pring birds are yelling from snowy trees this morning. It’s spring, despite wind, snow, roaring wood stove, and other evidence to the contrary. I’m taking today off of work. I’ve got nine stitches. I can do whatever I want.

I finished re-reading Microserfs by Douglas Copeland yesterday. This book was important to me at a formulative time. It helped convince me it was cool to be a nerd. It introduced other tech-inclined women to my humanities-girdled world. It drew a model of unashamed geekery, separate and outside of a traditionally-female need for perfection and image. It was pretty liberating.

An excerpt:

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

* 680X0 assembly language
* Cats
* Early ’80s haircut bands
* “My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group”
* License plate slogans of America
* Plot lines from The Monkees
* The death of IBM

Susan’s an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school – and the punch line is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes.
…
Susan’s a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.

Thanks for your kind comments last night during my Dark Night of the Beer. Friendly words were unexpected and wonderful. I often forget that there are people out there. Hello imaginary people. It’s as though my fictional heroes (Elizabeth Bennet! Harriet The Spy! Meg from Wrinkle in Time!) suddenly started interacting.

Off to haul wood one-armed and scour Craigslist for cars. What would your Dream Jeopardy! categories be?

runken blogging is ALWAYS a good idea.
I had minor surgery today, removing a non-dangerous-kind tumor from my shoulder. So, anesthetics. And beer, which also helps.

Want to lose a pound? There’s no faster way.

I’m taking tomorrow off work to search for a car and get my shit together. It’s been one hell of a week. Hell being the operative word.

Here’s some good stuff:

• new laptop. macbook duo 2gig ram. eat my processing dirt.
• friends.
• tattoo. I’m gonna have one hell of a scar. Researching scar-covering tats is keeping me entertained. There are some wicked literary tattoos out there.
• drunk. did I mention drunk?

Love ye all. Thanks for support.
xoxo
Ericalibrarydork

One more blizzard. One last blizzard. There have been storms since I returned, in one form or another. The snow is a fact. The storm is a fact.

Un-ignorable when you need to drive/shovel/haul wood.

By blizzard, I mean: Sideways snow total-white zero-detail pixelation of horizon, foreground, sky, and earth.

By shovel, I mean: The taller-than-me pile of shoveled/plowed effluent framing the driveway.

By haul wood, I mean: To keep the house warm.

By drive, I mean: My sexy rental car. To replace the Nissan I slid into a guardrail during the LAST blizzard.

I’m going to plunge into the snow for a few hours, shovel it into submission, and face the evening. Wish me luck.