Ghosts Of Christmas Past...

The magic is gone. The joy has departed. All I have left? Just another day of the year. 2005 has been like that a lot for me. New Years? Questions. Easter? Questions. Summer? You guessed it, questions. My Birthday? While I did get to spend time in Pittsburgh with friends, still Questions. Thanksgiving? Questions.

Sadly, for Christmas, I got answers.

Oh. And new shoes, a pair of blue jeans, and a 250GB hard drive. The hard drive has really come in handy, eliminating my storage woes. You see, I'm revamping this machine entirely, and now (thanks to Western Digital, the bums) it's a bit of a necessity. First on the install block is Windows XP. Now, call me crazy for trying to run it on a 566 Celeron, but hey, at least I can run half the software I need. While I'm not a big fan of XP at all, it'll have to be there for some things.

The 20GB drive (my old storage drive, which has been through hell) will be reformated and cut into either thirds or fourths, ready to play host to a few Linux distributions. Long have I used Mandrake (since 7.2), and now I'm going to give Fedora Core and Ubuntu a go-round. If I go for fourths, I'll probably pick a random distro, but for now, three is cool. Quad Boot sounds better than Quint Boot, anyway.

Because I'm working on redoing the machine I have doesn't mean I'm not working on getting a better one. For that, I have to call in some favors, but I think I can swing it now that the crush of the Holidays is pretty much over and done with. The presents are long since opened, the kids are playing happily or visiting with the grandfolk and cousins, and me? I've been here long enough, sitting in my room.

Years ago, we started a bit of an odd tradition. When I was 16, I had long since quit going to church at all, let alone on Christmas. The suggestion was made (by Chris, I think) that we open presents after they arrived home from services, which was around midnight anyway, given their gift of gab with the Churchies. So, technically, we were opening presents on Christmas morning, having bailed on the "Santa" routine (though some presents are still tagged from the Fat Man in my mother's dead-giveaway handwriting) long ago.

So, like I said, I've been sitting here in my room vegitating long enough. It's time I went and did my Holiday visiting routine, and there's only one place I have to go: Angel's. She's moved back from Milwaukee to Clearfield, and hopefully she'll be getting high-speed soon. I'm trying to talk her into writing for Blog Prophyts, as well as keeping her own blog. But why do I need to go over there?

Silly Eric left his laundry there last night. Folded, bagged, ready to go, and completely passed over when I walked out the friggin door. Remembered my damn mug this time, but hell if I could remember all my socks, drawz, and quite the load of black shirts. Damnit, damnit, damnit all to hell. Oh well. Christmas Visit, here I come...

Merry Christmas to all, and to all: Don't get killed, OK?