I’ve been spending some time on what I feel are inspirational sites. I’m taking the Full Tilt Boogie class from Dispatch from LA . I plan to do some work on that this weekend. I also spent some time at Walk Slowly, Live Wildly . I enjoy reading her site but decided this time to go to some of the blogs on her blogroll. Seems like at least a couple of the blogs had women that have given up their dreads. I find stuff like that interesting. I do find that it’s important to keep the creative juices flowing. I’ve not had a lot of time to put into projects lately, but I am determined to change that. I have a pile of beads sitting on my work desk to remind me.

I just really feel that it’s time for some changes in my life. My personal life is great and I’m very happy with Lon. I am less happy with the clutter in the house. I’ve tried not to make a lot of changes to the things in the house, at least for my first few years here. Now, I am anxious to speed up the process. I want to clear out a lot of the stuff that we don’t need or use. I’d like to pack up some of this and put it away or get rid of it. It’s not my stuff of course and that limits what I can do. I would really, really, like to spend less time trying to find stuff I need. So I will be making an attempt over this long weekend to clear clutter and find places for the things we need to keep.

we were talking about Fanny. She is now a jumping-off-the-walls big cat. She likes to sleep on me at night and will usually climb up on my lap any time I sit down. We went down to Lincoln City to visit Quinn and see the boat show at Toledo. It’s a nice show and I really enjoyed myself. Quinn is doing well and has been staying with Laura, his half sister. He’s working again and likes his new job at the Coho Inn. I hope he keeps at it. I’d love to be able to stay at the coast.

We are about to become the owners of a 1966 Ford F-250 pickup. It needs some work and definitely cleanup. We really need a pickup. There’s so much work at the river that we can’t do without a truck. We are still moving forward on the idea of moving there and renting out this house. I don’t even want to think what a mess it will be to pack things up. I hope we can start to get rid of some of this stuff. The clutter just drives me crazy.

I did not do any gardening. We do have chickens (including two Jersey Giant roosters that we need to get rid of. They were supposed to be pullets.) It’s still something that I want to do and I have a lot of plants in pots that will need to be transplanted. I just don’t seem to have much time to put into anything these days. I spent this weekend trying to rebuild Lon’s computer as his Windows partition got corrupted. I was able to pull all his files and pictures out through a Linux partition. I was able to get a fresh copy of Linux on a new hard drive and had him use that for a few days. I’ve spent all weekend fighting to get XP reinstalled. And that would be the tech rant of this piece. XP is obsolete. It’s ridiculous to have to go all over the place to download programs to be able to do the basic stuff. I couldn’t get the wireless adapter installed until I had Service Pack 2 installed. (Luckily I had another wireless card that I could install.) I had no problems with the card in Linux and the system was basically ready to go as soon as I installed it. I’ve turned my laptop into a dual boot machine. I run Bodhi Linux for my day to day stuff, since it’s so fast. I installed Ubuntu so I can sync my iPhone (which just doesn’t want to work in Bodhi.) I like having Ubuntu One do that automatic backup too. When I replace that laptop, I’m going for one that I can run Ubuntu on. It just feels like a real operating system. I don’t like the direction that Apple is taking and I’ve never been a big Windows fan. I let Lon know that I’m not rebuilding XP again either.