Instead of another virtual server move. Nope, found a place to rent in Athens less than 5 miles from where I work, rounded my stuff up out of storage, and schlepped it over to the new place. A 2 bedroom 1 bath house built in the ’50s; and boy, can you tell it. But, you gotta go with what you can afford, and my champagne tastes will have to suck it up for a while. On the plus side, it’s in a low-crime area, no noisy college students nearby, and there’s a huge field/woods right behind it. On the negative side, I’m re-discovering all the things I don’t have and need to get; and the list is piling up rapidly. Especially groceries.

The move has given me a new appreciation for e-books, though. Real books are, to me, more satisfying to read, and I love the smell of old books… but probably 1/3 of the boxes I moved were books, and those sonsabitches are heavy. Not to mention I’ve got to get bookshelves to hold them all now; they’re currently stacked up along the walls in any free space. With Kindle on the phone, I can carry all my books (well… at least the ones available as e-books) with me all the time and read them wherever I am. I’m not sure I like Amazon’s policy of storing them in the “cloud”… I like to have a physical copy (physical in this case meaning stored on a hard drive I possess) rather depending on someone else’s server somewhere.

And to add a little rant to this post… I’ve had an iPhone since the iPhone 2; so, 5 years or so. In all that time, I’ve never damaged one. So, of course, a few days ago, while putting the phone back in it’s belt case, I fumble it and it drops to the asphault flat on the face and shatters the screen. Of course.

It’s still useable if you peer past the spiderweb of cracks; and I’m out of contract so I can go to AT&T and pick up a 4 under contract for $0.99, but it’s the principle of the thing. All those years of smirking at people with cracked smartphone screens.