroom that we’re going to paint. I know I keep saying we’re doing this, but it’s a lot of work, these walls are a bit of a mess because the previous owners put so many holes in them. Then we both got sleepy and took a nap. I woke up when I heard the fishtank filter being especially loud. I walked out of the bedroom and it had sprung a leak! So Michael and I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the water that had already spilled, and dealing with the water still coming out. It was a serious pain in the ass.

Then there was this smell in the kitchen. It’s been around for a few days, and I keep thinking it’s different things. The tuna fish dishes that are in the dishwasher? The broccoli in the refrigerator has gone bad? Well after our fishtank troubles Michael found the cause. The bag of potatoes that I bought less than a week ago for potato salad had begun to mold! A nasty wet mold that had actually leaked down the back of the refrigerator (the bag of potatoes was on top of it). So Michael had to pull out the refrigerator so we could clean up the mess. Ugh.

THEN while looking in the bedroom to prepare to paint, I realized that we’d need to move the radiator. Woo more learning about house stuff! So Michael figured out how to drain the water from them so we could move that one (which is still proving to be a pain). While he was doing that he decided to move the one that had been drenched earlier in the day by the fishtank. It’s in a rather useless spot, and we wanted to put the fishtank there (this picture shows where the radiator is). He got that one out with little trouble which was good because then we could pull up the carpet and do a complete drying of the floor so it wouldn’t begin to mold.

Around 7:30 we went out for dinner at a local pizzeria. Came home and did a bit more sanding in the bedroom. I need to do a bit more sanding today, but I think this afternoon will be good for finally painting, for real! I should take a picture of how it looks before the painting starts.

Oh, Happy Memorial Day!

*wanders off to begin day*