Based on (as recounted last time):
1. Having to return the laptop to work, and
2. Being told specifically not to hit DA from the office, and
3. Being stuck with only my old 300mHz OS9 tower at home...

It seems:
4. I will be scarce around DA for a while.
5. Possibly longer, if other variables come into play in August (which I'd already anticipate, so:
6. In some ways, I'm being forced "ahead of schedule" to nearly vanish.

So, of course:
7. This is rather upsetting.

Sometimes, I feel the journey of the last eight years of my life has been to lose the things that have given me comfort.

Coming home from work yesterday, I felt as if a limb was missing. That laptop had been "internet at my fingertips" for about three years, so I kept stumbling upon the faulty reflex to reach for it. (For DA, for Wikipedia, for the blogosphere and news, etc.) When my tower is Photoshopping, it risks any work I'm doing to tap the net. OS9's worst quality is that a whole machine can hose up if one program goes wrong.

Meanwhile (during a rare Photoshop break tonight), have tried all three available browsers this evening, and two of them can't handle DA at all, and Explorer only bare-marginally. (Netscape used to work better than it does now, not sure what's up with that.)

It frankly amazes me even more how well Photoshop itself does perform on this machine. Even juggling multiple half-gig's full of layers at a time is like lightning compared to these old browsers.

Do hope to borrow a friend's laptop for checking in this weekend. Spent Sunday (with the laptop and CS2, before giving both up) making fresh JPGs of virtually my entire body of work, and, not incidentally, revised versions of nearly all my older prints. So this weekend, hope to upload them and tell you more about those. (There's a reason I've never said "Buy my prints!" before, based on a "5% imperfection" in the old ones, that will now be gloriously corrected (as the newer ones have been already).) Worth doing, you'll finally see much of my work as I've seen it myself. (Brighter, basically, more luminous. I'd finally found the hidden gamma setting last year, that almost no one knows about, that had bunged me up until last summer.)

So, my ultimate unfortunate point?

1) I'll be pretty scarce around here,
2) Missing you terribly, and
3) Hopeful that anyone will use email for anything important (cause I can check that from work),

Because

4) My "day-to-day" life at DA has come abruptly and ingloriously to an end,
5) Or at least to a prevalent hiatus, and
6) Little could feel more wrong.