Throw the towel!!!

If the Retrochallenge were compared to boxing, my entry would be considered as lively as Apollo Creed in Rocky IV, after Drago beat him into a limp mass of convulsion.  I feel like I should have thrown in the towel a while ago.  I had such lofty goals, and looking back on the month, I should have been able to do this, but I'll take this opportunity to cop-out as much as I can.

This month was not a fun one, for the most part.  Not only have I been looking for a job, and dealing with various other normal adult obligations, but I have been trying to keep the fence from falling apart.  The wind here...  CURSE YOU WIND!!!  At least one section of the fence has been repaired more than once.  Several other sections blew down during the 74mph gusts we had a week or two ago.  Some of them are now so rotted and falling apart from multiple repair attempts that I am going to have to start adding new wood.  And the newer section of fence, well, it's crap too.  It looked pretty when we moved in, but it apparently wasn't built well enough to withstand the high winds in this area.

Back to my project.  This shouldn't have been a hard one, if I were a kid still living in my parents' house and hiding in my room, coding until the wee hours of the morning, just because I wanted to and could.  Being a father, husband, responsible adult, what have you, I have decided that my time is not my time.  Oh, there was plenty of down time in which I could have added up to a decent amount of project work, but I don't work that way.  My brain won't let me switch gears very well, especially on intellectual projects such as this.  However, I also think I could have planned this a lot better.  I didn't even pick up my Apple II from the old house until a week before starting on the Retrochallenge, and didn't give it much thought before starting except for, "Wow, this is gonna be so cool."  I'm still hoping to finish this project eventually.  I did a fair amount of planning on paper, figuring out what functions and procedures I would need to write, which were necessary and which seemed like extra fluff to make it more cool, and even wrote some pseudo-code.

Will I take part in the Summer Retrochallenge?  I would like to say yes, given the right amount of time and planning correctly, I would love to, but I may not do a programming project.  I'm starting to like the idea of playing through some games on the Genesis, or maybe documenting helping my kids play through an Infocom game or something like that.  I also have a couple ideas for implementing alternate storage methods on an older system, but I don't want to say too much on that until it looks like I may go that route.

Until the Summer Retrochallenge, I will continue to be my nerdy self and play with old hardware and software.  I may even mess a little with programming in Pascal, since I do enjoy the creative process with programming on older systems, but I don't see myself doing anything crazy cool, unless the stars align and "The Old Ones" return or something like that.

In the meantime, I look forward to making some more random blog entries, taking note of oddities I see, commenting on life after moving two states away, or just mentioning how cool my kids are from time to time.  I'm also going to try to make a more dedicated approach to my writing.  I've got several really nice story ideas that I've had back-burnered for quite some time, and I'm hoping to revisit those soon and hopefully make some progress on them.  I may try my hand at podcasting too, not because the world needs another nerdy podcast, but because I think it would be fun.  But right now, I'm gonna finish eating my chili.