Welcoming the Millennium
January 1, 2001
10:55 a.m.
We welcomed the New Year quietly--just the three of us. No champagne. No party hats. I've been getting over a cold I picked up in Louisville over Christmas (thanks, Jeff), so we probably wouldn't have gone anywhere even if we had been planning to. First we had dinner, and then a game of scrabble. Lisa made a batch of brownies, so we stopped for a snack halfway through the scrabble game. Lisa won, by the way. Brigid almost beat me. Then we pulled out the blow pops and proceeded to make sure all of our mouths and tongues got to the perfect shade of royal blue. At midnight we gave each other New Years kisses, and switched the TV to see 2001, a Space Odyssey. It was 3:30 by the time we made it to bed.   I had planned to be a lot further along on the book by now. But fate is a strange creature. First was Christmas in Louisville with family. That was in the plan. Then we came back and I spent a couple days helping Brigid get her room straightened up, and piddling a little with the book--things basically according to plan. This is where it was supposed to pick up, though. Wrong. The cold I had was complete with one of those low-grade fevers where you end up sitting around looking like a lobotomy patient. So I read a little. And I watched both Louisville and the Colts lose games they really should have won. Finally, Saturday I felt better. So I started by messing with my page a bit--my old writing avoidance trick, you know--next thing I know I get an error message saying "Hey, stupid? Yeah, you in the big brown sweater. This directory you asked me to delete is supposed to be shared. Do you really want me to kill it?" Naturally, I replied that no, I didn't want it killed at all. It's a perfectly fine directory, and if I want it gone I'll ask for the hit myself. This, however, turned out to not be a good sign. To make an already too long story shorter, something ate all the directories in my data partition. I was ... miffed ... for a good hour or so. In the end it wasn't so bad. I had everything backed up to a point a few weeks ago when I restored the system, and the fact that I had been a slug for the few days prior to this meant I didn't progress very far. I lost most of the work I had done on the novel--only a few hours, though. And I lost the last draft of Ghandi. But I had that in hard copy, so it took me about a day to restore that. I usually backup my stuff every few weeks, sometimes going as long as a month and a half between episodes. This is a mistake, folks. Take me word for it. Back up early, and back up often. It could have been a lot worse ... So, here I am, sitting in my basement, clearing the slate for 2001. I'll be changing my tracking calendar next. And I'll plot my course. And I'll put together a couple submission packets. I feel oddly refreshed. Maybe the restore of the system and the cleansing of my data give me that feeling of a new start. Or maybe it's that I'm coming up out of a four-day funk where I haven't felt good, and I'm in one of those "Just happy to be alive" moments where most everything is good. Or maybe it's the quarter inch dusting of snow that covered the ground an makes everything look fresh. I don't know. But I do know that I'm looking forward to 2001. Good things are going to happen in this year. For me. For a few others. I just know it. Have a great year.  Got a Resolution? Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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Opportunities are disguised by hard work, so most people don't recognize them. Ann Landers |
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