More great joy! Toshi is joining the Sloan household - Toshi the sleek, slim black cyberpunk-looking laptop featuring just about anything a laptop could ever want. She's got a USB port. But she's got more. I think she can communicate with just about any electronic device that currently exists, she even has a network card to get along with Ema and Sonata, so they're going to cluster like the Three Graces dancing together and swap files a lot. A whole lot. She even has a dingus that could let me get online by way of a cell phone if I wanted to pay the charges (or use up a lot of free minutes on an offer that I cancel, that kind of freebie does exist and might be a good thing for emergencies).

The Compaq we looked at mysteriously did not show up on the site we clicked on to look - another case of "didn't up date the Pricewatch ad" and while they had other comparable ones (none with USB ports mentioned) they couldn't be reached by phone at all. One look at the list and the laptop priced just a bit less than the Compaq - actually a substantial Less - was a great looking Toshiba. Click on its site. There it is. They have nine of them. The price is as listed on Pricewatch, order online - and there clicking on details was the USB port that made the Compaq a bit special. Along with sundry and numerous other ports and connectors. Toshi even has an infrared port and if she meets another of her kind can wink across the room and swap data without any cords. Or with a cord, output to a big monitor or take a spare keyboard or mouse or pretty much anything including a docking bay.

And she's beautiful. I had looks down on the bottom of my list, all of my practical and impractical reasons for a laptop centered on emergency and health reasons and features. But some years ago they started making some, not all laptops with black or graphite cases instead of Utilitarian Putty or Glaring White, as all but a handful of desktops are - you can get candy colored Macs with transparent cases that show the works or semi candy colored like red and white, but the black desktop of doom is a great rarity.

Keep in mind that I have blogged before on the subject of Gothic Interior Decorating, something that I'm pretty good at with a strongly Medieval Eclectic slant. Gothic Martha Stewart shows some of the types of things I tend to do to the places I live. I like to make everything in my personal possession rich and visually powerful. I go for gypsy grandeur. The more important something is to me, the more likely I am to eventually apply some crafts or some art to it and fall back to a fine old human trait: show its importance with ornamentation.

Now with my life what it is, I literally spend a lot more time at home than most people. Keeping it simple is important for someone who goes out a lot - but even there, the difference between something that's got a pattern and something that doesn't is just a matter of taste. My favorite color scheme can be summed up in a stained glass window - rich deep or bright hues against black and black outlines. I tend to wear black, or the same bright or jewel tones in medieval garments. I'm self employed, so I can surround myself with my favorite things and do NOT need to even out my life into carefully inoffensive beige.

If anything, beige is very offensive to me. It tends to remind me of the kinds of offices where petty office politics cause grinding daily abuse, power trips abound and people conform - lying through their teeth and dragging themselves through resentful misery. Bit like Dilbert. Dilbert sums up the beige thing. Even if Sheila says the universe is beige, I'm pretty sure the other colors are right in front of my eyes.

So the neat black laptop is a tiny little detail of it that warms my heart as an extra. I had already decided that this time I was fed up with Putty as a color scheme for computers, and made plans to pick up two or three rolls of Contact paper - black, maybe a couple of brilliant colors like red or blue and gold metallic. Then cover the external surfaces of all my equipment with a day's puttering with an Exacto knife set doing faux inlay. For years I'd toyed with doing that with acrylic paint. I've seen some good examples of painted furniture in vivid colors and intricate patterns from assorted artists and musicians, and thought that would give the "creative artistic profession" look to my equipment.

Then I remembered what the Baroness down in Axemoor did with her big liter-sized travel cup coffee mug. Those are as non medieval as it gets. They usually have a gas station imprint or something like that, or come in various colors of plastic - but they are so functional and SCA people have a tendency to hang out spending long hours outdoors doing fun creative stuff. She just got three shades of woodgrain Contact and covered it, cutting out shapes as if doing inlay work on furniture or cabinetry, but with far less fuss. Bordered it with light diamond shapes and put a winding vine with leaves design occuping most of the middle against a darker tone of woodgrain. It looked gorgeous - and while it still didn't look medieval, it looked as if a medieval craftsman got hold of some plastic and the idea. Culturally it was a lot closer to the SCA than to K Mart or Exxon.

My apartment or wherever I live isn't period. But it has that flavor and I think I will try the Contact paper project for it. Easier to spend just one day and a lot less mess decorating it - and I might do something similar to the desk eventually. At the moment every stick of furniture I own is black except the desk. I can either keep the desk as the Odd Object or spend a little while making it blend with the rest... haven't totally decided since the gunmetal and green is antique too.

And in just days, probably around the middle of the week, I will be geeking in splendid comfort with my bad leg propped on half a dozen pillows while Sonata merrily downloads goodies.

Robert and Ari >^..^< (Food. Food would be nice around this time of night...)

Got a lot done... and even some writing. 1,182 words, Deathchance is, I think, dark fantasy. Fun little story. I enjoyed doing it in the late night Word War over at Forward Motion after much merry confusion looking at the new site - moving is taking a lot of troubleshooting and the Geek Heroes are even writing new software!

And came to a good decision about the housekeeping help thing, making a vital connection and getting authorized to pay a local friend who's actually very good at housekeeping stuff - and knows me and knows what's important because she's another writer and beyond that won't rearrange stuff out of my reach since she's even shorter than I am - which is a whole lot better than playing trial and error with a service. After that, a reasonably good appointment with my therapist, who is trying to wrap her mind around the idea that my being a writer is a good thing. She's a little dubious about its restorative effects if I'm down or frustrated. I think she's used to people whose obsessions don't generally lead to the possibility of making real money at a good self employed job?

Then home to play on the boards, post a lot, get into a keystroke war as part of Team Forward Motion where we're finding out if dedicated writers out-type Dutch Power Cows - Project Dolphin is where to see what that's all about. It's sort of neat. Dutch Power Cows is the leading team, they have over 400 people signed up and the total daily keystrokes of ALL of them add to their whopping total. Team Forward Motion is significantly smaller but comprised of serious heavyweights. About half an hour into it, I realized this wasn't just word count. It included posts, chat, blogging, blathering, oh, er, well, just about everything I do and why I really need a wristpad. The little Pulse program you have to install for a tracker is very easy to install and did not choke memory or do anything nasty to Ema. It's on Ema since Ema has the faster modem.

After phone bill this month, Sonata gets her own faster modem to catch up with Ema, so taht I can spend more time swapping off between them and mailing files to my cat on Yahoo so that he can download the attachments onto Sonata and get the goodies from one to the other. File backups - it's a major project.I am very tempted to give just a little premeditation to the massive project - and design the directory tree before just stuffing it in the same haphazard order all my files are sitting in My Documents on Ema.

Sonata has a My Documents too, over in the Windows partition. This is easy to get at from the Linux partition, it's just a path and it's not even that long a path as long as I remember to put "My Documents" in quotes in typing it in. But my successive awkward folder adding and folder labeling have resulted in - a messy filing system where I can't tell how many stories I've got or what genre they are or when I did them or what version of them is what. The mess of a filing system for images, bitmap backgrounds and graphics is worse. I need to work something out on paper and then start putting the files into the sensible new places rithg off - keeping in mind that on Sonata I actually have to remember paths and so they should be short and memorable.

I was right too. I do multitask with the two keyboards side by side and will probably get a lot done that way! But I definitely need to think about scrounging another wrist pad or finding one cheap - sliding it is a little annoying... hehehe...

Robert and Ari >^..^< (Purr! Waves little paw at everyone!)

More cool Linux install stuff... Sonata has now got the right number for my Earthlink connection in there and set up and everything. Mozilla works. And so does the "select theme" and "select background" function. She looks a lot nicer, having been customized a bit.

Emergency Systems Functional - Mozilla will reach my favorite chat. Linux runs good, albeit slowly - and another round of installs later, we will go romping through the freebie websites to grab RoughDraft and download it to run on WINE. That's most of what I did all day, and much easier on my back than cleaning up would've been or going out for anything.

And I redid my theme and background, discovering happily that I could use a gradient. I like gradients. They're one of the coolest things in computer art to me, a bit like a wash in watercolor. I'd love to fool around with art that uses them too and maybe I will now that I've got Gimp. This could be fun...

Robert and Ari >^..^< (You didn't tell me all those people we chat with were real!)

I Love Linux Episode I...

Three hours of tortuous chat in which my geek-enabled friends helped me get Sonata Lynx set up and running, including troubleshooting how to get the screen on teh monitor to show anything, led to my first great achievement last night. I created a user account on my Linux system. I have God mode and Man mode, and Man can do about 99% of what I really WANT to do on her. God-mode or "root" is the account to use when I have at least one Ubergeek in chat on the other system, something's going deadly wrong and we're trial and error troubleshooting. Move not, lest you touch the Red Button. Put the cat in the bathroom. He might kill the system with a pawstroke.

At first sight, sonata presented me with a command prompt the equivalent of a DOS command prompt but not the same thing... and asked me for my password. We spent at least an hour of that time playing "what's my password?" when I didn't have one made yet. Major stumper. Shows you what a Dummy I am when I come to these things cold. Reminded me much of DOS and Dstar and my New Orleans days as a Sysop... but we got through it! No, I am not posting my password here.

The physical setup was interesting in itself. It took two days to get my desk cleared of everything but the computer and printer, then move everything around enough to make room for a second computer. Final physical configuration - monitors side by side in the center flanked by towers with a fuzzy cat tail protruding between them, keyboards in front of the monitors, wrist pad floating in front of the keyboards depending on which one I'm using. Typing tray on the right has phone, mousepad turned sideways and two mice, immediately in front of Ema's tower is the brass gooseneck lamp, the box of index cards and stack of sticky notes clustered with a coffeecup full of pens and my signature paperweights. I don't usually use them as paperweights, they're contemplation objects and photography subjects. My office is almost totally paperless. That's "maniacal frugality" and saving printouts for submissions.

Left side, the postal scale, large speakers and the printer are tucked up beside Sonata's tower. Printer had to turn sideways to drop pages on top of the art chest. A side table will help in the next apartment, but as long as I can walk around the desk that makes the printer usable if not convenient.

Last evening after much slow getting up, going through box, remove a couple of things, sit and rest and do it again passes, I got Sonata's tower levered out of her box. She was well packed in her original box and I've got an entire book of CDs for her dual boot system - original Win95 disks and Encarta and Comptons Encyclopedias, plus a Nature Encyclopedia (COOL!!!) and the Linux disks. Way cool! She's so beautiful! She has everything... and everything works!

I was a little shocked to find out she only had 229mb of space left on her hard drive. But today's foray into Mysteries of the OS with Dstar, a known Master of Unix, led me to great joy. She was set up with about 1.4GB of empty space over on the other side of the partition, which I can access from the Linux side by knowing the path. Joy and great joy! I think the idea there is that while she's got two personalities, Linux is more of a core personality with better access to the other one's files. Dstar assured me that Linux software will not take nearly as much space as stuff for Windows and there's no real need to move the partition. Whew!

My hat's off to the folks at Red Hat and the couple who set up sonata's configuration. The software that was top of my list to download was already there! Today's explorations opened up Gnome, er, GNU, the thing that makes it look and operate like a regular Mac or Windows machine with a windowing system. Then to my complete and total delight, I found GIMP -- there is a graphics program in there that can do some of the things I've been screaming to find a program for, for years. Like doing gradients. I like gradients in the backgrounds of graphics. They're one of the cooler things to do to a picture. Windows Paint doesn't do them and I didn't have graphics software at all.

I thought I'd have to download Mozilla to have a browser that works on Linux. Mozilla was already there. Whew! Emacs is on there, a text editor - if Ema went down tonight I would still have a text editor and means to download RoughDraft... and great joy, wine is already there. That's the windows emulator that will let me run RoughDraft and things not designed to run directly on Linux.

It's now in a form where it makes sense. It's beautiful. I will be logging off later on and log on again using Sonata in order to grab RoughDraft and OpenOffice and Arachnophilia and do those setups. I feel so empowered. I feel like writing up a good article for SelfHelp... and hope that some people read that article who are in the kind of circumstance I came out of with the shelter.

This is every bit as good as Windows and runs better.

That something costs money and is commercially sold isn't always a measure of how good it is. The amount of good stuff sitting on this computer free for asking and learning how to use it boggles me. The open source people are living out the cyberpunk Robin Hood fantasy and making it real... put it this way, if it was that I didn't have a mobility problem and was just dead broke from having an underpaid job, it would not be impossible to simply scrounge a computer and do this thing. If you know where to go to get it. Sonata Lynx really will do everything I need to do to run my "sole proprietor fantasy author" business.

I don't know that I'm sorry I put it off this long. In New Orleans I spent a lot of time and energy just surviving and spurts of learning new things came along fairly rarely - usually when I either got sick or had enough of a windfall that I could take some time fooling around.

It's been a year since I was at the shelter.

Part of me still wants to shake up the people in it, staff and residents, and let them know there's more than what's visible from those environs. While I was there, I was in a constant struggle with the administration to get them to allow a Lifeline Program discounted phone line in my room - $10 installation and $1 a month bill - or to put one in downstairs for the use of all the residents hooked up to a donated computer that any of the case managers could've had just for a couple of hours cold calling assorted large companies and entities to inquire about the food chain. Companies AND individuals both run into the same thing when buying new computers. If the old one's not completely dead and the replacement was an upgrade, there's a natural feeling that you don't want to just throw away a perfectly good working machine when you know there are people out there who don't even have one.

Sonata also has a lovely little feature Ema didn't - at the base of her tower there's a thermometer giving internal temperature with a list of what's dangerous. I would have noticed Ema's overheating problems a lot sooner if she'd had that.

I will learn, and I will pass it on. I know at some point after I've gotten things together a little more solidly, I will go back there. Odds are they won't all be the same people. Gods, I hope not. I really hope that when I doget to where I've got the Bug and I'm rolling and going over to help out instead of trapped there, it's all new faces and I can reach the ones who are there then and give the ones capable of it a way out... the thing is, your basic geek doesn't stay in the shelter system that long and it would take extraordinary bad luck to throw him in there in the first place!

Best thing I can do is what I did while I lived there. Do a class once in a while, on something practical enough people could use it to bootstrap their way out. Buy crafts once I start my circuit and try to get stuff organized like I was trying to do while I was trying to get out.

A little backstory. Packed away with things that won't work till I have an apartment with reception is the Howard Paxton Memorial TV Set. Howard Paxton, deceased, was a resident at the shelter while I was there. He was a big warm man with a heart too big to live - literally and metaphorically, he had heart trouble. It didn't come from lack of kindness or lack of generosity, he was like the Grinch in reverse. His room was full of old televisions and he just found out I didn't have one. He found a little 13" black and white set, fixed it, put an antenna on it and gave me several screwdrivers and a pliers when he found out I didn't have any tools - we were just talking and I rambled that I missed my toolkit. He gave me his spares. He died six months later. He had given working scrounged fixed TV sets to at least three dozen people at the shelter - and I can't look at that without thinking of what a good man he was. He didn't give up - not on people, not on life, not on anything. He couldn't work, he found something real to do with his hands and didn't ask anything for his work. He got a lot of thank you's. He made a lot of people's lives more comfortable with what he was doing. I looked up to him in a big way and he's not forgotten. I miss him.

I don't know how to fix TV's but when I've got a vehicle, I might occasionally be able to scrounge a bit more hardware and just find someone who needs it - who doesn't already know someone. It's a slightly long term goal because I do have to master Linux myself and get a lot more familiar with the experimentation - but I'm making a good start and knowing where to look is a really good start.

LOL - the screen saver's even fun. It's off The Shining and it's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." over and over. I loved the book, I loved the movie and well, it's a cool screen saver.

I am having a good day. Off to do my article. >^..^<

Robert and Ari >^..^< (It's hot today! Think I'll sleep under the desk instead of on top of the new monitor. He got a good new monitor that makes a better cat bed, but that's the cold weather cat bed. Hot weather under the desk is a better den.)

I had to put this up, it was amusing.

I Am A: True Neutral Elf Mage Bard


Alignment:
True Neutral characters are very rare. They believe that balance is the most important thing, and will not side with any other force. They will do whatever is necessary to preserve that balance, even if it means switching allegiances suddenly.


Race:
Elves are the eldest of all races, although they are generally a bit smaller than humans. They are generally well-cultured, artistic, easy-going, and because of their long lives, unconcerned with day-to-day activities that other races frequently concern themselves with. Elves are, effectively, immortal, although they can be killed. After a thousand years or so, they simply pass on to the next plane of existance.


Primary Class:
Mages harness the magical energies for their own use. Spells, spell books, and long hours in the library are their loves. While often not physically strong, their mental talents can make up for this.


Secondary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.


Deity:
Azuth is the Lawful Neutral god of wizards and mages. He is also known as the High One, and is the Patron of Wizards. His followers believe that a systematic approach to magic is the best, and they strive for calm and caution in order to avoid accidents. They wear shimmering robes, and are well-versed in magic, as well as typical priest spells. Azuth's symbol is a hand with a raised, glowing index finger.


Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy ofNeppyMan (e-mail)




Basically, the most amusing thing about it is that I have never played one of those. I generally go Chaotic Good if I play D&D at all and will yes, often do a mage or an elf character. Sometimes a halfbreed. Once, a revolutionary orc. My characters tend to be as passionate in D&D and as strongly aligned as they are when I write novels.

But I haven't, ever, done a True Neutral character - or taken the idea of Neutral in that direction. It's intriguing. The next time friends go twisting my arm to play some version of D&D, I think I'll build this guy and see what happens. Looks like it could be fun.

Robert and Ari >^..^< (And if we play D&D then I get the cat character. Also the Feline Intervention Rule had better apply - if I swat the dice, my roll stands. Purr)

Holiday Cheer - happy Memorial Day to everyone out there...

Planning the summer ahead, it's starting to make sense. I'm already taking or auditing the Breakout Novel Course and that's a time commitment that puts me on a school-like schedule. Why not make another commitment to learn HTML seriously while I'm at it? Set that as a reasonable goal using books, tutorials, freeware and anything else I can lay my hands on.

Hanging in Crash Chat, I cruised the site for another author with a self published Print On Demand book and found it - well - a whole lot more topical, focused and organized than All My Websites even if they do all crosslink. Now maybe going off on all those tangents is cool - once I have a book related or series related site in the link and when I've got more volumes in print in unrelated universes, put links to the series sites on the Index page so that a reader who knows my name and say, likes Quest or likes Piarra or likes Nomads can skim or skip the other stuff, go directly to cool stuff in their favorite and hang out there looking at new art and reading neat snippets and stories set in its universe.

I've had ambitious plans for a long time and I did a spurt of webwork on the New Index listed in the sidebar here. It's time to push that to another level - including an art gallery where you click on thumbnails and go to pages that consist mostly of full size scanned artwork.

The more the pain goes down, the more my optimism returns. I know what happened. I know how I did this to myself. It really is just a matter of time. Someone brought up something else too - the way I knocked myself out on the Dares and stressed on them. It's okay to take it a little easy after a massive effort like that, especially while warming up to another.

But during Breakout Novel Course, I will not have time to immerse on a different book project and bang it out at my usual marathon speed. If anything, I made it through those six Dares on strategy and time management - and put off a ton of things that also need to be done. A good Raven Dance website will pick up sales on the one book I do have in print. A good Launchpad site will do a lot to give that anthology a good sendoff.

I will actually have time to set up all that and make it easier to maintain. I need to do it anyway because I need to move SelfHelp to a new server by late July. Knowing HTML would help immensely with that.

Massive Thank You! Some friends got together online and started a fund during the last, worst crash to buy me a decent system. They organized it completely behind my back, there was a short thread that cut off when it went to email - and they did it. The fund topped over what would cover a good used laptop - and that is insurance like nothing else. That's being able to work on the really bad days and recover faster when it's my body that crashes, not my computer. That's knowing that if the worst happened, I wouldn't be offline. Or the best.

I've had laptops twice before, one of them didn't have a battery. They are sturdy. They're harder to upgrade than desktops, but they're designed to be hauled around by people who travel a lot, go out constantly and are as careless as normal people with dropping things. This is overdesign if the most common use of my laptop is to keep writing on battery during thunderstorms or to cross the room and plop in the easy chair on bad back days. It means I'm not down and out or out of communication entirely no matter what goes on - and those are the times I'm more likely to use it. It's also insurance against major disaster. I have no apartment insurance. That's a joke for someone living on Welfare waiting for Social Security - if there were a fire or something I'd be lucky to save the cat and I would be reduced to what most homeless people have. I've done what I could about it by archiving all my short stories with one friend and all my novels with another in case that happens - but if I didn't have a computer I wouldn't be able to reach the archives.

With a laptop if there's a fire or even a fire drill, that backpack which sits by my bed gets grabbed while I'm moving. That means a life's work is not just archived but immediately handy, that means my job doesn't go down if everything else does. It was way off in the distance floating around the region of "if or just before I get a car" as a necessity... and my friends pulled it together. All I can do is pay it forward.

The last laptop I had was a 386 that I bought used from Dstar for $200 - he said it was a junker but it should last about six months and give me time to save up for a better computer. It lasted five years through five books even though it had a missing battery and by the end was literally falling apart. Keys skipped and got stuck. The screen frame came off and it still ran. I drove that into the ground and I laugh about it now - but I had it on me when I first went into the homeless shelter and that kept me sane. I missed that poor old thing since it died. I still have its remains in a nice backpack that I'll be taking out and using again soon! And packing up the way I did before - but not with the ONLY copies of the backups.

I've lived under a massive cloud of fear since the day I went into that shelter. That was the pit. That was the low point of my adult life, and it is so hard for anyone to climb out of that pit. All I feel about my friends is a vast gratitude that they care and they're my friends, a determination to pay it forward and a wild sweet joy that I'm living in the real world where people care and are real and good and generous. That is more real than the artificial shelter situation. That is what life was like before the shelter, and I can remember a few times I threw my door open to whomever or gave away art materials to artists starting out when I upgraded them, it's not the kind of thing that either Welfare or some of the shelter staff or some of the charities do to people in need. The shame that I had when I went into Welfare didn't have to be that way - and I don't feel that about Social Security because their attitude is, like my friends, that they'd rather see me on my feet than not.

There is a world of difference.

I've been trying to understand that difference ever since anyone helped me while online. What I feel right now is real gratitude, vast relief and a wild energy about making plans that will keep me moving forward on the hard path that's just as hard for any writer as any other writer.

It would take a long rant to go into the differences. Nutshell: no one online finds it unbelievable that I'll make a living from it someday and kick my poverty in the teeth doing a good job at something I can do despite my disabilities. My friends - and somewhat the hospital program and Social Security - do not doubt that I want to work and make a good living. That I'm taking trouble as just that, trouble, something that could fall into anyone's life and trudging my way out of it. Welfare and some of the charities (NOT all of them) and some of the shelter staff (NOT all of them) took an opposite view assuming that I was a deadbeat cheat who'd much rather steal, sell drugs to support a drug habit, rip off anyone within reach or just lay around watching television all day. Those are common problems of poverty. Some of what creates them is an attitude that poverty is deserved and people wouldn't live that way unless they wanted to. That they should be punished for having fallen into trouble in the first place. There's immense shame surrounding it. There's also a type of one upsmanship that's rooted in fear - because it could happen to anyone and does happen to decent middle class people who were doing a good job and living a reasonable life till the company downsized.

I don't feel all that superior. I just feel lucky that I did have a goal I was crazy enough about to keep from believing in the shelter frame of mind. I knew people in it who did fight their way out doing completely different things. One man, a natural salesman, got hold of a wholesale perfume catalog and sold body products door to door till he had enough for an apartment. That always works for salespeople, but it takes the psychological qualification of "sales personality" - outgoing, tremendous personal confidence and genuine fondness for people. One woman who'd lost her kids in a custody battle was in the shelter for over a year, she attended beauty school and got a job as beautician to try to get her kids back. I'm a writer. I remember all the stories. I remember all the faces and if I wrote a bit like Dickens before, after that I can't help writing like a Dickens because the Dickens stuff was written from life.

I'm out of it and the best thing I can do for anyone who's in it is to stay out of it. To keep moving forward and then never turn into a nasty landlord. I can do what's in my reach. I can always do what's in my reach.

I didn't have to sell my quilt this time. I still have the Homeless Quilt - and whenever I look at it, I remember the weekend I did the Quilt Workshop, the one it was a demo for. About half a dozen other homeless people had something real and finished the project. Some of them were elderly - two elderly women, one with cancer and the other married to an old man with various critical diseases had become best friends. They both finished theirs, and theirs looked nothing like mine. I still remember going up to their rooms to look at their finished projects and how beautiful they were. How the sparkle was there in their eyes and how they talked a mile a minute about quilting and we just hung out talking about crafts. Things like that still haunt me in a good way. I am back in the world and I won't forget - and I won't forget that I'm no different from those other disabled people, not arrogantly assume I could go off and just get a job at McDonald's either. My life is good. I'm building a darn good life here. And I feel so close to my friends.

I feel like nothing's impossible and though it's slow and gradual, the world is quietly getting better in a million little ways too.

Robert and Ari >^..^<

Not quite a day off...

But it still was from writing. Managed some rest. Managed quite a bit of it. Hung out chatting and letting the brain fog slowly dissipate - and picking away at other things. That may have something to do with the minor block against deeply immersing in writing. The other things were beginning to seriously stack up.

I got my desk clean.

Put away a lot of small things including the small television, recognizing that I'm not likely to get one of the mysterious hours when I get reception on one station before moving. Made room on the desk for both computers and moved the new monitor up next to the old one - now figuring out how to place both the tower and the printer on the desktop at the same time will get trippy. It took most of the day. I'd do a little and have to rest for a much longer time, do a little and rest, do a little and rest. It got done that way.

But I haven't had the seized-up leg cramps for a few hours and I haven't had to hold my leg up at a weird angle to get the swelling down for a while either. It will go away. I just have to be patient - and thanks to that last trip on Thursday, I think I might have time to get over it this time. I hope so. I am tired of having it flare up EVERY time that I go out.

That and my overall body aches have gone down to something bearable. It got bad yesterday, bad to the opint of relative incoherence. Today wasn't as foggy. Good progress.

Tomorrow I have a guest coming over - and I'm not going out - but after that I might have the energy to finally open the great lovely package and set up Sonata Lynx. I hope so. I'm excited even if I don't have that much energy and that is very much a physical energy thing.

I needed to recharge. I needed to slow down and take care of myself. I'm slowly managing to get caught up on that and if I'm lucky, two things will happen. It will take a little while to find a good apartment, but I won't have to go out again before we do and it will be a good one on the next try.

Onward! Sometimes I think it takes more willpower to sit and be patient than it would to exercise.

Robert and Ari >^..^< (Definitely. I'm a boingy kitten and running around is fun!)