Well, this has been an odd month. More bad than good, frankly. And I'm not sure what I mean by month, now that I think about it. September and October have run together. I'll just call it Septober and be done with it. Or Octember. Doesn't matter.

I'm out here, for what? I'm making money at it, I suppose, but what kind of life is this? It's not much of one, even when you divorce it from questions about the morality of war in general and this war specifically. Because I was out here, I couldn't be there for a good friend when his mother died. I did what I could, but I was a world away. All I could give was money. Nobody deserves to lose someone they love, and how much more awful is it when you're under 20, and just barely out on your own at all? I shudder to think of where he'd be at now if it weren't for his network of friends. Not even me, specifically, but all of us. Say what you will about the furry fandom, but there are good people in it. We defend our own.

I suppose that went out on a tangent. That's OK. My brain is running in sixth gear lately, and there's all at once not enough time and entirely too much. So, to stay sane, I write. Mostly just factual noding right now. I've started a series on computer collecting. The main w/u is sitting in a scratchpad of mine. It's mostly done, but needs some ZAM that it doesn't have right now. Next in my queue is Advice on buying a used Silicon Graphics system, followed by a bunch of hardware esoterica, then probably something on Mac and NeXT machines. I really should do something on HP and IBM kit but I just don't know it well enough. Guess I need some. And some Acorn kit. My beat-up old Archimedes A4000 just isn't the best example. But they want 800 pounds for an Iyonix, holy cow. Between the weaksauce US Dollar and across-the-pond shipping, that's two grand, or better. And VirtualAcorn runs on Windows, which would mean I'd need to build a dedicated machine and buy a Windows license (or, I suppose, recycle my current Windows NT or Windows 2000 one...) Yuk.

But anyway, this is a weird month-pair. Too much stuff, not enough stuff. I'm trying not to go mad.

Keep on keeping on.