it seems that nothing ever happens these days that i can't chronicle on my webpage... that's an insanity in and of itself.
i just went out for a walk. i got home early today, and as i was driving home a good song came on the radio, so i decided, even though i was less than a block from home, that i'd go way around the block in order to kill at least three minutes. (turned out to be ten minutes, which is okay 'cause they played another good song... all of this immediately after they played "we're not gonna take it" for some reason...) so i take a left, instead of a right, and drive past the school in our neighborhood; at a house across the street, a bunch of kids had set up a lemonade stand in their front yard. how cool, thought i, i must make a note of this and get some lemonade when i get back...
so i drove around, and came home, and found that Be Software had sent me a free update for the BeOS. this rather impressed me --- a free update to their operating system, from Release 4 (which i purchased for $75 last winter) to Release 4.5. i got rather involved in contemplating this, noting that micros~1 charged about $100 just for an upgrade from Win95 to Win98 (which was also a change only in the minor version number (4.0 to 4.something), despite their "let's number them by years!" trickery)... it makes me very happy that the new breed of companies do not have the "screw the customer" greed of the old generation of companies....
so involved that i forgot all about the lemonade stand until i'd been home for well over an hour. so, noting that i was still thirsty and our refrigerator is quite devoid of anything worthy of drinking except maybe some sour milk, i set off for dairy mart, hoping the kids would waylay me and quench my thirst with lemonade in the yuoung entrepreneurial spirit... or at the very least yell comical things at me as i walked by.
i was indeed disappointed to discover on the way there that the kids had dispersed. oh well.
next door to the house where the kids were no longer having their lemonade sale, i'd seen a tiny young girl, maybe 5 or 8 years old, complaining to this old dude that was probably her grandfather. in fact, she seemed to be pleading... but i couldn't hear, and didn't care. but now, on the way back, i she that she's decorated the sidewalk extensively in the last five minutes... she's up in the yard, and has obviously worked her way from the street to halfway through the front yard to the porch, drawing bright designs in day-glo orange and blue chalk.
and as i walk past, i read her handiwork on the concrete steps leading from the street to the front walk:
STaR WaRS
I WaNT TO gO
PLEaSE!
update: an actual photo
and thus, seeing that the younger generation is every bit as hyped as we were back in the day, has renewed my faith in the younger generation.
Fri Jun 18 19:19:53 EDT 1999
i have my dad's old yaschica 35mm camera now... it's ancient, and i have no flash for it , don't know how to use it, all that... but i went out and got film and played with the camera, and took a picture of the little girl's handiwork before the rain washed it away... i'm just now getting around to putting up the image... check it out here
Sun Aug 1 11:22:19 EDT 1999
