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February 1 1998, Sunday

I

t's Matthew Hart's 20th birthday. For the next 15 days, we'll both be in our 20s.

I

  have really nothing to say about what I did today. There was a mission to the Amoco for fries and free chili (or stolen, depending on how you look at it). Chili is ever so more interesting than ketchup.

I also tried various schemes to install LINUX on a spare (and remarkably well endowed) PS/2 Model 80. It has 170 Megs of hard drive, two floppy drives and 9 megs of RAM, and with gobs of MCA ethernet cards, I could really make it do some cool networking. But I can't get beyond a certain stage of loading the root disk. I hear the Model 80 has a buggy architecture, so I guess I should expect this sort of thing. Free stuff has its downsides.

S

peaking of free, a measure of freedom was introduced into the life of Shira the Dog today. Deya took her for a romp in the country. Upon their return, Deya was bearing a number of interesting rocks she'd found. This led to a discussion between Deya and myself on the subject of geology. It's just another field I can expound upon for hours. I told Deya about some of the wonders of geology, that ice stands two miles deep over the South Pole (from where I've received email!), but that it also once stood a mile deep over Oberlin, Ohio. Think of the muddy wasteland left behind when all that ice melted after having been there for thousands of years! By contrast, of course, there has never been any glaciation around here. All the rocks you find on this side of the Blue Ridge came from nearby, and for the most part they're volcanic in origin. Conversely, most of the rocks near my childhood home south of Staunton are sedimentary: limestone and occasional runs of sandstone (as well as spectacular veins of recrystalized calcite, some of which is clear enough to read through, though calcite has an interesting property: it translates all views into double images).

M

eanwhile, Matthew and Angela lay around in their rooms in an unenviable but altogether deliberate state of lethargy. I don't understand how such a pointless waste of a weekend could possible be considered recreation, but they paid money for it, so I guess that's what it was. In the late afternoon they did manage to straggle over the Blue Ridge to Matthew's mother's house in Staunton to attend a dinner in honour of Matthew's birthday. I wonder what he told his mother about the dark lobes under his eyes.

one year ago
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