Wee Tragedy.

Already back below 70 degrees and not yet seven o'clock. Well and good, friends. Nine heirloom tomatoes in the ground, two okra, two squash, three peppers, a bit of an herb garden. None of that will grow in temperatures like this, but let's just count the week's labor against what will have to be the still slow overheated nights to come. It can be hot so long as I get my tomatoes, I suppose.

No clouds in sight from here on the back deck. Birds and mowers all around. Grass getting long again, which is what happens. Dog asleep behind my chair. Wind still up, but calming. You can feel us trying to pull back toward spring.

In Very Slight Panic News,the little computer upon which the novel was composed, and upon which I figured all other novels etcetera, because I do not understand (a) technology or (b) the passage of time, is making a kind of wheeze when one, ah, how shall we say, turns it on, uses it, or passes it closely when walking into the room. It also is doing a kind of gentle but certain oscillation between varying levels of brightness, moving from just-too-bright-to-use to slightly-too-dark-to-see. Also there are sometimes lines on the screen, vaguely reminiscent of the I-dropped-my-graphing-calculator-would-you-please-buy-me-a-new-one-for-Mrs.-Newell's-calculus-class sort of lines. I have not dropped the computer, but I did turn it off in December, move it here to 709, and then crank it back up today (the last several revisions of the book have been on the fancy J. Crew U. machine, on account of its ability to use the internets, and to print on a printer not run by 17th-century monks). It's not an emergency. I have other computers. But it is probably dead. Or dying.

I just really, really liked that machine for first drafts. You could hit the hell out of the keyboard on that thing. You sort of had to. And I've been thinking maybe about a new first draft. Of something new.

So I spent the afternoon figuring out how to load my 12-year-old pixellated first-draft font onto a newer machine. It's an antique of sorts, too, but it can plug into the kind of internet cable that now comes out of our internets. There is that. I will not have to rely on a disk—they do not even make them any more, I don't think—to move drafts from machine to machine-that-can-email to this machine. But I'm still not sure I can write on the new(er) one. We may be looking at some Uniballs and a stack of legal pads. We may be looking at one more item to list on the 'crazy' side of the ledger. There's a second side of the ledger, I guess, but I don't know what it's called. 'Less crazy,' perhaps.

I have a thing where, druthers-wise, I'd rather not do early drafts on this J. Crew machine. I like to get my drafting world separate from all things J. Crew when at all possible.

So that's the sports. Let's do weather: warming up through the end of your week, friends and fans of shockingly banal Macintosh blog shite. Chance of rain as we head into the weekend. Cooler than you'd expect. We'll crack 80 again here soon enough, but cooler than you'd expect. Water your gardens: all this wind will soon enough undo all that rain.

Macintosh enthusiasts: half a step away from LARPers, I fear. I am now casting a +12 spell on myself.