Kinda slow here...
Dec. 23rd, 2005 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIt has been a quiet couple of days here at the Villa Sternberg. I took Wednesday off so that Omaha and I and the children could celebrate the solstice day and night together, and we chose to open our presents on the morning after the longest night of the year, but first we gathered around a candle and sang a song to wish the new sun a happy birthday and hope that it brings us shorter days as the year runs on.
I made pancakes for breakfast and paid close attention to them, using a splash of vinegar inside the mixing bowl for the egg whites and making sure that I gave the dough the rest time needed, and they came out wonderfully. Then we opened gifts.
I got several nifty things; FallenPegasus found me a copy of Walking To Babylon, one of the few novels not written by Iain Banks that everyone who has read it agrees is a Culture novel. I have to say that Mrs. Orman has quite the imagination; her introduction is magnificent in the way it describes a war between time-travelling cultures with serious anomie.
Omaha got me two very nifty things: a pressure washer and a new laptop. The laptop is an IBM T23; I slapped in a 50MB hard drive and it's up and running, and it is indeed very nifty. I have almost everything working on it under linux: it suspends nicely and resumes fine, the wireless networking and the USB ports work, the PCMCIA works, even the keyboard "night light" works. What's especially nice about is a little utility you can find on-line called s3switch that allows you to pipe your video out to your television: very, very cool. I hooked up my nifty laptop to our TV set and played movies and video games (look, Sonic the Hedgehog the way it was meant to be played: on a TV, with a joystick). It needs a seperate tool called xrandr to get the dimensions right, but it is way, way cool. The monitor is very nice and I don't understand why everyone thinks it's too slow to play movies; I watched Spirited Away on it just fine. I even got IR working. The battery is apparently fresh; it holds about a 2-hour charge when fully loaded, and unlike the 600E battery it knows to stop charging when the battery is full.
The pressure washer is a good buy because there are a lot of things around here than can use it: the deck, the fence, the driveway, the roof. The man part of me can't wait to try it out.
We invited FallenPegasus over for dinner while the girls fiddled with their arts and crafts stuff. Omaha made a fabulous dinner of spiral-cut ham, scalloped potatoes, and green beans with toasted pine nuts, and I chipped in with some dinner rolls made with simply unbelievable amounts of butter.
And somewhere in this house is a bottle of peach massage oil, but neither Omaha nor I remember where it is, dammit...
I made pancakes for breakfast and paid close attention to them, using a splash of vinegar inside the mixing bowl for the egg whites and making sure that I gave the dough the rest time needed, and they came out wonderfully. Then we opened gifts.
I got several nifty things; FallenPegasus found me a copy of Walking To Babylon, one of the few novels not written by Iain Banks that everyone who has read it agrees is a Culture novel. I have to say that Mrs. Orman has quite the imagination; her introduction is magnificent in the way it describes a war between time-travelling cultures with serious anomie.
Omaha got me two very nifty things: a pressure washer and a new laptop. The laptop is an IBM T23; I slapped in a 50MB hard drive and it's up and running, and it is indeed very nifty. I have almost everything working on it under linux: it suspends nicely and resumes fine, the wireless networking and the USB ports work, the PCMCIA works, even the keyboard "night light" works. What's especially nice about is a little utility you can find on-line called s3switch that allows you to pipe your video out to your television: very, very cool. I hooked up my nifty laptop to our TV set and played movies and video games (look, Sonic the Hedgehog the way it was meant to be played: on a TV, with a joystick). It needs a seperate tool called xrandr to get the dimensions right, but it is way, way cool. The monitor is very nice and I don't understand why everyone thinks it's too slow to play movies; I watched Spirited Away on it just fine. I even got IR working. The battery is apparently fresh; it holds about a 2-hour charge when fully loaded, and unlike the 600E battery it knows to stop charging when the battery is full.
The pressure washer is a good buy because there are a lot of things around here than can use it: the deck, the fence, the driveway, the roof. The man part of me can't wait to try it out.
We invited FallenPegasus over for dinner while the girls fiddled with their arts and crafts stuff. Omaha made a fabulous dinner of spiral-cut ham, scalloped potatoes, and green beans with toasted pine nuts, and I chipped in with some dinner rolls made with simply unbelievable amounts of butter.
And somewhere in this house is a bottle of peach massage oil, but neither Omaha nor I remember where it is, dammit...
