The Holidays are Over & the Nest is Empty Again.

The holidays are now officially over, sigh. My daughter’s gone back off to college and I began taking down the Christmas lights outside an hour after she left (She did not want any of the Christmas decorations removed while she was here). It’s also when I clean out the gutters. This is the perfect time to do it because when I put up the lights in November, the leaves are usually still on the trees and the gutters are mostly clean, but by January, all the leaves have completely fallen and are filling the gutters. I decided this year to only take down half of them today and the other half the next time we get a weekend with decent weather. I left up the ones that I can see from the den windows!

This was a rare beautiful January weekend weather-wise and perfect for getting out and doing some more b&w photography! I am currently intrigued with b&w and have been shooting around town and nearby countryside capturing some good rural and street scenes. I also got out and jogged and, as I mentioned earlier, spent a couple of hours taking down lights and cleaning the gutters.

I got my calendar back this week too. I had submitted the twelve pictures I posted recently under “My Year in Photography” to Walgreen’s to make a 2012 calendar. They did an awesome job on it too! The only problem is that they apparently can’t make duplicates after you submit it in-store. They said to re-submit it online, which will save it!

I ordered myself a roll of b&w film to try out in my ME-Super this week after not finding in stores. I’m interested in trying out b&w via film. Can’t wait!

I also began the arduous process of installing a new Linux version on the extra space on my new hard drive, Linux Mint v12. So far, I’ve got it installed and my browser extensions and two custom fonts installed. I’ve installed some of my software and copied my /home directory over and got my Tk software, namely the E editor and JFM3 filemanager up and running happily. Suspend & hibernate are working, I still have a titanic amount of stuff to do, since I’ve customized and tweaked just about EVERYTHING on my existing system, including rebuilding the kernel to remove all the bloat! I’ve only spent some time in the evenings and late at night since it’s been too nice to not be outside during the day. The thing that’s got me stumped at the moment is how to add my Afterstep window-manager to the login session manager. It uses one that I’m not familiar with “lightdm” or something “gdm”-ish which I’ve never set up before. Anyone have any ideas? – please comment!!

I did have one minor tech triumph today just before my daughter left. She was needing a M$-Word doc converted to PDF and could NOT do it on Windows, even in OpenOffice (she had ABANDONED Linux just before heading off to college). I was able to open it in Libreoffice and print it to a file (pdf) for her and send her on her merry way! She also introduced me to a new word today – “Sorastitute” – n: College-aged girl who is a member of a sorority who’s name contains Greek letters, lol!