A New Year

Well we are half past January, and I haven't blogged in a long while. Things have been extremely busy. I have been working on a major electrical problem at St. Rose, and last week, apparently, we discovered a leak in our oil tank at the school, and now I have to repair this, plus handle EPA. And the water board.

Ah well. All things shall pass.

I need to get back on track with living a holy life, which means taking my prayer more seriously. There's always the tendency to let work take over. That's true whether you're running a business, or working for the Lord.

I have a little exercise I do at the beginning of the year, putting down my goals for the year, long-term and short-term, on 10 index cards, which I place upon my bulletin board. I put a copy in my personal organizer too. That way I have them constantly before my eyes, and eventually, they get done. Big projects are furthermore chopped into smaller ones; in that way they become more manageable. So I will work on these 10 things, and put them on the cards, in the organizer, and perhaps on this blog.

My brother Gerard is going off to Iraq. We'll see if the new technologies I have installed help me be a better correspondent.

We finally got DSL lines down here in Springfield, Kentucky. As a result, I now have a DSL line plugged into a wireless router, and all the computers in the house and parish feed through the one line. Life has gotten very simple on the computer all of a sudden. I no longer watch the drip drip drip of data through a telephone dial-up line into my computer. No more waiting for pages to assemble; things appear almost magically and quickly.

For somebody who loves games, this can be a very bad temptation!

I also installed the Bluetooth system. Working in my office, I find that the standard lengths of your phone cords do not fit my needs to answer my phone on the other desk. If I don't get things just right, I end up yanking the cord from the computer, with deleterious effects on the headphones. And maybe the computer.

I just shot my last set of headphones in this way. I'm dictating this using a Bluetooth earphone, which is now hooked up to my desk computer. This will, I expect, will be the normal way that I function in my office. I have one ear for the computer, and one for the regular telephone. In addition, the same earpiece functions with my cell phone so I'm completely functional. The only thing which I'm supposed to be able to do, and can not yet figured the function for, is the hooking up of the earphone and my laptop computer to my cell phone modem, so that I can use a dial up function even if I do not have a landline or WiFi connection.

For somebody whose great joy is primitive camping, I'm turning into an awful techie.