The following are rants, in letter format. You could call them "letters to idiots". ;)

Some of them are recent, others have been brewing in my brain for a while and I just got around to posting them now.

Yes, I get grumpy sometimes. Yes, I do believe that ranting is the best way to get rid of the grumpiness. ;)

Rants in the extended entry, as this does get rather lengthy.

Dear Hotmail:

Once more I haven't posted in a while. Let's see, what have I been up to?

Nothing much, truth be told.

My computer was sick for a bit - it kept shutting down completely at random (it didn't matter what I was doing, or even if I was doing anything or not). It was rather annoying, as you can imagine. I asked several knowledgeable online friends and acquaintances (I suspected it was a hardware component going the way of the dodo, and I'm not too experienced in troubleshooting hardware), and the almost unanymous opinion was that it was my power supply failing. So I bought a new one, swapped it in, and my computer's been behaving ever since. Phew.

Then I got sick for a week, which I largely spent wandering around the house being bored out of my skull and feeling sorry for myself. Then a week or so back at my java course, thoroughly enjoying learning fun programming stuff.

Then, one fateful Friday, my father came home from Portugal (he'd gone on a work-related trip), not feeling too well. The following Saturday we were supposed to go to the La Fenice theatre in Venice to see an opera ("Parsifal"); we'd booked ages in advance (back in August), but my father woke up coughing his lungs out and with a rather high fever so we ended up staying home. (Waste of money, grrr. And I'd been looking forward to the opera.)

The weekend was then spent nursing my sick father back to health (in the case of my mother) and/or staying the heck away from him (in the case of me and my brother).

On Monday morning, my mother woke up with the same symptoms my father had had.

In retrospect, I should've known I was doomed :P

That same day, my brother left for his week-long school trip (and managed not to get sick, the lucky sod).

On Tuesday, I woke up feeling like complete shit. I was coughing my lungs out, and I'd managed to sleep maybe an hour total because I kept waking up coughing during the night. I wanted to stay home, but I checked my temperature and I didn't have a fever - and following my family's "no fever, you aren't really sick" rule, I ended up going to my java course anyway.

It wasn't a particularly pleasant day for me - I spent it mostly coughing my lungs out, feeling like shit and being unable to concentrate. (And whining to my friends on IRC.) By the time I got on the train home, I was fully determined to fight tooth and nail for my right to stay home and rest the following day, even if I didn't have a fever.

Turns out I didn't have to :P I really should've expected it - I got home, declared "there's no way in hell I'm going anywhere tomorrow", checked my temperature just to be safe, and discovered I had a really high fever (38.7 °C, to be exact). I crawled my way downstairs to my computer, notified the few online friends I could track down, then crawled upstairs and curled up in bed. I spent the next couple days there, feeling sorry for myself, feeling like my brain was frying and too sick to even get bored. It was rather scary.

And so I spent another week sitting at home and being sick. :P

After that, not much else. Well, there was Chocolate Day 2005 Easter. Mmm, chocolate.

I'm somewhat allergic to maths, but I can't help but find this page interesting. Who knew there were so many ways numbers could be special?

I may have mentioned this before - I can't remember if I have - but it seems we have been adopted by another cat. He first turned up about a month or so and was immediately incredibly friendly towards us... purring loudly, rubbing against our ankles, demanding cuddles, and so on. We still haven't let him inside the house, but he eats with our cats, sleeps in one of the cat baskets outside, plays with our cats, and is utterly snuggly every time one of us approaches. And he's still not moved from the general vicinity of our house.

For lack of a better name, I've taken to calling him Third Cat. Because, well, that's what he is. If he stays much longer, I fear we'll have to accept the inevitable.

Isn't he cute?

So I went for a walk in the snow...

Snowing again, yes. Rather a hell of a lot.

It's started at noon and is still going strong. We have a good 10cm of snow on the ground now, probably more (it's neck-deep for our cats), and will probably have more by tomorrow morning if this keeps up.

It's funny as hell, because our cats, while this isn't the first time they've seen snow, aren't quite sure how to deal with this much of the white stuff. So if they want to go somewhere in the garden, they'll go to the edge of the snow, sniff at it cautiously, set a paw in it, then start jumping - since it's neck-deep for them, and they (obviously) want to touch as little of it as possible, they've adopted this weird run/jump walk. Rather amusing to see, and leaves some very weird tracks in the snow. Hehe.

Plus they still aren't sure what the stuff is, it seems... so, for instance, one of them went under a bush we have in the garden, and started batting at it with a paw - of course, after a few swipes, the bush dumped the whole lot of snow it had on it on the poor cat. At which point the reaction of the cat could be summed up thus:

"Ahhhwhatthehellisthisthingjumprunawaaaaaay"

And of course, half an hour later, the other cat did the exact same thing. :D

Oh, and we had to take out the rubbish, so my brother volunteered (or rather, got volunteered), and went out in the snow with the rubbish bin... barefoot.

To be honest, I wish I could've done that. Going barefoot in the snow is fun, I've tried it a couple times. But I was sick this past week, I don't want or need to be sick another week, thank you so much.

I've taken photos, incidentally, but they look somewhat icky, since they were (necessarily, since it's dark out by now) taken with flash. I'll try and take better ones tomorrow morning, and if I can't manage, I'll upload these.

Illumichat is my newest project - yes, another new IRC network. It's got several of the same staff members Serenity-IRC had, and several of the same channels. And none of the pettiness and power-hunger and abuse that characterized that network these past few months (at least on the staff side).

Change is good, or so they say. And I know this change will be for the better - I've been already much happier these past few days on Illumichat than I've been for months on Serenity-IRC.

But, I suck at letting go of things.

I'll stop crying soon, I promise. At least I know that when I stop, almost all my friends will be there, and we'll have once more a safe home.

irc.illumichat.net #eagle - come find me.

[edit 2005-03-04: a slight clarification.
There was a lot of fighting on Serenity these past few months, which I avoided posting about while it was happening because I knew that, while emotional, I'd point at the people that hurt me and nothing more, while I've been at fault for some of the fighting as well.
After Illumichat split from Serenity, I thought I could post about this and keep it more neutral, especially given that I made this post after I quit - but I guess I expected too much of myself, thinking I could make a fair, coherent post while crying my eyes out. ^^;
I apologize if I've offended anybody with this post - it was not meant to do any finger-pointing or accusations, but merely to state that because the fighting was making it unpleasant for me to keep being there, I decided to quit and move on to start Illumichat, as did several others.
I have no grugde against anybody left on Serenity, and I honestly hope this split turns out for the better and helps heal the friendships there used to be between us all.]