December 31, 2011
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Yeah! Back to my (virtual) pen!
Whoa– long time, no see.
Computer (desktop at home) gave up its ghost in November sometime. It was a crappy week — the car started making a weird noise (kinda got that fixed), the washer made a horrific racket (got that fixed but now it has a new melody of mechanical dysfunction), our WiFi went nuts (bought a new cable modem; not sure if that was the problem, but it’s definitely fixed now), and the desktop’s hard drive died.
Actually, I don’t think the hard drive is damaged; I think there was some kind of short in the computer itself, which was rampaging about, knocking off certain vital elements. One day the data hard drive was gone (we had a C: and D: drive setup with most of our files on D:); the next time I started the desktop, its networking card was gone but the D: drive was back. I took it apart and blew out about a pound of dust bunnies, and things smelled a bit…. hot. So perhaps we had a cooling fan failure. I dunno. *shrugs* I had backed up about 95% of our valuable files in September (the weekly backups stopped working for a reason I could never figure out) and I don’t think we lost anything at all. In fact, we gained a Mac mini and a new monitor (to replace the Jurassic CRT monitor which had perched on our computer desk since 1999).
All that to say — it’s good to be back.
The iPad is awesome (really), but it’s not a device that I want to use for long stretches of typing for the sake of my wrists. Now when Coart is gone to UGA for those long weeknight classes, I’ll have some means to actually interact with the world. 
Looks like 2012 will start off with a burst of activity. I was offered a position playing second keyboard (is that better or worse than second fiddle? lol) for a friend’s musical at Project Challenge Playhouse. I don’t know anything about the musical (need to fix that), but Jamie is a fun fellow and strikes me as a talented theater teacher, so I’m expecting a good experience. Will chuck that paycheck into the Europe fund, for I still have my fingers crossed that the Spain/Italy 2012 trip will come to pass.
So as the new year gets rolling, I have some stuff on my mind that I’d like to unpack with words. Immigration, libertarianism, the biblical ethics of political positions — they’re all on the back burner.
Happy New Year!
I figure the Mayans just got tired of listing dates on their calendar wheel and stopped with 2012. “Oh, screw it,” they said. “Surely by 2012 somebody will have worked out a better calendar system!” lol
