I finally have a mailman who PICKS UP mail!

Back when I lived in Maine the mailman always would pick up mail if you had the flag up, I assumed this was half of his job. When I moved to upstate New York I quickly became used to never having the mailman pick up my mail. At first I thought it was just that mailman, but it was like that in a few towns I lived in. Then I moved to the apartment complex in North Wales, PA. Same thing, mailmen who expect you to use the big blue mailboxes. It was always such a pain to drop it off in the big blue boxes. But now we have a mailman who will pick up our mail at our house, it’s so wonderful %)

I had the day off from work yesterday. Spent the time doing cleaning and putting my toys and books on the bookshelves. I think I’m happy with it. I also experimented a bit with ways of putting up my still packaged Star Wars toys. This computer room is looking much better now %)

I’ve been on my laptop the past couple days. R2D2 is sort of dead right now. Michael put his cd-rw in it a couple months back so I could burn things on my computer, and it’s always acted a little funny. First it wouldn’t boot off a WinXP disk, then it started being really loud, and the other day it decided to stop working. Might be something as simple as a loose wire, but I’m not opening it up… it’s wintertime, which means that I’m the static electricity queen! So since that doesnt work it would have been more difficult to install an OS on it. I was sort of in the process of switching from debian to gentoo. So we’ll have to look at that this weekend and find out what the trouble is, and if I should order another drive.

Using my laptop so much for normal daily stuff made me remember some of the annoying things it does. The speed (333 mhz) doesn’t really bother me, and it’s got 160mb of ram now so it runs nicely, but it’s querky. Fluxbox in debian stable has focusing issues, especially with opera when I’m opening a new window. And my stupid touchpad, arrgg… I thought turning off the touchpad would be a simple bios option, but it’s not. I did some google searches yesterday afternoon with little luck, there are a few things I can try, a kernel patch that’s out there that works with a config tool *shrugs* I also discovered that all the sensitivity was a flaw in many of the touchpads of this era, which apparently is what mostly spurred on the development of config tools for it to decrease senstivity. I just had so many other things I wanted to do yesterday while I was home I really didn’t have time to mess with it as much as I wanted to. For the time being I TOTALLY HACKED IT by putting a post-it note over it. Someday I’ll get used to laptop hardware.

In other news, our “friend” bluefox83 of #13thHour finally crossed the line with me this morning. I’ve honestly tried to be tolerant of his existance there, but there are things he does constantly to annoy all of us. I think the most harmful is his tendancy to give computer advice even when he has no clue what he’s talking about. I really take pride in the fact that people can come to #13thHour and be helped in the right direction, and I appreciate being able to go there myself when I have problems, but his misleading statements and uninformed answers tend to be detrimental to that. The most *annoying* habit he has is refusing to RTFM. He’s trying to use Debian, and he just can’t read documentation, this is a problem. As much as I love Debian, and linux on a whole, if you are going to be doing a lot of work in it you really need to be the kind of person who can wade through documentation. I’ve given him many links and how-to’s for linux that would help him understand the basics that he seems unable to grasp. Instead of reading this he chooses to bother people in the channel for answers, and then complain that we’re ignoring him if we don’t answer. So this morning when he started asking about installing mplayer I foolishly tried to help: the log. Those of you not familiar with situati
ons with such users may get the wrong idea about me from this, I’m really not as bitchy as this makes me seem, he just brings out the worst in me. Those of you familiar with this particular user are probably wondering why we didn’t kick him out sooner %)

*Yawn* I’m going to go eat some breakfast now. *wanders off*

Last night we went right home after work. Michael changed the locks on the door (well, whole door knob and dead bolt) as the realtor had suggested, and I headed upstairs to put some bookshelves together. It was the same deal as my desk, a “Part A is used with screw 1H and inserted in…” but much simpler than the desk of course. I love doing those things %) It’s a big puzzle that turns into furniture at the end! The shelves were put together fairly quickly, and I put them in their proper place. Unfortuantely the floor in that upstairs room is a bit unlevel at places, and having bookshelves on the floors makes it more noticable %) I put a bunch of our books on the shelves, and starting putting my toys on some. I really suck at putting things on shelves for display, I have no knack for design. Oh well, it’s a work in progress.

I didn’t have any work to do today, but I came in thinking I did. Oh well, I was able to get a lot of my own stuff done today.

First I updated the Philly Chix site. Added a few new sections, a library of books we have to share, some reviews, and a section about what projects some of the Philly Chix are involved in, as well as books they are writing/written. I’m pleased with how that’s turning out. I’m happy with the changes.

Then I got caught up with some email. I’ve been much more active with personal email, communicating with more people that way. It always surprises me when I find people who don’t like email, I love email!

I did some more work on some other sections of my site, after someone asked if I’d put their picture on my Friends page I decided to redo the page, since it looked really awful. I’ve been redoing a lot of my site lately, I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely pleased with it.

I also spent some time making my desktop prettier. The old look was pretty awful, and made linux look horrible and archaic. It looks prettier now. Screenshot.

-!- R2Q2 [~null@X-2B032999.cust.oldcity.dca.net] has joined #null

That’s my second bot connecting from my home connection! This one is the IdleRPG bot. I connected R2D2 on monday, and he’s been completely stable. Granted, we haven’t been home to use our connection much, but it’s encouraging, Comcast hardly ever would stay connected for a whole 4 days.

I guess that’s it for now, I’m going home. *wanders off*

Everyone knows I hate Windows. I could list pages of reasons, but I’ve recently found myself in an unfortunate position.

I work as a web developer, and people at my job use Windows, myself and the network admin are the only ones who use linux. The people here are used to sharing Word docs, .psd (photoshop) files and other windows-centric files and having no problems. I’ve kept up with this onslaught of Windows files, and only had a couple problems. The first was that abiword can’t properly render Word docs, if text has underline and strikethrough it will only show one of them, which caused about an hour of wasted time. So I resolved to just use word on a win2k server I have an account on (set up in the first place for viewing things in IE). For win2k servers rdesktop works great, so it’s not been too much of a hassle, since all I do is view things on that box. Then recently the manager suggested I use Homesite, a Windows program used for writing HTML, since that’s what everyone else here uses. I have always pushed away from editors other than vim, but I said I might be able to use it via rdesktop if they really think it’d be a benefit. Then the other day I was sent a .psd file to start developing a website. I fired up gimp and opened the images, no errors, no problem. After creating the template for the site I noticed some interesting things that the original developer on the site had done that I didn’t see on my .psd files. Turns out that the newest Photo Shop does layering in a complex way that gimp can’t handle, I logged onto a nearby Windows box to open it and convert it to a filetype I could use and was annoyed to find that even the previous version of photoshop errored when trying to open the layers! I brought this fact to the attention of some of the people here and they said that in the future they’d send me flattened files.

This morning I found bluefish which seems to be a reasonable linux alternative to Homesite, so I am going to try working with that. So I am finding solutions, but is using rdesktop to get to a Windows box for all the other things a reasonable answer? Sadly, I barely use any linux-specific tools for my work. I love the stability of linux, I know how to use it (the last Windows OS I used full time was 98, not on a network, I don’t know how to use WinXP!), I like that my computer is fast while I multitask in linux (800 mhz, 256mb ram, it’d crawl while multitasking in WinXP, especially with programs like Photoshop running) and I like not having to worry about viruses. So where is the line drawn between the love of all things linux and the popular utility of Windows in my profession? Am I wasting more time with compatibility issues than I would be with the troubles and slowness using a Windows machine brings? I think Linux is still the lesser of two evils here, but maybe I’m just being foolishly stubborn. *sigh*

For now I’m going to continue to use linux.

Last night we headed out to the Home Depot for a few things. While we were there I wandered down the shelving aisle and came across some bookcases. Basic, but nice. So we picked a couple up, each 4 feet high, and should fit nicely in two spots in the computer room, I’ll put them together tonight.

Now I have work to do. *wanders off*

Sunday we decided to head out to do some shopping before dinner. We just needed to go to a couple stores to pick up little things, folders for organizing the bills in my desk, picture frames for some lithographs that I had kept packed away for years, dishtowels forthe kitchen. I don’t really like shopping, but the thought that our place would be so much nicer after having all these things made it a little better.

Afterwards we headed out to our favorite sushi place. We hadn’t been there in over six months because we began cutting back on how often we eat out. The dinner was amazing as always! We each got a Sapporo (a Japanese beer) and dined on seaweed salad, sashimi (sushi without the rice), and a couple yummie rolls. Then for dessert we had cheesecake, which was very good of course. I felt so good after that meal, it was a great Valentine’s Day (+1) dinner.

By the time we got home it was after six. We unpacked all the shopping bags, put away our newly aquired items, and I headed upstairs to the computer room to start organizing stuff with my new folders and putting pictures in their frames. I’m lucky Michael is so understanding about my crazy fascination with Disney cartoons and Star Wars! I framed three of my Disney lithographs, The Lion King, Sleeping Beauty, and Toy Story, and then put them around the room. It’s so nice to finally have a place for these. The lithographs came when I pre-purchased the videos from the Disney Store, they’ve been packed away since I bought them since I never had an appropriate place to put them, and a quick google search for buying them tells me that they run $25-40 each these days, pretty nice since the whole purchase price for the video+lithograph+extra thing (usually plastic watch) was $30 originally.

There are still boxes all around the computer room, we might go out this weekend and purchase a small bookshelf for our computer books, and maybe for displaying some of my toys. I’m trying to figure out what to do with all the Star Wars toys, back when I lived with my parents my bedroom was covered from wall to wall with toys and posters, in fact, I have pictures (1999):

Corner with shelves and more stuff

Computer Desk

Man, I loved that room. I still have a lot of this stuff, but I’m looking for a better way to display it all, especially those boxed toys. It’d be ashame to forever keep them packed away, what’s the fun in that?

Yesterday was a fairly typical monday. I’m starting a new project at work and that seems to be going fine so far.

Today I didn’t want to get out of bed, I’ve been so tired. We’ve been quite busy everyday, especially on our crazy weekends lately. I’m sure the cold weather hasn’t helped any, and this new commute to work means we leave at 6 am, while it’s still dark, and get homearound 5pm when it’s dark.

I guess that’s it for now, I have work to do *wanders off*

Yep, I’m online at home again. Our network is half set up, the basics are done so our workstations aren’t naked on the net %) Unfortunately my computer doesn’t really have an OS on it, since Michael was going to help me with a Gentoo install and then got busy with work. It’s ok though, at least I can check my mail, and links isn’t so bad to use for updating this.

I got my desk on thursday night, started putting it together on friday night, finished on saturday morning! So half the computer room is set up now, I’ll take pictures when the rest is ;)

We didn’t end up doing anything special for Valentine’s Day yesterday, we just had so much to do, and the ability to check my email was higher on my list of priorities than going out to dinner on the proper day, we’ll be going out tonight, probably for a nice sushi dinner.

In the morning we had a cord of wood delivered, do you know how much a cord is? A lot %) It took over 3 hours to stack it. We were able to have our first fire in our fireplace last night though, but the wood was damp so it started steaming a lot and then wouldn’t burn properly. Oh well, a few days in the garage should be sufficient to dry it out enough %)

Well I’m going to do some more cleaning of this room now *wanders off*

I was looking through my access logs this morning because I had some time and it’s a fun, relaxing thing to do on a friday morning, and it is a healthy habit. I discovered something very surprising about my Debian MPlayer How-To:

(elizabeth@r2q5) /var/log/apache $ grep “GET /MPlayer.html” access.log | wc -l
676

Nice. That access log covers about 5 days of traffic to my site, nearly 700 hits in 5 days to ONE site! But not *that* many are downloading the tools are they? *picks biggest codec*

(elizabeth@r2q5) /var/log/apache $ grep win32codecs.tar.bz2 access.log | wc -l
108

Now, while that’s not too bad, I think it is a problem. I have a bunch of tools to download on that page, which total about 14 mb, I’m serving 14mb about 20 times a day for just that one page of my high-traffic site, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing. So I have put a message on my mplayer page asking for mirrors of these files. At first I felt a little guilty asking for mirrors, but people do it all the time, it’s a better option than closing down the site and cutting off all the people who could benefit from it.

Here are some other big winners from those 5 days of logs:

/Isabella.html – 165
/Sailormoon.html – 161
/Living.html – 119

Nothing comes close to the mplayer how to.

Speaking of Sailormoon.html I finally got around to putting up my revisions. Like I mentioned in a post a while back I decided to redo it because of all the traffic it was getting, and the old version looked really lousy (I made it back in 2000 or so). I started by converting it all to PHP, so that the menu, header and footer would be easy to change, but then I realized that these sites have tons of google juice, and I really don’t want to take the time to point all these to other files (.php rather than .html). It’s not like my other pages that I’ve converted recently, like the #13thHour page that I’ll be changing often. I probably won’t change the Sailor Moon page, I’m not really intersted in it anymore. I’m happy with how it looks now.

We had the Philly Chix meeting last night. It was a really great meeting, 5 of us showed up! Yay! Now we’ve tied for the most populated meeting. It is also always interested into know what we all have in common outside of computers, we’re all just all around geeky. I think the meeting did a lot to cheer me up too, I missed spending “real life” time with friends, the last time we did was on New Years at the lan party. We’ve just been so busy.

It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow. I’m not entirely sure what we’re planning, a nice dinner out somewhere. We’re getting a cord of wood delivered in the morning so we’ll be able to have our first fire in our newly bricked fireplace! I’m excited, it’s a big fireplace, and it’ll be nice to be able to snuggle in front of it on Valentine’s day %D

I guess that’s it for now, I have some work to do. *wanders off*

I took a day off yesterday. Early in the morning a guy came out to take a look at our oil boiler, it’s old and will need to be replaced sometime in the next couple of years. That’s ok though, we’ve begun looking at our heating options (oil vs. natural gas), and it’ll be nice to have this choice pushed upon us.

I did a little bit of cleaning, but mostly spent the day relaxing, some much needed pushing away of worries and having me-time. I read, ate chocolate, and snuggled on the couch. Then spent some time doing a Rune cast.

I’m not a particularly religious person, nor spiritual, but I hold a special place in my mind for Runes. Rune stones are generally made of stone, clay or wood, and like tarot cards, you pull out a certain number, lay them out and read them. Different formations for different types of readings. My interest was sparked by my father and grandfather, who would cast them and for a while my father even kept a record of daily castings. Historically they are more part of my ancestry than anything Christian, their roots date back millennia, and I guess this is what really pulled me to them. So do I believe that a bunch of marked stones can tell me my future? Let’s just say that I believe in that strange pull that humans have toward spirituality, and that it’s sometimes important for one to exercise that in some sort of medium when they’re feeling lost. I choose runestones, and the readings from them make me content. Sure I make their message into something applicable to my life, but sometimes it works well to give me a fresh perspective on a situation, or leads me to discover a new way to tackle a problem. I have my own runes that I made back in high school out of clay.

So at the end of the day I was feeling better, felt ok this morning. Still down, but definately coming up.

I picked out a desk today! I looked around Ikea because of some suggestions, but still wasn’t pleased with their selection. Eventually Michael found one of the type I wanted, list price $350, Michael found by pairing up a sale and a discount that we could have it delivered to our house this week for only $159.98. From Office Max, of all places. Yay!

It’s been a busy day, I’m heading home soon. *wanders off*

I’m too hard on myself. I have known this for a long time, it’s always been this way, but it does lead to problems. I stress out too much over things, I think about them too much, and then when things do go wrong I tend to worry that it’s my fault until I’m assured that it’s not. So honestly, with most mistakes what is the worst outcome? Is it worth stressing myself out over? I don’t work in a business where people’s lives are on the line with my choices and actions. I need to just learn to relax and detatch.

I guess what spurred this comment on was the fact that I’ve been in a lousy mood recently, not particularly receptive to anyone or anything, depressed and crankie, I keep getting into moods where I’ll make elitist comments about everything I see on televison, and those moods are usually rare. I’m still unsure if this is all because of a change in medication, or still coming down from those months living with Michael’s mother, or just little stresses that are in my life that come with having a job and owning a house that I just need to learn to deal with. I need to cheer up, not even chocolate has been helping, all I’ve wanted to do is sleep since Thursday.

I haven’t been online since thursday either, so part of my extreme want to sleep might be that reading all day gets to be a little boring. *sigh*

Oh, we “fixed” the oven. Turns out there is a pilot light in the bottom, accessible by removing the broiler pan at the bottom, that had gone out when the gas was shut off for repairs shortly before we moved in. Of course Michael had to pull out the stove and follow the gas lines to discover it %)

The sewage smell coming from the washer pipe has stopped. I think this sewage smell problem was something they had fixed, maybe that first load of laundry was just a fluke, maybe some nastiness still stuck in the pipes, I did three loads of laundry this weekend and there was no smell. Still, the hose is held in place with duct tape, and that’s not cool.

On friday I stayed home, partially because I wasn’t physically feeling good, but I know that was probably just due to being depressed. I did some more cleaning, and went through a few of my boxes of stuff. One box was particularly interesting, and I was so amused by it I decided to sit down and take some notes on what I found, from my notes…:

• A test I took back in 3rd grade that got me out of Special Ed. My school had been fairly agressive in it’s efforts to find children with learning disabilities and to remedy them, I’m a perfect example of one of their successes, I was able to get out of special ed and my learning disability hasn’t played a major part in my life.
• A bill for an emergency room visit when I was a senior in High School. I was sitting in English class one September morning and I had a grand maul seizure, this is the bad kind, and I was taken from the school in an ambulence. I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital luckily, but it definately didn’t do much for my social life, such as it was. “Service date” was September 11, 1998, so it wasn’t even two weeks into the school year! And the total cost was $1,520.35 not covered by insurance because we didn’t have any, sometimes I wonder how my parents did it.
• A “Journal” published yearly by my High School “The Bartleby” this one for 1999, made of of artwork and writings typically submitted by the artist. I wouldn’t normally have bought this, and I didn’t submit my story to it, my English teacher Ms. Murphy did. So in a two page spread is my story “Cousins” you couldn’t imagine my surprise when I realized they had printed it, I had always assumed my writing was sub-standard (oh, right, this is me being hard on myself again)
• A “Student Of The Week” award from Mr. Casey’s class in 6th grade. We all gone one eventually, I’m not sure why this was kept, my crazy mother.
• A baby picture of me, I was 10 months old, blonde hair blue eyes, boy I was cute! I was holding a Cookie Monster stuffed toy. I should scan this when I get around to
  buying a new scanner.
• A printed 50 page javascript tutorial. I wanted to learn javascript once, and this was a good tutorial. Eventually I gave up, frustrated with how much things differed between IE and Netscape (this was circa 1999).
• A printed version of the mIRC 5.41 help file. As much as I don’t support mIRC these days, back then (and possibly now?) they had a damned good help file, you could learn to script anything from that, and it’s how I learned how to make the first R2D2 bot.
• A “System Resource Report” from basic old R2 back when he was a 450 mhz p3, in 1999. It’s funny how much of this makes sense now, back then I could barely get through the first page.
• A list of email addresses from people I knew when I first got online. Wow, I don’t even remember some of these people. Oh, and on the back is some of their old webpages, I wonder if any of these still work…
• The documentation for the first IRC server I ever ran, leia2.dyndns.org back in 1999. This server ran with wIRCD, a project which I believe is dead now, it was a simple to set up ircd for Windows, even gave you steps to go through to set up your first config file. Eventually I had a couple friends who ran servers too and we linked them up, had barely any population except for ourselves and a couple other friends, but it was fun! Too bad I don’t talk to any of those guys anymore, or know how to get into contact with them, those were good times.
• A “Break for moose, it could save your life” bumper sticker. These were given away by the N.H. Fish and Game department one summer, and was just too tempting to resist picking up, I should put this on my desk when I get one.
• A picture my youngest sister Annette drew for me when she was little, it’s a chinchilla and it says “Eve-y” this is so cute!
• “Maydra en una Adventura” and “Maydra y Pie Pequeno” a couple of childrens books I wrote for spanish class projects. This was a great little project, as much as I disliked Senor Crosby (high school spanish teacher) he did have good ideas from time to time. When I get a new scanner maybe I will scan these stories and put them up in some web viewable format.
• A bunch of old emails from back when I used to print out emails:
  • Some stupid forwards, one of an article published in a local paper about the kids in the school shootings (great article actually), a fwd from my sister Heather about internet addiction, this is from January 1999 sure didn’t take me long to get addicted, and here’s a fwd describing all the wonderful ways to use the word “fuck” I think my old buddy Tom_Servo sent me this.
  • An email from my friend Leslie in September of 1999 telling me about how Missouri sucks and she wished she was back in Maine *chuckles* how times change!
  • And email from Michael telling me how to set up my external dial up modem, this was 1999, the summer I was in Philadelphia for the first time living with my Aunt, I had never used dial up before. Michael was pretty funny in this email %) We were just friends at the time, dating other people, went on a double date that summer once even, very weird looking back now.
  • A few emails from my buddy Mark in Poland. I haven’t talked to him in a long time, I should email him sometime…
  • Emails from a friend of mine in India. Yeah I was all over the globe with my email buddies when I first got online, it was really amazing to me that I could really be communicating with someone a world away from me. Last I heard she had moved to California to study there, I should email her too…
  • Oh emails of bad teenage poetry! While going through my short bad poetry stage a few other former members of #13thHour were too, so we’d hold Poetry Readings. Yep, all those current members be glad you weren’t around then! *grin* After the readings some of the people would send me their poems and I’d post them to my website (then an angelfire site). It was actually a lot of fun, even if all our poetry was horrible.
  • All sorts of short
    emails from people I haven’t thought about in too long, Plas, Brian, Laran, Lela (er, well some things were meant to be buried).
  • Here are some of those stupid surveys you fill out that ask stupid questions. My guess is that I printed them out to read while I was offline. Crazy.
  • Scizor town newsletters. You see, as much as I tend to pass myself as well-adjusted I did do some odd things in my times of high school loneliness, like elect my stuffed animals to office for positions around my bedroom. Oh yes, we had a president, vice president, police chief, treasurers, all sorts of wonderful officials. I have a town meeting or two on cassette at home, I should burn them. Well there were also newsletters made up with articles about the town and current events that I cared about. In my defense, although I was in High School while doing all this it wasn’t alone! My sister Heather played with me, her stuffed animals were part of it too.

So why on earth do I have all this crap? Because I’m a packrat! And this stroll down memory lane was fun, so it did do some good!

I’m shopping for a desk. I decided that I hate desks that are specifically designed to be computer desks. I hate those little pull out keyboards, I hate those little “cabinets” that they make to put your computer in, and I hate that they generally don’t have much desk space for when I choose to do some writing or bill-paying. Most of all I hate that most of them I find are crappy and cheap, all “fake wood” that bubbles up after 6 months of (ab)use. So I’m thinking with going with just a basic desk, two drawers on each side, and a flat surface. I am going to head out to some stores this weekend to take a look at different brands so I’ll be better prepared while shopping online. So anyone have any pointers as to where I should shop online? Or should I just go to staples and pick up something there? I want a nice, basic desk that will last, and I want it to be under $300.

We have hard water. I’ve mentioned this before, but it is an issue. I’ll need to do some research about how to deal with it. Soap doesnt lather up like it should, and although I don’t give much thought to my hair, I have noticed that it’s not acting like it should, I’ve had a bad hair day for nearly a week. And I’ll need to know how to attack this from a cleaning prespective, when we moved in the sink in the bathroom was so coated with white mineral deposits that when we saw it chipping inside we thought it was the sink chipping! Nope, just deposits, and Michael was able to clean it up very nicely. So how to avoid this in the future? Keep up with frequent cleanings I guess, I have a feeling the previous owner of this house wasn’t exactly Mr. Clean… My biggest concern is the buildup around faucets, we’ll need to make sure they are cleaned periodically so that we don’t have another leak problem like in the kitchen. Hard water sucks.

I got an email from my Aunt Elaine tonight. Apparently my Aunt Mary Ellen is married again, for the 4th time! She’s marrying the guy she cheated on her last husband with. This guy is like 26 years old, she’s about 34… it’s just weird, I’m dating someone younger than her husband!

Hopefully we’ll be headed home soon. I’m not coming into work tomorrow because they don’t need me, and I hate getting out of bed and coming to work before the break of dawn if I don’t need to. Besides, I am starting a new project soon and I’ll have plenty of days where I only WISH I could stay home %)

That’s it I guess. *wanders off*

I hate Verizon.

Around the 27th of January, Michael called Verizon about getting phone service to our new house. By closing on the 29th our new phone line was all hooked up and working.

Around the 28th we contacted DCA.net so they could put in a request to get our DSL line from Verizon.

On Feb 3rd, Verizon denied our request for DSL because they could not find out phone number in their records. On that same day I went to get the mail and we recieved information about the Verizon phone billing system and to welcome us as their customers.

AND THEY CALL THEMSELVES A COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY!

So now the request has to be sent in again, it could be up to two more weeks before we have internet at home, and that’s assuming they can find our phone number this time. Grrr!

On the bright side, we have fixed a few of the problems in our house. The faucet to the washing machine just needed to be tightened so it would stop leaking. We have hard water, so the kitchen faucet just needed to be cleaned, the white buildup was so bad on the nozzle that pressure was building up in the faucet and causing it to find other ways of escaping. The addition of a p-valve to our washer shouldn’t be much trouble, we just need to buy the the proper piping and put it together. The oven on the other hand, I really don’t know, gas is something that’s not cool for the unskilled to mess with too much so maybe we should just call a repair man.

Michael went to turn off the upstairs light last night and the lightswitch sparked and stopped working properly. Sigh. Luckily the light could be turned off another way, but this is something else we’ll need to get looked at, electrical problems are not good.

Oh and I hate Windows again today, but I won’t get into it because it’ll just upset me %)

Yesterday I spent the day at home. I started cleaning when I got up around 7 am, and after about 2 hours my shoulder muscle that’s been bothering me started to hurt again. I took some advil and went back to cleaning. Within about an hour it started hurting badly aga
in, so I took a break. The whole day went like that, cleaning kitchen, take a break because the muscle hurts, start cleaning windows in bedroom, break, start cleaning baseboards, break. It was a long day, and not much fun, but I really needed to be done so I didn’t
want to just stop. I think it’s feeling better today, but I will take the advice of a friend of mine and grab some icy/hot on the way home from work.

Bleh, I keep complaining. It’s just been one of those days. I’m tired, and I’m sick of things breaking and people being stupid.

I was also able to unpack nearly all of my books and put them on shelves, also unpacked movies, and a bunch of knicknacks and stuff. It’s looking much more livable now, except for the pile of cardboard boxes in the livingroom. %)

I want to go home. *wanders off*

So I went to make french fries last night. I turned on the oven to heat it up and when I had the french fries ready to go in about 10 minutes later I opened the oven to put them in, it was cold. Gahh! I can hear the gas being turned on, but it’s not being lit, or something. I’m not even touching the dishwasher, I’m leaving the first real run of that to Michael %)

Well I’m not letting any of these little things get to me, sure it’s a bit of an inconvienence, and will need to be fixed when we have time. I think I’m finally getting a little better at not stressing myself out over things I can’t help. Good thing too, since I was started to go a little crazy.

On the bright side I successfully cooked the boca burgers on the gas stove, and was able to use the toaster oven for the fries.

I was invited to orkut this past weekend. I haven’t really had time to poke around it, besides to add a few friends and join two communities that were brought to my attention. My first impression of it, “pretty neat” but the timeout sucks, I am always multi-tasking and getting distracted by lots of things so I think I’ve logged in about a dozen times today because of it timing out.

I had my first meeting with a client today. It went well I think, about an hour and a half long, and I was able to show off the administration tools of the website. I finished feeling really good about it. You know, I honestly do LOVE to teach. Recently one of the women in the philly chix suggested I get into tutoring, and you know, I just might. I think I’d really enjoy that.

I love history too. Much more than I did even a couple years ago. Then I start to think, what is the use putting all this effort into learning about *history*? I came to the conclusion that it’s not particularly useful, but I enjoy it and that’s all that matters %)

After work we headed to the grocery store, since our two months stay with Michael’s mother meant that we had little of our own food left (well we could have had sesame seed and mayonase sandwiches, but that’s nasty). There are three grocery stores within a reasonable distance from our place that we’ve found. Henning’s in Harleysville, Clemens in Skippack, and Acme in Collegeville. We went to the Clemens the other day to pick up a couple things, and it was unimpressive, the same cramped store that I remembered. Last night we decided to go to Henning’s, since it’s on our way home from work. It’s a nice big store, very nice atmosphere, and although the prices are higher than they were at the Giant in North Wales, it was a very pleasant shopping experience. Shopping at new grocery stores is always a bit of a pain though, we had a whole routine down with Giant, and all stores have different selections of food, so adjusting our dining habits to accomidate what we can get takes some time.

We still have more unpacking to do, our bedroom is still full of boxes, and the spare bedroom is filled with boxes too. We must have done a very good job of packing all of our stuff into that apartment! It’s crazy how much stuff *I* have. And in some ways I feel like congratulating all the toys and knicknacks of mine that made it this far since I have thrown out SO MUCH stuff.

My upper back feels a bit better today, at least I can move without being in pain.

Well it looks like I’ll be staying home tomorrow. There is still more unpacking to do and they won’t have any work for me here. Not even dial up for over 24 hours! Hehe. I think it’ll be nice actually, it’s good to completely disconnect from time to time. No cable, no internet, and a nice mountain view from my new house, I won’t be suffering at all %)

Well I’m going home, so tired. *wanders off*