Marco Polo, Michael Glassbender, and Linus Torvalds...
Absolutely zero merchant-explorers, actors, or fathers of the Linux kernel were sighted in this post.
This past Saturday we headed over to my parents' and ordered takeout with them and Kelly, Steve, and the girls.
I had some Valentine's Day gifts for Kitten and the molerat delivered there instead of to the apartment; so, once I had opened and inspected those, I found myself with some unneeded bubble wrap on my hands.
I figured I'd let Liv and Riley fight over it, or bond over it, or whatever they might choose to do with it. It turns out they were both content for Liv to repeatedly run across it, pop a few bubbles, and crack up before doing it again...
I of course had to snap an obligatory photo during an inopportune moment at the dinner table...
And, I decided that Hannah is far enough out of the "fragile" phase that I would finally hold her for the first time...
Three Hungry People Walk into a Bar...
Sunday night, we took a short road trip out the turnpike to Harleysville, hoping to dine at an interesting-looking place called the 1750 Bistro.
The hours on their website assured us that they would be open; so, you can imagine our surprise when we drove ~45 minutes in the rain to find that open actually means closed in colonial bistro-speak.
We drove all the way back home and had dinner at JB Dawson's in Langhorne instead...
Marco...?
Monday night we grabbed pizza (and tiramisu for dessert!) at Marco's Pizzeria in Newtown. Then we stopped by Ross so Riley could do some clothes shopping...
...Polo!
I decided to walk around and browse the housewares and home decor sections out of boredom, when I happened upon a beautiful blue glass floor vase. I figured they'd probably be asking $80 for it... but the price tag begged to differ.
Only $28?! Sold!
What a find!
Michael Glassbender
Tuesday night, Riley wanted to look for some new posters at Five Below. (No luck in the poster department, but we snagged a book of Madlibs to make the trip worthwhile.)
And then we stopped at Michael's... because there's no better way to seal a great deal on a discounted vase than to drop $100+ on glass crafting beads and artificial flowers :)
But, we turned a plain ol' vase into a pretty decent objet d'art, and we're quite happy with the result...
Wednesday night, I whipped us up some nachos for dinner; and then we did a few Madlibs at the table afterward. Here's our best (or at least our cleanest) one so far...
I am a smelly American. I was born 13 years ago in East Djibouti.
When my father first saw me, he said, "Holy shit!" I am 19.7 feet tall, have crusty brown eyes, and an accidental complexion.
My hobby is collecting dumplings. I always speak lovingly, and I have made several beige motion pictures.
I am married to Lucky, the well-known Hollywood clown. I have given away thousands of dogs to charity.
My most prominent physical characteristics are my wheezy nose and my large puddle.
Who am I?
Answer: I am Penny.
Linus Torvalds
Thursday morning, my primary work computer informed me that my operating system (Linux Mint 19) was reaching end of life in 89 days and would no longer receive security updates. Awesome.
I had put off the pain of upgrading for well over a year now; so, it was time to bite the bullet and burn a few hours doing crapwork in the name of maintaining my security. And, as expected, tons of things "broke" during the upgrade process, and I ended up rebuilding and reconfiguring large portions of my system from scratch.
As a bonus, I spent enough time at the terminal to put myself into "sysadmin mode" for the first time in quite awhile; and so, I marched out into the living room, fired up the Ubuntu HTPC I have connected to our television, and spent 10 minutes fixing the driver for that machine's wifi dongle (which I had been too lazy to fix after it got borked during a kernel upgrade a couple years back).
So, our "dumb" TV in the living room is suddenly "smart" again... Even more so, since it's not full of telepathy and crapware phoning home to Google, Apple, Samsung, and Amazon with everything we watch, think about watching, or say too loudly within earshot.
Nope, instead we have a full-fledged Linux computer that does whatever we want it to do. And nothing else :)
A Virtual Snow Day?!
Finally, Riley and Taylor got a nice surprise on Friday: Since their schools are apparently not running Linux, the entire network went down for more than 24 hours nationwide.
Nobody across the country could connect or log in to their classes, so the kids essentially had a snow day... in cyberschool.
And in other news, Athennia and I finished Spartacus: Blood and Sand Friday night, after shotgunning the entire season throughout the week. So, onward to Season Two now—which is actually a prequel (so... Season Zero, I guess?).