It is that time of year ago. The ground is white and the snow continues to fall. Nothing like waking up to the first snowy morning of the year and looking out and suddenly seeing white instead of green. It is extra strange because at 3:00 am yesterday morning it was 71F outside and last night when we went to bed it had fallen to 36F according to our outside thermometer. And now it is so cold outside that not only is the water in the air freezing but the ground is cold enough that the snow is staying for a really long time.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opens in theatres tonight. Here in Rochester it won’t go to the DLP theatre until tomorrow afternoon. I am waiting for that. I am very excited.
Dominica was doing some research at work today attempting to find a recipe for custard tarts and came across this very olde recipe: Doucetes. Take Creme a gode cupfulle, & put it on a straynour, thanne take yolkes of Eyroun, and put ther-to, & a lytel mylke; then strayne it throw a straynour in-to a bolle; then take Sugre y-nowe, & put ther-to, or ellys hony forde faute of Sugre, than coloure it with Safroun; than take thin cofyns, & put it in the ovynne letre, & lat hem ben hardyd; than take a dyssche y-fastenyd on the pelys ende, & pore thin comade in-to the dyssche, & for the dyssche in-to the cofyns; & whan they don a-ryse wel, teke hem out, & serue hem forth.
I got started rather late this morning. I have been pretty tired and had stayed up pretty late last night. Late enough to post today’s Bible chapter before going to bed. It was cold out so Oreo and I just snuggled all morning and enjoyed the chance to get a nice sleep in brisk air. What a nice change that is.
Tomorrow dad and I are going down to Castile in the morning to do some work down there to get them ready. I don’t know whether or not we are going to be able to get in there next week during the vacation so I want to get as much done now as possible. Dominica’s college roomate Jenn in coming up to visit us this weekend and is going to be arriving tomorrow afternoon and hanging out for a little while in the afternoon. Jenn will be staying here Saturday through Monday so be looking for her on the podcast. The podcast page is a little different now and some people who were unable to listen to the show properly before should be able to listen to it just fine now while some people who were fine before might not be able to listen to it at all now. I am in the latter category. But I think that overall, it is probably an improvement for the average site user. It only affects people who are listening to the podcast directly off of the site and does not affect anyone who is downloading the MP3s before listening to them.
My Chia Herb Garden started to show signs of life last night. Today it was so cold outside that I decided that they needed to be moved into the kitchen so that they would have some hope of surviving. So they are now next to the range with a flourescent lamp right about them keeping them a little warm and giving them a decent amount of light. They seem to still be growing and the first leaf is now visible. Maybe we will have real plants going by Monday. I will get pics for y’all as soon as I am able to take the plastic wrap off of them. It will just be glare until then. I am resoaking some pepper seeds today in the hopes of getting them going. They are from the grocery store though and not from a seed place so there is a decent chance that they won’t work. Plus I didn’t soak them long enough the first time so that didn’t help things either. We will have to wait and see.
I spent a significant amount of the evening on the telephone with Mary. I talked to her for about twenty minutes early in the afternoon before she left for work. I had been planning on going over to the hotel to eat dinner over there since we have hardly seen each other for the past two months or so. But then she called a little after 5:30 to say that she was still at home in Silver Springs because she had blown some tires on the way into work here in Geneseo and had to go back home. So she missed her shift today but we managed to take the opportunity to get her all set up with Juice and FireANT so that she can check out all of the multimedia splendor of the SGL world. She listend to some of the podcast this afternoon and watched a few of the videos from Disney World. I also got her hooked on RocketBoom. Resistance is Futile.
I installed and began working on the new web server that we are going to be using here for SGL. It will be some time before we are actually able to put this new machine into service but the groundwork is being laid now. My plan is to move the site over to WordPress. It is going to be a tremendous amount of work to have that actually happen but we really need to move away from all of the manual site management that I have been doing for the past five years. The site is just too big and the whole thing is just far too ambitious to try to do by hand. And there are tons of features that I want to be able to offer and so many of them are offered through WordPress that it will make my life a LOT easier. I am going to be running the new site on a Novell SUSE 10.0 server. I did my first server install tonight of SUSE and I am really impressed by how much easier they have made it than previous versions or even compared to Windows. SUSE Linux is a really great product. I am going to be busy at the school working to convert them to version 10 as well. They are currently on 9.2 which is two versions behind. It will be nice to be able to have such an upgrade. This latest version is supposed to be really fast during startup compared to the previous versions which is a big deal at the school where short class times couples with common restarts causes a lot of lost productivity. This will help to minimize that.
Oreo avoided going outside until quite late this afternoon. I think that he knew that it was a lot colder than he was interested in dealing with so he held it as long as he could. When he went out this afternoon it was, to the best of our knowledge, the first time that he has ever seen snow on the ground. He was a Houston dog and they don’ get all that much snow there in the balmy south. He may have lived for a while in Colorado but we don’t really know. He seemed to be pretty comfortable with the snow, though, and wasn’t very worried about it. Eventually he went out and played around for a while outside and didn’t appear to be too chilled when he came back in.
Dominica came home at her regular time and we managed to do the podcast immediately which, IMHO, really helped us do a much better show than normal because we were both awake for it. We tend to get tired right around midnight and if we aren’t careful we end up crossing past midnight while doing the show and then we are too zonked to be entertaining. Mr. Humphries was kind enough to not come down and interrupt us during the show tonight too. Oreo was pretty gassy and that almost caused a problem.
After doing the show Dominica made some custard tarts. As far as we can tell they are as close as we can get to what Lionel eats regularly on As Time Goes By. It is funny that I have been wondering what they tasted like since I first saw the show so many years ago and now in the same week that I see the end of the show I finally get to have a custard tart. They aren’t as amazing as one would hope. Ambrosia Devon Custard is more or less a lot like vanilla pudding. It was good but nothing to write home about. Maybe just something to write to the world about. Hmmm…
We hung out in the office for a little while and played with the animals. The hamster has really been wanting a lot of attention lately. How that he has been moved into the office he is so much more involved with us. I am glad that he is here. I am pretty sure that he is getting enough attention now and less disruption during the day. He seems to be a happier rodent. The problem with him is that the more attention that you pay to him the more he wants. So he is becoming very demanding of our time. If he knows that we are around he will come down to the bottom of his cage, grab the cage door in his teeth and rattle the cage something fierce.
Bed time at 12:30. Dad is calling me from his breakfast meeting in Perry this morning to have me meet him down in Castile so that we can do some work. I will be down there until early afternoon. Then Jenn Generoso is coming over early in the afternoon so I am trying to get back to Geneseo to see her.