Sundays With The Penguin
Aug. 11th, 2003 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSaturday evening FallenPegasus comes over for dinner and miscellany. We end up playing Give Me The Brain and Fish Four (the latter of which has curious dynamics about information hoarding) while my laptop gleefully churns through an upgrade to Redhat 9.0 and the kids are busily bombing about outside. Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan both demonstrate their ability to do chin-ups and a curious fascination with a new squirt gun. They're neat kids to play with. Yamaarashi-chan figures out how the pulley system that attaches the porch to the treehouse works and spends a good hour asking FallenPegasus to push stuff back and forth. Kouryou-chan tries to master the art of Frisbee.
While walking down the street to the grocery store, I passed by my neighbor's house. It seems he had a bumper crop of zucchini in his garden, because they're all out in a box at the end of his driveway with a sign reading "take one and leave a quarter." Now, I know I'm twisted, but sometimes I amuse even myself: my first thought upon seeing this marvelous collection, in all sorts of shapes and sizes, was, "Wow, I could have one hell of a good time for only a dollar."
Make of that what you will.
Dinner was chicken and peaches on couscous-- absolutely marvelous, and I'm not much for fruit in my dinner. The poison oak subsides to tolerable levels and regular washings with an oil-based soap and application of calamine help.
The install on my laptop went without a hitch. I was very annoyed that not installing Nautilus was not an option, but once the build was up I ran RPM and removed it and, unlike RedHat 7.3, there were no complaints this time. After dropping my network and Thinkpad-specific configuration files into the right place, It Just Worked. I still have a few stability issues that are bugging me-- twice I've caught it not going into suspend properly, and when rebooting I have to tell the kernel to read in several drivers manually (sound, power control, pc card manager), but since I never reboot Lain that shouldn't be a problem. I really should figure out what's wrong and make it right, but I'm lazy.
It was during this time that Yamaarashi-chan's mother called and told us, "Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you, a friend of hers has a birthday party tomorrow." I was furious; I had already made commitments Sunday and now she drops a three-hour time block in the afternoon right into the middle of them. It's a great set-up; one way or another, I'm going to look like a villain to somebody. Crud. Next time, she can re-arrange her life to make her child happy.
Oddly, she didn't ask, "Can I say hi to my daughter?" or anything like that. I really don't understand what goes on in that woman's mind sometimes.
Fortunately, my friends are understanding, and so, wonderfully, is Omaha, who agrees to take the kids for part of the day so I can go and install Linux on a friend's computer. We spend a good hour backing up the stuff she wants to keep, then go for the install.
It's an ordinary gray box, and my friend swears that it's an ordinary gray box. Except it's unbelievably slow-- It's got an AMD K-6 in it, which is faster than my laptop, but it takes us nearly eight hours to get it into a working condition. I had a corrupt CD-ROM. The backup medium didn't work, so I had to fetch a new one. We still don't have serial connectivity. She has a winmodem, a Supra something. None of this was RedHat's fault; the install itself went flawlessly, recognizing sound, video, monitor, printer, old FAT32 drive, new EXT3 drive, the works. Sound came up, as did all of the peripherals. I was actually impressed with the way it all worked. But on the first boot it froze on INIT. The last time I saw something like that happen was in 1991. Ever since then it's been completely reliable. But the hiccups have been annoying. The only thing I can think is that there's a hardware compatibility problem somewhere-- it was built in 1999, with some part as old as 1997, but then so was Lain, and Lain's been as reliable as a brick.
While the install proceeded I fetched Omaha and the kids from the birthday party. They seemed to be having a good time, although the birthday girl was just a little too wrapped up in her presents to actually say goodbye or anything, and neither kid wanted to leave. But the party was winding down and it was time to get Yamaarashi-chan fed before heading back to her mother's house.
My friend cooked up a lovely dinner and Omaha and the kids and I all ate much of it down. She makes good casserole and conversation, much of it illicit gossip among friends.
Then I dropped Yamaarashi-chan off at her mother's house, also dropping off a check for the complete back support. Nuisance. Damned bank; apparently, it's not enough that they have a court order indicating an increase, I also have to consent to the bank to automatically deduct the increment. This is not indicated anywhere in the instructions from the court. It really sucks because I've tried quite hard (and quite successfully so far) to be on time and up front about making child support payments. Ah, well, giving her one legitimate grouse is annoying but hardly the end of the world.
I felt bad about watching Yamaarashi-chan disappear into her mother's house, to get swallowed up in all the noise and chaos and craziness of a single mom with three teenagers. I hope she's okay in there. I always hope that.
I had to run home to grab yet another CD for the install, so I agreed to drop Omaha and Kouryou-chan off. The excrement hit the impeller as Kouryou-chan got her finger stuck in a little cranny of one of her toys and, after getting it out, it swelled up and causes much pain. Omaha was more thans a little frayed after a day with the kids and a week with both of them, and so I spend a half hour more than intended holding Kouryou-chan, calming her down, putting ice on her finger and distracting her with word games. Then I hurtle down to drop off the CD, then head back. By the time all this is done, it's an hour past my bedtime. I feed the cat and go straight to bed.
While walking down the street to the grocery store, I passed by my neighbor's house. It seems he had a bumper crop of zucchini in his garden, because they're all out in a box at the end of his driveway with a sign reading "take one and leave a quarter." Now, I know I'm twisted, but sometimes I amuse even myself: my first thought upon seeing this marvelous collection, in all sorts of shapes and sizes, was, "Wow, I could have one hell of a good time for only a dollar."
Make of that what you will.
Dinner was chicken and peaches on couscous-- absolutely marvelous, and I'm not much for fruit in my dinner. The poison oak subsides to tolerable levels and regular washings with an oil-based soap and application of calamine help.
The install on my laptop went without a hitch. I was very annoyed that not installing Nautilus was not an option, but once the build was up I ran RPM and removed it and, unlike RedHat 7.3, there were no complaints this time. After dropping my network and Thinkpad-specific configuration files into the right place, It Just Worked. I still have a few stability issues that are bugging me-- twice I've caught it not going into suspend properly, and when rebooting I have to tell the kernel to read in several drivers manually (sound, power control, pc card manager), but since I never reboot Lain that shouldn't be a problem. I really should figure out what's wrong and make it right, but I'm lazy.
It was during this time that Yamaarashi-chan's mother called and told us, "Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you, a friend of hers has a birthday party tomorrow." I was furious; I had already made commitments Sunday and now she drops a three-hour time block in the afternoon right into the middle of them. It's a great set-up; one way or another, I'm going to look like a villain to somebody. Crud. Next time, she can re-arrange her life to make her child happy.
Oddly, she didn't ask, "Can I say hi to my daughter?" or anything like that. I really don't understand what goes on in that woman's mind sometimes.
Fortunately, my friends are understanding, and so, wonderfully, is Omaha, who agrees to take the kids for part of the day so I can go and install Linux on a friend's computer. We spend a good hour backing up the stuff she wants to keep, then go for the install.
It's an ordinary gray box, and my friend swears that it's an ordinary gray box. Except it's unbelievably slow-- It's got an AMD K-6 in it, which is faster than my laptop, but it takes us nearly eight hours to get it into a working condition. I had a corrupt CD-ROM. The backup medium didn't work, so I had to fetch a new one. We still don't have serial connectivity. She has a winmodem, a Supra something. None of this was RedHat's fault; the install itself went flawlessly, recognizing sound, video, monitor, printer, old FAT32 drive, new EXT3 drive, the works. Sound came up, as did all of the peripherals. I was actually impressed with the way it all worked. But on the first boot it froze on INIT. The last time I saw something like that happen was in 1991. Ever since then it's been completely reliable. But the hiccups have been annoying. The only thing I can think is that there's a hardware compatibility problem somewhere-- it was built in 1999, with some part as old as 1997, but then so was Lain, and Lain's been as reliable as a brick.
While the install proceeded I fetched Omaha and the kids from the birthday party. They seemed to be having a good time, although the birthday girl was just a little too wrapped up in her presents to actually say goodbye or anything, and neither kid wanted to leave. But the party was winding down and it was time to get Yamaarashi-chan fed before heading back to her mother's house.
My friend cooked up a lovely dinner and Omaha and the kids and I all ate much of it down. She makes good casserole and conversation, much of it illicit gossip among friends.
Then I dropped Yamaarashi-chan off at her mother's house, also dropping off a check for the complete back support. Nuisance. Damned bank; apparently, it's not enough that they have a court order indicating an increase, I also have to consent to the bank to automatically deduct the increment. This is not indicated anywhere in the instructions from the court. It really sucks because I've tried quite hard (and quite successfully so far) to be on time and up front about making child support payments. Ah, well, giving her one legitimate grouse is annoying but hardly the end of the world.
I felt bad about watching Yamaarashi-chan disappear into her mother's house, to get swallowed up in all the noise and chaos and craziness of a single mom with three teenagers. I hope she's okay in there. I always hope that.
I had to run home to grab yet another CD for the install, so I agreed to drop Omaha and Kouryou-chan off. The excrement hit the impeller as Kouryou-chan got her finger stuck in a little cranny of one of her toys and, after getting it out, it swelled up and causes much pain. Omaha was more thans a little frayed after a day with the kids and a week with both of them, and so I spend a half hour more than intended holding Kouryou-chan, calming her down, putting ice on her finger and distracting her with word games. Then I hurtle down to drop off the CD, then head back. By the time all this is done, it's an hour past my bedtime. I feed the cat and go straight to bed.
