Okay. I’m bad. Very bad. It’s been, what, two months since the last time I updated this entry? Since my last entry, I’ve dropped out of library school, spent a lot of time being sick, done a lot of writing, taught a class with my wife on “The Gospel According to Tolkien” at our church, and had my laptop computer stolen.

Library School. Yes, well. Honestly, I’d been having second thoughts since the summer; the job market for librarians is pretty slim, and what I’d seen of the working life of the librarians I’ve observed and talked to, I wasn’t sure if the payback would be worth the investment. I was always much more interested in library technology anyway, particularly in the application of open-source software to library needs. Based on comments I’ve received on the Literate Penguin and in other forums, I think I’ve actually started making a name for myself in that arena. Couple that with the fact that I was doing spectacularly poorly in my Ethnic Collections Development class, and you have a recipe for disillusionment. I’m going to keep developing my IT skills, keep learning how OSS can be applied to library needs, and hopefully go with that. I’m told that for what I want to do, a library degree is pretty much irrelevant.

Sick. Back in November, just before Thanksgiving, is when I had the first of this winter’s ick. It lasted longer than I would have liked. And then, just about three weeks ago, I started coming down with more ick. This time, I was running a slight fever, coughing almost constantly, and living on my nebulizer. My peak flows were down below 300, which, as any asthmatic knows, is pretty wretched. I was out of work for over a week, and it was two weeks before I could put in a full day again. I was given a course of Prednisone and a course of antibiotics, and while there were vague words about sticking me in the hospital, that, thankfully, didn’t happen. I’ve had a swollen lymph node in my neck since just before getting sick in November, and I’m hoping it’s just due to all of the illness I’ve been through. Since I’m a mild hypochondriac, though, I simply can’t help thinking about lymphoma or Hodgkin’s disease.

I’ve also started an interesting new treatment for my migraines. It’s called Cortical Electric Stimulation, or CES for short. It involves putting electrodes on your earlobes and running a mild electrical current through your head for an hour. You don’t feel anything at all. I think it’s been helping, though. I’m still getting headaches, but they’re definitely less intense and less frequent. If this works out, I may purchase a CES device of my own.

Writing. I’ve committed myself to writing 50,000 words of outline for the Terassic Cycle over the next few months. I’ve gotten a pretty good start. I’m re-reading The Road to Gilead, the novel I wrote for National Novel Writing Month in 2003, in preparation for finishing it up. I’ve determined that this novel is the first in the Terassic Cycle, which means that I need to restructure the novel on a very fundamental level. This doesn’t bother me at all, but I’m impatient. I want to have it done.

I’ve also rewritten a couple of short stories and gotten some excellent feedback. I’m still working on “The Honor of Our Ancestors”, which is proving to be a much more difficult story to write than I had anticipated. Maybe I’m not cut out to write fantasy.

And, finally, I wrote a short story, “Little Fluffy Wiggletoes”, which I’ve decided to unleash upon the world under a Creative Commons license. You can find this story on the new website which I am developing: http://www.underpope.com/writing/stories/public/.

Tolkien and Church. Jennifer and I taught a five-week class at our church entitled “The Gospel According to Tolkien”, in which we examined Christian themes as they are presented in The Lord of the Rings. It was a really enlightening class for me; I’ve gained a much deeper appreciation of Tolkien’s works and philosophy. Last summer, I discovered that Tolkien was a dedicated Christian and close friend of C. S. Lewis (another favorite of mine). At the time, I thought it was exciting news. Now I understand that it’s pretty common knowledge. So when I encountered this, the “Lord of the Rings Oracle”, I was in a good position to appreciate the irony. Given Tolkien’s staunch Catholicism — in a letter, he wrote that his Catholic faith was the most important element in his creation of Middle Earth — I would think that this product would cause Tolkien to roll over in his grave.

For each class, we would bring in one of our laptop computers to play selected scenes from the movies to illustrate points. Last Sunday we used my computer, which had just come back from yet another repair at the Sony plant. After class, I packed up my computer in my laptop bag and put it in the back seat of our Prius, shoving it under the seat as best I could. Which brings us to:

Stolen laptop. Yep. Someone broke into the Prius and stole my laptop, bag and all. Did you know that you can use a sparkplug to break open a car window? Neither did I. Fascinating. In fact, the police in our town, if they find sparkplugs on a person they’re arresting, will charge that person with possession of burglary tools in addition to whatever else they’re being charged with. I remember walking out of the church and down the steps to the car, which was parked right in front of the church door. I first noticed the pool of shattered glass on the sidewalk next to the car. I looked up, and saw that the window was missing. I hoped fervently that was just a defect in the glass, but when I looked in and saw that my laptop bag was gone, I realized what had happened. Apparently, I uttered words which should not be uttered in the vicinity of a Methodist church when I figured it out.

The police officer, when he came by, was sympathetic and friendly. At one point, after taking the details and getting a case number from dispatch, he bent over and picked up a little piece of ceramic with a number and a plus sign; it was part of a sparkplug, which is how we figured out how the thief had done it. The rest of the sparkplug was missing. Apparently the thief took his tools with him when he stole my computer.

Fortunately, I’d done a backup just that morning, so nothing important was lost. And our insurance will cover the loss as well, so I’ll probably have a new laptop in a week or two. Still, it’s the principle of the thing. You don’t want to be burgled right in front of your church. There’s just something unholy about it.

My only consolation is that the computer runs Linux and not Windows, so the thief will have a hard time figuring out what to do with it. Makes me wish I’d enabled the BIOS password, though, like I’d been planning to do for months.

And that’s about all that’s happening at this point in time.