I now sit in front of Rygel, typing my first rambling in what I am hereby dubbing the Neighborly Abode. I believe it is a title that fits.

Culturally learned biases would dictate that I become suspicious, be more careful to lock the doors at night, and generally be afraid that bad things will happen here. Why? Because it is an area where (1) poor people live, and (2) the majority of residents are minorities.

(I laugh as I reread that last clause, which contains both the words "majority" and "minority" to describe the same noun. Or actually, not a noun. In a sentence diagram, the noun in the subject is equated with the properties of the direct object of the preposition. Am I off my rocker, English majors? lol.)

But everything I have experienced about it so far makes me feel safe and calm. Every time I have passed someone in the halls, they have offered a genuinely warm greeting. When we were moving in a few nights ago, the hall smelled like pot, to the great amusement of scottgalvin.com, Jaeger, and myself. Tonight, it smells like somebody is cooking french fries. The aroma as I carried in Rygel made my mouth water.

This morning, my dad talked about inviting mom over to host the first dinner in this place tonight. But neither of them are anywhere to be found. At this point, I'm not exactly scrambling to find out what's going on.

The snow continues to fall outside. In the current arrangement in this place, my back is to the window. I find myself turning around to look out. Methinks the Celestial Cyberhaven did a little more than whet Bitscape's appetite to the idea of having a window to look out of beyond the monitor.

Silly me. To describe the Cyberhaven as having a "window" is the grossest understatement of the century. "Wall of glass above the top of the city" would be closer.

Well, I suppose everyone is wondering... what about my story? Now that I have generated a sufficient amount of preliminary verbage, I shall continue where I left off. What was the last sentence before the pause? Oh yes. "I wanted my Firefly DVD set back."

So I was calling the cell phone of scottgalvin.com at the crack of dawn, uncertain as to whether he would be awake yet. I should have known better. A sleepy, groggy voice dutifully answered.

I asked whether I had woken him up. He said yeah, but no problem, don't worry about it.

I asked what time he planned to leave Fort Collins to visit Bandwidth Central. He said it would probably be several hours, as there was some paperwork he needed to fill out and mail, which would take a while. And that would happen after he decided to wake up. So if the server arrived via Fedex before he completed it, maybe I could go down and get started with things without his presence?

We're talking about a crazy overnight delivery here. This server, which had been running in production in another city, had been shutdown at the close of the business day the night before, shipped via FedEx to arrive directly at our data center in the morning, and they wanted to have the network and DNS settings updated and up in producting in its new home when the new day began.

But anyway, then I got to the true purpose of my crack-of-dawn call. Feeling somewhat silly at this point, since my question had nothing at all to do with the server, or the other project that was coming past due, I went ahead and asked if he could bring my Firefly set with him to Denver and return them if he wasn't really going to watch them anyway, because I was feeling in the mood to see some episodes again over the weekend.

He said that they had actually been left at his girlfriend's house, which is in Denver, but we could swing by and pick them up after our install meeting at Bandwidth Central.

Cool. I apologized for waking him up, and he said if I wanted to, I could call the datacenter and see if they had any word about the arrival.

I was like, "Yeah, sure, whatever." (Whenever it's remotely possible, I am happy to let scott do all the phone talking to any people who are not us.)

I did actually try calling the number he told me a while later, but it ended up with some sort of wierd "call could not be completed" error, so I figured either he had misstated the number in his drowsiness, or I hadn't remembered it correctly.

Well, anyway...

Sleep wasn't going to happen. I was restless, though a bit less brain-whizzed than earlier. So I decided to take another walk.

In just the sweat pants I sleep in, plus a warm sweater, I walked out into the morning, armed with my disc player and a few cds. It was chilly, and just starting to snow, but I found the air refreshing.

Now we're getting to this part, which I'll quote from the last rambling.

"This morning, as daylight appeared, I found a renewed sense of strength and purpose. The agony seemed to evaporate into the clouds. I was strong. I am strong. No matter what, the universe continues to be."

Yeah. The mind was in another place, yet more present and awake than ever.

After my walk, I tried to call the data center, and got the aforementioned phone error.

I decided to go to the then-unnamed dad's apartment, and get Illian up as the firewall. (I had made an attempt the previous morning, but had failed due to the fact that my hub was in my bag at the Celestial Cyberhaven. But now I had it with me.)

Not wanting to go back into mom's apartment while she was waking up, I went directly to Tobias without re-entering, and drove over to dad's. The Illian install firewall proved painless as could be. Plug all the cables in, power it up, and go. I didn't even have to plug in a monitor, as I feared I might, for you never know what's going to be different in the new location. Sweet.

I laid down on the floor for a few minutes until my phone rang. As expected, it was scott. He said he would wander over to his Fort Collins office and call me again in 20.

I decided this would be just the right amount of time for me to drive back to mom's place and shower before the big business began again.

A minute later, just as I was pulling out of the parking lot, another call from scott. "The tracking number says the server has arrived. Can you go right down and set it up?"

Silly me for not showering earlier. I entered professional mode. "Yes."

I diverted course, and with the snow coming down, drove to the trusty data center in my pajama/sweats. Well, this wouldn't be the first time we've shown up there looking all haggered after staying up all night.

If you are on The List, the employees there treat you like royalty, no matter what you look like, how you dress, or how badly you stink. I was on The List.

I went in to the front desk where usual woman was occupying her station, and as we performed the ritual exchanging of driver's license for door pass, we chatted about the strange weather. They had been planning to have a barbecue for employees later in the day, and it was still on, but now, it would obviously happen inside.

(Tangent time: A BBQ for the employees. A company that treats its employees to barbecue deserves commendation. I remembered how we used to have a number of those at another tech company I once worked for. Happy employees make friendly employees, and it shows. (I contrast this with the king soopers philosophy which says, "Don't you dare eat any of the leftover chicken that's about to be thrown away at the end of the day, because that would be stealing from the company."))

I asked if any packages had arrived for scott galvin. She said to ask the guys upstairs.

Up I went. This routine has started to become familiar, although this would be the first time I performed a complete server install solo.

It turned out the package was so fresh that it hadn't even been entered into their database yet, and they had to call the receiving department to verify that it had arrived. It had. The friendly attendant took me to our cabinet, unlocked it, and went to retrieve the newly arrived server.

This had to be one of the smoothest server installs ever. I called scott, jotted down the info from him, and went to work. Now, the convulsing thoughts of a few hours before were a distant memory. I was in the zone.

I had initially been a bit dubious about the prospect of rushing into doing tweaks on a server that had been installed and configured by others, with all sorts of potentially strange and unknown pitfalls arising from this fact. But in this case, we ended up lucky.

When I deemed it ready, I called scott again, and he checked it out. There were a few more minor changes that needed to be done. Everything came naturally. Before long, there was nothing left to be done, at least that needed to be done in the physical presence of the server.

After wrapping up the final bits, I called scott yet again and suggested that this whole idea of him driving down to meet me at inflow had been obviated. He had work to do which could be done there. I could do all the other work better from the Celestial Cyberhaven. He agreed, and I departed with good speed.

The snow was really pouring by this point. A drizzle. A haze.

It took me about a half hour to get to the Cyberhaven. Once I was there, we revered to the traditional jabber communications channel. The big server install was only half of the big stuff happening that day. The other thing was a project whose official deadline had already passed. Most of the work for this one was on scott's shoulders, but he did need my help for the final phase of it.

When I got online, his part wasn't quite ready yet, so I snacked on some leftovers from the fridge, and started to type a rambling. And so, we come to the point at which the documentation of the first part of this saga began.

This rambling is living up to the title all too well, and I am frankly getting tired of writing it. So I'll end and continue the continuation later. But before I do, I must write about the moment I've been wanting to write about ever since I started the first "Snow in Summertime" rambling.

It was just minutes before. I was feeling on top of the world. I was on top of the world.

A fairly attractive woman was also aboard the elevator as I rode up. For the first second or two, we just assumed normal elevator positions in silence. "Fuck that", I thought.

But I didn't really think that. I didn't really have to think at all. It just happened. I started a conversation. Nothing terribly important or deep. Just a "How's it going?" And a few words about the weather, although on this particular day, the weather had the merit of being a genuinely interesting topic of conversation.

She smiled and started talking too, about how it seemed like it should still be ski season. No introductions, or other mindless obligatory bullshit. Just real talk. For a few seconds.

It was a moment. To paraquote one of the wonderful scenes from Waking Life, a "real human moment."

Now with my brain running in tweaked mode, I am fully aware of the illusions that can happen, because I know the documented symptoms, and I have experienced them. But this was something a little bit different.

When the elevator arrived at floor 12, the door opened. Obviously, it was her stop. But for a few lasting instants, she continued to just stand there and talk to me, even as the elevator door stood open. She hesitated before finally getting off when it was about to close again. It was apparent that we both wanted the conversation to go on just a tiny bit longer, but that's not how this works.

Her last word before disappearing was a softly uttered, "bye."

We had never said hello.

How does this happen? On a day when I haven't had a shower, my face isn't shaved, my hair uncombed, and the clothes I'm wearing are the splotch-stained sweats that double as pajamas.

Judging by this woman's reaction, not only was I not totally repulsive, but I was worth conversing with in a friendly manner.

On most days, when I'm wearing somewhat more presentable clothes, this does not happen to me. The difference?

I just started talking to her. Nothing more.

For some reason, this realization blew my mind. The rest of the afternoon went by in a momentary flash that lasted an eternity.