Historic Computer Rehab

The machine on which I do most of my blogging is a nearly eight-year-old Gateway that was a real fire-breather when we bought it.

But its once incredibly huge 40-gig drive is full, and its CD-ROM drive died quite a while back. I was thinking of replacing it.

But the old CPU is still fine for the stuff I do -- word processing, web surfing, e-mail, blogging, and the occasional production on Windows Movie Maker. And the price of a good, new desktop just wasn't in the budget right now.

So I picked up a $25 read-write CD burner at Staples and a new 160 gig internal drive at Best Buy for less than $100. They were really easy to install; my old gateway had two open slots for additional internal drives.

The only tricky part was getting iTunes to find the 20 gigs of music I migrated to the new hard drive, and even that wasn't very hard.

If I had known it was this cheap and easy, I would have done it a couple of years ago.

Haw River Memories

When I die, I want my ashes to be scattered in the Haw River.

(Photo by Dave Horne)

In the first years of our marriage, Laurette and I rented an old post-and-beam farmhouse that stood on 1,100 acres in Chatham County. You could only get to it by a mile-long logging track that meandered between low rocky forested hills and along a creek. The place was wooded with beech, poplar, pine, oak, and understory dogwoods whose white blossoms glowed out of the spring twilights. Our teenage children were babies then -- two of them were born while we lived there -- and we had two young dogs who are now long dead.

If you followed the logging track past the farmhouse -- it was called Way Station Farm, and had once been a stage stop on the way to Pittsboro -- the track led down to the banks of the Haw, eventually fading off into the undergrowth. I followed it through the brush a few times to find the stone foundations and ruined chimneys of houses that had once been like the one we lived in.

In the four years we were there, I think we walked down that track almost every day, winter and summer, our shepherds making wide circles around us through the woods, our children usually in backpacks and the baby jogger. When we reached the river, the dogs would have a swim, and the kids would throw sticks for them into the water. Sam caught his first fish there, a small greenish catfish. We threw it back.

In spring and summer the ticks were ferocious, and we spent part of most evenings pulling ticks off the dogs with tweezers and dropping them into a small glass of rubbing alcohol. We checked the kids and ourselves, marking the day of every tick bite on the calendar in case of Lyme Disease or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

But there were no mosquitoes, probably because every standing pool rippled with tadpoles that ate the larvae. What few survived the tadpoles were taken by the dragonflies that patrolled our yard, or by the quiet bats at dusk.

One spring the jungle of wisteria that was choking to death a nearby stand of loblolly pines bloomed so intensely that if you stood in the middle of it you could hardly take a breath, the sweetness was so overpowering. The bees and other insects were intent on the nectar, so that you could stand in the swarm without them paying you any attention.

In high summer the fireflies would settle in the trees after their dipping twilight mating flights and just pulse, their yellow glow contrasting with the thick icy white of the Milky Way. Late at night the whippoorwills would wake us up with their loud, repeating cries. In winter, you could often see the barred owl who lived nearby, and through the bare trees there were always a couple of turkey vultures circling in the pale sky.

Wouldn't it be a terrible waste if a place such as this were clearcut for a gated suburb? Don't you think places like this should be preserved for generations to enjoy?

I do. That's why I support Citizens for Haw River State Park.

Hope You Enjoyed Your Day

Yesterday was a good day for some people. Mr. Sun spent quality dad time with his boys, took a nap, and made some cute graphics about living in Greensboro. Ed Cone went shopping for consumer goods with his son, and got to make fun of Circuit City afterwards. On Facebook, one of my colleagues updated his status to "having the best day ever!"

Me, I spent the morning alternately feeling like I was going to throw up and shouting obscenities at myself, because we let my daughter run out of gas in our Prius, a block from home.

Did you know that if your Prius runs out of gas, and the big battery gets depleted from driving only on electric power, you have to get a new battery? And the battery costs $4000? And I don't have $4,000? And Sam is going to college next year, and Madeline the year after that?

So I spent the morning getting the car towed to the dealer, hoping against hope that all was well, and shouting the f-word (sometimes vivace, sometimes lento, always fortissimo) at myself all the way home from Rice Toyota.

The afternoon I spent in the 18" spidery crawlspace underneath my kitchen, feeling a lot like Charles Bronson's character in the Great Escape -- you know, the tunneler with claustrophobia.

I had discovered some serious decay caused by our house's previous owner building a deck attached to the rear of the house, which allowed moisture to penetrate and rot the support beams. All this had to be fixed by building a new concrete-block support pier and replacing the rotted beams, in a space accessible only by wiggling 25 feet over and under a century's worth of plumbing, electrical wires, and steel ducts. Lots of those white spider egg sacs this time of year. Thousands of them. They feel kind of tickly on your head and down the back of your neck and under your shirt.

Anyhow, I got the pier built, and took a call (while under the house) from the Toyota technician. All's well with the car (which I still like a lot, so please keep your schadenfreude to yourself, hybridophobes).

And I'm going to enjoy this afternoon by constructing and replacing beams with my new friends the spiders.

Enjoy your nap.

Update (Sunday, 7 pm): I emerge victorious over spiders and rot.