I'm trying to think in terms of positives

It's snowing outside. There's at least an inch and a half of accumulation, and possibly two. I've missed the snow. I know a lot of people hate it, but I actually actively like winter and snowfall.

Sometime in the next few weeks I'm going to have to return to full-time work. I'm not sure that's actually a positive, per se; but it will get me some things that I need, like insurance and the ability to pay my bills. (Unfortunately, this means that I'm going to be spending even less time online than I already am, but I'm not entirely convinced that that's a bad thing.)

Three cups of coffee on a full stomach produces a less pronounced jitteriness than three cups of coffee on an empty stomach. I'm glad I waited until after I ate this morning to have those three cups. (It doesn't help, though, that I suspect that those three cups - from SAGA - were brewed more strongly than usual.)

It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who shows up early for CGI, although in some respects it's also nice to have the room to myself.

This is the one that you might actually want to pay attention to: In the wake of one of my recent posts, I've decided to stop posting creative work to this journal. The stated goal of posting my work to this journal is to get feedback; all of the "it's your journal, do what you want with it" arguments aside, it seems that most of you aren't actually interested in (or don't have the time for, which gives the same end result) my work. The latter is incompatible with the former, and so in the interest of clearing up my journal and not being disappointed by the stated goal not being fulfilled, I'm simply going to stop posting creative work here. This doesn't mean that I'm going to stop creating, and in fact I find it highly likely that I am, instead, going to start putting creative work on a website somewhere and create an RSS feed for newly-posted work.

(I did consider using etherjammer as a way to get work on the web, but in the end, it suffers from the same flaw that this journal does: my posts there don't get comments. Likewise with Aleae Iaciens, although I'm a little less sensitive about that venue for some reason. The object of putting work on my website is to mitigate the frustration I feel at not receiving comments, since I probably won't be providing a way to leave them - and if I do, it'll be an email address or something.)

Balancing costs

Among the things I get to figure out in the next few days is this particular problem:

Is it more expensive to drive to Maryland, get the books I left behind, and return to Indiana, or to buy new copies of the books?

Moreover, the problem has a corollary:

If it's more expensive to buy new copies of the books, is the cost difference worth the time it would take and the difficulty of digging through all of my books to find the ones I need?

I really should have thought of this when I was there three weeks ago. In my defense, I not only thought I already had these books in Indiana from when I moved out in August, but also didn't know that I was going to be needing them.