First of all, let me confess that it might have been partly my fault. I was in a kind of daze when I left the house this morning, because I'd been working with Tim on his infamous letter, revision 43,687,925, and he just couldn't get it through his melon that if he works on an earlier version and sends it to me, I have to go back and make all the same corrections over and over and over.

Isn't that the definition of insanity? Or is it the definition of stupidity, when someone explains to you that the reason your head hurts is that you keep beating it against the wall and you keep on beating your head against the wall anyway? Harder, even?

After spending the whole morning trying to get out the door and over to Mom's to see how she's doing (and just basically trying to get away from the clanging phone), I wasn't seeing quite straight by the time I walked out the door an hour late. So it might have been partly my fault if every other driver on the road had no idea how to make a right turn without coming to a complete stop, or needed a whole city block to change lanes (the blinker going the whole way), or seemed to accept it as their sacred duty to keep me from getting anywhere.

Yeah, I'm sure all that was my fault. I just wasn't in my usual mellow driving mode. My tolerance level must have sunk below the Maginot, Mason-Dixon and Mendoza lines. My well of good feeling had run dry.

Okay, nothing really happened, but every other car seemed like a near-miss waiting to happen. Or nearly happen, I guess.

Um, that's the whole story. I had a bad morning, and it made me nervous while I was driving. Somehow I survived intact.

At long last late this afternoon, my new Zip drive — the device that will liberate me from the old computer — was delivered to my door. For two weeks I've been watching for the brown UPS truck to bounce up my driveway, but it was my friendly letter carrier who brought it. Yes, it was shipped not by UPS, but by USPS, the old reliable United States Postal Service. I guess I read the receipt wrong.

So I've spent the whole evening transferring files to Fidelina, being meticulously careful not to overwrite any documents that I've already modified. I can't believe it's finally here. The Zip is here, and so is the day when I won't have to turn the old computer on. That'll make my days about fifty percent more efficient, if I can do everything on the newer, faster machine and never have to switch the monitor cable again. Eventually I'll have the two computers networked, but that's not happening yet.

The first thing I did with my new Zip drive had nothing to do with work. I moved all my personal files, including everything journal-related. This entry you're reading is the first that I've uploaded directly from Fidelina. That might not mean much to anyone but me, but it's huuuuuge! I have a few more hurdles, but this was a massive chasm that I've finally managed to get across.