Welcome to Frankentosh.

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I’m in the process of harvesting files from my old Mac, in preparation for getting rid of it. I’m having to use floppies to transfer anything I want to keep, so that’s forcing me to be pretty selective. It’s just as well, I have no reasons beyond sentiment to keep anything.

However, I am definitely keeping all the old letters to friends, and the homemade graphics, and even some college papers and other writings. I haven’t looked at a lot of this in a very long time, and I am glad to have the chance to see it now.

This’ll be the first time since 1984 that I haven’t owned some sort of Apple computer. I’m not quite nostalgic enough to keep this one around, though. It’s a Performa, which was bad enough when it worked. The modem and ethernet card are both dead, and for years it hasn’t displayed any red in its colors.

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I’m moving to North Carolina at the end of the month! I’m very excited. I feel underprepared for the move, given how little time is left and how it seems to sprint away from me. I’m going to have to get rid of a bunch of stuff, hopefully enough that packing won’t take me that long. I’ve already gone through some of it, and I’m amazed at how much I could still eliminate. I thought I had done a better job of streamlining my possessions when I switched apartments last year.

For sale: one crane, gently used

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You are on the landing of a stairwell. Stairs lead down to the first floor, and up to the second floor. To the north, a glass door leads outside.

There is a row of mailboxes here.

>OPEN MAILBOX 24
(with the mailbox key)
Opening the mailbox reveals about ten pounds of the usual junk mail.

>EXAMINE THE MAIL
(taking the mail first)
You pry the pile of mail out of the mailbox.

Stuck between a catalog and a credit card offer, you see a small postcard addressed in your own handwriting.

>READ THE POSTCARD
The postcard says:

“Supreme Court: County of New York
D. B. G. Hurst vs. M. L. Garrison
A certified copy of the judgment of divorce ($8.00 per certified copy) may be obtained in room 141B at the certification desk, after receipt of this postcard.”

[Your score has just gone up by five points.]

>WOO HOO
I only understood you as far as wanting to woo.

Hmm, I guess I could have been updating after all.

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All right, time for an update, even though the things I desperately want to be able to report still have not happened, including my much-delayed divorce judgment finally coming through, and the ensuing celebration.

So what has been going on for the past month?

  1. Insane amounts of snow. I enjoy snow each year for about five minutes. This snow has been around for, let’s see, about three weeks now.

    Actually, all that’s left now is sooty remnants of formerly huge plowed-up mounds. I really shouldn’t complain, my friends in Ottawa have it much worse. But surely they handle it better up there, just because it’s more routine. Here’s an example of novice snow handling.

    My apartment complex overlooked the actual parking spaces when they “cleared” the parking lot. So everyone had to dig out their cars, and where did they put the snow? In the spaces other cars had left behind. So before long, many of the parking spaces have four feet or more of snow in them. Night falls, everyone returns, and somehow there aren’t enough cleared spaces to hold all the cars that were in there when the snow first fell.

  2. My grandmother’s 75th birthday party, which I didn’t get to go to and therefore moped about for a while. It was in my hometown, I would have had to fly to get there. I wish I could have. Grandma is the standard for kindness by which I measure everyone, and is definitely one of my most positive influences. She loves me a lot, and all through my life I’ve never had to doubt that for a second, which has helped me get through times of serious self-doubt.

  3. A new appreciation for my job. Or, to be more precise, it’s an appreciation for my career in general as a technical writer; my current employment situation has little to do with this. In fact, it has more to do with my dissatisfaction.

    My friend and fellow tech writer Ashley, whom I worked with in New York, recently started at a new job and has been asking my advice on lots of things. It’s made me realize that I really don’t feel appreciated by my current colleagues, and I miss that a lot. I’ve really felt helpful lately, and it feels good.

    I also miss feeling like I was doing important work. My old boss was really great at making it feel like a mission. I’ve gotten into some heavy WebWorks Publisher customization work, and it’s been interesting enough that I enjoy working on it. I’ve made some enhancements that other writers would find useful, and I posted them to the user group on Yahoo. This has come closer to the sense of importance that my work used to have, so I’m glad for that.

    Anyway, sometimes I consider switching into programming, but I really do enjoy tech writing. I’ve just had job blues for the past couple of years.

  4. An excellent TMBG show in DC. Already seems like ages ago.