Chris and Sarah’s blog

Wow, so two whole posts in just 1 month. A new record. Anyway, Sarah is in Atlanta, GA for a conference on Multiple-Sclerosis. This has left me all by myself in our big, empty house. What have I learned from this? That I suck at living alone. I knew I’d miss her — she’s my wife and I love spending time with her. But I never thought I’d find myself feeling really, really sad and anxious for most of the time that I’m in the house by myself. I’ve always had issues with separation anxiety — that’s something I’ve dealt with my entire life. I thought I’d brought it under control when I went off to college and eventually got over my homesickness. Turns out now that I’ve been living with Sarah for almost 2 years while rarely spending more than 12 hours away from her, I seem to have relapsed into it.

I remember that when I lived with my parents and my Brother, I always thought that the time I had to myself in the house was nice. It made me think that I liked being alone in my house, and that someday I’d enjoy living alone. But back then, such solitude was always the rare exception. With 4 people in the house, I was virtually never alone in the place for more than 30 minutes at a time. I’ve been alone in the house for between 4 and 6 waking hours for the past 2 nights (last night I had Keith and Kriebel over for about 2 hours, which was nice to break up the loneliness), and each night after about 1 hour of alone-time I’ve been sick to death of it. Playing video games, watching TV, or reading takes my mind off it for only as long as I keep up the activity. As soon as I put the controller/book down or turn the TV off, the loneliness comes flooding back. By bedtime on these past two nights, I’ve been genuinely sad for no reason other than the fact that I was alone. I guess I’m a more social creature than I ever thought I was. I just only want to socialize with a small group of people. In this case just 1 person.

Having the house to myself hasn’t been all bad, of course. I’ve had the chance to play my single player video game a bit more than usual, and I went for a nice, long walk the other night. Still, I would rather have done both of those things with Sarah around.

Tonight I’m going to drive to Basking Ridge and spend the evening hanging out with the family. There are plenty of things I could get done around my own house — boxes to unpack, things to put away and clean, a big jungle of a front lawn to mow … but I really, really don’t want to be alone in a big empty house for another minute, and I have an alternative tonight. Therefore, those tasks will just have to wait. Also I don’t want to have to cook and eat dinner by myself again. Screw that, I’ll eat whatever Mom’s making.

Come home safe tomorrow, honey — I miss you!

My wife bought me a MacBook Pro! It’s a fun little machine, I’ve named it Demeter after the Greek Goddess. I’m writing this blog entry on my new laptop as an excuse to use it for something. I’m paying more mind to appreciating the feel of the machine at my fingertips than I am to the content of this post, so please excuse my rambling. I’m still learning how to get around in OS X, but I’m getting the hang of it. Expose is as much fun as I always thought — not really much more efficient than alt-tabbing through windows, but more fun.

At first, the fact that Sarah went right out and bought me this machine scared me and upset me more than a little — she dropped 2000 bucks on it without consulting me first, plus she bought a computer without letting me check it out, and she bought it off of eBay. Granted, she had her reasons. She was getting it for me and she wanted it to be a surprise and the price was good, but still … I make software, I think I should be consulted about ALL computer purchases in my household. The truth is that if Sarah had come to me for approval before buying this wonderful thing, I probably would have said no. The price would have scared me off, plus I wouldn’t have bought it on eBay — I’d have wanted to buy it new, straight from Apple, which would have jacked the price up a lot. However, now that I’m using it, and getting to know it, I’m very grateful that she bought it for me. We got a SquareTrade warranty for it, so if anything goes wrong, we’ll be covered. All in all, it was a good buy, and it is a great machine. My wife is the best. Still, next time ask first, honey? Thanks.

Mmmmm … Apple. All the power of Unix under the hood, none of the headaches of Windows (viruses, spyware, trojans, eventual unexplainable sluggishness that gets attributed to “entropy” and can only be cured by reinstalling …), and a slick UI to boot. None of the Mac-vs-PC commercials tout the power of Unix that OS X has by way of its Darwin ancestry (and the GNU tools that it comes with, and that are readily available through fink). They should have that Mac-guy mention that sometime. It’d help remind the nerd-zealots in the audience that Macs are not just good for Mom and Dad, that they’re good for anybody. I’ve been fielding a greater than average number of random tech-support questions from family lately. The next time one comes in, I’m going to espouse the virtues of Mac instead of Linux for a change. Well, maybe I’ll espouse them both. Ha-haw, espouse!