Small towns and old friends
Not sure if I should tack this on Thursday, but oh well. Last night I stopped by Level 12 to help Mark (my roommate) move some of the display cases around. He was already tuckered out from moving all day, so he just hunkered down with the Oreo blizzard I’d gotten him, and had a nice chat with a friend and I.
We talked a while about the options for selling Level 12, since Mark is getting tired of running it (after 12 years, I can hardly blame him.) His friend had a lot of great ideas, but the weird part was that he seemed really familiar to me. His mannerisms and some of his speech patterns just clicked, and reminded me a lot of a guy I knew from years ago. Since I was more or less an outsider on the conversation, I just sat quietly, keeping my ideas to myself.
When we were finally breaking up, Mark pulled up his records to be sure he had his friend’s phone number, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye the name on the account. So it turns out that this random stranger was indeed the guy I knew from years ago: one Bill Batton.
The main reason I remember Bill is that he was the first real computer teacher I’d had, and I can still remember a lot of the lessons I learned from him. I still remember one of the first times he came over to teach my brother and I, and we took our computer completely apart. We had everything laid out across the room on saran wrap, and how cool and exciting everything was. Besides introducing me to computers (#1 obsession) he also had a strong hand in getting my into rpgs (#3 or 4 obsession). Anyway, we traded phone numbers, and may try getting together sometime.
Today was also exciting because I had more time to get to know Brad, our new computer tech at trib. Turns out he’s a Mac freak, but I can forgive him of that, because he’s also a web-designer. His page is really quite good, and he gets a pretty decent hit-count over time. The best part is, he doesn’t know all that much about the back-end support of the site, and we may end up hooking up so that I can do the fun back-end coding, and he can continue doing the pretty design bit.
My truck is starting to resemble a motorhome. I’ve already been using it to cart me and my laptop to and from work on a regular basis, but with the addition of the workout routine, I’ve had to include my gym bag. And to top it off, this morning I splurged on a mess-kit, small cooler, and some food to stock it, basically giving my humble pickup its own micro-kitchen. All I need now is a microwave that runs off the cigarette lighter.