Memories of Uncle Don

Daily Story Project, General

Found out today that a favorite uncle, Uncle Don, is on hospice care. He’s in his 90s, so it’s somewhat expected. Still sad, though.

Don, a 90 year old white man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a coat, smiling, next to a middle-aged white man with a black stocking cap, glasses, and a coat, outside, with a background of green leaves behind them.
Uncle Don, and me, at his 90th birthday celebration, May 28th 2022. Photo Credit Bob Moon

Just two years ago the family gathered in Hoyt Arboretum to celebrate his 90th birthday, and his wife, Helen’s, 80th. We were all encouraged to get up and tell stories about Uncle Don and Aunt Helen. This was the story I told that day.

I saw the movie Alien twice in the local theater with friends opening weekend. I was in high school. A fan of sci-fi and horror. I loved it. A couple of weeks later Uncle Don and Aunt Helen were visiting my parents while I was around, and mentioned that they wanted to go see Alien, since it was playing nearby. Would I like to go with them? Of course I would!

We sat in the balcony (remember when theaters had balconies? I loved the balcony) up near the front edge. They both knew that it was a horror flick so they were delightedly anticipating the suspense. I tried, oh, how I tried, to keep my reactions to myself. But… I couldn’t. I knew what was coming and my teenage brain and body were winding me up as the movie progressed.

And I basically spoiled the Big Scene (you know the one) because, even having seen it before, I was scrunching down in my seat, hiding in anticipation behind my giant soda and popcorn, as the crew of the Nostromo were enjoying a nice meal.

My aunt Helen kept asking me, “what’s wrong? Are you OK?” And when It Happened (YouTube link, spoilers for the movie, fair warning) she was looking at me, not the screen. She was startled by the sound (terrific sound design on that movie, among other things) and nearly lept out of her skin.

After I was done recounting the story at the birthday gathering, both Don and Helen thanked me for sharing. They remembered the incident vividly. I again apologized. They accepted it and even forgave me.

Here’s to you both, Don and Helen. Love you both, lots.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light

Daily Story Project

Never a good time when you start your car and get a Check Engine light. Right? I saw a TikTok in the past few days where someone was arguing that every time they feel good about their situation, bam!, car trouble. I would believe it except I haven’t felt good about my situation for quite a while now. Things are dire, y’all. Nobody’s hiring for my skill set. If it weren’t for the help of family I would probably be half way to homelessness. True facts.

But, damn, Check Engine. Do I have to check the engine right now? Listen, my car is old enough to rent a car (1996 Honda Accord) and I thought that thing would run forever as long as I keep the fluids topped up. OK, OK, I haven’t been keeping the fluids quite as topped up as I’d like to. That one’s on me.

Even more shamefully, though, my dad was in the car. As mentioned previously, he’s been staying with me while his living space is remodeled, and since he doesn’t drive, he asked me to run him up to the 7-11 for some cigarettes. Not a problem! He’s commented in amazement that my car continues to run at all and I’ve laughed it off, knowing that it’s probably on its last legs, and hiding how nervous I am about driving it. Don’t worry, everything safety-wise and legal-wise works and is paid for, and I’m not a danger to anyone else. I just always drive with the secret fear that it’s going to leave me stranded.

Like this morning. The engine sounded fine. But there was that angry orange light on my dashboard. Check. Engine. Could be worse, it could be flashing. Flashing Check Engine lights are the highest level of alert.

Dad said to check the oil and of course, it was low. I had a quart handy but that barely brought it up to the level of the bottom of the dipstick, so I walked to the nearest car parts store and bought some more. Sadly that didn’t make that stupid light go out, so now we needed more diagnostic info. The car parts store plugged in to my car’s ODB II port and said: Oxygen Sensor issue.

We paid too much for an O2 sensor, rented the stupid special socket wrench needed to get it out, along with some WD-40 and wiper blades (it was due) and just over an hour later, a brand-new O2 sensor was installed. We only lost one bolt in the process, an unnecessary bolt for a shroud over the exhaust manifold (it only needed the two bolts to hold it in place, honestly.) The car parts guy said that I needed to drive it for a full cycle of about 25 miles or so, so I asked dad if he needed to go anywhere else. I ran him around town for his errands, we stopped at Kay’s for happy hour and burgers, and got back home.

Again, let me stress: the engine is running fine. No stalling or racing, no weird sounds or smells. Just normal engine running. Hopefully nothing is catastrophically breaking under the hood. But that orange Check Engine light is still on.

Tomorrow morning we’re gonna try replacing the air filter (that’s another potential cause of the error code we got) and if that fails, unplug the battery to reset the computer and clear the code.

I’m sure it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s just as fine today as it was yesterday before that dumb light came on. I’m almost positive.

The Power of the Atom – Installing and Modding Fallout 3 in 2024

Gaming, Tech

As a funny follow-up to my post a couple of days ago, Saturday morning I woke up and decided to install, patch, and mod Fallout 3 to make it somewhat stable, look better, and be a bit more modernized, in anticipation of streaming a playthrough of the game at some point in the near future.

And so did apparently everyone else.

The primary site for downloading mods for games like all of the Fallout games, as well as many others, is Nexus Mods. And on Saturday morning, Pacific time, by the time I got going, it was struggling. I kept seeing Cloudflare checks to prove I was human; a tactic to slow down high levels of use for websites. And sometimes, even then, the pages I was trying to reach did not load, and required refreshing. It was frustrating but also a little hilarious.

I am glad that there is interest in the Fallout games. I’ve said this before; I love the universe and the lore and the games, so having more people playing and learning about the world is amazing. You will never catch me gatekeeping people being excited about something cool.

I didn’t do a lot of mods; I think my list stands at 22 or so. Heck, for the record, here are the mods I installed:

I have a hankering to write up a current How To for this. The list above is sorted alphabetically and doesn’t reflect the install order or the load order. Let me know if you think that would be useful; I was going by my own experience and a lot of google searching for best mods and order. And most of the how-tos I found were for Mod Organizer or NexusModManager, not the newer Vortex, which is what I used.

There are more than enough gotchas in there to trip someone up. I can confirm that; I was that someone and I got tripped up several times. Had to wipe, uninstall, and start over at least twice.

Some tips for anyone trying this themselves:

Get a nice clean install of the base game first. Open the launcher, let it auto-detect your graphics settings, launch the game and let the opening title cards play, maybe start a New game, then exit. That creates the base files.

Install Vortex from Nexus Mods. You’ll install most (haha, no, not all) of the mods through here.

If you’re installing from Steam, it has an update that removes Games for Windows Live, which is broken since it was intended for WinXP, and Fallout Script Extender doesn’t work with that version (1.7.0.4). You’ll want to downgrade the game to 1.7.0.3. Luckily, the community has provided a patcher that will downgrade Fallout 3, as well as patch it to use more than 2 GB of RAM, and other helpful things. Download and manually run the Fallout Anniversary Patcher first before anything else.

Next thing you want to install is Fallout Script Extender. Don’t use the button in Vortex; manually download it and manually install it.

At this point, you can start installing other mods. You can use my list above as a starting point. My philosophy was – I wanted lore-friendly stuff, no major changes or new questlines, bug fixes and modernization, and just a hint of upgrades for modern graphics and displays. I did succumb to the temptation of making the 2008 Bethesda faces look a little better, but I did not install any body mods or new weapon or armor textures. I might, still, but for now I’m fine with it looking the way it did back in the day. And I am experimenting with re-done NPC animations.

I may still tweak or remove the persistent green tint in favor of third-party lighting and colors through the use of an ENB, or I might not. Again, part of the reason I want to play this is nostalgia. The look and feel of original Fallout 3 is a majority of the charm, to me.

It’s worth it, though, to have a clean, pretty game to play. And my computer, while it hasn’t been top-of-the-line for a good while, is still plenty powerful enough to run this game at 1080p and 60 frames per second. I’m looking forward to revisiting the Capital Wasteland.

Comment or contact me if you’d be interested in a full How-To write up. And stay tuned if you want to see me stream my playthroughs. That is definitely coming soon.

All of the above

Daily Story Project, meta, Tech

This blog has been up and in existence in some form or another for over 20 years. Over that time it’s run on several different platforms: first on Blogger, then on a bespoke CMS written by a friend, hosted on that friend’s server, and finally, when that friend moved away, hosted on a Mac mini I plugged in whereever I could, then, eventually, imported into WordPress and migrated from whatever hosting service sucks less and costs the least amount (currently Bluehost.)

When I started this whole thing, it was just a place for me to dump my random thoughts on whatever I wanted to talk about. I never designed this place for consistency and I never had an eye to making money from it, be it by getting sponsors or affiliates, putting ads up, or soliciting for digital downloads and media (although there was a desperate period in my life when I did try putting ads here, which failed because of the low low traffic.)

While I love everyone who comes here to read anything I say, there aren’t enough of you to make it worth it to Google for monetization. Don’t get me wrong on this. At the highest traffic levels for this space, I was getting about 200 hits per day, and I was posting nearly daily. To me, having 200 people care about my work is amazing and humbling! If I were standing in front of a crowd of 200 people who cared about the words I write, I would be beyond happy. But those numbers are peanuts to the internet, even for the time (this was a decade ago), and especially now.

But I do kinda care about reaching a larger audience, and one of the technical problems that I would need to fix, according to Google, is broken links. And with all the years of posting, holy shit are there a shit-ton of broken links, some of which I have no way to fix beyond deleting them or noting them as broken in the present day. I have spent hours going back through old posts checking links and fixing the ones I can, but let me tell you, manually doing that for (including this post) 2590 published posts over 21 years is a lot of work.

There’s another category of broken links, though. For a while, my post permalinks used the scheme of bamoon.com/year/month/day/post-title.php. I think there are perhaps 50-100 of those, from a previous WordPress configuration. Eventually I switched to bamoon.com/post-title/ Because these follow a regular pattern, I know that I could probably use a script to go through the posts and the database and update them all. But I am not a strong coder. I also know that one can use a feature of Apache and add lines to the .htaccess file to re-write the requests one-by-one as users request them. But, again, that means regex and scripting, not my strong suit.

Here comes ChatGPT, though. It’s not good at so many things, like making sure people have only four fingers and one thumb on each of two hands, but people (like Molly White) say it’s brilliant at scripts and coding. So I asked it for help. It gave me solutions for both cases. Great! I have a staging site I can test these on, so it won’t break the main site. But… one last question, ChatGPT: which solution is better?

And I feel like it punted. It said both are good, and I should implement both. The database fix is more permanent; the .htaccess rewrite is immediate and invisible to the reader.

Looks like ChatGPT is an Option D (all of the above) kind of bot.

Big Iron on our hips

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech, TV

With the release of Fallout on Prime, the new TV show set in the Fallout universe, interest in the post-post-apocalypse wasteland has never been higher. I mean me, my interest, mostly. I want to reinstall and play all the games, now. And I have at least reinstalled several of them (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 76) but haven’t yet found the time to start a new journey in that wild far future.

It’s been fun going through the process of getting a nice clean install, patching the older games to run on modern hardware and software, and picking out a few good mods to make it more stable, improve the graphics and gameplay, and fix the more egregious bugs. OK, again, that’s probably just my own quirky tech-focused kind of fun; your mileage may vary. For Fallout 3, it took maybe an hour’s worth of googling, downloading, and a scosche of trial-and-error. But I got it all running.

Stay tuned to this channel for the possiblity of me streaming a playthrough of Fallout 3, playing as myself… I’m working up the nerve to try it.

Screenshot from the game Fallout 3, opening credits: an old TV test pattern in black and green saying "Please Stand By" in retro-futuristic text and graphics.
Coming soon: me making a fool of myself in the Capital Wasteland

That being said, my nephew also wants to play some Fallout, excited by the new show and especially for it being set in the game’s continuity, being a true follow-on to the game chronology. Max and I have been texting each other questions, theories, and memes about Fallout since the show dropped. This is actually fun for lots of people, not just computer geeks like me! Surely anyone reading this has one or several friends they share memes with, right? Not just me? It’s a universal thing these days?

The other day, though, he sent me a link to a Steam Community guide about how to install and run Fallout: New Vegas and asked me if it was a good how-to. I took a look and it seemed pretty comprehensive, and offered to help him out if he ran into any troubless. I felt a bit of a duty; I had helped him build his current computer a couple of years ago. Mostly though I’m excited to see him play and happy to help him get the most out of his rig. He’s been mainly a console player; mods aren’t a normal part of his gaming experience; whereas I’ve been modding games since Skyrim. I may not be an expert but I would consider myself a competent modder.

He started to get it going the other day but I didn’t hear anything more. When I pinged him to ask how it went, he said he got distracted, totally understandable. Today, though, he had the energy to get it going, and I was able to screenshare with him and walk him through the trickier parts, like making sure to back up the default files and folders before messing with them, which saved us in at least one instance. The instructions for the mod that enables scripting support, NVSE, said to copy the entire contents of its mod to the main game folder, it wanted to overwrite the Data folder already there. I backed him out of that, had him rename the old folder, and then copy everything.

Once we got the mods installed, though, the game crashed to desktop on launch, throwing the error “missing masters.” When I had Max launch the game normally, it didn’t appear any of the DLC was available; turns out they all lived in the old, renamed Data folder. Copying them to the new modded Data folder fixed the issue.

Then I spent over an hour watching him start a new playthrough, MST3K-ing and joking and googling things for him (like what is a hot plate used for, anyway? And did the Brotherhood try to take over Hoover Dam (they got distracted by Father Elijah’s fixation on HELIOS-1)). Fun times!

I’ve spent so much time in these worlds, playing, learning the characters, maps, and lore. Even making up my own wasteland lore (which has yet to be contradicted by the official material, yay!) Fun times, indeed. And I’m so glad that non-gamers are learning how rich and weird the Fallout universe is. I welcome new fans with open arms.

Feel free to ask me any questions. Love to help.

Star Trek Discovery S5E04 “Face The Strange”

Daily Story Project, reviews, TV

This week’s Star Trek Discovery Season 5 Episode 04, “Face The Strange” was SO MUCH FUN. The show has finally found its footing. The writers know the characters well, they put them together in interesting ways, and they play to their strengths, which is emotional connections amid bonkers Star Trek science. Minor plot spoilers ahead for this episode.

This week, the ship gets sabotaged by the crime couple that are the big bads for the season in the form of time bugs, literaly spiders that somehow tap into EPS conduits and force the ship to jump backward and forward in time. For Reasons(tm) Captain Burnham (played by the delightful Sonequa Martin-Green) and grumpy new First Officer Rayner (played to perfection by Callum Keith Rennie) are immune to the time loops so they keep getting reset and have to figure out a solution. They do get some help from Chief Engineer Stamets (Anthony Rapp) because, of course, he’s got mushroom in his DNA. If you aren’t following this show you will probably think I am making this up but I assure you, I am not.

By having the leads jumping through time, but being tied to the ship, the writers get to have them interact with the history of the ship, and all the crazy shenanigans that have happened over five seasons of off-the-wall Star Trek nonsense (I say nonsense with love; I love this show, flaws and all) and even get to finally tie up a loose end that was introduced in a Short Trek a few years ago (“Calypso” if you’re curious) to my satisfaction, at least. Even Captain Burnham gets to see just how far she’s come from her origin as Star Fleet’s first and only mutineer, to sitting in the center seat.

Just really well done, y’all. I am sad that this is the final season because it feels like the show runners, cast, and crew are firing on all warp cores. Just this episode has so much payoff, it was a joy to watch.

The thing about Star Trek, for me at least, is it was my first fandom. I was too young to see it when it originally aired, or at least too young to remember that (I was born in late 1964, the first episode aired in September 1966) but I was old enough to watch it when it ran every afternoon on KPTV-12, Monday through Friday. I watched it and I loved it; it showed a bright (literally colorful) and hopeful utopian future, a future of adventure and science.

It remains the one major science-fiction franchise that says we can be better, that life can be more than war and hate and strife. Everyone gets second chances in Star Trek. Everyone tries to know themselves, and improve the universe they live in. Everyone tries to find solutions to problems by talking it through and appealing to our better selves. Even steadfast enemies become allies, in time. I love it so much, and am happy that for all my life, I’ve had stories that point the way to the good world I know is possible.

Interloper

Daily Story Project, Gaming, reviews

Been playing a lot of The Long Dark lately. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a computer game that’s a survival challenge that I’ve written about before. Your character is lost in the eerily abandoned Canadian winter on an island in the vague northwest. You have to struggle to stay warm, find food and water, and manage your strength. Meanwhile you have to watch out for predators that are far more agressive than found in nature, like wolves and bears. Infrastructure like running water and electricity is down, although sometimes there is an aurora that causes electrical devices to be temporarily usable; unfortunately this also increases the agression of predators making it very dangerous to be out and about under the glowing lights in the sky.

There’s a story mode, too, where you can play as Will MacKenzie or Dr. Astrid Greenwood (voiced by the incredibly talented Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale, respectively), estranged spouses who are trying to find each other and get to a town on the island with a mysterious briefcase. Four of the five chapters have been released for story mode and at least one more is coming. It’s interesting and goes into the weird Quiet Apocalypse that’s befallen Great Bear Island.

That’s not the mode I’m playing right now.

For as long as I’ve had the game I’ve enjoyed the lower levels of difficulty; in those modes the game is much less tense, you start with basic gear like decent clothing and matches (important for getting and staying warm, as well as boiling water and cooking food), and you have better loot scattered around to help you survive, like knives, hatchets, pistols and guns.

But I always admired the streamers and let’s players who played on the highest difficulty level: Interloper. Streamers like Tomasina, Zaknafein, Archimedes, among others. On Interloper, there are no guns, and you start with no matches at all. In that mode, knowing where you are and where to find matches and other good loot is paramount. The maps themselves don’t change, but the possible locations of gear is somewhat randomized. And you have to craft your own knife, hatchet, and bow — there are no guns in this mode. And without a knife or hatchet, you can’t harvest animals well, you can’t craft the best clothing in the game, and you can’t make a bow and arrows. You can’t even defend yourself from hungry wolves when they attack.

To give you a little idea of how the developers see this mode, there is a Steam achievement for surviving a single day in Interloper. It took me several tries, after doing my best to learn the maps on lower levels, before I achieved even this. When I wrote my earlier post I hadn’t even attempted Interloper. It felt too brutal.

I forgot to mention: this is permadeath. Dying in the game means your current save is deleted. Go back to Day 1, you have to start over. Make a single mistake and it can cost your whole run. And nearly every death in this game can be traced back to a mistake the player made. Get overconfident, go out into the cold without proper precautions, or just misjudge how much food and water you’ll need, and it’s over. You’ve faded into the long dark.

But I have finally strung together enough luck and skill that I am past Day 200 on a single run. Other players I’ve talked to have said the game gets boring at this point but not for me. I’m enjoying having a better chance (not a guarantee by any means) of surviving after the brutal first 20-30 days getting set up.

It’s far more than a walking simulator. It’s beautiful, meditative, and challenging. I love it.

Computer Origin Story, Part 1

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech

I was listening to a member special from the Accidental Tech Podcast folks, and they were sharing their Computer Origin Stories; remembering their first time using a computer, and their journey from there to their later computer programming jobby-jobs (as Casey always calls their regular jobs) before they all eventually quit to do the podcast full-time, some faster than others.

It’s fun to reminisce! It was all so very long ago, because I am old.

I should probably make this a much longer post, with links and images, but I wanted to kind of sketch out the outline of my own personal Computer Origin Story first. Try to get it down in words. It’s hard and I may be leaving out things and it might not all be in the right order, but here’s my first notes on the topic.

I am unsure if arcade games count for the purposes of “computers” but they were absolutely computers, so I’ll begin the chain of events by my encounter with a Lunar Lander arcade game in what must have been early summer 1979. It was the end of my 8th grade year in Junior High and our class got to celebrate by taking a day trip to the Kah-nee-ta Resort in central Oregon. While the rest of my schoolmates were riding on horseback, or relaxing in the hot springs, or sunbathing, I was in the dark resort lobby feeding quarters into this game trying to land a vector-graphics spaceship on a 2D planet surface, guiding it in by using a knob to control the rotation and a button to feather the rocket to speed up or slow down.

The first personal computer I remember using was a Tandy TRS-80, at a computer store in a suburban shopping mall. I must have been a teenager in my middle years. There was a grocery store in that mall, and when mom would go get groceries, I’d wait for her at the bookstore in that mall, and then, eventually, I’d wait for her in the computer store. This must have been in the early 1980s. I was in high school but I don’t remember what grade. I suppose I can try to find the name of that store, but for the life of me I can’t.

At some point the store ran a contest where the prize was a TRS-80, which would have been prohibitively expensive for my family to buy. To win the contest I had to play a Star Trek game and have the highest score. I got one chance to do it, and I don’t think I lasted longer than a minute or two. My parents, particularly my mom, thought I was going to beat it. I did not, but I had a lot of fun.

That store sold other computers. I would regularly buy issues of Byte Magazine and read up about computers. That’s where my interest began. But it didn’t stop there. More to come soon; there are a few more stops along the way.

Tired and whatnot

Daily Story Project

I’ve made a note of some ideas about things I can write about but for some reason, that reason probably being my dumb brain that hates doing boring things that aren’t novel or urgent, I can’t bring myself to write about them. So this entry will become another stream-of-consciousness flow of random stuff until I reach around five hundred words, as have they all been for the most part. Sure, some of the past entries have been coherent but that is not what I’m feeling today.

I’m tired, is what I’m feeling. Like sleepy tired, but also mentally tired of the dumb job hunting and the endless capitalism and the grind of having Things that Need Doing. Life hasn’t had a lot of joy lately for me. Brief moments of happiness or enjoyment but actual full-on joy? Not present, man.

Physically tired because yesterday I ramped up my exercise routine. Been walking at least once a day every day for several weeks now, thanks to inspiration and a challenge from my friend Christi through our Apple Watches. Walking is great but I miss running, so because I’ve been nailin’ it in the walking thing I pushed myself to try adding little jogging segements. Nothing crazy, just a block or two, and then I let my heart rate ramp back down before going again. It felt good to do it; I’ve always said that running makes me feel human, by which I mean feeling myself in my body, and not living in my head. And even though I returned home sweaty and tired I wasn’t injured or hurt; no pain just discomfort from having worked my muscles harder than normal. I went out and did another, slower walk later in the day, after dinner, to keep my body in motion, and maybe that helped prevent soreness and pain.

And today, my legs and back feel a bit stiff but mostly what I feel is sleepy. I don’t want to move much. I just want to sit, or lay down ideally. I want to be still, close my eyes, and drift into a nap.

Can I do that? After this post. I promise, Me. You can rest soon. Just another 132 words after that last sentence. Keep going.

The mental tired is also a problem. Is this brain fog? Am I a victim of Long Covid? How could I tell? That’s not a diagnosis that doctors are handing out these days. I’m sure I’m just worried about All of This. It’s nice having my dad here, though. It gives me a bit of comfort knowing someone else is around. Dad and I didn’t always have the best relationship but it’s pretty solid now.

How did I get to my dad from exercise? Oh, probably because he can’t exercise. Well, walking around, slowly, is the most exercise he gets these days, being in his late 80s, and having had surgery to repair his broken spine and ribs less than a year ago. That puts exercise into perspective. Right?

Red Barn Kids are not in a barn

Daily Story Project

One of my earliest memories is using a typewriter to write “stories”. I wish I still had some of those. I remember being inspired by a Scholastic book called “The Boxcar Children” about some orphaned kids who lived in an abandoned train boxcar. I wonder if that book actually exists or if I confabulated it somewhere along the line? Memory is a strange country, folks.

The kids in my apartment building and general neighborhood broke in to a locked up standalone garage down the street once, where an old car was parked. It might have been my dad’s Triumph race car? I can’t tell if these are real memories or if I’m inventing them out of whole cloth. The events would be, if real, over 50 years old at this point. I can see some of the other kids’ faces, but others are just generic fuzzy images. I know my sister was there, if it’s something I actually know or not. We did not get caught but then I went and tried to type it up as a story using the family typewriter, a mechanical and not at all easy to use device that often locked up, all the type arms jamming together and requiring delicate untangling before it could be used again.

Maybe the typewriter jammed because I did not know what I was doing? Surely not. OK, yes, that is almost certainly the issue.

I loved the sound that thing made, sharp crisp metallic spring-loaded typefaces smacking into the paper. The little “ding” of the bell when it reached the end of a line, the ratchet sound of hitting the arm, rotating the cylinder to move the paper down, and slamming the whole thing back to start another line.

The title “Red Barn Kids” emerges from the memory pool. The garage was red, but I do not believe it was a barn. But “Red Garage Kids” doesn’t sound as good, does it?

I can see myself sitting in our living room, the tiny TV in one corner, me on the couch with a laminated TV tray unfolded in front of me, the heavy mechanism of the typewriter holding down the shaky metal legs of the tray, and me pounding those keys with my fingers, one finger on each hand since I was, what, 7 or 8 years old and had not learned nor even knew about ten-finger typing yet? That wouldn’t be for another 10 years at least when I took typewriting class in high school, a skill I use daily thanks to computers being, y’know, a thing now.

Kids breaking in to a barn to look at an old car isn’t much of a story. That’s my thought now. More of a scene, or a vignette. It needs conflict, tension, resolution. Why are they breaking in? Just bored? To retrieve something? Does anyone get hurt, or scared, or refuse to enter? Clearly this story is not ready yet to be published.

Would be nice, though, to see what 7 year old me committed to paper. Actual paper, I mean. That kid had goals and the tools with which to achieve them.