I jumped to conclusions on the last one. My computer is, in fact, fine. But for a good 14 hours, I thought that all was lost. Okay, not *all*, but friggin’ *a lot* was erroneously presumed to be lost and gone forever.

If nothing else, I have been given a second chance to figure out a way to properly back up EVERYTHING I have. Also, my noodle has been sufficiently tickled + pressure cooked into finding a way to budget finances over the next few months to fit saving for a new computer in between the paying off of debt and addition of comprehensive health insurance to the pile of regular bills.

I’m looking forward to using the first months of 2007 to accomplish a great many ‘resolutions’ that I’ve been ironing out in my mind, and will commit to paper/keystroke soon enough. I have been encouraged to sit down, think and make plans about where my life goes from here. I’ve been asked a trillion times “What’s next?” by well-meaning people, and I have given them my general daydream answer… now is the time to number crunch, design, plan and step forward in faith into the great world beyond [college]. I also want to tell stories.

Lineford Strongwell was a sad, little man. He wore bifocal lenses to compensate for his terrible eyesight. He had lost most of his hair, and what pitiful remnant still cllung to his scalf was beginning to turn the color of ash. He lived in a run-down apartment complex on the poor side of town and worked at a dead-end job. He was the poster-child of mediocrity. He blended with the crowd like a grain of brownish sand would blend into a beach head. And he dreamt at night of the most incredible and bizarre things.

This is a chronicle of the fragmented dreams of Lineford Strongwell. No attempt has been made to ‘explain’ or otherwise elucidate the dark corners of the sub-concious worlds that Lineford dwelt in during his slumbers. But between the setting and the rising of the sun, Mr. Strongwell became something much much different. He became the dreamer, a figure far greater than the various figments of the grand dream itself; he became master of a terrain encased wholly within his skull.

But one night, Lineford awoke from a particularly peculiar dream. This is where we begin our chronicles. With the House of Oakenbeams and the Flight of the Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood was located in a hilltop monastery somewhere in Wyoming or Colorado. The scenery composed of moraines and ravines coated in earth tones, a sight that was limited in palette, yet strikingly beautiful. The monastery had a byzantine look about it, as though it had been sucked off of a mountaintop in the Balkans and set rather crookedly on the fringes of the Great Plains.

The kids would leap and bound around the grounds of the monastery, while Father Beltram looked on watchfully. Bringing orphans this far from civilized society, where they could learn how to provide for their own existence with their own two hands, along with valuable lessons on how to relate to their fellow man, was one of the chief ministerial uses of the monastery. Another use was for the brewing of certain, ‘prohibited’ beverages, prepared by the skilled hands of young men who had forsaken a life of peasantries and sophistication for one of simplicity and peace.

…