I went to bed around 10:30 (on Friday) and just wasn't able to get to sleep once again. About 12:30 I got up and found a package on my front deck... my laptop had arrived! So I spent the next coupla hours playing with it.

Analysis: I like it. It's pretty heavy, and it needs a new battery, but aside from that it works great. It runs WIN3.1, which is OK. It only has 8 meg of memory, so I'm not gonna run 95 on it.

Hopefully I can recondition the battery and not have to buy a new one... I'm afraid that they might be expensive. Those ni-cad batteries are easy to ruin by leaving them plugged in too long or recharging them before they're depleted, but they can be brought back sometimes... it's worth a try anyway.

No other news on the Photoshop deal... everyone just figgers that they got burned, but the authorities are looking into it. The guy is no longer answering email, and the address of the company is a front. Luckily, about 20 of the 60 people hadn't sent their money in to him yet, so he didn't get off as rich as he might've if I hadn't blown the whistle on him... sh*t, he'll probably put out a contract on me.

Anyhoo, I kept hitting the snoozebutton until about 20:20, so I didn't get a chance to take a shower or eat tonight, but I did take a "spit bath"; works OK in a pinch. That, and a lot of deodorant.

Today was reportedly a beautiful day, sun shining and 75F... it was actually pretty nice when I went to bed, but it got better. Today (meaning Saturday, now) is supposed to be partly cloudy and a good chance of thunderstorms. I might work outside some before I take a nap, then I have another project planned.

The other project is... moving my computer room downstairs again. Yep, back to the basement. This time will be a little bit different, though, I'm going to put it in the back room, and I'm not going to be using my 4 foot by 9 foot door for a desk... I think that I'll actually go out and buy a computer desk. It's really nice to have all that space, but all of that space gets really junked up. So maybe a little less room will improve my work habits... like, maybe I'll keep the checkbook current instead of keeping piles of stuff on the desk, ready to enter... from... well, since before we went on vacation.

But we really need the room upstairs. The kids (Patrick and Lacee) need beds, and we really have no place else to put them. I had thought that their living with us was going to be a little more temporary that it's turning out to be, not that I mind any at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite, I love having them and Kim around. I just wish that we had a bigger house.

This has been, so far, an exceptionally slow Friday night. It's about 03:00 and the bars have been closed for an hour, and still no action. Things were steady earlier, but I've only done one patient since 01:00. Last Friday night I got my ass run off, I'm glad that's not happening again. It's too early to tell, of course, and just merely writing these words may produce an onslaught of inebriated partiers/fighters/drunk drivers who need to have every bone in their bodies xrayed. It's happened before.... and it'll happen again. Just not tonight, please...

I am still amazed that people think that Bill Clinton is hiding stuff. Six-plus years of the (supposedly) smartest republicans in the country working on it, and they have come up with their own sh*t on their faces and nothing else. But they are persistent, you gotta give 'em that. However, in this case as in many others, persistence breaks down into being stubborn and pig-headed and just completely wrong. If there were a god, and s/he came out and told these guys that Bill Clinton was as innocent as he says he is, these guys would argue with him/her. They just can't let go. As I have said before, people who wear dirty underwear think that everyone else does too. They can't tell if anyone else smells good because they themselves are so odorous.

There is also the possibility that they are not as smart as they think that they are.

And with that, here comes a scary thought... all of these people who think that they're so damned smart, that convince everyone else that they're so damned smart... what if they're bluffing? What if nobody is really any smarter than I am? This is, in a way, parallel to my way of thinking about art. Art is, by definition, what the artist declares it to be. And a person gets to be an artist by proclaiming themselves to be an artist. And how good of an artist they are is dependent on how many people believe them. And if they're really lucky, they can do this before they die.

There was a high-speed multi-injury crash about an hour ago about six blocks from the hospital... right in front of the other hospital. Last I heard, they were trying to extricate the people from the cars. 10th and Washburn seems to be a bad intersection... from the sounds of things, someone blew a red light at high speed, and there were four cars involved. We didn't get any patients... there may not have been any. And the proximity to the other hospital would have skewed our chances of getting any anyway....

Home now... I'm going to get this up, download some stuff for the laptop and install it and then start finding a home for my space in the basement. Since I'm moving stuff, I'm going to install the 6.4 GIG HD at the same time... but I'll have the laptop up to speed, netwise, before I do that.

So... here I go! More tomorrow....