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.

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*