Category: Stuff

The Crux of the Matter

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

– Methodist Pastor David Barnhart

In which I go off on a wild tare

So, we have this bay window right? And its big, and pretty, and has a decent amount of room for a display in it. That decent amount of room is usually covered in all kinds of detritus of the house. It leaks cold air like a sieve. You can feel it flowing over your hand like a liquid if you put your hands on the bottom.

Not today. Not any longer. I did a thing. I took everything out of it. The Terrarium. The random horse statue. The weirdly healthy african violet. All re-homed (some of it needs to be permanently re-homed, but I’ll get there).

Once I had it clear, I cut several pieces of 3/4 inch foam insulation to fit in it and covered the shelf.

 

Then I had to trim it to make it look pretty.

Once it was (almost) completely covered, I hit my stash. A couple years ago I made a quilted circle skirt. I had a fair amount of the cotton batting left over that I should have thrown out years ago. I used that to cover the foam insulation and make it look like snow. Its cotton with no glitter in it so we don’t have to worry about microplastics. I used scraps to fill in the gaps that I couldn’t get into with the foam core.

My ability to throw things out has taken a huge hit, but hey. It looks amazing.

Once it was covered, I broke out the lasercut village display Michele gave us years ago. It is really pretty and I love it. I hung two strings of LED lights around it, and added our window candles. It looks so cheery and light!

I sent pictures to Michele. Hopefully she likes them.

I can’t feel cold air pouring out of the windows anymore, so hopefully that is all set, too. It would be nice to not have to plastic the window this year.

It’s the Little Things

Small things make me happy.

I run a local Active Directory domain on my home network with a Samba back-end.¹ Over the past few weeks I’ve been building out a second domain controller, but I didn’t have 100% replication – it replicated AD and DNS, but not DHCP.²

After a short outage yesterday (due to an update) I decided that this had to change.  So I:

  • followed the instructions,
  • realized that the instructions were out of date,
  • figured out the correct procedure,
  • completed my setup, and
  • submitted a revision to the wiki.

It’s a small step, but I’m such a nerd that I’m riding high – one, because I’ve scratched an itch and have redundancy in my domain; and two, that I’ve visibly contributed something useful to open source (small as it may be).

¹ For along time it was powered by a single Raspberry Pi, but keeping that up to date became a struggle because it’s a little too low-powered.  But that’s all another story.

² This isn’t a completely useless situation.  It’s much easier to recover from a domain-controller crash if you still have a standing domain controller.  (A solo-domain-controller recovery is much more complicated recovery.)

Lies, and the lying liars that tell them

There are strangers in your life that you should never lie to:

Your doctor or therapist because they won’t judge you, want to make you healthier, and can only make the best treatment plan with your full cooperation.

Your lawyer because they won’t judge you and can only provide the best legal advice when they know all the facts.

Your dentist and oral hygienist because, regardless of your lies, as soon as you open your filthy mouth they know whether you’ve flossed or not.