Where do I even begin?

Actually, I have no issue with trying to figure out where to begin... I am a chronological kinda girl.

Lets see... Wed, picking up Mum.
Before we left, Amy called. She was being all sympathetic with the strain of having everyone over and wanted to know if having her here too was going to be too much. I assured her - with no pretense - that I wanted here there most of all. So, she was happy.
In the car, on the way to the airport, Dad was saying, "I know your Mum stresses you out a bit when she comes over and tries to run the house," and I say, "Gee... ya' think?" and he was like, "she just feels bad about not being able to host these shin-digs and wants to take some of the load off us." And I was like, "So, yeah, she means well, but it would be so much easier if she would just kick back and relax." So, of course, Dad comes back with, "Have you ever /told/ her that?"
What could I say? I hem-haw'd about for a bit then just resigned, "No... not, like, in /words/ and stuff."
So, yeah, my maternal unit it a bit of a control noodge, but I am not exactly the best at, like, talking and stuff.

We get her and have brunch-ish. Mum says I am looking good (she lies) and that since I am getting some hair I should let her have someone do something with it. So I take off my touque(sp) and show her that it is only growing in the front. Nothing really to do anything with. I make a mental note to get rid of it all. Hey, I tried to let it alone.

Shopping for food.

No, back up. Mum tries to get us to go clothes shopping now before the crowds hit on Friday. She gets vetoed.

Shopping for food. Mum wants to do a turkey. I want to do fish. She says, "who does fish for Thanksgiving?" I say, "Hello? Alaska? I think there is some whale in the icehouse." Mum cringes. Dad represses a giggle. No, wait... he is more manly than giggling. And that should be "suppresses", not "represses."
We compromise. Turkey.

So, on the way back to the house, I actually /tell/ Mum that she should just relax and enjoy herself. So she tells us how she wants the turkey done and starts "setting up the house for guests."
Dad and I share a private laugh. But at least she it out of the kitchen for now.

Okay, so Mum is arranging for everyone coming over - sleeping wise.
"You know, LQ, if you do not want to share your room with Amy... If you are not comfortable with that..." she says.
"Oh, no. It is fine. It would not be a family get-together without sleeping with Amy."
She raises an eyebrow at me.
"You know what I mean. And no, it won't be weird. I'm not worried about her trying anything. We're cool." And that is probably more than I have ever told Mum about my relationship with Amy.

So, we snack and cook and watch movies and play games and everyone eventually arrives.

Around the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Yes, I know that was a sentence fragment. Get over it.
Re-capping the party members:
Mum and her two ex's (Dad and Amy)
Her brother, his ex (Amy), current (Joan) and offspring (Jill)
Dad, his ex (Mum) and current (Kathy) and offspring (Me)
Amy, her two ex's (Uncle and Mum) and (?) (Me)
Joan, her current, her current's ex and her offspring
Jill and all these weirdos.
Me, surrounded by people who know far too many of my issues, all too well.

Bird is on the table. All the side are on the table. Drink glasses are full and all the places are set. I am the last one up and the bird-carving tools are still in the kitchen. So, I go pick them up and bring them to the table.

There is this... odd... silence as everyone (rug-rat excluded) is looking at /ME/ holding a /great/ /big/ knife.

I roll my eyes and hand the thing to Dad, but there is that moment. That elephant walking through the room.
I sit down, fold my arms across my chest and I think my bottom lip even stuck out just a little and Dad starts carving. (For those who may not know, I am not permitted sharp/pointy things. The failing track record I have with them is evident on my skin.)
Joan serves herself some stuffing then passes the dish. "So... how do you shave?"
After I pick up my jaw, I am actually pleased there was someone at the table over the age of /me/ who was unclear on the answer to that.
But the pleasantries for the next far-too-long pretty much ended there as the dinner conversation was centered around the fact that the seventeen year old (me) was displaying no more signs of puberty than the two-ish year old (Jill).
It did kinda end after the suggestion of getting out the CT scan of my ovaries was thrown out there.
"How about lets not," I say. I did not say, "Hey, lets /not/ get out the pictures of my crotch... again"
There is some debate on the relative merits of looking at the proof that I do actually have them. I give dad a pleading look and he kinda changes the subject and things get better after that, but I still could not really eat. Yep, I was embarrassed. I really tried to not show it, because it really was not anything to /be/ embarrassed about.

Moving on...
After dinner's cleanup was followed by much playing of Rock Band. That was cool. I mean, Mum, Kathy and I were taking turns on the vocals, Amy played drums, mostly and Dad and Uncle mostly stuck to the guitars. Joan rotated through the set here and there while entertaining Jill.

There was over all very little discussion of my inert reproductive system, my bad habits, and (most importantly) the few little gaps I have from the past few days are, well, few, and seem innocuous. Just some, "Earth to LQ - Hello - You in there?" and no one heard me talking to my food - that I am aware of.

I enjoyed a nice cup of espresso with minimal upset.

My bread pudding went over well.

I got to have some of the good scotch - but just a sip.

We did all have Guinness Punch - even Claire (I am such a bad influence - hahaha).

I ate at least something every day.

Friday, my friend Claire came over. Saturday, I went to Claire's for a while.

All in all, much of the long weekend was spent with all of us playing in the snow and me being Amy's pet like I used to. Only, now I am a little more reserved because I know what effect that has on her.

Claire did say it was a little weird seeing Amy kiss me bye. But not much weirder then seeing the general affection I show for Amy. She is way more accustomed to me keeping far more distance from people.

So, everyone is gone. The rest of the putting-the-house back in order will wait until tomorrow morning... after I post this. This was a much better holiday than last year.

Them are the highlights. I'll post this in the morning.
So for now...

Take Care -
LQ

It is Friday and I am not sure how I feel about that

This update may take me a while to get posted, but I will leave it up here until I am good and ready to post it.

This week has really gone my fast. Too fast, one may say.

The Linux Mint servers were having issues from being overloaded. I am happy that they are getting that popular... in a way.

Maybe I should go back to looking for a nice, quiet, unpopular distribution... maybe I should stick with Mint. It is great, but I am never one to go with the flow, as it were.

Rice. Sure, it's rice - who expects it to _not_ be boring. But hey, seasoned right, it is very flexible. And, dried, it stores well all winter, so, you know, no point in being down about it, eh?

I watched the film they made of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and...
I think they did a good job. I am not goring to do a side-by-side breakdown. I have given up on trying to do that because it never ends well for the film. Maybe an exception or two. Now, books made from films? That is a whole other issue all together.
Back to the point, I really think that - for a conversion - the stripped down film made a lot of sense. Yeah, I think there was a point or two missing... but those missing points are mostly Mrs. Sebold's issues/hangups. It was tidied up nicely for the movie-going audience.

Never Let Me Go, when it comes out, I am not likely going to be so kind about. In fact, I think I am going to re-read it over the holidays so it is all fresh. It has been even longer since I read Ishiguro than Sebold. This was an incredible book. Depressing, yes, but incredible.

Now, I have no idea if there are plans or not, but I think Peter Jackson could do a good job bringing Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series to film... seeing as how Hollywood has thrown in the towel on original film concepts. (Did I spell Westerfeld right? lemme look that up... Nope. Better go back and fix that. Done. Now no one will know.)

I did a thing a while back about songs that, given a more developed story, could make a really good film. Some may be more like a Sundance festival short, other maybe like a full fledged motion picture, but hey... interesting plot nonetheless.
I am listening to Yaz (or Yazoo, for those of you across the pond) while writing this. It feels good.

Earlier, I was listening to Cherry Poppin' Daddies:
"You gotta move fast to beat the devil
Your arm is too short to box with G__"
I feel like that some days... stuck between anything and everything with no recourse and no wall to put my back against. It really wears me out sometimes.

Oh, I am doing better now, I suppose. Sometimes when you are lying down at the bottom of the well, the only thing to do is be still and hope the kicking is over with soon.

So, this is supposed to be the month for writing, right? It is bugging me that I have not been able to put anything down, you know? And Mum will be here Wednesday. It feels like it may as well be tomorrow. I am not ready to deal with family again. Maybe I just want Dad all to myself for the holidays. Yeah, that is bad of me to think like that, but then, I have even worse thoughts, so, oh well. The point of that was to say that starting with Mum on Wed,family will be coming and between getting ready, and then them being here, I doubt I will get anything finished enough to post. :bummer:

This is getting long-ish and has touched on a number of subjects without being very meaningful to any of them, so I suppose it is time to wrap this up.

Take Care-
LQ

My Jove, I think he's got it.

Well, there is hope at last.

The contractor guy who sends this data work my way interceded. 1) he explained that no, it was not okay, but that the compiled data they got back from the other guy may be bad. 2) said they need to get their extract fix, 3) Told Mr Honcho in no uncertain terms that he was not entitled to contact me directly - certainly not without including him.

So, the short of it all is that the character is not supposed to be in the data. *If* I removed it so my process would work correctly, it still would mean that the raw data is compromised. They are doing to have to have the stuff on their end looked at. This seems a little anti-climactic after how the guy irked me so.

Dad says that I have had a big problem staying ... myself these past few days and yeah, I have big missing blocks with this going on. It is not worth it.

I got other stuff to do.

Take Care
LQ

It's Friday - I'm in... pajamas

Yes. It is Friday and I know that most of you out there do not need _me_ to tell you that.

I _so_ do not feel like posting on my blog today, so I thought I would post about that.

This is just a Friday blog and not very interesting, so you may want to just move on, but here it goes.

I have been missing a lot of time lately and that makes it really hard to get things done. Well, sure, I think I swept the same floor like 5 times on Tuesday. So, I know that got done, eh? Maybe we should get security cameras in here so I can find out what it is that goes on during these spells. Or maybe I am better off not knowing. Typically that is what I hear - that I don't want to know, or it was not important .

Twice this week I woke up in Dad's bed, once in the kitchen and once in the bathroom. Once I came back from my missing time undressed in the coat closet and once by the creek in my parka and boots.

For the November writing thing, I was really hoping to get a lot written... no a character.

Then... I get this e-mail yesterday from "my client" (a honcho at the place for whom I crunch data. See, first, I was like, "The byte count is off and there is this transmission artifact (ascii-burp) in the file. Please re-transmit."
So I get it back without the garble, and there is one record with a bad field count and it is throwing things off. So I find an un-escaped delimiter in a field in the record and it should not be there at all - like, there is no reason for that character to be in there at all.
I go back to them again and I am like, there is this record that has a problem. It was extracted that way and it needs to be fixed, re-extracted and sent to me again.

This is where the honcho's e-mail comes in because they should have the file back [today, now that it is Friday] but it will be late, etc, etc.

The e-mail was just to me, like it was my fault. I included my contractor guy when I replied, "Excuse me?"

That was really depressing on top of all my uncertainties this week.

So, _NOW_ I am feeling bad.

I was listening to The Bravery this morning what waffling about posting this. I made ginger-curry rice with an egg, but they are getting cold while I type.

Pffffftttt...

Reading Misfile did not help because it is kinda a mini cliffhanger and I could just about kick Chris in the shin for doing that to me today, but no... I couldn't do that.

I am thinking hard about finishing watching Kick-A__... but I don't know. I am about 40 minutes in an waiting for a character that I like. Well, I liked Mr Bitey, but that is it so far.

So, there it is. Hope I didn't bring anyone down.

Take Care-
LQ

Friday: Back to Linux Mint 10 RC

Hi, and welcome to Friday.

As far as moods and disposition goes, this was not a good week for me to have been messing about with OS's. There are times when I am in a much better frame of mind for Slackware based distros.

Most of my "grief" came from three simple things, but there was more to it than just these:
1) Virtual Box & Guest Addition display drivers
2) Package management
3) I'm an idiot.

So, it went something like this.
I was running Linux Mint Debian Edition, but the RC for Linux Mint (Main~Gnome) 10 which has a lot of cool new features on the mintMenu in particular. And, it is available in 64bit.
Okay, great. Got it installed. Got Rosetta@home going again. All was good.
Well, while going through all that, I was thinking to myself... I wonder what Zenwalk has gotten up to lately. I mean, we are talking about a virtual machine, right? I stayed up on LM10 the whole time. No problem.
So... yeah.
First off, Zenwalk Core is great for a number of things. I mean, the file server here (an old 333Mhz Pentium got mercy's sake) that I built up scraps (with Dad's help - it was my first computer assembly) is still running Zenwalk Server for about four years now. Very stable, but anyway.

One of the things I like about it is it is really easy to switch from init 3 to 4 and back. (console environment to graphical environment) This is a good thing because I needed it. I just could not really get Xorg configured. It wanted to use nothing but the vesa driver and stuck me in 800x600 in stead of 1280x800 and the mouse integration never really worked right.
Going on the supposition that these were VirtualBox issues and all this would work fine in a "real" installation, I decided to set that aside and have a look around - the real purpose of the exercise. Well, the package manager - netpkg was not too bad. I mean, I am spoiled to Mint's updater and whatnot, but I could work with netpkg/zenpkg. It is better than it was four years ago when I set up the file server. But you kinda have to know what package you are looking for. There are plenty of resources for looking around the interwebs for package names, then hope that netpkg can find it out there. I mean, I did get the kernel headers installed so I could install the VBGuestAdditions. It was livable. Zenwalk is very pretty, but I do not want to settle. If I really wanted a MAC, but did not want to pay for it, I could run ZW and install everything under the sun and be happy, I suppose.

Quickly, I just went back to LMDE, but I could not get it to install. I got kinda frustrated with that because I _had_ installed it before.

So, I looked at Absolute. It too is slackware based. And kinda pretty. I had kinda tested it out in the past, but as soon as I saw that I could not just run it in VBox out-of-the-box, I moved on because I was looking for something kinda specific at the time. So, install again.
It had a nice little "Here is what you can do now" welcome message. Google Chromium was installed out of the box as were some other things I use and others I don't. Typical.
During the install, it prompted to create a root password, but did not have a step for setting up the user. Here in the welcome screen, the message was something like this:
Here is where I am supposed to tell you that you should create a user for yourself, but I don't because I need root for everything because the only things I do on this distro need root access and I do not want to su or sudo and keep having to type the password over and over.

Well, 1) sudo can be set such that one does not have to enter the password every time. It is not as secure, but better than running around as root all the time. 2) I suppose that is fine when one is the only person to use the computer or everyone using it is just going to all use the same ID. Whatever.
So, okay. I could just set myself up my user account and configure it the way I want - I hardly have to subscribe to the author's policies, right? I *see* where he is coming from, but I just don't go there myself. No biggie. Moving on.
I downloaded all the kernel source and started building modules and installing the guest additions. Pfft - same thing; 800x600 and no mouse integration. Oh, and no mounting host shares. That is definitely a show stopper... ish.
Then it comes to the package manager - yeah, right. Search the web, find the package its self, install it. Okay... this really is fine for plenty of situations. I can really see jumping into this methodology really easily. Especially in an IT type environment where you probably have a file server with all your packages on it and can just mount your share, get to your own little custom repository and pick and choose.
BUT, if I was doing that, I would probably just run SLAX, you know? This just does not suit my current mission. Maybe when I am setting up something where that would be more appropriate, then that would be more... well, appropriate.

Now, a few things about the installers. What ever happened to letting me use more than one drive for the install? No... What drive would you like to install this on. Pick one and I am going to ignore the rest. This is fine for some things, but I want to go through this setup during installation and not have to revisit it after the fact. I want swap on a disk all its own. I want to choose where my home gets mounted - on its own drive. Putting /media in its own partition has its purpose too. Sure, I can add them later, but during install really is when I want to do it. After install, I just want to get the extra packages I need, remove the ones I don't and get to work, you know? Not the end of the world, but I feel like this was a bit of a step back in the evolution of linux installers. (Sure, someone is going to read this and think to themselves - hey, if she had just done it this way, or that way, everything would have this or that. Did I mention that I was not in the proper disposition for doing this stuff this week? Maybe later. It's virtual, I can pick it up again when I feel more like gettin' teckie wit' it.)

So, I go back to my good old Mint. What is this? I had not reset the environment back to 32 bit when I was installing LMDE! Oh... I am an idiot. But, well, I am installing 64 bit now, so no problem.

I put the VM back to Linux Mint 10 RC so I can track it until the release comes out and see if I want to install it on my laptop, or stick with the debian.

Frame of mind? I had kind of had a few setbacks when I kept blacking out during the Zenwalk tests. I would be in the middle of something, then the next thing I would know, I would be doing something else, somewhere else and have no idea where the past few hours had gone. A major setback in the trying-to-get-things-done department.

Now, all that is set aside for now and I am back on my laptop. :sigh: Comfy.

Thanks, take care, and happy Friday!

(yet) Another Friday Instalment

Well, what can I say...
Where have been things that happened this past week, but they were weird and I am not going to blog about them -
 - Other, that is, than to say it has been a weird week.

I got to a point this morning after not being able to sleep, not feeling good, etc that I will not waste blogspace or keystrokes talking about, where I was like, "Oh boy! It's Friday! Time to blog again!"
That was followed quickly by the stark realization that I have no idea what to blog about.  Hmm... imagine that.

So:
The trailer for "The Girl Who Played With Fire" was released.  Um... what is the word... Oh yeah.  "w00t"
Watch It Here
Okay... that was not the English/internat'l trailer that was just released, but apparently the only link back to it I am finding right now is on youtube, to which I am insanely allergic, so you have to read the Swedish. For some of you that will be fine, I know.


Also, there has been a lot of buzz around the literary circles for the series (Thank you @randomhouse) which is cool because it is much with the awesome.

Then, also, a friend of mine turned me on to an anime series Bamboo Blade.  It is cute and funny, but it has amusing character development.  It centres around the sport of kendo.  Being a fencer, I find this cool.  Reminds me of clubs I have known, but I will leave it there.

Let's see... what else.

Oh - I wrote a (bash) script to... automatically tweet whatever I have playing in xmms2.  But it is a little annoying... I think I like to be more selective about what I share - even if it may not seem like it.  :rollseyes:

Well, there you have it.

Have a good week.  Read a book.

Take Care
LQ

p.s.  Yes, I am missing most of last weekend.  Not sure I want it back, given the evidence.  Two more "episodes" this week that I am sure of.  :sadface:

Re-reading for the first time

I had apparently started "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", but cannot remember reading it.  I mean, like I blanked out, but kept reading.  So, now I have to start all over again. :le-sigh:

I asked dad about the black-out.  He said I was just quietly reading and didn't think anything strange was going on.  I mean, sometimes I apparently act a little different and he can tell that I am not myself and that I will not remember stuff.


I thing that I am going to start to blog my blackouts when I can or whatever.  I have the feeling that sometimes they go by with out really anything to go on, but other times I can really tell that something weird went on without me.


Take Care,
LQ


ps. if I was a more organized person I would have a separate blog for different kinds of things I was to blog about, but alas... not-so-much.