Tuesday, January 22, 2002

last spring

"The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I'm up and showered and dressed and coffeed at the usual time. I have a meeting I want to pop into but it isn't until after ten so I dawdle at little at home, watching the morning TV, answering personal e-mail, checking my work stuff from home. This probably makes me appear to be a slacker at work, drifting in after nine. Yeah. Well.

Work. The presentation is going well I think one minute. The next I'm not so sure. I'm having fun with it, though. And learning stuff. The meeting I sit through is OK, too. Someone asks a question that I can answer for one of the speakers making me think that I'm useful for about one milli-second.

Lunch. I tell SuRu we should eat at Jason's so I can go into Williams Sonoma and set some stuff. I have a frito chili pie and it doesn't sit too well and I can't finish it.

My mom says she is unable to arrange her e-mail messages so she can see new ones. Which means, of course, that she has clicked on sender or something and ordered them that way. Rather than try to tell her on the phone, I go by there and fix it and painstakingly show her. I don't think she will remember but still I show her. I fool around downloading pictures I've sent her and setting up her screen saver to play them. This is something they enjoy. Mom says she is working on some of her miniature projects. When I come in, she is putting pills in those daily plastic bins. She says she has worked some on a loom, too. And she has called my friend's mother to invite her to play games at their church one Friday. Except this week some people are coming to visit them. She really does seem to feel better and that is good. We talk about going to see my niece this summer when she has a new baby. That excites her.

When I get home, FFP has some soup he has gotten at takeout. Turtle soup. (Mock? Do they really make turtle soup with turtles anymore?) He heats it and puts boiled egg and sherry in it and it's quite good. I have some green grapes for dessert.

We watch TV and I dispense with a bunch of the newspapers. Then FFP's computer gets all balled up reconnecting to the network and then we discover other computers in his office down. So, it's boot and fiddle and fool with them until things seem right again. Frustrating, for sure.

I should get to bed early. I have an early meeting tomorrow. But I don't. Because I'm booting machines and then I don't feel like going to sleep. That used to bother me. I'm much calmer about it now. It doesn't kill me to miss a few hours sleep unless I worry about missing the sleep.

Changes are coming. But that's always the case, isn't it? Change is just a fact. This one promises not to be as pleasing as some changes. Some changes push you to a place where you need to be. This doesn't promise to be one of those. But you never know.

JUST TYPING
So many machines.
Interfaces.
Crashing, confusing, confounding.
Can't live without them.