Yesterday began pretty slow, I read for a while and I’m very close to being finished with Ender’s Shadow, which is turning out to be really great. It takes place parallel to Ender’s Game from the point of view of another character. I was worried they’re be a lot of annoying overlap of the story but there really isn’t, and when the old stuff is rehashed it’s interesting to see it from another perspective.

Later in the afternoon we headed over to ‘s (Ed’s) for the wedding celebration for him and his wife Kelly. came down from Boston to join us, and brought along his girlfriend , who was a real pleasure to meet. They’re staying with mct and Nita, so of course they were there too, and Nita’s sister Dessica and her new husband. There was a lot of family of Ed and Kelly there, and of course Kelly’s friends, so plenty of people I didn’t know, so I pretty much stuck with the ones I did. Kelly did a great job with everything, lots of food and drinks and everything. We had cake and got to watch their wedding video, and just hung out and talked a lot. Had a really nice time. Since Ed will be selling his house soon, Michael suggested that we get up on the roof and watch the sun set, Darxus climbed up, then Michael, and then noticing how easy it would be I climbed up as well.

, ,

, , Kelly, , , , mct, Nita, Dessica

Most of the people had left by 9, so we figured we should get going, but then mct and Nita suggested we go back to their place and watch some movies. So we decided to meet at their place after stopping at home to get changed (we wore shorts, and it was a bit chilly yesterday). We grabbed some snacks and headed over to mct’s and Nita’s. Ended up watching Coupling that Michael had on his laptop. Nita made lots of fruity drinks. I didn’t really feel drunk, but I guess that’s just because we were hanging out and watching TV instead of sitting around and talking. We left their place around 2 because we were all getting tired.

Today I’m not sure what we’re doing. Maybe we’ll finally get around to painting %) *wanders off*

I have some seasonal allergies. I never had them while living in Maine, but when I moved away I started getting them. It’s not any fun, but since they aren’t particularly disabling I haven’t gone to the doctor for any sort of treatment. On days I feel all bogged down with congestion I take a couple Benadryl.

I was sitting in a Benadryl stupor the other day and I wondered, what about Benadryl makes me so sleepy? I asked in IRC, and people didn’t know. I did a couple google searches and I think I lost my train of thought and just gave up.

This morning I was going through some headlines and I discovered this: Why Antihistamines Put You to Sleep. Apparently there was a study to “Pinpoint Role of Histamines in Waking.” Aha! So now I know:

Detailed in the May 27 edition of the journal Neuron, the findings show that the cessation of activity in histamine cells causes loss of consciousness during sleep, while cessation of activity in other brain cells — those containing the brain chemicals norepinephrine or serotonin — causes loss of muscle tone in sleep. The findings also help explain why antihistamines, often taken to control allergies, cause drowsiness. — UCLA Newsroom

Last night Michael spent some time getting the fishtank set up and filled with water. It looks really great. As much as I want to get some glofish I am keeping an open mind, maybe I just want one big fish! It’s a 50 gallon (~190 litres) tank, so we have a lot of options.

Today we’re heading over to ‘s for a party. Yay! So I must shower and get ready for my day.

*wanders off*

Yesterday I spent a bit of time cleaning the screens in about half the windows. Last night Michael helped me figure out how to remove the rest of the screens. It’s pretty annoying that the old windows in the house are much nicer and easier to maintain than the newer ones. The newer ones have special new designs that in their first few years of life might actually make them easier to clean, but once they start getting older their complex parts start falling apart and you end up with a horrible broken window that’s a serious pain to even keep open. At least with these old windows there aren’t 50 different parts that can break. Anyway, I’m cleaning the screens of the evil new windows today.

I installed gkrellm2 for fun yesterday, it’s not a bad little program, much better than crazy bad epplets anyway, I should play around with some plugins later. I have also decided to start using xmms again. I had been using ogg123 and mpg123 for my media playing, but I realized that I really wanted to make playlists that mixed mp3s and oggs. I sort of wanted to stay with the command line, so I gave mp3blaster another shot, thought maybe the newer version in Gentoo would be better than the one in Debian. No luck, it still has serious resizing issues that just annoy me. I could just create playlists in the form of shell scripts that would alternate between using mpg123 and ogg123 for whatever songs I was playing. But that’s a bit crazy. Since I’m playing music from my own computer (not through a media server hooked up to stereo speakers) and I rarely quit x, and I have a fast machine that can handle 34245 programs being open at once, I figured I’d just load up xmms and use that. It’s turning out pretty nice, I forgot how nice it is to be able to click through directory listings to find what you want *grin* making playlists is pretty simple too. So with these changes in software usage, I took a screenshot.

Today is May 28th. My long lost broski pseudoplasmodium turns 21 today. I decided I wouldn’t depress myself with another futile attempt to google for him, I finally told myself that I’m very easy to find, and if he wants contact again it’s simple for him to initiate it. If he stumbled upon my website he could realize that I’m looking for him.

<nostalgia>

I met plas on irc.scifi.com back in 1998 around the same time I met Michael and Peacimowen, when I first got online and into IRC. We all had lots of fun in #13thHour back then, we’d watch MST3K together, X-Files, all sorts of geeky shows. Much less computer talk than there is now, and it was more windows-centric since Michael was the only one using any *nix.

In May of 1999 he became the first person from online that I met in ‘real life’. He started dating a friend of mine from High School and I went to spend the summer in Philadelphia (where I met Michael in real life for the first time) after graduating that spring. We still kept chatting together, and tried to make plans for Michael and I to take a trip up to see him in MA but it never panned out.

The last time I saw him in real life was on my 18th birthday when he and his girlfriend (my friend from high school) came over to my house to hang out. I should have caught the negative vibes from my friend as she saw that plas and I were very close friends (what did she expect?), but I didn’t and she asked to leave early (even before cake!). Finally plas and I gave in and they left. He dropped by IRC only
a few times after that day. Claimed he was busy or things had come up. The relationship between him and my friend ended, and she was apparently reluctant to speak with me again. I got her AIM nickname a couple years ago from another friend, and although she was civil she changed her AIM name that very week.

I still hope someday plas will just show up, email me, make contact somehow. But as the years pass my hopes dim. I should probably just let it go, but there are so few people in my life that I instantly connected with, and I have a horrible habit of losing these people. *sigh*

</nostalgia>

The configs on xelium are now all synced up to ban some of the latest file leeching software (bottler, IRC Ork) that’s popped up. We chose to ban this software because our first goal as an IRC server is to provide a place for community, NOT some server that people can connect to with software to just leech off the file sharers that we have here and there. We don’t want leeches scaring off actual community active people. It seems that this software has gotten quite popular in the past 6 months or so because of the crackdowns on file sharing groups such as kazaa.

That’s all for now. *wanders off*

I was in the grocery store on Sunday night to pick up a few things. One of the things I wanted was some yummie ice cream snacks, ice cream sandwiches maybe? I approached the freezer section and to my dismay saw a plethora of labels announcing:

FAT FREE!
LOW CARB!
LOW CALORIES!
DIET!
WEIGHT WATCHERS!

I swear there were more of these than regular foods. Now I don’t have a problem with people who try and use such things to lose weight, but I’m in the camp that believes moderation is the key. I mostly eat healthy foods, I avoid beef and pork where possible. But when I go out to dinner I splurge, when it comes to the occasional desserts I splurge. If I want an ice cream snack I’m going to have it 100%, all fat, carbs and calories included. It just doesn’t taste the same otherwise, and when I want something sweet, taste is always at the top of my list. Besides, in a decade or two there will be a new fad diet, maybe they will claim fat is good for you and vitamin C is the REAL evil.

So I decided they need a “fat full” section of the store, so I don’t need to scrutinize each label to make sure there is nothing “diet” about it. When did it become hard to eat normal food? I don’t remember it always being this difficult.

It’s nice and rainy today. *wanders off*

Caligula hates books. I read quite a bit, and when I’m reading I’m not paying attention to him. A couple weeks ago he started attacking the corners of my books with his teeth while I was reading them, I had no trouble shooing him away. Last week I saw him jump in my bookcase and try chewing on a book there, which I responded to by pushing all the books to the back of the bookcase so he couldn’t get behind them.

I really should have known that his next step would be actually attacking any books he saw lying around.

I always have lots of books by my bed, and yesterday he staked out a copy of Friday that I’m borrowing from . I am not sure why he chose this one to attack, it’s the only book out of the pile that I’d be upset if he attacked. Sigh. I’ll have to buy a replacement, which is actually not so bad, since I’m really enjoying this book and won’t mind having a copy in my library, I just feel bad.

But this did teach me a lesson! I won’t leave my books around where nasty little kitties can get their teeth on them.

Yesterday was good, I got painters tape put all around the bedroom we’re going to paint, got some more sanding and spackling done. Michael did a kickass job of getting the fishtank clean and repaired, it looks amazing now, see?

I noticed yesterday that there are actually things growing in my vegetable garden! The beans and cucumber plants have begun to sprout, yay!

Today. Well at least the weather is nicer. I’ve been working on a bunch of things online, I really should go get some more work done around the house, but I’m just so tired from the previous days…

*wanders off*

This past weekend was exhaustingly productive.

We didn’t end up painting. It’s crazy how many little things need to be done before undertaking such a project, I keep finding more little spots that need spackling then I need to wait for it to dry, then sand it, respackle if needed. We just want to make it as close to perfect as possible so all this work doesn’t go to waste. We moved all our furniture out of that room and moved it into “Caligula’s Room,” which is nearly identical to ours, except the paint job is a bit nicer (we might do touchups later). Caligula seemed a bit miffed that we moved all his toys out of that room, and meowed at us a lot, but he seems fine with the arrangement now.

I got around to mowing the lawn on Saturday, got the front done and decided to wait on the back (which I finished this morning). The fishtank and all it’s parts that n-tropy gave to us is now taking up most of my kitchen, Michael’s been working on getting that spotless so we can put it in our livingroom. The ircd for xelium was upgraded on Saturday, and now we are the proud owners of odin.xelium.net, a new server, yay (so come by and see it)! It’s running great so far. While upgrading Michael took the opportunity to pull out the air conditioners and finally put those in our bedroom and this computer room. The temp got up over 90 this weekend, it was getting pretty miserable in here.

So it’s monday. Michael wasn’t feeling well last night, and slept badly, so he’s working from home today. Poor myn %( I think it’s just this sudden increase in heat, even with A/C in some rooms it’s difficult to do a lot of work in the house when it’s so hot, even I ended up with a headache for the better part of Saturday. I have lots to do, more sanding in the bedroom, need to put painters tape around the parts we don’t want paint on. I’m just taking a break now from the exhausting lawn mowing… and it’s air conditioned in this room, mmm.

*wanders off anyway*

At work I finally gave in. After much resistance and stubbornness my computer at work is running Windows 2000 server. I’m not proud of this, and it’s actually a bit depressing, but I really can’t deal with linux there anymore. Compatibility issues were just taking up too much time, and then I went into work yesterday morning…

Since I hadn’t been at work in a month someone else was using my desk, my computer was in Michael’s office. He brought it out and plugged it in. X wouldn’t start. Michael spent a bit of time configuring it and trying to figure out what had happened to it. Shut down during an upgrade? Hardware issues with some swapped parts? Unfortunately neither of us had the time to screw around with it, we both had work to do. Frustrated I muttered “Just put stupid dumb Windows on it.” So much for my lovely Gentoo raid box %(

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to wait for a Windows install and all the software installing that I’d need, and Michael didn’t have the time to set it up for me anyway. So we looked around for a computer I could use. All the Windows machines were being used. A lonely power mac with OSX 10.1 sat in the corner. OSX is *nix, no problem, I thought.

Now I know better.

I guess this is a lousy way to be introduced to a foreign operating system. I had to use the tools on the system because I wasn’t about to go looking for new software (and risk screwing up the box). Quickly I got very frustrated, the terminal I was using to ssh into the production box didn’t support vim colors… no syntax highlighting!! AAHH! Actually the color support all around in that terminal was pretty lousy, seemed to handle irssi colors fine (of course there were horrible keybinding conflicts) but couldn’t see mutt or vim colors properly. I also couldn’t use the pgup/down keys in terminal, this was annoying, I ended up navigating the files I was working on by /searching through them. I had to open a Word doc, and the only way I could do this was on a Windows machine (the copy of office on the mac was shared with another mac, and you can only have one open at a time), so I had to use a remote desktop program. Now this is the real tricky part, I’m a linux user, who has to paste from windows into mac. Do you have any idea how insane that is? I kept hitting the wrong copy or paste. Shall I talk about the mouse now? It wasn’t a mouse, it was a trackball. I hate trackballs. The keyboard was a nightmare, it was small and loud and the alt key is in the wrong place! IE was the default browser, so I kept ended up using it rather than firefox, and it crashed 4 times during the day. Now that I use mozilla all the time I’m not used to a browser crashing!

It was a long day. I figure that work that could have taken 5 hours took 7 instead. By the time my work was done I was all ready to curse up a storm in irc, and I’m sure people were quite amused. This doesn’t mean that I hate OSX though. I can actually step back from my day’s horrible experience and realize that my problems could easily be worked around with small changes that I’m sure could be made with some tweaking and installing different programs. And from what I saw, I think MacOSX really might have a good future. It gave me a look into what *nix could be. Candy coated and user friendly, even moreso than KDE. I think if they keep on this path and make more and more stuff work well with it it could really go somewhere. Oh, and bring their hardware down a bit in price…

Not that I want to complain more, but I must share my experience with Opera 7.5. Back in the days of Opera 6.x I dealt with the random crashes of the browser because it was so quick and slim and saved my settings when it crashed. A crash wasn’t such a big deal, and I didn’t need to load bulky mozilla (for a lot of that time I was on a 450mhz machine). Opera was great because it was slim. Now with 7 they added all sorts of crap to it, made it heavier. With 7.5 it’s even worse! Built in RSS reader (which is cool because they are the first browser to do it, but not so cool because it
sucks), it has an irc client (I tried it, it makes chatzilla look good), it has all sorts of addons that make me dislike it. I want my browser to browse dammit, not make my breakfast (and a lousy one at that)! So, I stick with mozilla and firefox.

Well today we have plans for doing lots of house stuff, hopefully paint the bedroom, mow the lawn, clean out the fishtank that gave us (he is cleaning out his house to sell it, and needed to get rid of lots of stuff, maybe we’ll get some glofish). Must get started on these things now. *wanders off*

When we first moved in we worked to get the basics cleaned in this house, quick top to bottom to make it livable for us. While I was cleaning the kitchen I took down one of the curtain rods to clean try and at least dust the top of the curtain. The curtain was stuck to the rod. Now these aren’t full length curtains, they are just decorative that cover the tops of the windows, so when I thought they couldn’t move I honestly believed that they were glued.

I even told people about this.

Well yesterday I was cleaning some curtains and decided to figure out if I could do anything with those “glued on” curtains, since it was hard to get them clean in the state they were in.

I climbed on a chair and took down the first curtain rod, I started pulling on the curtain, and to my surprise it began to come loose. So I continued to pull on it and eventually got it off the rod, I touched the rod and it was mildly sticky, not glue sticky, but “hasn’t been cleaned and is damp in the kitchen sticky”

MY CURTAINS WERE STUCK TO THE ROD WITH FUNK.

I felt like an idiot. Don’t get my wrong, I keep a pretty clean house, it’s just those spaces that no one noticed that can get weird in every house. The “funk” on these rods was mostly invisible except for a bit of dust.

So I was able to get all the curtains off the rods (the one above the stove was especially difficult… yuck yuck yuck). And I could finally wash and bleach them! Yay! So I finished that up this morning and got them all nicely hung again. It feels good.

So I was glowing after that wonderful homemaking task, and I heard that I actually have some real work in the office tomorrow. Yay! I get to go into work!

This weekend we’re going to try and get the painting in our bedroom done. We really want to do that before our friend’s party next weekend, and before our LAN party that we’re planning for “sometimg in mid June” so the options for weekends is pretty slim. The irc server needs to be upgraded as well, we’re adding another server to test for stability for a couple weeks, and considering retiring a server that has been causing even more problems lately.

That’s it for now, I need to go make some dinner.

I tend to be a bit strange when it comes to books. I have trouble getting rid of them, and unless there is something especially vile about them, I am reluctant to even trade them in at a used book store. So sometimes there will be a book on my shelf that will just one day say “Read Me” and I realize that I haven’t for whatever reason. Last night Caligula jumped into my bookcase and was attacking my books, and a book on the shelf did that last night, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House.

I recieved this book for Christmas in 1999 from my father. I was 18 at the time and it was difficult for me to hide my distaste for it. I figured it was probably some jab at my mother for not being a housewife (I was probably correct about this), and I’m a liberated woman dammit, I don’t need to play housewife! What I didn’t realize is that SOMEONE is going to have to keep the house looking nice someday, both men and women need to worry about cleaning, and a book like this which gives a lot of tips and tricks to doing house work can be very helpful. When I moved out (early 2000) I shoved this book at the bottom of a box, it stayed there until this winter, when I finally had shelf space for all my books.

So I started actually reading this book the other night , it gives an interesting view on housekeeping, brought up things that I hadn’t really thought about reguarding “making a house feel like home” and I realized that in my present position, this book could be quite helpful. It goes through all sorts of things that should be regularly done in a house, and has TONS of information about everything from how to sew a button, to what different types of cloth are for to how to properly clean tiles… it’s just a really great wealth of information.

I decided to try and find out if this book had some sort of official site, I had little luck, but I did find a couple articles that seemed to strongly dislike this book. Now granted, the woman who wrote it is a neat freak, but come on, is there any other sort of person who would write an 800+ page book on keeping house? Probably not. Her expectations are high, but the virtues of this book FAR outweigh anything you could complain about. I find this book wonderful and amazingly helpful, if you want to open your mouth and spout some feminist babble to me I’m going to clobber you with this book.

I guess I’m just sick of this feminist/anti-feminist war. It can make someone such as myself very unsure as to what my place in society is. I’m currently really struggling with this. I went as far as to do some studying of the roles women played in the past, and learned how untradtional the postcard “traditional housewife” of the 1950’s actually was. Women prior to that did house work, but it was some serious work, laundering was a heavy chore without automatic clothes washers, cleaning the carpets was much more difficult without a vacuum, the heating sources used in the previous centuries tended to be quite dirty and made homes much dirtier than ours today, sewing was something that was done so you and your children had clothes, not as a hobby… In reality, the 1950’s was an anomaly. Technology was just beginning to make a huge difference on the amount of free time that a woman could enjoy. Which shines an interesting new light on how many misconceptions about a woman’s role there are.

I guess this brings me to where I am now. Yet again wondering what I’m doing. I guess I can rest assured that there are plenty of people my age in the same boat, so it’s not like my problem is strange. I suppose this lost feeling is just part of becoming an adult. I do have interests, even if I am having trouble forming this into a concrete idea for a career. As far as the basics of my life (where I want to be physically, who I want to be with) I’m very secure.

It’s crazy how 22 can be such a crappy and wonderful age all at once. I’m definately happy and not bored, in fact I’m quite busy. I am still learning a lot and making progress in all sorts of fields I’m interested in. M
y house is nice and clean and my garden is looking great. I just haven’t worked at a job in over a month.

*wanders off*

Today I spent some time cleaning this computer room, getting the hardwood floor swept and looking nice, arranging the rest of the room so it wasn’t so cluttered. Things look much nicer now, though going over the floor with a damp mop might do it some good. I spend some time getting the screws and nails out of our bedroom walls, I swear the people who owned this house previously were obsessed with coat hooks and putting tons of stuff on the walls. I was able to spackle the holes decently (I’d never spackled before). So now our room has the pale purple walls, and a bunch of white splotches, it sort of looks like it’s dying from some sort of disease. Hopefully we’ll get around to painting the room this weekend, so no more icky pale purple! I also got some “helping out people with linux” stuff done, as I am giving a bit of my time to a small linux support group, writing a little documentation and stuff for fun, today I wrote up a couple short articles for them.

So I got a bunch done. It feels good.

I suppose that’s about it. Depending on when Michael gets home tonight we might head up to a BCLUG meeting.