My Thanksgiving
Dec. 1st, 2003 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWell, it was a nice four-day weekend. I'd like to say it was mellow, but that would be lying. It started unremarkably enough: Thursday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
omahas rose and set about making a pumpkin pie for later in the day. Unhappy with the results from making her first crust, she tried to make a second, but this one came out too dry. She poured the custard into the crust anyway, and then she, Kouryou-chan, Yamaarashi-chan and I drove down to j5nn5r's place to share dinner with his family. His eldest daughter wasn't about this year as she's now in the Marines, learning to blow shit up with grenades and stuff. So that the adults could be adults, we put on a movie for the girls after dinner, but they didn't even want that much TV and it was hard to keep them from going a little stir-crazy.
After the evening, I drove Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan home. Omaha stayed over because it made for easier shopping the next day while she went and did the Black Friday thing.
I was going to go to bed on time when I discovered, to my disgust, that someone had broken into my router. They hadn't gotten any further; the rootkit exploit they dropped on me (through a hole in the NFS server; thanks, Sun Microsystems) required that mail be set up but I had instructed everyone in the house to use their own SMTP servers, so the router didn't have one by default; the data the hacker was trying to get went to my "Error Sending Mail" mailbox instead of his. There's also a strong possible kernel exploit-- although the evidence of that is slim-- so I've actually walled off the router and will be installing Trustix on it soon.
I didn't get to bed until five or so.
Friday, I woke up and fed the kids oatmeal and scrambled eggs, then tried to keep them from going nuts while I cleaned house. Omaha came home around three PM only to realize that we had to go back out and return the computer printer she'd just bought; it was the wrong model, at the wrong price. So we got a much nicer one instead. The kids were great as they went about K-Mart looking for new clothes, underwear, socks, and coats. Then we went home and relaxed untilfallenpegasus showed up to take Omaha out to see Master and Commander again. While they were out, shaterri showed up with a carload full of stuff. I sent him and his co-driver off to crash.
Which means that Saturday when we all woke up, there were four adult men in the house along with the kids and Omaha, and it was insane. Blissfully, FallenPegasus had brought donuts, which made feeding the kids easier. I made coffee that was eagerly downed by our guests, and then we were all off on our own crazy missions. For Omaha and I, Saturday meant heading over toshemayazi's house and helping them move to their new digs. This was a serious case of real friends help friends move boxes of books.
Their new place is nice-- fewer nooks, fewer crannies, but the rooms they do have are much larger than their original counterparts, and there's a real kitchen. My only concern is that part of the ambience of their old home was its immediacy to the University District, with short walks to decent food. Now they're in an ordinary suburb with automotive requirements to anywhere. But it's quiet. Their neighbors have a big white cross and a small sign with Mark 8:36 on it: "What doth it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?" Oh, that will be fun indeed.
We did two runs in the van, packing all manner of stuff, boxes and boxes, and furniture, and beds, and mirrors (without breaking a single one) and a big wooden cube with no discernable purpose whatsoever. We got fed pizza and I had the pleasure of meeting some very cool (and rather beautiful) people who were other friends of Shemayazi's. Whee!
And then home again. To sleep, to dream.
To wake up Sunday to the reality of going out on the road, again, this time to return the ink cartridges that accompanied the wrong printer, to get ink cartridges that would fit the right printer. To egg-salad sandwiches and to mopping the kitchen floor and changing the bedsheets.
Omaha and I also took one of those "big steps" in life; we moved Kouryou-chan's bed out of our room. Permanently. She's long had a bigger bed in her own room for a while, but we'd left her toddler bed in our room for the past month or so and it was time to move it out. It came apart easily enough.
Now we just need Shaterri to move all of his boxes to some more ready storage-- they're filling up the kids' playroom! Dinner was quiche and salad with a homemade dressing and, for me, beer. We got Shaterri integrated into the house network and all, and then it was quiet time in the house. We watched Queer Eye for a while, I read another hundred pages of Charlie Stross's book, Singularity Sky, and then off to bed.
omahas rose and set about making a pumpkin pie for later in the day. Unhappy with the results from making her first crust, she tried to make a second, but this one came out too dry. She poured the custard into the crust anyway, and then she, Kouryou-chan, Yamaarashi-chan and I drove down to j5nn5r's place to share dinner with his family. His eldest daughter wasn't about this year as she's now in the Marines, learning to blow shit up with grenades and stuff. So that the adults could be adults, we put on a movie for the girls after dinner, but they didn't even want that much TV and it was hard to keep them from going a little stir-crazy.After the evening, I drove Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan home. Omaha stayed over because it made for easier shopping the next day while she went and did the Black Friday thing.
I was going to go to bed on time when I discovered, to my disgust, that someone had broken into my router. They hadn't gotten any further; the rootkit exploit they dropped on me (through a hole in the NFS server; thanks, Sun Microsystems) required that mail be set up but I had instructed everyone in the house to use their own SMTP servers, so the router didn't have one by default; the data the hacker was trying to get went to my "Error Sending Mail" mailbox instead of his. There's also a strong possible kernel exploit-- although the evidence of that is slim-- so I've actually walled off the router and will be installing Trustix on it soon.
I didn't get to bed until five or so.
Friday, I woke up and fed the kids oatmeal and scrambled eggs, then tried to keep them from going nuts while I cleaned house. Omaha came home around three PM only to realize that we had to go back out and return the computer printer she'd just bought; it was the wrong model, at the wrong price. So we got a much nicer one instead. The kids were great as they went about K-Mart looking for new clothes, underwear, socks, and coats. Then we went home and relaxed until
fallenpegasus showed up to take Omaha out to see Master and Commander again. While they were out, shaterri showed up with a carload full of stuff. I sent him and his co-driver off to crash.Which means that Saturday when we all woke up, there were four adult men in the house along with the kids and Omaha, and it was insane. Blissfully, FallenPegasus had brought donuts, which made feeding the kids easier. I made coffee that was eagerly downed by our guests, and then we were all off on our own crazy missions. For Omaha and I, Saturday meant heading over to
shemayazi's house and helping them move to their new digs. This was a serious case of real friends help friends move boxes of books. Their new place is nice-- fewer nooks, fewer crannies, but the rooms they do have are much larger than their original counterparts, and there's a real kitchen. My only concern is that part of the ambience of their old home was its immediacy to the University District, with short walks to decent food. Now they're in an ordinary suburb with automotive requirements to anywhere. But it's quiet. Their neighbors have a big white cross and a small sign with Mark 8:36 on it: "What doth it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?" Oh, that will be fun indeed.
We did two runs in the van, packing all manner of stuff, boxes and boxes, and furniture, and beds, and mirrors (without breaking a single one) and a big wooden cube with no discernable purpose whatsoever. We got fed pizza and I had the pleasure of meeting some very cool (and rather beautiful) people who were other friends of Shemayazi's. Whee!
And then home again. To sleep, to dream.
To wake up Sunday to the reality of going out on the road, again, this time to return the ink cartridges that accompanied the wrong printer, to get ink cartridges that would fit the right printer. To egg-salad sandwiches and to mopping the kitchen floor and changing the bedsheets.
Omaha and I also took one of those "big steps" in life; we moved Kouryou-chan's bed out of our room. Permanently. She's long had a bigger bed in her own room for a while, but we'd left her toddler bed in our room for the past month or so and it was time to move it out. It came apart easily enough.
Now we just need Shaterri to move all of his boxes to some more ready storage-- they're filling up the kids' playroom! Dinner was quiche and salad with a homemade dressing and, for me, beer. We got Shaterri integrated into the house network and all, and then it was quiet time in the house. We watched Queer Eye for a while, I read another hundred pages of Charlie Stross's book, Singularity Sky, and then off to bed.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-01 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-01 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-01 11:57 pm (UTC)Singularity Sky
Date: 2003-12-02 12:06 am (UTC)I love the Three Commandments:
"Thou shalt not violate causality within My past light-cone. Or Else."
Fun, insane book. I've also read Stross' "Lobsters", which is available online at Fictionwise.com. That one's not as good, but it's still OK.
-Malthus
Re: Singularity Sky
Date: 2003-12-03 02:46 pm (UTC)Re: Singularity Sky
Date: 2003-12-03 11:02 pm (UTC)Also, the first one is slightly wrong - the LiveJournal you want is that of autopope (http://www.livejournal.com/users/autopope/), not antipope (http://www.livejournal.com/users/antipope/).