Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

This week was midterms. This is good because it means the semester is halfway over and *checks pulse* yep, I am still living. And I am well done over half the work in both of my classes, so the latter half should be significantly less intense than the first half. I have around a 98% in both classes, so I am floating buoyantly with my head and upper chest above the water at this point. I had two midterm essays to write this week for my Renaissance class that were like pulling teeth to write; neither topic was very interesting (I had to choose two of three and the third was even less interesting), and the one book I had to discuss, Gargantua and Pantagruel, however ... intriguing ... and sometimes entertaining it was, was not a book I found easy to write about. I just finished both essays, and they are posted, and I am caught up on other work for the week.

So I am rewarding myself by writing in my journal. \0/

Bobby and I went to Ocean City last weekend so that we could take the Goldens. Dogs are not allowed on the beach or Boardwalk May through September, so it was one of the last weekends we could go. We had a good time. We left Friday after school, sat in horrendous traffic to cross the Bay Bridge, and were in OC by 8 PM. There are very few pet-friendly hotels in OC, but we have stayed at the Barefoot Mailman before and liked it, plus it is rated #7 in all of OC on Trip Advisor, which is saying something! It keeps company with the Hilton and Princess Bayside and other luxury hotels that, in season, cost several hundred dollars a night to say in. It is a humble little motel that doesn't even back up on the ocean, but it is very clean. ("Pet-friendly," unfortunately, tends to equate with "slightly skeevy" in my mind; I had a former coworker who stayed at a pet-friendly hotel once where the chair had fleas!)

The Goldens were good. This was Lance's first trip to the ocean. We took Alex when he was still a baby, before we had Lance, when he was afraid of the ocean and ate sand that he later shat out on the Boardwalk. (I just looked back at those pictures. Alex looks so young! I look so skinny! Bobby looks so beardless!) Alex is still afraid of the ocean, as is Lance, but no sand was consumed or shatted out on this trip, although Alex did poop once on the beach, right on the edge of the ocean, and got washed over by a wave in mid-poop, which he did not like, Bobby said. (This was early morning. I wasn't there.) The weather was decent but not great; the Goldens behaved better than the weather. It was chilly and so windy on Monday, the day we left, that we decided to skip a final walk on the Boardwalk and just go home instead.

( More about Our Trip with Pictures below the Cut )

( Feastival Preparations and Other Random Happenings in the House of Felagund ) To members of my LJ flist who are celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I hope you have a wonderful meal and even better company. Journey safely, if you're traveling. I am thankful to all of you for the support and friendship you give me throughout the year.

Today, I was working and I realized that I've become Coraline's mother. (Not the Other Mother, thank goodness.)

The chickens have been out in their pen by day, so the Goldens have been in the house since they haven't quite learned to behave yet, and I don't trust them unsupervised. So here I am glued to my computer, writing gardening articles. (Yes, really. I write mostly gardening articles. Just like Coraline's mother.)



While the Goldens wander in and flop their heads over on me and sigh about how bored they are, and "Can't we go outside?"

No. Go count the numbers of windows or write a list of everything you find that's blue. Don't bug me. I need to work.

Goldens, if you discover a much better Mommy who offers you canned dog food for every meal and never tires of throwing Big Orange but who has buttons for eyes, don't fall for it.

Life here has been hectic. SWG birthday is underway. The chickens are growing quickly. We had one at the vet earlier this week, but that's for a post to follow.

( Cut for Dog Poop-Related Grossness and TMI )

Speaking of animals, the Felagund Family flock is about to get bigger. Literally. Bobby called the town office today and received confirmation that, yes, we can have chickens. Not only that but, apparently, our humble three-quarter-acre residential lot is actually zoned for light agriculture! So we could till up the backyard, plant row crops, and sell them on the roadside if we wanted to. (Actually, after getting over my initial surprise, our zoning made perfect sense since our neighbor across the street does sell organic lettuce and eggs.) We cannot, apparently, have a cow, though, which sucks.

But, as I told Bobby, we were getting chickens no matter what the town said. I was fully prepared to pull a Henry David Thoreau on the Manchester bureaucracy and go all civil disobedient and keep chickens whether they were allowed or not. Two reasons why. Firstly, there are three other houses on our street that I know of with chickens. It's like the time my dad was trying to get a pool permit, and the county tried to deny him, and he pointed out all of the houses on the street that had built pools without permits, while he was trying to go about things legitimately and honestly and give the county their cut in fees. Secondly, sustainability is the closest thing I have to a religion. So there. >:-Þ

While I'm babbling about the town, Bobby and I went to the fire department carnival last Thursday, and I saw five of my students there. I told Bobby that, if I get a job at Manchester Valley, like I hope, when my certification's done, then I will probably know half the kids and parents at the carnival before long.

As of yesterday, late morning, we were dug out of the first snowstorm. First ... yes, we are expecting another to begin at any moment, this time with accumulations of 20-27 inches (50-68 cm) over the next day and a half. It is difficult to estimate our accumulations from the first since the snow came with high winds and there was a lot of drifting. Upon venturing outside (and yes, frenchpony, I did eventually go outside because I had to help Bobby shovel out the car ;), the snow came to my knees in some places and almost to my hips in others. I have heard the estimate of 30 inches (76 cm) floated around, and I think that's a fairly reasonable estimate for us too.

Following are pictures we've taken over the past few days, of the snowfall as well as the Goldens. (Because I haven't posted Golden pictures in a while and what else is there to do while cooped in the house but to take cute pictures of your pets?)

( Goldens, Snow, and Golden Snow )

Well, Round Two has started. It's been snowing pretty hard outside since right after I started this post. Bobby just came into the study with a big brick of frozen vegetable chowder that he made over the summer and kept just for a moment like this, we just hauled our next load of firewood into the basement--we're ready to go again!

I don't need to be told how woefully behind I am on posting pictures of Lancelot growing up. I still have pictures on my camera, but these will take us from his early puppyhood till October, when Lancelot was about four months old. (He's nine months now already, believe it or not.) I'll try not to take months this time in getting the rest of the photos up on my journal.

( Lancelot and Alex )

And now for something completely different ...

Pic Spam!!!

Following are the pictures we've taken over the past month or so. They're on all topics, organized under various LJ cuts. There's about fifty of them, so dial-up beware.

Before we really got underway with packing up the apartment, I took pictures of all the rooms, for sentimental value and also so that we could one day laugh at the egregious amount of clutter that we have. What follows is a truly frightening amount of mess. I did not clean up before taking these pictures. The apartment is much neater now ... because about 33% of it is packed into cardboard boxes. Whee!

( The Old Apartment ... or the Slum that Dawn Calls Home )

And now, we move onto the baby birds.

Last year, we had a nest of house finches on our balcony, in our hanging flower basket. We got another pair this year; I don't know if it's the same pair or a different one, but they're house finches again. The babies left a few days ago; I tried to take pictures every few days to show their growth.

( Baby Birds )

Yes, no pic spam would be complete without pictures of Alex. He's still growing and getting prettier by the day. All that puppy awkwardness is nearly gone, and he's getting feathers on his legs and tail.

( Alex Gator )

I have still more (yikes!) of Alex baby pictures just developed and pictures from Swallow Falls State Park, but I'll save those for another day.

I've wanted to write for days, but this is the first chance that I could grab. We got the house. Sunday evening, we were over my parents' house and Pat (my cousin's fiance and our real estate agent) called to say that the owners had made a counter-offer; it took Bobby and me about thirty seconds to decide that we could live with it. All of the final contract paperwork was finished today. So, pending inspection, it's ours!

This is all very exciting. We settle on 29 June (my sister's birthday!) and will move in that weekend.

Now that the place is definitely ours (pending inspection), every little detail about the apartment that annoyed me but I could live with suddenly seems one hundred times worse. Interesting psychology going on here. Coping mechanisms. ;) Today, I came off of Route-29 onto Route-40 and traffic was backed up at the light. I had to cross three lanes through this mess to turn onto my street, like I do every day. I deal with it; become proud of how good I've gotten at this task when it used to be ulcer-inducing to a bumpkin like me. Today, I thought a string of profanities and realized that I just didn't want to deal with this anymore. That I'm just not suited to this area. It's gorgeous and I adore the historic district to an unhealthy degree, but the rude, pretentious, self-absorbed people who live here; the constant press and hustle and endless congestion; the cost of Howard County just to boast, "I live in Howard County," with my nose in the air ... I'm sick of it. And every time that f***ing dog next door starts yapping or something falls from a bookshelf or the refrigerator or the washing machine and clunks me on the head because we have no room and have taken to storing dishes in the oven ... I think, Only a few weeks left, and am so relieved and happy just to be gone from here.

Because I don't want to feel this way. This was Bobby's and my first home together, and I want to remember it fondly.

In less important (but still big) news, the beta-test for the SWG archive is well underway. I had in mind all these very efficient plans. May, I was going to do the grunt work on the archive and start testing. June was going to be the first month of public use, which will likely be rocky. Inevitably. July, we were going to start looking for a house. But the two should not overlap. Riiiight.

As it was, we did the bulk of the house-acquisition at the same time as I finished building and started beta-testing the archive. Not the best setup, but I can't put off the first and don't want to put off the second. As it is, we're over the worst of both hurdles. We have inspection and settlement looming for the house, and that's it. All the financial stuff is done, and the contract is signed. And I've worked out the worst of the bugs in the archive; what is left is mostly aesthetic and could really be accomplished beyond the testing period as well. I'm looking forward to writing and watching movies and sleeping. All good things. :)

In less pleasing news, we've canceled all travel plans for the year, which include our trips to Toronto, Bermuda, and England. Bobby and I can travel on a shoestring, but the shoestring's been a bit frayed as of late and almost coming apart.

Alex decided to act like an asshat at the end of his walk tonight. We're changing headcollars because the one he has now pops into his mouth whenever he pulls back suddenly, at which time he happily gnaws through it. He's almost through this one, and it's his second in a month. While removing it from his mouth, as he happily jawed away, he punctured my hands in two places. Ouchie. Both ache relentlessly. He barely broke the skin, but they're swollen and sore. I can't wait to move. He'll have a yard; I'll have a place to train him again. A tiny apartment and 80-pound dog just don't work for training purposes anymore.

Did I mention that I can't wait to move?

(And I'll answer my comments very soon. Right now, it's off to bed to enjoy a bit of reading before dying for the night.)

Massive quantities of Alex-and-sand-related pictures ... dial-up beware!

( Alex in the Sand )

Well, I've been busy. Hence the fact that I haven't read my LJ flist in almost a week ... *wince*

So ... is there anything new going on with you that I should know about? Good news, exciting news, random shtuff that you just have to share? Let me know! I feel very productive ... but very out-of-touch too. I miss you all and our enlightening/absurd/hilarious/passionate conversations! :)

Primarily, I have been working on the SWG website. It's almost finished--that is, the website is almost finished, not the archive. That's a whole new animal. But this website has been dragging on for almost a year now, mostly because I work on it in spurts, accomplish a great deal (without ever finishing), and then get pleased with my progress and allow myself to become distracted by something else. Months pass ... nothing new gets finished. So I set for myself an ultimatum: The website must be ready for release to the group by 1 April. The bones are there; it's just tinkering, filling in holes and fixing mistakes that I've allowed myself to neglect, removing those sections that have nothing but "IN PROGRESS" or "CONTENT GOES HERE" in the main content area. Once the main site is up, I can check out the archive software and start confabulating with Lenine (my all-knowing-PHP savior!) about getting the archive up. And then I hope to concentrate on the fun stuff, like getting new features and resources in place, not with deciding whether third- or fourth-level headers look best for this or that subtitle.

I wanted to write about Alex, but here I am rambling about web design ... *sigh*

( Alex Surgery Stuff ... Cut for the Squeamish (But It's Not Graphic) )

The other day, we discovered that Alex is afraid of guitars. Bobby touched the acoustic, it made a noise, and Alex went wild. We sat it down without playing it and let him approach it, sniff it, and lick it. It didn't help that he'd bark at it and the G- and D-strings would hum in reply, so I guess he thought the guitar was barking back. I played a few chords on it, and he went crazy. Silly dog! He's gotten used to it, though; I was strumming the acoustic and Bobby was playing the electric, so he got desensitized pretty quickly.

The computers at work are fucked up again. To prove, perhaps, that bad things come in threes, we 1) practically lost the network; it was so slow that it took Johnny the Boss fifteen minutes to open an Excel spreadsheet, 2) our Access database where we keep the warrant logs corrupted, and 3) I cannot print criminal records off of CJIS, which is 95% of my job. Issues #1 and #2 have been resolved; #3 is supposedly being solved. In the meantime, I have thirty warrants waiting to be run; I can run them, but I can't print the records, which doesn't do the officers a whole lot of good.

I do have a lot of sympathy for the help desk. They probably deal with some real idiots in the course of the day. But dayum. They can act like idiots too! I call and say, "We've had this problem before (referring to the corrupted Access database); all I need is a backup copy restored from last Thursday, which was the last day that I am certain that the database worked properly." The tech I'm talking to then attempts to convince me that my network drive is improperly mapped and that we have one too many network drives on our server ... dude, we've been using this system for three years! Finally, I say, "Look, we've had this problem before. All I'm asking is for a copy of the database from last Thursday. And I guarantee that the problem will be fixed."

So he sends me a copy of the database. It still doesn't work. I ask, "What date is it from?"

"Last Friday."

*gnash teeth/pull hair/put head through computer monitor and hope for electrocution*

"The last day that the database worked properly was Thursday, not Friday. It worked fine on Friday before 3:15 p.m. but I know that it didn't back up before then." Thinking, "As I told you ten minutes ago."

So he restored Thursday's copy ... and voila! It worked! OMG! *teh gasp*

Then today, I'm talking the head honcho of the IT people about the CJIS issue. He remotely accesses my computer. He attempts to print. It doesn't work. He asks why I need to print from CJIS in the first place.

Stunned silence ensues. "Ummm ... because I work for the warrant unit and I put together warrant reports from CJIS?!?" Thinking, "And the warrant officers can't read my mind and probably don't want to carry my desktop out in the field with them?"

He then scribbles the mouse around the screen and attempts to print again. And would you believe that the simple act of scribbling the mouse around on the screen did not fix the problem that's been going on for a week now??

I watched this man do this a dozen times while the urge to attempt electrocution-via-monitor-screen slowly came over me again. He never did solve the problem, so I am currently in limbo, awaiting a call from that nebulous entity "the server team."

As I said, I know that their job is not easy and that they deal with stupid/ignorant/rude people pretty much every moment of every day. But sometimes, they make more work for themselves. Over at the good ol' WAU, we're well versed in computer problems caused by corrupted data, lawnmowers, and everything in between. It seems to me that if a user calls and says, "I've had this problem before and this is how we fixed it," then that might be a sensible place to start? Rather than questioning completely functional systems that have been in place for years??

*sigh*

Anyway, tomorrow it will hopefully be fixed.

At night, Bobby and I have been watching the Discovery HD series Planet Earth. Oh my goodness. I think this might be the most beautiful program I've ever seen. It is beyond amazing ... not only are the images gorgeous but the landscapes and animals that they show: I asked Bobby, "How can we have lived on this planet for twenty-five years and never known that such amazing creatures exist?" And there's definitely cute-baby-animal overload too.