It's 11,001 miles from Topeka to Baghdad. Wichita Freight Train Whistle. I bought this jazz recording on vinyl in 1967, at the same time that I bought my first decent stereo. At the time I was in Ft. Steward, GA, working as an x-ray tech, running the medical part of the department while Sargent Norris ran the military part. I was listening to this record when I had my first experiences with... um... dope. And I made it a part of every , uh, dope, experience that I had while I was at Ft Steward, which covered eighteen months. The Wichita Freight Train Whistle was never a big name, and I have no idea who the artists were nor what happened to them, but they sure made life at Ft Steward a lot pleasanter than it would have been without them. O'yeah, Bob Dylan, he was there in vinyl, and so was Gershwin, and a lot of others. Some of the vinyl I still have, others were borrowed and never returned, and a lot of it is in the hands of one of JDs friends, who is going to turn it into MP3s for me. Some day. Some day, for the last five years, heh. Yeah, Colin, I'm still waiting.... Anyway, boredom in the military is ferocious. I'm relatively sure that I would have never poked a needle in my arm or snorted cocaine or dropped acid if I was a civilian, but that was kinda the norm when I was in... you were a freak if you didn't do what everyone else was doing... Of course, I was a freak even when I was doing what everyone else was doing. It's just my nature.... And there was always the god squad, looking for bored GIs. They damned near had me a coupla times. Back to reality, and to today. There are so many people in this world that hate what they do for a living, and I'm so happy that I love my work. The problem, of course, comes when I slight other areas of my life. Yeah, I've been slacking off on my computer time, heh. well, no, really... probably 95% of the people hate their jobs, and I love mine. Well, not my *job*, really, but my work. My work is cool. I would almost do my work for free, but the stuff that comes with the *job*, that they gotta pay me for. Yeah, I know, 95% of you want me to be dead right now. Nyah Nyah Nyah! Today was a pretty nice day again, but I was "off my feed" and just not feeling up to par. Part of that was that I stayed up last night way too late, working on a project for Lacee's birthday... trying to load windows 3.11 onto a little off brand laptop that JD gave me. WFW 3.11 doesn't like it much, so I'm out looking for WIN31. The name of the laptop is Magitronic, and the only help on the web is people who want to sell me batteries for the damned thing, heh. Anyways, I took a nap today, which means that I probably won't get to sleep at a decent hour... and I only have myself to blame. And this coming week isn't going to be much fun, in fact we're running a tech short until the first week in April. And I'm on call next weekend, meaning that there will be no time off for me at all for the next two weeks. I usta could do that pretty easily, but the older I get the harder it gets. O'well, life goes on, it does, and so do I. In the Mail: On the shelf: