,---.                                                       ,--.   
/  .-' ,---. ,--.--.,--.  ,--.,---. ,--.--. ,--,--,  ,---. ,-'  '-. 
|  `-,| .-. :|  .--' \  `'  /| .-. ||  .--' |      \| .-. :'-.  .-' 
|  .-'\   --.|  |     \    / ' '-' '|  |.--.|  ||  |\   --.  |  |   
`--'   `----'`--'      `--'   `---' `--''--'`--''--' `----'  `--'   
                                                                   

Ten days ago, I found myself sitting on the couch in my Luther house for the last time. After nearly 30 years of family history within those four walls, it was time to move on. The papers had been signed, the checks deposited, and the UHaul trailer was packed up and ready to go. All there was left to do now was get on the interstate and head west to a new city and a new life.

I had wondered how I would feel as the door closed for the last time, and instead of being the total wreck I thought I'd be, I was surprisingly calm. Maybe the Herculean effort it had taken to get this far had left me exhausted, or possibly all of the tough calls about what stuff would be kept or purged had sapped my normally sappy sentimental nature, but as I sat there and reflected on everything, I found myself at peace with the situation. Mom's words of, 'Well, when I am gone, you can do whatever you want with this place.'echoed in my head; words that I had been reminding myself of anytime the emotions of this decision started to get the better of me. Granted, I don't think selling it to the owners of the BBQ joint across the street to make room for a parking lot was what she had in mind exactly, but she made it clear that it was my hand on the tiller now, and that's the course I was going to take. Now both of our times were short. I would soon be on the road, and in a few weeks, the house would be no more.

As I looked around one last time, every spot in that house held multiple layers of memories. The spot where I put my TV was the spot Mom had put the loveseat Beth was sitting on when I proposed to her on Christmas Eve, 1993. Of course, right behind it to the south was the spot where I passed out on Christmas Eve 1994, drunk and heartbroken. (Look, no one said they were all going to be good memories, people.) Of course it was easy to see Whiskey laying on his couch under the window, and Boris sitting on Mom's lap in their recliner. Every room, every wall, every square inch of that place was full of the tragedies and triumphs of life going back to December of 1992, but it was time to take those memories and say goodbye.

Houses are inanimate objects. They don't have souls, or memories, or anything else we project upon them. They are made of dead trees, gypsum wall boards, copper wiring and little else, or at least that's what I kept trying to tell myself. I don't know if it was listening, but before I left, I thanked it for its 30 years of shelter and service to our family. It had served my family well, and that whatever good may happen in my life from here on out was going to be a result of its sale. Hey, I said my sappy, overly sentimental nature had been depleted, not killed.

And so having said my peace, I closed the door on #2 Luther Street one last time. I made one more right turn onto Highway 17, and watched as Luther disappeared in my rear view mirror.

================================================================================
July 19, 2022. Hello, World.

Back in the early 90s, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, a few of us took a break from chatting on IRC to check out this new thing called the world wide web. Soon we were all writing our own web pages in basic html, and creating spaces of our own on the internet. In my case, that space was Tim's Virtual Apartment, which still lives on thanks to the The Wayback Machine at archive.org. Later, that virtual apartment gave way to Tim's Virtual House, and its own domain name: fervor.net.

There have been more than a few incarnations of fervor.net over the years with varying degrees of effort and success, but this latest one is a little different in that I am writing it with old school computer hardware in mind. That means there's going to be a lot of ascii text, very few images, and no css or php. Nope, this baby is coming straight out of my head and into Notepad++, where it will get sent to the web server via Filezilla. I suppose if I was really retro I would be trying this from one of the old Atari computers I've got set up, and maybe that will happen when I overcome some technical obstacles (like figuring out if either the 8 or the 16 bit Ataris are capable of sending a file via FTP), but this will have to do for now.

Of course, the obvious reaction to this website can be boiled down onto one simple word:

WHY??

Well, that's a good question. I guess it comes down to several factors. First off, I am bored and unemployed. I have a lot of time on my hands right now, and since I still have the fervor.net donain under my control, I figured why not spend some of that free time on a fun little side project? It keeps me entertained, and gives fellow retro computing enthusiasts another place to check out with their old machines, which is a double win. Second, it gives me a reason to write more, which really is a use it or lose it kind of skill. My writing abilities are still kicking around in that brain of mine, but they're a little rusty to say the least. Let's see if I can get those neurons firing again, and burn off some of that accumulated dust.

Finally, I really miss those early days of the net. Back then the internet was as much a frontier of discovery as it was a way to share information, and we were all the 20th century version of an electronic Lewis and Clark. The internet was new and exciting, and big business had no idea what to do with it.

Yet.

Obviously they figured it out, and iit's not all bad. I mean don't get me wrong, I enjoy YouTube as much as the next guy, but I don't like the catches that come with it. Here there are no catches. There's no cookies or user tracking, which means there's no data to sell to advertisers. I guess that means I better find a job soon, huh?

So welcome to my latest project. Part blog, part experiment, and part... whatever. Just enjoy your stay, and feel free to send me a low tech email with your comments, questions, and/or death threats.*

Thanks for stopping by!

* please don't send me any death threats.