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*

Well my last entry was brief, so here’s what’s happened since my last real post.

Wednesday I took the day off from work since there wasn’t much for me to do. I didn’t do much that day, slept in a little, surfed the web for a while, made some cookies, I was mostly depressed all day for whatever reason. I think I was just stressed out, and nervous about becoming a home owner, and I really wasn’t looking forward to moving. My neck hurt too, which was frustrating, it had been hurting since monday.

Thursday morning we slept in a bit, then headed out to the title company where we were closing at. Got there a little after 11, closing was at 11:30. A representative or two from each side of the deal was there, adding up to about 8 of us in the conference room, and then they found some problems. Apparently some miscommunication between a couple of the companies led to a numbers problem which needed to be worked out before settlement could be final. They were all running around making phonecalls sending and recieving faxes, shuffling papers. The lawyer from the relocation company ended up signing what he needed to sign and leaving an hour into it.

We finally closed at 3:00. Now closings aren’t supposed to take this long of course, but everyone (after the nasty lawyer left) there had a good sense of humor about it all, and they were willing to work hard to get the deal we had planned on. In the end they found a way to fix everything, so we got everything that we expected.

We then drove up to Skippack, stopped at a little pizzeria there that we were familiar with, and brought a pizza up to the house. We were happy to find that the real estate company (seller) had plowed the driveway like our realtor had asked, but we were a little annoyed that they didn’t bother to clear off the walkway. Still, we had a nice lunch/dinner in the livingroom of our empty new house. We took the chance to walk around the house, check out things, plan painting (it all goes to white!), and poke all sorts of things. It was a great evening.

Friday we went to work. Afterwards we headed to the Home Depot and bought a nice metal shovel and a 40 pound bag of salt, stopped at Michael’s mother’s to pick up our cleaning supplies, then headed up to the house, by the time we got up there it was dark out. The walkway turned out to be more trouble than we thought, about 3 inches of compacted snow and about a half inch of solid ice at the bottom. The compacted snow could be scraped away eventually, but the ice was causing problems. After trying to shovel for a little bit we decided that we were just too tired to do the cleaning that we wanted to do, and we wanted to save our energy for Saturday, when we were planning on moving all the big stuff. We headed back to Mom’s, got there a little after 9, cooked up a couple boca pizzas for dinner and then I fell asleep while Michael was watching a show on the History Channel.

Saturday I got up around 10, wandered around for a while, had some breakfast, went into the basement to try and arrange some boxes to move. When Michael got up we started bringing small and light boxes upstairs that we could bring over first, since we planned to work on the ice/snow issue more before moving the big stuff, it would have been too dangerous otherwise. We headed up to the house around noon. Got there and work was being done on our new hot water heater, no water! So I cleaned out the fireplace, and started cleaning the kitchen. We took turns hacking away at the ice and snow outside, used up the 40 pound bag of salt in no time. Eventually the water was turned back on, but only cold, at least I was able to wash my hands after all that cleaning. Then it started getting dark, it was after 4, so we wouldn’t be able to get to the truck rental place in time to rent a truck even if we did want to do the move in the dark. So after a bit more cleaning we headed out to get some dinner, and then went back to Mom’s, I went to bed.

Sunday morning I got up around 8:30. Grabbed a bit of breakfas
t, took a shower, went downstairs to survey what we had to move. Unfortunately through this all I still had that neck ache, which seemed to actually be just a knot in my shoulder muscle on the left side. I REALLY wasn’t looking forward to moving! But this is the last move… and we’re moving into our new house! Those thoughts helped, a little. By 11:30 we had a truck in the driveway and started to load it up. Big things first, the desk, the couch, all sorts of heavy things, and with the slush the truck was pretty slippery, luckily none of us fell. Michael’s mother helped too, despite our protest, and although it was exhausting and required two breaks, we got it all loaded up by about 2. Michael’s mother kept offering the help of her boyfriend and his son, and we kept refusing, but finally before we left to drive up, she offered once more (they live in nearby Limerick) and we decided to give in and let them help us. I’m so glad we did. We got up there a little after 3, and within an hour the truck was unloaded and everything was in the house. In the beginning I helped moving things inside from the truck, but after a few boxes I resolved to stay in the house and keep the livingroom clear, so 3 boxes come in, and I disperse them to the bedrooms and laundry room so they wouldn’t have to walk all over the place, just come in and drop the boxes off. It all worked out pretty good. They were able to bring in the desk and the couch much more gracefully than just Michael and I could have, and faster. By the end we were all pretty tired, my upper back was killing me. I decided to stay at the house and do more cleaning while the guys drove the truck back.

While we were bringing everything in a couple contracters were doing a bit of work in the house. The hot water was turned back on by the time we got there, and they were laying the firebricks inside the fireplace when we got there, it looked great! They then went to the upstairs and removed the problematic insulation. Everyone left around the same time, and I was alone in the new house. I got a bunch of cleaning done, was able to put a lot of stuff away in the kitchen and bathroom, made the bed (and resisted the temptation to take a nap in it).

And then a bad thing happened.

When taking stuff off the counter I noticed a lot of water, I assumed this was all because many of the cardboard boxes on the counter had been sitting on the bottom of the truck, and had gotten a little slushy, or had picked up snow somewhere between the truck and the house. When I turned on the faucet it sputtered a little, but the contracter said that was because there was still air in the pipes from the water being shut off. So I had everything dry, I turned on the faucet, and noticed water leaking out of the base! Ah! I dried it up and then looked in the cabinet under the sink, more water! I removed everything from the cabinet and dried up as much water as I could. Then I wrapped a towel around the faucet, hoped it wasn’t a big problem, and waited for Michael to get home. Hopefully it’s just some little broken piece that can be replaced easily, and I don’t think the problem has existed long enough to cause any water damage, but still… ugh!

We went out for dinner when Michael got home, the same pizzeria we had gone to the previous night, and on thursday. Then we went back home, it was about 9 by then. I was exhausted, but Michael needed his jeans washed so we decided to try out our new washer and drier. First we noticed a bit of a sewage smell, not bad, but it was noticable, and we looked at the water connecting pipes, held together by duct tape, and decided that something needed to be done about that. Probably the sort of trap used in sinks so the smell doesn’t come up the sink, but water can go down. Bleh. Then we noticed that the faucet feeding into the washer was leaking a little, not bad enough to be serious, but still… *groan*

I guess these sorts of small problems are to be expected, and luckily these should be simple fixes.

And now it’s Monday, we’re at work. I ache a lot,
that small knot in my shoulder has turned into a monster that spans my whole upper back! Ouch %) When this day is over I’m going to go home, clean the bathtub really good, and take a nice long bath.

I am happy to be all moved into the house. It was so nice sleeping in our own bed in our own house! And it really is everything that we wanted, I keep getting excited about the littlest most obvious things, like the fact that we have a garage, or the tile floor in the bathroom. It all may seem silly to people who haven’t purchased their own home, but this is a huge thing, and I’m very glad I can be happy about it, very glad we didn’t need to make any comprimises.

Man, I’m tired. *wanders off*

We have a house now %)

It’s been a long week, I can’t believe it’s only wednesday.

This past weekend was fairly uneventful. Friday night we decieded to head out to the Drafting Room in Exton. It wasn’t the best experience there I’ve ever had, learned that they took my favorite chicken sandwich in the world off the menu! Ah! And we should probably plan to go on less busy nights, while the service wasn’t bad the food had “less love” than I’m used to from them. A nice evening anyway, got to have some yummie lambic, even some peche lindenmen’s on the tap! Mmm!

We went to Sam’s Club, a big bulk food store, with Michael’s mother on saturday, with the plan of “getting cleaning supplies and stuff for the house.” I remembered quickly once we arrived there that I really don’t like shopping, and I mostly hate people. Nothing like a huge discount store to remind you of those things! Smelly people everywhere, quickly grabbing up all the canned cheese whiz and bulk ramen then can find. It was a little scary. Still, we purchased some things we needed for the new house, and after about an hour there we were finally able to escape. I guess it was worth it %)

Afterwards we headed over to Sears in Willow Grove to pick up some vaccuum bags and check out appliances, while we were there we decided to look at coffee grinders, and unfortunately all they had were cheap plastic ones. So we left there without buying one. On the way to North Wales to get hair cuts we passed a Starbucks and we decided to stop to see if they had coffee grinders. The only one they had was similar to the plastic ones, but was metal and a little more expensive, about $30. So we decided to buy it. Yay a new coffee grinder! No more using the blender to grind beans! (which actually worked pretty well, but it’s big and a pain to clean each time we use it).

Sunday I didn’t really do anything, at least, I don’t remember doing anything, so it probably wasn’t important.

Monday we went to work, I wasn’t in the greatest mood, and my neck hurt. I haven’t been in a good mood all week. And on top of it, there was snow outside, we had to shovel and throw down salt for nearly a half hour before leaving for work, before having coffee! Once at work I got some things done, a couple hours of actual work. When I got home I was miserable, in a horribly crankie mood, I even excused myself from dinner early because I just didn’t want to be around anyone, I didn’t want to partake in conversation, and I really can’t stand people seeing me in a bad mood %) I went to bed fairly early because I didn’t want to be awake anymore.

Tuesday was similar, I didn’t want to be awake, and my neck hurt. I went into work, had a few hours of work to do. I learned yesterday the true meaning of “I’m sick of this” … one project has driven me so crazy that I nearly feel ill when I think of making more edits to it, I’m so sick of it! At the end of the day I asked the guy who generally gives me my tasks if he needed me today and he said that there wasn’t much work, and it would probably be best to just come in on friday so I could do it then. Cool. We left work a bit early, a little after 2, and headed over to our house. There we met with our real estate agent and did the last inspection before closing. Basically we just had to go through the house, make sure everything was in it’s proper place, make sure everything was working (the house had been “winterized” and they had just turned the water back on earlier in the day). Everything looked fine. It was nice to get up there again, I had only been inside the house once, when we first decided to buy it. We took a second look at the washer and dryer and made the decision to just stick with them until they die, set aside some money now into some sort of “appliance fund” so we’re not left high and dry when they do decide to die. I’m also expecting to have to replace the stove/oven soon, since it’s looking a bit old. The dishwasher and ‘fridge look great. We left the house around 4, just as the freezing rain was starting to come down. We had boca pizzas for dinn
er, and after talking a bit about broadband options I decided to head up to the bedroom early and just zone out and watch Nova.

Broadband… it seems that we can’t get speakeasy, which had some kickass plans. We’re going to go with verizon through dca.net (they are “DSL partners”). We’re going with the best residential plan 1.5 down, 384 up. While it’s not as good as speakeasy, at least we can get *some* DSL service, any broadband is better than Comcast! So that’s all ready to go, we’ve got our phone service lined up too and a new phone number. It’s all going nicely.

So today I’m at home. It’s very snowy out! But Michael made it to work alright. I got up around 8, puttered around the house for a while, decided to make some chocolate chip cookies because the chocolate chips were sitting on the counter. I haven’t been in a good mood today really, but the baking helped, and I didn’t screw them up completely this time! After making them I did some vaccuuming, cleaned out the fireplace, went outside to put more salt outside. All sorts of fun stuff. I think this solitary day off was good for me.

Once we get into the new house I’ll feel better.

Tomorrow Michael and I are off of work. We head to Lansdale around 11 to sign all the papers to officially buy our house! I’m excited, but harboring a bit of worry of course ;) Moving from apartment life to owning a home is pretty scary, no more just calling maintenence guys when something breaks! More worrying about the roof collapsing! But people do this everyday, I shouldn’t be too worried. Of course there is the move still to go, I swear, if it snows again on our moving day I’m going to cry %)

I had all sorts of ideas for other things to write, but now I forgot. *wanders off*

It’s Sunday, I guess I’ll just rundown the boring events since my cat post.

First, kitten stuff! On thursday night we were watching this history channel it’s barbarians week (I think I mentioned that in a previous post) and they had specials on ruthless dictators. Well I was joking that we should name the cat “Ivan the Terrible” and then a special on Caligula came on and I joked that we should name him Caligula.

-Michael- Hmm, you know, I actually like that name.
-Lyz- It does sound nice.

We got to work on friday morning determined to find a name for our kitten. Searching through all sorts of Egyptian names, then through names of gods, then did more research into Caligula. He had a hard life, he was perverse and paranoid, killed many people and enjoyed watching torture. At his height as emperor of Rome he thought himself a god, and even moved to formally deify his favorite sister. Not a nice guy, but you can’t deny that some of these attributes are cat-like! *grin* The name “Caligula” is actually just a nickname meaning “little boots” which was given to him by soliders at a camp he spent time with at with his father when he was younger.

We were quite attached to the name Caligula. We figured people who understood the reference would be amused, and it sounds neat otherwise!

Later that day we sent off the deposit. Then I emailed her to tell her we had decided on a name. The breeder the deposit yesterday and sent us pictures!

I came into work this morning, had a couple hours of work to do, it was good. They also asked me if I was interested in an upcoming project that they wanted to do in Zope next month. Yay! That means I’ll have steady work for a while next month.

I emailed a number of cat breeders yesterday, Maine Coons, Bengals, Norwegian Forest Cats, Egyptian Maus. This afternoon I got a few emails back, one of which was from the Egyptian Mau breeder in southern New Jersey. I was very excited to recieve this email, and even more excited to learn that the price of them was well within my given range AND the breeder had a couple kittens the color I wanted ready for adoption in March!

Egyptian Mau, Smoked Color – Image borrowed from http://www.aime.us/AIME_us.htm

Apparently the Silver are the most popular, but I was going for darker and less typical, and this color is beautiful, precisely what I wanted! A description of the coloration:

SMOKE: pale silver ground color across head, shoulders, legs, tail, and underside, with all hairs to be tipped in black. All markings jet black with a white to pale silver undercoat, with sufficient contrast against ground color for pattern to be plainly visible. Nose, lips, and eyes outlined in jet black. Upper throat area, chin, and around nostrils lightest in color. Nose leather: black. Paw pads: black with black between the toes and extending beyond the paws of the hind legs. Whiskers: black.

So cutey!

I was reading through some FAQ and here are some things about them:

• The Mau is a very gregarious and interactive cat that likes to be with people and other animals and join in with everything that is going on.
• A Mau will follow you around the house, ride on your shoulders and sit on your lap (usually on top of the book you are trying to read).
• Maus tend to bond very strongly to their owners and some Maus can be shy of strangers.
• The Maus are very athletic and will perform stunning leaps.
• They are moderately active but not as hyperactive as the Abyssinian; they are often referred to as the “gentle cousin” of the Aby.
• Maus are very protective of their toys carrying them around and growling at anyone who threatens to remove them.
• Maus are extremely intelligent and will learn to open cupboards and draws, especially the ones where food and toys are kept.
• Many Maus will play fetch (for what seems like hours) without any special training.
• Maus certainly do not have the loud voices of the oriental breeds such as the Siamese, however some are quite talkative. They will often chirp and chortle rather than mew.
• Although the Mau was accepted for championship status by CFA in 1977 it is still a very rare breed. CFA recorded a total of 566 Egyptian Mau kittens born in 1996 worldwide, compared with over 6,000 Siamese and over 95,000 Persians!
• The Egyptian Mau is a 100% domestic cat. It could be argued that maus are in fact the oldest breed of domestic cat since there are records of mau-like cats from thousands of years B.C.

This sounds like an appropriately active cat for my tastes.

They are medium sized cats, so not big like the Bengals or Maine Coons, but a medium size cat will fit nicely in our house.

So Michael and I are going to discuss this all more this evening, hopefully arrange a trip to the cattery sometime in the near future (maybe this weekend?) before we decide to put a deposit on one of these kittens. I’m very excited! Even if we don’t end up getting one from this litter (I’m quite picky) I definately know that I want this kind of cat.

More pictures!

Egyptian Mau, Smoked Color – Image b
orrowed from http://www.aime.us/AIME_us.htm

Kitten Egyptian Mau, Smoked Color – Image borrowed from http://www.geocities.com/Petsburgh/2239/

Kitten Egyptian Maus sleeping, Smoked Color Image borrowed from http://www.aime.us/AIME_us.htm

It’s thursday, only one more week until we close on our house %) That rocks.

I guess I’ll come into work tomorrow, not really sure I’ll have work to do, but I’ll keep myself occupied. *wanders off*

I heard on the news recently that “web logs” have, for the first time, been a “big thing” in a presidential election, and politics in general. Well it seems I got a taste of that with my last entry! It really is a wonderful platform for discussion, and I enjoy arguing with smart people %) Yay I’m a statistic!

I decided to post some of the entries I wrote offline. I think there are about a half dozen of them, all marked with a red “Offline entry, posted Jan 21…” note, and I made sure they were labelled as back-dated so they won’t fill up your friends lists ;) So you can wander to my main LJ page to see all my entries about Christmas and stuff if you feel so inclined.

This past weekend… hm, what did I do? Umm… We went to Unos on saturday afternoon to have some food with Bob. I guess that’s it, the rest of the weekend was spent just relaxing. I did some offline work on my websites, just tedious stuff that I could do while watching TV, I haven’t uploaded any of it yet because it requires some live tweaking, and creation of a number of symlinks since I changed the names of some files while switching them to PHP. I focused mostly on converting my 13thHour site to php, since the pages are almost all identical, and there are a lot of them, so it’s silly to have to edit the menu, for instance, 60 times when I want to make a change (well, I’d actually just use a perl script to change them all at once, but it’s still silly). I also decided that the Sailor Moon section of my page could use some work. I am not really into Sailor Moon anymore, I only put that section up on my site because I had it sitting around on my harddrive, and the design of it is pretty lousy. Well it turns out that it gets tons of hits, so I figured I should clean it up so it’s a bit more presentable, and make it in php. So sometime I’ll eventually get all these pages up on my site.

Hmmm, we went to the grocery store sunday night (the excitement never ceases!) and since it was “Eagles Game Sunday” the grocery stores were pretty empty compared to normal Sundays. We got the strangest cashier, we’ve gotten him before and I think I mentioned him here, he’s the guy that forces customers to interact with him. He asks “How are you?” and if you don’t respond he repeats himself “HEY HOW ARE YOU?” and when you do respond he tries to strike up a conversation. Well there were these two women in front of us, clearly of asian decent, and who didn’t speak very good english, well he’s laughing and telling them jokes about the eagles football game, and they are just nervously smiling and nodding while he laughs and laughs at his own jokes. In the midst of it he mentioned that he “doesnt like sports because in high school there were a lot of sports fans” The hell? This guy is like 55, and still sore about high school? So we finally check out, and as we’re loading the bags into the cart he takes the time to roll up our receipt, while he’s standing there rolling it for about 2 minutes he’s saying “Thank you for shopping Giant, we really appreciate … and have a nice evening… here you go!” It was all very uncomfortable. I know he’s just trying to do a good job and be friendly, but he goes WAY overboard.

On monday I went into work. Puttered around for some time, and then was told that it was a slow week for work that I could do and they probably wouldn’t need me until friday. Well that’s fine, I expected that after this last site launch that I would have some down time. I figured I’d come in anyway, since there is nice internet access there, and it’s generally more fun than staying here at ‘home’ anyway. So I spent monday pretty much just surfing the web, researching cats.

Cats? Yeah, we’re looking to buy a cat. I’ve been studying the breeds, their temperments, their care records, their cost and availability. I sort of settled on a Bengal cat, which I have had interest in since I saw my first pair back in 1995. They’re really great kitties, and have a “wild look” while being completely domesticated. I’m still looking though, can anyone recommend
any breeds that they prefer? I’m also looking at Maine Coon cats I am sure I could find a breeder in the area, but they are long-haired, and although I won’t dismiss a cat because of it’s hair length, I’m mostly looking at short-hairs. So any recommendations would be much appreciated %)

Now I realize that my choice to go to a breeder is frowned upon by a lot of people. I know all the arguments against it, so there really is no need to enlighten me, and I respect your position. All the cats I’ve ever had were strays/part of unwanted litters/cats people couldn’t keep, I’m just choosing to go a different route this time.

On tuesday I woke up with a bit of a headache, I decided that I’d rather stay in bed until it went away than go into work to play online. It was just a typical old sinus headache and went away after I drank lots of water and took some advil, so I spent the rest of the day just wandering around doing various things around the house. I watched a little bit of TV while working on my laptop, was able to catch an interesting phone interview on CNN with Mike Rowe (of mikerowesoft.com), and I watched a documentary on Attila the Hun. Whee! Then I decided to spend some time playing around with Michael’s mother’s computer, which is the only one online right now. Previously it was on Windows ME, but over the past few weeks Michael has taken it upon himself to turn this into a big conversion project, it’s now running Windows XP and Gentoo+KDE, it also got a ram upgrade and a nice external modem. It’s really quite amazing how great this is running! And while I’ve seen KDE, and poked around it briefly, I never completely realized how pretty KDE 3.1 is. And all the K-programs! Running in a KDE environment it’s all pretty cool. And kweather! What a great program, and not just because the author is a real life friend of ours, it’s a perfect replacement for the evil WeatherBug in Windows that was installed before. Transparency is very pretty, and Konsole is a pretty sweet term. Of course I’d never use KDE myself, but as a happy clicky GUI for people converting from Windows it’s many steps ahead of other window mangers (sorry Gnome). This is a real, good alternative for typical “check email and surf the web a little” users. I love linux, and Gentoo itself even continues to impress me. Right now I’m on this computer, and chatting, even with dial up this system is much more comfortable for me, I really really hate windows, and I don’t enjoy using it.

Ah computers. I did something really really stupid recently. I added a group to my home workstation, R2D2, for website access, so I wouldn’t have to be root to edit stuff in /var/www/ and it’d be all around better … well I created the group fine, added my user to it, everything is great. Then…

Wait, I didn’t just chown my whole system did I?
OH GOD.

Yep, a mistake in a command can do very bad things, I chowned my entire system to root. *bangs head on desk* Now as far as I know there is no easy fix for such an idiotic mistake. But how bad could it be? Hah, hah, HAHAHHAA. Postfix broken. MySQL broken, having to chown all my home directories back to their proper owners. I’m not sure what else is broken, since I haven’t been using the computer much, but I can’t imagine Zope survived either. So I thought about all this for a while, do I really want to take the time and go through my system fixing all the permissions, knowing full well that I will probably miss some and it could be a source of problems down the road forever? Bleh, no. This is a perfect excuse to reinstall my system, with Gentoo. *gasp!*

Yeah, for as long as I’ve been active in the linux community I’ve been a devoted Debian user, so it probably comes as a surprise that I’d consider switching, but I wasn’t kidding with how impressed I was with Gentoo. I started out in debian using testing, but then switched to stable because I was more comfortable with it’s security updates, and I really wanted a STABLE system, so unstable was pretty much out of the question. Well, needless to say stable
is old. I was living in the stone ages as far as software went, and although this didn’t really bother me before I started using Gentoo at work (“it works fine!” *shakes cane at new fangled things*), I quickly began to realize how this new stuff really was stable and good. Now I’m not too wild about compile times, but that’s a one time thing that I can handle. And I have a lot to learn with Gentoo, I am a total n00b, but I hear the docs are very good, so I’m not too worried. So Michael brought my computer into work Monday night to back it up and start the Gentoo install for me. I’m confident it’ll go fine, and I’ll have a spiffy system ready when we move into our new place!

Of course I’m going to continue to use debian on my laptop, and on servers, since I am comfortable with how it does those jobs. I do still love you debian!

This has been long. I’m going to go find some lunch and probably surf the web doing a little research on kitties and whatever else happens to grab my attention. *wanders off*