Life Updates

I am glad that your daughter is succeeding in something that she wants to do and enjoys doing. That doesn't seem to happen all that often.

Not sure that I have heard anything about work... or a trial.

I'm not going to get to far into your mom's passing because I consider death, especially that of a loved one, a private matter and it makes me uncomfortable to discuss these things, but do know that I understand what it is like for people to think that you don't grieve right and how one can come to terms with and be prepared for the passing of a loved one long before it actually happens. I suppose that I am lucky enough to have never dealt with the family spats or what you are dealing with now with your mother's friend, but I have seen the bickering and bile that has come from two deaths in Mal's family since we've been together and it is something that I would very much never have to experience first-hand in the future.

Good - Congrats to your daughter! And enjoy your trip to Vegas.
Bad - My condolences on your loss! Even when we expect it, it can be hard to deal with.
Ugly - Everyone deals with grief in their own way...and few people can keep themselves from commenting on, or meddling with, other people's grief. If you don't fall apart, it is normal...for you. Don't let anyone make you feel like you are "doing it wrong." Also, this can be a part of the other person's grieving process...complaining about everything and trying to insert herself into the middle of everything.

Hey everyone, sorry for not being around. Hugs to Kammi, you know
I know how this feels. I was away from work a week after my mothers passing, not sure that counts as falling apart,

As for an update, our little Robert Severin was due on the 11th, it's now the 15th, we are going to the hospital to begin inducing today..so having a June 16th baby is a strong possibility. Will try to remember to post some more updates.

Oh, that has to happen. I told you when this started that you needed to have it on the 16th. It is my birthday, after all.

This is the best birthday present. Congrats to you. Though... he is red-headed. His axe may lack a soul.

I'm just going to use this as the general thread for this sort of thing. The one I made was going nowhere fast. Also, someone should probably announce a wedding soon. I'm not volunteering.

I spent my birthday dealing with the issues that stemmed from attempting to find an alternative to OpenSUSE, the linux OS that I have been using since my PC experienced hd failure. I was pretty fed up with the bizarre issues that I kept running up against in OpenSUSE and decided that it was high time I move on.

Since I am running this on an eight year old laptop, I figured it would be in my best interest to check out some of the lightweight distros. Unfortunately, there are four attributes assigned to these distros and you may only choose two:

1) Ubuntu derivative.
2) Ugly as sin.
3) Not actually lightweight.
4) Not Ubuntu derivative.

I don't know how the third category keeps sneaking into these lists, but it somehow does and it is really irritating. Elementary, one of the much-touted ones in recent years, was one of the first distros I tried when after my computer crapped out on me and it ended up being not only slow, but prone to crashes whenever anything remotely intensive was done--like opening multiple tabs in a browser. This time around, I went with Mint because several articles called it lightweight and it looked pretty snazzy (I have to stare at this thing for hours on end, I'm allowed to be shallow). It was not lightweight. At all. I can't even call it a rival for Elementary's brand of slow. This was system-crippling hell.

Both are derived from Ubuntu, by the way.

Next I went with another Ubuntu derivative, LXLE. It is based on an older, long-term support Ubuntu release and is supposed to be stable and quick. It was never quick. OpenSUSE, which was not lightweight by any means, was faster than it. That's OK though, I can handle a bit of slowness. How about stability? Well, LXLE worked really well... until it didn't. In this case, it worked fine until I went to bed last night and then it decided that it had pretended long enough. It had quirks before--like being unable to change the default browser from the hilariously outdated SeaMonkey, which almost succeeded in making me nostalgic for the time when I still used Mozilla (not Firefox, Mozilla) as my browser of choice--but it decided to thrown usability out the window. Suddenly, I couldn't update anything. Anything. Every attempt to update or install something led back to a fetch error from the Ubuntu repositories. This, if you have never been here before (I have, oh very much so), is the point where you look upon your new OS with dawning horror because the only worse thing that can happen than this is the OS not working at all or a bricked computer.

(I installed Ubuntu on my laptop several years ago, after it broke and we replaced it and there was really nothing more that we could do with it other than screw around. That came back to bite me when I returned to it and discovered that the installed Ubuntu was outdated and no longer supported. My attempts to upgrade to a newer version ended up breaking it completely. To get a new OS onto the computer, I had to go through a long, convoluted process that included constant switching between an ancient netbook and a few tiny distros in order to build up toward something that was usable. It was a pain in the neck and cost me several hours.)

Usually, I would just switch to a different distro. In fact, I had already decided on Korora, a Fedora derivative (something new!), for my next trial and downloaded it. All I had to do was create a bootable disk, which is usually a simple affair... but not this time. LXLE has a native start disk creator, but it is tailored to Ubuntu and won't notice any other distros. To get an alternative, I'd have to install it, which was impossible. Cue several hours of googling to fix my server issues. That was solved when someone left an offhand comment on a post about just switching the repository source. Problem fixed, I went ahead with the download and install and was ready to... go nowhere.

New problem. The program I downloaded doesn't recognize my usb stick. Google for a while, figure out that it, unlike every other program I have ever used, requires the usb stick to be erased by the user. I know how to do that, at least. Shouldn't take long. Oh well, no, because now I am not allowed to unmount or mount my usb stick anymore. When I fixed that, it was in read-only mode. When I fixed that, I realized that it was evening and I just spent my entire birthday on this crap. Then I jumped ship and moved to hopefully greener pastures.

If they aren't, you'll hear about it... and probably not understand a thing.

Night. Past nine. I'm lounging in bed, naked, reading some girly manga filled with misunderstandings and love polygons when the doorbell rings. I curse, but I'm up in a flash trying to untangle my discarded shorts. My shirt has gone into hiding, so I give up and just pull another from the dresser. Luck smiles down on me for a moment and I manage to get my shorts on and navigate the hall at the same time without falling on my face. This has to be important, right? Why the world would someone be at my door this late otherwise?

By the time I get to the kitchen, I see Mallory at the door and hear my neighbor's voice.

She's bored. She'd like to borrow some cigarettes. I recall that she still hasn't paid Mallory back for the cigarettes she borrowed a few months ago.Mallory doesn't have cigarettes that she can borrow, but 'no' appears to not exist in her vocabulary. She'd like to come in. Again, no. Again, she doesn't recognize this word.

I retreat to my lair. I'm furious. I don't like people coming to my door at night. I don't like people I dislike coming to my door at all. I don't like being interrupted when reading my girly manga. I don't like having to get dressed when I am finally comfortable in my oven of an apartment.

There is a very good chance that I will answer the door naked the next time she visits.