Caligula is very talkative. When we’re walking around the house doing things he has a tendancy to follow us and meow from time to time to let us know he’s still there. It’s really cute, but it has taken a bit of getting used to, Cargo usually just meowed when he was anticipating food.

Cargo… I miss Cargo. We’re trying to think through when the best time to bring Cargo home to meet Caligula for the first time. At first I thought it would be best after Caligula was fixed at 6 months old, but then I learned that cats probably won’t spray the house before 6-7 months old even if there are other cats around. So maybe it would be best to introduce them while Caligula is still a kitten, that way he can get used to the idea that Cargo will come over for visits sometimes, and it won’t be “Adult cat meets adult cat.” They are both healthy and up to date on vaccinations and vet visits.

Michael and I went for a walk on Wednesday night. It was the first time I had seen the Perkiomen Trail, and we live right next to it now! It was in the 60s out, so we just put on light shirts and headed out for a walk after dinner. I guess the walk turned out to be about an hour long, before I knew it we were halfway up Spring Mountain wondering where the mountain had gone. The it’s very wooded and trail climbs the mountain very slowly, so you don’t really realize you’re on it until you are coming down. It’s so cool living in this area, I love being able to get lost in the woods a few feet from my house %)

I need to work on my organization skills. I keep saying that I will, and this is how it always goes:

– I realize there is a problem because there are 150 files/directories in my home directory and 200 in my ~/images/ folder.
– I think “Hey, I really need to work on my organization skills.”
– I complain in my journal about how I have no organization skills.
– I finally get fed up with it, and on the fly create a bunch of directories to put stuff in, which include ~/bz2 ~/txt ~/perl ~/bashScripts.
– I start sorting my files into these directories, at first I’m good about it and delete things I really don’t need, but then I start `mv *.sh bashScripts/`.
– After about 2 hours my home directory is just a bunch of directories and a couple important files, I realize I’m sick of this now and it’s “good enough” further organization of folders like my ~/images directory ignored.
– folders like my ~/images directory become a lost cause.
– I can’t find anything.
– After a month or two this whole process repeats.

So maybe I just need to work on discipline, and take more time when going through my files so I don’t save a bunch of crap, my home directory is currently 5.7 gigs, GAH.

Over the past few months I have been thinking about learning other languages. Not programming/scripting languages, spoken ones, and I’ve spent some time thinking about which one to learn. French was up there on my list, simply because it’s widely used, Canada, France, Belgium. And I do have a frend who speaks French as well as English. But honestly, do I WANT to learn French? What is my purpose? So I started looking elsewhere. I stayed away from any of the Asian languages, I’m not up for learning an entirely new set of characters. German would be cool, since it’s the language of my ancestors and all that, but I don’t know any German speakers, and immersion is vital to my learning, I failed miserably learning spanish because I wasn’t in an environment where I could use it, in the 90s Maine didn’t have many spanish speakers, no spanish tv channels. I need to be around people who’d be supportive, who I could shout out “Hej!” to in IRC.

Hej?

Swedish. At least one on every public irc server I chat on. And supportive? Hell yeah. Can I trust them not to just teach me the way of swear words? Mostly! I also discovered that another english speaking woman in one of the channels is learning Swedish, and I asked her and she gave me a whole pile of links that she’s used to start learning. As swede f
riend of mine even sent me a bunch of swedish lessons in mp3 format, and offered to send me swedish movies and television programs when I felt that I had progressed enough to watch some. Yay!

Of course, I won’t get too excited yet. Learning another language is hard, tedious and takes a long time, and I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if this will just be another project that I attempt and fail at because I lack the patience and the drive. So I’ll give it my best shot.

Yay it’s Friday! %) *wanders off*

Let’s start with monday.

Monday I did a bunch of cleaning. In the afternoon I was thinking about Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and remembered that there had been an old text game from 1984. It was Zork-like and I had never played it! So I did a quick google search and found this site: DNA/HHGG Infocom Adventure. It’s an in-browser java version of the game! But I don’t much like java, so I gave the link to people in IRC (got Peacimowen and Tsukiyo addicted for a bit) and began looking around for a downloadable version of the actual game. I found it but it was a a .z5 file. What the heck is a .z5 file? Apparently it’s a Z-code file, and this is what Infocom wrote their text games in. So I needed an interpreter so I could play. I discovered xzip in Gentoo’s emerge. While it’s pretty basic, it seems to work nicely, screenshot here. Also that afternoon I was sitting in IRC complaining about dvd region encoding. After someone mentioned that some dvd-rom drives might be region free, I realized that I had never even tried to mount a dvd, so I went downstairs to grab one. I was pleasantly surprised when it mounted with no troubles, so I tried to play it with mplayer.

MPlayer was compiled WITHOUT libdvdread support!

Oops. I recompiled mplayer with dvd support, and guess what? It plays my dvds %D! YAY!

Monday evening we had to take Caligula into the vet. The last time we went to the vet it was relatively empty, this time there was a big barking dog that Caligula did NOT like. He sat in his carrier hissing and growling at the dog! The dog was taken away within a few minutes, but Caligula was already puffy-tailed and scared. We opened up the top of the carrier and tried to calm him down. About 10 minutes later we got into the exam room and when I went to take him out of his carrier, he growled at me! He didn’t want to come out. Eventually I was able to pull him out and give him to the vet tech. He was all puffy-tailed again, and growling. They weighed him, 4.1 pounds! He had gained a pound since we brought him home less than a month ago. They then took him away to take a blood sample and give him his vaccination. Poor Caligula did not like leaving us, and when they brought him back he was all scared and unhappy. His stool sample came back fine, his FIV and Feline Leukemia tests all came back negative, and we were sent off with our healthy, albeit upset, little kitty.

Tuesday morning he was acting a bit odd. He stayed in our bed even after I got up, and when I got out of the shower he was sleeping on the couch. He was like this for most of the day and we figure he was still upset about the vet visit the previous night.

Nita came over around 11 yesterday. She had never seen the house before, so I gave her the grand tour, even showed her the basement, and the garage. Of course she got to meet Caligula, and he was good, even if he was still in a funny mood. A little after noon we decided to head out to the Swamp Pike Pub. Unfortunately, when we got there we learned that their site was incorrect about the hours, and it didn’t open until 3, arg! So we decided to head up to a little italian place that Nita knew about. The food was pretty tastey, mmmm pepper poppers. Their dessert menu was pretty lousy, so we asked the waitress if she knew of any “Dessert places” in the area, and she recommended the Dutch Oven Bakery down the road. Mmmm bakeries. This bakery smelled soooo good! So I picked up some chocolate chip cookies for Michael, Nita picked out me some “funny cake” which she said I had to try, we got a chocolate cake to eat, and some crumb cake. Ok, so it was a lot, but it smelled so good in there! We went back to my house and ate some cake and talked for a while. Caligula was so sleepy so he didn’t really want to play.

It was a good day, Nita’s r
eally the only person I ever spend time around without Michael, and I hadn’t really seen her much lately because we’ve both been so busy. Yay for having a real life friend %)

While she was here I went out to get the mail, and Caligula’s tag came! It’s a blue paw tag from http://www.petsonthenet.co.nz/idtags.htm, a pet site based in New Zealand. At first I was reluctant to buy from so far away, but it was only $13.50 USD, including shipping! So we figured it was worth a couple weeks wait. I took some pictures today, they’re here: http://caligula.bevilacqua.us/gallery/04072004.php

It’s nice out today. I’m going to sit on the roof and read for a bit. *climbs out the window with book*

I’m definately sober now.

As briefly mentioned when I posted the link for the pictures, the LAN party was fun. And oh boy, it’s been a very long time since I’ve had that much to drink.

Our friend Bob came over in the afternoon to ride with us over to the party, and he wanted to see our new house. Caligula was great too, he was a little shy at first, but after a half hour or so he was sleeping on Bob’s lap. A guard cat he is not! Hehe. We got to mct and Nita’s around 6, right on time! And of course were the first ones there. It was ok though, we got the tour of the house they’re renting, it’s nice and big %)

People started showing up around 7, n-tropy (with ut2k4 cds!), waltman, gr, and a couple people I hadn’t met before. Once UT2k4 was installed on my machine I started playing with n-tropy and Bob, as the installs were finished more people would join up, it was pretty fun. Nita started making some fruity drinks (ice, margarita mix, vodka, and this time, tequila). Of course, as is quite normal with me, the start of the fruity drinks means the end of my lan game playing. I’m not sure what time that was, but it worked out fine, since I wanted to hang out with Nita and get drunk, and a couple people didn’t bring computers so they were able to play on mine. UT2k4 seemed to run fine in linux, but it seg faulted 3 times on my machine, and at least once on Michael’s. We figure it is just because of the version of xserver that Gentoo uses *shrug* It’d probably crash for me that many times in Windows as well as the night wore on, and I’d need a no-cd crack if I had wanted to run it in Windows. Oh yes, the linux version doesn’t require the cd to start it, just like normal ut and ut2k3, yay!

While Nita was making another batch of fruity drinks I noticed that gr and co. had brought Guinness. I do like Guinness, and I order it from the tap when we go to lunch with Bob at Unos, but I had never tried the stuff in the can. In the can there is a little CO2 cartridge, so it foams up the beer in the can when you open it. Drinking from the can is gross, so I poured it into a nice beer glass, of course I am used to pouring foamy belgian ales so I had to be taught how to properly pour a Guinness. It was quite strong, more so than I would have liked really, and as I mentioned in my last entry, I like it from the tap much better. I probably won’t be buying Guinness in a can anytime soon.

So, much, fruity, drink. I finished the Guinness and started on the potent fruity drink again, and I got drunk. People have assured me that I’m a happy drunk, and I’ve never made much of a fool of myself, except for when I try to act I’m sober and have a conversation with a completely sober person. I should not do that. I always end up losing my train of thought, giggling, and saying “man, I’m DRUNK!” It’s much better just to sit and talk with Nita, at least then when I lose my train of thought it’s to another drunk person and it’s less embarrassing.

I had so much fun. Nita and I polished off almost a whole bottle of vodka, not a huge bottle, less than a liter I’d say, but that was mixed with tequila. I didn’t realize we could drink so much! We made sure to keep the snack bowls stocked so that we wouldn’t get sick, and it worked nicely. I ate so much junk food, toward the end of our fruity drinks I know I was almost continously eating pretzels, chips and those horrible cheese balls[1].

By this time I was drunk, and in this picture I think I was defending some silly Star Wars thing to sober people. From the left: me, Nita, mct, waltman, n-tropy, two powerbooks and Michael’s thinkpad.

I guess it was around 3 (well, it was 2, but daylight savings time, so new time 3 am) when people started leaving. We stuck around with n-tropy swapping some big media files (I now have season
s 5-8 of Red Dwarf!) until around 5. Sometime during this mct and Nita brought out a 750ml bottle of Lindemans Kriek lambic, it was about half full and they assured me that they’d had it for a while and would probably not drink it. Well I was already drunk, and it’s difficult for me to refuse a lambic! So I drank it, mmmm cherry lambic, and ate some reeses peanut butter eggs. Before we left n-tropy gave me an old Wallace and Gromit calendar that he found of his, the really interesting thing about this calendar is that December is a scene of Wallace and Gromit dressed up for Christmas, which doesn’t show up any of the movies, so it might have been made special for the calendar that year, which is pretty cool %) He also let me borrow his DVDs of “Firefly” a scifi series which mct and Nita had been borrowing previously.

It was a great party.

When I got home I drank a glass of water and took a glass with me to bed. Bob crashed on our couch for a couple hours and so Caligula wouldn’t bother him we closed him in our room. Of course Caligula was lonely for us and wanted to play. He ended up knocking over my water and jumping and clawing us until it was beginning to be light out (ahh morning!). Eventually he settled down and I was able to sleep. I woke up around 8 am thirsty, so I got a new glass of water, and it wasn’t until I lied back in bed and the room was spinning that I realized I was still drunk. Waking up still drunk is funny. I got up again around 10, came upstairs and got those pictures off my camera. I wasn’t hung over in the traditional sense, no headache, I seemed to be properly hydrated, I was just very very sore. By the time I wrote that short journal entry around noon I realized that it was quite insane for me to be awake. I went back downstairs and crawled into bed, but Caligula wanted to walk all over the bed and meow, so rather than allowing him to wake up Michael I decided to go relax on the couch, Caligula followed me and we both slept there for a couple hours.

So yesterday was a slow, relaxing, achey day. We didn’t get anything acomplished since we didn’t actually get dressed until 5 pm. Around 7 we had some boca pizza and watched the first DVD of Firefly. It’s not a bad show, not something I’d watch looking for intellectual stimulation, and I don’t think I could have watched with with commercials, but for a night like last night where I just wanted to put myself on autopilot it was great.

Today, I’m still tired, but I really should do a bit of cleaning. It’s cold out (hovering around 30) so no plans for outside today. At 7 tonight Caligula gets to go to the vet again for a couple routine tests and the last of his vaccinations. Nita has some time off, so hopefully we’ll be able to get together sometime this week, I miss going out with her.

*Yawn* Must go do some cleaning now. *wanders off*

[1] Cheese ball snacks are evil, I always manage to convince myself that I don’t like them, but then I end up drunk at a party and I realize that as horribly fake as they are, they really aren’t bad.

It’s noon, we lost an hour last night. The LAN party rocked. It was held at and ‘s place. I got to meet a couple of new people, one of whom I think I recall seeing at a PLUG meeting once. came with canned Guinness, it was the first time I had ever tried the canned stuff, I definately prefer the tap. Oh right, this was a LAN party, I played a bit of UT2k4, but then wandered off to get drunk with on fruity drinks and let other people use my computer. You know what, I’m either still drunk or just phenomenally exhausted, so I’m just going to post the link to the pictures and go back to bed.

I met my first genetically engineered fish the other day. It was a Red Glow Danio, or GloFish, according to the local pet store website:

New on the market. These fish actually glow in the dark under black lights or atinic blue lights. These fish have been genetically altered using jellyfish and/or anenome DNA. You can be among the first in the country to own these fish!

I heard about these fish last year, there was a big uproar about them and California banned them. My first thought was “I want one!” As soon as that thought was half finished I started thinking about the ramifications of this. All of a sudden visons of Brave New World and Gattaca floating in my mind. I also thought of an argument against animals genetically engineered for our benefit, when does it stop? When do we start creating legless, beakless chickens because it’s more convienient for food and egg production? I’m no fan of chickens, but there is a point where it just becomes creepy. What is that point? Who decides? Ah these are interesting questions that it seems my generation is already beginning to struggle with.

Still, I love zebra fish, and GloFish are damn cool. If I was in the position to invest in fish they’d be at the top of my list.

While writing this I did a quick search to find an article about California’s ban on them, and it turns out that just yesterday there was news about them reconsidering the ban: DFG commissioner’s wife lobbies for GloFish – SACRAMENTO — California regulators voted Thursday to reconsider the nation’s only ban on biotech household pets after one commissioner said he was intensively lobbied by his wife, a household aquarium owner who wants to buy the outlawed fluorescent fish…

The pet store we were at was just a nice local one in Harleysville. It was large for just a local non-chain store, it smelled like a pet store, and they had all sorts of great stuff. Both Michael and I feel much more comfortable giving our money to a place like that than the huge Petsmart or Petco chains in the area (remember my fear of cookie cutter chain stores?), and supporting local business is good. They use an old credit card machine that has a noticable dial up connection to process requests, and dozens of hand-written notes decorated the area around the register with various prices and PLUs. When I noticed they had a website I expected the kind of poorly designed local store website that I usually see. Boy was I in for a surprise. Their website is finsfeatherspawsclaws.com, and not only is it beautiful, it’s up to date! Specials of the *week*! Someone really takes time to handle this website, and I’m impressed. Yay for local shops with kickass websites!

I was checking the forecast this morning, hoping Sunday would be nice enough to do a bit of hiking around some trails here, and I saw this:

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? It’s April! No more snow %( my poor flowers. It’s supposed to get back up into the 50’s on Tuesday. Maybe next weekend will be better for doing some hiking.

But now I need to make a few adjustments on my system before the LAN party this evening. Yay LAN party! I’m so excited. *wanders off*

I should have learned long ago that I can’t “just read the introduction to” a Douglas Adams book. I’m a Douglas Adams fan, his books have me in tears from laughing so hard. When I found a copy of Salmon of Doubt at the library last night I HAD to take it out and push back my plans for other books. When we got home I sat down on the couch to read the first few pages, and I was sucked in. I was practically walking around the house doing a few things with my nose stuck in the book, I even laughed out loud at some parts. Then it hit me, he’s dead. Of course I knew this, I remember my shock the day it happened, and I had just read all the introductions talking about how he had passed on and the reason for the publishing of the book, but it wasn’t until I was deep in his adventures that I realized how horribly sad it was that there will be no more. *Wipes eyes on trusty towel*

I tossed all my design ideas for princessleia.com. I just got frustrated. I think my trouble is mostly that I compare my own design skills to people who are really good, I do that in all aspects of my life and I really should stop. But in my mind too often either my designs are too dark, or too light, or not “me” enough, or they just suck. So rather than redoing the whole front page and risking I’d make it worse I just did a bit of tweaking. I got rid of the light purple on the top, because it bothered me and moved it all to the dark purple surrounding it all. I can be happy with that design for a while. I also went through and reorganized the stuff in the menus, so it’s much more sane. I decreased the font size as well, since 14px was a bit large.

Now I need content for the middle. My site has tons of stuff, but what to put in the center of the main page? Right now I have a boring old history that I doubt anyone ever reads. I used to have an updates thing, listed all my previous updates, I might go back to that. Or I might do some sort of a “who what when where why…” questions about the site. Hmm….

Tomorrow evening we’re going to a friend’s for a LAN party. We’re actually going to go to this one, we haven’t seen these friends since last year and we’re really looking forward to seeing their new place.

Well I need to do some stuff *wanders off*

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.

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*