Ever have a day where it feels like everything you do or say is making you look like a moron? I’m having one of those days…

I spoke to both my parents last night. My mother seems to be doing fine, ‘cept that she had to get off the phone when her husband asked who she was on the phone with and then complained that the dinner was getting cold. I have heard that he is fairly controlling, and from his tone even through the phone it seems to be true. But hey, that’s my mother’s choice, I’m not going to worry about it, nothing I can do anyway. My father is doing alright, out of the hospital and living in the motel again. My frustration grew as the conversation progressed, he started giving me all this advice, then asking if I understood what he was saying. I know he means well, but it just comes off as talking down to me. Myk’s mother also called to wish me a happy birthday, we’re going over to her house on thursday night for dinner, it should be nice.

*wanders off*

o/` BOA – For Jasmine o/`

-!- BirthdayBot changed the topic of #13thHour to: ` – . – ` – Happy Birthday PrincessLeia2!!! – ` – . – `

I’m 22 today.

Yesterday we went out to the Whole Foods market near our place to get salad stuff and rolls, and ended up picking up some pumpkins. It’s not too early, last year we got them about 2 days before halloween and so we didn’t have them for very long, was so sad.

I played with Cargo a lot yesterday. It really was a great weekend %)

R2’s forecast script is broken again. I sorta expect this since a simple change in the html or design of the weather.com page could cause issues… but it’s still annoying. I guess I am torn between liking the challenge that it presents and just being annoyed because I don’t always want to fix the silly script.

We’re thinking about adding a couple more servers to xelium. I guess some guy is offering 9 servers, claiming “The servers are on a dedicated OC pipe binded by an optic table” … that would be good, and hopefully we can trust him. 9 is too many though, he is not bringing new users, so we’ll still have around 325 users. 9, plus our existing 4, 13 servers for 325 users? It’s not needed, and would only increase the chance of many netsplits.

The weather finally decided that it would be fallish. We had the windows open all night and it was COLD! … even now it’s only about 60 degrees.

I have a tendancy to dislike, and even look down upon people in IRC who speak in “AOLese” .. you know “hi how r u? ur great lol, im goin 2 go 4 dinner nw, kthx by” I just assumed that they “spoke” like this because they were stupid. Then the other day an acquaintance of mine tried to convince me that it was just “chat slang.” He claimed that since it’s generally accepted in the chat community (what chat community? AOL? MSN?) so perfectly respectable people might choose to chat this way. I thought about this. So he claims they aren’t really dumb enough to actually need to communicate like that. Ok, that’s believable. But I still hate them and think they are dumb for conforming to such stupid and annoying methods of chatting. Seriously. I need a translator for what some of these people say in AOLese, like the translator in “Airplane!” who spoke jive… hehe.

-$stupid- ppl tell me im 2 wierd 4 my own gud if dey fink i am dey shud tlk 2 u

It took me like a minute to read that, and it really wasn’t worth it. My ignore list is growing.

I’m actually in a great mood, these people just drive me batty.

Oh it’s that time of year again. What time of year? House hunting time! We have been seriously thinking about it recently, we want to move to somewhere a bit closer to Myk’s work, and to somewhere cheap so we can save up money for a nice house in the future. And where we are now it’s impossible for me to get a real, consistant full-time job (not close enough to public transportation), living somewhere where that would at least be an option would be very nice. So we’re starting to look, our lease here runs out in early December.

I guess that’s about it *wanders off*

Today is Myk and my second year anniversary. Wow. Two years %) That makes me so happy.

Yesterday was great.

First Cargo kitty woke me up around 8:30 (ok, that wasn’t so great). So I got up and played with him for a while. Hopped on my laptop and *finally* got caught up on email mailing lists that I habitually forget about (I had over 350 to read). Got through them all, replied to a couple that were only a day or two old. It was a nice relaxing morning.

I spent a bunch of time reading in the afternoon. Once we were all showered, dressed and awake (um, around 3:30, yay weekends!) we decided to head up to the Drafting Room in Exton. Myk wrote up a pretty inclusive description of what we ate there: Myk’s LJ entry. Yeah, it was an early birthday dinner %) (didnt want to go on sunday because it would be football time and there is a bar there, didnt want to wait til monday because we’d have silly time constraints with it being a weekday). The food was amazing. Mmmm bottomless mussels! And the beer was excellent… swordfish and shrimp, oh yummie! And the chocolate cheese cake… *drool* The evening there was spectacular, I couldn’t have imagined a better dinner %)

After dinner we picked up some movies from blockbuster and headed home. We sat down and watched “Treasure Planet” first. It’s a Disney movie. The first full-length animated feature of theirs that I didn’t see in the theater since I started my obsession with Aladdin. It was kinda sad for me that I broke that “record” of seeing them all in the theater (sometimes multiple times, I think I saw Pocahontas 4 times in the theater..), but Lilo and Stitch was also released that year, too much Disney release for one year! I did enjoy Treasure Planet though, not nearly as good as most of their films, and in the beginning I really disliked their use of CG animation, but toward the end it started to grow on me. Then we watched “Rocky Horror Picture Show” (talk about variety, Disney cartoon then RHPS, hee). Ok, I know I said I didn’t like musicals, but I actually enjoyed RHPS. It was a bit disturbing, a lot campy, and they were poking fun at SO MANY things. It was funny. And apparently it has been released on DVD… but Blockbuster only had it in VHS, how annoying, the only reason I go to blockbuster is because they usually have all of the latest and greatest.

I went to bed around midnight because I was so tired. It was a great day!

Cargo kitty decided to wake me up at 8 this morning. I would have just tried to hide under the covers and go back to sleep, but he was making a lot of noise so I just decided to get up and play with him so he didn’t wake up Myk too. I played with him a bunch this morning, so maybe I can get an hour more of sleep this morning if he wants to settle down %) Now, when I have a cat of my own there will be certain rules about waking me up and being in my bedroom ;) It’s hard to train cats, and training a cat like Cargo is especially so, since he goes to so many different people’s homes, with all different rules. Still, he’s a great cat, he loves to play, and sometimes he’s absolutely batty %) I love him so much *hugs Cargo*

On Friday I communicated with one of the newest members of Philly Chix and she offered “officially” to be the driver on our trip to DC. Woo! We’re planning to have the trip on October 25th (saturday). It should be nice… just trying to now figure out how many people want to go. Running a group like this is a bit difficult sometimes %) I really have to nag at some people to get them interested, hehe. I hope this all works out, I’m really excited.

I discovered yesterday that the release date for “Wallace and Gromit in Project Zoo” was pushed to October 3rd. Not a big change, especially since I can’t get it right away, but still, the sooner it comes out the sooner I can hear more about it ;) It looks like a really great game.

Today I will spend playing with Cargo Kitty. *wande
rs off*

I think I’m finally happy with the design of PrincessLeia.com. Almost. Yeah, I it. I think. Ugh… Well it’s staying the way it is for a while anyway. I like it.

Yesterday afternoon I was also able to redesign, moved, and renamed all the files in my section about Star Wars. It looks much better now, and it’s done in php so I don’t need to worry about all the crazy menu updating on every page that I used to. I love php. Today I got around to doing some redesigning of my Tribute to Leia. I’m not sure if I like it, but that also is in php now, so I have all the love of includes.

I cleaned the apartment this morning.

I guess sometime this weekend, maybe saturday? Myk and I are going to go to the Drafting Room for bottomless mussels and beer, w00t! I dunno if it’ll be a sort of anniversary/birthday or just birthday or just yummie dinner out yet, but I’m looking forward to it (%

Yeah. *wanders off*

o/` Vangelis – Tears In Rain – Bladerunner Soundtrack o/`

I spent a great deal of time today redesigning PrincessLeia.com. I never liked the former design. Maybe it really did suck, maybe I just looked at it too much. I really am pleased with this new design though.

Yes. It’s pink and purple. I might reconsider the link choices because people have been screaming about their hatred of pink since I put it up. I like pink…

I’m in a design mood today and I should probably take advantage of it and clean up a few of my less than beautiful sections of my webpage.

“Square Enix announced today that existence of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children an computer-generated animated feature which will debut on DVD sometime in 2004.”

http://www.gamesarefun.com/news.php?newsid=90
http://www.the-magicbox.com/game092503a.htm

*Gasp!*

There have been rumors floating around about this, but they werent confirmed until today. Now I want to go replay FF7…

Myk brought home Indian food last night, yay! It was great. Then at 9 we watched The West Wing season premiere. It was good, I’m so happy the new season of that has come, it’s such a great show.

I’m not going to talk about my family, it’s not something I want to think about right now.

I guess that’s it. *wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – High o/`

Today is very Mondayish. Not good, not bad. I sorta feel like I didn’t get enough sleep, but I don’t remember sleeping badly last night. It’s probably just the cloudy weather. I’m happy though, in a moderately sleepy sort of way %)

Last night our friend n-tropy and his girlfriend kelly came over. They brought board games. First we played Balderdash, which I had never played before and I admit I was not very excited to try it because I’m horrible at lying. Luckily we were all new to it, so by the end of the game Kelly and I were racing for the win ;) Played .com Monopoly for nearly 4 hours too, that was fun. I was the second to become bankrupt, it came down to Myk and Kelly by the time 10:00 rolled around and they decided to head out. It was a great night, nice to have some friends over, it’s been a while.

My birthday is in a week. I’ll be the big 22. Crazy. I was thinking today what I imagined myself to be at this age, and I realized that I never really had any idea. While I was a teenager I was very very depressed, so I just expected the future to be equally is dismal and I never really thought about it much except with dread. It’s amazing what a couple years can do %) I never thought I’d be this happy.

There has been some activity in a channel that my friend Peacimowen and I have been hanging out in for quite some time, #Andor. Originally it was just a Wheel Of Time channel, but we’re trying to expand it to encompass other books, and maybe sometime get a sort of “reading club” together so we can read books around the same tiem and then discuss them. Anyway, one of the newer members of the channel thought it would be fun to bring in an eggdrop “AI” bot that “Learns” to communicate by listening to what people say in the channel. We’ve all talked to it a bit, and sometimes it’s responses are really funny… here are some of the best lines today (aemon is the AI bot):

-@PrincessLeia2- aemon: moogles are cute white fuzzy final fantasy animals
– aemon- PrincessLeia2: You are the biggest dunderhead of all animals.

-@PrincessLeia2- aemon: don’t be mean
– aemon- PrincessLeia2: A chromosome is a person who manufacturers bread.

-@Peacimowen- aemon: Who is Peacimowen?
– aemon- Peacimowen: Peacimowen is the dragon reborn

– aemon- Peacimowen: R2d2 is a small marsupial peculiar to australasia.

– aemon- Peacimowen: A dog is a heavenly body which orbits a star.

– aemon- Peacimowen: A planet is a body fluid that carries food and obtaining energy and vital substances from within the body.

AI bots are funny.

After I cleaned the bathtub this morning I started filling it up for a bath (my back hurt a little from leaning over a game board for so many hours last night). While waiting for my bath to be ready I decided to once again go through some of the apache access logs and find out what people have googled for to find my pages (for “hit #” and link I simply used google.com defaults, with the exception of listing 100/page instead of 10):

First Google Hit For:
mirc random response scripts
idioms of the 1800s
hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy quotes
sailor moon wavs
hotkeys in redhat 9.0
living things and what they need
hotkeys xsession
r2d2 theme
“katherine blake” Miranda
keybinding settings enlightenment

Second Google Hit For:
thick curtains
enlightenment menu file
IRCstats
ewok sounds
February 17, 2003 snow storm

Third Google Hit For:
Jedi test
Luke Skywalker family tree
starting enlightenment
koala cookies
what’s the funniest thing on the internet
minesweeper linux

One amusing thing I did discover while going through these was the amazing number of hits that my page on Isabella d’Este (over 150/week) gets . Who would have thought? I simply put this page up with a few other short papers I wrote in high school. A few google searches proved that I have some info on that page that might not be found elsewhere, at least not so much of it together. Very interesting.

The main page of princessleia.com just hit 16,000 early today %)

*wanders off*

o/` Bauhaus – All We Ever Wanted Was Everything o/`

Yesterday was nice. I finished the last book in Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series (second time reading it). I really do love those books. Then started reading Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man, which has proven to be just as amusing as his other books (but no Rincewind! *sigh*). Went grocery shopping, went out for a bit, went for a walk… nothing else notable really.

I guess that means I don’t have much to write about.

I worked things out with a new member of Philly Chix and she offered to host the next meeting (October 8th) at her office in Fort Washington. It should be easy to find, and it’s location is so much easier for me to get to, it’s also near a train station so hopefully the chix in the city will be able to make it. And we’re making it earlier this time, possibly will have dinner together or something. I can’t remember if I mentioned it previously, but I got into contact with a woman who had posted to a chix mailing list about coupons to barnes and noble for a few linux books. Apparently this woman works for the publisher and was promoting them and sent me to coupons via 2-day UPS mail, yay! I’ll be giving these out at the next meeting if anyone shows interest.

I spoke with my Aunt Elaine (mom’s sister) yesterday. She asked if we had plans for thanksgiving and then asked if we’d mind having her and Chet (my cousin) coming down to visit us then. That’d be so nice! Hopefully she can come. And apparently she still has my ’86 Chevy Nova! She had the carburetor cleaned, and a few parts replaced and she says it hasn’t even stalled since June. I’m so surprised, I never thought that little car (as much as I loved it) would have lasted this long. I’m glad it has though, I no longer have to feel guilty crashing at her place as a bit of a freeloader for a few months before I moved in with Myk. Yay Souper Nova! We also talked about how my family is, my parents, my sisters, all the family gossip that we needed to catch up on %) It was really great hearing from her.

I guess that’s about it. *wanders off*

o/` Barenaked Ladies – This Is Where It Ends o/`

Because of the crazy winds and rain from Hurricane Isabel, the power was out today from about 4:30 am til 2 pm. It made for an interesting day. I read during most of it, cleaned the apartment like I always do on fridays, it wasn’t really hard, except for when I had to clean the bathroom and I had very little light. I waited til afternoon to take a shower, and that’s good because I was able to wait til the power came back so I had nice, warm water %)

Luckily the power didn’t go out where our server is housed so mail, webpage and irc server didn’t have any downtime (of course I was worrying about my email being down when I had no power at home!). *Grin*

Yesterday I went into work. I didn’t really have much to do, which is ashame, but it wasn’t bad at all, I was able to catch up on all the email that I had neglected for about a week. There were about 400 unread mailing list mails, ahh! It took most of the day to go through them, I really should try to keep up.

I got two more mails about my mplayer how-to yesterday. It’s really amazing how many hits that thing must get… I just did a quick google search for: mplayer debian and it’s number 10. To my surprise the number one hit for this search was clockbot.net and the PLUG How-To archive that Myk maintains… and hey, the search for: debian mplayer gives me the first hit! So cool, I guess that explains all the traffic. Anyway, I made a few more updates on that mplayer site of mine, and linked the unofficial debian apt sources as well, since a few people visiting my how-to have mailed me to tell me that they exist.

It came to my attention yesterday that a friend of mine had some trouble when her employer found her web journal. She was asked to resign because of some of the things she said (she worked at a church). She felt that this was unfair and a couple people suggested (in irc, in her journal, etc) that she get a lawyer and make a case out of it. It seems that everyone was upset that they had discovered this information through a web journal. I guess I sort of hurt her when I disagreed completely and made it clear that anything you post on the internet is completely public. It seemed strange to me that people have some sense of security when posting in their web journals. Is it because the internet is so “new”? Because it’s so huge? Because it’s so abstract to so many people that they think they can “hide” there?

I try to talk all about my life, but when it comes down to specific personal details, and certain areas about my life and my past, I don’t write about it.

After work we were driving home and I realized that I was in a “mood” that made me want to eat. We stopped at the Whole Foods market, picked up a carrot cake (my favorite tied with chocolate) and some boca pizzas (fake pepperoni, yeah!). It was a nice night, especially with the crazy rain and wind outside.

Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t bother saying that we’ll have a boring relaxing weekend because each time I say that it doesnt happen. So I will say “We dont have plans for the weekend”

*wanders off*

o/` Moby – Porcelain o/`

I spoke with my father last night. This long complaint about the conversation that I’m about to write is not because I’m looking for advice or anything, I just need to get this off my chest. Conversations with my father always drive me nuts.

He called at about 6:30, we had just finished dinner. He began to tell me all about his life these past few months. One day he was out with my sister (Heather, 20, goes to school and works to support herself, she also is the “wheels” for my father since he doesnt have a car) all day running errands, and when he got back to the home he was staying at they asked him to take a breathalyzer test (apparently this is common after the residents are out for an entire day, one of the conditions of this living place was staying sober). He failed the breathalyzer. He said that he didn’t have a chance all day to drink because Heather was with him. He was kicked out of the house and sent to a homeless shelter in Portland. He called Heather and she came to pick him up at the shelter. That weekend he decided to move into a sort of motel room that rents places out by the week, he can afford it for now on his social security disability checks.

A couple weeks ago he had to go into the hospital for about a week. His liver problems are getting very bad, so he was unstable for a couple days and they put him in the ICU for part of the time (his condition was bad AND they were running out beds in the hosipital..). While in the hospital he spoke with a priest (Mercy Hospital) about his situation. My father claimed that he hadn’t been drinking, and was wrongfully thrown out, the priest said he’d stay in touch and try to help him out if he could. He claims that a doctor he spoke with said that one of his medications that caused the faulty breathalyzer results.

I honestly don’t know what to believe, I really want to believe him, but he’s lied to me for *years* about his drinking. Maybe he was drinking and my sister didn’t notice, or didnt want to admit to my father that she did? It wouldn’t be all that strange, since he always hid it from us and Heather has been really blind (or at least acts that way) to my father’s problems. But maybe it was really the medication that gave a false positive… but since it was medication for the liver wouldn’t it make sense for the home to know about this when giving the breathalyzer test? I feel like a bad person because I’m reluctant to believe him, and a complete dope for wanting to believe him. Ugh. Maybe if he hadn’t lied so much in the past I’d believe him!

I wish we could just communicate honestly and directly in my family. I am tired of expending the effort to read between the lines and get all sides of each story.

My father isn’t doing well. This recent hospital visit was an clear indicator of that to me. He wants me to coem visit again soon, but it’s so difficult to get there often.

On a better note, my father heard about the visits that I had with my cousins recently and I guess my cousins really liked Myk. Yay! Everyone in my family is very happy for me, and they all know that Myk’s a great guy. Not that I needed their approval, but it certainly does make me happy that I have it (for once in my life). Of course with this approval comes my father’s question “So when are you getting married?” Ugh.

Ok, I’m done complaining, I feel much better %) Getting back to working on things now. *wanders off*