-- Friday, March 10, 2000 --

11:32 p.m. The world I depend on is shockingly fragile and capricious and ever so delicately balanced on the pinhead of a programmer who has long since cashed in and cackled all the way to the spa.

Thanks to some kind of grit in the gears, I have a very different working environment today -- and it's hard to realize that the frames can change in the blink of an eye, and not a single thing is safe and secure in a glass-fronted universe. But hey! It could be worse.

I've lost all my old mail, but I'm still able to receive new mail. I have an alternate, slower browser, and yea, my window to the universe may have gotten scratched up a little, but verily, it's still there. Do you ever sometimes wish that everything could always be the same -- that things didn't break and people didn't move away and feelings were programmed and programs made sense?

The computer troubles I've been having have actually made me muse (for a very short moment right before dinner) that maybe I'd better get a secondary hobby. We may not always have free, dependable browsers, for instance. If you're addicted to email or Xeney's forum or the doggie cam, maybe you'd better take a break every now and then. A real walk in the real fresh air; maybe say hello to a real person.

Because it takes so little to wreck so much so fast. One minute you're all over the globe, looking at the pretty pictures and the next minute you're back to your notebook looking up the serial numbers and the passwords all over again.

One day Bill Gates may prevent us from using his little browser window for free and we will have a decision to make.

I have to tell you that I never really appreciated sturdy, conveniently bound and portable books until I had my fill of trying to download and format and print out reading material from the web. And I also have to point out that no book on the earth has ever just disappeared from my hands when I turned the page, or erased all its words while it sat on the shelf.

Which is what basically happened to me and my words last night.

So I'm glad I've been printing out a nice color rendition of these pages every day and putting them in a three-ring binder, just in case.

In case the power goes off. In case Dreamhost raises their rates. In case a hacker comes in the dead of night and makes off with my vowels. In case a worm gnaws through my modem. In case I lose my way and try to pretend that this is but a piffle; a mere meringue.

Meanwhile, we party on thin ice. And the kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol.