o/` Matchbox 20 – Time After Time_(Cyndi Lauper Cover) o/`

I really intended to post yesterday, just never seemed to get around to it since Myk took a half day *shrugs*

FUCKING COMCAST. Hi. Ok, so maybe it’s not their fault this time, but my connection was down again for most of the morning. I called their tech support and got a message about it being down in five counties because of an “Accident.” Ugh, well I waited on the line to talk to someone, and make sure I was credited for this downtime (hey, it might only be $1, but it’s something, and they need to know that we won’t put up with this!).

Yesterday morning I chatted a bit, and spent some time updating the #13thHour webpage, updated the long outdated “members” page, added a few more user profiles (including escapenguin and Vehicle00!), updated the “links” section. That actually took up most of my morning. I then watched the Wallace and Gromit short for this week “Shopper 13” it’s soooo funny! And Shaun is in it, BONUS! Hehe… Shaun rocks. I love Wallace and Gromit.

Since they have been releasing all these shorts for free on Atomfilms (unfortunately sponsered by microsoft so you can only see them with the proper Windows(TM) plugins *sigh*) I have been taking screenshots of them all as they came out. So I also updated the Pictures section of WallaceAndGromit.net yesterday, so now all Cracking Contraptions shorts have a bunch of screenshots to go with them. Ideally, I someday want to have ALL the Wallace And Gromit movies to have a bunch of screenshots. That would require the ability to use the DVD-ROM that’s currently in the printserver, and forwarding the output to my X display on my workstation. Hmmm… I am sure such a thing is possible, it must be! If all else fails I could just hook up the dvdrom drive temporarily in my system and do it the easy way. In any event I guess I’d need to recompile mplayer with dvd support, but that’s easy. Why do I have the DVD-ROM in the printserver? Well it’s from 1999, has issues playing a lot of dvds and it’s really slow as a cd-rom. So I’d rather have a 48x regular cdrom in my computer than a 8x dvd-rom…

Taking screenshots of all these movies moved me into a slow progression away from gimp and into using imagemagick. I would watch the shorts (in win4lin, going into actual windows would not allow me to take screenshots, they would turn out all *BLUE*), take a screenshot with gimp, crop the screenshot with the mouse drag drop click, and save it. Now this took time, I dreaded this process honestly %) But I run a fan site! I must keep up with these things if I ever want to expect visits to my website. So I did this, for nearly all of the screenshot taking. By the last couple weeks I was really frustrated with this, and that’s when I remembered imagemagick. It’s a command line “toolbox” of image editing tools. I used `mogrify` to crop my images like this:

mogrify -crop 447×256+690+429 image.jpg

This crops image.jpg to a rectangle the size of 447×256, and positions the start of the crop right 690 pixels and 429 pixels down. So I was taking the screenshots with gimp still, saving them, then using mogrify to crop them. This was still a bit of work, since the actual act of taking a screenshot with gimp requires more than one click. Am I lazy? Of course! But time is time, and the more time I spend screenshotting and cropping images for this website, the less time I have for doing other things.

Finally I remembered that there was an imagemagick tool to take screenshots. So by the time the last wallace and gromit short came out, I had this line ready:

import -window ro
ot -crop 447×256+690+429 image1.jpg

That takes a screenshot of the whole X window, then crops it and names it image1.jpg. One simple command line command and I did all that, the only thing i needed to change for each screenshot was the name of the file! I guess I’m still brainwashed to believe that if you are editing images in any way then “GUI is better!” but oh no, it’s not so! The quality of the images is the same as if I had done it with gimp (there are ways to change the quality from default in imagemagick). It was a fun experiment with these linux tools, and turned out well! *hugs her ImageMagick tools*

And as if I didn’t talk about my webpages enough in this entry, I’m pleased to announce that there is actually a webpage for xelium now. I pretty much gave control of it over to the owner of the domain xelium.net. I tried to tell him that I wanted a hand in it as well, but I didn’t get my hopes up… gave him the info I had and he ran with it. Oh well… he included some of my ideas, but I guess the end result is what counts, right? The Official Xelium Webpage is here:

http://network.xelium.net/

It looks nice, I’m pleased with it.

Last night Myk started the install of gentoo on my laptop again (I had a headache, and had seen the parts of the install he was doing before), so maybe by the end of the weekend I’ll have my laptop running on gentoo %o That’d be cool. Unfortunately we discovered that the dongle (stfu, that’s what it’s called!) / NIC card connection is kinda crappy. As long as the laptop doesnt move and no one touches it it’s fine, but the slighest bump to the dongle and it gets disconnected from the network. Oh well, at least it’s enough to get the install done, I can get a new NIC sometime.

Anyway, I am going to go see if I can convince myself to do some work on this rainy afternoon. *wanders off*

o/` Better Than Ezra – Extra Ordinary o/`

Yesterday I really intended on getting some work done on a page about enlightenment that I’m working on, but I just didn’t feel like it, and I got distracted. See, there is this guy on the IRC server who apparently wants to be an IRCop there someday. He seems a lot like Seti from ukscifi, not so much that he lies all the time, but he speaks down to me. Treats me like I’m just a girl, I’m not an admin on a big irc server, I’m not a linux user, i’m not a web developer. Now in some situations, that’s cool, but when I’m working on a webpage I *DON’T* need that crap from someone. I don’t need someone talking down to me and treating me like I don’t know what I’m doing. He suggested a couple times I should use a template, even offered to edit the html for me, wtf? It’s like he didn’t even listen to me when I said I develop webpages. AND consistantly when referring to the admins he said things like “well I figure the admin name, his server…” HIS? Ugh… It’s like he didnt even realize what an ass he was being. I like it when people are helpful, but not when they act like a condescending moron.

Yeah, I’m working on a page for the xelium network. I don’t know if it’ll actually be used, but it’s a step in the right direction, since I have time to work on it and apparently no one else does…

Today… I mostly got sucked into the world of IRC unfortunately. It’s just because I’m having trouble focusing, I don’t know what’s up, but it’s frustrating. I think I’m sleeping ok… bleh.

Spent lots of quality time with Myk last night, just relaxing and talking and watching a bit of “Good Will Hunting” which was playing on Bravo. It was a nice evening… of course we never got around to working with the laptop and gentoo. Maybe tonight, I’m really looking forward to it %)

Um… so I guess I’ll go try to get some work done, I should really close my IRC windows or something… *wanders off*

o/` Barenaked Ladies – Box Set o/`

Not that I want to dwell on the Matrix needlessly, but I am starting to see some sort of “coolness trend.” Apparently, being a hacker is cool. I am sure in 10 years when people look back at the early 21st century they will laugh at this “leet” culture, our sunglasses will be the 70’s bellbottoms. leet.

So hackers. I was recently wandering around some “Hacker” groups on some online journals, and I was very disappointed. I will never join one of these groups (no offence to my friends who are part of them). Why? Well for one, I’m not a hacker. Believe it or not, this is obviously not a prerequisite for any of these groups that I saw. Most of these people are sad, sad windows monkeys.

I complain about that a lot. It’s just that I honestly go looking for cool new people, and I keep running into morons and liars, I’m so sick of it.

I watched X-Men 2 last night. Wow. After the uber-disneyish disappointment of “Finding Nemo” and the complete disaster of “Matrix Reloaded” I was about to give up hope. I am glad X2 came through and kicked some ass. It had plot, well-developed characters, and enough action and speaking parts so that I wasn’t really bored with any of it. It was clever, and amusing, and you know… I think I liked it more than I liked the first. And Nightcrawler was so cool! So, X2 is good. I might even consider going to see it in the theater.

We also did some work on the compaq laptop last night. Myk was able to grab and unused NIC from work, so I don’t have to worry about that anymore. I really wanted to just put debian on it because I know how to use that, and I have never really had a laptop before, so I wanted something I’d be familiar with. But alas, Myk convinced me to try Gentoo. The install is a bit complicated, but Gentoo’s site gives very good documentation, it tells you everything you need to do in the crazy install (I’m sure the install would be near impossible without the documentation). But it was pretty fun %) Unfortunately the mirror we were using in the make.conf was a little b0rked. *sigh* so around 9 last night (after tons of “host not resolved errors) we decided to hang it up for the day %) Luckily, this morning Myk was able to change the mirrors on his IBM laptop and get everything working properly there, so hopefully when he comes home this evening he can show me what he did and we can get the base compile done on the system. It’ll take forever %) But I think it’ll be worth it. The harddrive is small, and I don’t need too many programs on it, so once the basic tools are there I doubt I’ll need to do anymore installing. And, as Myk pointed out, this is a perfect opportunity to learn Gentoo. Ok, ok, I give in… I will learn Gentoo! Hehe…

It looks like we should have about 5 people coming to the next Philly Chix meeting! YAY! It’s a few weeks away, but I’m already excited. Still wondering if we should have some sort of topic or ‘presentation’ this time, I guess we’ll see if anyone has any ideas when the time comes. And hey, by then I’ll have my little laptop up and running %)

It’s nice out today. It was nice out yesterday too. Sunny, breezy, upper 60s/lower 70s. I went for a walk yesterday during the day, and then again in the evening with Myk, it’s so nice… and we saw some bunnies %D It’s nice being able to have the windows open, I hate wasting so much power to use the a/c.

-!- Current Global Users: 290 Max: 328

Wow! Last night xelium got an all time high of 328 clients %) and hey 290 for a tuesday morning isn’t bad either. It’s cool that we’re part of a bigger network now, we actually get people from other channels into ours, and it actually *grows* .. unlike silly old psiblade.

Speaking of xelium, we are finally listed on Netsplit.de. YAY! Xelium’s Current Values

Well I am actually going to get some stuff done today, so I should end this now. *wanders
off*

o/` Massive Attack – Mezzanine o/`

The problem with paying off a credit card that you have had a large amount of debt on for a long time is you are so excited when you do so, and you want to mark this occasion with celebration. “Hey we paid it off, let’s go out and celebrate!” … oh wait, we cant, because we just spent all our money on paying off the credit card. D’oh. So on saturday, instead of going out, we stayed home and Myk made some fruity drinks! Yeah, the kind we have for parties. Strawberry Margarita mix + ice + vodka. Mmmm. These ones weren’t too strong (lucky for me), but they were yummie.

Yesterday.. um, well besides the net being down most of the day (grr!) we didn’t do much. Cargo snuggled with me on the couch while I read, which was nice, he’s so cutey! And I took a bath yesterday afternoon, after the experience with the faucet (he was very amused by it when we let the water drip), we thought he might also be amused with the bathwater. It was so cute cute because he kept hitting the water and being all curious each time there was any sort of splash, and he played with the bubbles while they lasted. While I was making dinner he was sorta being a pain though. I was trying to make tacos, so I had the Boca “meat” frying in the frying pan, tomato, lettuce and cheese sitting out on the cutting board, nachos in the oven, and salsa ready to be poured and he wanted to be up on the counter! Myk tried to keep his attention away from the food long enough for me to get it on the table luckily so we didn’t have cat fur in our food, hehe. It was nice having a kitty for a couple days, but I definately want to wait til we get a bigger place to keep one full time, it wasn’t very cool having a litter box in our living room ;)

We watched The Matrix Reloaded last night. And no, it wasn’t at a movie theater ok? We are evil thieving pirates! (a friend of ours made us vcds from downloads from bittorrent) I can’t help but express my disappointment at the movie. Maybe I was expecting too much. Maybe it really was all meant to be eye candy. So my biggest problems with it? (Spoilers!)

– Assumption of “coolness” : The Matrix is cool. Tight black shiney clothes are cool. Sunglasses, especially when in a badly lit room, are cool. Actors in the Matrix movies don’t need to actually act because they are so cool. Now I know that some of these actors CAN act, but they just have this “cool seriousness” about them that gets comical at some points because it’s so absurd.

– Too much sex : Ok, that scene with Neo and Trinity was just stupid. Why is that even remotely relavent to the plot? Oh, they have sex… well no kidding! Did the movie need a sex scene like that? Isn’t it enough that they are kissing in every other scene (Even after she DIES and Neo brings her back, they both seemed to forget about her mouthful of blood just 2 minutes before, I mean I’m sure I’d want to be ‘making out’ with my boyfriend right after I am brought back to life). Now I can see how the orgasmic chocolate cake fits into the plot… since we needed to see the guy was such an ass as to practically seduce a woman in front of his wife so his wife would get pissed and show them to the keymaker. But couldnt they have made it a bit more subtle? Turning her legs into “matrix code” just wasn’t subtle enough for me thanks! Maybe I’m just prude when it comes to needless sexuality in movies.

– Bad special effects : If you are going to do a scene, do it right dammit! I nearly laughed out loud at some of the fighting scenes because they were so *bad*

Ok, I’m done complaining about it. We watched “Finding Nemo” on friday night while munching on pizza and wings. I think it lacked some of the charm of some of pixar’s previous films, but I enjoyed it.

I cleaned the apartment a lot today… trying to rid our apartment of cat fur %) It was mildly sucessful… but I’m sure I’ll be picking cat fur off my stuff for months to come %) I’ll probably have it all gone by the time Cargo comes to visit again, hehe.

Anyway, it’s getting late… ah it’
s been such a monday! I got nothing done… *looks at the time* well I guess I can get a couple things done if I keep myself away from IRC… *wanders off*

Finally got online to post this…

o/` Jane Siberry – It Can’t Rain All The Time o/`

Based on when I disconnected from IRC last night, it seems I’ve been offline since 4:30 am (it’s nearly 10 now). That pisses me off. For *months* my connection was fine! Never even dropped from IRC once, and now it’s so bad. Maybe the neighbor’s upstairs have cable net and that is killing our connection? Maybe Comcast just sucks! Ugh… I mean come on, I’m paying a significant amount to be online all the time, I depend on this connection for mail and my webserver… and now they have both been down for nearly 6 hours! I can’t wait til we move in December to a place where I can get dependable DSL!

So update on the laptop. We worked on trying to get it run yesterday. Unfortunately we don’t have the connector thingy that goes between the NIC that the laptop came with and the ethernet cable. We tried two other NICs we had laying around and it seems they are both dead, this isnt surprising since we got them free from a co-worker of Myk’s who didn’t want them anymore. So I guess we’re going to ask around to see if anyone has one they want to part with for real cheap. What does this all mean? Well since I wanted to put debian on it, it means that I can’t really do anything with it til I get a new NIC *sigh* oh well.

On a nicer note, we have a little guest with us this weekend. His name is Cargo Kitty! He is owned by a company that is in the same business park as the company Myk works for. Myk often does work on their computers, and always sees Cargo Kitty around, so this week he asked if he could take him home for the weekend sometime (each weekend someone brings him home). He’s so cute! And he does the strangest things. And do I have pictures? Of course I do!

Cargo Kitty Pictures!

My allergies haven’t been too bad either, just some chest congestion. I heard that sometimes allergies to animals develop when you stop living with them for a while, and go away once your body adjusts to having one around. I’m hopeful! Myk is doing fine because he’s on that prescription allergy medicine %) It’s nice having a kitty around here though, even if there is fur everywhere, hehe, I guess I never realized how difficult it is to keep a home spotless when you have a cat.

Yesterday I mostly just played with Cargo. I’m currently reading Swan Song, which is turning out to be a very good book. It’s funny though, my father recommended it, and this is the second time he has recommended a book that deals with the last few people after a worldwide nuclear holocaust (The Beach was the first). While I can’t argue that the books are *bad* I can say it’s a depressing genre. Or maybe not? Maybe after and during the course of reading these kinds of books you begin to feel better about your own life? A roof over my head, food to keep me alive, and general safety, all things we take for granted that characters in these books must deal with.

Well, I’m going to go read… *wanders off*

o/` Madonna – Live To Tell o/`

More nightmares. I don’t know why I have been getting them so frequently. They aren’t a hassle themselves, but they make me wake up and then I am disoriented and can’t fall back to sleep. I hate nightmares.

There was a big thunderstorm last night, it was so cool! I haven’t seen it rain so hard in years, buckets! I love thunderstorms. It’s supposed to rain more today… I’m hopeful %)

People who use those mIRC mp3 scripts need to die.

I get to go pick up film this afternoon from the pharmacy, w00t! It’s always exciting to see the new pictures, and this roll of film is old. I hope there arent too many of Myk’s ex girlfriend on there o_o but he gave me permission to torch them if there are, hehehe. There should be pictures from our trip to Maine last year, and of course there are ones on there from my trip this past weekend… a few of Annette’s 8th grade graduation that I’m going to need to send to my mom…

I’ve decided that I want to stay home all weekend (except for the possible grocery shopping trip). We thought about going to a museum, or on some sort of hicking trip, but I think I would be happier just relaxing. This past weekend was crazy, and we’re going to a concert (Summer Solstice Space Spectacular) in Harrisburg next weekend. So we’re planning on getting a pizza tonight and sitting down to watch some pirated vcds that we got from a friend of ours, yay!

I don’t really have any focus or direction right now, that’s frustrating. I think I might get to work on a section of the site Naru_Chan has created for open source desktop managers.

But now I’m going to go head up to the store and pick up my photos. I might stop at staples too and get some permanent markers that say they can write on cd-rs without damaging them… *wanders off*

o/` Bush – Mouth o/`

We had our first phillychix meeting last night. Above is a picture of both of us there, hehe. I asked my friend Nita if she wanted to come, but it was her birthday yesterday, and it was understandable that she didn’t want to go to center city to a chix meeting %) And the other woman who had planned to come ended up being sick all day, so she couldnt make it. Still, Sam and I had a nice time, just talked about *nix stuff. It wasn’t hard to get to either. We took the same exit we would have taken for PLUG, and it was in the same general area, there is even a train station nearby, so if I ever got brave enough I might be able to just take that to the meetings! Myk brought his laptop and I guess he ended up going outside and sitting on a bench across the street on the U.Penn Campus, he’s so awsome for driving me into the city for the meeting %) I learned about “pin” which is something you can use in the debian sources.list to keep a package at a certain version… say you never want gimp to upgrade, you can “pin” the gimp package and it will never change from that package, pretty neat. And she recommended I put BSD on my laptop, but I’m reluctant just because I’ve never even tried BSD beyond a shell account, and working with a laptop will be difficult for me anyway.

So the laptop. Last night we put in one of our extra laptop NICs that’s a bit nicer than the one that was in there previously, and Myk suggested we put Gentoo on it. The advantage of using Gentoo is that everything is completely customized for the system, it can use precompiled binaries, but usually it compiles everything from scratch so that it works great with your specific architecture. That’s cool, once you have everything installed it runs really smoothly and fast, but it takes forever to compile. I have never used gentoo myself either, which meant that I would have been merely an observer in the install, and it would have taken forever. Anyway, we popped the Gentoo Live CD into the drive, and it found *everything* which was awsome %) But at the end of the night we decided against installing it. Why? Well besides the day long base compile of the system, I really don’t need everything that Gentoo offers in the base install. Debian would be faster to install, and I’m familiar with it, and I can install a more minimal system on the 2.5 gigs I have. So tonight and this weekend Myk is going to help me out with the install. I think I will take notes of everything we do, especially the things that are a bit strange about the laptop debian install… since the only documentation I’ve found on this particular model is in italian and is about installing Redhat. Should be fun %)

It’s hot out… but not so hot as to heat up the apartment too much. We had the AC on last night, but I turned it off when I got up kept the windows and shades closed, and it has stayed nice and cool in here %) I hate the heat… I hope it doesn’t get as hot as it did last summer.

I’m tired, I really didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m still all achy from the crazy travelling adventures of my trip. I just want to go take a nap %) I went for a walk this morning to go to the pharmacy and drop off the film from my trip to get developed. I have no idea what’s on that roll, Myk had it before I moved in with him, and we took it with us on our trip to maine last year, and I have some pictures on it that I took this trip, 40 pictures! So it should be interesting when we pick it up tomorrow. Hopefully it won’t be too expensive, it’s been a long time since I’ve paid to get film developed, but it’ll be nice to have actual pictures instead of all the digital ones we usually have and cant print out %)

I’m going to go read or something now, I’m feeling so tired… *wanders off*

o/` Stabbing Westward – High o/`

I’m home!

I just caught up on reading everyone’s entries that I missed, it took a very long time %) And now this entry will probably take most of the afternoon to write ;) I doubt anyone will read the whole thing, but it’s really a record of events for my personal record %)

:: Saturday June 7th ::

I woke up at 4 am. Took a shower, checked email, popped into IRC for a couple minutes, checked to make sure I had everything. We left home to get to the Glenside Station and catch my train which arrived at 6:59. I was a bit scared, I had never ridden on a train alone before (and even with other people I had only been on one about 4 times).. I told this to the guy on the train who collected the money for the tickets.

“Well, you’re in for an adventure today,” he said.
“Oh no,” I replied. My first through was that I was on the wrong train somehow.
“They closed down part of the line for repairs, so you will nede to take a shuttle bus half the way,” he quickly explained. So I was on the right train!

Still, ugh! Luckily people were very nice along the way, and I got where I needed to go, despite being terrified. The bus ride didn’t even take too much time off of my trip.

At about 8 I got to the philly airport. I got in line to check my bag and get my boarding pass, and while in line an airport employee said that people with e-tickets could do a self check in. Great, I got out of the normal baggage line, got in the short line for the e-ticket machines, only to finally get to one and find out you need a credit card “for identification purposes” to use it! I don’t have a credit card. I sighed and had to go back to the regular baggage line. Finally got through the line around 8:30 and got to my terminal to go through all their crazy security. I even had to take my shoes off! But everything was fine and I got to the correct gate without any trouble.

We boarded at 9 am and I ended up having to sit between two women (it was a 737, 3 seats on each side of the plane). They seemed nice enough, but the woman with the window seat quickly said, “Just so you know, I’m sick. But I’m on anti-biotics so I’m probably not contageous anymore. I will cough in the other direction.”
Unsure of how to respond to this I put on my most sarcastic voice and said, “oh, it’s not SARS right?” and then grinned.
“No, just a cold.”
“I was joking anyway.”
“I know, but it’s still a legitimate question these days.”

She seemed very nice though, we talked for some of the flight.

Getting my luggage and stuff was uneventful. The shuttle van from Boston to Nashua was very nice and comfortable, and short! My grandfather (Granddad) met me at the Sheraton Tera Hotel and brought me to see my grandmother (Nana) at their independed living home. They gave me the grand tour of the place, and I ate lunch there, which wasnt too bad. It’s a very nice place, and they are both healthy and seem to be doing good, even went out and played golf the day before! (Granddad is almost 84, Nana is 80). I took a few minutes to send an email to Myk to tell him I had arrived ok. All they have is an imac on AOL, ah! It was soooo slow! *g* I spent part of the afternoon speaking with Granddad, he was his usual self %) And explained some of the issues with my father. He also went into some of the concerns about Heather’s choice of career, and then went into exactly what I was doing, which he seemed to approve of (consulting type things, working for myself). In all, it was a nice visit, my granddad can be fairly intense sometimes and this wasn’t one of them.

We then went to see my aunt Elaine (not the one I usually write about, this is my OTHER aunt elaine). She seems to be doing well. Nana and her brought me to Borders so I could buy a small 8th grade graduation gift for Annette. Then we decided to go see my Aunt Meg. She seems happy, still into skydiving and was packing up her parachute when we arrived. Her place is quite nice, a big condo right on a river. From
there we went back to see my grandparents and have dinner. My cousin Brendon (who is is just a couple months older than me, we used to play often when we were little) and Aunt Meg (Brendon’s mother) met us there, which was nice because then all of granddad’s talk wasn’t directed at me.

Following dinner, Brendon and I went back to my Aunt Elaine’s house and met up with my cousin Erica (the one who lived in Philly for a little while) and proceeded to head out to a bar called the “Nashua Garden.” It wasn’t a bad place, I had some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and I felt really good about knowing what I liked in a bar, hehe. We met my cousin Melissa there, I hadn’t seen her in years, and this was really the first time I felt I could talk to her as an equal (Last time I saw her I was 15 and she was in her mid 20s). Bars arent really my thing, and at one point I went to the bathroom and while coming back this guy stopped in front of me, smiled, and said “hi” … as tired as I was I didn’t really know how to react so I just ignored him and kept walking back to my table… I avoided the restroom the rest of the night so I wouldn’t run into him again, hehe. It was really cool seeing my cousins, we all go along and had a nice time, and family is family! We didn’t have to be shy with each other, and it was nice catching up with each other and finding out what we were all doing. The only down side was a “friend” of Erica’s (Erica likes his friend, so she puts up with him) came by our table and was relucatant to leave *shrugs* eventually he got the message that he wasn’t too welcome and left. We all ended up talking until after 11, when Melissa said that she had to leave so she could get up early and go to work in the morning. I was exhausted too. Erica and I went back to my Aunt Elaine’s and ended up going to bed around midnight.

I did learn a few things from Erica that made me a little uncomfortable. Apparently a few weeks ago Granddad mentioned that once I come up to Maine and see the situation that I could probably move back to take care of my father and put heather on the right track (“every little girl wants to be a vet, it’s a bad field to be in!”). I guess Erica made it quite clear to him that he couldn’t ask me to do that, and it would be wrong for me to even consider it. I guess everyone there is sorta afraid of scaring me off again… I mean there were a couple years when I pretty much shut off all contact with all of my family, partially because I didn’t want to “hear it” from them. I do want to be part of the family more than I have been the past few years, but I won’t give up all that I have to go back to Maine where I will just be miserable.

:: Sunday June 8th ::

I woke up around 9, it was the best night sleep I got my entire trip. I got to see my Uncle Chris and then around 10 my Aunt Elaine, Erica and I left for the drive up to Maine. Stopped at a dunkin donuts to get the much needed coffee and muffin %) The ride wasnt bad, it was drizzling a little (like it was all weekend). It was funny getting back into Maine where I was familiar, everything is so small and slow! Hehe. We had planned to meet Heather and my father at the rehab place where my dad was, and got there right at noon. The rehab place looks ok, it’s not a dump, and the people there are all pretty scruffy. We waited around for my father to come downstairs. He came down and I barely recognised him. He has put on a lot of weight, his skin problems (chronic psoriasis) have gotten much worse, and he has not shaved in *months* so he has scruffy beard. And his hands were shaking, he was barely coherent. I was floored. A couple minutes after he came downstairs I had to go stand outside for a minute because I just needed to get out of there. Erica followed me and said that he was doing much much better a few weeks before when she saw him, and that she had never seen him this bad. “We were looking forward to you coming because he was so normal last time we saw him, this is the complete opposite, I am sorry,” she said to me. I nearly cried, but was able to
hold it back as my father came out so we could go to lunch. My Aunt pretty much took care of my father while we were out, making sure he got his food ok, trying to keep the conversation going, I tried to keep my father in it too, but I was just so shocked by his condition that I couldn’t do much. He ended up going back to the rehab place for a nap after lunch. Of course this bothered me since I only had that one day to spend with him, and he was doing so badly… my aunt and Erica left then, and I guess they felt *horrible* about leaving because of my father’s condition.

Heather and I spent the afternoon driving around to places. We checked into the motel we were staying at for the night, went to the mall for a bit to buy Heather some luggage for her trip to canada in a couple weeks, went to the grocery store to pick up some beer and popcorn for later that night (I needed it after seeing my father like that!). We bought some beanie babies too, picked up a little moose one for Myk %) We also went to heather’s place so I could meet her cat and hop online to write a quick email to Myk about how things were going. Then we stopped at the storage place that has all the stuff from the old house I grew up in, I got some old papers from school and stuff, we couldnt get to much since it was piled so insanely, but I couldn’t take much with me anyway. We went back to the rehab place around 6 to pick up my father for dinner.

At least he had improved to the point of being coherent and able to maintain a conversation with us. We went to the Weathervane, which is a seafood place in the mall parking lot. Heather and I ordered lobster and my father got the fish and chips. He was still rather quiet, and I tried to keep conversation flowing between all of us, and it hurt because it was the sort of thing I did grow up too, pretending things were ok and trying to keep people sane *sigh* … my father had a bit of trouble eating because his hands were still shakey, and I felt so horrible about seeing him that way… After dinner we went back to the motel so we could “Talk.” Apparently the test results reguarding his condition came back and were fairly bad. His liver is not repairing itself from the years of alcoholism, and he needs a transplant. Unfortunately he can’t get a transplant since they don’t do that for alcoholics for obvious reasons. They can do transfusions and such to clean his blood, but with all the other medical problems he has on top of the liver problems, they only guessed that he has another 2-5 years to live. That is sad, he’s my father, I love him despite everything… to imagine that he’ll be gone in that time? It really upsets me… and it saddens me that this could have been prevented if my father had not been drinking for so long. I find myself deeply torn between the sadness I feel for losing him in the near future, and the anger I feel for knowing that he did this to himself. Sure, there are millions of alcoholics, but he never could break free from it, he never had the strength to do it for himself or us.

We had to bring my father back to the rehab place before 10. I guess he expected to get a motel room too (he had a pass to get out of the rehab place for 2 days), but he never communicated this request to anyone, so his disappointment was frustrating, what could I do? After dropping him off we went to Heather’s to pick up stuff she’d need for staying with me in the motel (I didn’t want to stay alone!), then we went to see Leslie, the only friend from high school who I still communicate with (mostly through this web log). Heather drove us, and had trouble backing out of the driveway (And I let this girl drive me all over southern maine? GAH!) so she went down to the bottom of the driveway to turn around and her car started making a squealing noise, at first we assumed it was her tires since she was making such a sharp turn, but when she finally got out on the road it still made the noise. Of course Heather was freaking out, but we just asked her to relax and we’d worry about it when we stopped. We stopp
ed and looked under the car, things looked ok, and nothing was burning %) So we just went into the Tim Horton’s and Heather and I got some hot drinks. It was nice seeing Leslie, she looks good, seems to be doing ok too %) Lost in that 20-something “what am i doing with my life?” funk, which most of the people I know are in, myself included. It was kinda funny talking to her since we have pretty much kept up with each other through web logs, so finding something to talk about was difficult. “Well just the other week I…” “I know, you wrote about it in your web log” .. but eventually we got to talking about things we hadnt written about in web journals, hehe. It was really nice %D And while I was there visiting, she showed me the little Compaq laptop she had thought about selling to me. It has so many demons! On boot up it takes forever because some virus has done some crazy things to the windows boot sequence. But it’s a little Compaq Presario 1245, 333mhz, only 32 mb of ram… which I will NEED to upgrade, but I am sure I can get a little 64 mb chip for around $20. It’s not a bad little computer %) I plan to put debian on it… with Myk’s help of course, since I know nothing about PCMCIA and he has been working on a couple laptops this past week. It also has an older NIC, which we will replace with a newer 10/100 one that we have, YAY! I have a laptop now. Sure, I’ll just be using it for word processing and a little chatting, but it’ll work, especially after I get the ram upgrade (unfortunately the limit to ram upgrades is 96 mb).

We left Tim Horton’s around 1, since we all needed to get up the next morning, and Heather was gettnig a bit antsy about wanting to figure out what was wrong with her car. We decided to drop Leslie off and then drive straight to the motel. The sound in the car wasn’t getting any better, but we drove on fast straight roads mostly and couldnt really hear it %) We got back to the motel, and heather is going on about how if her car is broken she wont be able to get to work and she’ll be all lost, etc etc so I said “ok, do you have a flashlight? We will look around the tires, and under the hood to see if we can find problems ok? We can’t do anything about it tonight though. She agreed. Nothing was stuck in the tires or anything that would cause such a noise, and then I looked under the hood, first thing I looked at was the power steering fluid thing. And guess what! She had NONE. Oh man… now I have dealt with old cars that need many fluids replaced often, so checking fluids in my car is like second nature to me, I couldn’t believe she had gone so far as to let it be empty! We decided to just head to wal mart in the morning to grab some fluid, and in the meantime, get some sleep! So we headed into the motel room, and oh, we have beer! I pulled it out of the drawer where we had hid it (couldnt keep it out in full view when my recovering alcoholic father came to visit now could I?), and got out some popcorn. By this time it was about 2 am. We each had two beers, some cheese popcorn, and some fudge while watching TV and finally got to sleep around 3 am.

:: Monday, June 9th ::

The alarm didn’t go off at 7:30 like Heather said she set it at. Maybe it was broken, I didn’t bother looking when I woke up at 8 am and got in the shower. We had planned to go right up to my mother’s house that morning, but I decided it would be ok to go out for coffee with my father first, since I didn’t get to spend much time with him. First we stopped at Wal-Mart to get the power steering fluid. I poured it in the car up to the proper level, she turned on the car and pulled out of the parking space, no more squealing! YAY! I fix0rd it %) Showed up at the rehab place to pick up my dad at 9:30 like we said we would, he was already waiting. But had to head up to his room for a minute, and the guy in charge of the rehab place asked us to come int
o a private room to talk to him for a minute. Apparently my father had stopped taking his medication for a few days, which could account for the shakes he was experiencing. And it sorta seemed like he was trying to accuse us of something, “I am trying to help him, now if there is anything I need to know…” I guess it’s his job though. I have no idea why he’d stop taking them, but that was probably why he looked so horrible on sunday. He looked better on Monday morning, nearly his old self again communication wise, and I was pleased with that, the man I saw the previous day I could barely accept as being my father. So we went out to Dunkin Donuts, just because we only had about an hour and really no where else to go. We had coffee and talked a little more, mostly just small talk, talked about how my life is going, how Myk is, what my plans are… it was nice. Around 11 we brought him back to the rehab place and said goodbye.

We stopped at Heather’s for a couple minutes so she could feed the cat and email her boyfriend real quick, then headed up to my mother’s. Now, during the entire trip I assured Heather that we had money to do whatever she wanted. Nana had given me a few hundred dollars to make sure gas was paid for, and we had everything we needed, and STILL everytime I turned around Heather was complaining about money. She wanted to take 295 up to my mother’s, but got on the highway going the wrong way, easy to do, I’ve done it dozens of times! But then when I suggested she just go and take 495 she said “but that costs like $4” … I blinked, looked at her, laughed and said “JUST GO!” And she went %) It drove me crazy though, we went to the store and she was checking price tags every other second. Granted, I used to do that too, because we grew up in a home with very little money, but you need to let go sometimes, especially since I had assured her that it was ok. And Heather talks a lot. I’m sure it’s because she is lonely, but on the way up to my mother’s she just couldn’t stop talking, even about boring things… ugh… at one point (despite feeling bad about doingso) I turned up the music a bit to see if she’d stop talking, she didn’t. So I tried to stay interested, I was just so tired and so bored with travelling! And it was raining again, so I wasn’t in the best mood I guess.

We got to my mother’s around 2. She took us out for a small lunch, and mentioned that we were having hamburgers for dinner. I told her that I didn’t eat beef and they arranged to make some turkey burgers, yay! Lunch was good, and mom introduced me to some family member that owned the place, I don’t remember who he was %) But they were all impressed that I’m the girl from Philadelphia, oh the big city! Hehe… it was an interesting position to be in because they were asking me all about the city, and I really do just live in the suburbs! After that we went to a horse barn when one of Annette’s friends “works” I guess. And there is a horse there named Apache who was neglected, and she’s still pretty skinny, but my mother wants her, hmm, my mother never really showed interest in owning a horse before this! But I guess she can afford to keep her, and has every intenion of taking care of her, so we’ll see. Of course my allergies went crazy because of the hay and I had to go outside and use some eye drops before my eyes got all red and puffy. Maybe I am a city girl afterall! Hehe.

We then went back to my mother’s house.

Yes, that is her house. I am not going to say anymore about it because she’s my mother and it would be wrong. Extrapolate my feelings folks.

Annette asked me to look at her computer. It seems they bought it from Rent A Center, oh dear %) But it’s not a bad computer, I never did look to find out how fast it was or anything, but she had all sorts of crap running, errors everywh
ere… it was a mess, and she complained that she didnt have sound. First thing I asked was if the speakers were plugged in, she assured me they were (I should have looked). I proceeded to remove tons of silly programs, stop the dozens of things that started when windows booted up, and really made it run nicely, but the sound still wasnt working. Finally I moved the computer to see if I could open it and take a look at the sound card, and lo! The speakers weren’t plugged in. Goddammit. %) It’s good that I got things running nicely for her though. I think her screensaver broke unfortunately and I didn’t have time to look and see why. It’s not really important, she’ll live, it was probably some crazy program who screws with settings when it is uninstalled, who knows, not me, I don’t do windows %) Then Heather came to me and complained that my mother’s computer couldnt see either of the cdrom drives. I was still busy with a couple things so I suggested she run the new hardware manager to see if it would even see the drives, and told her I’d look at it later. Right before dinner my mother said she was going out to the hardware store to get a grill lighter, and dragged me along so we could have some alone time to talk. Luckily she wasn’t too interested in dwelling on conversation about my father, and was good about it when I told her I didn’t really want to talk about him. She just wanted to see how I was doing, explain how the situation with her was and stuff *shrugs* it was good talk, and it was nice to get away from everyone else and be able just to talk to her. It was then time to go to Annette’s graduation.

It was kinda boring, same old sort of thing every school has, awards are given to the same 20 kids over and over again, for an hour or so. I wasn’t sad when it was over. They all walked by and I took some more pictures, but I took them with the real camera, so I need to develop the film %) As she walked by I yelled “Yeah MONKEY!” … not many of her friend’s know about that nickname, so it was amusing. We got back to mom’s around 9:30.

I took a look at my mother’s computer while Annette got ready for bed. It’s a Dell on Windows XP, which I’ve never really used, but when I rebooted it it complained about not being able to identify what was on the secondary IDE. My mother said “It always does that, just hit F1” (F2 goes into the BIOS). Well of course that was why their drives werent showing up! I poked around in the BIOS and couldn’t find anything amiss. And apparently the drives never worked, and they’ve had this computer for months. I told them that they’d just have to call Dell tech support. Jerry (my mother’s new husband) asked if I would, hah! Have you ever been on Dell’s tech support line? I would have been on it all night. And the only other thing I could do was open up the computer and see if things looked right, but that could possibly void the warrenty, no thanks. I told him that they’d just have to call, they are used to newbies, and my experience would probably hinder more than help a call like that. Yes, I gave up! Hehe.

Heather, Annette, and Mom

My mother had a bunch of old pictures too. We went through all those, I picked out a few dozen that I wanted. I had the last two beers from the 6 pack I had bought the previous day (after asking if anyone minded), heather brought out the rest of the cheese popcorn, and after Annette went to bed, my mother, heather, and I stayed up and talked til about midnight. It was nice, just relaxing and talking, while munching on popcorn and chocolate.

:: Tuesday, June 10th ::

I woke up around 6:30 because my mother and Annette were getting up. We had planned to leave there around 9:30 so we could meet Erica at noon in Portsmouth. I took a shower, which was fairly unpleasant because the water there is so rust
y, ugh. After that I played with my chinchilla Merlynn for a bit.

Me and Merlynn

We were ready to leave around 8, and decided that we should just stop somewhere in South Portland and get some yummie breakfast. So we left my mom’s at 8:30, drove to South Portland (via 295 this time, I guess it’s faster). Ended up eating at IHOP. After breakfast I suggested we hop over to the Victoria’s Secret in the mall because they were having their semi-annual sale, and I didn’t feel like dragging Myk to the store to buy underwear, hee. We get into the store and Heather looked completely lost, when I asked her she just said “I just can’t see spending $3 on one pair” … Er, she was serious! Now I’m not saying that every girl should shop at a nice underclothes store like victoria’s secret, or that it will make them feel better for doing so, but it’s just a good example of how completely selfless she has become. She never does anything to benefit herself. I guess Erica recently took her out to get her nails done, you know, basic manicure just so the nails look nice, no colorful polish or anything, and she made excuses about how silly it was the whole time. She needs to realize that she can do good things for herself too! She can be selfish sometimes! *shakes her head*

We got to Portsmouth just before noon, met Erica there soon after. Erica and I ended up getting a quick lunch in Arlington, Mass (just outside of Boston) and then stopped for a little while at my cousin Keith’s house. He wasn’t home, but I got to meet his wife and his new son %) It was nice, but I was so exhausted so I dont think I made a very good impression! Doh! At about 4 we left and drove to the Boston airport. I checked my bags, got through the terminal I needed to, had about an hour on my hands. So I got a soda (because I could barely keep my eyes open) and some gummie bears and sat waiting for the plane. Got on the plane at 6, I got a window seat, YAY! And it was a clear warm day, the plane was hot inside, but at least I could see out the window. It was a nice view, and we flew along the coast almost the whole trip. The guy next to me slept the whole time, snoring sometimes, hehe. The plane ended up being 15 minutes early so we had to wait for the terminal, got off the plane and was able to grab my luggage by about 8:10.. just in time to miss the 8:09 train to Glenside! Gah! Now I had read that I’d have to take a bus or something, but I guess I was just mistaken. When the train came around 8:40 I was confused because I was supposed to take the R1 and this one was the R2… and… oh I am such the anti-train traveller! I was confused, but the guy taking tickets was very helpful so I got back alright.

Myk was waiting for me at the station when I finally got off the train at 9:30ish. I was so travel worn! And I felt horrible, and I was hungry. So Myk took me to Friday’s YAY! I had a chicken sandwich, it was good %) Got home around 11, I was so exhausted. I came in the apartment and was so glad to be home, I started emptying out my suitcases, and showed Myk the laptop, and then realized that I wasn’t awake enough to put everything away just yet, so I piled it up, got a glass of water, and went to sleep.

:: Today ::

I did laundry, cleaned up my suitcase mess %) And wrote this, hehe. I still have to get caught up on my email, ugh… Now I’m getting ready for dinner and to go to the Philly Chix meeting, ah! Hopefully I Won’t be late, I’ve never been to this location before. After this meeting I’m going to come home and stay at home for weeks! Hehehe… so so soooo tired! *wanders off to make dinner*

And congrats if you read all this, you are crazy ;) A couple more trip pictures here: http://www.princessleia.com/images/MyImages/Photos
/mainetrip2003/

o/` Eagles – Hotel California o/`

So I leave tomorrow morning. And I’m feeling… anxious and worried. I will be taking a train to the airport tomorrow morning. Myk was going to drive me, but it’s really much easier for me to take the train.. that way he won’t have to pay for parking or worry about crazy airport traffic, and it’ll probably be cheaper %) Still, I’ve never ridden on a train before. It should be easy, just need to stay on the train til my stop at the airport. I’m scared of everything! But by this time tomorrow I should be relaxing with some family in New Hampshire.

This morning I went to the doctor’s for the follow-up to the cryo-therapy. It was a short visit, and they said everything is healing properly, yay! When I came home around 10:30 I cleaned the apartment, then went for a walk up to the pharmacy to get a $10 phone card and some travel toothpaste and mouthwash, goodie! Came home, printed up all the info I’ll need for the trip, started to get things organized. I even spent a bit of time this afternoon chatting with someone who found me through livejournal. He lives in the area, and seems pretty nice, even helped me realize that the train schedules aren’t as confusing as I was making them out to be %) So I am all set to take the train at Glenside station tomorrow morning at 6:59. I should get to the airport by about 8 am, that’ll give me time to check my luggage and figure out what I’m doing before my flight at 9:30.

What a day.

Hopefully I have everything. It’s been so long since I’ve had a vacation where I actually went on a plane and flew somewhere. I am such a travelling newbie. Hopefully I’ll be able to tone down my anxiousness enough to get a good night sleep tonight.

I decided on one carry on bag and one bag to check. I keep feeling like that’s excessive for a 4 day trip, especially since the suitcase isn’t full. Unfortunately a carry on with all my stuff in it would probably be too big, and if not, it’d leave virtually no room for anything I happen to aquire while I’m there. And I have to have a carry on to at least put my book in so I have something to *do* while I’m on the flight… bleh.

So I won’t be posting for a few days, unless I feel extra energetic on monday night after my youngest sister’s 8th grade graduation, which I somehow doubt %)

Now I’m tired and I need to go over my things again to make sure I have everything, I am so bad about forgetting things! And I am making sure I don’t bring any software. No one has asked me yet to do anything with their computers and I dont want them to say “well while you are here with that disk…” No, I’ll be far too tired to do anything like that! %)

*wanders off to attack her suitcase*

o/` Bel Canto – Mornixuur o/`
Well unfortunately I didnt get to meet escapenguin and Vehicle00 last night. Apparently Vehicle had a work meeting that ended up taking more time tha he expected. Escapenguin wanted to make it, drove into the city, got lost, and by the time he found USP it was raining, he couldnt find a place to park and it was 8:45. I don’t blame him for getting lost though %) This plug meeting was actually the first time Myk and I *didn’t* get lost on our way there. The problem with that part of the city is there are a lot of one way streets, and “slight” turns on roads that break off and don’t have signs… a slight right at the wrong intersection and you’re lost. Even now as I look back at the mapquest directions we have, I notice they are wrong… there is an obvious place that says “take a right” when it should be “take a left” arg! I was disappointed though.

It’s ok, I got to meet Samantha (the woman I’ve been working with for phillychix) and her husband Fred, they seemed like really nice people, I’m really looking forward to the meeting next week. The presentation was also fairly good, I understood it at least %) It was all talking about IT Security in Linux. Before the meeting they had a fairly amusing time trying to log into the computer that they had to use. The meeting place is a University and the computers they run in presentation rooms run windows 2000, the box was rebooted so the presenter got to a login prompt. Now of course this is all posted for the whole room to see and people start suggesting passwords and user names to try to get into this system, imagine that! A whole room of linux geeks stuck at the win2k login prompt %) Anyway, a few minutes later the presenter logs into windows, smiles, then points to the part of the monitor just above the screen and said “hehe, I read the directions” haha!!! And during the question time someone brought up the whole SCO linux thing. A moan erupted from everyone in the room, which was soon replaced with everyone’s “expert” opinion on the whole thing. Ugh.

I was really tired toward the end of the meeting. I guess I was feeling ok, just very tired, maybe it’s better that we didnt meet those guys last night %) So we ended up just going home right after the meeting instead of staying for pizza and beer.

I’m not feeling so great today either, just exhausted for no reason, a little headachey. Maybe it’s because the coffee maker is broken. Come to think of it, yesterday afternoon I was pretty tired too. I went to relax in bed with my book for a while until I started to become afraid I’d fall asleep reading it. So I turned on the tv, nothing was on of course, ended up settling on a movie that was on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Now I’m not a big old movie fan, sure I enjoy them sometimes, but they are usually not my first choice as to films to watch. Why? I don’t know, maybe I just haven’t had enough time to “discover” them. “No Time For Comedy” (1940) was the movie I ended up watching a bit of, and I really enjoyed it! The only actor in it i knew was Jimmy Stewart. There was just something about the movie that struck a chord with me. Nothing really about the people in it, or the plot, I think I just felt like it was so REAL. The people in it acted like real people, the way they interacted with each other was so perfect… I don’t care what the critics said about the movie, I liked it. And you know what? There was no violence, no sex, no special effects. When is the last time I watched and enjoyed a movie without these things? It amazes me that movie makers today believe you must have all these things to produce a successful film. Is that true? Well I’m definately going to start watching more older movies…

I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning, ugh… then I need to finish getting all my things arranged for my trip. I wrote out a little budget for my trip so I know how much money to bring… and I need to make up a list of things to pack… bleh. But right now I’m going to go lie down ’cause I don’t feel so great. *wa
nders off*