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Suse
4 April 2004
Oops: more drinking, more being drunk. Friday was Jean’s leaving-work do, as she will hereafter be full-time working for Cornwell Internet, the rather wonderful company that manages this website and many others equally fine. So I spent the afternoon and early evening with Jean and Roger (the other half of Cornwell Internet) and a few of their friends; we drank, we ate. Then they went off to catch a train, and I slipped into my favourite pub for a pint to see me home - and was hailed by a couple of friends, and we had a pitcher of beer, and then another, and...
And I woke up in the morning not entirely remembering how I’d got home, only pleased to discover that I had. And now it was Saturday, and there was a party to be catered for (I made dips: salsa cruda and byesar) and then attended, and I think I must have got exceedingly drunk, because I only really remember the start of it. Oh, sigh. Damn this alcoholic amnesia, it’s a terrible thing.
But the other thing I’ve been doing all weekend apart from drinking is upgrading my system, to the latest release of SuSE Linux. Always nervous-making, but we seem to have come through without major trauma. I’m still engaged with that inevitable process of finding out what’s new, what’s changed, what doesn’t work any more and what’s replaced it. The old installation was getting a little rough around the edges, frayed by a couple of years of electronic friction; this feels sharper, more solid. I wish I understood it better than I do, but I haven’t really learned the basics, so I’m like a permanent newbie, fumbling my way through. I downloaded some new software off the net yesterday, and so far I haven’t actually been able to find it...
And the other other thing I’ve done today is start the next section of Selling Water. Bit late, I let too much other stuff displace it, and I’ve only got a couple of months left now till the deadline. I used to be really reliable with deadlines, but not any more. They’re like overdrafts; when you’re young, you’re scared of them. Then what you're scared of happens, you run into debt or you miss the deadline, and actually the sky doesn’t fall on your head; so you slowly become entirely cavalier, live in debt and write in arrears. But I don’t want to be like that any more. Zeal, all zeal, Mr Easy. I can write half a book in two months, of course I can, why not...?
© Chaz Brenchley 2004
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.