Weird, non-threatening day. I am slowly realizing I'm spending way too much time on this journal, but I'm hoping it's a phase. (A month or two ago it was Yahtzee on a Cheerios giveaway CD-ROM, which I neatly solved by breaking the CD.) At least some of my posts here have been "what I think about such-and-such" rather than "what happened to me today" or "what I think about me," which is perhaps just as well; I don't want to introduce too much of my personal life into this journal (nor, I'm sure, does Karen). Of course, this post will be different, in a way.

Over the next few months, I want to develop more friendships with people out here – preferably in the three-dimensional world, as Karen and I put it. I'm coming to the realization it's unlikely we'll be moving back to the East Coast any time soon, if at all (which is not necessarily a bad thing), and I'll only see the friends we have in New York once or twice a year. I've got a number of friends I've made through alt.tv.game-shows (newsgroup), some of whom are involved in Live Journal. But I've never met any of these people (the last three Game Show Conventions have all fallen when we've been on vacation elsewhere). One of the other friends from Live Journal is one of our close New York friends, who happened to latch onto this at the same time I did.

The logical way to meet new people on Live Journal is to plug in your interests, check to see who else has them, and contact them. But it also has its risks. I replied to someone yesterday who shares several interests with me (astonishing primarily because this person is maybe half my age), and I think I may have scared them half to death. One person's contact is another person's psycho stalker, so one must tread carefully.

In any case, what I need to do is work at meeting people out here. Q had very few people my age – the people closest in that regard were the two women at the same level as I and my boss, but my living way out in the western burbs (plus my tendency to work crazy late hours) kept me from hanging out with too many people after work ended. (And I missed last year's Christmas party because Karen's was on the same date.) My current company is so small, and my spot so significantly isolated in its level (the two people above me are the co-owners, the four below are entry level or slightly above and all in their early 20s) that it won't work well, either.

Still, this is the sort of thing I've got to keep working at. The Internet has been a boon for shy people (Garrison Keillor: “Shyness... it's not for the timid"), but with nearly half of my life gone by, I don't have time anymore to let that kind of stuff slow me down.

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Goals for the next few months:

1) Finish Superhits 1978-1983. I've been stuck at 31 disks since we went to the Upper Peninsula.
2) Clean the apartment. And I mean clean it. Including vaccuming, scrubbing, and ironing all those button-down shirts that have lived on top of my dresser since we moved out here. As well as setting up the second TV in the bedroom. That's because I need it there to...
3) Go through all unlabeled and uncatalogued videotapes, label and catalogue them. I'm sick of not knowing what we have on tape. That will make it easier to...
4) Finish Game Shows ‘75. Including Snappys, and, hopefully, a redesign. Considering I launched it four years ago and at least ten pages are still “to come,” it's overdue.
5) Count and catalogue all trading cards. Yes, all 60 to 70 thousand. Can't put them all in binders; we don't have the room.

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Is John Ashcroft kidding? (Of course, he's not; he has no sense of humor.) According to The Washington Post, the Justice Department is simply ignoring a court order to explain why a prisoner held at Guantanamo is being held as an enemy combatant. This didn't even happen during World War II – even Roosevelt didn't ignore the courts. (Of course, there weren't as many lawyers back then.)