Home from Chicago, after a fine visit and some other stuff.

I love the train. Pity other humans are allowed onto it.

I write in a lovely old DOS program called Textra. I like Textra. It's simple, it's comfortable, it can do a lot of powerful things without making the common tasks more complicated, and it never ever tries to do anything "for" me. And I don't, by and large, have a problem with writing on elderly laptops scrounged from friends' disused equipment ( Read more... )

Yes, it's novel-research question time again ( Read more... )

If you were meeting someone inside Union Station, what feature or landmark would you tell them to wait by?

I remember Union Station as being huge, impressive, and loud, but it's been a long time since I was there with time to look around, and the details are plenty fuzzy. Seems like there ought to be a big fancy clock or some other unique ( Read more... )

Saturday, I finally got around to cleaning the downspouts. Not a fun task at the best of times, and not made better by the fact that I still can't lift my left arm to the side past about 45 degrees. Guess what position most of the work required? The center downspout was actually clear; the blockage is up at the gutter (again -- really regret ( Read more... )

Yes, it's more techie-type questions for my novel research ( Read more... )

Still out of town ( Read more... )

So, the housemate will be back later today, and my extended vacation from reality will be at an end. This is good; while I've enjoyed having the house to myself, it's been long enough that another human to help wrangle the cats will be very welcome ( Read more... )

So, as mentioned in the previous post, I woke up Saturday morning inclined to write. The current laptop, kindly donated by the generous cat_paw, was salvaged from the scrapheap where it had landed due to a "bad screen". Since I started using it several months ago, however, it's worked just fine. Until Saturday, when I got a sample of the problem. The ( Read more... )

For the third time this week, I played 45+ minutes of racquetball as the cardio part of my workout. (Note that when I say "played racquetball", what I mean is I stood in the big white room and tried to keep the ball moving with the racquet and not with my face.) I'm excessively bad at it, but it's good exercise and I have fun, which is what ( Read more... )