It snowed this morning. There is a slight dusting on the ground, it’s nice, I missed snow.

You’ll never guess where I was yesterday… out looking for a job! Yeah, I figure I really do want to find something by the beginning of the year I am not getting as much work done at home on the computer as I hoped to, and I guess I am getting bored, plus I feel like a burden, and just want to do my part in paying for things. So I went up to the shopping plaza, picked up some applications, and when I stopped in this GNC Health store (with vitamins n stuff) the woman had me fill out this mini application and said if i wasnt busy around 5 to come back and she’d have an interview set up with the manager. Ack! Well I agreed, because she seemed rather eager, and all I had to do was be honest and tell her I had plans for the holidays and wouldnt want to start until january.

So around 4:30 (it was already getting dark *ugh*) I walked up to the plaza and at 5 I wandered in and met the manager.

-me- Hi I’m here for an interview
-manager- Uh, are you sure you have the right place?
-me- um, yeah, I came here this afternoon, the woman working said she’d set something up with, um, jackie?
-manager- Well that’s me *looks on shelf and picks up a note with my mini-application attached* oh, I’m sorry, she never said anything to me about it.
-me- Well I can come back another time if that’s better for you
-manager- No. No, this is fine.

Wasnt exactly a wonderful start, especially since the first question was whether I would be willing to work in other locations, which of course I couldn’t since I don’t have a car. I explained my mode of transportation situation, and it seemed fine. I was pretty honest with her as far as the job goes, I was just looking for part time, and could get by with 10 but would work up to 30 hours a week. She said that would be great, and asked when I was available to start. I hesitated then told her I was really looking for something beginning in early january. She said that’d be perfect because one woman will be wanting to work less around then, and she’s not sure how long another person is going to stay there. She said the job is pretty boring sometimes, since it’s not a busy store, but boring is good, I’ll just bring a book. That lead her to looking down and saying “you know, this doesnt pay much” … here it comes, i thought, minimum wage, but instead “it’s $6/hour, plus commissions, a 10 cent raise after 90 days, do you still want a job?” It was obvious that this had been the killing point of many interviews, since she didn’t expect me to say yes. See, you have to be 18 to work there, since they sell some substances that you need to be 18 to buy, and I guess most people over 18 dont want to work for $6 an hour, plus you get paid everyother week, instead of every week. So she was quite happy that I still seemed interested, and told me that if I wanted a job, to come back on January 6th and we could work something out, and if I didnt want the job, to call her sometime before that and tell her…

I still filled out the other applications, will prolly go drop them off in a couple weeks, I guess only if this job doesn’t work out, I mean they are bound to have other people applying, people who are doing seasonal work or something currently and want to get a real job, right?

Of course I could get a better job than this if I had a car. But you figure I really dont have the money to just go out and buy one that would be dependable, even if i got on some sort of payment plan with a car i’d have that bill every month, plus car insuance, plus maintainance, I would HAVE to work full time, which I dont exactly want to do… there is a good chance at a crappy help desk job that i’d get stuck on second shift or something and hardly ever be home when Myk is. That would suck %( At least with a part time job the most I can be away is like, 3-4 evenings a week. I wish there was public transportation around here, but alas, this is the US.

I guess we’ll go out this evening and buy stuff for thanksgiving (great plan huh? no, i dont like pain, i just didnt feel like going out last night).

My right arrow key broekn. It’s always been that way but now it’s gotten worse. Luckily I am using all vim-keys on my desktop now, so I dont use it nearly as much, but now it’s started to stick. I wouldnt mind so much, but when I go to play UT or something it’s going to suck. Speaking of UT we are going to a lan party on saturday, YAY! Actually in all honesty I am not as excited as I usually am. I just have not been into games lately, which is disappointing. At the last lan party I hardly played (well, that is partially due to my crappy system at the time and their want to play a game that my computer wasnt really fast enough to play), but I guess I really didn’t WANT to play either. Maybe I can get Myk to play a couple games of Battlefield 1942 or something before the weekend, so I am not so rusty, hehe.

Myk’s home for the rest of the week, plus monday, YAY! He found out yesterday that his “official laying off date” is September 30th 2003.. but they are unsure even about that, luckily he’ll have at least that long, but they might extend it, who knows, so he’s going to be looking… We’re really lucky he has this much warning before he is let go tho %) I guess this is another reason I wanted to get a job, we should save money, and all my money will probably just go towards savings, whether it be for a house, or just for emergencies. Stupid companies.

Yeah, so Myk is home and it’s cold, I’m gonna go crawl back in bed for a little while *shivers and wanders off*

Stabbing Westward – Happy

From all (3) the entries yesterday it’s probably obvious that I didn’t get much work done, heh. Pulled away from what i was doing with questions in chat directed at me… then my younger sis (PurpleDragon11, 19) msg’ed me to tell me she had bought a webcam… from BestBuy, the thing was like $30 with a $10 and $20 mail-in rebate, so it was like getting it for freeish (+tax). She said if she had time she’d go to the store and pick a couple up for Annette(my 13 year old sis) and I.. but I went around and found there are no linux drivers for them, and I am not in windows enough to enjoy it *shrugs* We have a digital camera anyway.

I ended up taking a walk after all my xanga postings, I needed to clear my head I guess so I could focus. After, I came home .. it was almost 5, so I was frustrated that I had wasted an entire day accomplishing nothing that I felt even more depressed. So I turned on some Stabbing Westward, ’cause as I often forget listening to SW, and NIN, and the like really cheers me up when I am feeling hopelessly down.

It cheered me up, and I decided to mess with php a bit. Installed the mysql php libs so I could use php with mysql, got about as far as opening a database, which is stuff I’ve done before, but couldnt really think of anything to do with it at that moment. So I messed around with include statements. Ended up modulating my site a bit, now I don’t need to edit my index.php (on princessleia.com) I just edit files like mainmenu.php and links.php. It’s nice, and now my index.php is actually easier to navigate since it isnt *huge* Then I discovered shell_exec … this is a really cool php function that lets you execute bash commands and return the value in the php doc (as a variable, etc). So I can do so many cool things now! I made it give live system stats of my workstation on our LAN %) (I run apache on my workstation so I can play with php and mysql in a secure environment, so the live stats are on r2d2.clockbot.net… locally, not visible from the net). I dont think I will put anything like this on my webpage, ’cause no one cares about the stats of my webserver… ‘cept for uptime, ooooh *grins* Anyway, while trying to parse out the data for separate sections I discovered how cool awk is. Using it I was able to calculate the hdd space and such into Gb, instead of leaving it in icky bytes… I think I will play with awk more today.(A screenshot of the lan page).

Oh, I did end up watching The Ice Storm last night, it was all right… when I was wandering around the net last night I found it had been compared to American Beauty, heh, no way. Speaking of which, I was talking to someone a couple weeks ago who didn’t believe that the Colonel (the ‘homo-phobic’ neighbor) was gay in American Beauty. To me it was obvious, so I went to check out stuff on the movie and apparently this is a big debate. Some people think he was gay, and killed the Kevin Spacy character because he turned him down… others think it was like “Judas’ Kiss” … the kiss of a betrayer, while others (like my friend) assume it was because he wanted to see what his son got out of “being with” another man, so he kissed him. Then of course there is a whole different group of people who dont even think the Colonel killed Spacy (we’ll leave those crazies alone tho, hehe)… it was just weird, I mean I was SO SURE that he was gay, and now there is a debate? What did you think?

I learned this morning while readying the Bizarrenews Newsletter that some people are suing McDonalds, and other fast food places, for their obesity. They claim that eating there 3-4 times a week has caused them to become fat. Of course… but blaming McDonalds of this?! How much more absurd can you get? I can’t imagine how people wouldn’t know they would get fat from this, so it’s obvious that they are just looking for a way to make money off their gorging. Sometimes I really hate this country.

Someone asked me for help with gcc, I didn’t know the answer, i’ve never really used gcc directly… after I admitted my ignorance:

-@Axelay- maybe I am linking you too closely to Time
-@Axelay- my vision of you two is more along the lines of twins
-@pleia2- kinky o_O

Axelay = guy asking for help
pleia2 = me
Time = Myk

Mediaeval Baebes – Byrd One Brere

I was feeling really down yesterday. I guess it was just because we can’t go to NY for thanksgiving, it really has me down, I was really looking forward to it. I did a bunch of reading tho, that cheered me up, then Myk went out and bought me some Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream, that really brought me completely out of my slump. I really will try to be happy this week, I mean Myk has most of the week off (only working today and tomorrow) so we’ll get to spend lots of time together, and we will have a nice thanksgiving here together %) Speaking of which, we thought about getting a turkey, but then realized we didnt have a pan for the oven to cook it in, or a temperature taker thing, or any idea how to cook a turkey, hehe. So I think we are gonna buy some stuffing, some potatoes, pumpkin pie, and chicken %) should be a good thanksgiving.

We watched La Confidential last night, another big movie that I had never seen. I guess part of the reason I never saw it was because it looked cheesy from the cover, come on, Kim Basinger is the most prominent figure on the cover what was I supposed to think? Ugh. Well it really turned out to be a decent movie (with Basinger playing a small role of a prostitute, so the point of the cover art? Sex Sells!). Tonight The Ice Storm is on… is it worth wasting my time on? Myk says it was pretty bad, we’ll see if I’m bored enough.

I dunno what I will try to accomplish today, I really should make an effort to do something productive (I say this at noon, when all I’ve done is cleaned up the apartment and checked email, etc.)… Wanna see something funny tho? Apparently a guy from #goddess made this funny .gif:

The World According To America
Check it out if you have a chance, it’s great.

*wanders off*

We had some Chouffe last night %d it was yummie, and I was able to refuse opening a second bottle so I feel ok this morning, hehe. I couldnt really read while I was drinking of course, so I watched the nightly movie on FX, which was Grosse Pointe Blank. I had never seen itbefore, it was funny %)

My mother called me last night, she only does that ever couple months, last time was on my birthday back in september. It was a pretty typical phone call, except for the news that my little 13 year old sister Annette finally got her way and got her belly button pierced.

That’s not the worst of it

My mother got hers pierced too!

How many girls can say that their mother has more piercings than them? Heh… well it’s not something I’m proud of! It’s weird! She’s almost 42…

I recently joined an emotional abuse online group called Emotional Abuse Victims on Yahoo! I sorta stumbled upon it after writing an Account Of Verbal Abuse I Went Through on my website. Of course it’s been over a year since I’ve been in that verbally abusive relationship, but giving advice to others, and seeing that I am not the only one still recovering from a bad relationships (one woman has been away from her ex for 7 years and still has problems!). It’s really good for me to talk about what happened… it’s really making me feel much better, and if I can help one woman out of a similar situation then it’s worth so much more than the few minutes a day I spend reading and posting to the board.

It’s cold in here, I think I am gonna go crawl back in bed, hehe… yay weekends

Biological Clock

Growing up I was never one of those girls who flocked to carriages carrying babies and ooh’ed and aah’ed at how wonderfully cute they were. I liked kids, sure, they’re fun. I didn’t mind babysitting, I really enjoyed playing with kids because I never grew out of my “let’s pretend” stage, still havent, I have a crazy imagination. Anyway, even with the fun I had with kids I never really wanted one of my own, I guess I just didn’t want the responsibility, didn’t want all the work it took, and was always afraid I’d make a terrible parent. Recently however my feelings have changed a bit.

I knew when I started dating Myk that he’d want kids, I figured we could cross that bridge when we came to it, and maybe I would change my mind. So the other morning I was making some French toast for Myk and I, and I had this little thought “wouldn’t it be so great if I could make breakfast every morning for kids?” … It was one of those thoughts that just somehow pop into your head out of nowhere, and until you think them you have no idea that you felt that way. But of course it started a whole avalanche of such thoughts. Is this what they mean when they say my biological clock has started going off? hehe. It’s really not “i need kids right now” just I definitely want some (or maybe only one) in the future and I really think I’ll enjoy it. This may not seem like much to the casual reader, but if you know me as well as my closer friends do, this is a startling revelation.

So it’s come to a point where we decided we need to seriously start saving money for a house. This means cutting back our living expenses, fewer dinners out (i know i have said this before), saving money on groceries, renting fewer movies at blockbuster. It shouldnt be too hard, we really tend to be careless at times.

It’s my friends from Belgium’s birthday today… a couple from chat (Yann and Frost), they have the same birthday, which is cute, and convenient for him I’m sure, hehee. Anyway I gotta go make them an ecard n stuff *wanders off*

Fisher – Believe In Something

I went and got glasses last night, YAY! They are freaking expensive, gah… we went to LensCrafters as well, so I guess that was part of it %) It was interesting to find out that in PA a eye doctor’s office can be inside a store, in Maine they made it so the doctor’s office had to have a separate entrance. Anyway the appointment was fine, they had to dilate my pupils for one test, they put these special eyedrops in your eyes.. creepy stuff! I couldnt read for a few hours after that, lol. Anyway, it was lenscrafters so we decided to wait there at the mall for them to get my glasses done in “under an hour” … we didnt really know what to do, so we decided we’d just wander around the mall for a the hour (driving home and then back would have been silly.. icky traffic AND it was raining, ugh). I don’t really like malls, the people, the smells… it just gets to me, I was never the kind of person who enjoyed going to malls. So we found a bookstore! … but my pupils were not back to normal yet so it was nearly impossible to look at books, doh! So we went to the Disney store, and a pet store, and a few random movie stores, got a yummie seasame seed pretzel to hold us over til we could get home for dinner. Then I got my glasses! Putting on those new glasses for the first time is such a wonderful feeling… being able to see all the things you couldnt see before, I mean my vision had gotten pretty bad since my last visit to the doctor %)

I ended up getting a headache while we were at the mall though, which sucked. It’s probably ’cause of be dilated pupils, but it’s possible it was just from the eye exam itself, or the evilness of being in a mall for over an hour! So we came home and Myk made dinner for us, and we sat down and watched Strange Days … I had never seen it before and FX (one of those cable channels I get) has been showing a movie every night at 8… of course they are all somehow related to Fox, but I have been catching up on a bunch of big movies I have never seen. Tuesday night I saw The Full Monty, a really funny movie which I hadn’t seen.. Wednesday night they had Devil’s Advocate but we were out for dinner and didnt get back til after it started, Myk is a big Pacino fan and said he was great in that one, maybe we’ll rent it sometime. Heh /End FX Plug

I spent almost the whole day cleaning the apartment. Like I’ve probably mentioned before, we arent messy people, so it’s usually just a 2 hour dusting, vacuuming and cleaning the kitchen and bathroom session, hehe… today I decided to move stuff around in the bedroom so I could clean the whole thing. I even went through the closet and organized everything in there, woohoo, hehe.

I am gonna go do some stuff noew. *wanders off*

U2 – New Years Day

Sometimes it feels like no matter how much money you make you STILL have money problems. I assume this is because people have some sort of standard of living, which causes them to use a consistant percentage of their income, no matter what that income is. I mean, take a look at my parents, they made less than I am living on now, and managed to take care of themselves and three kids… of course we didn’t have a lot of money, but we were happy, and we were never starving, we always had what we needed. Now Myk and I only have the two of us to support and we still have weeks were we just dont have much money. Of course this is because we live in a nice place, spend money when we need to (my parents they saved up for EVERYTHING), and we do tend to enjoy going out to eat and spending money with friends.

The point of that money rant? We realized last night that we really will not have enough money to go up to New York for thanksgiving. See, a few unexpected expenses came up… I need to go to the eye doctor and get new glasses so I can pass my PA License exam (which i NEED to get since I will be on Myk’s insurance as a resident of PA), plus Myk’s Jeep needs a tune-up and oil change before we go anywhere… and I have another doctor’s appointment tomorrow (none of this is on insurance, but i need this appointment now)… So it adds up to not having the money to go on a vacation right now. All those plans… seeing some family I haven’t seen in years, meeting some new family… Star Wars in the IMAX! No go %( Plus we wont be able to fix my Aunt Elaine’s computer like I said we’d do while we are up there. Maybe we can go up for Easter or something…

*Sigh* I should really get a job…

I am so depressed.

Oh well, things arent all bad. I installed Eterm yesterday. It’s really nice actually, and I can paste from Opera to here! Oh and I did some research on the whole cut and paste problem… apparently Opera uses Qt (I knew this) and the problem with the pasting as to do with the qt libs, which have been upgraded in testing, but not in my stable debian version. There is no way to fix this without breaking things, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with using Eterms instead of gnome terms for a while *shrugs* it’s not so bad. The only problems really with Eterm is it has an option for being transparent… but no shading, and since the middle of my desktop background is too bright to write over this causes problems, so I just have a plain black background. It’s ok really, just not so cool looking ;) And it seems to have trouble with arrow keys in vim. Heh, yeah, I am one of those people who just can’t get used to using vim-keys %P .. well this is not actually a bad thing really, I am going to force myself to use Eterm with vim so I learn the vim-keys! Yeah, the only way I will learn is if I am forced to do it %P To help me with this I also changed my Enlightenment keybindings, removing arrow keys from the navigation of the desktop and replacing them with vimkeys (Myk has done this for quite some time now… but i think he still has arrowkeys bound), so now I HAVE TO use vimkeys even then… I will become a vim expert yet ;)

Hmmm, Myk just showed me wterm… this is promising as well.

*wanders off to work on stuff*

Dido – Take My Hand

I have been sneezing all morning, ick. I don’t know why I so often wake up feeling like I have a cold.. usually it goes away by noon.

We had some Chouffe last night.. we keep putting it in the fridge to drink in the evening, then deciding we don’t really want to drink and taking it out, but of course that is bad for the beer. So finally last night we decided to drink it. This was probably not the wisest thing to do, both Myk and I were exhausted because of the lousy night sleep monday night, and drinking beer when you are tired is baaad, especially when it’s only 7:30 pm. So what happened? By 8 pm we had had 2 beers each (remember, it’s 8% alcohol Chouffe) and we were in bed sleeping. Now I am sure I have mentioned this before, but I have a *terrible* time falling asleep at night when I take naps, especially when that nap is a few hours before my normal going to sleep time. I ended up waking up around 10, cursing myself for falling asleep. I left Myk sleeping, he ended up getting up around 11:30. During this this I was very awake… it seems that I am more alert and able to get work done when my sleep schedule is irregular, I don’t quite understand this because inevitably when I have an irregular sleep schedule I actually sleep LESS than I do when I sleep normally. Maybe I am just so much of a night person that I just can’t properly function during the day no matter how much sleep I get %) Eak I lost track of what I was talking about.

Uh… Right. So I got up around 9:30 last night after a short nap and was able to get the “How-To” written for binding those other keys in Linux. It was really just a revision and addition to a page I already have up… I bound my windows keys in Red Hat back when I was using that, so I had a little section on my page for that… I pretty much just added the Debian instructions and a “FAQ” section. You can check out the page here: http://www.princessleia.com/Windowsbind.html … Myk wanted to add it to the PLUG HowTo Archive but I dunno.. it seems pretty simple, I think Myk is just overly excited because I took the time to figure out something cool, without any help.

It feels really good to get sections revised on my site.. and even better when I found my site on google searches yet again when I was looking for stuff… the search: bind windows keys and: windows keys linux has my little howto site is the first hit … it’s the second hit for: linux bind keys That’s so leet %) Maybe someone will someday have use for my site! Not that they havent in the past, I certainly don’t give myself enough credit sometimes(like when I say that my site is “little” hehe).

I decided to go to bn.com and cancel the last book on my order. It’s really a pain that they havent shipped it yet. I can do without that book (it was sorta impulse anyway)… the whole point of ordering these books before I had finished all from the last shipment was so I’d have them BEFORE I went on vacation next week, so I dont have a box of books on my doorstep for days telling the whole neighborhood that we are not home. Luckily the rest of my order was shipped on Friday so I should get it before I leave.

So after that big weekend mess playing with my lan card we ended up reinstalling debian. I am using stable now instead of testing (testing does not get consitant security updates or something apparently…). Now this wouldnt bother me much, stable is good right? Well it’s a bit quirky, especially with it’s pasting methods. I cannot seem to paste from opera into a Gnome Terminal. Now this may not be a big thing for most people, but I use Gnome Terminals (don’t have experiance with eterm, maybe i should use it… and xterm just sucks) as my main x terminal… and Opera as my primary browser.. and so of course I am going to use both these together constantly. Bleh… I’ve been opening an xterm to paste between the two … ick.

Woohoo! I just got a knock on the door (freaking because I still have my pj’s on) and I looked outside, no one there… So I opened the door and there was my box of books, yay! This is the second time the UPS guy has just knocked on the door and run off before I could even see them, they are strange like that… Growing up they’d always wait at the door for like 5 minutes, I guess they just assume no one is home… but the first time this happened it scared me… I mean someone walking up to the door, knocking on the door and when I look outside no one is there? Isn’t that a way to gain entry into an apartment for bad things?! I’m really not a paranoid person… really.

Anyway, since I am still in my pajamas I should go get showered and dressed, since it’s almost noon, gah! *wanders off*