But Miff Dwifcoll, My Muvvah Just Died

Look, I just filed my tax return and I'm basically not getting any frickin' money back. In fact, if I hadn't given money to charity and itemized deductions this year, I'd owe money to the government. Am I member of that exploited "middle" class that get so much Air America-airplay? Jesus.

I was pruning the lemon tree a few days ago, and do you know what? Lemon tree sap smells like lemons!

Ugh, feces explosion. I didn't sleep well at all last night and was groggy and confused all day as a result.

Mer and I went to the best restaurant on Saturday night -- it's on 5th Ave. between 6th and 7th, and carries the rather unfortunate name Coco Roco. It's Peruvian food, which seems to be like, really tasty, fruity Mexican food with much, much more fish and seafood. We had (what I think were) deep-fried mashed potatoes filled with pico de gallo and a little shredded beef and then I had some bass and some very good paella-like thing; Mer had sweet-potato crusted snapper and plantains. $12-13 for an entree -- a steal considering how good the food is.

We rented a couple of movies, too: The Fisher King, which is, I'm sorry to say, a ponderous mess (although it was cool to see those shots of my old high school that they took while I was attending; they added this whole extra stone arch-way / entrance thing that totally isn't there in real life); and Tape, which was also a ponderous mess, though I should say Mer watched a lot of it without me.

Shadow Hearts continues to be retarded: The game referred, the last time I was playing it, to a series of "grizzly murders."

Further adventures in the search for a good portal system -- I don't think what I'm asking for is totally outside the realm of reasonability, but the fates seem to be allied against me on this one. Here's what I want:

• The ability to manage / publish / organize discrete documents, such as papers, photo essays, etc.
• The ability to do the same for web-logs hosted on the portal site itself
• A calendar that I could use to remember events like birthdays and things would be nice

...but the most important thing is

• Being able to import individual news items from external RSS feeds and seamlessly mingle them with content published locally

And nobody seems to be able to do that! If a package allows importing RSS feeds at all, it's always in a block of headlines kept separate from everything else. Like I think I said earlier, this package called Drupal *almost* lets me do what I want, but it requires a plugin that's no longer supported by its author. Then, today, I found what seemed to be the perfect package, something called ezPublish -- it would have been perfect, except that for some goddamn reason it requires 12 megs of RAM at runtime; the default configuration for PHP (which is in effect at our ISP) caps memory usage at 8 megs (for good reason). WTF?! Here's the thing, though -- I figured out how to override the ISP's default, but after reading our ISP's Terms of Service, it sounded like doing so might be pushing it (and the account is in M-Biddy's name), so I didn't do it. Fuck.