I spent yesterday morning planting my vegetable garden. I planted a couple rows of beans, cucumbers, white onions, and carrots. Hopefully something will grow ;D The rows I created are probably wider than they need to be, and I left a bit on the edge of the garden empty just in case I want to add some more plants later (possibly some small tomato plants). I think it looks good though, yay my garden is all planted!

Unfortunately I was so busy yesterday morning that I forgot to put suntan lotion on. When I came inside my back looked fine, but by the time evening rolled around it was clear that my entire back was burned. Gah! It’s not bad actually, it’s more annoying than hurting at the moment.

Rest of the day was pretty dull, Michael went over to ‘s to help him open his pool for the summer. I hung out here at home and read, paid some bills, and got annoyed by our internet connection. The connection had been solid since we hooked it up back in February, but yesterday it died a number of times. Even today it’s limping a bit and I’m not going to risk any big file transfers today… if I can surf a bit and my irc connection is maintained I can deal with this for a couple days, until we figure out the problem or it resolves itself. In the evening we went out grocery shopping, since we had been really bad about it and we had no food in the house.

Today… Well I’m sunburned, so I need to be careful about how much time I spend outside. Maybe I’ll start on mowing the lawn. *wanders off*

Yesterday was nice. I read for a bit, and then we grabbed some sandwiches at a local pizzeria for lunch (not much to eat in the house, and neither of us felt like going grocery shopping). Afterwards we headed out to run some errands, the typical sort of thing. By the time we were done it was close to 6 pm, so we headed over to ‘s for his birthday party.

The party was fun, played some Scene It?, which was amusing, but my horrible inexposure to so many movies really shined through as I got only one question correct during the whole game. Still, it was really fun. We got to have pizza, and Kelly made some yummie cake (mmm cake). Ed showed me the books he had brought over from his old place already and offered to let me borrow a bunch of them, yay! Everyone also convinced me to play poker, which I had never bothered to learn. We play for money, but it’s only $1 each, so it’s just enough to make it somewhat exciting. Well, armed with the list of hands I could have I tried to play. I lost pretty quickly, so much for beginner’s luck! Still fun though, after I lost I got to play the dealer, yay! We ended up leaving around midnight because we were both a bit tired.

Once home I crawled into bed and started reading the copy of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett that I borrowed. I got about 30 pages into it before I realized I should probably go to sleep. Starting out great though. I’m not yet finished with The Metaphysical Club, but it’s getting a bit deep, (not hard to read really, I’m just not retaining as much as I’d like to at this point) so I need a break. I did a google search for “Good Omens” this morning, and apparently there has been a bit of planning around getting it made into a movie, along with plenty of rumors that production is stalled, or it’s never going to happen. Sigh. Why does this always happen with the coolest movies? At least HHGTTG is actually futher along in production than it’s ever been in it’s 20-some odd years of the idea existing.

Today… well it’s only supposed to get up to about 75, which is the lowest and nicest temp on the immediate forecast, so I am probably going to take advantage of it and start some planting of veggies in my garden.

Now I’m going to go pull Michael and Caligula out of bed *yawn* maybe make some coffee. *wanders off*

It’s not so hot today! Yay! Right now it’s only about 80 F (27 C), which is a nice break from the higher temps yesterday. I spent most of the morning doing normal cleaning and mopping. Caligula ended up being put in his room (our extra bedroom where Michael’s turntables and a bunch of Caligula’s toys are) while I mopped the floors because I kept coming back to them and finding kitty prints on my nicely mopped floors.

This afternoon I put an audio cd into my dvdrom drive and tried to play it by typing ‘cdplay’ (command line cd player) which had always worked on my Debian boxes. No go. At first I was quite puzzled, am I just tired and I forgot how to play a CD in linux? So I started up abcde to see if it was even reading the CD, and it could see that it was there. Must have something to do with alsa again. Yep, CD audio was off. So I turned that on and typed ‘cdplay’. No go. So I open up grip, because I know grip will play it if it can. Yay sound with grip! Now what is wrong with cdplay? Well it seems that the version in Gentoo is new and improved. The controls are all different! Arg! So just typing cdplay won’t work. This annoys me a bit, but the new options aren’t difficult. Big old meanies, making things more complicated.

Oh right, I should make these into oggs instead of playing CDs…

Last night was the Chix meeting. Michael usually goes down with me because the big city is scary (shut up, I’m from Maine!). But he was tired from work, so he really didn’t want to go down. Since we hadn’t had a meeting down in the city since November, and it had been even longer than that since I had seen Sam, I insisted that I had to go. The meeting was at 30th Street Station, so all I had to do was get off the train and walk to the Food Court. I had never been there before, but I figured it’d be easy and safe to find, so I told Michael that he could just drop me off at the Lansdale station and I could take the R5 down and back.

The train ride down to the city can be interesting. This one was especially amusing. At the North Wales station (two or three stops after mine on the trip down) these three hugely overweight girls with ice cream get on the train. They were all wearing tight clothing that made their obesity even more obvious. Now I don’t mind this, if they’re happy to sit there and eat their ice cream on the train while giggling and chattering about nothing, that’s fine. But while sitting there reading my book I couldn’t help but hear one of their conversations (they were being quite loud). They got all serious and were wondering if “trains go fast enough to suck you out of them like airplanes do.” I nearly burst out laughing, these girls are *my* age! Then I lost faith in humanity, again, and realized how Bush might be re-elected, again.

I got to the meeting a little before 8. It was really great to see Sam, and we talked about all sorts of things. It only turned out to be the two of us but it was pretty fun, I only wish I could have stayed longer, but the train ride back to Lansdale was an hour long, and I wanted to get back before 11. So I hopped on the 9:45 train and got back to the Lansdale station at a reasonable time.

This morning I was skimming through the past week’s news, and I stumbled upon this article: UK Plastic Surgeons Put the Knife Into TV Makeovers. TV Makeovers? Oh that’s not a new thing, people go to the plastic surgeon all the time to get small flaws fixed. While I don’t agree with it, I don’t exactly have a huge problem with it, so I went to read the article.

Plastic surgeons in Britain have criticized television’s “dangerous” new craze of putting members of the p
ublic under the knife, often to make them look like celebrities.

TO MAKE THEM LOOK LIKE CELEBRITIES? It turns out that MTV has this show called I Want A Famous Face which profiles people who have gone through the process of getting enough plastic surgery to actually look like a Celebrity. These people should be seeking mental help, not being made famous by some stupid television program. For the second time this entry I’ve lost faith in humanity and realize how Bush could be re-elected! *cries*

Now I’m going to make dinner *wanders off*

It’s hot again today. I really wanted to get the garden plot finished today so I started early, got out there around 10 and was done by a little after noon. Oh boy it was hot out there! And putting the guard around took longer than I thought. But now it’s finished! And I took a picture:

Philly Chix meeting tonight at the 30th Street Station. Now that I have a good working camera we can actually take a picture again this time, yay!

It’s too hot to think about what to write. *wanders off*

Yesterday ended up being quite productive.

After going through the config files that needed updating in gentoo, I realized that one of them was an alsa config, oops. So I replaced that with the new one and wandered around gentoo’s site to go through the configuring directions for alsa to get it back to a usable state. So now I have sound again, yay!

I also managed to stop that stupid weather epplet from starting up when I started enlightenment. Turns out it’s an epplet bug, and I needed to edit ~/.enlightenment/…e_session-XXXXXX.snapshots.0 while enlightenment *wasn’t* running to remove the exec command for it. Ugh.

I’m feeling better about gentoo now, I guess just getting myself to the point of getting my hands dirty with a new distro just takes a push sometimes (like something horrible like the sound breaking).

After playing with R2 to get these annoying things fixed, I went outside and was able to completely finish tilling the garden. It was a little after 5 pm when I finished tilling and the bugs were coming out, so I decided to head back inside and worry about putting the plastic guard around it today.

Yesterday evening heard the sad news that irc.scifi.com is dead.

In our continuing efforts to improve SCI FI.COM, we will be unveiling our new chat software in the near future. As part of this upgrade, our IRC chat rooms are no longer available. scifi.com

Now, I don’t chat on irc.scifi.com. It’s been nearly 2 years since I have regularly. When irc.clockbot.net (aliased to r2q5.xelium.net these days) linked up with irc.deep13.org (deep13.xelium.net) back in September of 2002 it was to leave behind the evil politics, uncontrolled script kiddies, and continual ircd crashes. Soon after leaving they stopped letting users create their own channels, and the whole place dwindled to about 70 users. Well I dropped by every so often, eventually all the people I cared about drifted to other servers or joined #13thHour. So it didn’t mean much to me anyway. Well now that it’s completely dead I can’t help feeling a bit sad. It was my first IRC server, I met so many people there, I met Michael there for the first time, , , , , , , , , , and countless other people who don’t have livejournals, madragoran, Aquarius, Obi-Wan-Rockstar, Rubicant, ShellGh0st, Syntopicon… the list goes on to many who don’t even drop by #13thHour anymore, so many people. And now an era has ended.

This morning I got up and decided I was going to set up ntpd on R2, so after a few tries I got that all working nicely, yay!

I actually went outside to start working on the garden today, and after just a few minutes I was sweating. Ok, none of that today. Apparently it’s up to 87 F (30.6 C) right now. Yuck.

So I’m going to poke around my system for more little things to fix, and probably go read for a bit. I hope tomorrow is nicer. *wanders off*

Thanks for the recommendations everyone, my “to be read” list is all nice and filled up again. I did some searching through the local library system as well and was happy to discover that many of them are in there, which is great since I really can’t afford to spend a lot of money on books right now.

Yesterday didn’t quite turn out the way I had hoped. I got all set up outside, tools out, kitten hanging out on the porch, radio nearby, and I started tilling the soil in the garden. After about 20 minutes I started to get a sinus headache. I tried to keep working on it, so little to do! But I started sweating because of the heat (around 80 and humid) and finally ended up stopping. I brought everything inside, took some advil and hopped online a bit to see if my headache would subside, it didn’t. So I took a nice cool bath. It didn’t help much, besides getting me clean. Around 3 I gave up trying to actually do anything, took some more advil, and ended up zoned out in front of the TV watching episodes of Firefly that let us borrow a few weeks ago. Michael came home around 6, and I was still feeling miserable so I threw some frozen pizzas in the oven and we had those for dinner. He went out to wash the car and I spent the rest of the evening watching Firefly. I don’t remember exactly when I went to bed, in fact I really don’t remember much after 8 pm. I hate headaches like that.

This morning I was woken up to Caligula thwaping me in the nose with his paw. I guess he just wanted attention (of course as soon as I get up he goes back to sleep, right now he’s looking something like this). My headache was pretty much gone when I got out of bed, I took some advil just to make sure the small headache that remained stayed small (or non-existant). I’m feeling pretty good right now, hung inside this morning just to make sure the headache didn’t come raging back.

I think I’m going to go make myself a salad and maybe go out and work on the garden. *wanders off*

So I decided that I need some book recommendations. We all have a “to read” list, and amazingly mine is quite small these days. I keep going to the library and picking up random books that I think I might like, and that’s been hit or miss. I feel like I’m wasting my time with this randomness, there are so many amazing books out there that I’m sure my friends could recommend that I’m not reading. I don’t want to go the route of “reading all the classics” because that’s boring to me. I guess I want to stick with Scifi, Fantasy, History, sociology, religion, and computers for my reading. And not Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, David Eddings, JRR Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, because I’ve either read plenty of them, or I’m taking a break from a series.

This weekend was productive, in addition to things I mentioned previously, Michael was able to rid our house of the wasp nests that were in part of our roof. Wasps are evil, and a couple weeks ago he sprayed the nest area with some wasp killer stuff, so they were all nice and dead when he went to scrape them out this weekend. Yuck yuck yuck. The funny thing is that there are all sorts of guards and screens put up around the edges of the roof so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. So much for that. My veggie garden plot is almost done, I need to till about 3 square feet still, and remove rocks, and then put the plastic guard around it, but that should be it, I am hoping I can finish that all today, but I’m pretty sore still, so I don’t want to push myself too much.

We ended up taking Michael’s mother out for sushi last night, it was really good, and she enjoyed it.

Watched The Missing last night (mostly because it was directed by Ron Howard). I’d say it was pretty good, but predictable, and really not my kind of movie.

This morning I was finally able to bring myself to look at my piles of email. I had a whole bunch from the vacation week, and then last week I was so busy working and catching up on other things that mailing lists were completely neglected for another week. It was quite a task, but I was done in about 2 hours. So I’m back down to a managable 16MB.

I suppose I should get outside now, they are predicting scattered showers today, but the weather is still decent right now. *wanders off*

On friday I managed to tackle the lawn. I had a bit of trouble starting the lawn mower, but then I thought “I spent all that time arguing that I’m not just a weak girl and I can mow the lawn myself, I’m not going to fail before I even get started!” So I eventually got it started. I feel really great now because it’s done, of course it’ll just need to be done again next week, sigh. I did manage to get a strange shape sunburn because of my inability to put suntan lotion on a small part of my back, and I didn’t realize it. Yay me.

I also spent a lot of time on my garden plot yesterday and friday. After mowing the lawn and working on garden plot I’m so tired and sore! I woke up this morning and really didn’t want to get out of bed, ouch ouch. Today I’m taking a day off of it all, and we’re going to take Michael’s mother out for dinner for Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day all! I am going to drop my mother an email in a moment, I don’t have her new phone number, so calling is pretty much out of the question.

We saw Lost In Translation last night. Bill Murray played a great mid-life crisis type man, and Scarlett Johansson played a very convincing 20-something girl lost. The soundtrack was great. Oh and I was quite pleased with the cinematography. So in all, I think I liked it.

Not much else going on, a couple Gentoo issues are still looming, I think I really just need to dive into some documentation and figure out everything that could be causing anything. I want my system to run perfectly dammit, no more errors! And I think that’s a reasonable request. Maybe tomorrow. *wanders off*

So my troubles were all Gentoo-specific. I guess I’m just used to the way Debian does things, and then crazy Gentoo does stuff and throws me off balance, often making me think it’s something *I* screwed up. Bleh. I feel better about computers now… bad moods suck.

Yesterday I did a lot with the veggie garden. It turned out to be a bigger job than I thought, and not just because I don’t have the proper tools for it. As I think I have mentioned in the past, the soil is VERY rocky, so I needed to dig up the soil, break it apart with a hand-held claw tool, and remove the bigger, troublesome rocks. So I spent a lot of time with that, and quickly realized that doing the whole garden (which is 16x21ft) would take DAYS. Do I really want a veggie garden this big? I don’t think I could maintain it this large! So I have decided to chop the garden a lot, it’ll be about 1/5 the size, about 16×4. To the right is the diagram of that. Above the dotted line is what I’ll be keeping, the rest we’ll have to plant grass on. It’ll take some work, since there are raspberry plants growing on the wrong end, and we’ll need to plant some grass, and move the plastic guards surrounding the garden. Oy, it’s going to take a while. A photo of the garden can be seen here, just keep in mind that it’s a bit decieving… it really is 16 ft by 21 ft %)

Last night Michael went out to get some gasoline for the lawn mower and after a long “I’ll mow it” “I’ll mow it” “No, I’LL MOW IT.” “Nope I’ll do it…” conversation, he finally conceded that I could do “part” of it while he’s at work. My argument was that he’s working all day and I am here at home so I can do yard work, his argument of course was that he’s the guy and he should take care of exhausting chores like mowing the lawn. Neither of us actually like mowing, and no, I won’t mow your lawn.

I got up this morning, and it was wet outside. Not just dew wet, but actual post-rain wet. Raurg. So I have waited around this morning to see if it would clear up, and it has, it’s quite warm out now. I’m going to go outside now and get started on mowing, with our brand new lawn mower, yay! And then later I’ll probably spend a bit of time working in my garden again.

*grabs handle of lawn mower and wanders off to back yard*

Computer suck and I hate them and they are always fucking broken!

Ok, so I’m in a bad mood, it’s just one of those days when I really don’t want to be on the computer. Luckily it’s a beautiful outside so I am going to go play in the garden for a while.

I finished up Caligula’s vacation page, you can check it out here. Michael’s mother wrote a journal for each day from Caligula’s perspective. It’s so cute. I also included some pictures we took when we went to pick him up on Sunday.

Now I will save you from my horrible mood and go outside. But first, a couple pictures!

I found a pretty little bleeding heart plant in my garden %)

Caligula!

*wanders off*