A long, winding road...

I finally got under way on Tuesday at almost exactly noon, as Lee had called and wanted to stop by during her lunch hour and say good-bye to me. Yeah... right... more like say good-bye to Sasha, who got a going-away bath and groom.

The van felt heavy, and it was, loaded down with the washing machine, a television, and a bunch of stuff that I'd decided I could not live without in Pagosa. After a few miles, though, as is usually the case, I adapted to driving with the load, and was soon whistling down Beltway 8, pausing every few hundred feet, it seemed, to toss yet another dollar bill into the gaping maw of the toll system.

A few hours later, I found myself freshly off of Highway 290, heading north on Highway 183, skirting Austin. I happened to recall that tsarina had noted in her LJ that she'd gotten a job at a Half Price Books just south of Burnet at 183, so when I saw an exit for Burnet in front of me, I decided to drop in and say hi. Both Sasha and I needed to stretch our legs for a bit, anyway.

As it turned out, tsarina was on the premises, and it was the young lady I was talking to as I asked if "Amanda" was there. When I introduced myself as AlexPGP, a slight cloud passed over her eyes momentarily, until she placed the name. We didn't socialize for very long, just said hi, and then - after taking a quick look at the reference section to see if there were any unusual Russian dictionaries in stock - Sasha and I got back on the road.

The tank I had filled in Houston was well-nigh empty by the time I pulled into the truck stop at Tye. It seems I am becoming a regular customer there. As I got back onto Interstate 20, I was seriously thinking of turning in for the night, but that meant having to cover 600-plus miles the following day, so I pressed on.

And on. Past Lubbock, all the way to Clovis, just slightly into New Mexico. There, I registered at a Motel 6 (they have a pet-friendly policy) and turned in for the night.

The next morning, being short on dog food, I vowed I would not eat until I got food for Sasha. Unfortunately, no good opportunity turned up as we moved along, and the only thing we ate was the miles to Ft. Sumner, and past that, to Santa Rosa. There, I filled up with gas, bought some dog food at the truck stop shop, and ordered a sandwich for myself.

Onward and onward we drove, to Clines Corners, up through Santa Fe, past Espanola and Chama, and into the home stretch as I sped by the general store that is (I think) Chromo, New Mexico.

We made one detour while in that last stretch, and that was to go a few hundred yards down a Forest Service road. I was curious to see what, if any, mushrooms were beginning to sprout in the forest. After a few minutes of hiking, my preliminary finding was that it was still too early for mushrooms, until I just about fell over a bunch of them sprouting from the gravel road bed.

They looked a little like Portabella mushrooms, but my knowledge of gilled mushrooms is rather spotty, and it's been almost 5 years since I've done any serious mushrooming, so I am not sure. In any event, even if these were king boletes (a.k.a., Boletus edulis), there's no way I'd pick anything growing in a road bed, or on a maintained lawn for that matter.

Once home, I unpacked the van (except for the washer) and settled down for a nap [who am I kidding... I was going to sleep!], but Galina came home and woke me, and kept me awake until about 10 pm. One of the things that kept me awake was a couple of king boletes that had been dropped off at the store by some folks who were sending a couple of boxes of them off to New York, to be served in gourmet restaurants. The caps on these mushrooms were at least 5 inches in diameter and I wanted to jump in the car that minute and go get some of my own. But I'll wait until this weekend, and then Feht and I will go hunt us down some edible fungus.

So far today, I've opened the store (G. didn't get much sleep last night) and took that opportunity to package and dispatch my VAIO. Sony had sent a box, flattened, to me to package my unit into, along with a shipping label that provides for UPS Next Day Air service.

This means that, if all goes well, they will have the unit tomorrow. Assuming it doesn't spend much time in a service queue (all it needs, I think, is a new fan), it is entirely possible that I'll get the unit back in time for my next trip to Houston.

I was relieved at around 9 am by Drew and Caleb and upon returning home, set about replacing the CPU in my eMachines 333cs (before the new CPU got lost in my junk). You'll recall, Linux would not boot properly with the unit's Cyrix processor, so I replaced it with an AMD K6-2 (though the "slowest" unit I could find was a 450 MHz CPU). Anyway, the change seems to have done the trick as far as being able to boot Linux is concerned.

My next Adventure In Linux will be installing something called Win4Lin, which supposedly lets you install a Windows 95 or 98 system that runs under Linux and that, further, lets you run many industrial-strength Windows programs without problem, including Microsoft Office. I took a look at a couple of on-line reviews, and it sounds as if there may be something to the product. At any rate, I have a copy and intend to install it soon.

Drew will be coming by in about two hours so we can go to Farmington and pick up his new car (the one I am cosigning for). That's "new" in the sense of "another," as opposed to "brand spanking, never-before-owned." It's a heck of a debt for a kid to take on, but you have to start somewhere, I guess.

I need to go back and review what I have and have not yet done for my client with the socio-ethnographic text. I did next to nothing with it while in Houston, but better nothing than a poor-quality something.

Cheers...