On 2004-12-19, I bought a house. Technically speaking, the house is my house, not "Jessie's and my house," because of the fear that her name on the paperwork would hurt the chances of getting approved financing and the
like. Now she's got a fairly good credit history thanks to our joint accounts and the fact that I seem to have mostly dug myself out of the Black Pit of Debt with only a third of my owings going to unsecured holes. None of that is really relevant, save the fact that we have an actual house-house instead of an apartment or cave-dwelling or other stuff-keeping-place that belongs to a third party.

Our house has a garage. It's kind of a manky, tinky outbuilding, with a broken outhouse, rotting support beams and crumbling shingle-siding. The previous owners had started to put up new vinyl siding, but they'd abandoned
the effort pretty early into the game, with two-thirds of one of four walls finished and the rest ignored. It looked... bad. There really isn't any other way to say it. It was tacky and cheap, and I wasn't happy about it, but I never went back there because I was renting the garage to Aly and Aly didn't care how it looked as long as it gave her a place to work on her Firebird, toke and listen to Howard Stern.

I think she did more of the last two than of the first.

At any rate, the garage for the house has never been up to code since we bought it. The appraiser looked down his nose at this little rundown building, and the borough gave us a lot of grief over it during the purchase process, but ultimately it worked out that the previous owners would agree to finish siding the house within ninety days of the purchase, since they couldn't legally sell the house with the garage in its current condition anyway. Jessie and I both thought at the time that that was an acceptable answer, and we signed off on it when we claimed the keys and the mortgage.

The previous owners contacted me exactly once over the next ninety days after that. Perhaps twice. I remember one call to arrange a time to meet to learn about our new coal furnace, and I know at some point there was a discussion about when the siding on the garage would be finished, with the ex-owner saying he was going to do the work himself and would get to it as soon as the weather was more hospitable, and these conversations may have been on the same call but it's possible they were on two different ones. Even if they were, though, that's still only twice that I ever spoke with the people responsible for bringing my new house into code.

I probably should have done more across the intervening time after that to follow up on this and get them to fix the siding, but shortly after that—or is it those?—call(s), the pipes froze, and then there was the major reconstruction, and then The Bad hit, and by that point my focus was on other things entirely.

So, imagine my surprise when last week, I got a letter from the Borough inspector's office, saying that they'd tolerated my eyesore for quite long enough, thank you very much, and that I had thirty days to fix it, get rid of
it, or get fined. 

Of course, I called them the day after the letter arrived. I did my best to explain to them that it was the previous owners who were legally and financially responsible for the problem, as they could not have legally sold the house to me without an agreement to fix it, and in fact I had that in writing in my sale contract. The city inspector said he sympathized, but he also pointed out that I was the owner of the outbuilding in question, and that it was my responsibility to follow up my own business contracts and enforce them, not theirs. If I thought in thirty days I could cajole, beg, bargain or intimidate the previous owners into fixing the garage like they were supposed to have done by beginning of March 2004, he'd be more than willing to drop the entire matter. Otherwise, he said, it was my problem.

I hate it when other people make sense.

A day or two later, I found a contractor who could take on the job of "dealing with my outbuilding" on such short notice, and he agreed to come out and inspect it to give me a free estimate on either repairing it or hauling it away. He showed up, studied the little ramshackle shack for half an hour, pointed out all the things he thought he'd need to do to it to make it functional again, and gave me a number. 

I twitched and said, "I've got five thousand in the bank, and I'm in no financial shape to go over that; that's my entire safety net." While the statement is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, it's not much of one. I maybe have another five-hundred beyond that but that's getting into the financial Red Zone. Remember the X-Men video game in the arcade, and how when your hit points got low enough you could use your special attack without it hurting you? Ever play City of Heroes? This is Financial Defiance, people.

He chuckled, said, "I never leave anybody broke," and agreed to do the whole job for four-thousand.

He spotted Aly's Firebird in the garage and said I'd have to move it before he could get started; it'd be in the way. I told him I didn't have the legal ground to do so and explained the whole convoluted mess involved in this
piece of the Vixapede Legacy. He looked at his son, shrugged, and said he had four guys and a truck, and the car'd be "handled" as part of the job.

I don't know if he threw that in there to clinch the deal, but it worked.

Last night, I gave them a check for the repair work, which they took off to Magical Bank Land to convert it from a worthless piece of paper into a lot of not-so-worthless pieces of paper, or perhaps some very valuable ones and zeroes in a computer system somewhere. I think this guy is the pieces-of-paper sort of guy, though. That's fine, too. All I know is that pretty soon here, a lot of my valuable ones and zeroes—mostly the ones—are going to go away to cover this conversion cost.

The practical upshot of all of this is manifold:

• After next week, I should have a practical, useful, pretty garage again that looks like it belongs on my lot, not as part of a set for the re-enactment of a post-apocalyptic suburban warfare movie. I'll sort of miss
  the look, but not really.
• Jessie and I are likely going to have to cancel our planned trip to visit her parents in Shreveport in November. This one's not guaranteed, but it's pretty likely given the state of our financial cushion. Their place isn't big enough for us both to stay on their couch, and they have enough pets that my allergies get hammered after just a few hours, so that means a hotel and a car rental on top of the plane fare which at this point is likely to be over a thousand dollars of trip that we now cannot afford. I'm not giving up on
  it, but I'm not counting on it either. 
• Further Confusion is off for both of us. Don't bother asking. If some financially-independent party has two-thousand dollars to throw at a couple of Universe-A refugees to attend church for four days, let us know, otherwise we'll be here in Philly when the opening ceremonies commence.
• Megaplex may happen as a substitute con, but this one's stretching it. I won't have fully rebuilt our buffer by that point, and to be blunt it's in Florida for Dobbs' sake. Getting Jessie south of the Mason-Dixon Line once was hard enough; I don't think I could manage it again without, like, cookies the size of dinosaurs.

I checked with a debt collection agency about getting the money back, and they sent me to an attorney. I checked with an attorney about getting the money back, and they said it was two-hundred dollars per hour to pursue it as a case, meaning it's not cost-effective if it takes more than three days of wrangling to try to get blood from these turnips. 

Maybe I'll find the previous owners' new contact information in the paperwork for the settlement, call them and get profuse apologies and a check for costs plus heartache. Maybe I'll strike oil in my backyard, too.

Four steps forward, three steps back. 

A few pieces of news, some good, some bad, some weird.

Last week I had my first dental visit in over five years. As I had mentioned before, a part of one of my teeth broke off in my mouth the other day and it really scared me. I did a fairly good job of not showing it, but I was quite panicked over the whole thing, and I had repeated visions of sitting down in the chair and having the
dentist declare that they'd all have to go, or worse. Dreams of surgery weren't uncommon over the last few weeks.

The hygieniest took one look and said, "Oh, that's just tartar built up into crystals on your teeth; that will all come off under the water drill. A shard of crusted tartar broke off in your mouth, not a fragment of tooth." Sure enough, after about an hour of blasting my teeth, not only could I actually feel every individual tooth in my mouth again, but the discoloration was completely gone.

The dentist told me during the cursory check-up following the cleaning that I had better teeth than I had any right to possess given the way I'd abused them. Those weren't his exact words, but that was the general sentiment
expressed.

The scare had some impact on me. Nothing earth-shattering; I'm still not brushing-and-flossing three times a day, but I bought a sonic toothbrush, a new roll of floss and some Listerine. I hate using brand-names when there's a
generic available, but in this instance I had specific orders from a medical professional to buy a given product, so I followed them. Hindsight being what it is, this may well have been a product-placement request for all I know,
but down that road lies visions of the corporatization of daily life to an extent that I really just don't want to consider because it would make me break out in hives.

I figure at some point the same kind of scare will happen with my weight and my dilation, but I don't know what it will take. I've put on ten pounds since I dropped off the low-carb diet, I'm back to sneaking snacks and other
less-savory habits. My brain knows that these behaviors are self-destructive, and yet they don't stop. There is something wrong with me and I have not in thirty years figured out what it is.

I remember a time when I had successfully dropped over a hundred pounds and I could tell people, "all it takes is willpower." I can now safely say that that statement is a load of bullshit. If willpower were all it took, this would have stopped long ago. All of it. 

---

Friday night, I engaged in a bout of excessive drinking for fun and profit. More fun than profit, really. Actually, I did it because last week at work felt like it sucked, and in hindsight it wasn't too bad, but as my mother loves to quote from the Scarlet Pimpernel, "there's nothing in the world something that's quite so bad as that which is not so bad."

Bitching about work will not fix the problems. Finding a better company will only possibly fix the problems. I suspect that many of my current issues are endemic to large companies in general, most of them relating to manager-employee and employee-employee relationships and the nature of how to measure qualitative work.

A lot of it also has to do with the fact that I'm the only one in my department required to fill out weekly status reports and show up at a specific hour every day because my coworkers are warehouse types that don't understand a lick about information technology. Most of them don't even understand what an on-call is or what to do with one. Last week something broke at 07h00 and nobody said anything to anyone until I arrived at 08h15, and then everyone got mad at me because they were down for over an hour.

That was precisely the sort of event that I predicted when they said that I couldn't push my hours back to help cover the second shift that just started. At some point, either they're going to learn to use the on-call number, in
which case it shouldn't really matter when I'm in the office; or they'll require someone to be in the office during any possible work hour to cover all the potential problems that could occur with the system, in which case I push for being the second-shift operative and I get what I want anyway. For now, I'm stuck in the limbo between these two conditions, waiting for them to piss or get off the pot.

Anyway, drunk. My drink of choice these days is the Bourbon and Seven-Up, a mixer I learned from my father. Between that and my love of Cabernet Sauvignon, I think he warped my tastes in alcohol for all time. At least I'm
not drinking Mad Dog and Thunderbird like my mother. 

I don't usually drink for the purpose of getting drunk; there's always a hidden agenda to it. As stated, this time's open purpose was to mentally shut down for a few hours in response to the crap piling up at work, but it had an
unexpected side effect as well. In the depths of my stupor, I first dictated several paragraphs of rant in character-voice to Shay, and then I had a rather deep outpouring of emotion to Jessie on the nature of an intarweb conflict that occured a few weeks ago. The latter was shocking to me, mostly because even the morning after I remembered it with fairly strong clarity.

I know in the past I have appeared to many people to be a callous, heartless bitch. In some senses, this is true. I don't go out of my way to pander to the emotional needs of the general populace, and in fact I can be quite cruel
at times, especially towards those about whom I have do direct caring. I draw a very sharp line internally between "us" and "them", and I can be merciless to "them" if I feel "us" is under any sort of attack.

This is not because I enjoy the negativity. This is not because I like being mean or spiteful or hurtful. This is because ultimately I have a capacity to feel that runs far deeper than does my capacity to actually implement change in the world.

I am tired. I am bitter and sore and weary. I want to make the world a better place, and I feel like I am directly competing with people in the Internet-B camp—the Something Awful, Portal of Evil and like-minded crowds—for market share, and there's no way to compete with that kind of spectacle. Worse, I'm also competing with the Universe-B mentality—the Focus on the Family and 700 Club and Family Research Council and Westboro Family Church types—who proclaim that theirs is the One True Way and that anyone who disagrees is destined to rot forever.

Mathematically and philosophically, an axiom is a statement that must be assumed true as the underpinning of a framework within which the rules of logic apply. No axiom can be proven true; they can only be assumed. They are, if you will, the articles of faith on which we all rest our further statements of belief. The existence of God is a common axiom. The accuracy of the scientific model is another.

In TDB, the axiom is described as a statement which cannot tolerate its opposite. It is a statement that cannot at the same time be true while its negative is true as well. There can never be A and not-A within the same system. If there is, then there is an error in understanding A, not-A, or their relationship. It may be that either axiom is wrong. It may be that they both are. It may be that they aren't opposites as previously thought, or that some sort of Hegelian synthesis is necessary to reconcile the two positions. However, something about one of those ideas must be incorrect, either in the statement itself or in the understanding of it; it and its counterpart cannot both be true at the same time. 

I believe—as axiomatic—that a tolerant society cannot itself be tolerant of intolerance. That is, if we wish to say we are an open-minded and fair-thinking people, we must reject as false any viewpoint that itself dictates that is the only right answer. This sounds paradoxical, but I think it's the only way to reconcile the contradictory views of multiculturalism and monoculture. Far too often, I hear monoculturists use the ideals of multiculturalism against those who would follow them, on the order of "you must by your own ideals grant me the right to believe what I wish, and I believe that I'm right and you're wrong, so you must believe that I'm right!"

Being able to say, "No, I am only tolerant of those ideals that are themselves tolerant of other ideals" is a way out of that trap.

So, what's the point of all of this? Masturbatory self-exploration aside, it means that yes, I do support a wide variety of views and I believe that there are an endless number of ways to achieve happiness and salvation and truth and love, but I reject outright any viewpoint that starts with "but can't you see that you're just wrong?" It means that I don't feel guilty in the slightest for ignoring people who feel that my way is the wrong way without bothering to try to explain to me what it is that I'm doing wrong. It means that I'm willing to entertain any notion of how to do things right, as long as there's a rationale that makes sense, but that I'm not just going to assume that my way is wrong just because somebody else is right. 

There is no blueprint to salvation. There is no roadmap to happiness. There is no twelve-step program for becoming a better person. Rather, there are a million, billion programs, each with a million, billion steps; and they are all right for some and wrong for others. Anyone saying that there is only one right way to do anything must be, by definition, wrong, and there is nothing contradictory in rejecting those viewpoints out of hand, because they
themselves reject other viewpoints out of hand, and intellectual cauterization is necessary to prevent the spread of philosophical gangrene. Yes, we're hacking off this monocultural limb, but we're doing it to save the
postmodern body.

All of this is, of course, my own perception.

This, ultimately, is why I seem cruel or callous. It isn't that I don't care. It's that I have had to cut off large chunks of humanity at large to preserve my own sanity and my own worldview. It's that the vast majority of people I meet have views that I find incompatible with my own except in specific singular overlapping instances. It's that I know I cannot fix the world's problems, and so I have narrowed the scope of my focus to that subsection of
the world whose problems I can fix.

None of the people I have willingly removed from my world are bad people. None of them. Not Lurene, not Mitchell, not Andy, not President Bush, not Yeshua ben Yosef. In a universe in which I had limitless energy and patience, I would gladly and willingly continue to interact with them, offering love and caring and tenderness and what little wisdom I felt I had acquired in my time on this mudball, even in the face of such pointed opposition and even direct contradiction to my own worldview.

However, I am not possessed of infinite capacity, nor of infinite time. I have only so many resources to accomplish the tasks I have set for myself, and spending time trying to convert the masses to my view, or to get them to leave me alone, takes away from that already-limited pool and leaves me less to pursue my goals. If my choice is between trying to explain for the thousandth time why I think "lol what" isn't funny or why "you suck fag" isn't a valid debate tactic, and telling someone "I don't have time for this" and then working on my novel or a short story or even relaxing playing a game with Jessie and increasing our mutual happiness... the choice should be obvious.

Of course, if I think by pursuing someone and laying on with the Big Black Boot of Great Justice will make somebody's oily chitinous carapace crack and give me the chance to administer some Key 23, then I'm going to do it, if only because it means fewer resources spent in the future trying to get that person out of my face on other issues. It's worked a few times. Not many, to be sure, but often enough that I do still engage in such things when I feel I can spare the energy. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Sometimes, I try, and it doesn't work, and that's really the worst time of all. That's what happened with Ilthuain, and I feel bad for it. Bad that I wasted my time, bad that it didn't work, bad that I blew what might have been
my one chance to explain myself and make things better.

How can I carry you, when I can barely walk myself? 

I dreamed about Aly again last night.

I don't often have dreams involving her, but when I do, they're usually very memorable ones. This one was no exception, but it wasn't a good one. It was, in fact, one of the few times I'm willing to state I had a nightmare, one so bad that it forced me awake. In it, Jessie and I were living in a house that reminded me greatly of my parents' old house in Texas, but it wasn't Texas, and it wasn't their house. I remember that the front entry to the house led directly into the kitchen, and a hallway past the master bedroom led to the back door and garage. We were in a close neighborhood, not close as in houses, but as in being on good terms with the neighbors and actually going to block parties and the like, which meant it had to have been a dream since I haven't had that kind of relationship with my neighbors... ever, to my knowledge.

Aly was there, but it wasn't Aly. It was the person who had murdered her in her sleep and then stolen her skin, grinning maniacally from behind borrowed eyes. I knew her secret, and she knew I knew it, and I knew she would come to kill me as well, stealing my body and moving into it, but nobody would listen to me or believe me when I tried to warn others about her. Seeing her filled me with dread, because I knew the person I knew as Aly was dead and yet here was her body, up and moving about as if nothing were wrong, and everyone else was so happy to have her back "among the living" that they refused to accept any sort of fearmongering, especially from someone as prone to "wild ideation" and "paranoid delusions" as I was. It wasn't that anyone was trying to be mean to me. It was just that they knew what a vivid imagination I had, and that it was almost certainly overacting again. Aly was back; why couldn't I just be happy with that?

How could I be happy when I knew it meant I was going to die?

In this dream-logic state, I knew I had no way to defend myself. I knew I couldn't protect myself from her. My only defense came from others believing me and protecting me from her. I couldn't stop my own demise; I could only delay it by avoiding being alone with her. As long as someone else was present, I was safe. If someone else believed I was in danger, that person could save me. The latter never happened, but I kept narrowly avoiding the former, which led people to start accusing me—at best in gentle-chiding, at worst in exasperated-parent tone—of being clingy and co-dependent, and that I should just get over myself. When I tried to explain that no I wasn't being clingy but was instead trying to save my life, everyone just laughed and patted me on the head and told me I was a sili buni.

I awoke from this dream when my alarm went off the first time. I'm at once amazed that I didn't turn off the alarm clock and curl up and crash hard again, and surprised that it was as hard as it was to wake up fully after that. I did spend a great deal of time, comparatively, trying to press myself into Jessie's back and disappear, but every time I fell far enough back into sleep to get any sort of REM, I was back in that house and she was there again. Today's going to be a rough day if that's how it started.

Whatever I did, Aly, I'm sorry. 

---

My business trips are becoming... not more frequent, or more regular, really, but more common an event. Until I came to T-Mobile, I'd never been on one before. Now I've been on three in the last six months, and it may well be that they're actually going to be a regular part of my work environment for the foreseeable future. At least as long as I'm reporting to a manager in Atlanta, they will be.

As always, I took Malachi with me on my trip, because he loves to travel. When I bought my new personal laptop, I had to buy a new backpack even though we had a laptop bag big enough to hold marumari; there wasn't enough room for Malachi to sit and have his head outside the bag and still be able to close the zippers and flaps tightly enough for him to be safe and secure. So, the day before the trip I acquired a new Swiss Army backpack. Literally, it is a backpack made by the same company that makes the Swiss Army Knife, and from the number of pockets on this this thing I can believe it. It's not quite as roomy within the main pocket for Malachi as he might have liked, but there's definitely more space there for him than there would've been had he tried to ride in the old laptop bag.

At any rate, he's asked me to help him put together a travel diary of sorts, so that he can talk about the trips that he gets to take. He loves to tell stories, perhaps more than I do, and his enthusiasm for such things is incredible. I took a number of pictures, not nearly as many as he would've liked but definitely more than I expected to take given that I hardly ever use the camera on my phone, of the places we went while I was down in Georgia. Next time I'll try to get some more shots for and of him for his own diary, which I'll be helping him to assemble over the week. I'm going to have to enlist Jessie's help in getting the images off of my phone, and then probably some help in design work with her as well, so that I can get Malachi's site up and running.

He can't wait to talk about his adventures... and neither can I. 

Mary Travers has leukemia.

Have you ever seen a few blades of grass, growing up through concrete? Have you ever marveled at the strength and power of those few tenuous shoots that they could shatter the confines of the artificial barrier laid upon them? The number of times this metaphor shows up in my life should by now tell me that when I get one of these emotional responses to something primal, something from my childhood, I should honor and remember and listen to it, rather than try to shove it aside into a box. I still haven't really learned, but I'm learning.

I've been a furry since before I knew what furries were. I was making animal-people in a four-color bitmap editor on my father's 8088 when I was nine. I started playing D&D when I was six, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen I was playing druids, mages with polymorph self, and lycanthropes by the score. I had a mage, Mordana, whose sole purpose at one point became to turn other characters into animal-beings just so I could play them as such.

I listened to folk music—Peter, Paul and Mary and Simon and Garfunkel specifically—when I was eight or nine, or maybe even younger. I watched their twenty-fifth anniversary concert on television and cried along with all the grown-ups in the audience at "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Light One Candle". I remember hearing "El Salvador" and knowing it was incredibly profound even though I didn't really understand it at the time.

It's been twenty years, it seems, since I really spent any time listening to or for that sort of music, but lately I've felt a resurgence of attachment to it. I found myself singing "Right Field" in the car driving home from work the other day, and since then I've been craving the simple harmonies and powerful emotions that this music evokes in me. Finally, it occured to me to look for the lyrics to one of their songs, and I found their website. It was right where I should've expected it to be, but somehow the simplest ideas never occur. 

Reading that one of my childhood stars, even before I really knew what the idea of a celebrity was, was potentially deathly ill broke my spirit for a brief period, and I found myself crying as I sat at my desk. I don't have a cube, per se, but I have a lockable office that I share with somebody else who is often not present because he's the building's ITA, meaning the hardware and desktop specialist to counterpoint my software and application skills. I kept waiting for him to look over at me and see the tears on my face, but he never did. I don't know if that's positive or not.

This week has been a week of trials. Part of the back of one of my front bottom teeth crumbled two days ago, and when I tried to inspect the damage, I noticed that four of my teeth are grey on the back. I've never seen teeth that looked like that except in the "don't let your mouth look like this" pictures at the dentists' offices of my youth. The fronts of the teeth look fine, they don't hurt, they don't bleed, but they look like they're seriously rotted in back. They're my incisors, for criminy! How do they rot like that? How did they get to that state without my realizing that they were a problem?

The teeth alone would be enough to have put me into a foul mood, but it really felt like a capstone to a monument with the inscription, "Kristy's Health Failures." My weight's back up, my dilating's shot to hell, and now my teeth. I'm surprised I haven't come down with terminal head-falling-off yet, or something. A friend of mine says that she feels like her body is alien to her. I'm nowhere near that bad, but some days I feel like a factory second, that's for sure.

Ah well. Back on the regimen. Exercise and shower before sitting down to play City of Heroes. Quit eating just because food is present. Brush once a day. Schedule the dentist's appointment. Measure the daily milestones and forget about the length of the journey. Focus on each step in turn, and let the trip handle itself. 

Every step is the first step. 

Last night, at 01h45 as I was trying to get to bed in order to be up at 06h00 for work the next morning, I noticed that my phone was telling me I had messages. Since I was still on call until 09h00 the next morning, I went ahead and checked my messages, hoping that it wasn't anything critical. The house being not unlike a Farraday cage, unless my PCS is right next to a window, I can't use it, so it's not uncommon for either Jessie or I to miss calls on it and find out hours later that we did so.

It turned out to be the Operations group telling me that we had a critical failure in an important middleware website... at 20h00.

Now, this got my blood pumping. To be on call and miss such an important call like this... I was having visions of you're-fired dancing in my head as I called back to get details and find out what needed to be done. I found out
then that the failure had actually happened on Sunday morning, but that several other issues had cropped up around the same time and that one had fallen through the cracks, meaning it had been down for about ten hours when I got the call in the first place! I told Operations I'd drop off the call and do my best to reach somebody that had some visibility into the problem, as there wasn't anything I could do with it myself.

Three calls to my manager, and three each to three of my coworkers, resulted in twelve voicemail responses, so I called the command bridge—also known as the Oh-Shit Line—and told them we'd had a critical failure but that I couldn't get anyone on the line that knew anything about the application or how to address it. They said they'd extend my resource list a bit further and asked me to wait on the line until I heard back. I spent thirty-five minutes, roughly, waiting for someone to return, only to be told, "Well, it looks like there's nothing anyone can do with it tonight, and it's only critical during business time, so we have about five hours to address it. There doesn't seem to be anything more you can do with this, so have a good night."

At 02h30 this morning, I finally went to sleep, meaning I actually fell asleep around 03h00. At 05h00, I got another call from Operations, telling me that an automated process was down. Fortunately, this one I knew would happen and I was able to tell them that yes it was down, yes Supply Chain knew about it and yes we had it under control. They said they'd add it to the list of reports in the associated ticket, and I said that was fine. I then went back to bed at 05h15, to rise when my alarm went off at 06h00.

Total sleep time before work: just under three hours, spread across two shifts.

To say I felt like death reheated in the microwave would have been a credit to my condition. I felt utterly miserable, and it took me an hour just to will myself to sit up out of bed. When I did so, however, I started the
process of putting myself together, but at 07h30 I got an SMS from Operations informing me that another process at work had had a fatal error and that my presence as the Supply Chain on-call was requested on the command bridge again.

Now, last week it happened that I had a request to join a command bridge before work, and I decided that time that it would be easier to deal with the work call before going into the office and then drive into work than it would be to try to explain to people that I was in the car and could do nothing for ninety minutes until I arrived. That time, after the call my manager told me that if it happened again I was to call a coworker to do the remote work while I drove into the warehouse so I could make sure they had an on-site presence, which is why I had been hired in the first place. I told my mananger that I understood, and I did, so when it happened this week, I
ignored the initial page, thinking to myself that I would get to the car and dial into the bridge as soon as I was underway so I could tell them I was en route to address the problem.

Two minutes after I got the page, my manager called me. His words were something on the order of, "go ahead and get on the call, then work from home today; I know you had a rough night last night." I told him I had to get my laptop out of the car, and that I'd be on the call as soon as I had it. He said that was fine and hung up to return to the command bridge.

Help Desk called me two minutes after that, asking for the same thing. I explained the situation to them as well, and they said that was fine. So, in my head, everything was all well and good. I got on the call, we dismissed it
in short order as a known issue to which we had proposed solutions and that the systems manager had rejected as infeasible or overly expensive, and that there was nothing we could do to solve the problem without an alternate solution that nobody had yet invented. Help Desk agreed, and we ended the command bridge call. I then dialed in through the VPN and got to work.

This afternoon, I got a call from my manager. In it, he basically said that he thought I was doing a great job and knew how much work I was doing for the warehouse and the company, but that the systems manager—my
"customer" insofar as I have such a thing—had complained to the VP of Supply Chain that I wasn't doing my job because I wasn't in the office again today, and that I had a "history" of showing up late and working from home, usually because of scenarios like the one described above.

In his mind, my role at the company is to support the Bensalem facility. Not "the distribution centers" meaning Denver as well as Bensalem, but just his warehouse. To the systems manager's thinking, I was spending too much of my time worrying about things that weren't supposed to be my job, and that I was supposed to take over all the warehouse tech support and troubleshooting, and get rid of everything off my plate that didn't involve taking care of the Bensalem warehouse. That meant being in the office at 08h30 every morning Monday through Friday, and not leaving any time before 17h00 any day during that span. Period. I was there to support the warehouse
and that was it. 

Unfortunately, that's not the position for which I was hired, at least as far as I, my previous manager or my current manager understood. My stated role was to support the warehouse production software and the distribution
centers—both of them. That meant being part of the on-call list, being part of the overnight monitoring team when conditions warranted, and generally doing what anyone else in Supply Chain did. That was the job that was offered to me, and that was the job I took, instead of the database development position that had been offered to me at the same time. 

Had the choice been between database development and the glorified help desk job that my current role is threatening to become, I would've taken the risk on the hourly position.

Now, I have to reiterate that my manager thinks I've been doing a good job. He thinks I know my stuff and he knows how much work I'm putting in for the company. Unfortunately, he also knows that his boss' boss' boss—yes, three levels of management up from him, meaning four from me—is getting complaints directly from the systems manager that I'm not doing my job in his eyes. My manager and I agreed that the systems manager is trying to have his cake and eat it too, which is to say he wants me there from 08h30 to 17h00 doing all his glorified help desk jockeying, but that he's going to sorely miss having somebody to do all the overnight and after-hours work I do now. However, he is, as noted above, the "customer" in this, meaning my role at the company may have to change to keep him happy, or at least to give him what he says he wants until he realizes he doesn't want it.

Truth be told, I don't want it either, and if it looks like the help desk position looks like it's going to become permanent, I'm going to have to start farming my résumé a lot sooner than I wanted.

Right now, I put up with a lot for my job, but I do it because of the promise that I'm going to be learning new technologies that will expand my career options and because at least the work I do is semi-interesting to me.
Removing all of the actual analyst work and leaving me nothing but the technical grind and mechanical troubleshooting will take away one of the only things I have left to like about my work. It will dramatically lessen the time it takes me to burn out on my current position and want to go elsewhere. It will make the ninety-minute drive that much longer, the weekends that much shorter, and the daily schedule that much less tolerable.

In the next day or two, my manager, the systems manager and I will be having a conference call with the express purpose of hammering out what my actual job duties will be. I'm hoping in the course of that phone meeting that it
will come to light just how much work I do after hours and on weekends, and how much support the systems manager is getting that he doesn't even recognize because it's not traditional at-the-desk-during-business-hours
support. If it doesn't go that way, then I hope it's a very short amount of time before the systems manager realizes how much he's having to do that I used to do for him, and yields.

If that's not the case either, I hope I find something else soon.

"The job's not where your happiness lies."

In the course of a conversation on job stress and frustrating work issues, my team lead said this pithy phrase, and everyone else on the call just laughed and that seemed to be the end of the conversation. I didn't laugh, though. I
didn't laugh, or cry, or complain. I just... went silent, quietly lost in my own train of thought kicked off by this concept.

First, the job's not where my happiness lies. I am not a function of what I do, and I am especially not a function of the subset of what I do that other people will pay me to do. Writing code makes me happy, but only insofar
as it's in the sense of solving problems and using what I know. Analyst work makes me happy but only in the context of finding problems and fixing them. I enjoy making things better, but not as a career. I'd far rather be in a
creative field, or teaching and helping others. However, there's no money in either of those, certainly not to put two people through transition or keep us in hormones and the general lifestyle to which we've become accustomed. So, I remain in the tech industry out of necessity, not desire. I don't expect the job to make me happy, and I'm not disappointed when it doesn't. 

Second, the job isn't where my happiness lies? I'm going to spend almost a third of the best years of my life in indentured servitude to a third party in exchange for the priviledge of supporting myself and my family; I had damn well better get some happiness out of the exchange! I'm giving up time with my mate to be here, and no amount of money can replace that. I'm pretty sure that if I use the phrase "non-material payment" in my discussion anywhere, somebody in the audience will come to my house with a syringe of erotoxins and a hypnobeam to make me forget I did so, but such is the price I pay.

A job isn't just about measuring my time in dollars. My time is not merely calculable in terms of financial gain. There are so many other things I could be spending my time doing whose value cannot be measured in terms of money. Money is a medium of exchange, but it's not the only medium of exchange, merely the most intersubjective. Time itself is valuable; I'd trade a lot for an hour less a day in the car that I could dedicate to other tasks. "Time is money" for a reason. Forgive my recitation, but...

"It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. Now it takes three. Those two hours are mine, as if I had physically pushed back the clock, giving me that time back to spend on other things." -- Ellis Wyatt, Atlas Shrugged

If time can be a medium of exchange, what else can be? What about ideas? Information is quickly becoming the currency of the New Millenium, if it wasn't already, but what is the value of a thought? People pay for news—for newspapers, news magazines and subscriptions to information websites—because these things provide important information in a timely fashion. It's not just the knowledge, but the speed with which it's delivered. Some pieces of information are timeless. Others are time-critical. How will you know to sell today and buy tomorrow if you don't know what your investments are doing, and how do you find out in time to make that information important? Why do people pay to go to training courses? Why else would you invest in the Church of the SubGenius, except to learn what you really thought?

Emotion, too, can be a powerful medium of exchange. People who love each other share a bond that reinforces itself through repeated exchanges of that emotion, growing with every trade. It doesn't have to be love, either. Deep friendships can be built in the same fashion, and probably even powerful emnities as well. I'm sure lots of people love to hate somebody. Who is to say, then, that I shouldn't make positive, rewarding emotion part of the
demand I make for my time away from other sources of emotional support and growth? Why shouldn't I insist on liking my job as part of the condition of working?

Work should not be "the daily grind." That way lies madness and frustration. If I have to work, I should at least enjoy something about my job. I enjoy the problem-solving aspects. I like my coworkers. I do appreciate my salary. I don't like my commute. I detest my hours. It seems right now to be a toss-up between being worth staying and wanting to find better. I think for now staying is the best option because it lets me build up stability in a position, which will look good when the time comes to leave, but I have trouble imagining that I'm going to retire here.

One thing I realized not to long back is that there's no real room for promotion in my position. If I want to move up or into another department, I'm going to have to relocate. The only reason this job exists is because the warehouse needs an on-site support person. If I'm not working support, this place doesn't need me. I can advance within my position, but not out of it. To move into another department, I'd have to go to a facility that needs that job function; the warehouse won't. That puts a damper on any real plan to stay here in the long-term, unless I decide I'm happy and comfortable here and don't feel like growing.

I'd appreciate the stability, perhaps, but analysis really isn't what I want to be doing in the long run. When I left academe to move into the real world, I did so with the intent of one day going back, getting my doctorate, and
being able to say to my students, "yes, you will need this in the real world, and here's where." In the six years that I've been working, I've used what I learned in college less than a quarter of the time. The rest has all been things that I learned as a sideline to the actual information in the courses I took. "Computer science" as a field isn't about learning to be a computer programmer; it's about learning to be a theoretician with application as an afterthought. I only took two courses in either of my degree programs that actually focused on programming, four if you count the introductory classes on programming that I skipped because of my AP scores in high school. The rest were all "the theory of how and why computers work the way they do," not "how to make the computer do what you want." Analysis is not furthering my goal of being able to say I used what I learned in school, which is a little demoralizing when it comes to my long-term plans.

I've had a few side-projects that I've wanted to make semi-professional for a long time, but they've all stalled for want of an artist and my own false laziness. I really do want out of tech in the long term, but I'm not ready—emotionally or financially—to cut the cord just yet and let myself freeflail into a fresh position somewhere. Like as not, I'd destroy everything I've worked so hard to build. I feel like I'm in so deep that my only way out is through. There are things I can do, but all of them involve looking for another job closer to home that matches my goals and desires more closely, and I don't feel that trying to find another position right now is in my best long-term career interest. If I can't get out of tech, then I need to be the best damn tech I can be, and that means showing I'm more stable than the people for whom I've worked.

I may not do what I love, but I should at least like what I do. 

Another year, another Anthrocon.

As always, I come away from them on Sunday night thinking I'm going to be alright, and the day after I'm exhausted and nearly unable to function. Last year, I was unemployed when the con hit, and I had all day Monday to recover without really thinking too much about it, and prior to that my memory is kind of vague. I know I was working at HMS in 2003 and ISI in 2002, but the memories of work afterwards are something of a blur at this point. All I really know for sure is that yesterday at work I was utterly exhausted, and that I came home and collapsed last night and slept until dinner, then went back to bed and slept until 06h00 this morning, when I finally felt vaguely normal-for-me again.

The con itself is almost inevitably fun, or at the very least emotionally refreshing. I told a friend of mine yesterday
that it very much felt like going to church for the weekend, and I know that probably sounds crazy, especially in light of the fact that I'm horribly unchurched—or perhaps underchurched or mischurched depending on point of view—but there is a sense at the con that I am around "like-minded believers," even if I'm not. People walk around in ears-and-tail or full fursuits and nobody thinks of them as weird... or at the very least such opinions tend not to be loudly expressed. There's a higher sense of casual intimacy that's at once very comforting and very offputting, but it too is strangely familiar, moreso than the standoffishness of casual life. Even the vocabulary and vernacular of the group is subtly different in ways that make me feel more included than I typically do with the majority of people.

So, Anthrocon—and likely other furry gatherings as well—always give me the sense of "coming home" that other gatherings don't. I can only imagine this is how other people feel about Bible camp, or a family reunion. It's a
place where certain beliefs are just assumed true, and there's less for me to have to explain when trying to make myself understood.

This year, though, things were rather awkward for a number of reasons.

Normally I'm staff at AC, and this year was no exception to that, but I felt more out of the loop than normal. SusanDeer used to be the programming director, and I served as writing-track advisor and nominal assistant director of programming. Last year I carried a radio and did all the running Sue couldn't, and even in prior years I at least served as a sounding board for the schedule creation process. I was used to a certain level of involvement with the whole schedule creation process, hearing about the panels that related to my track, ofering suggestions about what could go when, and generally learning about the process of building a schedule. To be quite honest, I thought to some degree that when Sue announced her retirement from the board to focus on her career that I was going to end up with her job.

Instead, KuddlePup, the programming director for MegaPlex was offered the role, a fact that at first relieved me. I wasn't quite sure I was ready to fill the role of programming director for the largest furry con in the world, and that somebody else was willing to do it meant I had more time to learn about it before having to face it myself. However, from the get-go things were a little more complicated. KP's in Florida, and I'd never met him before, much less worked with him in any sort of official capacity, so I really didn't know what to expect as far as personality went. I did get the chance to meet him at AC2004, when he ghosted Sue's position alongside me, and he seemed nice enough, but my brain being the broken piece of hardware that it is, I still wasn't really that comfortable. Plus, getting in touch with KP proved to be a lot more difficult than I'd expected. All in all, it never really felt like I was working with KP so much as he and I were both working around each other to get to the same goal. 

The schedule is a good example of that. As I said above, I was used to having some level of information aboutthe panels before they went into the schedule, and at least marginal information about the schedule itself before it went to press. The first time I saw the schedule is when Jessie—as designer of the pocket program—came to me and said, "I've noticed a few problems." In the two months prior to that, I hadn't heard anything from KP about the schedule at all, so I didn't even know it'd been started until the proposed final draft was Publication's control.

At this point, we were about two, maybe three weeks out from Opening Ceremonies, and our press deadline was in a week, so at the risk of stepping on some toes, I put together a replacement schedule based on what I knew of Sue's practices and sent it to Kage with a polite note saying we'd spotted a few issues and here was our suggestion. This got forwarded to KP, and after a few more rounds of back-and-forth on this-can't-go-there and that-can't-go-here and these-two-things-can't-happen-at-the-same-time, we ironed out something that everyone seemed to like, and it went to press.

At Closing Ceremonies, Kage praised KP's schedule work. At least somebody got some recognition.

Then again, Kage said a few other things at various points that irked me to some degree or another, mostly relating to this year's theme of the convention, "Heroes." During the opening ceremony, Kage called for all the EMTs, firefighters, police and military personnel to stand and be recognized. While I can hardly say I'm surprised by such an action, it seems blatantly propogandistic and reinforces the idea that heroism is tied to profession, and further tied to a certain social view. I had much higher hopes, and was greatly disappointed by what felt like unnecessary pandering to a very antithetical worldview.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't support the police, the military, firefighters or doctors. I do. I believe they
put their lives and their values on the line every day, and I recognize that. However, I also believe that our society as it currently stands is rapidly losing another class of hero, the ideologue willing to combat the rising public sentiment that disagreement is tantamount to treason. Where is the recognition for teachers who stand up for reason and logic in the classroom against the proponents of abstinence-only education and "intelligent design"? Where is the support for the foster parents who are taking in and raising all the children born because their parents didn't have access to timely abortions, or proper child support that would let them raise their own children? Where is the praise for the journalists who were willing to report unpopular news stories that challenged public sentiment and ran contrary to official doctrine? Where is the admiration for the political activists that overthrew dictatorships in Uzbekistan and Ukraine without firing a single shot? Why are we as a society pushing this one particular view of heroism tied more into profession than ideology, and why is someone as allegedly intelligent as Uncle Kage supporting it uncritically?

It's not even that some professions are heroic and others aren't. There are those in the so-called "heroic jobs"
who have done their own share of questionable activity. What of the environment of evangelicalism at the Air Force academy, and the removal of a chaplain from her post because she dared to challenge it? What of the story of Rodney King? What of the EMTs who pointed and laughed at a victim in an auto accident, denying her critical treatment and contributing to her death because she was a pre-operative transsexual? Fine, yes, recognize the heroes who exist, but don't treat every cop, ambulance driver and soldier as a hero just because of zir job. That'd be like treating every lawyer as crooked and shady, or every judge as impartial to the law. Essentialism can only
get one so far in life before it runs into these kinds of problems, and the fact that nobody seemed to notice this or care bothers me.

Of course, the conbook was loaded with glurge about the WTC Debacle, firefighters, police, military, and a few references here and there to the medical profession. I submitted a story that I felt did an adequate job of challenging the prevailing views, but it felt like mine was the only one to do so, and as a result I probably spent far more time than necessary hawking my story to the few who I knew actually read the conbook, hoping to get them to read past the sugar coating and see something a bit meatier and savory. I can only hope I succeeded, but I probably irritated more than a few folks in the process.

I have, since starting this post, been informed that Kage did bring up the idea of marrow-donors as an
alternative hero, and he did make mention to heroes being "anybody you looked up to," and I'm quite glad to learn of this. However, I think my point still stands that the overwhelming majority of images and words and actions were in support of a very limited range of interpretations of the concept of heroism. This is as much the fault of the fanbase as it is of the chairman. To be sure, there were other stories and art in the conbook depicting Good Samaritanism and other, less obvious forms of heroics, but they were in the minority by a wide margin.

After this unconscious pandering to the majority view, Kage called for a moment of silence for the victims of the London bombing the day before, and I used the opportunity to quietly leave the proceedings. It's not that I don't feel sorry for the dead or their families, but again I feel that this was an inappropriate expression of solidarity. I don't know anybody that died, or anybody that knew anybody that died. I had no reason to grieve, and I'm willing to bet neither did the vast majority of people in the room. However, like the WTC debacle, it would have been politically inappropriate to say as much, and yet to stay and participate in this moment of silence felt like an affront to my beliefs. Let me choose the time and place and manner of my grieving, should I feel the need to do so. Don't push it into the public arena and presume that I feel a certain way. Don't make an issue of something that by all reckoning the survivors themselves aren't discussing openly. Honor my right to express myself if I choose to do so, but don't use the podium as a tool to convince me that I should feel a certain way.

While I'm on that subject, in fact, don't use this kind of tragedy as an excuse for why people didn't come to the con. The predicted attendence was three thousand, based on past projections. Six hundred people did not cancel because of bomb blasts on another continent. If you run the percentages of attendees based on last year and you see that Europeans as a whole were vastly under-represented, then maybe you can use it as a point, but I have difficulty believing in absense of such statistical analysis that this had anything to do with our numbers.

Now, all of these complaints aside, I really did have a good time at the con, though as always I was exhausted by the end of it. I never seem to get enough sleep, partially because I was sharing a double bed when I'm used to a king, partially because I never sleep well in hotel rooms as a general rule even when I have enough space, and partially because as a member of staff I was pretty much busy all day every day. Even though I'm not in an active-duty position like Operationss or Registration, when a programming issue arises I have to help solve it, and this year that meant running back and forth between panel areas trying to make sure everyone had the space necessary to actually fit. 

Saturday was the worst day for this. As a writer, I'm usually disheartened by the lack of interest in the writing panels, and so I was elated for all of about two seconds to discover that one of the writing panels had more than quadrupled its expected attendance, but this turned quickly to horror when I realized I had nowhere to put them. The animatronics panel had run long and they had assumed that they could simply use up the gap time since "nobody needed the space for another hour". This meant an emergency reshuffling of people into other places, which quickly propogated along the chart on Saturday from about 14h00 through to dinner.

Then Mr. Albee had to be located for his 15h00 panel; he'd lost track of time and was chatting amiably with folks in the dealers' room. To be fair, he was mortified when he discovered he'd missed the first fifteen minutes of his scheduled chat, and he practically ran from his table to the room where he was scheduled to discuss his animation. He's a nice enough fellow, I suppose, but it felt at points like the con book, badges and the other swag that people get as part of their registration were all loaded with advertisements. It's one thing to give a free promo to a guy because he's the guest of honor. It's another to become that person's private marketing company for three days.

Finally, the improv panel scheduled for late Saturday night after 2's ever-popular Rant and the Masquerade got delayed because we discovered at the last minute that the puppet show that had been in that room earlier had not dismantled their stage, on the grounds that they were going to be using it the next day. So, we tried to find another room in which to put the Masquerade, only to find out that we didn't have one big enough that wasn't already being used for something else! So, after much hemming and hawing, we finally elected to dismantle the stage for the puppet show and leave them a note explaining what happened. Technically they should've torn down their own equipment after they were done, but I wasn't going to argue at that point.

The two panels that I ran seemingly went off without a hitch, at least. Eye of Argon is always a hoot, and now I
know there's a "lost ending" which should add another three paragraphs to the reading. This should mean another
half-hour of bleeding eyeballs and smelling salts for the audience. Then there's the Iron Author competition which
challenges writers to come up with the worst possible furry story given the required elements. I'm a little embarrassed that this year's cliché list didn't add anything new, but I blame the hell of my regular job over the last month for that. Next year's will be better, I assure you. Or is that worse?

As always, I saw too many people to name that I wanted to see, didn't get to spend nearly the time with people that I wanted to spend, and came away from the event feeling like the whole affair wasn't nearly long enough for the opportunities it presented. Hopefully one year I'll have enough of my act together that I'll feel un-disorganized enough to actually do all the things I want to do. I doubt it will be any time soon, but I can hope. In the interest of furthering this goal, I hereby present a few basic Buni-At-Anthrocon-Handling Instructions:

No groups larger than six people

I cannot stress this one enough. Six is about the maximum number of people that can sit around a dinner table and have a mutually-beneficial conversation that won't break up into smaller groups. Six is about the maximum number of people that can actually make a coherent plan without requiring a voting methodology. Six is about the maximum number of people that can easily get seated at a restaurant without requiring special arrangements necessitating half an hour's wait. Six is also about the limit of people around whom I can be at any one time before I have to start filtering people out to pay adequate attention to others. Thus, when a group hits six people, we make a decision and go. I'd rather have a dinner on time with six people—or even two or three or by myself—than stand around waiting for half an hour trying to see if "just one more person" wants to be invited. This is no offense to anyone, people. This is purely me and my broken brain. If you are person number seven—or eight or nine as the case may be—I am not trying to
snub you by not waiting up for you.

Groups larger than six are acceptable if they happen spontaneously and without effort

As always, every rule has an exception. If there are nine of us standing outside the video game room and we all say "let's go eat at the pho place across the street!" I will not ask three of you to leave, nor will I suddenly decide to go elsewhere. I just know that we spent a lot of time at AC waiting for individual stragglers and sending runners to find people and delaying the acquisition of foodstuffs to cram into our gutsockets, when we could've simply called and said "we'll be at the pho place across the street if you want to join us" and then just gone to the pho place across the street. If the others wanted to join, they could find us there.

Room parties are great as long as they're in other people's rooms

This one may seem a bit odd, but it comes back to th' buni and her need for a hutch in emergency situations. I need somewhere to go to shut down mentally if I get overwhelmed, and if there's a room party in my room, I can't go there to take a bad brain break. At one point, I had to get up and leave my own room because there were too many people present doing too many things at once, and I honestly didn't know where I was going to sleep that night because of it. No offense to anyone who was present, but I can't do that again. 

I'm sure I'll think of more requests and requirements as next year's con draws closer. For now, I'm just content to sit back and wait for the rose-tinted afterglow to settle into place so I can think about everything that happened with fondness instead of mentally picking it all apart. I've got some questions remaining about how things will work when we move to Pittsburgh, and a few things to work out with other staff members, but it's nothing that can't be resolved, I'm sure. I'm definitely looking forward to it, and everything that follows.

See you next year. 

Slack happens.

This morning, as I arrived at work, a woman from State Farm approached me in the parking lot and handed me a check for USD8346.48, in exchange for a signed title to the Blazer. This is over a thousand dollars more than the
mechanic's estimate, and two-thousand more than what my father said the vehicle was worth. The difference between the two number, in fact, is more than what I paid for the new laptop I just ordered. Essentially, I got my new computer for "free."

It's going to be such a beautiful thing, too. Made by IBM Lenovo, three-gigahertz processor, fifteen-inch 1400x1050 screen, 256Mb of RAM, forty-gigabyte hard drive—twice as much as motherbrain—NVidia graphics board... not quite "the works" but sufficiently loaded as to prevent me needing to upgrade it for some time. It'll be damn sight better than the current ThinkPad 600 I'm using.

I can't wait to poison it with Slackware, then Cedega and City of Heroes.

Sadly, on top of the laptop, I must also buy a new car. As mentioned above, and before, I totalled the Blazer, meaning it's time for a "new" car, or at least a new-to-me car. My credit's so lousy that I doubt I could afford the payments on anything new, but I should be able to get a fairly decent used one for the money I've got. Tanya, in fact, found me a Buick Century wagon for just under two-thousand dollars, which would be great if it's in good shape. She said she'd go and test-drive it for me today, then buy it for me if it turned out to be a good deal. It's such a hideous beige, and it's got the backward-facing "suicide seat" so you can cram eight people into it legally! I love it!

Of course, I think it's about time I do a proper accounting of my past vehicles, in case anyone's wondering why I hate automobiles: 

Name	Type	Lifespan	Reason for Leaving
The Boat	1977 Ford LTD Wagon	Nine months	Rear-ended by a Suburban at 55MPH, frame bent. Vehicle totaled by insurance company.
Vulcar	1984 Honda Civic	Five years	Driven for an hour on a highway with no water pump, aluminium engine melted. Vehicle sold for scrap.
The Boat MkII	1984 Ford LTD Wagon II	Forty minutes	Threw a rod en route to campus the day of purchase, engine destroyed. Vehicle abandoned by owner.
Phoenix	1987 Chrysler Fifth Avenue	One year	Electrical system began failing six months after acquiring from parents, eventually stalled in an intersection in Dallas during rush hour. Vehicle abandoned by owner.
The Clown Car	1994 Ford Escort	Three years	Driven for nine months without an oil change, lifter in engine broke. Vehicle donated to Cancer ResearchInstitute.
Shamiqua	1990 Plymouth Acclaim	One year	Engine burned a quart of oil every half-tank of gas. Vehicle donated to Cancer Research Institute.
M. P. S.	1987 Volvo 240DL Sedan	Six months	Slid on patch of black ice during turn on paper route, driver's front wheel slammed sideways into high curb at 25MPH, axle and control arm broken. Vehicle totaled by insurance company.
The Beast	1998 Chevrolet Blazer	Five months	Hydroplaned during rainstorm, spun around backwards and slammed into telephone pole at 35MPH, frame bent, drive train and rear axle damaged. Vehicle totaled by insurance company.

In hindsight, I really haven't personally destroyed that many cars. The three totals were either another driver or bad weather, three of them were mechanical problems beyond my control, and the last two were genuine lack-of-knowledge. I admit driving it without an oil change or a water pump is dumb, but at the time I didn't know I didn't have the water pump, and I didn't know the oil light meant "hey, stupid, you're in danger of physical damage if you keep this up."

Hopefully the next car will be better.

Live and learn. 

---

I mentioned the laptop before. I'm eagerly awaiting its arrival, not only because of the chance to play City of Heroes on my own machine for once, but because it'll mean Jessie and I can team which should prove to be loads of fun. I'd team with more people, but I hate-hate-hate random invites, especially when I'm not looking for teams. Probably just part of my overall personality quirks, but I'm not playing an MMORPG for the MM part, or even the O. It's the RP that's important, and for most people witty character interaction and meaningful in-game relationships get in the way of power-leveling.

Yeah, it's a bad attitude, but I know I can't be alone.

There are a couple of hitches at the moment, but hopefully they'll be resolved soon. I have a few requests to make the gaming experience more complete:

A Nostromo SpeedPad n52

Jessie first introduced me to these when she "inherited" one from Aly. At first I thought it was a mutant mouse of some sort, but once she showed me how it worked, I fell in love with it. I'd love to have one to use on my laptop, but I'm half-afraid that Cedega won't support or recognize it properly, and I'll be forced to use the keyboard instead.

A Logitech Trackman MarbleFX

Described both as the Cadillac of Trackballs and the worst eyesore to ever hit the desktop, I loved mine when I had one, but it died from use and they're now discontinued. I've got a bid on eBay for one, and I've supposedly found a site in Texas that sells new ones from warehouse stock for USD100 each, but if anybody knows where to find one of these for less, please let me know!

More memory

This one's already resolved, thanks to Furious Bees. IBM charges a small fortune for memory, mostly because getting a gigabyte of RAM means a single stick of memory, instead of two sticks of 512 megabytes each. They don't even provide the option on their site, which really chafes. So, I bought it with the 256Mb option and am paying USD120, or thereabouts, for an upgrade. Jessie can have the leftovers, if she can use'em.

The only other issue was the ship date. It seems that the custom-built laptopI ordered had parts that were on backorder, so Lenovo claimed a ship date of August 5, which is not the two weeks their website told me custom-built laptops normally take. I called them and they not only found a pre-designed laptop with better specs than the one I built, but they dropped the price on the pre-designed model by five percent because they couldn't fill my order as placed. So, I'm actually getting a better laptop and saving fifty dollars on the deal.

The anticipation is sweet. I can only hope the reality is sweeter. This is the most I've spent on computer hardware... um... ever.

Next I upgrade the server.

Okay, first the bad news.

On the way to Outback Steakhouse, to celebrate Jessie's birthday, I got rearended by a telephone pole doing thirty miles an hour. No, that's not a typo. It is, however, a bit of an exaggeration. What actually happened is that going around a corner on Route 100 South near the house, the Blazer began hydroplaning, and I succeeded only in changing the direction of spin, not in actually regaining control of the vehicle. I slid backwards off the road, through somebody's lawn and then into a telephone pole, crumpling the back end of the car. I think I bent the frame, but it was really hard to tell. What was obvious was the back bumper touching the passenger-side rear tire, and the shattered window in the crunched gate. What was also obvious was that the bunny should not be allowed to drive in inclement weather in a rear-wheel-drive SUV. She hates rear-wheel-drive vehicles. She hates SUVs, as much as she loves their carrying capacity.

Were I in better financial straits right now, I might say to hell with the Blazer, ask them to total it, and take the money as a down payment on a hybrid station wagon of some sort. I am not in that good an economic position, but it's still really tempting. 

Nobody was injured, thankfully. Jessie got an abrasion from rubbing the back of her hand against the door during the spin, and we were really sore over the weekend, but we both seem to have made a full recovery, or will do so. It actually would've been fun, I think, if we'd had proper safety harnesses and it had been a ride at an amusement park. As it was, it was quite harrowing,and it left me very rattled for a few days.

In every time in the past in which I've ever had an accident of any sort involving a motor vehicle, it's always been just me in the car, and anyone else involved has been in somebody else's car under somebody else's control. This is the first time I've ever been in an accident with someone else under my direct influence, and it scared me very badly, thinking how it could have gone... how Jessie could've been hurt. I spent Friday night and part of Saturday suffering from very serious nightmares, all on the order of the Blazer rolling or hitting the pole head-on, and it took a lot to convince myself that I had not casually jeopardized my wife's life. That really shook me.

I suppose what really gets to me most about it, even now, is that the whole event felt like a message of some sort from Coyote, both in the potential severity and in the ultimately minor loss that resulted. Nobody was hurt, nothing is permanently destroyed, the only losses are material, and even those are ultimately temporary. Really, I'm out about five-hundred dollars in towing, rental car and deductible, but it could've been far, far worse. It felt like a warning of sorts, a reminder that I am neither infallible nor immortal. This could just be me and my broken brain reading patterns where they're not warranted, but that doesn't make it seem any less true.

When I was younger, I never thought I'd find religion. Now I wonder if I'll ever lose it. 

---

Now the good news:

The house refinancing is done. This is a Good Thing on many accounts. First, it means I'm no longer banking with Navy Federal in any fashion. After the way they screwed me over at the beginning of the year, during The Bad, I'm pleased to say that after the fifteenth or so, I'll never have to do business with them again. The big downside is that I still haven't found a bank that's done well by me; my financial experiences have all been either with Companies That Screwed Me or Companies That Haven't Screwed Me Yet. I'm really hoping that's not the norm, but the more I research, the more I suspect it's becoming the case. For now, I'm with National Penn Bank for checking and web-banking, and Ameriquest for my mortgage. They've done well by me... so far.

The other thing, though, is that I can roll the worst of my credit card debt into my mortgage and convert it to secured debt. This is a most excellent thing for many reasons:

• The interest I pay on it is tax-deductible.
• The interest rate I pay is a lot lower than it was on the credit card.
• The principal will count against me far less on my credit report.

All of these are nice, and they definitely help, but the real advantage is that the monthly payment on the new mortgage is about two-hundred-fifty a month less than the combined mortgage and credit card payments were prior. That's an instant savings. Plus, I don't have to pay anything until August, which means another good chunk of change our pockets. Finally, and this is the truly frightening thing, I still have equity left over even after the new
loan. This is pretty freaky to me. Check this out: 

1. I paid USD 81,000 for the house in 2003-12.
2. It valued at USD 85,000 at the time of purchase.
3. I guessed it was worth USD 92,500 when I applied for the refi.
4. The mortgage company guessed USD 120,000 on the initial application.
5. The appraisal company estimated it as USD 132,000 last Friday.

That means that in eighteen months, I've turned a fifty percent profit on my "investment," without even trying. Of course, there are a number of reasons why they might think the house was worth that much. The housing market in general is booming. The job market in the area is theoretically improving. The house has all-new carpet, furnace, paint, oil tank, heater and linoleum. It's in good repair in a fairly nice neighborhood.

Of course, this means that the best thing I ever did for my finances was let the pipes in my house freeze.

I did just get done talking about Coyote Luck, didn't I? In other circles, it would be known as "surfing the Luck Plane." Either way, it's perfect wu wei. Now I just have to avoid taking pride in it. It happened. I didn't make it happen. I shall merely be glad that things worked out for the best. 

Getting back to the nuts and bolts of the new loan, I've been able to pull out about five thousand dollars in equity to do things like repair the sidewalk in front of the house and finally buy a new laptop to replace my current one which is dying by inches with random lockups and reboots. It's money in the bank to pay bills when they arrive and not when the next paycheck clears. It's financial peace of mind.

I'm sure I don't need to describe just how good that feels.

We're not out of the woods, but I think we've finally found the path.