Month: February 2010

Raised white pickup?

Bill1 Comment

Last night, I had a dream that I was driving one of those ridiculously high raised pickup trucks that had a ball hitch sticking out the back of it. We were in some parking lot way out in the country and I was doing a three point turn to get out of the parking lot. Then I somehow backed up and into a parked SUV that I didn’t see, my ball hitch smashing the rear window of the SUV.

The woman came out, rightly upset and so we did the whole insurance, take your information thing. Turns out it was Margaret Atwood (whom I had no idea what she looks like, nor what her ethnicity was prior to that Wikipedia lookup), and it turns out Margaret Atwood looks almost identical to Michelle Obama. I wonder what it is about your subconscious that just every once in a while looks around and says “Awh, fuck. Uhmmm… uhh… fuck it, you know what, just make her look like uhh…. Michelle Obama.” (also, raised white pickup truck? I know we’re moving back to SD, but, really subconscious? Do you really see that in our future?)

And breathe

Bill4 Comments

V-day came and went.  Clare requested an extension on her end of it (something she’s making?), citing extenuating circumstances (broken down car, her dad in town bringing a replacement for said car, flu, etc).  That works out ok for me, too, as  I’ve got a day planned for us, but it requires a little leg work that I wasn’t quite prepared to undertake in my plague-racked state.  With that and the recent passing of my birthday, we’re all done with our Winter Rush.  Christmas, New Years/Anniversary, her birthday, Valentines day and my birthday… it can all be quite exhausting.  I think maybe when we get married it should be in August.

In other news, we’re mostly on track to be moving back down to San Diego in early summer.  It’s weird – it’s actually a little scary to be moving back in some ways.  Looking for a job is something I haven’t had to do in a while, and it’s something that will need to happen as soon as I get there.  And in a rough economy at that.  We’ll also have to find an apartment right away.  I’d like to be able to move the cats down the 5 and directly into their next home.  It’s all really complicated and it all kind of has to happen at once.  Ideally It would be best if we had an apartment and jobs lined up so we could move right in… but that would involve taking time off of work and spending it down in San Diego before we move.  Time off of work is money we could be making and saving for the rainy-day fund we’ll obviously need.

I think we’re both also a little worried about fitting in.  We’ve both been up here a few years now (Clare almost 6?).  Attitudes are different up here.  People (at least in Berkeley) are more open-minded about a lot of things (certainly not everyone or about everything though).  And it’s relatively easy to try new things.  Cultures are so much more easily accessible.  The first year I was up here, we went to San Francisco and took part in the Day of the Dead festival.  Last summer we went to an Iranian Pro-Democracy protest rally.  I’ve taken a few yoga classes and no one really bats an eye.  It is strange the things that people can be uptight about here, though.  It seems like more people are less accepting of say two people being in a long term relationship in their 20’s than you would see in San Diego.  Of course San Diego can be uptight (and/or ignorant) about different things.  It will be interesting to see how much it’s changed in the past few years.

I suppose I should probably go ahead and end this.  I have an A+ cert test to prepare for.  Which basically means I need to learn about hardware 20 years old like dot matrix printers and try to memorize tables of CPU pinouts from before the dot-com bubble burst.

Server come, server go

BillLeave a comment

So here we are again.  I’m thinking that this webpage should stabilize out now.  a few weeks ago, my server just started freezing, randomly.  For a few weeks, a reboot fixed it, but now the stupid thing doesn’t even turn on.  I can’t afford to replace it right now, so I’m splitting some stuff up.

I found a decent hosting service where I’m hosting this blog, and maybe eventually a few other services.  I still need to be able to get to stuff at home, however, so I’m also re-purposing an old Dell laptop and converting it into a server for SSH access.