Tasks

Antique tasks day.  I cleaned out the wood stove, and poured some ashes on the driveway ice, then fired up the stove again.  I cleaned mouse droppings (what a nice delicate word, like spoor or fewmets) out of the kitchen cabinets after executing the last mouse with a Victor guillotine trap, still the most effective.  They or it had made a mess chewing open a bag of high quality cocoa powder and distributing it (mixed with feces) in amid the pie plates and canned goods.  

Then I installed, with the help of EM at the WordPerfect Universe site, a copy of WordPerfect 5.1, which he had so constructed as to be able to run under my 64-bit Windows, using something called DosBox, with modifications.  And now I have it, as pretty as it used to be on my Compaq 386, the only computer program I ever felt true affection for.  I recovered my old massively modified WP keyboard, though i can't remember what several of the keys actually do. One allows me to turn, with a keystroke, two clauses joined by colons or semicolons into two sentences.  I wrote the macro.   I've written a few macros, something I can't somehow do on  later WP versions, and forget Word.  I will type up the book I am just setting out on with it (though I will write the book on some beautiful long yellow pads I got by special order from Rhodia, like legal pads in excelsis.)  I have decided against dressing in a wadded dressing-gown and monogrammed slippers for this task.  

Why all the fuss?  Thoreau says "The art of life -- of a poet's  life -- is, having nothing to do, to do something."  I think he meant something deeper than just fooling around, but it's true that a vocation that consists mostly in staring out the window and mulling over imaginary things needs something to do -- sharpen pencils, square up paper, find nice journals, load WP 5.1.  Whatever.