Image is an American Toad singing in Chatfield Hollow, CT.
MARCH 23, 2009: if you are wondering why i haven't posted any monsters or updated the MotM writeup in the last few days, it's because i just got back from National People's Action 2009 with my family. It was a great weekend, meeting and working with hundreds of people from around the country who are all working towards change in their own communities. Our own group came away from the weekend with considerable new energy, motivation and lots of ideas on how to more effectively organize and plan actions to MAKE THINGS BETTER! There will be a writeup on this as soon as i can organize my notes.
FEBRUARY 2009: OMG i bought a computer! Yes, after nearly a year and a half without a computer to call my own - indeed, every writeup that i submitted during that time was written on and posted from a BlackBerry, which probably goes a long way towards explaining the searing pains i keep having in my left thumb - i went and spent some of our tax refund on a new writing machine. It is all wow and stuff like that. And, um, it's a netbook, which if you'll read that writeup you'll find that makes me some kind of hypocrite, only not quite because i did a lot of thinking, especially after all the responses to my writeup that pointed out that portability is a huge advantage, and i kind of smacked my head and said "hey, *I* need portability AND my computing needs are close to nothing since i don't play that many video games anymore!" not to mention that i have like zero budget because we're fucking poor people can you dig it, and every time i manage to save up a hundred bucks we have some emergency plumbing work or the car gets totaled or whatever, meaning the total amount i could ever afford to pay for a computer was about $400 and good luck finding a "real" small laptop at that price so the search was on for the netbook with a keyboard i could live with and lo, the HP Mini 1000 won out and god DAMN, this thing rocks. Yes, that's a real sentence. Sort of. And indeed, i'm still adjusting to the keyboard but i do like it and hopefully this means that pretty soon now i'll start producing good node content like i used to, only don't count your chickens because i've got two kids now and a full-time job and at least two books that i need to write damn soon.
And yes, i will update the netbook writeup eventually. Feel free to bug me about it if i don't.
"Hladik was past forty. Apart from a few friends and many routines, the problematic pursuit of literature constituted the whole of his life; like every writer, he measured other men's virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do." -- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Secret Miracle"
The thing about Borges is that he has stolen every cool idea you will ever have, and cleverly arranged to have written them better than you could ever hope to, sixty years ago.