Journal of a Sabbatical

June 27, 2000

parallel port

Today's Reading: Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, The Herring Gull's World by Niko Tinbergen

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Pete Schourek

I spent about half this morning's therapy session on the misadventures of Buddy Brigham. I wasn't taking the whole thing so damn personally until Friday when Mrs. L's fake niece woke me out of a sound sleep (granted normal people are awake at 9:00 AM but I've been sleeping in lately) to tell me she never agreed to adopt Buddy and she's not in Florida until Sunday she's leaving for for Florida on Sunday and on an on until she got into a long diatribe on how I took Buddy at the worst possible time in the worst possible way. Also, she's not Mrs. L.'s niece. Anyway, after all this I somehow managed in my best persuasive wheedling voice to convince her that Buddy would languish in the shelter because he's so old and really she's his only chance and so on. But even after I got off the phone with her, I felt miserable about myself and filled with regret like I never should have tried to place Buddy there in first place and so on and so on. Well, this is what therapy is for, so the time I didn't devote to the usual insanity from my family of origin got devoted to my role in the Buddy debacle. This didn't leave much time for my "and furthermore I suck as a computer consultant" or "why on earth I am going to China?" insanities.

After lunch with Hussein in which we discussed whether the people who built the Great Wall of China were physically stronger than we are, where on earth are Dan and Geri these days, and what's up with this heat.... I drove up to the competent CompUSA and bought the damn parallel CD-RW, which although such a device does not exist they've sold 12 of since last week. I told the guy the polite version of what happened at the Framingham store. He was amazed by that, not because the kid was rude and unknowledgeable, but because, as he pointed out to me, the one connection almost all PCs have is the parallel printer port. If a parallel CD-RW didn't exist, we'd have to invent one.

On the way home, the heavens opened up. Thunder, lightning, parallel rain - ever seen it rain sideways , it's really impressive. The power went off at my house. I got sick - nothing to do with the power or CompUSA possibly bad food or heat stress. I lay my body down on the bed and the next thing I know it's almost 5:00 PM. Yikes! Must have needed the sleep.

The thunderstorms came and went and I finally felt comfortable turning the computer back on. Then good news is I finally got MacOS 8.1 to install correctly and I can now use Real Player to listen to the Red Sox radio broadcast. The bad news is that whatever I did brought back a problem with Eudora that I had solved before by using Conflict Catcher. I wish I'd written down what the conflict was, because I can't run Conflict Catcher now that I have 8.1. Boy, I just can't wait until I go to MacOS 9.