Kris and I went up to Mike and Kate's yesterday evening to make cookies with Liza. Kate invited a fairly big group of people (mostly all from work) to visit, I just hadn't realized how big of a group until we arrived there: everyone was tall. And I mean tall. Kate, Kris and I were the shortest adults there (exaggerating for effect, there were two other women shorter than I am at the party, but there were also five women taller, and all the men were definitely taller, it was like a giants' party, and we were there as midget entertainment).

Kris hadn't been to the Gulls' new house. After the drive up, I think he'll be even less likely to head up very often. Fortunately, they'll be coming down the mountain on a regular basis for work. We went up in Kris' car, and managed to drop his MPG down about five MPG on the way up. The drive took forty minutes, which may limit our visits, and definitely destroys any chance of our moving to the boonies before we're independently wealthy.

After a few minutes at the Gulls' house, it became very obvious that the trip up wasn't going to be a cookie baking event as I was expecting (i.e. similar to the Christmas cookie baking Mom and I would have with the Gudis twins). Liza was playing with a neighbor, who was maybe 13 years old (and, in the tall theme, nearly as tall as I), and much more interesting than a thirty-something ex-neighbor. The two of them dashed around the house, rolled cookies out, played in the loft, all the things two young girls do.

After an hour, I gave up and realized that, no, I wasn't going to have any cookie baking session with Liza, that their move to their fantastic new house essentially ended the ease and comfort of having good friends as neighbors.

I've been a bit upset recently at Mike for moving away. Less so in the last two weeks, but tonight just reminded me of it again. I know that the move is a great move for the family, more room, different lifestyle, and I'm happy for them. But in the way I know is selfish, I miss them a lot. Just as I still miss Ben and Lisa a lot. Life happens, people move, groups of friends change.

I guess I'm more frustrated that everyone around me seems to be moving on to the next phase of their lives and I'm stuck at a perpetual 29.

After who knows how many tries, fits and stops, I finally have what I consider a working unix laptop with my shiny MBP. I like it a lot, as I slowly force it to submit to my will (read: works the way I started working when I was on an SGI IRIX box ten years ago).

Emacs and the terminal window were the two hardest parts to get right. I become very cranky if a system I'm using doesn't have emacs on it (try as I might to switch to vi/vim/gvim at Andy's suggestion and with his help). I become even more cranky if I have to use a mouse on a regular basis to navigate amongst windows: splat-tab is fine, I can even use splat-tilde to navigate through windows of the same application. But force me to use a mouse exclusively to change applications and watch the laptop fly through the air and most likely out the window.

So, when the new install of OmniOutliner Pro overwrote one of my frequently used emacs keystrokes (splat-greater than, or splat-shift-period, which sends the cursor to the bottom of the editing buffer/window or the end of the document in Word speak), I became very, very cranky.

Turns out splat (or flower, or apple, or command, it's all the same key on an Apple keyboard) > is the OmniOutliner Pro Service call to "Add to clippings," essentially copying the system clipboard to an outliner. If OmniOutliner Pro, eh, screw that name, if OOP is installed, this service is installed, and it can't be modified, can't be disabled via the OOP application.

And won't send the keystrokes to emacs.

Fortunately, on the OOP forums, another person had a different OOP service that frustrated him, and Troy B of Omni pointed him to ServiceScrubber, another app that will overwrite the keystroke overwrite.

Download, double-click, double-click, drag, splat-space, s e r *return*, scroll, uncheck, splat-s, splat-q and I'm back in business.

As uncomfortable as I am about installing small random applications on my computer, the mac part not-withstanding, this and DoubleCommand, which Doyle found for me, are the two tiny apps I'm glad I have on my system. I'm very happy other people are scratching those itches and a few dollars via paypal means they're scratching my itch, too.

Earlier this month, Kris said the horrific words, "I think the dishwasher is broken." I looked into the dishwasher to see four inches of stagnant water, and thought, well, crap. I told him not to worry, though, I'd fix it. He looked at me, and shook his head, in a "I wonder how long this is going to take." sort of way.

Nearly a week and a dozen sinks worth of dishes washed later, I pulled the bucket and a screwdriver from the garage and went to work under the sink.

I have no idea what convinced me that 1. I knew what the problem was, or 2. I could fix it, but ignorance breeds confidence and, within minutes, the plumbing was disconnected under the sink. One quick, flashlight-aided look later, and I knew we weren't spending hundreds of dollars on a new dishwasher.

Turns out, when I made my most dee-lish-shush mushroom barley soup for Thanksgiving, and had dumped the old, spoiled barley down the drain (before I realized how stupid such a move would be, and threw it into the compost pile instead), I had inadvertantly clogged the incoming dishwasher line. It was packed full of barley, about eight inches worth of barley packing.

A plumber's snake, a chopstick, fifteen minutes and only one dishwasher water explosion later, and we had clear plumbing again.

Plumber Kitt to rescue. I'm liking this hands-on approach to fixing house problems.

Following Jason Kottke's My Year in Cities post, I have my list of cities. I'm completely ignoring all of the local cities around here that I don't frequent, but that traveling to is blog-worthy, such as Santa Cruz, Oakland, and San Francisco.

Chicago, Illinois #
Winchester, Virginia
Boulder, Colorado *+
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada #
Waimanalo, Hawaii
San Diego, California #
Davis, California *+
Big Island, Hawaii
Portland, Oregon #
Grand Canyon, Arizona
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Phoenix, Arizona
Chico, California +
Burlington, Washington +
Seattle, Washington +
Sarasota, Florida +
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia +
Perth, Western Australia, Australia +
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia +

Following Kottke's rules, I've spent "one or more nights in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days." Those marked with a + are ultimate-related cities. Those marked with a # are conference cities.

Electronic journalling works better if I have some electronic mechanism for input. Alas, tonight I didn't.

Mostly.

Didn't quite finish the post, though.