Personal

it’s probably not fair to blame etselec, but i do. You scored as Friedrich Nietzsche. Well you’re an egotistical maniac, and you are so very iconoclastic that you probably are currently lost in a post-modern Jupiter, I mean jungle of self-definition. Don’t let it get you down though, someday, through a willful onslaught of reinterpretation of dated forms and ideas, you will strike on something that passes as remotely new, and people WILL be into it on the basis of how hip it is alone. Also, the average espresso drinker looks up to you. Friedrich Nietzsche83%Dante Alighieri75%Miyamoto Musashi67%Stephen Hawking58%Jesus Christ42%Sigmund Freud42%Elvis Presley42%O.J. Simpson33%Hugh Hefner25%Charles Manson17%C.G. Jung17%Mother Teresa17%Steven Morrissey17%Adolf Hitler0%What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You? created with QuizFarm.comYou Belong in San Francisco You crave an eclectic, urban environment. You’re half California, half NYC. You’re open minded, tolerant, and secretly think you’re the best. People may dismiss you as a hippie, but you’re also progressive, interesting, and rich! ...

One last comment on the day – K and I went out to get a Christmas tree this afternoon. The place we usually go was just about out of trees. In fact, they had run out, but spoke to another tree seller who hadn’t sold all of his trees yet and they bought a good chunk of his stock. Even still, there were only five 7 foot trees, a bunch of 6 foot trees and an 8 foot tree. Unfortunately, the only decent tree was the 8 foot one. Fortunately, we’ve got high ceilings 🙂 ...

Turns out that there is at least one advantage of having constant plumbing problems – you often have the part you need. I had been noticing a leak under the kitchen sink. In checking it out, I found that the nut holding the drain in place was lose. As I tried to tighten it, the nut broke up in my hand. Resigned to not having one of the dual kitchen sinks, I put a bucket under it and blocked it up. After dinner, we went on our walk and on the way back in, it occurred to me that I had a spare drain segment with a plastic nut. Installed the new nut and no more leak!

Why didn’t someone tell me about this sooner? Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) and Stephin Merritt are the Gothic Archies who’s new CD is the Tragic Treasury: “Music for a Series of Unfortunate Events. For a sample, see Funtime OK (a mp3 blog), or Youtube: My favorite so far is “Shipwrecked.

I hadn’t mentioned this, but it had been about 5 weeks since Luke (the boa) last ate. For the first three weeks, I didn’t worry. He had just shed, he’s a snake and it’s winter, etc. By week 5, I was getting concerned. Last Saturday, two days after finishing his cage, which upped the daytime temperature to ~80 degrees, he finally got interested in food. Now he’s prowling the cage, looking for another rat. 🙂

I hope everyone’s having a good Thanksgiving. So far, ours has been great. K’s parents are in town which means: a) her father gets to see the house for the first time; b) we’ve got help cooking dinner; and c) we’ve got a reason to cook more food! I started off the morning by (finally!) finishing the snake cage. I put the frames around the vents and put glass in about 3/4 of each vent (losing too much heat otherwise). I installed track lighting in the top and put two 75 watt grow bulbs in it. After they were on for an hour or so, the temperature rose to 81 degrees. Just about perfect. Eventually, we’ll replace the grow bulbs with heat lamps that produce no light, only heat; but for now, these are great. Luke’s basking right now and seems to be enjoying it. ...

The snake’s been in the cage for a few months, but I’ve held off posting pictures until I finished the last little bit – the frames around the window. But as pointed out in this comment, it would be good to get some pictures with Luke in his cage. So, hopefully I’ll finish up the frames this week, while I’m away from the office, but in the meantime, here are some pictures: ...

K’s parents are in town and staying with us. Okay, that’s not a typical thing to be thankful for :-), but I like her parents and this gives me a great excuse to take most of this week off. I lost 54 minutes of vacation last month, I would like to avoid a repeat. Hopefully, I can get caught up on a few things while I’m out of the office

I took the day off for my birthday. I got to sleep in late and get some things done around the house. I managed, I think, to get rid of whatever was smelling up one of our air ducts, I tarred up part of the roof and repaired the fence where the dog kept getting out. After that, I headed up for the Poindexter small group meeting and then his talk (more on these later). On my way home, I picked up some take out from the local Mexican restaurant. We ate dinner, made a cheesecake and walked the dogs. I opened presents when I got back. K got me a hand full of things I had wanted: the Library of America Writings of Washington and the Writings of Thoreau, Jared Bernstein’s All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy, and the Pinky and the Brain DVD 🙂 Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides is still being shipped. ...

bah – the past few nights, my website/blog keeps getting screwed up because all of the disk space on the drive is consumed. the first night, i freed up some space, but didn’t pay attention to how much was free. it happened last night and again i freed up space, noting that i had about 700 MB free. Tonight, it happened again and I finally tracked down what happened. I do an rsync backup to an external drive every day. A couple of days ago, I rebooted the machine and the external drive didn’t mount back up. So I wound up doing a backup of my home directory and root partition to the root partition. Of course the partition filled up. Oh well, problem solved now. I just need to be more careful in the future