I tend to read everything – textbooks, novels, plays, classics – old and new stuff, seemingly at random. I used to read quickly enough that even while working and keeping up with a “normal” working life, I would consume 2-3 books in an average week.

Sadly, my illness has changed all that.

I know it will sound weird to those who haven’t experienced it, but for ME/CFIDS/CFS sufferers, using the brain can be just as exhausting as using the body. For most people, the body is able to easily produce enough energy to power their mental processes without having any sort of feeling of exhaustion. When you spend a long time working on a project that requires a great deal of thought, one may feel mentally exhausted but usually not completely physically drained (barring some extenuating circumstances like extreme stress or duress). For me it’s very different. If I take a long walk, it can be as exhausting as running a marathon. Here’s the kicker – equally as exhausting is something like reading a book.

The energy required to run my brain to read a book or think about our budget (or write a blog post, etcetera) can leave me more exhausted than taking that long walk I mentioned. Or weeding the garden. Or building something. It certainly is equally exhausting in most cases. That means that to walk to the library and get out a book to bring home to read typically leaves me too tired to read it. We live in a tiny hamlet, but we are very lucky to have a library. We’ve lived here for almost 2 years. My total trips to our local branch of the library?

Zero. I don’t even know what the place looks like inside.

This has made reading difficult… I can’t usually afford to buy books except when they’re library donation/discards for a buck or two… I certainly can’t afford the $30 and $40 price tag many bookstore releases are carrying these days. Hell – paperbacks are running into the $12+ range now. It’s brutal.

Then there are all the other issues associated with reading a book in bed when you have a chronic illness. This might sound lame, but books are damn heavy. Holding one up can be hard. When you get too tired and let the book sag, you lose your page. Worse, you fall asleep – and end up damaging the book and losing your place. That is especially not good for borrowed books like those from the library.

Ever since they were introduced several years back, I was excited about the promise of e-readers. I’ve tried reading books on a computer, and it really doesn’t work out well. I spend a lot of time on the computer in bed, obviously – but typically I have a hard time reading anything that is very long. That’s why Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook have been where I spend most of my time. It takes a major feat of concentration to read an entire online article if it takes more than a page or two. Reading a book has been an exercise in futility – I just can’t put the computer in a position to be able to relax and read pages upon pages without quickly running out of gas. I’ve also tried reading books using my phone, which has been slightly more successful but has still led to me abandoning completing longer titles after a few chapters (yeah, I’m looking at you AGAIN, Ulysses)… it’s too hard on my old eyes, among other things. Looking at e-paper, with it’s non-backlit screens and light weight and ease of use, along with the ability to keep my place in numerous books at once – especially the billion text-file ebooks that are out there – has made an e-reader a highly desirable choice so I could actually read again.

Except for the price. I was so excited about many of the devices available a couple of years back until I saw what they cost to purchase. Running in the $300-400 (sometimes more) range, they were exactly the kind of thing that I couldn’t justify in our budget. Up until very recently, I’d resigned myself to the idea that I wouldn’t be able to do much reading any more.

Then Amazon introduced their new Kindle for $139 a few weeks ago. It doesn’t have the free-for-life 3G, but it does have Wi-Fi and pretty much every feature I’ve hoped for in a reader. Although it is at the very limit of our budget, it can possibly be squeezed in if nothing goes drastically wrong.

So, of course, some things went drastically wrong.

Nonetheless, She Who Must Be Obeyed is quite insistent that I should have one. She knows how much I used to read. She knows how much of a tonic it is to my soul when I can comfortably enjoy a book in bed. And she knows how impossible that has become in the last 5 years or so.

So, she’s ordered one for me. The order didn’t get in before they were sold out the first time – or for that matter, the second time – but I am on the waiting list now. I’ve agonized over the money and argued with her about being able to afford it, and every day I say I have to cancel it because we can’t afford it, but she insists that this is something that I need. But really, we can’t afford it… I shouldn’t be buying it. She still thinks I should.

Maybe it’s because I’m starting to get a bit crazy. Maybe it’s because she wants me to stop asking her to pick up something for me to read at the library, and she’s tired of getting my holds. Maybe it’s because she’s sick of me complaining about the cramps in my hands from holding a book open to a page for long enough to read it.

Or maybe it’s just because she really cares and feels that a month of eating canned spaghetti and Kraft Dinner is OK if it gives me a little break from feeling trapped in a bedroom most of the time.

I think that makes her just a little bit more wonderful.

How the heck did I get a Mac? Well, thanks to a very old friend (not his age, he’s younger than I am – just that I have known him since a long time ago although we were out of touch for 10+ years in the middle), I was able to pay in installments to purchase his used Mac Mini. He was very generous to allow me to do that, and the ‘Mini was inexpensive enough to make it worth a little temporary suffering (although at this point, I do have a twinge of regret as I know NOW what I did not know when I agreed to buy it – I need a better lens for my camera which is going to cost big $$$). Anyway, Mike, I really and truly appreciate it and thank you very much, I doubt we ever would have owned one of these if not for you.

Now, many of you have gathered the impression that I loathe Macs. I really don’t. I simply loathe Mac hype and the lies that get spread about them by the brainwashed Mac masses, or Macolytes as I have decided they should be called. They say things like Macs don’t crash, and “it just works” and sound more like a Mac commercial and marketing campaign than an actual user.

I know that Macs crash, so don’t tell me they don’t – I watch Kevin Rose on Diggnation and he sometimes has problems with his browser locking up and being unable to read his email live on the air. My brother uses a Mac at work and he hates the damn thing due to its shortcomings. And I too have used Macs before – and at the school board where I worked several years back, there were a couple of schools that decided that instead of getting Y number of IBM PCs they would get X number of Macs (and yes, X<Y). Part of our job in the department where I worked was to get the Macs working. And you know what, Macolytes? IT JUST WORKS is a lie. I could configure a dozen PCs a day while working at that job, and these were old PCs I was rebuilding from scrap. It took our best guys – both of which had expertise with Macs – 2 days to get one SINGLE Mac to do what was needed. I’m not even going to get any further into the description of the added nightmare they had trying to get the it just works Airport networking going. If the damn Macs didn’t cost double what the PCs cost, I am sure we would have, as a group, risen up and stomped one of them out of existence. I do have to confess, however, that this was in the OS 9 era, before they started basing things on UNIX/Darwin/FreeBSD.

I’ve tinkered with them over the years since, but never owned one. First of all we just are not in the income bracket to allow it. Second, even if we were in that income bracket, I feel they are grossly overpriced. Third, although I tend to be naturally intuitive about all computers and OSes, it would require me to teach everyone in our house a whole new set of skills. There are other reasons as well… but in this particular situation, most of my concerns are alleviated by getting a fairly-recent, very small and stylish machine that I can tinker with and no one else will be forced to use. The kids have their own computer, the wife has her own computer, and I can flip between my MacMini and my PC as simply as changing a setting on my dual-input monitor.

And that brings me to right here. I have been tinkering for a little while. I installed Firefox and all my “usual” plugins. I started investigating what might be gained and what it would cost if I want to someday install the newest version of OS X (this one has Panther). I discovered that the Mac support on my Ximeta networked hard drive is actually a very limited level of support which annoys me.

But… here are my first impressions:

• It really is a cute little machine, and is well engineered. The Mac keyboard and mouse are solid, and the computer itself, which is just over the size of a large sandwich made on regular bread, has a nice heft and solid feel so it doesn’t feel “cheap” in spite of being one of the least expensive Macs ever made.
• While trying to test out the built-in optical drive, I put in my “Garchive” disk, which is all of the Garfield comics from 1978 to 2003. I didn’t even look at the disk before the drive snatched it out of my hand (nasty little thing!) The pictures came up, but browsing them was no more or less intuitive than browsing pictures on a Windows XP machine. However, it was noisy so I took the disc out and discovered my kids must have been handling it with sticky hands. I mean, this is a CD that on the laser-read side is absolutely filthy with fingerprints and sticky gunk. The Apple drive still managed to read it. That was kind of impressive.
• Installing software is easy, although almost counter-intuitive. You almost feel as though something went wrong becuase it just doesn’t interact with you much at all. I loathe Windows installers that don’t tell me what they are doing and just take over, so this irritates me on the Mac as well.
• It just works! Yes, it does! But… so does my Windows XP machine. I have not had any problems where something didn’t “just work”. I’m not sure who, exactly, has had something that DIDN’T just work – except obviously someone who works for Apple marketing.
• Because I have not played a lot with the Mac in recent years, I now have a learning curve – not in how the system works (although I had a terrifying few minutes wracking my brain figuring out how to find how to reboot or turn off the damn thing) but in what software I should use for my various needs.
• The system required an update in order to connect wirelessly to my router. If I had not had a wired network switch within reach, I would have had some very serious aggravation about this, as in order to get the update, I would have had to download it from the internet, and in order to download it from the internet, I would have had to be connected wirelessly. The standard which was needed to connect existed when this machine was shipped, so it should have had it already properly implemented, in my opinion.

So what do I think?

Exactly what I thought before. From an operating standpoint, it is a computer, no better and no worse than any other properly-configured machine. It is nice to have fewer worries about installing anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities, but on the other hand when someone DOES decide to hunt down a Mac exploit, all the barely-technically-literate Mac users are going to have a really serious problem fixing it, which will make Apple lots of money in support/repair fees. Having to remember I am on the Mac and the implementation of cut, paste and so on is done differently is an irritation but more a function of me flipping back and forth from one machine to the other.

The hardware is pleasing to the eye and feels like it has substance. It is in no way an unpleasant addition to our collection of
hardware. It reminds me a lot of our Wii, and that brings a little smile to my face.

I am now a Mac Owner. I like my MacMini. I don’t like it better than my XP machine, and I don’t like it worse. It’s just different, like having 2 children. There is a difference, though – if I had to give up one of my children, I could never choose between them. If I had to give up one of my computers, the Mini would be the one sold into white slavery.

I really need to get on our websites. I have all of the MYSQL Databases backed up on here, but since we transferred to a new host I have not had the mental capacity to get them back up and running. I tried to just import them intact but unfortunately it is going to be more complicated than that, and I have to do some line-by-line manual pasting to place all of our blog sites back online. That means ALL of our family blogs have been offline while my brain has been incapable of the attention to detail needed for this task. It also means I don’t have my own blog page. And it is why I am now posting this here.

The holiday season really has never been my favourite time of year. Various childhood disappointments combined with the deaths of 2 grandfathers during this season and so many other issues which have come up in November and December in the past (going back over 20-25 years) have cemented the whole thing as a really unpleasant time of year in my books. Until I had kids, most of my associations with the beginning of winter were negative. On top of that, being of a decidedly non-Christian stripe made all of it seem completely hypocritical to celebrate.

To me it’s a shitty time of year, where the days get too short and something bad ALWAYS happens.

Much of that changes when you have children. Materialistic or not, kids just get so happy when everyone is giving them gifts. But, my wife and I did not want our kids being raised to focus so hypocritically on Christmas when we don’t believe most of the surrounding religious claptrap and hullabaloo. Add to that the fact that parents are programmed to lie to their children to support the ridiculous myths of Santa Claus and the like, and it just ends up feeling like the season is nothing more than a time of year to treat your kids like idiots and spend money you do not have.

If I have any religious beliefs at all, they are Buddhist. Not the praying-Christian-tainted Buddhist beliefs but the belief that the philosophy of the Buddha itself is a really good way to live your life. I take many of Buddha’s words to heart, including the ones that say question EVERYTHING. Do I believe in reincarnation and Karma? To some degree yes, to some degree no – which is why I hesitate sometimes to call it a religious belief: Religion is supposed to be based on faith, total faith if you listen to some. Do I believe – that is have faith – that someday I will come back to this planet in another form? All I can say is, I hope so. I don’t know it for a fact. Someday I WILL find out for sure or I will be worm food – as will we all.

As a family we created a way of celebrating this time of year that incorporates the secular cultural beliefs as well as our belief in our connection to Earth and the universe as a whole. Rather than focus on a strictly secular “Xmas”, or worse still be constantly restraining the urge to throttle anyone who says “Jesus is the reason for the season”, we spread our celebration to take place over the beginning of winter and the end of the year. We begin with a celebration of the end of shortest day of the year. Then, we have a solstice feast (usually roast beef and winter vegetables) on the day winter arrives. We incorporate a strictly secular Christmas Day, but we also celebrate the traditions of Boxing Day. We share all the legends and myths of Santa Claus and Father Frost and other icons of various cultures to do with this time of year without pumping up a bunch of mystical, magical crap. The kids know Santa is not real, but they still get a Santa gift and a stocking on Christmas. They also get a gift for each of the 12 days between the shortest day (Solstice Eve) and New Years Day. These are usually modest gifts, but spreading it out means they really do appreciate each one, rather than tearing open piles of shit on one day and tossing each item aside looking for the next one. We conclude our holidays with a New Years Day feast – usually a fairly traditional turkey dinner. This really works for us… and no one feels like a hypocrite for lying to the kids or for emphasizing the birthday of someone who may or may not have existed and certainly was NOT born at this time of year if he did.

This year was actually not a bad year. We had managed to budget well for it, and had some very good circumstances allowing us to have better-than-average gifts and the snow had everyone delighted. But of course, in keeping with my own personal tradition, something bad happened again. This time, it was the death of my beloved budgie, Sunbeam, on December 24th.

I am sure there is some asshole among you who is saying so what, it is just a budgie – but Sunbeam has been a daily companion for me, especially since we moved to this house. The 2 levels mean there are some days I cannot gather the energy to go downstairs, and I miss out on many things. Sunbeam and our other bird Raindrop live in this room with me, keeping me company when everyone else is busy. He was the tamest budgie I have ever had, would come when he was called, and although he never mastered human words (vaguely saying hello and pretty bird only occasionally) he was a master mimic of other sounds. He was our family solstice gift 3 years ago when we were in a very bad financial place – all we could afford was the budgie. It was one of those years where the 12 gifts for my daughter ended up being stuff like a 6-pack of socks divided up to cover all the days we had nothing else to give her. Sunbeam made us smile and got us through that difficult time. He was a cherished FRIEND and a true part of the family.

He was only a little over 3 years old and began to show signs of illness on the 23rd. Before that he had been a little bit quieter than usual but he had gone through periods like that before. I was very concerned when I observed he did not appear to be eating much. He would take a few grains of seed from my hand but not really enough to make me feel he was getting adequate nutrition. On the morning of the 24th I found him with his feathers puffed up and decidedly sluggish. I expressed my concern that he was probably dying to my family.

This is where all this rambling gets difficult. My 7-year-old was extremely attached to him as well. When she heard he was so sick, she looked like someone had punched her in the heart. And then she asked me the hardest question I have ever had to answer as a parent, to date.

“Daddy,” she said, “Can we believe in God just for a little while today and get him to save Sunbeam?” Then she pleaded, “Just for a few minutes?”

I told her that if she wanted to pray for Sunbeam, then it was all right to do so, but that all we could do was hope for the best. His survival was completely dependent on his spirit and how much of a fight he could put up himself to get better. She began to cry, and a part of me got angry at the people from her playgroup, who had told her that believing in God kept bad things from happening. I hugged her and we both cried a little together.

I had done everything I could, keeping him warm, forcing him to drink, but he was getting worse. I had kept a vigil near him for his last few hours. When I saw he was losing the strength to hold only his perch, I held him in my hands, and there he remained cradled for his remaining 90 minutes of life.

He finally expired with a tiny seizure, ripping out my heart and that of our whole family with the exception of my 2-year-old son, who didn’t understand why we could not change his batteries and make him better. Our friendly, playful little bird was gone and our room was awash with tears. My daughter got angry – she blamed me, then she blamed a god who didn’t save him even though she had tried prayer, and then just broke down and sobbed. I joined her, swimming not only in my own sadness but hers.

Today is New Years Eve. It has been one week since Sunbeam died. We think of him every day. We make plans to get another baby budgie that we hope I can tame as well as him, who will keep a very lonely Raindrop company. Tonight we will go to a free skate at the arena. At midnight we will watch the ball fall, and then take a walk just after midnight and enjoy the air of a new year. The kids will open the last two gifts they have waiting for them. Tomorrow we will have a New Years feast, and we will put the 2007 “12 Days of Winter” to rest.

All I hope for is that things are better in 2008, not only for us, but for you and yours and the world.

Have a happy New Year.