Ho, Ho, Ho.

Our lovely hostess.

It has been a busy few days here at the Villa Sternberg. Let's see, where do I start? Ah. It all starts on Tuesday, when, after Yamaarashi-chan's mother came and took her out to celebrate her older sister's legal adulthood, with all that it entails, Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I all went out to a pagan yule log festival that was actually a lot of fun. A lot of people we knew were there, including shemayazi, who was wondrous in gifting us with hand-made shawls and hats and who gave Kouryou-chan a fabulous gift of dress-up clothes.

We all lit the yule log and the ceremony went about as planned. Even little girls, and there were three of them, were well-behaved. We had a lot of fun.

Wednesday, I had to take Yamaarashi-chan to the physician because she was showing a particularly nasty cough. She did not enjoy the nasal swabs at all, but the test did come back that she did not have pertussis, just a sinus infection. Her physician said that she had seen twelve or thirteen cases come out of Yamaarashi-chan's school, which makes me wonder if there are that many parents out there keeping their kids off the Diptheria-Pertussus-Typhoid vaccine. After that, Omaha and I completed more shopping.

Christmas Time

Well, Yamaarashi-chan was heading over to her mother's on Thursday, so we decided to have an early opening of gifts. That was quite fun. The girls got all sorts of things, mostly toys and chalk and crayons and more play clothes. They were great.

Friday came and went in a flurry of shopping and driving. I don't even remember much of what happened that day. Saturday, Christmas day, we opened Kouryou-chan's last gifts: a kid's cookbook and a bicycle. She was thrilled with the bicycle. It's a purply thing which is just barely small enough for her. Then Omaha and I let her make breakfast. She needed a lot of help-- hey, she's only five-- but we made banana pancakes, which were quite yummy.

For dinner, Omaha and I had a flash-frozen potroast dinner that her grandparents had sent us. It was remarkably good, despite the fact that everything is revived by ten minutes of simmering.

I wish I had more to say. But I'm not good with holidays.

Post-Traumatic Christmas Disorder

Sunday, Omaha and Kouryou-chan and I hurtled about the stores, doing the after-Christmas sales. We were out to get storage. It seems to be our most pressing need, containerization. I also bought a wallet; mine fell apart a couple of weeks ago and I needed one, so I just picked one up, thinking a wallet was a wallet. Boy, was I wrong. It's bulkier and stores less.

As I was standing in the mall waiting for Omaha to buy a pair of shoes for her upcoming business trip, I spotted $130 wallets behind glass and I wondered if they were really worth it.

Kouryou-chan and I stopped by the robot alligator and threw pennies into its mouth. For dinner, we had leftovers. I played a little Half-Life 2 which was interesting. It really is as good as they advertised, but the anti-theft mechanism is ridiculous. The game is themed on a totalitarian state; I felt like I was in one trying to register for a decryption key for the contents of the DVD with the game on it. And you cannot play the game off-line; you must have a network connection to re-affirm that you are who you say you are to play the game. Annoying. Give me the ID model.

I put Kouryou-chan to bed. She wanted me to read to her from Little House in the Big Wood. Man, the book reflects just how hard their lives must have been, but it's oddly fulfilling in its own way.

Is it too early to start on New Years' Resolutions?

Sweet! Dreamweaver on Linux!

So, I upgraded to the latest version of Wine last night, and then tried an experiment that up until now has been more or less a bust: running Dreamweaver under Linux. Well, last night I got it to work. It's rather slow but I think that's a feature of the way Wine is doing draws rather than a problem; this is Dreamweaver 3, after all, and meant to run reasonably on a Pentium-2.

If I turn window management over to Wine, the display is faster and more accurate, but it completely takes over X-Windows and covers all of the native windows. Annoying; I suppose I'll have to take the good with the bad. Still, having a version of Dreamweaver, any version, even an old one, is nice. Especially without having to run WillySoft.

( Screen shot )

Public shaming

Well, that was interesting. While I'm working away, I suddenly get an IM from someone I've never heard from before. I have no idea who they are, or where they're from, or what. The icon is some animated Bratz character with the logo "punk girl looking 4 punk guy", the [info] tells me nothing at all. She (I'm assuming it's a she) starts peppering me with questions like "Who are you?" and "Do you know Melanie?"

I was non-comittal to any of the questions, generally just giving my name and stuff. And then:

(12:22:13) Elf Sternberg. It's my real name.
(12:22:32) If you don't know anyone by that name, then you're just some person across the internet.
(12:22:44) Now, now. Watch your language, young lady.
(12:23:25) foul-mouthed brat: I DONT HAVE TO YOU MOTHA FUCKA BC U AINT MY MOMMA
(12:23:58) Maybe not. But you'll never get anywhere in the world acting like that. It's rude and it makes you unattractive.
(12:24:28) foul-mouthed brat: im only 12 and i can cuss bitch!
(12:24:49) How sad that you can't tell the difference between "can" and "should."
(12:25:23) Anyway, I think your friend messed with you by sending you my AIM tag.
(12:26:21) foul-mouthed brat: shut the fuck up and leave me alone before i shoot a cap up yo ass
(12:26:51) Yawn. Goodbye, child. I'm not interested in your powerless rants.
(12:27:22) foul-mouthed brat logged out.


I then banned her from my AIM list. Interesting that she should suggest I "shut the fuck up and leave me alone" when she's the one who first IM'd me. I'm still trying to figure out what the whole exchange was about. Part of me has this niggling notion that it was a cop phishing for on-line perverts; if so, he was barking at the wrong tree.

And part of me actually hopes it wasn't legit. Because if it was, I despair for the manners and morals of the next generation. But then, doesn't everyone?

Miscellany

So, I went and read the Portal of Evil thread, and most of it was amusing. The one thing that annoyed me most was the comment about Omaha; there was no reason for some braindead moron to question her taste or motives in marrying me. Sweet Osiris, it's just a story. It's not like I spent more than a few hours amusing myself on it, and now it generates endless hours of controversy and entertainment.

Ah, well.

---

Great gifts cost negative dollars. Omaha and I upgraded our cell phones over Christmas; we went from our free Nokia 6002's to "free" (with 2-year service agreements, of course) 6010's, which are smaller and have prettier screens. We switched from the AT&T network to the original Cingular, and are getting much better performance and coverage for our effort. But they're still cheap phones, with minescule displays, little data handling capacity, and they're the "candybar" rather than "flip" configurations. And they don't have cameras. Ah, well.

We're still getting used to the phones, and they don't have all of our old contact information in them, so we're waiting for people to call us so we can put their data in. And we saved money by doing the switch; about six bucks a months on our service agreement and forty bucks with the first month free deal.

---

Ann Coulter would like to remind her muslim readers that "If we'd invaded your countries, killed your leaders and converted you to Christianity YOU'D ALL BE OPENING CHRISTMAS PRESENTS RIGHT ABOUT NOW!"

No, really. She said that. She repeated her line. When is the right going to distance itself from this fruitcake?

---

The President of Uzbekistan is apparently unhappy with what's going on in neighboring Ukraine. My favorite quote: "It is unnacceptable to use democracy to take over power."