titles are for suckers

Last night I saw Rent for the third time. I had no idea that Darth Vader was Lukes father; I should really pay more attention when I go to plays. First time was in London sophomore year, then in New York last winter, now Baltimore. I'm beginning to think that this is the only play I'll ever see. Maybe by the time I die I can have seen it in every major city in the world. Maybe not.

Ninas cats are starting to be more friendly with me, despite my best efforts to make them hate me. I think that animals like it when you play rough, just so long as you don't actually hurt them. I know this holds for most dogs, but I always figured cats didn't like it. Maybe only kittens deal with it well, and when they get older they just want to be pet or left alone.

Today is my sisters birthday. She turned 24. That about sums that up.

Moving back in time:

Saturnight (I meant to type Saturday night, but that came out instead and I don't feel like using the backspace) I turned off my computer to make some quiet, and the next day when I turned it back on I got this nice little "Operating System not found" message. Restarted, same thing. Went into BIOS and my /home hard drive wasn't found correctly (the one with / and /boot was fine, though.) There was some other name (not WD200G or whatever) in place of the name of my 200 gig /home drive, and it had all sorts of extended ASCII characters. Somehow, opening the case and pushing all the EIDE cables connected to my hard drives against the drive fixed it. (nothing was disconnected, nor did any of the cables even move) So now my computer works again. Whatever that was. I'm beginning to think that I should upgrade my computer. I'm using the same MoBo and CPU that came with the computer, and while I have plenty of memory, my system isn't as fast as I would like, and every now and then it decides to stop working for a few days. Maybe I'll get a new computer over the summer. Maybe not.

Sunday I got to see some of Baltimore, including the National Bohemian building (I saw the face wink), Ninas school and the neighboring graveyard, the inner harbor, and some cool library. I'm not usually impressed by libraries (okay, maybe I am by the glib or libpng libraries, but that's different) but this place was different. Huge open spaces, a fountain with gold fish in the children's area... it felt like a museum, only a museum where you can touch things. I went home afterward to decorate the Christmas tree at my parents place, and despite the fact that I told them I'd be there in a half hour or so, the went ahead and started without me. Not that I was really bothered by it, hanging little trinkets on an evergreen is by far one of the most bizarre rituals in the Christmas celebrating culture.

I think we're going to try to go skiing some time next week (between Jesuses birthday and that day when, five years ago, every computer stopped working thrusting mankind into a digital ice age.) If anybody is interested in going skiing, let Tim or me know what days you're available so we can figure out an excuse for why you can't come.