These are old archived entries from my journal, Ornamental Illness. I have eliminated all graphics (except those in context of an entry) to save on my bandwidth usage.


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Saturday, July 27, 2002

Change for the Better, I Hope

After the incredible stress that I've endured from the computer crash and having to make the major paradigm switch of losing the phone number I've had since 1989, I'm nonetheless very happy. Both Stan and I have felt as if we've been forced down a windtunnel or tube, and come out the other end extremely quickly. We've both been extremely exhausted. It's been so fast, this changeover in technology and all. Stan got his iBook the other day, and I've been teaching him things about OS X. Now that he can connect to the internet at the same time as me without having to ask me to get off line, he can now read this journal too, so I better be good.

The ironic thing is that our friend Bill in Colorado has decided to dump his landline (losing his phone number he's had since 1979!) and go cellular too. This has all been independent of our decision...he found out about what we were doing in an email I wrote to him last week, and he was going through the same thing. This is all very weird, but I think Bill and I are psychically connected as we both bumped our head in the same place (not just on the same place on our heads, but against the same place on the van) during one of our visits out there. We would also lose sleep on the same night, not knowing the other was losing sleep too.

Something very wonderful has happened too. The guy we met at my opening, Perry, went out with Tim the other night and they got along great. At the opening, Stan suggested we all meet for dinner some time (thank you Stan, for speaking up on behalf of everyone!), so last week Stan, Tim, Johanna, Perry and I met at the gallery and went out for dinner. It was sort of a going-away party for Johanna, as she left for Italy just the other day, where hopefully she will get to teach English classes. We all exchanged numbers, and then Perry called Tim earlier this week to go out for coffee. I just hope hope hope everything works out...they are both great guys. And we're all from the same generation, so we all have that sort of ironic born-under-the-sign-of-Kennedy and early-Johnson-administration sense of humor. And Tim and Perry both come from small towns and grew up on a farm, which sort of makes them different than the more urban born-and-raised gay man. I'm just so happy they met...I just hope it works out. I hope things work out for Johanna too. We'll miss her, but hope that we don't see her too soon because that will mean things are going well for her in Italy. She's already taught in Germany once before, but it still sounds like an extremely hard thing to do by yourself. Hell, even the move from Fort Collins to Madison was difficult, and Stan and I even had eachother. But you know, maybe it was so difficult for us because we just assumed it was just a lateral move to another part of the USA and weren't expecting the cultures to be so different. I guess if we had expected a total change in culture, it would've been easier to deal with.

I love being able to get on the internet without doing anything, I love being able to talk on the phone without static (our landline is now disconnected completely...it was just unbearable its last few days). I love being unlisted too. No more strange calls about my business from people who looked up my phone number via an online search who do not want to email me instead (if I wanted to have my telephone number as a contact on my website, I'd have put it there, right?) No more phone calls from people wondering what happened to such and such web designer who no longer has a site (like I'm responsible for that and know what's up?), and most of all, NO MORE TELEMARKETERS!

Posted by Ann on 07/27/02@10:26 AM CST ..::Link::..

DREAM-shopping center

It was cold outside, possibly snowing, and we drove to a vast, empty parking lot of a rather desolate and abandoned shopping center. We walked into a large store, like a grocery store, that was also rather empty. I think the people I was with were Stan, Johanna, and maybe someone else, but I can't remember.

Posted by Ann on 07/27/02@08:08 AM CST ..::Link::..

Friday, July 26, 2002

DREAM-Barn Beach

Very strange dream. I was with some people and we were at a beach where a bunch of people were swimming. I had to photograph swimmers with my digital camera, and chose as a subject a woman and her young child. I couldn't get a good shot of them because they were always moving, and I was in the water myself and afraid to get my camera wet. Then, I was with one of the people I was with earlier and we were trying to find a place to lie down on the beach, but instead of sand, it was straw, like on the floor of a barn. I was trying to find a place to lie that wasn't in some sort of cow or horse manure. Then I was with Stan and we were in the north part of Fort Collins traveling in a car with some other people, but we were driving on train tracks. It was at night, and the tracks were old. We headed toward a train station that was so old, almost as if it hadn't been cared for since the 1880s. It was rather spooky.

Posted by Ann on 07/26/02@08:47 AM CST ..::Link::..

Thursday, July 25, 2002

I did it!

I figured out how to hook up to my G4 and log in from my iBook and access my other hard drive.

Wow. I never thought I'd be doing this.

I amaze myself.

I'm thinking that maybe in the future I can even hook up my old Laserwriter 4/600 printer (which is a GREAT printer) to my G4 via a local talk to ethernet adapter. It's currently on a my first computer, the 75/7200. I have to sneakernet all my files I want to laserprint. It's a pain. Then I can donate that old system (That is, if the schoolkids in this town aren't so spoiled that my old computer isn't GOOD enough for them and the Madison Public School District) and free up some space on the table.

But right now I need a rest from all this networking stuff. I need to vegetate on a beach somewhere or do something so very banal and primitive, no tech knowledge necessary.

Posted by Ann on 07/25/02@12:55 PM CST ..::Link::..

Networking/DREAM

IRL Last night I was able to network my iBook and G4 together. It's tougher to connect to the G4, easier to connect to the iBook...something to do with OS X on the G4 makes it harder. Anyway, this should help because Stan's getting an iBook too and now he can just connect an ethernet cable that's connected to the router to his iBook and back up his stuff to my iBook's external hard drive without having to unplug my Zip drive, plug it into his, etc. I feel like I've accomplished something that would've been unthinkable a month ago. But since hooking up the router so that both computers could access the cable modem was so easy, I thought, what the hey, let's give it a try. I guess I'm not a total ungeek anymore. I feel like I've lost my virginity.

Anyway, this whole networking thing caused me to have some very strange dream hallucinations last night. You know how some dreams are more like continual hallucinations rather than "dreams with a beginning, end and plotline?" All that kept going through my mind last night were images of tree trunks with vines around them and those long roots that some philodendron plants have, wrapping themselves around the treetrunks. Somehow these symbolized my computer network. Kinda neat...computers really do need to be more organic.

Posted by Ann on 07/25/02@09:12 AM CST ..::Link::..

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Don't have a Cow...

The inside entry was sent to me in an email by someone I occasionally freelance for. Not sure who originally came up with it, but it's excellent. Made me laugh... [more]

Posted by Ann on 07/24/02@03:04 PM CST ..::Link::..

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

DREAM-The Stairwells

One of those recurring dreams where I'm wandering around in a sciences building at a university somewhere late at night when everything is shut down. I'm going up and down stairs trying to get to the ground level so that I can leave, but as soon as I find that I had gotten to the ground, there's yet another stairway, but the stairway is creepy as I have to assemble it myself so that I can descend it.. I decide to leave the stairwell and go into a hallway. The classrooms are all in the 400s, so I realize I'm still on the 4th floor, that all the floors I passed descending were only half floors, inbetween the main floors. I figure that I'm getting nowhere with stairs, so I decide to try and find an elevator. I'm walking around looking for one, but it's very crowded with lots of people, despite it being at night, supposedly. I find someone I know (I don't know who, or even what gender they were), and we go to an island kiosk in the building that is serving refreshments. I'm starting to get very belligerent and mouthy, probably because I'm in a bad mood because I can't leave the building. People are starting to stare. I order some very bizarre frou-frou non-alcoholic party drink that has weird circles in it, sort of a dark-margarita color, and tastes like lime and chocolate.

Posted by Ann on 07/23/02@10:00 AM CST ..::Link::..

Monday, July 22, 2002

Cinderella City

I don't remember how we got onto the subject, but the other day talking to my sister-in-law, Marcia, I brought up Cinderella City in Englewood, and how it was THEEE place to go when you were a teenager in Colorado in the '70s. It exuded Colorado teenage 70s from every pore in its concrete; one literally drowned from the Clearasil in the air in "CinderAlley," the hangout area in this oversized mall-to-end-all-malls. A typical Saturday would be spent driving down to Denver (usually with someone's parents or a friend's older sibling) in the morning, dropping us off at Cinderella City while they went elsewhere, picking us up in the mall later, and then a dinner somewhere else in Denver, usually at Casa Bonita where experience is everything and taste is nothing. Marcia mentioned that she has no idea what is there now, so I did a quick search this morning and found this, with pictures of its demolition in 1998.

Now I am extremely mall-phobic and avoid the local malls at all cost, however I am rather saddened and nostalgic for the once great Cinderella City. Its demise is definitely an end of an era. The last time Stan and I went to Cinderella City was in 1984 or 1985 or 1986, and we remarked that it was stuck in the 70s...all the people there looked like they were still in that era...same bluejean clothes, same feathered hairstyles, same headshops in CinderAlley. We were the only ones who had any semblance of 80s-ness. We were stared at as if we were from the future. We never returned.

When we are in Colorado lately, we don't spend much time in Denver anymore, and if we were to go to Denver it would be to see the gardens or the zoo or the museum or the IMAX. It certainly wouldn't be to go to a mall. Yet it would be comforting to know it was still there, to know that somewhere in CinderAlley there was a teenage girl wandering around in a record shop and feeling this strange ambience of a generation she never knew, the ambience of the 70s, the same other-era ambience I felt of the 50s when I visited my grandmother in Racine, a very early-to-mid-20th century city. Some places were just meant to be of a certain time and place. It's too bad this monument or memorial of the 70s has been destroyed.

Posted by Ann on 07/22/02@09:01 AM CST ..::Link::..

Sunday, July 21, 2002

DREAM - Great Aunt Helen

Another weird dream with relatives from my dad's side. I was talking to a great aunt, Helen, that I met back when we moved to Massachusetts when I was 6. She's been long gone, having died around the same general time her sister, my grandmother, did. In the dream she was showing me pictures of her, my grandmother and their other siblings (I know there was another sister, but I don't know about other members of the family) which was taken around the turn of the last century. Everyone had that 1900s sort of look to them, and the photograph was in sepia tones. I asked her if one of the people in the picture was my grandmother. She said it wasn't, but it looked like her to me. I know that doesn't sound like too much of a dream, but it was rather impactful.

Posted by Ann on 07/21/02@12:06 PM CST ..::Link::..

Diary

Cable: this is great! No dialing up, no fearing of getting disconnected, no re-dialing up hoping for a good line, no getting cut off before I can even make a connection, no having to retry five times before I can even get online only to be cut off after a minute. I still have to get used to it. I'm online thinking, "I better sign off, I've been online a long time tying up the phone lines." No I'm not. (pretty soon the answer to that will be "what phone lines?") [more]

Posted by Ann on 07/21/02@12:01 PM CST ..::Link::..
By Ann @ 20:56 AM CST:07:20:02 ..::Link::..