Author: trinalin

Happy Birthday, Linus & Lucy!

Although no one is really sure what day Linus & Lucy were born, the vet and I made the decision that June 15th would be their official birthdate. So that means today, my babies are one year old! Wow! The time sure flew!

To celebrate, I bought them cat food today. Heh. I’ll be mixing it with their kitten food until they get used to the new food. They’re currently playing with trash in the living room. I give ’em toys, they prefer to empty out the trash can. Go figure. (Not the kitchen trash, thankfully, just some plastic from my recently purchased Doctor Who toys.)

And, for your amusement, three recent photos of the kitties behind the cut.


Linus checks out the flowerbox
Linus checks out the flowerbox

Linus is in the den looking out at that flowerbox.
Does this bed make me look fat?
Does this bed make me look fat?

Seriously, Lucy isn’t that tubby!
Lucy checks out the flowerbox
Lucy checks out the flowerbox

Lucy looks out over the flowerbox from the dining room.


Portable Apps

This Sunday I’ll be heading North East to Wooster for B-WISER Science Camp for Girls once again. There was a fear that we wouldn’t even be having the camp this summer – enrollment is down big time. We have 30, maybe 32 girls, signed up now, however, so we’re going to do the camp, but with half the staff we usually use. As one of the senior teachers (heh, I still think that’s funny – I’m younger than most of my coworkers at this camp, but I’ve been teaching there many years now) I still have a job there. Phew!

In order to accommodate the smaller staff, we’re splitting the morning and afternoon up into different classes. Normally Dee and I would teach 6 sessions of physics. This year, we’ll teach 3 sessions of physics in the morning, and then in the afternoon, we’ll teach 3 sessions of computers. Dee is in charge of the physics in the morning with me as her assistant. And I’m in charge of computers in the afternoon with Dee as my assistant.

Computers, eh? Wow, what to teach for computers? I had a lot of ideas and little time to implement them. (Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do computer based labs for a week?) But what I finally settled on was getting the girls something they could use even after camp – portable applications and a little flash drive to store them on. (Thanks to the College of Wooster bookstore which is giving the camp a nice deal on 1GB flash drives!)

Monday won’t actually require the portable applications – I’ll be working on Internet Safety and Skeptical Searching. I haven’t decided yet if we’ll use Firefox portable to do the session or just have the girls use the browser that’s on the lab computers we’re using.

Tuesday we’ll definitely get into the portable apps. I’ll introduce them to the programs on their flash drives. Then Dee and I will have the girls do a lab on work, power and energy, but we won’t have them do the calculations. We’ll return to the computer lab and use OpenOffice.org Portable‘s Calc (the spreadsheet) to do the calculations. 🙂

Wednesday is when I introduce them to the Gimp. Yes, there is a Gimp Portable. And it works just fine. We’ll be uploading photos each night to my website of the girls and they can download some and manipulate them. Mostly I’ll focus on resizing pix for webpages and presentations.

Thursday we’ll return to OpenOffice.org Portable and work with Impress, the presentation program. We’ll have the girls create a presentation of the pictures they worked on the day before. And best of all, they can take everything home with ’em when they go.

Friday we don’t meet for classes, so that’s all we’ll have to teach during the week. I included some other programs which we’ll put on the flash drives, including GAIM, a media player, Clam Antivirus, a PDF viewer, and Sudoku. 🙂

Day off? Nope! :-(

Ah, today was going to be my Day Off. I was going to sleep in til I couldn’t stand it anymore, then eat my strawberry donuts and play City of Heroes. Oh ye evil lightning blasts of the weekend!

Around 8:30am, I got a call from the treasurer at work. No one could logon. So I sat up, slipped on some clothes & a hat (my hair must be washed every morning) and rode my bike to work. I figured all I’d have to do was turn on some servers that didn’t restart or reboot one that got confused.

I did the rounds and most of the servers were doing quite nicely. The PDC (Primary Domain Controller), fileserver and web caching server all were uninterrupted thanks to the UPS they are hooked to. The elementary server showed up fine on the server list. But the two servers in the media center were not showing up on the list. They were both on, but Blackknight wasn’t responding and the HSBDC (High School Backup Domain Controller) needed logged in. HSBDC is our DHCP server (sorry for all the geek talk – those of you who know what I’m talking about can start to see why things weren’t necessarily working well). And when I checked on the DHCP service, it wasn’t running. And I couldn’t start it. DHCP is what sends addresses to our computers so that they can log onto the network. So with it down, people couldn’t log on. Blech.

Well, I didn’t know how to fix that DHCP service since it was running on Linux, but I can set up a WinNT4 box with DHCP, surely… Well, I had done it before. So I decided to stick it on the PDC. This is all temporary anyhoo since this summer the school is getting a new tech and Win2003 server network. I figured the PDC could handle being DHCP until then. But stuff still wasn’t working even when I had it set up. A few phone calls to other techs (the county & MDECA) and it was 3 hours of me at work. I was very hungry and very stinky. I needed to have breakfast & bath & wash my hair. So I rode my bike back and did just that. (Mmmm, strawberry donuts!)

Well, thanks to the calls, when I had returned, I had an idea of what to do. I changed a few settings on the new DHCP service and then released & renewed addresses for any machine that I knew had been on that day. (For a school that’s out, there sure were a lot of folks in the building!) It was another hour and a half of work to finish all of this. But it looks like folks were able to do everything they needed to do. Yay!

Tomorrow is the first of two summer training sessions on ProgressBook, our new grading program. It’s the one I signed up for, so no day off for me tomorrow. I’m hoping that Wednesday will be my Day Off. The donuts will be rather dry by then, however…

Deep fried strawberries for the win!

This is the weekend of the Troy Strawberry Festival. I invited mom to come along with me this year and she agreed. And then dad invited himself along, because he was looking forward to riding the school bus to the festival. (Yes, he’s a little odd…) So I drove us to Meijer this morning and we took one of the free shuttles (driven by the dedicated bus drivers of Troy City Schools) to Hobart Arena. The festival is held on the levy near Hobart arena, so it’s a very long festival, but very narrow. A few years ago they began to have some spillover down near the Troy HS football stadium, so we started there first. My first stop? Strawberry donuts! Only 15 minutes in line, then I looked for the parental units. It turns out they were in Tammy’s glass pendants booth. Tammy’s a coworker of mine who’s taken to making neat glass pendants and artwork. She’ll be doing quite a few festivals this summer, selling her wares. Mom got a neat necklace there. She also shared some strawberry-lemon shakeup – very yummy.

Mom & I each had a donut and dad had a bite from each. Then we found ourselves in the booth selling bamboo plants. The fellow selling them claimed they were very difficult to kill. I think mother took that as a challenge and decided to get one. And I got a very small one with a cute panda base (for $4). The booth owner let us keep the plants there while we shopped around some more.

We made our way onto the levy and wandered down one way, checking out the wares and the food stalls. We finally decided upon barbecue chicken dinners. We sat on the side of the levy and watched some firemen playing “Waterball.” They had two teams manning fire hoses (pumping water from the river) trying to send a ball to the other side. Think of a “push of war” versus a “tug of war.” After lunch, we continued shopping. I decided upon some strawberry ice cream, which was very refreshing. (It was a hot & sunny day.) But I hadn’t even half-finished my ice cream when I saw a booth selling “deep fried strawberries.” Hmmm, I’d never had those before. So I ordered some. Turns out they’re strawberries filled with a creamy & sweet goo which are then covered in donut batter and deep fried. And then they pour a sweet sauce on top. Da-amn, they were good! And not so sweet that they killed, (not like the strawberry dough ball I’d had the year before.)

Once we’d seen all of the booths on the levy, we headed back to pick up our plants. Then I headed off to get us another strawberry-lemon shakeup. Just as tasty as the first. We shared it until we were finally seated on the bus. There was a lady from Hilliard between me and the parental units, so I didn’t pass the shakeup to them until we were back at Meijer. A short hop to the pet store for food & litter for the kitties (we’d run out of food earlier yesterday, so this morning I’d grilled them a chicken boobie for breakfast. Heh.)

We returned home and the folks headed off to the Lake for the weekend (and much of next week). Then I played CoH for a bit before taking a nap. School’s officially out for us, so I have Monday off – woot! Tuesday will be training for our new grading program, but beyond that, I’ve no idea what my summer schedule will be like.

Last.FM Personal Radio

Well, they finally figured out a way to embed Last.FM radios into LiveJournal. So I present for your amusement, Trina’s Personal Radio. (I apologize for any Christmas toons that come up if you happen to give it a listen.)

Memorial Day Weekend – Lazy Day

So Friday & Saturday were actually pretty busy for me for a Memorial Day Weekend. But I made up for it today.

elsaf and I were once again the first ones up. And we booted judiang out of bed so that Elsa could leave at a decent hour. She made us pancakes again (yay!) and there were even some sugared sliced strawberries left over. But after breakfast, Elsa had to pack up her things and head north. Awwww. And she didn’t even get to see my hardwood floors or new bookshelves. I guess there’s always next year!

Judi and I geeked for a bit, then I finally showered & dressed and headed out to start the fire for lunch. Without our resident gourmet chef, we resorted to burned hot dogs and nuked baked beans. (There was only a jumbo can of baked beans, but Judi and I managed to eat them all!) ‘Twas a good lunch.

Afterwards, I read some of Special Topics in Calamity Physics and slept. Judi read & slept as well. It was a very laid back afternoon.

As it neared suppertime, I checked the weather radar and was afraid a storm might pop through later, so I’d best start supper. I made a wonderful fire and grilled us some steaks (with a sample rub that I’d gotten last year at Taste of Chicago) and veggies/fruit (onions, portabello mushrooms, and pineapple). Along with Elsa’s potato & bean salads, we had a wonderful supper.

The storm never came, so Judi and I sat outside awhile chatting and I made a couple of s’mores. But eventually the fire burned out and the mosquitoes realized it wasn’t going to rain after all and came out to have supper on us. So we went inside and geeked for awhile.

We finished the evening playing Rumikub and watching videos on Judi’s laptop. Judi was hoping to distract me with the videos (which finished off with a repeat of last night’s Doctor Who) so that I’d lose, but I won the first two matches with Judi finally winning the third. (The first match took almost an hour to complete – sheesh!)

Tomorrow will start out laid back, but around 2:30 we shall leave the comfort of the Lake and work our way to the Columbus airport (with a veering off to Fairborn for some shopping). And then, alas, our short vacation will be over. It’s been a lovely weekend and once again, I thank the girls for making it so!

Memorial Day 2007 day 2

Ah, what fun it is to have elsaf and judiang over for Memorial Day weekend. We got to bed late last night (I, for one, was wired on caffeine), but Elsa and I still managed to be up before 9am. Judi, meanwhile, was enjoying the Lake Effect and sleeping soundly.

So Elsa and I nipped off to Wagners for groceries. And an hour later, returned with Judi oblivious to our departure. In fact, I woke her up & she thought I was saying we were *going* to the grocery. I think she was impressed with how quickly we returned. Heh heh.

Elsa made some Hungry Jack pancakes and sugared up some sliced strawberries, so we had a wonderful breakfast. Then Judi snoozed while Elsa & I geeked. And suddenly, it was almost 1pm! I started a fire and then grilled hot dogs for the Judester and me, and grilled a chicken booby for Elsa. Elsa had also brought some potato salad and some bean salad, so we had that with our lunch. Everything was tasty.

I then drove down to pick up Papa so we could go to my cousin’s graduation party. We found the park just fine, but missed the cabin where the party was being held. A second drive through the park and we saw my cousin Deanna’s (very distinctive) car. Chris was there, ready to accept hugs and gifts. (He probably preferred the gifts, heh. Especially the flat ones that were green & papery.) It turns out his first cousin (no relation to me) is also graduating, so they were doing the party for both of them. We had cake & ice cream and chatting with Becky & Deanna. And then we returned home.

Once I’d picked up some things from home which I’d either forgotten or didn’t realize I needed, I returned to the girls at the Lake. After we vegged for a bit, dad showed up (I’d invited him to supper) and shortly after that, I started the fire for supper. First we grilled some veggies and pineapple. Then we grilled the pork tenderloin that Elsa had been marinating for a week. (I’ll let her tell the story if she’s interested in doing so.) She sliced the pork & then added a lime/orange/garlic sauce to the slices. Dinner was very tasty and we supplemented the meal with potato salad and bean salad. Well done Elsa! We topped the meal off with more of her pineapple upside-down cake (with me & Judi augmenting ours with ice cream).

Papa headed home and Judi and I cleaned the kitchen (with Judi doing the brunt of the work – you go gurl!) We then settled down to watch the new Doctor Who episode (Human Nature) and discovered that the sound was funky on the copy we, um, obtained. Still, despite the sound, we watched the ep and all enjoyed it. Here’s hoping the second ep is as good (or even better) than the first.

Once we watch Confidential tonight, we’ll probably head for bed. Poor Elsa has to head home tomorrow. Wah! But at least Judi and I have another full day at the Lake.

Memorial Day Weekend 2007

Well, it wasn’t as planned in advance as some of our other weekends at the Lake, and I completely forgot about setting up a card playing night for judiang (but with Granny passed on & mom off being a Bad Gurl with Amy & Rachel, that only leaves 3 card players), but the Weekend at the Lake is here. Yay!

I didn’t wind up getting on the road to the Lake on time as I’d hoped, and when I was 15 minutes away, I got a call from Judi telling me they were “kicking me off.” (At least, I think that’s what she said.) Apparently, there were bugs eating at them and elsaf had to use the ladies. They headed off to the local Grocery while I finished my trek to the Lake.

Eventually, we were all in the cottage and ready for a nice relaxing evening by the fire. But the rain had another idea. A real frog strangler of a storm came through and we began to discuss the evening plans. Well, Elsa and I discussed the plans while Judi got all confused thinking each idea was the finalized plan.

The finalized plan? Go out to eat at El Sombrero and then go see Pirates of the Caribbean 3. I was going to order online tix when Judi decided maybe she didn’t want to see it tonight. So then I stopped ordering. Then she decided maybe we should see it tonight. So we hopped in the car and then I remembered – oh yeah, pre-ordering tix. The girls sat in the car while I bought the tickets online. (Let’s hear it for online movie tickets!)

As we headed south down I-75, we found out that it hadn’t been raining in Miami County. And when we got to the new El Sombrero location, we found out they didn’t have as much seating as they once had. After waiting 15 minutes with no one looking like they were planning on vacating their tables anytime soon, we decided to hop down the strip mall to W.G. Grinders for sandwiches. (Yes, Amy, there is now a W.G. Grinders in Piqua!) Ah, a good change in plans.

W.G. Grinders, a regional chain, serves hot sandwiches and deli sides. I ordered the “white pizza” which is an open sandwich with artichoke hearts, Italian dressing, and several types of cheese melted on top. I also got the broccoli salad as a side, and it was very nice. Judi got ham&turkey, Elsa got a turkey Reuben (AKA a Rachel). Supper was good, fast, and required no tip. We got to the theater at 8pm, half an hour before the flick.

The movie, as I suspected, was sold out, so pre-ordering = good idea. (Let’s hear it again for online movie tickets!) Judi got in line to order popcorn & pop, and I suggested she up the size on the popcorn. (If someone in my party gets popcorn for a movie, I wind up eating some too.) I ordered a Coke for myself, so I know I won’t be sleeping tonight!

We found seats on the right side of the theater (it was already mostly full) and still had 20 minutes to go before the previews. The commercials they showed were very quiet and the movie wasn’t that much louder IMO. Still I heard most of the dialog. Judi wasn’t so lucky, but in the car afterward, we got her sorted out.

So what did I think? Fun movie! Wonderfully convoluted plot that actually stands up to scrutiny afterward. And stick around for after the credits if you can. 🙂

When we got back to the cabin, we all hopped on our laptops and then Elsa cut slices of her pineapple upside down cake. Yum! I made Judi a margarita (the first I’ve ever made and I guess it wasn’t that good), too. (Blech, margarita AND pineapple upside down cake!) So now we’re vegging out for the remainder of the evening. Yay for vacation!

Finished Bookshelves

I promised pictures of my finished bookshelves, and here they are. I’m still in the process of putting books on the shelves (though my Doctor Who books are on their shelves now), and will post the final photos when I get that done. Yay for books! Yay for kitties who love people who love books!



Books in Waiting
Books in Waiting

My books, patiently waiting for my bookshelves to be built.
Mapped Out Shelves 1
Mapped Out Shelves 1

Blue masking tape helped me to map out where I wanted my shelves. This set actually was flipped when built – the X marked where I wanted to put the sound system.

Completed Shelves 1
Completed Shelves 1

The first set of shelves is done!
Completed Shelves 2
Completed Shelves 2

And the second set – woohoo!
Completed Shelves 3
Completed Shelves 3

Two more sets are done…
Completed Shelves 4
Completed Shelves 4

And the final set of shelves – with room for kitty potty & all…
Linus & Lucy Explore the New Shelves
Linus & Lucy Explore the New Shelves

As soon as the dust settled, Linus (top) and Lucy (bottom) had to check out their new bookshelves.


Happy Mother’s Day!

Happy (nearly belated) Mother’s Day to all you mom’s (or wannabes) on my flist! I got my mom a t-shirt which says “Ask me about my grandcats” and has a couple of paw prints on it. I also got her a gift certificate to a wine store in Troy. We also (her, dad and I) went to see a few homes in Troy just for grins (the last day of a Home Builder’s Association home show). Tomorrow, I hope to post some pictures of my new Floor to Ceiling bookshelves built by my dad (with help from me & mom). Yay!

In other news, Happy Birthday felicityk!