As many people no doubt noticed, my webpage was hardly even touched from August of 1998 to, well,
now, which is September of 1999. What was I doing for an entire year, you ask?
My life became a living heck. Problems registering in courses at university, problems at work,
and major upheavals in my social life meant little or no time for oohing and aahing over my
virtual pets.
In fact, Kaylee was all but abandoned for most of August; and towards the latter half of the
month she was saved on a Zip disk, sadly awaiting the moment when she could be moved to an
actual computer.
On August 28, my last day at work, I bid a sad farewell to my temporary work pets Polar Claw
the teddy bear, Gamera the Tortoise, and Volkswagon the Rabbit. It was especially sad, since
Volkswagon's e-mail address (so well-behaved during most of the summer) suddenly stopped working
the week I was due to leave.
However, at roughly the same time, I managed to buy a new computer for my room. I guess I should
have remembered the old saying, "Caveat Emptor" or "Buyer Beware", since it gave me about a
week's worth of troubles, and cost me a $50 upgrade to a bigger monitor (as well as two return
trips to the store I bought it from). However, I managed to move Killer and Kaylee onto the new
computer, and as well, was able to reinstall... FINFIN!
I'd first gotten FinFin from a friend in the US, who gave me her copy of this fascinating
virtual pet/lesson in patience... but after a few weeks of happy/frustrated companionship
(since Finfin is a wild animal that you observe and try to befriend, I spent a lot of time
chasing him through the various habitats that he frequented) the CD Rom Drive had mysteriously
started rejecting Finfin. The drive would hum, as though reading the disk, and then stop.
I tried reinstalling, and failed...
However, on my new computer, not only did FinFin work like a charm, but some options previously
unavailable to me, such as the Snapshot option and the Photobook option, were now there in
sparkling 16 bit colour.
So for the remaining week before school started again, I spent most of my time chasing Finfin
around on Teo, IRC chatting, and trying to re-collect all of my ICQ contacts and AIM buddies.
I also continued to send Killer and Kaylee out on occasional mail-delivery missions.
Oh, and one odd thing happened. Around Killer's 70th day, he suddenly began to shake his head
vigorously and reject "candy". He seemed to prefer bitter, non-kiddy foods such as
"rice cookies".
This peace and Fifin-filled tranquillity didn't last for long. My computer kept freezing,
refusing to boot, and on one occasion, would freeze partway through loading Windows 95...
All of my programs had to be reinstalled. In addition, I was getting incredibly stressed...
For starters, I was going into my third year of university. While I had been coasting along with
just a small load of periodic stress, I was now facing much more stringent marking of essays...
Added to this was the fact that I had decided to schedule nearly a year's worth of studies into
one 4-month semester and two year-round night courses, so that I could use the second semester
for an English Co-operative Education Work Term.
This is a special program set up by my university, where the English Department of the university
sets up some of their best students with various employers around the country who need skilled
writers. Although the English Co-op Program will forward the students' resumes to the employers,
it is up to the student to impress the employers with their resumes and job interviews, and
land the job.
Since I had to continue my studies, I was limited to work-terms offered near my home and/or the
university; added to this job-hunting stress was the sheer *hell* of my course schedule, and
the extremely unpleasant details of my personal life. I was, quite frankly, overwhelmed (and
a bit distressed over the deaths of my various Virtual Pets.)
Fortunately, a friend sent me the computer program Creatures
2, which served as something of a de-stresser and stabilizer for me. (Especially after I
lost FinFin's reinstallation disk.) It also kept me from
having the energy to move my webpage from Geocities to Xoom, like I'd been planning to do for a
while, but at least I was no longer despondent and despairing of ever being happy again.
Over the past year, increasingly nice things have happened. A contact I made in Japan was kind
enough to send me her "For a Friend" PostPet CD, for PostPet
2001, and I was able to install a Japanese Partition on my computer. I spent a great deal
of time downloading stuff for my new PostPets, and trying to meet Japanese PostPet friends.
(Operative word: Trying. It didn't always work out, since I could only occasionally access my
Japanese hard drive; my work term was extended from January to May, all the way to August 1999.)
Some time around August 28th (1999), I was told that my services were no longer needed at my workterm site. I was suddenly left with almost nothing to do until my final year at university started; I looked at my hard drive, and realized that an entire website was sitting there, waiting to be updated and uploaded to my Xoom account. No time like the present, I thought, and began a mad two week-long flurry of activity (extending into my school year), as I tried madly to update, remove references in my virtual pet diaries that I knew would be upsetting (it turns out that I had well over 100 virtual pet diary-related files! Wow! And that's HTML files alone, not counting linked images!), and add new pages to the site that were relevant to my current interests.
If anyone is reading this, I'd like to take this moment to thank you very much. A year is a
long time, especially on the web (where most people seem to constantly update their webpages!)
and I'm very grateful that you kept reading.
Feel free to e-mail me at twotone@canada.com
and ask me how my summer was (I went on a vacation to New York, and to New Zealand and Tokyo!)
or to send over my PostPet. I'll do my best to oblige.
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