Yay

I have computer woes. Actually not so much "woes" as really fucking annoying bullshit. Sorry, but I'm a tad irate. I tried to install XViD (it's an MPEG-4 video encoder, if that makes any sense to anyone reading) and it (or I) somehow corrupted the Windows registry, or exacerbated an existing corruption, or something. Anyway, the upshot is that I was unable to boot into my system and unable to fix the problem.

So I installed Windows XP while praying to God that my 15 gigs of really important data was still intact. It was. Thank you, God, I owe you one.

Now I'm copying that data over to another computer on the network so that I can wipe this drive clean and start over. It's going to take a couple of hours, so I think I'm going to bed.

I apologise once again for my extended absences. I get focused (my wife would say "obsessed") on certain things to the exclusion of almost everything else, and recently I've been focused on really nerdy computer stuff instead of this blog...

My dad was visiting with us a few days ago. It was great to see him, but it reminded me, as it always does, of how much I miss my family in England. Most of the time I just sort of forget about it, but it's always there, in the back of my mind. I suppose I feel a little as if I'm between homes right now. England isn't my home any more, but Canada isn't either. I don't know where I belong; somewhere over the Atlantic, perhaps. Don't get me wrong: this, here, this place, this house is my home, but I mean it in a different sense. It's hard to explain. My family -- my wife, my kids -- are more important to me than anything. But I still don't feel like I belong here, sometimes. When I go back to England, I don't feel I belong there either. Both countries are, in some fundamental way, alien to me now.

Maybe this will change with time. Perhaps I'm just in the middle of a shift from one state of being to another, from "British" to "Canadian," if you like. Or perhaps I'm not. Maybe I'll always be floating between, never really belonging anywhere. I don't remember ever feeling any particular attachment to England, now that I think about it, aside from the obvious connection that it's where I was born and where almost all my blood relatives live. It could be that "British" and "Canadian" really have no meaning, they're just convenient labels. Or perhaps I'm just congenitally unable to feel "in my place," always with an underlying sense of displacement, a refugee from everywhere.

On that cheery note I'm going to sign off. I'll try to write more. Seriously.