I'm finally getting a few loose ends tied up. I finished up the diaryland template for Violet and got a few care packages mailed off that had completed, but were stagnating here unpacked and unmailed. (I'm shocked I can mail an large envelope and a box full of videotapes and CDs, plus a letter and get some one-cent stamps for less than eight dollars. Apparently, these packages aren't even going out on a slow boat, but rather on the back of a leprous one-legged camel, so they might get there in six months. Maybe. (This reminds me of one of my infamous bogus raving sagas.))

Anyway, that said, now it's time to size up what I have left to do (in no particular order):

• do the proposal for Evita;
• do a diaryland template for Crafty;
• answer Carrot Top's snailmail letter from June;
• start on the website for the new support group;
• work on my personal website;
• clean the car, inside and out (it's getting a tad bit filthy);
• dig up information on starting one of... those... websites for Snowbound;
• install a bigger hard drive in Gillian to store .mp3 files and stuff;
• update my r�sum� and start doing a regular job search again;
• find a way to start walking a few miles a day (while not being run over by traffic);
• set up a guestbook for this journal to see if anybody actually reads it (which, of course, requires me to customize it, else I'll never be satisfied);
• answer some of my infinite backlog of email (there are people who haven't heard from me regualrly since March!);
• set up a new configuration in Pegasus to check all my POP accounts at once, so I can start keeping up with mailing list traffic (amazing the things they implement between version 2.something and 3.1 of a program), not to mention move all my mailing list subscriptions and tell all my correspondants my new addresses at pobox.com;
• research who would be a good webhost for restlessmind.com, since I am somewhat unhappy with Dreamhost now, at least for the direction I want to go in (they're too expensive for databases and CGI and SSIs), and the fact that they had the Hell hacked out of them recently;
• a beefy list of books I need to read, which is still growing at a rapid pace;
• all the quasi-infinite things that have slipped my mind but I will remember in time.

I talked to my grandmother today because unfortunately I had to go tell her to charge her new cell phone with the phone off to condition the battery since it's new, so that meant I had to attach socially for a while. She talked to one of our neighbors recently (something I never do), so of course, true to form for her, she had to share everything with me.

(Actually, I don't like this particular neighbor. He used to (still does? I don't know) have a "computer consultancy and placement firm" out of this little office near here a few years ago, and I wasn't really thrilled with my job, so he called me up to ask me if I was looking.

Sure, I was, I'll talk to about anybody, so I went down to talk to him.

So I went down, and he was telling me about this job where they needed a system administrator. And he was asking me all these questions, some of which I knew the answers to, some of which I knew where to find answers to, and some of which I knew were possible, but I told him I'd have to actually go out and find out how to do it. After all, I am a generalist, as I said earlier. I don't carry things around in my head if I can help it, there's too much noise going on up there anyway.

"If you aren't qualified for the job, why are you even wasting my time talking to me?" he asked me, standing up.

"Uh, hey, you didn't tell me what the job was, and you are the one who asked me down here."

"Well, sorry, but I don't have time for this right now."

It felt good when I saw him broken down on the side of the road about nine months later and I slowed down, and then kept on driving. Spiteful bastard, aren't I?)

"Well, I didn't know he was, but I suspected. I got this letter from him this summer, and, y'know," I replied. I didn't feel like debating the relative merits of my old friends, as if I could have divined my future and that of all my friends while a teenager.

"Well, they said that he was in again, for five years. Drugs, he said."

"Posession or dealing?"

My grandmother shrugged. "He didn't say. He just said it was Carrot Top's third time being caught."

"Yeah," I said. "They'll put you away for that, huh?"

"I guess so. And his brother is going back to Florida to be with his kids."

This took a moment to process. Carrot Top's younger brother was the very picture of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, not to mention a supposed-learning impairment (at least, that's what I seem to remember, maybe that's not true at all). This isn't somebody you'd think who should necessarily have kids.

"Kids? He has kids? How many kids does he have?"

"Five. Two sets of twins, and a single one. None of the three sets of them has the same mother."

I was tripping out. "I gotta go." And I turned, walked out the back door and went home.

So... I don't know if I want to write Carrot Top back, or not. This is not the same kid I used to play around with on the computer, and BBS with, and play AD&D with, and spend summers on the phone with every day while I was exiled to my father's house for my three weeks visitation from the divorce decree.

Am I avoiding things now? I don't want to do that. I know that avoidance doesn't solve my problem, especially when I have a lot to do. And I don't want to blow Carrot Top off -- he was one of my best friends when I was new to this area. It doesn't seem right to just turn my back on him because he made some mistakes.

The problem is that he seems to have been making the mistakes over, and over and over. I would hope that somebody I knew was brighter than that, but perhaps that's a little too much to hope for.

Not like I'm any better, 'eh?

restlessmind