Back of the Envelope

I moved into my new apartment on Thursday, although I must say that I'm using the phrase "move in" loosely. I basically brought only the stuff I could fit in my little Saturn ION, mainly clothes, an inflatable mattress, and a few other essentials (read: electronics). The rest of my worldly possessions will take at least a week to catch up with me.

I had arranged things so that the afternoon I moved into my apartment the ComCast would come by with my cable modem and the self-install kit. So I didn't have a bed, a couch, a television, dishes, or much of anything else... By God, I would have fast Internet. Or so I thought. Turns out that the cable internet isn't working. The Cable connection light on the modem isn't blinking rather than steady, so the problem is either with the cable or the modem. So I bought a TV to test the cable. Okay, I also wanted a small television for my bedroom, so I spent $90 and got a TV/VCR combo. It turns out the cable is fine, so either the Internet signal is attenuated (they're at different frequencies and have different power requirements as well) or the modem is defunct. I called up COMCAST and after they had asked me to try all the inane solutions which are in the startup manual and which I had already tried ten times, they promised to send someone by to fix it. I had to schedule it for Saturday, since I didn't want to have to take off work to get my cable fixed my first week. We'll save that for getting my furniture delivered at least.

Not to panic, however. This is Boston, and I live in a community filled with college students and young professionals. There are at least five wireless networks visible from where I am, three of which are unsecured. I don't like piggybacking, but it's not my fault that my cable modem is broken.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my first few days back in Boston. I went to my old church on Friday night, which had a free concert as part of Boston's First Night festivities. This concert featured fiddler extraordinaire, Hanneke Cassel, who is a member of Park Street Church. I bought a CD and got her autograph on it. I had met her once before, but I'd have been surprised if she remembered me. I did, however, happen to meet a couple of folks who did remember me, mostly friends from MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship. It was good to meet them again. Some of them were considerably surprised that I was back in town. I haven't tried to keep it a secret, but I suppose I haven't really announced it.

One thing I didn't miss about Boston were the roads. I know I've commented on it before, but it really is awful. You come to an intersection where no fewer than seven roads come together. There's not one stoplight you have to go through, but three. You know you have to bear left, but is that at the second stoplight or the third. And God help you if you turn left, because then you're on the wrong road entirely, and when you manage to turn around to make another try (usually involving circling the block or else a clumsy three point turn on a side road--if you're really lucky, you find a parking lot with a stop light), you find that making a left turn onto the road you want is forbidden from where you are. Did this really happen to me? I'm hashing a couple of the times together, but I'm not exaggerating. Of course, what's almost as bad is that the street names change every few miles. This is, of course, due to the fact that the Boston area consists of a lot of little towns which grew up during the days of horse and buggy, if not plain walking. So it made sense that the road is called Lexington Street in Waltham and Waltham Street in Lexington (see, in Waltham it's the street that leads to Lexington, in Lexington it's the street that leads to Waltham). I'm not sure if it changes to Lexington Street again further out, but it wouldn't surprise me. I've found at least one other Lexington Street, but I wasn't quite sure where I was at the time.

I'll post a few pictures tomorrow, so you can see my living conditions. The place is nice, but my furnishings are not.

This is a photo Ed took of one of the knights in the jousting exhibition.

Update: Oops, I did it again. The image source was wrong, so you couldn't see the picture. It's fixed now. Also, I've corrected the misspelling of Photoblogging in all three posts. Darn Internet Explorer's autofill anyway! Darn it to heck!

This picture, also taken by Ed, is from the Falconry Exhibition, which was the most educational thing we saw at the festival. It was a lot of fun. Most of the birds were pretty small, but there were one or two that were downright huge.

Once again, welcome to photoblogging week here at Back of the Envelope. Now that I've put up about as many Christmas photos as I think you can handle, here's one from the Renaissance Festival I mentioned earlier:

That's Hope riding a camel. She had a lot of fun at the Renaissance festival. This picture was also taken by our friend Ed.

Remember, I'm moving this week, so I'm giving photos rather than my usual posting. This is the last Christmas photo I'll be putting up:

That's both my nieces, Hope on the left and Kara on the right, the daughters of Sarah and Bekah, respectively. This picture was taken by Ed, a family friend.

As a reminder, since I'm moving and not blogging, I'm posting a few pictures while I'm gone.

This is another one of Kara, asleep on my arm. She wasn't sure what she thought of me at first, but we've reached the point where she wants me to pick her up even when I'm trying to work at the computer. Maybe especially so. She likes banging on the keyboard. My mother took this picture as well.

I'm moving this week. I was just going to head out and not put up anything, but I'm paranoid that if I do that I'll lose all my readership, so I'm going to be putting up something every day. Since I'm nowhere near a computer, these posts are going to be scheduled beforehand. And since I don't have anything good to write about--at least not enough to fill up a week--I'll just put up some cute pictures. Such as this:

That's my niece, Kara, Bekah's daughter, in her Santa hat. She has the best smile. My mother took this picture.

It's Christmas Eve today, and I'm wishing you all a Merry Christmas. I will be moving next week, so I doubt you'll see many posts from me in the near future. Enjoy your holiday, and hopefully I'll be posting again before the new year starts.

Now that I have an apartment, it's time for me to move again. What fun! I have a move-in date of December 30th, and while it'll be pretty easy for me to move myself there by that time, moving the rest of my worldly possessions will be a bit more difficult. I'll have to see what I can do.

Well, folks, I'm back in Louisiana. Despite my best efforts, I didn't completely avoid the snow, and I had lots of fun driving in Boston on my way back. But I did make it, and my late afternoon flight wasn't even delayed. Which was interesting, since I ended up sitting in the area with folks whose flights had been delayed three or four hours.

In any case, I have an apartment now, so I'm ready to move to Boston. I haven't yet figured out how I'm going to get all of my stuff to Boston, so it's basically going to be just me and no furniture for a little while unless I can work that out.

I was going to tell you an interesting anecdote about two girls whom I met while waiting for the plane who didn't know each other but who went to the same college and had a lot of the same friends, and who also had seats right next to each other on their upcoming flight. It was an interesting coincidence, but I was more or less a casual observer, so it's not even my anecdote to tell (well, aside from the highly condensed teaser I just shared). I will say that I don't believe in coincidences any more than I believe in fate. I do believe in God. Something like that makes you wonder whether there might be a purpose to such a meeting--although I'm quick to add that trying to discern said purpose is usually futile unless it reveals itself.

The T was running smoothly today, so I was able to get out on the town with minimal difficulty. I went to Park Street Church for the evening service and ran into a few old friends.

Anyway, I noticed I forgot to do the Weekly Webcomic Update. I'll get that up later tonight.

Well, I'm about to head out today: get some lunch, maybe do some shopping, and visit my old church for the evening service. I'm hoping that the T is running again, but as I wasn't able to get information on it, I really don't know. If not, I'll probably be back here sooner than I expected.

While I had fun at MIT, getting home was a bear. Apparently, there was a fire on the Red line, the subway line that runs from MIT to Alewife (which is where I parked on my way into Boston). The fire was supposed to be at the Harvard Square station, which is where all the ambulances and fire trucks were located when I went by, although to hear people who were there talk about it, they saw more smoke at the Davis Square station, the next station up the line. In any case, they shut down everything between Park Street and Alewife and had buses running between them. Kendall Square, where the MIT station is located, was so crowded that I figured it'd take a couple of buses before they could move everyone (and after waiting ten minutes, I had yet to see any buses), so I walked up to Harvard Square (about two miles, a forty minute walk) and got some dinner, then caught the shuttle to Alewife. The bus leaving Harvard Square was much less crowded since its closer to the edge of the T system. I didn't get back to the hotel until 6:30 pm, about two and a half hours after I set out from MIT. But you have to allow for the half an hour it took me to get dinner.

I was riding the T, Boston's subway, today when I saw a type of advertisement I hadn't seen before. Instead of a single ad at one of the stations, it was a series of images along the route between stations. Once my eyes caught on, I realized that it was an animation, like a flip book, and I was rather surprised that I was able to see it as such, when the movement of the train was what created the effect. Overall, it was pretty cool.

I woke up this morning feeling much better than I did on Wednesday or Thursday, and it's been improving throughout the day. I'm still sneezing occasionally, but I can breathe and I no longer feel like someone's taken a razor blade to the roof of my mouth. So either I'm getting better, or I'm drugged to insensibility. Either way, it's an improvement.

After whining about the lack of inspiration yesterday, I had a great flash of it. It's a tangent, and it doesn't really tie back to the main storyline I'm struggling to write, but it's cool, and I must... write... now. Actually, I'm going to try to wait, as my inspiration usually improves when it percolates for a little while. At least one cool thing is going into Fire's sequel.

Oh, and I may finish the next part of Ryan's and Emily's adventure in time for the next Storyblogging Carnival (hosted by Dodgeblogium), but as I have yet to have any inspiration in that direction, I may not. We'll see.

I'm not exactly sure what I'm as sick as, but I'm not entirely healthy. When I'm sick, that tends to affect the blogging, not so much for the day I'm sick, but for the day after. That's because my time on the computer is such that I do most of my blogging late at night, after 11 pm, and then schedule the posts to go up the next day. Such as this post, which will go up tomorrow morning. I'm not sure how much more I'll write tonight, since my eyes are burning, and my throat, which kept me up until 6 am last night, is still sore. Fortunately, I have more medicine now than I did around 3 am last night when I realized that my cold would be keeping me up. Hopefully, I'll have an easier time sleeping.

I've been having all sorts of trouble writing recently. Oh, I can put words on paper, it's just that I look back over the last thousand words and the story hasn't gone anywhere. People take different approaches at writing. I usually wait until I have some idea and then start. Recently, the idea's been vaguer than usual, and I start writing hoping that it will take form as I write. Surprisingly, it usually does, but it takes forever to get there, and there's a lot of fat to trim to leave me with the meat of the story.

Looking back at what I've written in the sequel to Fire, I have about 66,000 words written so far, whereas Fire itself was about 90,000 words, but I don't feel as if I'm over two-thirds of the way through the sequel. I'm beginning to realize that the story hasn't been progressing as quickly as I wished, and much of what I've written for it is more fat than meat. I think the reason is that I've been so focused on writing a certain number of words per day that I wrote even when what I was writing didn't really advance the story.

So what am I going to do? I don't know yet. I haven't figured that part out. Every writer I've ever heard give advice on writing says to write every day. I always assumed it was good advice, since they're famous writers and I'm an engineer with a website, but I'm not too happy with the result.

I pressed the wrong button on my cell phone last night and discovered that I can send e-mails with it. I can also receive. I suspect they charge per e-mail, so I'm not going to be playing around with it too much, but it is kind of cool, but also a bit sad it took me so long to discover it. I won't say what my cell phone e-mail address is, both because of the aforementioned cost, and because it's the same as my cell phone number, and I really don't want random strangers calling my cell phone.