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*

I have all sorts of things to talk and complain about today. I think it’s the weather, this bitter cold has got me into a tired mood. Weather, I’ll start off with that.

It’s been cold. When it first dropped into the 20s I laughed at the news people who were going on and on about the “bitter cold” I mean come on, I’m from Maine! In January the temperature barely rises above 20 %) Then it started to get REALLY cold, today I woke up and it was in the single digits outside, and windy, so we had a wind chill of about 10 below. *Shiver* that’s cold! But at least I’m not up north any further, I was talking to crypticreign yesterday and he said the temperatures are even lower up in Boston. Now I’m not usually one to complain about the cold, even when it’s this cold, but when I have to wake up at 5 am the LAST thing I want is to have to suffer in the miserable cold as well, cold and tired do not mix well %)

I ended up cancelling the Philly Chix meeting last night, getting down there around 8 probably would not have been too horrible, but by 10 or so I think the really low wind chill would have been something we wouldn’t be able to handle and be happy with, especially if we were unable to get parking close to the bookstore. We’ll resume the regular meetings next month.

But it could be worse, I heard on NPR this morning that in the White Mountains of New Hampshire the temps hit -44, with wind chills around -100. Gaah.

Maine is north, I bet it’s cold there too. My 14 year old sister is up there and I got a chance to talk to her yesterday, she had all sorts of interesting things to say:

$sister: have u heard anything yet?
Leia26: no
Leia26: about what?
$sister: about me getting aresseted and shit
Leia26: no o_o
$sister: wow dude i got lik 3 court dates now
Leia26: what did you do this time?
$sister: heraament…cimual conduct..asalt..tampering..trettening

At least she spelled tampering correctly. She wouldn’t tell me what exactly she did, I’m not sure I wanted to know. I really don’t understand how she’s become such a problem child %( maybe my other sister and I stole all the intelligence and “good girl” genes and didn’t leave her with any. Then again, she did have quite a difficult time growing up, she’s always been active, then my parent’s divorce, me leaving (we were VERY close when she was younger, I was “Bethy Mommy”), and her lack of disapline following the divorce (she lived with my mother, but they both wanted to stay on her good side by being the “nice parent”). It’s sad really, I hate to see my sister throw away her life like this. It’s not like I can do anything about it though, so I just sit down here in PA and sigh.

My other sister is in Alberta seeing her boyfriend. I sent her a quick email this morning to see how she’s doing up there.

So the football team here in Philly is apparently doing good, some championship game is on Sunday, do you know what that means? For the past two weeks at least 50% of each local news broadcast has been stupid football stuff, 45% about the cold weather, and 5% of other local junk. I can’t believe how mind-numbing the local news has become. Have you ever seen these interviews with football players? Especially after a game, they mumble about fate and how things were “meant to be” and how important football is, yadda yadda yadda… I can’t stand to watch it for more than a couple minutes because I’m just overwhelmed with the stupidity of it all, it really pains me to watch these idiots. They move between football and weather the whole broadcast, inevitably “showing” how cold it is by having some poor tiny weather person standing in the windy cold to report while they shiver. Are we really such a nation of sadists that enjoy watching this? Why on earth do they do it? And then they interview cold people on the streets “Boy it’s cold!” No kidding, can we move on? “Sure! THE EAGLES are headed…” *groan*

And then the national news at 6:30, it doesn’t matter what channel it is (CBS, ABC, NBC),
we usually choose NBC for whatever reason. Not only is it VERY US-centric and hardly ever covering anything but popular stories (Michael Jackson and our soliders dying in Iraq), but it’s riddled with commercials! The last 15 minutes of the half hour program is nearly all commercials, it very difficult for me to watch. I HATE commercials %)

I think I am going to give up trying to watch any of this news. I can get all my news via the internet and news radio anyway.

Do I have more to complain about? Oh yes! After this whole mars rover news we learned that Bush plans to put into action all sorts of new space plans. It’s no a coincidence that it’s an election year. How stupid does he think we are? Are we this stupid? All Bush has done during his years in office is spend money and cut taxes, does he live in the same economic world as the rest of us? It makes me so angry. Why not come up with a plan that’s remotely sane, say… “I’ll give every US Citizen health insurance” at least I could support that, even if I know he’ll never actually do it.

So now you may wonder, am I a Democrat or a Republican? Who am I voting for in November?

Neither. And I don’t know who I’m voting for.

Apparently most of my views are quite Republican/Conservative (in those online quizzes I always fall into this category), and I’m not a fan of big federal government, I don’t think illegal immigrants should have any sort of government benefits, I am loudy opposed to affirmative action, and I think all law-abiding citizens should have the right to a gun if they want one.

But I do hold many views that would generally be considered Democratic/Liberal. Separation of church and state is VERY important, I believe gays and lesbians should be able to marry and benefit from the same services as straight couples (as a committed yet unmarried woman myself I know all too well the benefits such couples lose out on), I’m pro-choice (I’d never have an abortion myself, but I don’t believe it can be effectively legislated), I don’t think cutting taxes is the answer.

Oh and I hate politics, but I think most everyone does.

Enough complaining for now. I’ve been bringing my laptop into work this week to listen to music. It’s been working out very nicely, not exactly the size of an iPod, but it’s cheaper :D And hey, I need a workout carrying this to and from work, since all my other excercise plans have fizzled and died this winter. *pats the good laptop mp3/ogg player*

More good news, we pretty much have all the paperwork and meetings done for getting our house! Insurance in place, mortgage rate locked in and all ready to go, it should be smooth sailing for our expected closing date of January 29th. YAY! %)

I guess I’m going to work on some things on my website, I am sort of in a design mood, so I’ll probably work on fixing some existing pages to make them prettier.

Take care everyone, and stay warm %) *wanders off*

http://www.city-data.com/city/Schwenksville-Pennsylvania.html (this site rocks).

This is the town I will be living in.

Population (year 2000): 1,693

Neat.

Of course the only picture on that site of the town is a view of the nuclear power plant cooling towers that are in nearby Limerick. Speaking of which, while visiting Michael’s friend Bill this weekend, he gave us a housewarming gift of KI pills. Ha. Ha.

I feel much better this week.

*wanders off*

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

Hmm, I went online and posted an entry about it already. Long days, a lot of stress, bad news concerning my health, it’s just been a mess.

Friday night we ended up staying at work until nearly 11 because Michael had so much work to do. People were coming to him all day with new projects that they wanted him to get done that day, on top of the other stuff he already had to do. My day actually wasn’t bad at all, I did a lot of basic html work which was perfect for how numb my brain was from the whole week %) and I had a bit of time online with my friends, got to update my website in a few places. For dinner we left work for a little while and went to our favorite Chinese place, Natural Village. I ordered “Phoenix and Dragon Fly Together” which was a yummie chicken and shrimp dish, but I ordered the vegan one, so no meat! I was very impressed again, the vegan shrimp really had a shrimpy taste! I keep being impressed by that place %)

I was exhausted when we finally did go home. Slept until about noon on Saturday morning.

When I got up on Saturday morning I took a shower and in the mid afternoon we headed up to Michael’s friend Bill’s house. Bill has a farm, but it’s more of a hobby farm, which is very cool. They have 4 buildings that I could see, three sheep, a few chickens, and 20 acres of land. It’s the “someday when I have enough money for my dream house” House. He’s go so much cool stuff %) He was having a little get together with a lot of his friends, so it was pretty busy and there were people everywhere. It was fun though, even if I was horribly shy. Bill and his wife are excellent hosts, very nice people, and of course there was lots of yummie food!

We ended up leaving around 9. On the way up we learned that he lived off of route 29, our new house is off of 29 too! So we decided to drive down 29 to see how far we’d be. Turns out it was only about 20 minutes, cool. We then decided to try and take 63 part of the way home, just because I was curious as to how far exactly our place was to Lansdale via 63. Well it ended up being quite a long ride home when we were done with it %) but it was worth it, I have a better idea of how the area is set up, and can now cross 63 off my list of commute routes! Ugh. Depending on traffic we’re really starting to think taking the northeast extention of the turnpike on our commute will be the best, even if it is 90 cents each way. Maybe we should get an EZ-Pass.

There is some cool news this week though. Sam, the woman I started the Philly Chix with, recently purchased philly-chix.org! Yay %) Michael is going to set up all the stuff on our side so that I can still host it, and we’re going to buy phillychix.org as well, probably sometime this week, so we’ll have both pointing to the site (this way we won’t have to worry about some pr0n site grabbing one of them). So finally we’re going to have a cool domain for the Philly Chix. Speaking of which, the next meeting of the Philly Chix is this week, on thursday. We’ll probably take the train from Glenside down into the city. Should be fun, and hopefully by then we will have the new site URL up and running %)

Have I mentioned that I recently found the Swenksville website? Well it’s horrible %) It seems that it’s hosted on some free ISP website, which is so sad! And the design could use quite a bit of work as well. If I were in a position to redo the site with them with a good domain name I would, but we really can’t afford to host another site right now. The site is very cool though, a lot of older photographs of the town from the early 20th century, and even a whole town history! I grabbed the town history as soon as I saw it and printed it out (all 11 pages). I read it last night, and it was so cool %) The original European settlers there were from Germany, George Washington stayed in the area once during the Revolutionary war, the borough was incorporated in 1903, originally there was a copper mine owned by the English, and a variety of interestin
g little tidbits and “we don’t know if this is true or not, but the story says..” sections. It was very interesting reading, even if I’m not really familiar enough with the “Families Of The Area” to understand some of the implied amusement in some sections. I also learned from this that the library in town is all volunteer, heeey I want to work at a library! I think that would be a cool volunteer job if they need the help, I could do that between contract jobs. I love history.

Today, well I said at the party last night that I was going to sleep all day (to which Bob replied “It’s good to have plans” hehehe), but I did actually need to get up so that I could get some sleep tonight. I guess we aren’t going to do anything. Michael mentioned that he might want to light a fire in the fireplace, that would be nice to snuggly by with a book or laptop %) I need to do some laundry too. I’ll find ways to occupy myself. It should be a nice relaxing day.

Not sure how much I’ll work this week, the two big projects I was brought on for in December are both at a point where I can do little more for them. I am sure I could find a way to occupy all my time if I do end up having to stay home, but I’d almost rather come into work with no work than stay here sans internet access. *shrugs* We’ll see.

I’ve been writing entries offline on my laptop a couple times a week, I’ll get around to putting them up once we’re settled in our new place just so there isn’t a huge hole in this journal, but for now since I’m online I’ll just give a brief update.

Things have been difficult. Not the house stuff, that’s all going well, but my entire situation right now. I’m excited about the house, I even have new pictures of the outside that we took for the insurance company (click here to see new pictures), yay! But everything else has been a bit rough.

I haven’t been sleeping the best lately, trying to get used to this early schedule is very difficult especially since I can’t bring myself to preserve it during the weekend as well. How could I go to bed at 10 pm and wake up at 5 am when I don’t have to? *sigh* This exhaustion has added a lot to my stress.

This week at work I experienced my first site launch. On tuesday I came in, already tired from a lousy night sleep the night before, and I learned that they expected to have a site launched with content they had just recieved by that night. So I came into work at 6:30 am and wasn’t able to leave until the site was in launchable condition, at 10:30 pm. Gah. I am definately not used to 16 hour days, I made foolish mistakes because I was so exhausted later in the night. But we got the site up and running. The rest of this week was spent running around fixing little problems with the site, I was cursing and Netscape6 and IE for quite some time as well. It’s all been very hard. I never realized how complicated it would be dealing with clients %) We want to make them happy, but sometimes things are confused, or I don’t get the information I need, etc. Still, I feel very acomplished, and I’m happy I could get this done, but it still took quite a toll on me. On wednesday I was so frustrated I couldn’t even look at a computer after work, and don’t even get me close to a webpage right now! Today I’m better though, I did some work to put up those house pictures on my website, and the lan party pictures from New Years Eve.

So I am very busy at work, and then I go “Home.” Since we’re living with Michael’s mother it’s not nearly as comfortable to having our own place. She’s doing everything she can to make us feel at home, I don’t think anyone I’ve ever lived with has done better, but there is always a bit of stress when you’re living with someone else like this. Every night this week I was a complete wreck by the time I retired with Michael to our bedroom. Tired, crankie, down. I just want to sleep.

The weather hasn’t helped either. Usually when I’m depressed taking a walk is very helpful, but the weather has been in the 20s most of the week, and taking a walk in that would probably just make me uncomfortable. This cold cold weather is such a waste without snow! But snow isn’t in the forecast anytime soon. *sigh*

I got a call from my doctor last night. I had an appointment last month, some follow ups to the a small procedure I had last year to remove some “irrelgular” cells (non-cancerous, but still potentially troublesome). They told me “if we don’t call you in the next 3 weeks you have nothing to worry about” … well this phone call was within those 3 weeks %( I was worried so I called last night, but the office was close already. Great, I already had enough on my mind last night when I was going to bed. So I called this morning, it’s not good news, there are traces of bad cells again. I need to go back in a couple months for a few more tests for more follow ups to see what we want to do.

I am not sure if my lack of broadband at home is adding much to my stress level, but it is another change that I am handling. I’m not used to being so separated from my online people. I can still drop by in IRC sometimes, but I can’t be as nearly as attentive as I was before. And I miss reading everyone’s journal’s all the time. I guess all of this is adding to the seclusion I am feeling right now.

I’m definately going
to be spending this weekend relaxing.

Gah this entry sounds so miserable. It’s just been a lousy week.

Oh and here are those LAN party pictures from New Years Eve. go to lan party pictures! *wanders off*

Offline Entry, Posted Jan 21, 2004

And as I expected things are starting off nicely.

The LAN party on New Years Eve was fun, we got there around 8, were able to hang out with all our friends, eat some yummie pizza and snacks, and I brought along my laptop here so that I could install xv and vorbis-tools. Around 10 or so we started playing some UT, YAY! We played some of the cool Chaos maps, nothing like being able to kill your UT opponents with a sword or crossbow ;) Around midnight we all went into the living room and watched the ball drop. Watched a bit of Jay Leno and then went back to play a bit more UT. We stayed until after 2, when we decided that being up for over 20 hours in one day was enough, I was so tired. I took some pictures while we were there (yeah, I took them, so there aren’t any of me %P), they are still on the camera though, silly not having much internet! Oh well I’ll get them online eventually.

We got home from their place by taking rt 73, it took under 25 minutes, nice. No wonder 73 is so crazy busy during rush hour, it’s really the most direct route from where our work is and our new home is. I think I need a map of Montgomery County so I can get a better idea of where we are and all the roads we can take to get to home. I’m still figuring on about an hour commute.

On New Years Day we sort of wanted to go out and do something. Most things were closed, and we knew the movie theaters would be packed, so we decided to go out for a drive. We headed up to Easton, which is further north, and right on the PA/NJ border. It was a great drive, all we did when we got up there is drive around, they have a Crayola Factory! Since there were pretty signs pointing people in the direction of it I can only assume that it’s a neat factory designed to hav visitors, I think I’d like to go sometime %) It was cool to see Easton though, it’s a nice little city, reminded me a lot of Harrisburg. When we got back in town we decided to try and go out to the Drafting Room for dinner, but it was closed. So we just came back home and had some leftover pasta. I’d say it was a nice day though, even if a bit of depression was creeping into both Michael’s and my mood.

Yeah, a bit of depression, despite the whole wonderful house thing, there is a lot on our minds right now, and it’s difficult sometimes when things are so crazy. I think both of us are suffering from “lack of me time” as well. I am so used to having entire days to myself, working on my own projects and just being *alone* and Michael is used to having at least the drive home alone, and of course having our own place. It’s difficult for us to be together all the time. Things will be better when we have a house though, it’ll be our place to monopolize, we won’t have to feel imposing when we take over more than just our own bedroom.

*Pokes the laptop* Hrm. I think some of this hardware is buggy, I get some very strange things happening that shouldn’t happen on a basic stable debian system such as this. And has anyone with warm hands ever used a touchpad? I find that sometimes the warmth from my hands is so great that just the movement of my hands on the keyboard over the touchpad is enough to move the mouse around on my screen. Very annoying. Then again, the positive things about finally having even a slow laptop like this one FAR outweigh the things I complain about *hugs R2A6* like the fact that I can sit in the livingroom here and write this.

The rest of the computers are now in the basement again, but they are all hooked up. The other day Michael decided he wanted them online so he set up his mother’s computer as a dial up gateway and put the router downstairs with ethernet running from her computer to the basement. It’s definately a setup that takes advantage of the resources we currently have, but I haven’t really utilized it. I prepared myself for this time offline, and I lined up a lot of things to work on offline, so I’m not going to cling onto a dial up connection as if my life depended on it %) It doe
sn’t, and it’s difficult to bore me these days, I’ve expanded my horizons from the computer, I can read, I can write, I can knit, I can just sit and think without my brain turning to mush.

This morning when I got up I went downstairs and plugged my laptop into the network, grabbed a bunch of music off of the music server… Gah I’m now using 1.8 gigs (out of 3) o_o Hm, well what else was I going to use it for? I also grabbed some logs of #13thHour and this afternoon I’m going to go through some of them and compile a new “quotes from #13thHour” page, since the current ones aren’t a very accurate picture of the users in the channel anymore, I think the last one I made was in 2002.

I spoke with my father last night, he seems to be doing alright, he sounded more awake than I did at 10 pm, so that’s a good sign. I learned from him that my grandfather was recently in the hospital, some sort of intestinal blockage and they were concerned that he might not make it, but he did and they were able to take the appropriate measures to insure he’d be ok. My grandfather is really an amazing man, he’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale. It’s ashame that I had no idea about this until now, I wish the communication in my family was a bit better. My father also mentioned a book he’s writing, and he asked if there was some way for me to put the first chapter online. So I said I would put it on my website, then I showed him my website (he’s online with RoadRunner now). My father really doesn’t know much about computers, I think it’d be safe to say that my mother knows more. It’s understandable since he hasn’t really had access these past few years, and even back when I lived at home he didn’t use the internet much. He also had valid complaints about how much things change, the commands and things he used back then don’t work now, Windows 95 is a whole different world than WinXP! That bugs me, you’d think they could manage to keep things more consistant, like unix has %) He also complained about how all his system resources are always being used, and that his pentium computer seems faster for word processing because of all the spyware and other evil that is running on his new computer, and his new computer is something like 1.6 ghz. That makes me so angry! He also has some sort of stupid spam program in IE that pops up popup windows constantly where ever he goes, he was just looking around MY site and he was getting popups! My site certainly doesn’t have them. Rar! See my previous entry for more of this rant ;) He said he’s a bit concerned about the spyware issue, and as much as I don’t want to add to anyone’s paranoia, it is a problem. I won’t even do online banking on a Windows PC that I’m not sure is secure (ie Michael or myself put everything on the system and KNOW what’s there, and it’s behind a firewall I’m happy with). Now the chances that someone will actually steal my social security number and credit card info are slim, it is a very valid fear. Sigh. I wish there was some way I could be the happy computer fairy and put all my family members on linux and have the time to admin the boxes so they wouldn’t need to worry about all the Windows crap. You need very little knowledge to use a properly configured linux box, you need quite a bit to control the spam and spyware of a Windows system.

Ok, I’m done complaining about Windows for today.

But I’m not done complaining about Microsoft %D Internet Explorer is evil. You know that change font size option? Yeah, well it sucks. I define fonts in both pt and px in a CSS file and IE acts retarded and can’t resize either of the fonts. *KILL KILL KILL* Why would IE have such a lousy function? Mozilla is wonderful at enlarging fonts. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go into each page and write out font tags for each bit of text. So while a huge deadline is looming on the horizon I’m forced to spend 2 hours looking for a solution. Use em instead of pt or px, use % instead, use in instead… every place has a different solution and I had very little luck. It is very frustrating, I h
ave a TON of work to do, and I really don’t have time to rewrite everything because IE has such backwards ways of doing things. I even asked one of the smartest HTML guys in the company and he was puzzled by it. I’ll have to talk to my boss on monday. My job would be so much easier if IE was as predicably well-behaved as mozilla %)

I guess I’m going to head off and work on a few things I wanted to work on. Michael seems to be getting a bit of a cold %( so relaxing at home this weekend would be very good. *wanders off*