January 26, 2003

Cancer
Warren Zevon is about to die.

''I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years,'' he told Letterman. ''It's one of those phobias that didn't pay off.''

Poor guy.
[permalink ]

Basement

For those of us who have been getting all proud of ourselves because thought we were becoming less slovenly than we were when we were students, cleaning the basement is a humbling experience. It seems that even marrying a non-slob hasn't helped me as much as I had thought. We have boxes of crap down here whose contents we haven't even wondered about since moving in a year and a half ago. Mason jars and pint glasses, a FedEx box of cocktail napkins marked "Extremely Urgent", review materials for the bar exam K took a year and a half ago. There are two hand-me-down printers I had completely forgotten about, sitting in boxes under the stairs, hopefully ignorant of the one we bought about six months ago. (I feel only a little less like an idiot than I might otherwise because both old printers are alleged by their original owners to have suffered subtle mechanical failures, and probably wouldn't work anyway.)

Empty boxes were taking up about half of the storage space in the basement. Small storage units occupying a larger one, thus making it small, too. The lava lamp on the fireplace down here hasn't been turned on in at least six months, so that's running. The ridiculous teal naugahide glider I'm sitting on (the internet works from down here!) has been covered in crap, unused.

There are two old Macs down here. The 7200 was my college graduation present from my mom, and got me quite nicely through grad school, where it served variously as my primary research machine, my first Linux box, the first box on which I ever played with Python, C++, and relational databases, and the first non-food object I ever owned that depreciated by two orders of magnitude. The SE/30 was a hand-me-down from a faculty member at Lehigh who had moved on to bigger and better computers, but hey, this was a $4,000 machine when it was new thirteen years ago. It now runs Scheme and MORE. If I could connect it to the internet then I'd have a pretty kickass blogging machine, but alas, the ports out the back of the thing are pretty old, and none accept Ethernet. The 7200's disk won't spin up, and the SE/30's screen is gone. Sad.

There are two air conditioners down here, one that we use every summer and the other that has sat idle in the basement for about a year. The latter has a funky 220V plug, and currently serves as a table for the 7200's monitor. The former is unbelievably heavy, and I haven't exercised regularly since the one day in the fall that I moved it from the bedroom upstairs to its current spot atop the dropcloth pile in the corner. The furnace is super loud.

O, how Lighting and cheap Plastic shelving make everything Better.
[permalink ]

©2001-2007 Josh Daghlian, All Rights Reserved.