I don't have much time left till I start college. This week is going to be pretty hectic I think.

Starting with Monday! I need to...
- Get my wedding ring resized (wish I could say it was sized down, heh)
- Get eye exam and new prescription glasses
- Um... I forgot the other thing! Oh wait I think it's getting a math review book. Though I'm not even sure now if I still need it, this interactive review site seems okay.

I spent all of Sunday being a DR dork though. Talli's getting around and doing a lot of things. Helping during invasions, building relations, giving recruit lessons... she'll also be adopting two daughters, whoa!

I DID finally install Wordpress for Talli's blog. But am getting lazy now about actually making a layout for it. I'll probably just get a free theme somewhere, I guess. I'd really like to be able to separate IC / OOC stuff, so I just have to kick myself into doing it.

Besides looking forward to Sims 3 Late Night, I recently found out about The Sims Medieval! I could make a DR neighborhood with this, or old Anthegenia. It'll be a LOT of fun. That is IF I have the free time to even enjoy it, between college and DR!

A couple things I hope to write and possibly post soon
- some thoughts on IC vs OOC in roleplaying
- my 15 influential albums (it's been way too hard to choose 'em!)

Lately Jon and I have been playing this MONSTER playlist I created by taking every song in our MP3 collection (ripped from CDs we actually physically bought, we're the new vinyl collectors I guess!) I put them all in one list, hit shuffle and played. It's 7870 songs and 587 hours long, incredible! And the selection is so eclectic, yet I RARELY have head a song I don't like. I like that. :D I was silly and called the list "Fern", as in "...a diverse buyer fern... buyer segment! I wrote this stuff, why can't I remember it?!" </Winnebago Man>

I want to buy more CDs soon, when I can afford it. Which reminds me... the water was cut at the apt. for a while, but then it came back, and we didn't notice the tap was on until it was too late! Water all over the kitchen and living room! The CDs got wet (we had stacked on the living room floor since we've yet to get a shelf for them) so we had to move those and a bunch of other stuff.

So sleep deprived! And I don't think I'll give myself more than 4-5 hours to nap. I have an obligation this evening and don't want to miss NWN2 either. :(

I'm feeling fairly energized, for some reason. The news of my Lola's thrown my sleeping patterns for a loop, so my mind has just been churning and churning.

I already had a long and thoughtful post written up, but I'm on the laptop and the touch pad is pretty sensitive! I mistakenly wiped all I wrote. But it's not a big deal, a lot of it was ideas I've written about before. I find I get wordy and repetitive when I'm running on little sleep. :D

The short of it is, circumstances are starting to shape up to my favor. Tentatively, because I still don't have everything I need to be ready for college, but it's definitely not bad.

Getting the laptop helped a lot. It's gotten me more motivated with my little web and server projects. I'm hoping that the program I'm entering in Concordia will expose me to web development and administration on a much larger scale. On my own, I've never had to deal with the "Digg effect" or serving millions of users. I just help a few friends and family, and learn just enough to set up my own sites and maintain them (sometimes shoddily).

My Lola is sick in the hospital and may not be long for this world. My sis let me know and it seems they suspect it's an advanced form of cancer. She is 88 years old, so she's lived a long life.

(note: Lola and Lolo mean Grandma and Grandpa in Tagalog.)

I've not been in contact with her for over 10 of those years. Honestly, the years she cared for me were only a fraction of her life... maybe 20 years or so of it. She lived more of it in the Philippines with her relatives there. She was the second wife of my late grandfather so we don't actually have blood relation. Still, she is family to me.

So, since I don't have the time, money or passport to visit the Philippines with my parents, I sent a letter through my mom instead. She and dad are going to visit her.

Because of the time and distance I don't think this is hitting me as hard as it otherwise could have, but I still cried while writing my letter. I feel like I'm not very good at these things... I've never really lost a loved one truly close to me. It's harder to feel it when you're not with the relative every day, when you aren't at the funeral looking down at their body after the soul has passed on.

At $7.95 a month you sure don't pay for good support.

Though, I would've been fine without VPS support if only VPSLink actually had a remote console accessible for customers if they lock themselves out, or like me, try to update kernel through SSH (lol, bad idea). I'm pretty sure Slicehost has a console like that for Xen VPS and so does Linode.

Not sure if I'm just getting screwed cause of the very low cost VPS or what. (Maybe that's why support was so slow, too? No priority for the low paying noob?)

I'm almost wishing now I just went for the more expensive choice to begin with. :/ it'll be more of a pain to move, particularly for the domain name. Gonna have to wait a month at least for the lock on the registrar to run out.

While I'm here setting up ZNC again (gave up on waiting for support and just reinstalled OS) I need to remind myself of another quirk of the Ubuntu install on VPSLink. I had to replace their /etc/apt/sources.list with the original distributor list. VPSLink had some sort of mirror site source listed but it doesn't even exist any more. Meh... What a pain!

At least I've got the whole process down so I can do it again if need be. But I hope I won't have to start over again any time soon.