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( Cut to spare the uninterested from several paragraphs of blatant geekery. )

I feel good about all the stuff I've gotten done today. The bedroom is almost entirely clean (that was a good many hours of work) and I sorted through all the boxes and bags of cable in the computer room, so that's looking a little bit better. Part of me wishes I had gone with Moira to the faire today, but a slightly larger part is glad I stayed home and cleaned. Maybe in a few more weeks I'll have the whole house clean and I'll be able to go out and do things, or play games at home, or even study for my yet-outstanding certification exams, and not feel guilty about not cleaning up. At that point, you may see more of me online and out and about.

Until then, wish me luck cleaning and I'll wish you well in your pursuits my friends. 'Till next...

(no subject)

On a related note to the tech stuff in the previous post, this is an astoundingly funny site at 3:00 in the morning.

www.routergod.com

Ever want Arnold Scwarzenegger to tell you about PIX firewalls, or Gillian Anderson to tell you about VLans? You got it! It's all right there, and so much more...

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My sweetie and I were talking about something that I decided I needed to post here about and get comments on. She talked about how most of her life before a certain point was a blur; that things only come into sharp focus at a certain point. I realized that this is true for me as well. For me, a lot of my life before a very specific time is rather a blur. That's why if you ask me what year I graduated from high school or what my experience in the various elementary schools I attended was like, I'd be hard pressed to tell you. There's a sort of fog obscuring the details of everything before November of 2002. I had started keeping a journal a few months before that (I just paged through a bit of it; wow. Was that really me?), but November is where my memories start coming out from under that haze. November is when I went to Midwest Fur Fest.

I was terrified. Honestly, I don't know how I even managed to get the courage to go all by myself. Maybe my concept of furry culture was so wonderful that it managed to overcome what was, quite literally, near crippling shyness. Maybe the idea of being with other furries was less frightening than being with a large group of people, even fen. Despite knowing that I wasn't going to walk in and find anthropomorphic animals walking around the hotel, I still managed somehow to be slightly disappointed when I didn't.

I still didn't have the courage to actually talk to anybody. For two days I just lurked around panels and the dealer's room, driving an hour each way (and taking an extra two hours on Sunday because I forgot my badge and drove home to get it). I almost left the con without having talked to anybody apart from saying hi to (and getting a hug from) a fursuiter that left me feeling all warm and fuzzy.

But somewhere on Sunday I saw somebody whose name I recognized from the LAFF directory. Someone who sounded sort of like me; into computers and books and gaming. I saw his badge, approached without thinking about what I was doing (that way I wouldn't scare myself away) and said hi to daveqat. That moment led, either directly or indirectly, to my meeting nearly everyone in my life right now. My life changed dramatically on that day in November of 2002. In my memories, it's, in a metaphorical sense, like a switch from black and white to color.

I would love to know, dear readers: do any of you have the same sort of demarcation in your life? A separation between 'the vivid now' and 'the rest of the past'? If so, what moment was it? Inquiring dogs want to know...