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.

I often get irritated with things on Amazon. Sometimes, I send an email about my complaints. Usually, I get an automated or otherwise not-very-promising reply. Then, the problem gets fixed after a year or two. The weird thing is that the things that bug me that get fixed never get the kind of fanfare that new features I don’t like get. Those giant video clips kept getting in my way, the animated shaking gold box made me want to smack somebody, and so on.

I really try to buy things locally whenever reasonable. I’m willing to pay a fairly substantial premium to do so, because I like to support my town. That said, Amazon gets a lot of my business. They have a lot of things that it’s hard to get locally, we have no local bookstores that I consistentlylike shopping with, and Amazon Prime makes it feel like there’s never any shipping tax on my orders.