01/01/2004: "New Year's Day"
Music: The hum of a refrigeratorMood: My first cup of coffee
I was going to upload another photo from David Parker’s haunts this morning – Hibernian Hall’s psychic signature by moonlight – but Greymatter always balks when I try to do this from home, using a dial-up. Maybe I’ll go into the office tomorrow, jack into the network, and do it from there.
Resolution No. 1 for the New Year: Get DSL. Or a wireless connection.
The newspaper I work for bought a wireless frequency in an FCC auction a few years ago. Most of our wireless customers are corporate accounts, but we’re looking into whether we can hit my house with the nearest relay tower. We live next to a bike path that runs along a creek deep in a wooded hollow. It’s a pleasant, park-like setting, but not conducive to cell-phone reception from certain providers – Sprint doesn’t work, Nextel does – and so on.
We shall see.
My only planned activity for the day is to drive down to the plantation and make sure the mice aren’t eating the lines on the sailboat. Also, I want to pull the sails out of the cabin and bring them home so we can keep them inside over the winter. Seems to me I saw an ad somewhere for a solar battery that will hook up to my iBook, so I can write while I’m spending time on the boat. That sounds like a good idea, especially since it might allow us to write off our taxes the boat and all related expenses. It’s not a sailboat, you see; it’s a floating office, a writer’s studio that slips silently across the waves on starlit summer nights, driven by the whispers of dreams coming across the darkened water. The United States has some lovely tax laws, if you have a shrewd accountant who knows how to cut all the angles. We do.
We might drive a bit father south today band stop in and see my father. I talked to him on the telephone last night, told him my New Year’s resolution was to start giving huge amounts of cash to my children in 2004, and asked what resolutions he’d made. He failed to take the bait. Alas, he thinks he can take it with him.
We had a quiet New Year’s Eve. We cooked some filets from Omaha Steak that friends sent us for Christmas – if I fall down and start typing gibberish, alert the Mad Cow Squad.
Other than that, that galleys for AMERICAN GOTHIC arrived by Fed Ex yesterday. I’ll be reading those next week and getting them back to the publisher.
Aside to the young writer asking me for help: Email me back the code words MASONIC RITUALS and I’ll assist you.
Selah -- arg -- gak -- #lDRFi$$+==@*$& ... MAD COW!
Michael
