Saturday, October 2, 2004

Not much time to spend at the keyboard this morning. I'm packing up to make a second trip to Likely, where I'll finish setting up the little computer I gave to Lucero last week. Her dead Mac turned out to be well and truly dead--and, a Performa, not worth resurrecting in any case--so I gave her a PowerMac 5200 I've kept as backup for a few years. (I'm down to a half-dozen such "backup" computers. Every time I'm relieved of one it's a blessing.) The 5200 came to me from a friend via a high school auction, and once I'd erased the hard drive and installed a new operating system it proved to be a stalwart little machine. I'm sure it will serve Lucero well, as long as she doesn't expect it to go as fast as the ones at school. I also gave her a modem (yes, I have a box full of those, too; it's madness, I tell you...) and set up Internet access on my account, because she said she needs it for homework. Her dad Horacio, a farm worker, can't wait to order movies from Mexico and instruments for his band, which plays traditional Mexican music at events such as weddings and--what is that girl's-fifteenth-birthday-celebration called? The movie we searched for last weekend, Clave Privada (1999), wasn't available from Amazon, so I'll look around for it elsewhere when I have a chance. Today I have to fine-tune the software--add some, remove others, add memory, and turn on some filters. This is tricky. I've never set up a computer before for an 11-year-old Mexican girl whose parents don't speak English. Her father has concerns about pornography; I can't blame him. And I wonder what would happen if she clicked on something in my blogroll (yeah, I showed her "feral" last week so she could look at my cat picture) and got an eyeful of some Nun of the Week... Tricky. How do parents today deal with this issue? Comments? *** I've added/relisted a couple of categories. I stashed "Romance of the Soil" under essays, and have begun my Jimmy Flood sequence in Salvage. I established the latter category not so much because it's worth anyone's time and attention to read, but to motivate myself to get going on this project and put some words out there. Ultimately I hope to create something book-worthy from Jimmy Flood's history. (You may recall from my Life of Brian series that Jimmy Flood was a '50s welterweight contender and father of my half-brother.) The little first-draft paragraphs I stick in this category will be carved up and edited and spliced into something worthwhile (not a memoir as such) as I go along. 9:31:39 AM    comment []