Bleah.

[elfs]

My beloved friend kaelisinger and I went out to a concert last night to see William Pint and Felicia Dale, a pair of shanty singers who were completely wonderful; good with the crowd, good with their instruments, and just a whole lot of fun to listen to. I have see if I can get the girls and Omaha to go with at their next concert, which will be Saturday, October 18th. They sang mostly 18th and 19th sea shanties, with a mixture of other popular tunes thrown in, and some modern reworkings of the same, mostly on guitar and hurdy-gurdy. I was fascinated to watch them.

The girls came home from summer camp and got off the bus weather-worn, scratched, desperate for a bathroom. Yamaraashi-chan just said, "Hi, Dad," in a low, tired sort of voice. After I got a Slurpees into the two of them, though, they were much more lively and regaled me with all the horrible things that had happened to them at summer camp: skinned knees, bug bites, waking up freezing in the middle of the night because a blanket had gotten kicked off. And they sang. Oh, they sang, on and on, the most inane, time-killing songs the camp could find, and it was wonderful to have them back.

But through it all, I've been, well, kinda bleah. I think I'm having a mild depressive phase. Nothing serious, I don't think; just a soft sense of burnout, although I'm not sure of what, exactly. I haven't been coding or writing my brains out too much the past week; quite the opposite. I had a blast with Omaha on the mountain trails, but everything else is just not too appealing right now: cooking, coding, writing, sex. All of those just feel like effort.

I'm sure I'll get over it. I always do.

The good news is that my desktop has mostly recovered from its severe case of death. I have back my old crypto layer and can watch movies. No sound yet, though. The kernel was still good-- the only thing that was-- so I was able to boot up using the Gentoo 2006 disk, but download the Gentoo 2008 overlay into the OS directories (/usr and /etc), then ran an upgrade on the core. So far, so good. Running a fresh install of Gentoo is slow, and I tend to have kooky settings installing, say E17, TeXLive, and Wine, but so far over 300 packages have gone in (Gentoo tends to count every subsystem as a package, so installing Gnome installs 120 packages; Firefox gets eight or nine on top of that). So at least that's coming along nicely. I'll know tomorrow if there are any more crises to deal with; I tend to run the installs overnight, since Gentoo's a build-from-source distro.

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