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Found a reminder that life was once in a positive state, which reminds me just how crippling an effect the years in between have had. Knowing that families bled me every step of the way towards correcting that, doesn’t help along side having most of a year wasted.

One solution to a radioactively bad mood: turn off comms and bury myself in code up to the eyes…. until it subsides.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the day I get an honest to goodness break, I’ll probably be hit by a car for kneeling in the middle of the street.

Somehow, I think idiots like my mother who can ask the same question repeatedly of an invariant and expect a different answer each time, need to repeat high school mathematics or have their diploma revoked..

I do believe that my mother has finally realised that she has an *insane* amount of crap hoarded — after finding books apparently left over from high school.

You know, I may not always right but I’m sometimes I’m not wrong either ;).

You know you need a new life when you dream of the zombie apocalypse like it’s just another work day.

In addition to yesterday, or should I now be saying yester-yesterday… being one heck of a day it’s own right, things have been busy.

I was awake non stop from Sunday to late Monday afternoon. When I finally crashed from the days exhaustion, even if only for an hour or two.

Started with the system backups on Sunday: ensuring that my impeccably backed up home directory is safe, along with less commonly used things—plus a full “local” backup. That is, everything that seperated the FreeBSD install there from a simple install FreeBSD, install updates. That includes about 6-7GB of applications, system wide configuration, custom kernel configuration, and an archive of /var; where the database of installed packages are. Life without the Windows registry, is so sweet ;).

While that was getting done, I rigged vectra to fetch the current ISOs for FreeBSD 8.0-Release and Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop. The plan being to reformat the laptop (dixie) with GNU/Linux and be ready to set it up to dual boot with BSD, which could be restored easily from the backups I made. Simply put FreeBSDs file system can be grown larger, but not shrunk smaller o/. Out of the ~30 GB of data there’s about 10~12 GB in backups. The rest can be done from install media or network.

My main reason for the switch has to do with XFire support in Pidgin, and being able to use better file sync software. All of which work on just about everything quite smoothly, except for the BSDs :-(. I’m happy enough with GNU/Linux but do actually prefer a BSD unix system.

Monday was riddled with it’s own affairs, plus having to *fix* crap with the laptop. Assuming my instant messenger has stopped crashing (blasted xfire plugin), most things are stable now. The closest I get to sleeping, is being staring at my computer screen all morning: listening to 94.9’s radio stream and hoping to pass out eventually. With luck I get a few moments sleep spread across the late local-morning 15-20 minutes at a time.

Tuesday (what’s now “Technically” yesterday), my brother finally showed up. Not that the combination of Lady Gaga and cigar smoke is not my idea of perfection, I did get some driving time on his car. Although admittedly, it is well past the point where hours matter. It was however nice to get to see my brother.

Broke the “Cease fire” today (eh, yesterday, whatever), very much needed a good walk after everything on Monday. Price justified, even if my mother will likely make my life a living hell if she finds time to think about it. Went to the library. Started to read the Aeneid but only bored my mind clear enough to get work done. Started on a few C++ files before heading home in the thunder. Having done enough walking and running for my sides to hurt and my head to swim, I think I can say: I’m starting to hate running! Walking however is quite relaxing. Rather than make it home to a much needed shower, I instead got dragged across two stores. I definitely hate shopping.

Had a string of messages on my PC by then, and ended up joining someone for a little bit of Raven Shield. Took a break to perform surgery on the laptop, after about 10-15 minutes of that. I rarely play RvS these days unless I’m invited or it’s someone I rarely bump into otherwise.

Laptop is almost done… just a question of whether or not I’ll actually sleep tonight. And tomorrow I get the spend the morning in the vets office bright and early o/.

sigh.

After all these years, I really do not want to know what percentage of the day I spend in front of a computer.

Finishing up my laptops backups and prepping for an overhaul of the software setup…. why do I feel like my stress levels are about to climb a dozen rungs?

I’ve spent most of the day cleaning stuff out, circumstances being as they are, ma finally decided on cleaning out the hallway closet – a prelude to deeper cleaning. I always knew she would find someway to enlist me >_>.

The thing that irks me is that of course, my mother hates to throw anything out. My family are pack rats, among other things. Out of the entire closet, I would say that the keep pile outweighs the chunk it pile. At least plenty got done for a change, I could swear some of that stuff was older than I am!

People go through life acquiring a lot of stuff, to some people their “Stuff” is everything. In my honest opinion, if it’s no use to you: then either find someone who can use it or throw it out, and skew this years landfill calculations in a more accurate direction lol. I offered suggestions where I know a better home for some things (generally accepted), even noted that others like the useful “Collections” of encyclopedic or more scientific materials should be donated to the library. Of course, she wouldn’t hear that and those had to be chucked 8=). They were the kind of books you would go to a library for anyway (or grep several websites per topic).

When it comes to cleaning things out, I default to THROW OUT!

From the entire closet, of which ma has probably kept at least 1m² or closer to it – there were only four things I would’ve opted to keep. Two boxes of comic books because you never know when you’ll run out of real books, and two dusty old children’s books that are “Time before time” kind of old. Only reason I would opt to keep those, is because I’m sentimental. When I was very, very young and long before her Alzheimer’s set in, one was a book my grandmother always read to me whenever we visited. So they invoke my more ‘fond’ memories of her. I don’t have many childhood memories to be fond of either. Yet, if there was no place to put it, I would still put that in the out pile if absolutely necessary: because I don’t need  the book to remember, my memory is to close to photographic to forget that sort of thing. It’ll be on my book shelf.

My mother on the other hand, if there’s so much as a 0.001th chance it could be useful, if it cost plenty, or if it took effort, she won’t throw something out. Even if the damn thing was never used in the first freaking place o/.

Generally I’m more sentimental than not, but first and foremost… I’m a practical son of a gun. Space and usefulness generally outweighs most other concerns when you have to set priorities. I don’t think my mothers ever been good at that either.