On the road - St. George, SC

I am in a hotel room in St. George, South Carolina, wrestling with two things. First, the age-old issue of Do I Run The Heater And Put Up With The Noise, Or Do I Freeze Quietly? And second, a brand-new piece-of-shit Windows XP laptop that's been configured by our network people to be goddamn near useless for me. Even after I killed all the little spyware detectors, virus checkers, and all the other horseshit they install on this thing, I still cannot get it to download EXEs. Since I have to download some new software from Lotus, I have to go the asinine route of downloading it to the trusty and honorable iBook and then copying it across the wireless to the Windows laptop.

First order of business: putting Firefox on it so that I can use it without puking.

The drive down was fast and uneventful, though I got started several hours later than I usually like. The cats are all supplied with catfud and clean catboxes, Margaret was liberated from the bathroom and permitted to rejoin the general population (but not before she and I had words about her puffy-tail-and-hissing act). I left an extra bag of food for the catsitter... hopefully, she will actually show up this time. The last time I called her was a year and a half ago when Melody and I went to California, and for some reason she didn't show up. The cats were OK, though.

This is going to be a strange and difficult week.