Saturday, December 5th, 2020
          
          	The church bells were ringing this morning as I was leaving 
          the house to take the recycling in to town. I've never been 
          terribly religious - I describe myself as an apathetic agnostic - 
          but it is still rather lovely hearing the bells ring their songs. 
          My village is lucky enough to have a church in it that still has 
          actual real bells - I know many others in the area have resorted 
          to playing a recording from their defunct bell towers. The church 
          folk recently, in the last couple of years or so, had some major 
          repair work done on the bell system. Before they became 
          inoperable, it was very rare they'd actually ring them, and they 
          never played music. Even for someone like myself, it's quite a 
          treat to hear them play.
          
          	I had a new project machine dropped on me today: I do some 
          data recovery and e-waste disposal work on the side, mostly for 
          people trying to recover their lost photo albums from a dead PC 
          or trying to safely get rid of a machine with their tax records 
          on it. In most cases, I'll trade the labor for the computer in 
          question. This time, it's a large Toshiba AIO, from around 2013, 
          with an Ivy Bridge i3 in it. This is the second AIO I've acquired 
          this way, and they are a little limited in what they're capable 
          of - not much RAM, not much in terms of horsepower from the CPU, 
          no dedicated GPU. The previous AIO, I could think of nothing 
          interesting to do with, so I just loaded LibreElec onto it and 
          turned it into a kind of smart TV. At least this one has a touch 
          screen - if it still works, perhaps I can come up with something 
          cool to do with it. I was also able to salvage a good Win10 code 
          and a 1TB HDD from it, so that's a nice bonus as well.
          
          	I'm already getting pretty deep into the budget right now 
          between home winterization, car repairs, and holiday stuff, but I 
          have really had the itch to build another PC lately. I have got 
          some good lines on pretty nice used modern parts right now. If I 
          had the financial cushion for it I'd take a plunge, buy some of 
          it up and try to build/sling some entry-level and mid-range 
          'gaming' rigs on ebay or something, that way I could build some 
          PCs without going totally broke or without totally filling my 
          house with unused machines, haha. I used to make some pretty 
          decent money on the side doing something like that with import 
          video game consoles/accessories years ago. It was always pretty 
          fun taking on a couple thousand dollars in debt to buy a bunch of 
          stuff you know isn't working in the hopes of being able to fix it 
          and still make at least enough to cover your expenses. However, 
          now with me having a mortgage, a car payment, and something of a 
          family, I don't think I could work up the nerve to take a risk 
          like that again any time soon.
          
          	I've found that I really enjoy writing these logs. I dunno 
          if anyone actually reads them, but that doesn't really matter to 
          me. It is something for me to look forward to doing, and I feel 
          like it has helped me to gather my thoughts, something I have had 
          a very hard time doing for the last few years. I do feel like I 
          come off as a bit of a rambler though. I have always had a really 
          hard time getting stopped in my communication once I manage to 
          figure out how to start. Part of this is because if I want to 
          talk on a given subject, I *really* want to talk about it, but 
          part of it is also legitimately not knowing how to change gears 
          or end a conversation in way that isn't me just trailing off or 
          abruptly stopping and walking away. In the context of these logs, 
          maybe I should start adding a little sign-off at the end or 
          something? I guess I'll have to think on that, but for tonight I 
          think I'm just gonna stop here - it was still the 5th when I 
          started writing this, and it's almost 1AM on the 6th now, haha.
          
          -Prokyonid