Longer Hours for a Car

I've decided to keep my car, and work slightly longer hours. If I work at least 5 hours a day, 3 days a week (and keep my other job, at Sound Times), I have calculated that I can probably afford to keep my car. Tomorrow my brother and I are going to visit our Aunt Helen, who is 94. When I see him I'm going to ask him if I can give my car to his son Alex (who is 16), if his grades improve in the fall. Then I will buy a new car.

I continue to be less depressed. In the past 7 weeks I've only been depressed twice: once for 1.5 days, and later for 4.5 days. The former time I "called in depressed" (missed work) one day, but during the latter time I wasn't depressed at work, and did not call in depressed. One of the main reasons I have been less depressed is that I have begun implementing TileGamer (my games program), which I am programming in Python. Most Saturdays, instead of going back to bed after reading the newspaper, I work on TileGamer. Although last weekend I was depressed on Saturday (the tail end of those 4.5 days) and did go back to bed.

Today I received in the mail a CD-ROM from my cousin Eric and his wife Deanna. It contained a Power Point presentation with family pictures, remembering Eric's late mother Muriel (my mother's sister). Today I'm going to send them a thank-you email, and tell them about my blog. I tried opening it up in Linux, but most of the slides were empty. I'm not sure whether I have Power Point installed on my Windows partition. I must boot up in Windows anyway, as that's where their email addresses are located.

I got up around 4 a.m. this morning and worked on TileGamer, finishing the development of a tool which will enable me to store TileGamer configuration data on my hard drive. I use Delphi at work, which has a similar tool built-in, but in Python I had to write my own (which wasn't very hard). I recently solved (or at least found a workaround for) an annoying problem with my Python program editor. Every once in a while it would crash when I typed a parenthesis. My workaround is, whenever I need a parenthesis, I first save my work (Ctrl+S) and then type both an open and a close parenthesis in rapid succession. After I started doing that it rarely crashes (not sure about nested parentheses, though). The other workaround is, when in interactive mode (typing Python commands at the command prompt), it would crash almost every time I typed a close parenthesis, so I removed all import statements except "import sys", and now it never crashes. I really only need interactive mode when developing tools, without a GUI (graphical user interface), so that workaround is not a serious limitation.

This afternoon I'm going to buy groceries and work some more on TileGamer (I've finished reading the Globe and Mail). Now I'm going to boot into Windows and email Eric and Deanna. Getting that note and CD from Eric/Deanna brings back painful memories of the family reunion and memorial for my Aunt Muriel, which took place last summer. I was more depressed and unstable back then, much more so than I am now. They live in Vancouver, which is not far from where my sister lives (Victoria), so when I visit my sister next month I might see them as well. Note to self: must cut down on all those numerous and lengthy coffee breaks at work, so I can continue to afford my car. It's OK to do that at home, however, when I'm working on TileGamer. Now it's time to post and reboot. Bye-bye, Linux. See you again soon!