It’s almost dead quiet here, except for the hum of the HEPA filter, which we just found and got online again, and the distant hum of traffic on the 880, which doesn’t look horrible for a Friday evening, but give it another hour. The house is somewhat clean now, and Sarah is going to pick up her sister, who is here from Milwaukee and will spend the next few days with us. I actually have a few minutes to relax and do nothing and sit on the couch in this cavernous new loft and take in the light grey sky from a misty October afternoon.
The weather reminds me of Indiana Octobers and Seattle Octobers (and basically October to Aprils) and why I always liked that season. I don’t care about the turning leaves or apple cider or any of that crap, but there is something about the melancholy and undecided sky that always made me like this part of the year. When I got smart enough to stop going back to Indiana in December, I started taking these preemptive-holiday trips back in October, and always liked walking around the Bloomington campus this time of year. A lot of my best memories of IU involve this period of the calendar, of long walks from the Mitchell house to Lindley Hall with leaves all over Third Street sidewalks, and just enough chill in the air to require a jacket, but not so much that it made walking a chore. It was this time of anticipation, the start of a school year before I torpedoed the whole thing by skipping too many classes, when I was still enthusiastic about getting good grades and doing well, instead of researching the drop/add policy to find some medical loophole and exit without total carnage, because I spent too many late nights trying to publish a zine or trying to hack unix or whatever else stopped me from actually going to school.
I have not been writing at all lately. Things have been busy with work and various house projects, so I can’t even think about it. I need to, need to get back to reading more and try to get the ideas flowing. I theoretically have the time, and this whole ipad thing is supposed to revolutionize my idea collection process, but all it has done so far is revolutionize how I play this stupid risk-type strategy game I found the other day. I did find a good app to read all of my google reader feeds today, so that will hopefully plug me in a bit more there. And this is my first try at actually writing an entire post here without my ‘real’ computer, and it is going okay so far.
The Whirlpool warranty repair guy was here today to fix our stove (it works, but the cooktop is cracked, so they will replace it, but it’s seriously going to take them at least five appointments to do it, because, well just because. Murphy’s law, I guess.). Anyway, the repair guy had this computer that looked like it was seriously from like 1993. It was some kind of ruggedized thing, but it was maybe three inches thick. I thought at first there was no way it was any newer than twenty years old, but then i saw it had a built-in WAN connection of some kind, maybe a 3G card or a radio back to the truck. But it seriously looked about as thick as three regular laptops, maybe something built in Soviet Russia right before the 1991 self-destruct.
I installed a new router, a gigabit thing with 802.11n and the whole deal. I now have a total of four routers, wireless points, and/or switches around the house. All of the ethernet is working, and I think all of the computers are talking to each other, although i am sure there’s some routing disaster waiting to happen.
Just got a call that Sarah is en route, so I need to fire up yelp and find us a place to eat tonight.