yesterday, I took a healthy sum of cash out of the bank – for reasons out of my control this involved a teller and two ATMs – and carried it across Brooklyn to the Broker’s office and made sure that we were going to have an apartment to move into. Still not certain if we are going to get one with a terrace and a view or not, but we’ll be living in big apartment building soon. Or place will be smaller than what we are accustomed to, but we have been shedding unnecessary stuff to be able to fit into it. This is all healthy for sure!

Just last week, I was able to stick Squeaky on the couch and use the angle of the seat to keep her on it, I was also able to surround her with pillows on the bed and contain her; no longer. Her mobility is increasing dramatically. In fact, as I am writing this she is feeding herself by holding a bottle on the couch. She stands up with the help of furniture now. Yesterday, I had to beat her off with a cricket bat to keep her away from my popcorn!

This is a great program which can be installed into the KDE environment, which teaches you how to touch type. We had a typing program on the old TRS-80 that Dad had around the house in the 1980s, but I never really dtuck with that but this one, who knows maybe I will leaarn how to type correctly, once and for all. I just worked on an exercise that develops ‘j’ & ‘f’ as well as the [space].

As I putter around the house this morning, EJ is sleeping so beautifully on the bed. I just walked by her as she is lying there in between the two stacks of pillows, and waved her little hand in the air. Her eyes were shut and there was just the right bit of sweat on her forehead to make her hair stick together in little clumps. Her skin just glowed in the morning light streaming through the window and her little tiny hands with their little tiny fingers were just so magical to look at. I totally love when she is asleep!
Hark! What stirs in the bedroom? It’s my bubby! Yay!

I have tried and tried to not like it. I started out with Ubuntu on an couple of really old machines that were very, very slow. So lots of experimenting with the standard issue GNOME left me seeking Enlightenment. E17 is a nifty Desktop Shell, but still I was running it on an old slow machine. Then just a couple of nights ago, I managed to crash my Ti Powerbook that I got second hand. I needed to use it and did not have a backup system disk for OS X, or for any of the proprietary software that I lost. I did have a copy of Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10. So I loaded it up.
Then instead of dealing with the ugly brown and tacky feel of the GNOME experience, I installed KDE. EVERYTHING KDE that was in the repositories. I had been trying to link everything into emacs on my Enlightened Ubuntu machine, but was having difficulty writing my ~/.emacs to do what I wanted to do. Then when I made the Powerbook run Kubuntu, everything got really bright and clear.
I love how Konqueror is a web browser/file system navigator/pdf reader/ftp drop and dragger application. I love how Kontact lets me link email/Todo items and journal entries to documents in my files or to URLs. I like having the crisp, juicy freshness of everything all working together. It is what I have been seeking!

I started using emacs because the old machine which I was using to discover linux was too slow to use KDE or any of it’s fabulous applications. I needed some sort of day guide to be able to keep track of my university studies. So I used emacs with planner and emacs-wiki initially. Then I switched over to muse as the backend. I was trying to configure the publication portion of that as well, but when I recently completely installed Kubuntu on my Powerbook, I was able to use Kontact as my Personal Information Manager. I no longer feel the pressing need to learn how to master emacs. Perhaps some other day, I will once again feel this pressing need, but for now, I will be completely shifting all my emacs generated .txt files into the my new PIM.

Recently, due to a self-imposed critical error, my Powerbook crashed. I tried over a couple of days to stop it, but I was unable to do so. Then when I attempted to recover the OS using a Live CD, I just was not clever enough to do so, not this time. Since I had university assignments due immediately, and I had been talking much smack over the last couple months about Open Source software, I went ahead and wiped out the hard drive and installed Ubuntu on my Mac.
Yup! That’s right, no more OS X on my machine. The only data that I lost was the purchased music on my itunes account, since everything had been backed up already. I spend a couple of days reconfiguring the system so that instead of running GNOME as the Desktop Environment, it now has KDE. Some minor tweaks and I got the sound card and DVD player working.
I have been really enjoying some of the features of this new operating system, with the speed and power of the hardware, it is a real pleasure to work on. I enjoyed using Mac OS X, however most of the applications I used were Open Source software, so since I had it set up as a Linux box, it only makes since to go ahead and be a Linux box.

Today, Steph and I set about packing up stuff in the living room. In the process, we emptied two closets into boxes and discovered how we are going to pack the clothing. We seem to have an unusual amount of luggage in our possession – which we shall employ to move the clothing from here to there. Speaking of there, we still have yet to determine exactly where there is, but It looks very hopeful for a place near the park, which will be nice as Spring and Summer are quickly approaching.

Lil Bug had quite the blast helping us pack up. She was quick to sort out the trash and the things which we are getting rid of. It is very exciting to be shedding some of this stuff that we have no idea that we have or no use for or have just been carrying around cause we thought we might want that some day. No more cassette tapes, no more papers with crap on them, even the thin dreams that we disillusioned ourselves with have been blown out by this move. It is very refreshing to realize that we are beginning to make some serious changes in the direction of our life. Feels good too.

we started looking for a new place the first of the year, and we had to set a date of 15 February in order to insure that we would indeed move out. Yesterday, Steph started packing stuff up. We’ll be moving into a part of Brooklyn called Lefferts Garden. It’s on the Southeastern corner of Prospect Park. I am really looking forward to being two blocks from the park in the summer time.