It’s been a year with a lot of small but important changes. Sometimes the most impressive changes are the ones that are easiest to see - new house, loss of job, new pet, kid - but those sort of take care of themselves. They don’t happen all the time. For me, I find that I sort of coast through the big changes and it’s the apparent doldrums in between that get a little tricky. I could ramble about how my kid’s in preschool or recap the car accident I had in the summer, but my kid was in daycare before, and I didn’t get hurt in the accident and ended up with a very similar car afterwards. They make up events on the timeline of the linear version of my life, but they don’t make up real change. (more…)

Since I work at home, I wouldn’t easily get snow days anyway, but I feel cheated sometimes when people around me are off and I’m in my lair hunched over a keyboard and pushing pixels around. My clients are still in New York City, and it’s 60 degrees there right now. Me, I have half a foot of snow on the ground and it’s under 30 degrees, so I feel like I ought to get snow day. Locally schools are closed and people are staying home in some cases; 6 inches of snow is not exactly like armageddon, but it’s a nice excuse to take it easy when that’s what’s going on anyway. I’m not actually having any trouble working (remember being in school and trying to focus when it was snowing outside?), but it would definitely be fun to sneak out and play with my daughter for a couple of hours. (more…)

I offer now my own Dave Barry style contribution to Murphy’s Law; nothing scatological need be implied by the title.

I don’t know what cosmic law of attraction is involved, but as a mostly private person, I’ve found that the best way to abort a lonely fugue right at the onset is a quick trip to a bathroom, wherever I live, whoever I live with, and whatever I’m doing. (more…)

This isn’t about computers, but a computer issue I had today got me thinking. I spent about 6 hours working on a dumb but crippling computer problem; seemed like it should have been minor, but minor or not, it would have stopped me from working come Monday so I needed to fix it. I have a Mac, but I run Windows XP on it, too, using a program called Parallels. It’s pretty cool when it works, and it usually does. But it introduces some new wrinkles, and occasionally I have to work for 6 hours to get things running again. (All things given equal, it’s been easier for me to coax a fussy program like Parallels back to working every once in a while than getting a Windows machine back up once things have gone awry. Virtualization is mostly cool most of the time. Your mileage may vary.) It’s a little sad to spend a Sunday doing stuff like this, but a) I’m kind of sick today, so I was sitting around anyway, b) some of the time I spent was just waiting for the computer, so I played PS2 while I waited, and c) better Sunday than during the week when I have real deadlines.

Anyway, after a bunch of trial and error - mostly error - I found a magic combination of stuff to fix it, and now I’m more or less in the same position I was in at the end of last week. Half of the last day of my tearfully short weekend spent just getting where I used to be. (more…)

I love living in New Mexico, and I love the seasons. Autumn has gently started; we still have mild weather and quiet nights, but the leaves are changing. It’s beautiful. I’ll trick myself into ignoring that it’s what precedes winter - not my favorite time of year - and enjoy what is usually a long and enjoyable autumn. (more…)

I’ve confirmed that a new generation of angst dreams have started. My family’s in them now, but I don’t know why it should change now as they’ve never been in them before. They still don’t cause the angst for the most part, just typical “But that’s not what I want to eat” type stuff. I’ll probably figure out something. (more…)

I’ve been a pretty enthusiastic outdoor cook for the last couple years; I’ve always loved it, but living in New York and New Jersey in apartments limited my opportunities. Not as much as I would have thought, but that’s another story. (more…)

I’m not a nightmare-haver. I’m not an ecstatic flying-with-dolphins dream haver. Most of the time I have dreams, they’re usually angst of some sort. I’ll have a dream where I’m back in college and miss the deadline for dropping classes and have to catch up in some class I never intended to take. Or endless long beurocratic lines somewhere, each of which proves incorrect. Or realizing I have left for a meeting or class, so I’m going to be 10 minutes late no matter what I do. Nothing terrifying, just not pleasant. I even went through a period where I dreamed I was awake all night. I’d wake up exhausted, and it took me a while to catch on. (more…)

It’s been a quiet afternoon, in that my wife and daughter have been out, but it’s been pouring torrents and thundering. We need the rain, so I actually enjoy “monsoon season,” as the locals call it. I had the bright idea that I should block off the back little garden area so the dogs wouldn’t go back there, it becomes a total mud pit with just a little rain and the dogs track it all over the house. I looked out my bedroom window, and sure enough, Sheba and Loki were just walking around eating grass and/or laying in the bog.  (more…)

I was trying to sleep last night, it was a rare windless night, so every little sound in and out of the house set off my tribe of dogs. We have a guest, so that could mean someone in another room flipping a light switch or closing a door. It was garbage night, so it could also mean a neighbor wheeling out their week’s haul for the next morning’s pickup. Or it could be inexplicable whistling noises followed by coyote howls, as the case may be. The heat wasn’t anything that was genuinely stifling, but without the normal breeze to push some of the cooler night air through the house, it was definitely warmer than we were used to and it made it just that much harder to sleep. (more…)