Having read this encouraging message, "shipping in 48 hours", I scanned a photograph for today's journal and as I was adjusting the color of the lady's face, the mouse crapped out. I am tired of the mouse crapping out, tired of losing my scans and felt, as a man who can order a printer before nine, that I can go over and buy one of these new optical mice with a light beam instead of a mechanical (cat hair wrapped) track ball at CompUSA before ten. I wondered briefly how it might work on my new mostly white, perhaps overly reflective Reality Asylum mouse pad. I've had nothing but trouble with a number of different mechanical mice over these last few months. This new one seems to work just fine, thank you. In fact it seems one of these computer breakthroughs you read about, junk the old and buy the new, be the first on your block. I felt things were picking up. (It works fine on my Rien Amalgamated, Inc. and Ltd. Reality Asylum mouse pad, by the way. It has a little red light on its nose. Cute. CompUSA extracted my $50 without a blink.

Now that things were rolling, it was time to drive over to the train station to buy a ticket to Portland leaving the Tuesday before Thanksgiving with a return ticket from Seattle the following week. See the family over Thanksgiving, rent a car and drive up the coast of Washington with a camera, stay in motels, see my aunt at the end of the trip in Seattle before I return on the train. Good for me. I have been thinking about doing this for a while (couple of years), but not talking about it (I don't think). In fact, I haven't mentioned it to my sister. Perhaps I should. This evening. Just in case. This three day weekend is turning into hell on wheels. Wadda trip. Now for a couple of shirts and a new pair of pants, the ones that have all of the pockets. Get a pair that will hold a small notebook. For writing thoughts on the fly. Subjects to write about. That I will otherwise not remember.

The printer, the mouse and the trip to Seattle are three totally incongruent things that I've been turning over in my mind for some time, some say forever, hence the procrastination lament. I think it comes from wondering what in the hell I'm I going to do with myself these next whatever many years. The problem isn't money or interest or even a defective procrastinated personality, the problem is finding the next chapter and going after it. I mean, you can't just sit around and watch your navel forever. Nothing spectacular like forming a dot.com or inventing super glue, you understand, this next chapter, just something to keep me occupied, off the street and relatively content.

Or maybe it's really not that dramatic. In the last few days with the work picking up and the carbon blowing out (I don't know, my ears? my ass? my tippity tip tap journal?) I finally feel clear I'd like to sit down and map out the skills I need to manage a nice web site, including, if I have to, Java and Oracle and WebSphere (of the Northwest Mounties) or whatever, but also PhotoShop, more photography and writing. And not worry about it. And maybe, although there is no hope of this whatsoever, not write about it. If it doesn't work out in Oakland with my current employer, why not just make a really major change and move somewhere nicer? (Nicer than Oakland?) Maybe I'd like to spend the rest of my life in an authentic American trailer park, in a double wide with a DSL connection. I don't know. In Idaho. In Hawaii. Somewhere with people, I suppose, for pictures, and a small house, kinda like The Little House on the Prairie, maybe, but with DSL, set back in the woods next to a Jack Simplot owned and operated potato farm tied up on a fifty year MacDonald's contract. Shit, man, what does that mean? Don't ask.