Am I the only one who thought this movie sucked? Well, besides P, who watched it with me. Special effects were good, but the “plot” (I’m using the term in its most generous sense) was awful. I love science fiction, and real science,  and space, and I even like Matthew McConaughey,  but I hated the movie. It’s a big chunk of time I’ll never get back. Gravity didn’t get reviews as good, but it was actually a good movie. Interstellar sucked OK’s hairy yarbles. Hope we can find something better for this weekend!

I took these on the 10th of November,  resized them for WP, and completely forgot to post them. I packaged the dried catnip today and went looking for pictures so I’d remember the date I’d picked and hung it, but they were nowhere to be found. Anyway, 10 November.

Pile of fresh catnip.

Very interested cat.

Bunched and hung in the utility closet to dry.

14th December, all nice and dry, packaged in ziploc bags and placed in a shoebox in my junk closet because exposure to light weakens the effectiveness.

Technically more Windows stuff than Linux stuff, but it bollocksed up Linux, so I guess it counts. Anyway, for some reason, a week or two ago, I needed to boot to Windows (Plex gives me fits, updating new content), and I forgot that Windows had been trying to check the HDD for…forever, I guess. I almost never use Windows anyway, so meh, but I’d walked away from the computer while it was booting, and didn’t notice. When I came back, not only was it not booted to Windows, it wasn’t booted at all; it got to the “Press any key to boot from CD,” and then just stopped. Black screen, line at the bottom that looked like a cursor, but couldn’t type anything. I thought Windows must’ve toasted GRUB somehow while it was “checking the disk for errors” (i.e. doing whatever is in its power to make sure you don’t use a non-Windows OS), so I made a GRUB rescue disc and ran the fix. Nope. Still did the same thing. I looked in the BIOS settings, and everything seemed okay, so then I smacked F12 on boot to get into the BIOS boot menu and make sure my HDD was still showing, which it was. Third on the list after both USB drives. Hm. I had no more time to dick around with it, so ever since then, I’ve just booted it with F12 and manually selecting my SATA drive, but this morning, I decided to fix it. To make a long story short (hah!), the answer was in the ordinary old advanced BIOS settings…somehow, my SATA drive had been moved from first to third, so the machine was searching a 350GB and a 1TB USB drive, looking for boot files that didn’t exist. All I had to do was move the SATA drive up, but I was so pissed off and in a hurry the first time I tried to fix it that it didn’t occur to me that it could be something so simple, since I hadn’t changed anything, or run anything that would make changes in the BIOS. Whatever. It seems fine now, and I’m posting this in case the mobo is failing or something, and this happens again, and I don’t remember what the problem was. (That sentence makes the Grammar Nazi cry, but it’s good enough.)

I forgot to post this, but it’s funny. I’m perpetually in search of the perfect, loose-fitting olive green pullover sweater. Not wool/wool blend, no animal fur whatsoever, not cotton/ramie, not too long because I want to wear it with boot cut jeans, not too short because sweaters are supposed to be warm and not freeze my back. Scoop neck, not too deep. No turtlenecks, not cowl neck because I want to wear scarves, no V-neck, and not a tight crew neck, either. No zippers, or buttons, no collars because I generally don’t like sweaters with collars, and again, scarves. Olive green, but not yellowish olive, not too bright, and on the brown side of olive rather than grey. No sparkles, spangles, lurex threads or other colours. Chunky knit, solid knit/not “holey”, preferably with a cable design, and not tight at the bottom. No 3/4 length sleeves, no bell sleeves, no tight cuffs, and long enough to come to the top of my hand. I’ve found one chenille that’s close, but it’s got the wrong neckline, so I can’t wear scarves. Anyway, I always search ebay, but even if this one had been otherwise perfect (it isn’t), I don’t think I’d want a “sliming” sweater!

Moths. Yes, it is that warm…for now.

I turned the compost pile today. It’s doing okay, but I put these in over a month ago!

What’s December without a butterfly?

One, at least! FINALLY, OK’s house is finished. I wanted to get it out there before I ran out of daylight, but P was still asleep and that house weighs a metric fuckton, but it’s not going anywhere, so I’ll take pictures tomorrow or something. These’ll do for now. It’s not the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s sturdy and well-insulated, and it’s better than an upside-down purple plastic tub with plywood screwed to the lid. I hope OK will eventually decide it’s not constructed entirely of hot lava, and will sleep in it. I put his grungy old bed in there, and rolled up his rabbit skins to make a bolster on three sides. We’ll see…and thank Christ it’s finished!

I wrapped weatherstripping around the cord and squished it into the hole P drilled in the end so there’s no draught around the cord, and OK won’t have to walk over the cord to get in bed.

If they weren’t so goddamned busy trying to serve as many ads as possible, and make their mobile site difficult to navigate on…mobile devices, I might actually be able to scroll through more than the first screen of an article. I then had the bright idea that requesting the desktop site might help, but it now looks like fucking Pinterest, so I just left the site altogether. You’d think I’d have learned by now. I’m tempted to take the time to root my phone just so I can add eHow to my hosts file and won’t even go there accidentally.

In spite of the fact that the only person at Buchheit who knew how to run the colour matching computer was at lunch and wouldn’t return for 30-45 minutes, we soldiered on and found a stock colour that I hope will be close enough. It’s called “Love Story”. Jesus, who thinks up the names for paint colours? Anyway, OK’s Little Pink House is almost completely painted. P cracked me up with that last night. “Little pink houses for you and me” (and Ol’ Kitteh).

It’s only half over, but I’m almost finished OK’s new house, and I forgot to post this yesterday, when I accomplished nothing but loafing around, watching Criminal Minds and eating myself into a food coma. Anyway, it snowed a bitch when I was on my way home, and this was Thursday morning.

If I ever finish that goddamned house, I’ll have a picture of that, too!

The shit old people will buy.

Put a generic 8GB USB 2.0 flash drive in a Hammacher Schlemmer print catalogue in 2014, call it a “Picture Keeper” so old people will know what to do with it, and tell them it’s “smart” enough to know it has pictures on it and that it won’t duplicate pictures already on it, and it costs $59.95. You can even double the size to 16GB for only $99.95–that’s a lot of shots of the grandkids!

I had to specify USB 2.0 because that’s old technology that’s being replaced by USB 3.0, but I found a SanDisk that was comparable. SanDisk is a reputable brand, not some generic Chinese whatever, but close enough. When I plug this into a computer, my OS (Windows and Linux, at least, and probably MacOS, too) will recognize that it has pictures on it and ask me what I want to do, assuming I haven’t already set a default action. If I try to copy pictures from my camera or phone and those filenames already exist on the drive, my OS will ask me whether I want to skip copying those files, overwrite the existing files, or rename and duplicate. Windows and Linux (at least) will do this in plain English.  Assuming I am not a drooling idiot, I’ll figure it out. Price: $5.49 and free shipping. Free two-day shipping if I have Prime.

Old people will buy anything, especially if you tell them it’ll make fancy new computer stuff easier for them. Anyone who needs this will probably require two hours to find a USB port clearly labeled “USB”, and another hour to figure out how to get the cap off. It’ll take a call to a grandkid for instructions on plugging it in.

I don’t remember how old I was when we bought the set of encyclopedias, but I was young enough that I didn’t care about the encyclopedias themselves as much as I cared about the children’s story books that came with them. We got the encyclopedias, a set of dark green bound books called the Harvard Classics, and a set of 10 children short story books called Colliers Junior Classics. I was trying to remember one of the stories about an African girl, but the only words I could remember were “Damasi’s kraal.” A little googling revealed that Damasi is a man’s name, but kraal put it firmly in South Africa, and since that wasn’t the actual title, I kept looking. Eventually I stumbled upon a blurb on Google about a book called Thirty-one Brothers and Sisters, about a Zulu girl called Nomusa, and something clicked; I remembered that name. I looked for the book, but it’s out of print, and anyway, there was no digital copy. Then, I decided to check eBay, but it occurred to me that it wasn’t the whole book; those Colliers books had short stories and excerpts. I thought I’d look for the Colliers set, just for the hell of it, and I found several sets. Most were expensive or incomplete, but I found one starting at $13.99 plus reasonable shipping, so I set a snipe…and won. I just paid for them this morning, so I don’t have them yet, but it’ll be fun to read them as an adult and see the difference.

Now, all I need is the encyclopedia with the article for fashion! I could buy the whole set, but that’s really the only one I remember; I loved the pictures.