I would have to say that this has been such a great weekend. Its always great to spend time with friends and family and this weekend for me was like a family reunion. Betsy emailed us a back in late march early april to see if we would like to come out for the 4th of july and all the pieces seemed to fall together pretty perfectly and Livi, Anne, Steph, Emily and I were able to spend a wonderful weekend hosted at Chez Mccallon.

Night one consisted of a wonderfull grilled dinner at the house followed by college photo albums. I was starting to fade but when those albums came out and we started reliving old happenings…. good times is all I can say.

Saturday, a scrumptious breakfast and the Argentina/Germany world cup game (dissapointing match up) followed by tooling around town followed by a bbq at a friends house. This was one of the few times I wished I could partake in the drinking parts of the merriment, but as it was even being sober and out with the ladies was highly amusing (honestly not an angle I get to see it from very often).

Today was a classicly slow morning filled with a recovery routine of tv then lounging at the pool. We had dinner and came home to wait for the fire works and while we were waiting the ladies threw me a baby shower! I was so surprised and felt so loved it was wonderful. This baby already has a set of aunties who love him.

We decided to watch the fire works from the balcony which was not the greatest of views, but I was happy being with friends (plus that meant we didn’t have to try and get anywhere and back). We later ended up watching the boston fireworks display on tv and I have to say, the consensus among the group was that boston had the superior light show. We has been able to see the dc show on tv as well so it was a fairly even comparison.

I would never have guessed 15 years ago when I went away to college who I would meet or what hijinks we would get up to but I am so glad everything went the way it did because I have a group of people with whom I share a very unique set of experiences with and who speak the same language I do, although they are far more poetic about it than I. I am glad college ended and more glad that the best part of the experience lives on in my relationships with the people who found me there.

Tomorrow I fly home, back to my house and hubby and puppy and kitty. It will be great to be home (I get to watch my sciency shows at home without the cruel mockery of my bffs which is why I love mario even more). It will be much cooler and I will carry with me memories of sophisticated conversations and civilized behaviours

Posted by mobile phone:
I decided to really try to make virtual windows on linux work today. I am long been annoyed that for about 6 or 7 occasional computing things I have to boot into vista.well I am tired of it! Really the only reason I keep vista or windows for that matter, around is so that I can get into a few windows programs that I need for work. So I did a little poking and found out that I could install windows as a virtual machine on Ubuntu using VirtualBox. There are probably some others out there as well but this one seemed like it would be easy to install and easy to use. (And I have seen examples of people running Netflix successfully on it)
The first time I tried to install it I used the add/remove programs version. And that didn’t seem to work so I tried to install it through the synaptic package manager. And that didn’t seem to work all the way. So I went to their website and installed it through their installer. After following the user manuals instructions I got to the point where I was able to install windows and it was so exciting!

I have some playing around to do still. My goal is to be able to VPN into my work machine from my virtual machine. If I can make that work then I will wipe Vista from my machine, re-do the partitions on my machine and reinstall the virtual machine so that its got more than 4 gbs of space assigned to it (Netflix requires 3bg free to run) .

OOOOO can’t wait.

(Oh and again I understand why I married Mario. He is excited for me that I can get this working, and I think a little impressed