Organizing your writing life

GOING FOR BROKE: I went to Lowe's this evening and shelled out nearly $400 (that's with tax and delivery) for a new washing machine. I have never been so unhappy about a purchase in my life. For a half a second, I entertained not buying one and just walking the dirties down to the laundry room or maybe finding a nearby stream and beating the clothes against a rock. When I first moved out of my parents' house, I lived in an apartment without washer/dryer connections for nearly seven years and I dreaded doing laundry. I swore that would never happen again. The machine will be delivered on Friday at Lowe's convenience, not mine. Sigh.

Since I'm already poor, I decided to really go for broke and impulsively bid on a Macbook on ebay. It's only six months old, still in the box and in mint condition. The guy bought it for work then had to wind up buying a PC instead. I really am over Windows, McAfee Security, viruses, etc. I know...Mac will eventually face viruses, but it's not out of control yet. The auction still has three or four days, so we'll see.

Last night, AT&T's DSL service was out across all of the southeast from about 6:30 to 11 p.m. With all the problems I've been having with my laptop, I thought it was happening on my end at first. Then I tried to call AT&T and got the "all circuits are busy now" message. I turned on the TV and saw that the outage was making news on all channels. Apparently, some piece of equipment in San Antonio failed and...oops...there goes nine states. If terrorists ever decided to really mount a "cyber attack" on the Internet, it'll collapse in seconds.

I've got my set list of poems almost worked out for Poetry at Tech on Thursday. I tried to pull equally from Better To Travel, Slow To Burn and Wake, plus I'll throw in a couple of new ones. I rarely read from Better To Travel these days and surprised myself by picking a rather long one, Water (remembered), to perform for the first time in about four years.