Heading Downhill

The most difficult part of the day is behind me: I got out of bed.

I sometimes wake up all excited. Not exactly "rarin' to go," but with plans, hopes, and a list of things I wish to accomplish. Often, of course, I get sidetracked, and it's not uncommon for me to take a particularly hopeful scheme and ruin it by execution. Still, I awake and am eager to get busy.

Today, no such luck.

It started, in one sense, last year. Even though I've been careful not to pump up the economy by buying things left and right, I've still managed to accumulate a number of new things. These, mostly, are piled on one of my desks awaiting definitive homes.

Last week, when I was housesitting, I brought along my laptop and, lacking any reasonable plan, installed a new version of FreeBSD on it. I completely overwrote the hard disk, destroyed everything on it, and started off fresh. To my amazement, it worked, first time.

It took a bit of futzing around to get the GUI interface working, but I expected that. Now my laptop, a pitifully outdated machine, has more current versions of the operating system and graphic interface than any other computer I own. It's almost as if I've entered the 21st Century!

The one application I *don't* have is Open Office. In my eagerness to correct that deficiency, I've made several attempts to install that software. Unlike Windows(tm), Apple products, or any of the popular versions of Unix, where you download the program and issue a command or do a click or two, the preferred way of installing this software is through what FreeBSD calls "ports." You can download the port software, then run it and it fetches the program through the Internet.

You guessed it. The laptop can't talk to the Internet, not yet, and my several attempts to fool the laptop or have it build the program have all been utter failures. Whether or not I can get it to use the PC card and work through my router to fetch the necessary software is somewhat worsened by the fact that I've misplaced the dongle. Without the physical connection, addressing and setup concerns are moot.

The thing is, as often happens, I had the dongle in a "special place." It was in the pack I usually use to transport my laptop from place to place, but it's no longer there. Although that's a wonderful and logical place to keep it, I have this vague memory of moving it "somewhere safer." It need hardly be said that I, now, have no idea where that safe place is.

I have a hunch it's buried somwhere on my desktop, under scads of paper that wants filing and leftover Christmas junk. I realized this last night. It was too dark, then, to do anything about it, so I told myself I'd do it today. I should note that I'm very good at telling myself to do things "later," and it's an argument I rarely challenge.

So, this morning I woke up faced with the task of cleaning my desk. I can't recall any recent morning when I've been less inclined to get up and get cracking.