Wow, I really have not written very much this month! My head just hasn’t been in a journalling space, I guess. I have at least 3 half-written entries which I should really finish and post sometime soon. I just always seem to have other stuff to work on.
This past week a lot of my time has gone into doing stuff around the house. For instance, when I cleaned out the front closet over the Christmas break, I left four boxes of stuff sitting in the front room waiting to be gone through and mostly gotten rid of. Last Sunday I spent several hours upgrading the desktop computer to Mac OS X Leopard, and while it was chugging away at that I shredded boxes of old checks, pulled out and shredded pages from old APAs (mostly ones with my old addresses on them) and then chucked many of the APAs.
(Perhaps some of my old APAhacking friends are scandalized that I would be doing such a thing, but alas my sentimental attachment to boxes full of paper has waned in recent years, especially for the APAs that I was only sorta-kinda involved in, mainly in the mid-to-late 90s. I don’t expect to ever read these things again, and I don’t want to keep lugging them around, so out they go. Ditto some fanzines from the mid-90s, since I was never really part of fanzine culture.)
I’ve also been cleaning up and cataloguing my Magic card collection (which I think makes Debbi roll her eyes whenever I buy new cards or work on them). I went through and chucked a whole bunch of computer-related packing material (such as the boxes our wireless mice came in), books and CDs of software, as well as various other odds and ends. So things are generally looking a lot cleaner up there.
But between stuff like that, and gaming, and poker, and reading, and comic books, that just takes up a whole lot of my time.
And now I have this year’s Baseball Prospectus to read, and fantasy baseball season to prepare for, and a variety of housework to take care of, and movies at the Stanford Theatre to go see, so my March looks at least as busy as my February.
At least it’s been bright and sunny and warm out lately. Always nice to be able to move to short sleeves and start being active outdoors at the beginning of March!
I’ll try not to neglect the journal quite so much next month, though.
I understand the concept of junking APAs – i shredded APA-69 a year or two ago, simply because of the space it took and the poor likelyhood of me ever looking at it again. Hurt to do it, and i did take some selections out to keep with me, but there was a limit, and something had to go.
Yeah, I haven’t gotten to the APA-69s yet. Turbo got the axe last weekend, and this weekend I went through Capacity and WAPA. Sigh, those two were APAs I really enjoyed reading, but I so didn’t have time to contribute to them when I was in graduate school. Still, I can’t fret too much about Capacity, since that’s how I met you, Jim!
In many ways I lament that the community-oriented feel of APAs hasn’t really carried over to the Internet: The venue is too large, and there’s little-to-no control over who can be a “member”. But I guess you can’t have everything. And certainly the blogosphere comes with many of its own advantages.
I saved a few zines from the APAs that went out the door, including a few of your early Capacity zines, Jim. But for the most part I knew I just was never going to have time to read through them again, so I had to be brutal. It’s too bad, but I’m already way backed up on recent stuff I want to read, never mind fannish stuff from 15+ years ago.