After the Fall

The other night, after dark, I ran out of cigarettes.  So I did what I almost always do.  I put on my coat, grabbed my cane, and hobbled down the hill to the convenience store.

It had been a relatively warm day, for northern Minnesota in March.  About 10 degrees above freezing.  So the snowbanks melted a bit, and the water ran down the sidewalks like opportunistic creeks.  And after the sun went down, the air got gradually colder.  And the water got gradually frozen, layer by layer, from the bottom up.

Ask anybody who runs a skating rink -- that's the best way to freeze a rink, layer by layer, from the bottom up.  You get a nice, solid layer of ice, with an extremely smooth surface, great for skating.  Not so great for walking.  Even worse for hobbling along with a cane.

Years back, I spent most of a year living in Florida.  I also spent a couple of years living in New Mexico.  Down south in the warm, there were a great many things I missed about my home town.  Icy sidewalks weren't on the list.

Had my first slip-and-fall in about a year, that night.  The last fall I took, I stepped in a gopher hole or something similar, fell flat on my face, twisted my ankle really badly, and ended up walking with a cane.  Fifty isn't old, but it's old enough.  This time, luckily, I didn't realize I was falling till after I was flat on my back.  So I didn't really have time to tense up, and I landed as I said, flat on my back, spreading 225 pounds of force across the full width and length of my torso.  No new injuries, just a bit shaken up.  And I walked a lot more slowly and carefully the rest of the way to the store.

I bought myself some pastries while I was there.  I deserved a treat.

age, fall, ice, winter, minnesota, cane, pastry

Brown Recluse

I've noticed something that's kinda troubling.  Since I've been laid off, I've essentially never left the house.

This is not a good sign.  While I'm still blogging, still podcasting, still Twittering, still doing alla the online stuff I usually do, I'm not going anywhere, outside of the occasional cigarette run.

How the heck do I get up to speed on a new job, or even find a new job, when I don't even leave the house?  Add to that, it's not particularly good for me to just sit at home all day.  Should really get out and go somewhere, anywhere, just to break the cycle.

I'm very much lacking in social skills, and if I don't exercise what little I have, I lose them.  Happened once, a few years back.  Wasn't pretty.

This reclusive behavior has really gotta stop.  The Internet is not the world.  Even if the world outside is cold, it's still the world.

(sigh)

Clever Old Guy, Will Do Tech for Money

Day 5.

I have been lucky enough, for most of my life, to not own new or cutting edge computers.

Since the mid-70's, I've been fiddling with whatever computers I could get my greasy little fingers on. Initially, that was a time-sharing system through the local high school. Later on, I'd have whatever the latest (programmable) calculator I could afford. And I couldn't afford much.

I did, briefly, have three new computers, back in the First Home Computer Boom. Yes, there were two. In the first, lots of companies making game machines added keyboards, put in ROM-based BASIC (which is how Microsoft got their start), and called it a "home computer." It was, sort of. Those I had were Tandy Color Computers. And the ads at the time claimed that you hadda get your kid a computer, or they'd be behind the other kids in school, and would never get a really good job. Right.

During the Second Home Computer Boom, the market was dominated by IBM PC's and Compatibles, and by Apple's Macs. I couldn't afford the "real thing," but I could occasionally get someone's old or broken computer at a rummage sale for $50 or so. And, since I was starting with nothing, I really had to learn how to squeeze as much as possible out of this very old hardware. I wrote batch files, did a bit of programming, wrote my own mailmerge program for sending out resumes en masse. I couldn't afford to be afraid of breaking stuff, and had to learn what would and wouldn't foul up the computer.

So now, even though most of the stuff I know how to do is out-dated, I know enough of the fundamentals of why things work the way they do, I can puzzle out how to use the newer hardware and software, often better than other folks. And I can tell when things are just not working, as compared to being something I don't understand. The new hardware and software is created based on habits and ideas from the old hardware and software. So it's still helpful. Just not profitable, sad to say.