weekend of house work

[Kragen Sitaker]

So this weekend Beatrice and I went shopping.  We picked up a globe
for one of our bare light fixtures (which unfortunately didn't fit), a
cheese grater, a crock pot, another box of 36 ramen packages, various
other food we'd run low on, and more hardware for hanging pictures.

My aunt Sharon sent me two boxes of Arrowhead Mills brownie mix and
some pecans, so I made some brownies, which we then distributed to our
six neighbors in the building.

We hung some more pictures in the living room.  Beatrice spackled a
dent in the hallway wall that had been there since before we moved in.
I scrubbed down the front of the building and washed our windows and
the windows of our next-door neighbor who had given us flor de Jamaica
tea.

The front of our building was thick with (what appears to be) rubber
dust from a nearby busy street.  It was so thick that a number of
people had written their names in it, probably with wet fingers; it
was dark black.  Six or seven gallons of hot water, some dish
detergent, and thousands of strokes with a scrub brush cleaned it up
considerably; although some of the names are still legible, they are
quite faded.

We hadn't done much laundry since we moved in; I did 13 loads (a
triple load, four double loads, and a single load) last week, and
Beatrice did six loads at her parents' house.  We now have maybe two
or three loads left, which I may get done today.

For dinner last night, we had a chicken stew made in the crock pot, a
couple of steamed artichokes, and a fruit salad for dessert.

I spent some time reading _Project Oberon_, by Wirth and Gutknecht, a
1990 book that describes work done in 1986-88.  I was astonished at
the level of ignorance displayed therein about basic issues like
generational garbage collection, finalizers, usability, and graphics
languages --- all stuff that was developed and published by 1986.
Maybe it wasn't apparent at the time how important that stuff was.

Beatrice started using Mozilla this weekend.  Like everyone else who
uses it, she's very frustrated with the numerous annoyances in its
user interface.  Unlike some people, she doesn't have the option of
running Galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net), because she's using MacOS 9
instead of GNU/Linux.

Debian GNU/Linux might release a new version on May Day, which would
make me very happy.  Although everybody tells me Debian "testing" is
extremely stable, I'm afraid to install it on my laptop until after
it's released.  And I'm looking forward to running Galeon myself; but
the Debian Galeon package depends on 34 different other pieces of
software, so I don't really want to try to build and install it myself
on my old "stable" laptop system.

This afternoon I ate a dozen potstickers.  Yum.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we possess
ourselves.
       -- Gandalf the White [J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Two Towers", Bk 3, Ch. XI]