Journal of a Sabbatical

January 13, 2001

web potato vs. the monolith

Today's Reading: Gulls: A Social History by Frank Graham, Jr.

A salmon pink sunset painted the sky as far as the eye could see. We have great sunsets here. It's all that particulate matter from the incinerator. As darkness fell I observed the children who use my front door as a soccer goal pushing against the snow monolith with all their might. They grunt and groan and exclaim something unintelligible but the monolith is apparently frozen to the ground quite solidly. Alas I cannot get a photo because the outside light just burned out. Just imagine two middle sized children in the previous photo of said monolith. This is the most exciting thing that's happened here all day.

Some combination of malaise, agoraphobia, neighbor-a-phobia, and just plain laziness kept me indoors all day. I alternated reading Gulls: A Social History with heavy web-browsing aimed specifically at updating my Plum Island page. the PI page now features way more links, which are now organized into categories. And I didn't even include all the links having to do with the giant squid. I thought a couple of links under Squid, Giant would be enough. But I've got your fishing charter listings, your vacation photos, your newage mystical essays, and even a travelog by a Lovecraft fan. I didn't know Plum Island was in Lovecraft's universe. Acutally I've never read any Lovecraft because I could never pronounce the names. But hey, if somebody visited Plum Island just because he mentioned it that goes on the list.

When I wasn't looking for Plum Island references, I caught up on reading online journals. I was thrilled to see that Willa has achieved my dearest wish - to become a toon! I'll have to set up a blog worthy of being Weblogémonized. Meanwhile, one thing led to another as they tend to do on unstructured web-surfing excursions and I found out I could make a stortrooper of myself. But then I tried it and Netscape exited unexpectedly with an error of type 2. I tried it again with the same result. So I guess that's not my path to becoming a toon either.