Lhude sing goddam
Oct. 24th, 2005 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishSleet outside, all grey and cold and miserable. Time to break out the winter coat. I'm just glad I stopped to change into long pants this morning.
Still no computer; going to swing by PCLand (home of computer equipment and salespeople with iffy English; between me not being entirely sure what I want and not being entirely able to communicate it, this should be an Experience) after work.
I've been amusing myself by learning perl at work (again). It's incredibly useful for things like 'change these forty config files so that they point at a different server' or 'make twenty copies of this batch file with a slightly different filename for each.' It's also fun, in that way that developing new or long-forgotten abilities is, and the programs I've been writing are short enough that even the debugging is fun (that is, the things work properly after only a bit of hammering on).
Spent, um, weekend before last in Arkansas, at Pop's ninetieth birthday party. Pop's always been exceptionally healthy (despite a limp left over from polio when he was a baby), so seeing him at ninety, three days out of the hospital for a UTI and coughing a lot (the words 'congestive heart failure' were bandied about in low tones) was something of a shock. He seemed to be doing a lot better by the time Dad and I left on Sunday, though, so maybe he'll see ninety-one after all. And despite Pop's condition this trip to Helena was a lot less harsh than the one at Thanksgiving: partly because Gram's death finally hit me then and it's sunk in by now, but mostly because Susan's college-age kids (my cousins), Paul and Alice, were there. Paul's doing a largeish (semester-long? year-long?) project on technological innovations in utopian science fiction; I pointed him at Dispossessed and Trouble on Triton but I don't know if he'll have time to read them, and Alice was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. So, y'know, peers. Nice to have.
I'm exceeding happy that I went to the party: among other things, I finally got a chance to tell Pop thanks for casually handing me his copy of the Foundation trilogy when I was about ten, and thus kickstarting me into the world of Real Grown-Up science fiction.
Still no computer; going to swing by PCLand (home of computer equipment and salespeople with iffy English; between me not being entirely sure what I want and not being entirely able to communicate it, this should be an Experience) after work.
I've been amusing myself by learning perl at work (again). It's incredibly useful for things like 'change these forty config files so that they point at a different server' or 'make twenty copies of this batch file with a slightly different filename for each.' It's also fun, in that way that developing new or long-forgotten abilities is, and the programs I've been writing are short enough that even the debugging is fun (that is, the things work properly after only a bit of hammering on).
Spent, um, weekend before last in Arkansas, at Pop's ninetieth birthday party. Pop's always been exceptionally healthy (despite a limp left over from polio when he was a baby), so seeing him at ninety, three days out of the hospital for a UTI and coughing a lot (the words 'congestive heart failure' were bandied about in low tones) was something of a shock. He seemed to be doing a lot better by the time Dad and I left on Sunday, though, so maybe he'll see ninety-one after all. And despite Pop's condition this trip to Helena was a lot less harsh than the one at Thanksgiving: partly because Gram's death finally hit me then and it's sunk in by now, but mostly because Susan's college-age kids (my cousins), Paul and Alice, were there. Paul's doing a largeish (semester-long? year-long?) project on technological innovations in utopian science fiction; I pointed him at Dispossessed and Trouble on Triton but I don't know if he'll have time to read them, and Alice was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. So, y'know, peers. Nice to have.
I'm exceeding happy that I went to the party: among other things, I finally got a chance to tell Pop thanks for casually handing me his copy of the Foundation trilogy when I was about ten, and thus kickstarting me into the world of Real Grown-Up science fiction.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-24 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 06:04 pm (UTC)Yeah. I'd never had anything in common with any of my relatives before: the ones I see consistently are the ones who never left small-town Arkansas. It's good to know that I'm not the only black sheep of the family.