This weekend, my brother was in town and offered to help me with some house work. I took almost all of his aid in the form of wallpaper removal. I got some scrapers, a paper tiger, a few spray bottles, and two gallons of vinegar. As things stand now, the third floor is mostly depapered, except for some hard-to-reach areas high above the stairwell. I would say that on average, Steve was about ten times as productive as I was.

We have had no end of trouble managing branches, lately, and for no clear reason. This is how we generally introduce a big change:

The new house is three stories, and gets lots of natural light. Sadly, none of its third story windows is well-placed for stargazing. If one was, I’d have more time to look through my telescope and more inspiration to write silly astronomy code. Maybe when we overhaul the third floor, we’ll put in a window on the slant of the roof. Probably not.

Today, I got an instant message from Gloria saying, “Guess where I am!” She was at home, but also on the Internet. It’s pretty amazing what technology can do these days.

My Covad install date for DSL is tomorrow. I believe that at that point, I will really have a connection that I can use. It won’t be conveniently placed in my home, but I can deal with that myself.

[ Written Oct 3rd ]

Today was moving day! Gloria picked up a truck around 7:00, and once we figured out how to park it (because people had not entirely vacated our ‘no parking’ zone) and had some breakfast, the move was on! We moved the guinea pigs first, so they’d be out of our way. They’re in a currently unoccupied room, so we got to close them in and let them relax. I have no idea if it worked… guinea pigs can be so hard to read!

Recently, I’ve been re-reading some of the Rifts sourcebooks. Partly it’s just for nostalgic reasons: I only ever played the Palladium games long, long ago, maybe in middle school. It’s also to look at some of the more interesting ideas that Rifts had to offer. This can be challenging, since so much of Rifts is just serious twink-fodder. It reminds me of a lot of long-running comics: the authors have to keep struggling to make their characters even cooler than they were last year, so you end up with Cyclops sinking every ball on a pool table with one blast to the cue, Superman turning back time, and Batman beating God at hide and seek.

Well, there are two ways to look at it. On one hand, I have about a thousand more dollars in my bank account now than I did yesterday. On the other hand, I am in well over a hundred thousand dollars in debt, now.

I have been putting off writing anything down here because I want to wait for some things to be finalized before I talk about all the big stuff that’s been keeping me so busy and stressed out, but I thought I’d jot a few things down. If I don’t, I never will, and anyway this is a little sign of life.