I’ve almost finished setting it up, and I still suck at typing on it, but it’s here! I had to leave the crap screen protector on because I just ordered three today, but even so, I like it. Also still have to figure out how to get my Bluetooth earphones to connect. Anyway, it’s pretty, and it seems to work well. I took a picture because the only screenshots I’ve taken so far have been accidental. LOL

Well, here’s a screenshot, though I still don’t know exactly what I did.

Well, duh! If you hold the button down long enough for it to flash red and blue instead of just blue, the earphones will enter pair mode instead of just turning on. God, I’m a dumbass.

I’ve been so busy that last few days, trying to accomplish just a few more things before the holiday is over (and we don’t get another one until the end of MAY!) that I haven’t had time to update this. Anyway…

Christmas fridge finally arrived on the 29th. Only five days after they promised it. At least it got here in working order, I suppose.

I wish I’d had just a couple more days to work on this, but at least D & T did like their “menu site” a lot. So…here’s my scabrous ceiling. I scraped off all the loose paint I could, then filled with drywall compound. It’s still wet here, which is why it looks sooooo bad.

01-01-16 was the first time the pond had ice in it. It was out in the middle, so it didn’t affect the Babbling Brook, but colder weather is still to come. I really would like to find a way to keep the pump running because those little birds love their birdy-pool drinking spot. They’d use the main pond, I’m sure, but I want their pool open for business as long as possible. Not sure yet how I’m going to work that.

I’m not sure what kind of vervain this is, but it’s tough stuff! 02-01-16, and it’s still got a couple of little blobs of flowers. Dayum!

On Saturday night, I did the first wave of patching on the ceiling, and (being determined to have at least one pink wall), I put one coat on one wall. Not much, but something, and although I’d thought the colour was going to end up too dark, I was wrong. I like it!

I also got a new 6-cell battery for Cute Little Pink Netbook. My original intent was to use this to run a couple of cameras on Zoneminder, but I wasn’t able to get Zoneminder set up before I had to move on to other things because I was running out of time and tired of an ugly lilac purple bathroom with a badly peeling ceiling. I’ll probably go back to ZM at some point in time, and I like the new battery because it’s bigger and holds the back of the laptop up, allowing for better cooling.

When I was sanding the ceiling and a few dings/etc. in the walls, I had the door closed for dust. Good thing…it was like Halifax harbour at 5:00 on a June morning in there. I had to tape my dust mask to my face because my breath kept fogging up my safety glasses, and working in there without safety glasses and a dust mask would have been utterly foolish.

My hair was particularly glorious. It looked (and felt) like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. I had to use P’s shower on Saturday night, and I washed my hair twice. Ew!

I ended up getting two coats on the west wall, one on the south, and one coat on the little bit above the door. I also got a coat of primer on the ceiling so my showering wouldn’t undo all of my hard work before I’d even had a chance to finish it, and I used up extra primer in the pan by covering the ugly purple around the shower.

Making progress. It does make the bathroom look “different from” the rest of the house, which is all light colours, but I really do like the colours.

I liked it even more after I put my plant shelf back; the contrast between the darker walls and the white trim, and white shelf…it’s crisp and looks clean. I have my Tahka Butterflies shower curtain, and I bought another to make a valence, and also bought a couple of small bath mats in sage green. For that matter, I just now bought a Tahka Butterflies bath mat, but it’s primarily white, so that ain’t nevarr goin’ on no floor! It would make a pretty wall hanging over the toilet, though…I think. Dunno. Anyway, I’d seen it before for $40, but no bath mat is worth that to me, and I just happened to find one for $22. Pretty bathroom is worth that to me.

P was asleep Saturday evening, and I couldn’t sand because of the noise, so instead, I fired up Pink Power and mounted my TV in the living room. It’s easier if it’s mounted because then I can swivel the TV instead of my head when I’m lying on the couch, pinned in place by Miffy.

I went to water the plants last night, and they looked so bad that I did a little grooming and rearranging. I stuck Palmzilla in the corner. Barely fit, but at least it’s not out in the middle of the floor (where it left a damp spot on the carpet, so I stuck a styrofoam cooler lid under it. That tree has it in for my squishy mauve carpet!).

I just heard one! Not that I haven’t before–used to hear one every morning when I walked to work from 544–but they’re not common here. I wonder if my putting out seed and corn for ground-feeders is feeding more birds than I’d realized?

Also, the sky is a funny colour, and there’s a round, bright thing in it. (It’s been literally a week since we’ve seen the sun, except for a few minutes on Monday.)

Okay, so I don’t much give a damn about New Year’s Eve, or the new year, or whatever, but I did find the coffee grinder, and put it to good use grinding ghost peppers. I threw in the last of the Moruga Scorpions that I’d ground by hand, too. Worked great, but I don’t know that I’d want to grind coffee in this thing again, even though I cleaned it thoroughly.

Stored in a little plastic container, and labelled, just in case.

The primary purpose of this is so that I remember that the really fast image viewer I discovered in Puppy is called Viewnior. I didn’t like the Eye of Mate that came with my desktop OS, and whatever I used to use in Gnome (and liked) starts slowly in Mate, so I found a package for Viewnior and installed it. I hate that; I just want a viewer to flip through images, delete some, and maybe rotate one or two. I don’t need it to do anything fancier than that. Anyway, speaking of Puppy…

I don’t want to think too hard about the time-consuming nightmare that’s been trying to find a distro that will work to use my netbook for Zoneminder. I had Arch on there, but it was too old to upgrade, and a new install didn’t go well. Okay, this is taking too long…how about Puppy? Not bad, but unfamiliar with no apt-get, and if I wasn’t going to use it to install and configure a known pain in the arse like Zoneminder, I’d probably have kept it. I ended up with Lubuntu; it runs fine on the little machine, and it’s not like I’ve got 50 cameras. I just installed the Broadcom driver that (for whatever reason) didn’t get installed with the OS; once I get that done, I can begin the daunting task of “zonemindering”. I’m not even sure why; I just got it into my head that I need to at least try it.

Also, I bought a tablet. I wasn’t going to, but it’s an inexpensive one, and got great reviews. So great, in fact, that it’s sold out twice on Amazon. They won’t have any in stock until the 3rd, but my place in line is saved (they had some a couple of days ago, but sold out in a day, so I lost out.)

Okay…driver is doing its stuff, so here we go.

How many GNU/Linux users are needed to change a light bulb?

• 1 to post a thread in a mailing list telling the bulb has burnt.
• 1 to suggest to try to turn the lamp on through command lines.
• 1 to complain that the user broke the thread.
• 1 to ask what new bulb will he install.
• 1 to advice that we shouldn’t use the word burn for meaning a broken lightbulb, because it would mean that the bulb was set on fire and that it would be right to say that the bulb broke due to an excess of electrical current.
• 25 to suggest to install all the kinds of existing and imaginable lightbulbs.
• 5 who say that the burnt bulb is an upstream issue that doesn’t belong to the distro. There’s an open bug on the bulb’s developer mail list.
• 1 noob to suggest to install a Microsoft lightbulb.
• 250 to flood the noob’s mail address.
• 300 to say that a Microsoft lightbulb would turn blue and that you’d had to reboot continuously to get back to normal.
• 1 former GNU/Linux user who still frequents the forum, to suggest to install an Apple iBulb, which has a fresh and innovating design and it costs $250.
• 20 to say that iBulbs aren’t free, and that they have less functions than a 20 times cheaper standard lightbulb.
• 15 to suggest to install a national lightbulb.
• 30 to say that national lightbulbs are crippled remasters of foreign lightbulbs and that they don’t bring anything new.
• 23 to argue if it must be a white or a transparent bulb.
• 1 to remind everyone that the right name is GNU/Lightbulb.
• 1 to say that lightbulbs are a Winbugs users thing and that real GNU/Linux users aren’t afraid of the dark.
• 1 to announce finally which will be the model of the installed bulb.
• 217 to discard the chosen model and suggest another.
• 6 to complain that the chosen lightbulb has propietary elements, and that another should be used.
• 20 to say that a 100% free bulb, isn’t compatible with the lamp switch.
• The same previous 6, to suggest to change the switch for a compatible one.
• 1 to yell out: “STOP ARGUING AND CHANGE THAT LIGHTBULB FOR GOD’S SAKE!”
• 350 to ask the previous user what God is he talking about, and that if he has scientific proofs of His existence.
• 1 to explain how electricity works and why a light bulb is inefficient.
• 1 to say that we can’t trust in corporation-made bulbs and that we should trust in community-made bulbs.
• 1 to post a link to an ODF file explaining how to build a lightbulb from scratch.
• 14 to complain about the format of the previous file and asking to send it in txt or LaTeX.
• 5 to say that they didn’t like the taken decission and that they’ll fork the house’s electric installation and install a better lamp.
• 1 to post a series of commands to put to change the lightbulb.
• 1 to comment that he executed the commands and had an error message.
• 1 to advice that the commands must be executed as root.

And finally:

• The father of the first user, who, while everyone was discussing, went to the shop and bought the cheapest lightbulb.

Last night, I cut up ghost peppers to dry for the trash pandas  (or, more to the point, to deter trash pandas). When I did the Moruga Scorpion peppers, I wore gloves. I didn’t bother this time, thinking, “Meh. No broken skin on my hands…how bad could it be?” The correct answer to that is, “You won’t be able to touch anything even marginally warm for hours, you’ll have to wash your hair with one hand because warm water feels like molten lava, and you’ll have to keep your hand outside the blankets when you go to bed because that’s the only way to keep the burning sensation to a level that will allow for sleep.”

It’s better this morning, but I’m NEVER cutting up extremely hot peppers with my bare hands again. Two fingers on my right hand (knife hand) and nearly the entire top side of my left hand (pepper holding hand) felt like they were on fire last night, in spite of my washing my hands three times with dish detergent. Jesus, I can’t imagine what these things must taste like! Anyway, once they’re completely dry (didn’t want to scorch them in the oven), I’ll grind them and seal them. No wonder the trash pandas haven’t been eating the suet cake with scorpion pepper in it, and the ghosts are just as bad. Never touching these bitches bare-handed again!

It’s 2237h on 26 December, and outside, there are crickets singing. It’s also 63F, so I guess that’s not so crazy, but it’s weird to see the Christmas tree on my left, and hear crickets singing to my right!

Recorded with my phone, so I had to amplify it a lot and the wind sounds like a hurricane instead of a breeze, but crickets they be!

Pwresents! The best ones were for…ME!

Pink Power cordless drill, Li-Ion battery. Cool-looking, and already tested it out, drilling some mounting holes outside for P’s thermometer and the IP camera.

My Jedi Master bathrobe. This thing is soooo soft, and warm, and I love that it’s got a hood, and goes all the way down to my ankles!

P, opening his IP camera.

Civil War trivia book.

Present from the Laundry Faerie. 64GB USB drive that’s dust-proof, shock-proof, and (most importantly) waterproof. His current thumb drive has been washed at least twice, and possibly three times. Once, it even went through the dryer.

Chirpy Socks (not a joke; that’s the actual brand). I got red/white, grey/white, and pink. Super-soft and snuggly for sleeping and lounging. I also got Wigwam 40 Below socks for work, and two new scrub shirts (olive green and surgical green) for pyjama tops.

P had to cut the plastic to make my new Diablo table saw blade fit into the box.

Aftermath. P got slip on shoes, an organizer for nails/screws/etc., a sea salt/peppercorn grinder, a stuffed hummingbird with a note from the MLBs in Mexico, and a colour laser printer that I haven’t got around to hooking up yet. He wasn’t feeling well enough to care much, though.

I finally got the wifi functioning properly and got the camera online, then installed it between the house and garage. It has pan/tilt, and the image is okay. While I was doing that, I set up the motion detection, and accidentally got email alerts working on the indoor camera. Anyway, this is pretty cool.

Caught this shady-looking character hanging around the garage.

This guy walked right up to our house, bold as could be! (It’s the mailman…I covered his face to protect his identity from the thousands of people who read my blog. Hi to both of you, BTW).

That was Christmas. We still haven’t cooked the turkey, but if P doesn’t feel up to it tomorrow, I’ll do it.

I’m actually writing this on Boxing Day (HAH!) because I spent Christmas Eve on the phone, first with R and then with Mar, and Christmas Day was spent with presents and setting up the outdoor IP camera that Parview got P for Christmas. I got it working, motion detection and all, and somehow (accidentally) managed to get motion detection email to work on the indoor camera, too.

Anyway, I did the traditional rendering of beef fat on Christmas Eve.

Made more suet; this time with some cracked corn, and poultry grit. The poultry grit is calcium-enriched, which they will definitely need in a couple of weeks so the ladies will make strong egg shells once breeding season comes. That’s not terribly far away, either!

We opened presents in the morning, then P started feeling really sick, so I sat and defended the feeders before I started working on the camera. I was shooting all of the birds…starlings with a pellet rifle, and the rest with a camera!

The Bloos came for their pnutz.

RBW came for goor-met suet.

Then he left…fast, and with his beak full of suet. Blurry, but funny

Cardinals and house finches came for black oil sunflower.

It was warm enough yesterday that this little nuthatch checked the sweetgum tree for insects after he’d
got his share of suet.

The downy grandkids are pretty much guaranteed to be stuffing their little faces with goor-met suet.

Girl:

Boy:

Twofer:

OMNOMNOM!

I’d put fresh nyjer in the Goldisox’s sox, so they rewarded me with a game of peekaboo.

This one had just got a drink at the pond. He refused to face me, so I took his photo anyway.

Tufted Titmouse. Not a great shot, but the little shits don’t stay still for more than a nanosecond, so I’ll take it.

Chickadees usually don’t hold still, but this one did.

Proof that a non-woodpecker, perching-type bird can use the smooth feeder if he’s little and means to do it.

Another peekaboo. Everyone likes the log feeders. Unfortunately, starlings can raid those, which is why we have the smooth one as well.

And it wouldn’t be a collection of my shots if there wasn’t a bird mooning me. Chicka-butt.