Last entry for April. This log has been a good exercise so far, and I’m going to continue writing in it. We got back from Brian’s wedding last night at about 7:30; we both had a great time. My stomach decided it wasn’t happy on Saturday night and I was up with the Genny Screamers until 4am or so; that and sleeping on the couch so I wouldn’t wake everybody up really put a hurt on my body. My neck is still aching from Mom and Dad’s cratered guest bed, a night on the the couch, and my return to my own pillows. I do have to say, though, it’s great to have a solid 8 hours’ sleep behind me- I feel awake and alive. I think I’m going to put a moratorium on staying awake past 11:30 this week to see how well I perform at work on 7 hours’ sleep.

I’m out of vacation time and out of sick leave, I think. I probably have 4 hours’ sick time and maybe 4 of vacation with this new pay period. sigh. Mom was telling me everybody got some great porch time on Sunday after we left- that made me jealous and sad that I don’t live closer to them.

For some reason, I’m feeling a little nostalgic for playing Marathon. In 1996, I had just bought my first computer, a Mac IIcx, and I worked at Hopkins in a window office over the Harbor; they had e-mail but only internally; I bought an AOL account and used it on their 9600K modem. I got the demo on a CD from MacUser and installed it on the office 840av; the first day I played it it scared the shit out of me and hooked me completely. I played it constantly for the next 6 months. All I wanted was somebody to play with me- you could network it up and play on a LAN; I worked with a bunch of 40-year-old sociologists and lifer Hopkins drones. My cx would only play it at the lowest settings and with 256 colors; I had to devote all system resources to play it at anything near a decent speed. I had Hopkins buy me a Supra 28.8 modem and would spend hours in my office downloading maps for the game; then I’d stay at work for 2 hours or until dark playing each one.

In the early days of ’98, I had a job at an Internet design firm with a T1 and spent hours at a now-deceased site called the Marathon Hyper-Archive where this guy had collected all the maps people had created. I was able to get about 65% of the maps for all the different iterations of the games Bungie created, and archived them on CD. I figure it’s fun to go back and play the games every couple of years- sort of like busting out the Intellivision or the Atari 2600 for an afternoon of beers and Space Invaders.