I said that Caligula was getting bigger, but then I went over to see Cargo this afternoon. Cargo is freaking huge! I’m so used to having a kitten that a cat is quite a shock %) I guess I can rest assured that Caligula has plenty of time still as a little kitten.

I’m at work right now, finished up about 4 hours of work they had for me. It was nice coming in again actually, and I’m glad I came in today rather than yesterday, since I got the work done quicker than we thought I would. Now my revisions and questions go back to the client for review and answers, hopefully they’ll get a response quickly and I can come in for some work next week too. I did up my time sheet for March today, less than 10 hours %(

I was recently reading through a nearby LUG list. They started this whole thread about viruses, I jumped in for a bit of it but left quickly when I saw the whole thing turning into a flame. Well one thing bothered me, they kept saying “virii” instead of viruses. Is this some sort of slang that just got out of hand? Do they think that made up word makes them sound smart? I decided not to mention this to the list since it was already enough of a flame, but I HAD to rant to someone. So I hit up a grammar nazi friend of mine and started ranting. He laughed and said that it was probably good that I didn’t mention it to the list, since it was an annoyance of his as well and the last time he decided to say it on a list he got horribly flamed by people who “informed” him that it was acceptable jargon in a tech conversation. Anyway, to help me with my battle against the virii he sent me a wonderful link: http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html. It goes through and actually explains why virii is not a word. Yay!

Well it’s about time to go home now. *wanders off*

I had a sinus headache most of the day, which was a bit of a bummer. It’s almost gone now. I hate headaches like that, advil doesn’t touch them and I feel very tempted to nap. If I nap I’ll never sleep tonight. If I stay awake, what is there to do? Since blabbering on IRC was just making it worse I decided to surf (do people still say that?) over to the PBS website to check out what sorts of Frontline episodes they had to stream. Michael showed me how to unmask the realplayer for Gentoo and tweak some things to get it working properly (a soft link and edit to the plugins directory). So now realplayer is working nice and I can view embedded realplayer stuff, yay! Actually while I was trying that out yesterday I also decided to grab plugger. I’ve tried plugger in the past with little luck, this time it broke on me again, launching several instances of mplayer, going defunct, and totally messing with the realplayer plugin, so I uninstalled it. Sigh, plugger…

So I spent most of the day watching old Frontline episodes. That’s a great show.

I’m going into work tomorrow, and of course because of mad planning skillz that’s also the morning the Rav4 goes in for some work. Graaah. It’s fine, since the car appointment is early and won’t cut into my day much, but I could have gone into work today instead. When I said I’d come in on Thursday I was hoping that today would be nice enough to do some yard work or go to the library. Nope. Again it didn’t even get to 50, and it’s rainy and yucky out.

I actually have excellent planning skills. It’s quite strange that I’d forget something like that. Especially since it’s the second time I’ve made such a mistake in the recent past. I must be losing my mind. What year is it again?

Caligula is getting bigger. When we got him on the 11th I had no trouble just picking him up with one hand to move him, now it requires two and he’s not happy at all about it.

I did a bit more yard work yesterday. I decided that I like gardening but I don’t like yard work. The gardening part where I dig in the dirt, even get cuts and sore hands, digging out leaves and other junk, that’s fine. But once that junk and leaves needs to be piled into a garbage can and dragged out to the leave pile, that’s no fun! The hauling leaves and stuff to the pile part took up most of my work yesterday. I came back inside a little before 4 pm because it was getting cool and windy. I took a long hot shower and afterwards was quite sore. We relaxed, ate some boca pizza, and watched the last three episodes of Coupling.

I was going to do some more work outside today, but the temperature didn’t even get up to 50, and it was cloudy. Besides, from all the digging with my hands yesterday my hands even hurt when I type. A break is good. And it seems like it’s going to rain all the rest of the week…

I finally get to go into work for a bit on Thursday. For most of this month I’ve just been working a couple hours a week from home.

I’m so exhausted. I couldn’t think of why, but then I realized that all the work I did outside yesterday probably tired me out beyond what 8 hours of sleep could repair. I’m probably going to go to bed at 9 tonight, like an old woman!

But now I need to figure out what I’m having for dinner.

I watched the 3rd Matrix movie last night. The first 1/3 of it sucked, I was groaning the whole time while they did much of the same crap that made me hate the second one so much. All standing around and talking, trying to be all profound by speaking slowly and saying stupidly obvious thingszzZZZZzzzz. There was this one scene where they killed a bunch of guards in a pillared cooridor, wait, didn’t they do that in the first one too? Gah. But then the movie got better, the characters shut up, Neo and Trinity were sent away and we got to enjoy some good special effects and scifi-ness. There were some pretty neat scenes in there and I can appreciate it for that. They didn’t completely screw up the ending either! So it wasn’t horrible like the second, but I can’t say that I loved it either. At least I don’t feel like I wasted my time with it.

After writing that entry yesterday I went outside and played in my garden. At first I wasn’t sure how to approach it, it was quite a mess, and the only gardening tool I had was a rake! So after thinking for a bit and adding a few things to a Home Depot shopping list I decided to just dig in, with my hands. Turns out this was probably the best method, even with a case full of gardening tools I would have gotten my hands filthy. So I started digging a little after noon, and quickly realized that I often don’t know the difference between a weed flower and a good flower. So I started looking for signs that certain things were weeds, like random growth, growing too close to plants I KNOW are good flowers. I think I did ok, might have some stray weeds in there, but I’ll read up on things. So any gardeners out there? Sure I can do a google search for gardening, but it’d be nice to have some experienced people point me in the right direction.

I never thought I’d be someone who could enjoy gardening. At my parent’s house all we had was a tiny garden in the front yard, and that was a chore to keep tended. I watched my neighbors spend all summer preening and caring for their huge flower garden and just didn’t see that it was “worth” all the work put into it. Well I completely missed the point! And I didn’t understand until I was elbow deep in dirt yesterday, gardening is fun! It’s like programming/scripting, you enjoy doing it AND you get a neat result at the end! I think this might be my next obsession.

I’ve sort of worked out a plan for the gardens, I’m going to clean them out, with the possible exception of the one behind the garage, because it’s weird to plant flowers in a dark place behind the garage. Then I’m going to see what decides to pop up out of the soil, some of them should be nice flowers that I’ll be happy with, and I suspect that some plots won’t have any flowers, and some might have flowers I don’t like. All summer I’ll spend time learning about gardening and watching how my garden grows. Then come fall I can start planning what I want in my garden next year.

I took pictures!

This is after I cleaned out one of the plots on this side, the rest are still covered in leaves.
The rest of the pictures are here. Yeah, I decided to make a part of my webpage about my garden.

After all this yard work we decided to go up to the Home Depot to pick up some things we needed, picked up some hedge clippers, a little garden shovel, a garden hose, a spade shovel… and we managed to finish off that $1300 gift certificate we got at the closing of our house! Amazing how fast that went. Afterwards we decided to go to Giant, a grocery store chain in the area that we used to shop at. I just wanted to pick up a couple things, like boca ground “meat” which they don’t see at Henning’s (our new grocery store). Well within about 5 minutes of being in Giant I remembered that I HATE grocery shopping, we picked upthe boca meat, and tried to do a little more shopping, but the atmosphere was just too horrible. We went to try and check o
ut, and ALL the lines were long, they have something like 15 cash registers and only 7 were open on a Sunday evening? What were they thinking? Well we weren’t going to stand there for a half hour for a one item, so we put it back and left. Ugh, Giant sucks. We made it to Henning’s around 6, and got through all the shopping that we needed to do fairly quickly. I love Henning’s, it’s the most pleasant grocery store I’ve ever shopped at. It is a single store, family owned since the 19th century, it’s grown with the community. The feel in the store is nice, and instead of having pop music and advertisements playing in the store they have some neutral musak. The store doesn’t have that disinfected “clone” feel that chain stores have (often every grocery store of the chain is identical in layout, it’s creepy). And the people at the checkout aren’t insane, they’re usually high school kids and older women, who are quite pleasant and don’t try to talk to you. All in all it’s very home-like in that store, things are just right, and there are never huge crazy lines. It all adds up to make my shopping experience as pleasant as possible.

Hehe, grocery stores.

Well the forecast seems to say that it’s going to rain Wed, Thu, Fri… so today and tomorrow are my only days this week that I can spend doing more work in the garden, so I’m going to get working on that now. *grabs shovel and rake and wanders off*

We didn’t end up going to the LAN party yesterday, we just though it’d be better to hang around here and enjoy a relaxing saturday. Besides, we never got around to buying UT2k4, and that’s probably what they would have wanted to play the whole time (rightfully so). Michael built a fire, and I spent a bunch of time reading, I’m nearly finished with Foundation. I’ve had this book for years, but I’ve never read the whole series, so next time I’m at the library (hopefully tuesday) I’m going to pick up their copy of the trilogy. It’ll be good to have the first Foundation book still fresh in my head. Great book.

The weather this morning is not nearly as nice as it was yesterday, but we’re going to see if we can start some yard work, get a list of tools we’re going to need to complete it properly. We might even head out for a walk on the trails around here if we are in the mood and the weather warms up enough. Hopefully it’ll be a productive day. But for it to be so I have to get off the computer and start it… *wanders off*

(More kitten pictures)

Today has been nice. This morning it was a bit cloudy, but come afternoon the temp was up to 72 and it was sunny out. I needed to return some library books before monday, so I grabbed my Intel laptop bag (sans laptop) and walked up to the library after lunch.

The walk was nice, I wish I had brought the camera with me! Unfortunately when I got there the library was closed. It’s friday, it doesn’t open until 3:30! It was only about 2, so I dropped my books in the outside dropoff box and turned around to go back home. It’s about a mile (says mapquest) from my house to the library and I really needed the excercise, this winter has not been an easy one, and that means I’ve gone to get brownies more often than I should %) Good thing I don’t gain weight easily (*ducks*), the only thing I need to worry about is being out of shape.

This weekend a friend of ours is having a LAN party, so we’ll probably head over to that tomorrow, yay! We haven’t been to a LAN party since New Years.

Now I am going to go see what I’m making for dinner. It’s friday and I’ve got an insane craving for a sub sandwich… *wanders off*

Did more cleaning with that wonderful Lime Out (I said Lime Away before, but I was mistaken). Last night Michael did some great work with it on the bathroom sink and the showerhead. This morning I did the sink again when he said it might need it again, and it looks really nice! All that yucky mineral buildup was gone, no need to replace any of the faucent afterall! Yay!

After cleaning I decided to have some fun with programs. Now that I’m using Gentoo instead of Debian stable, I can play around with many more newer packages! I thought I’d try the Diablo 2 install with wine again. It was more successful than my first attempt, I actually got through the install! But after all that work it wouldn’t see my dvd drive when I started up the game, so it could see the play disk it needs to start. Sigh. I tried a no-cd crack, but then it wouldn’t even try to launch. I can probably play around with it more to figure it out, but for now I’ve given up again.

So I decided to install scummvm. Some friends in #goddess told me about it a few months back, and of course there is a version of it in emerge.

* games-engines/scummvm
Latest version available: 0.5.1
Latest version installed: 0.5.1
Size of downloaded files: 1,122 kB
Homepage: http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/
Description: Reimplementation of the SCUMM game engine used in Lucasarts adventures
License: GPL-2

This means I can play The Secret of Monkey Island! Ok, so it’s a very old game that I first played on my 486, but I love the Monkey Island games. They are so amazingly full of puns. I nearly died laughing when I played the PS2 game released a couple years back. I love this stuff. Well I finished this game a long time ago, and I thought it might be fun to try again since I’ve forgotton most of it, and hey, it’s a great old game!

Yah grog!!!

Today I was sitting in #13thHour and Michael pasted a screenshot where he uses nickcolor.pl in irssi. This colorizes the nicknames in the channel. I recalled xchat having a similar function, but when I asked Peacimowen he denied that there was one. Hrm. So I dug up an old screenshot from early 2002 which certainly uses it. Would they really take it out of later versions? Skeptical, I installed xchat2. Much to my surprise I couldn’t find the option anywhere in the options! How horrible of them! On top of that I’m really not at all happy with xchat2, they slimmed it down a lot and took out all sorts of things, what were they thinking? Screenshot.

Which reminds me, earlier this week I installed Opera 7.23 (I’ve just been using Mozilla lately). It’s horrible. The whole lure of old opera (circa 6) was that you could have a quick, slim browser that did just the basics, but did them well. I don’t need it to support java, or even flash, I just want basics on slower machines. The first time I opened up Opera 7.23 it choked up so bad that my window manager began to crawl while I browsed, this is Enlightenment on a 2.0ghz machine with 512mb ram, it’s not a bad box! I really couldn’t believe it. escapenguin mentioned that it might be because it tries to load the whole page before displaying. Bleh. I’m glad I installed 6.03 on my laptop. RIP Opera, you served me well for so many years!

Going to make dinner now. Boca pizzas I think. *wanders off*

I decided to take some time today to write some scripts for R2D2, now he has:

You can look up what country an internet country code stands for:

-@PrincessLeia2- !country aq
-@R2D2- AQ: Antarctica

And vice versa:

-@PrincessLeia2- !code Antarctica
-@R2D2- AQ: Antarctica

Then I decided to do some more standard-metric conversions (before just had C to F), now he does conversions of inches and cm and kg and pounds:

-@PrincessLeia2- !weightcon lb 130
-@R2D2- 130 in is equal to 59.0 kg

-@PrincessLeia2- !lengthcon in 65
-@R2D2- 65 in is equal to 165.1 cm

These were all easy little scripts, but I had been meaning to add them for a while.

Played with Caligula a bunch this morning. I wonder how long a cat’s day is. You know, how humans have a natural 25 hour cycle, it would seems that cats have a short and inconsistant one. Some nights he’ll sleep with us, some nights he wants to stay up after we’ve gone to bed, some mornings he wants to sleep on my lap, others he just wants to attack.

I’m going to have baked potatoes for dinner. Yum yum. *wanders off*

I have all sorts of things to do today, but I have had so many things on my mind that I had to take a break and write.

Today I went out to the mailbox, seemed to be the usual bunch of junk, but then I noticed some church spam, then another piece of church spam, then a spam for an “Armageddon Bible Prophecy Seminar” … I don’t think I’ve ever gotten religious spam in such quantities before! Since this was my first good experience with church spam I thought I’d take a look at them…

1. From Graterford Bible Fellowship Church; To: Rural Route Boxholder

The Fellowship Flyer

This seems to be a pretty standard church flyer. Printed on a bright yellow piece of paper by a photocopier or something. This sort of flyer doesn’t scare me.

2. From Christ’s Church of the Valley; To: Rural Route Postal Customer

“What do a ton of your insanely stressed-out friends and neighbors have in common? They’ve found a seriously good church to help them balance life’s demands. It’s at the Regal 24 Cinema (no joke!) every Sunday. Walk through the door and you won’t find any boring rituals or talks about stuff in the 138th century B.C.” … it goes on and on.

Oh dear, it’s one of those progressive churches… and held in a MOVIE THEATER!!! It’s printed on nice paper with pretty shiny graphics. These churches scare me, and I really can’t see how anyone can benefit from attendance at such a place. I mean it’s great to have your church be enticing and fun, but despite their claims of being “faithful to the Bible” I’m always skeptical…

3. From: Northwest Evangelism Institute; To: Resident

Armageddon: Bible Prophecy Seminar

This one is scarier than a church in a movie theater. It’s printed on nice shiny big paper, and has flames on it with capital letters real big saying ARMAGEDDON. Inside is lots of pretty colors and graphics, and exclaimation points. And scary things about “The Middle East Conflict and World War III” OH THE WORLD IS ENDING! Sigh. This is so weird.

Yay for entertaining Spam! Enough of that.

Wait, more Jesus. I saw The Passion of the Christ on Sunday night. I did a lot of thinking yesterday as to whether I liked it at all. I was pretty sure I didn’t like it one bit. It was bloody and useless. I thought about writing a whole rant about all the things that bugged me in it, but then I realized that it’s not worth my time.

We went to the grocery store last night and picked up some “Lime Away” which is supposed to get rid of mineral deposits. This morning I decided to use it on the dishwasher. Washing a dishwasher? Yes, like I mentioned previously we have a pretty bad hard water problem, and it seems like the dishwasher has been left to build up this white mineral film for years. This buildup probably doesn’t let it run very well, and having all that stuff in there while it’s running makes our dishes get white deposits on them as well so they don’t look very clean. So I spent over 2 hours this morning scrubbing out the dishwasher and racks. It wasn’t fun, and even with the gloves, the little this lime away stuff touched my hands was enough to dry them out to the point of hurting. The dishwasher looks pretty good now, it’s nor perfect, but I was able to clean up most of the really bad areas. This morning I also spent a bunch of time cleaning other things, since I had time between scrubbing the dishwasher and sending it through rince cycles. It was a productive morning.

This afternoon I’ve mostly been paying bills, dropped into irc a bit, and thought of all sorts of things to do with my website. I have a long to-do list again, lots of fun things. I should go work on some of them… *wanders off*

Yesterday evening we had our friends Ed and Kelly over. They recently got married, so we wanted to take them out for a congratulations dinner. Besides, it had been a while since we had seen them, they wanted to meet Caligula, and they hadn’t see the house yet. We were planning on going to the Drafting room, but a quick call to make reservations scratched that idea, we couldn’t get anything earlier than 8:30, and we wanted to eat around 7. So we decided we’d try a brewery that we heard about in Pottstown, Ortlieb’s Brewery & Grill. The pictures made the place look nice enough, and we thought it would be nice to try some local brews.

We got there and it wasn’t too busy, we were seated immediately, which is amazing for this area at 6:30 on a saturday night. The menu looked good, but when we asked for a brew list the waitress informed us that they had run out of their most popular ale. All they had was their lager (gah, lagers) and a bunch of strange flavors of beer. Now we go to a brewery to eat and they don’t have their most famous ale that we went there to try? How is this possible? Since we were already there and we were hungry we decided to stay, at least they had Guinness on tap. The food was good, the service sucked. In all we felt really bad about bringing our friends there %( Still, we had a nice time, got to talk a lot, got to hear all about their wedding in Niagra falls. They also mentioned that they’d be headed down to Disney World in September, and the offered to let us come too and stay at their condo down there! YAH!! They want to go the week after labor day, so I think we’re going to seriously try to save up some money to go down too. The last and only time I ever went to Disney World I got heat stroke so bad that I ended up in the first aid place all day %( It’d be really cool to spend a week with them down there.

The restaurant didn’t even have good desserts.

After dinner we came back to the house and sat around the fire drinking tea. I made some cookies(easy premade cookie dough that just needs to be baked, hey it’s yummie and great for times like this!). It was really great just sitting around and talking, I needed real social contact. After a while we decided to show them an episode of Coupling, which they really enjoyed.

Caligula was really great and friendly through all this. He liked Ed and Kelly a lot, wasn’t afraid to walk on them or play with them or anything. I’m very happy about that, we’ll just need to make sure we keep having friends over from time to time so he is used to other people.

They left a little before 11. It was a good night.

Today, no formal plans, I think I’ll do a bit of reading. And playing with the kitty! Yay!

*wanders off*