Surrender

I tried not to do it, truly.

Well, of course I knew that it was inevitable, I'm not a fool*. But I had hoped to spin it out a little longer, delaying the fateful moment: surely it doesn't need to happen now, not yet? I also had a fair amount of pride at stake ("I'm not such a softie"), not to mention money ("Can't afford it") or even the ecology ("Wasting resources!").

But this morning it did need to happen, and so I failed. I gave up. My resistance crumbled. My lofty principles were vanquished by my baser desires.

An hour ago, I swallowed my pride, lullabyed my conscience to sleep, and turned on the heating. Damnit, I had hoped to last until the first of October. Is that too much to ask? Apparently yes.

In other news the Internet connection in Rose Street died sometime Monday night, and is still resisting attempts at resuscitation. (Assuming of course, gullible as I am, that said attempts are actually being made. Pah.) Since G drank the free-telephony-over-the-Internets koolaid, there is also no telephone and no fax connection. It's very peaceful, but for the sound of G alternately weeping and raging into his cellphone at the providers.

In other, other news I've noticed from the weblogs that people continue to visit here, hoping against experience that I might have posted something since their last visit. My deepest apologies to you, dear reader, and my heartfelt thanks that you do continue to come by. Having said that, though, allow me to make your lives a little easier: download an RSS feed-reader and use it to review all your friends' blogs (and magazines, and newspapers, and Flickr photostreams, and the Recent Changes page of your favourite wiki). Most modern browsers recognize RSS too: Safari and Firefox display a little "RSS" icon in the extreme right of the address field of sites that have a feed. The advantage is that you see at a glance who has updated (and who hasn't) without browsing all those websites.**

The disadvantage is, of course, that you don't browse all those websites (unless the author has set the feed to give you only the first N sentences, as I have). You will miss the comments that are posted, and will be unable to post a comment of your own. My apologies here to folks like Dale and PostmodernSass, whose RSS feed includes the full text of their posts: I am still reading, but I am rarely moved to switch from the feed-reader to the browser to reply.

* At least, not that kind of a fool, but that's another story.

** Background info about RSS. I use and recommend NetNewsWire, available for Macs and iPhones/iPodTouch, but there are surely a dozen or more Windows feed-readers out there by now. (In case your browser doesn't display the link, here's the URL to my RSS feed.)