Taking a Breather.

It took quite a while after my shoveling and trudging before I felt able to do anything. I started making hamburgers for supper around 6:00pm but after I noticed that I was dropping everything and bumping into things, I decided it was not a good time for me to be working with intense heat. Instead I had a couple of sandwiches.

Much later I felt up for doing the sweeping and mopping, which is really a huge job that I hate doing. Well, after the sweeping was 80% done and much of the furniture was rearranged, I decided it would be a good idea to fix the bookshelf that has been leaning over and threatening to collapse for years. (I seem to recall that fixing it was a new-years resolution of 2006.) Mostly its been impossible to get to to work on, but what with the furniture rearranging it was momentarily doable. So, with Linda's help, it got did.

After the shelf was put back together and the books put back on it, Linda gave us each a glass of Gløg as she was afraid her pitcher wouldn't hold it all unless we drank some. The sacrifices we have to make in order for our friends to have a party! What with that and us being forced to eat the rest of the trifle, so that there would be a free bowl to hold the next trifle, its been a hard day.

So, seeing as I'd only had a couple sandwiches for supper, the Gløg hit pretty hard and I figured I had to come up here and do a bit of sobering up before continuing with the cleaning.

Virtualocity, Parties, Schedules and Schtuff.

Well, I finally got things set up well enough (at least for now) on my Debian box that I've gone ahead and turned on VirtualBox and am now installing Windows XP. Or rather, I've already installed it, and am now downloading the ten million updates it will take to get it up to speed. So far things have gone quite well. There was a false start where I couldn't boot my windows SP 2.5 slipstream which was resolved by me discovering it was really a movie DVD that had been put in the wrong jewel box.

Then I discovered that the slipstream would crash while settting up windows. I suspect its because the slipstream is patched to support the AHCI drives I have on this machine, which aren't present in the virtualiztized box. In any case, my original windows disk installed fine, performance seems to be excellant so far (although on an empty box it should be) and I'm now downloading and installing all the updates so that I can take a snapshot for a reference version.

Meanwhile, of course, we're supposed to be having our (delayed) solstice party, but no one has shown up yet and I have (mirabile dictu) finished all my cleaning and decorating chores before any of the guests have arrived. They should start showing up any minute now though, so I don't know how much more fiddling I'll get done tonight.

Tomorrow we're heading out to my folks place (weather permitting) and staying until the morning of boxing day. We should get back by afternoon and (again, should all work according to plan) we'll get together with azrhey and pphaneuf as we've not really managed to have any time together since I got back from California.