Adventures

Gainesville

Happy Birthday, Marty! I have sent you something, but it won't get there until tomorrow at the earliest. And thanks for the comment on the Adventure Game thread. I'm glad you remember it, and how amazing it was. (Tell us about Lee and Roger!)

Bill remembers it well too, and it's amazing how many sig blocks I see with a variation of "You are standing..." I was online a little earlier than that (OCLC in the library) but other than an infamous apple cake recipe cleverly hidden in a bibliographic record, I'd never seen anything fun online prior to Sandy showing me Adventure at work, and its interface was a Telex printer! I never forgot it, and when Chris gave me a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy game a few years later, I was already to hit the ground running with it, which in turn, inspired me to make to my CAI tenure project into the form of a game...

Worn out after a long hard day of Vacation. It's pretty obvious that I will have much less time to waste once it is actually my own. Did all my routines, including towels and sheets. Went out to run some errands in the midafternoon, only to discover it was perfectly beastly HOT. It hadn't been all that bad when we were downtown on Sunday, and Saturday afternoon when I shopped it had been perfectly, miraculously glorious-- clear skies, dry air, heavy breeze. I felt like dancing in the Publix parking lot, but thought the better of it. This made the contrast with today all the more hideous. I drastically cut short my errands when I realized getting to and from my car was a life-threatening journey. The all-important liquor run was accomplished, though, and the Publix dash to pick up a few things needed for the pasta recipe.

This latter, which I dub Rata-Pasta, was good, but didn't blow me away like the one from the FC79 back cover one did. Perhaps part of this was due to my having lost my grip on sanity sometime around 5:30 and sticking my face into a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia Lowfat Frozen Yogurt. ("I'll just have a few little scrapes of the spoon, it will energize me..." Do I sound like a Cathy strip, or what? To my credit, I only ate half of it, but it was a near thing. The POINT being, I'll reserve judgement on Rata-Pasta until I'm decently hungry. It also left major cleanup debris in its wake, which I was still dealing with after opening the bar at 10:30. I resorted to setting the timer for 15 minutes, and as usual, what seemed insurmountable turned out to be just a minute of two longer than that.

Once again, no time to watch famous Eroica. However, my inner recording, unlike any other media, becomes clearer and sharper as the days go by. Thanks for picking up "famous," Sandy. I know your grasp of the classical canon puts mine to shame, and you could beat the pants off me at any drop the needle game (now there's an expression about to disappear). It's been years since I listened to that stuff regularly, and undoubtedly, the inner jukebox is the poorer for it.

I would have gotten the "ABC News" quote eventually-- I'd narrowed it down to Don Henley/ Eagles and Elvis Costello, on the basis of snarkiness and rhyme pattern-- but when I asked Bill about it, he headed off to the Web Oracle, and had the answer before I'd even cleared the table. I was surprised it was on that late of an album. And here's my favorite Elvis C quote: "Well, I used to be disgusted / Now I try to be amused" Ring any bells?

Beautiful pictures of salad prep! They could easily be used in the magazine-- way cool.

Mom and Sandy, thanks to both for the input on earth-shredders. As I'd feared, there's not one out there for the likes of me. On the other hand, my "garden" amounts to two four-squares, and another patch that the lawn has completely reclaimed. If I were to try to hire anyone to till it, they would laugh. I think I need to buy myself a pick axe and just go at it early in the morning, 15 minutes at a time.

Speaking of which, you did good today, Mom. Got your routines done. I know all about the problems of trying to throw stuff away that is full of memories. But we must keep at it, lest the stuff crush us. Open, empty space is beautiful.

If only I had some. Alas, my comics collection project suffered a set-back today-- I realized I'd overlooked a three-foot shelf of the stuff hidden behind the DVD's under the TV. Originally, I could still see the tops of the books, but then I started piling up more on top of the foreground, and, well... This meant a major rethinking of the shelving in here. I got most of it done. And I'm pretty sure that is the last of my comics-related holdings! (knock knock)

More to say about both posts today, but it's now shockingly late. I know I'll tend to rock around the clock when on vacation, if left to my own devices. With just a week, that's not a good idea.