Way Behind On Blogging and Blog Reading

I've fallen way behind again. More than 1000 unreads in my aggregator. There are two reasons for this.

One is that last weekend I went to my 25th high school reunion and, while it was great to see some old friends and teachers again, there is some sadness, too. Too many of my friends from my youth have passed away, and I also found out that one of my favorite teachers... and not an old man, either... passed away a few years ago. It's not that I'm ill-prepared to deal with things like this, but rather that dealing with the onslaught of both happy and sad memories took me out of the blogging mood.

The second reason is that the trip to New Jersey was the last straw for my Dell laptop. It's had multiple minor problems for about a month now, and I knew it was going to have to go in for service soon. The touchpad buttons, which have been very flakey for several weeks now, finally stopped working completely. I have a suspicion that high humidity has an effect on the electromechanics in this laptop. It was extremely humid in New Jersey, and the humidity seems to have followed me home. The last time the Dell went to the shop it was for exactly the same problem, and I recall that it was just like this year, in that the problem started out as intermittent, but became persistent on a very humid day.