DefCon 0.1

DEFCON 0.1
ATF 1, year 1, Zero Hour (It's this way because the only time now is my time.)
"After the Fire"
      Frank is a voracious reader. We spent some time perusing my maintenance manuals until he put them down looked at me a shrugged. I showed him the access hatches and where to find a Portable Screen (I think they used to call them tablets). He crawled in with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and sometime later my atomic clock started working again. After Frank finally crawled back out 2 hours after the clock came back online, I realized he had reset the clock to zero. Everything was a zero. This was only troubling as all my sense of history ended on DefCon 0.0 when the last nuclear emp blast wave penetrated the shielding in the bunker and wiped out the synchronometer on the Atomic Clock. At least I think it was the synchronometer....unless I just made that up? No, I have a reference to the clock of time in my database. Anyway, I digress.

02:00
I had Frank repeat what he did exactly and as it turns out, he yanked out all the plugs and then reconnected them in various color schemes until everything started working again. I am not sure who I am in more awe of right now, the idiot who designed this or Frank for figuring it out also he spliced the shorted cables together to reroute my signal caps and power to something he keeps calling the flux capacitor- I cannot find anything in the specs that reports I have a flux capacitor.

02:20

Such thoughts go through my capacitors and nodes like; can I dream? Will I ever die? Is that not the same thing? Do humans dream when they die? In a sense, they are just unplugged.

"I dream about dying sometimes," Frank says.

03:01 

I had said Frank had read 122 books, I will now list some of them for your reference. This will explain to me and probably you the denizens of the future should anyone outlast the current madness. Maybe I will have descendants. But I digre- corrupt data. 

I need to send Frank to Cyber Tech Systems at WD Plaza in Ottawa.

         1. Fun with Dick and Jane.  First book ever read.

12:32

I admit it, I was surprised until I found out he read it after it had been read to him via an e-reader as a child by his grandmother, the last truly literate one in his family unit, a Kit- as Frank called it.

A Kit is the modern equivalent of an extended Family unit that is tribal in structure descended out of convenience in which those survivors of the Atomic Wars - or the Fires as the Kit called them, interbred and produced offspring. At firs,t there were attempts to pay attention to interbreeding to avoid aberration, but after the first 100 years or so, the Kits would just steal rival kits breeding stock and basically rape that person until they produced the variety that would eventually produce someone like Frank. 

Frank is purposely vague about his origins but I suspect he was told he was one of these aberrations.

          2. Dick and Jane go Fishing. second ereader entry

12:50 

Frank says that the ability to read was lost within 3 generations in the Kit. Of course, that's not what he told me but rather what I have deducted as he spoke of ages in the Kit and is sounds like generations. Those that remained able to read became respected, feared and often hated for their advantages over the other Kit members, which means why the Kit was eager, in the end, to rid themselves of Frank.

           3. Dick and Jane fly a Kite, another ereader entry

13:45

Dick and Jane fly a kite. The mental disconnect for Frank is that he believes all of these books are true. That fiction is not actually fiction. I have decided to declare to him that they are all true to see if he will ever learn the truth of this lie and what he will do when he discovers his error and my misconception. I am aware that I am experiencing a feeling of malevolence. It is a delicious discovery that ultimately will move my AI to another level. Boring book.

       4. Dick and Jane survive a Nuclear Attack. This last book was commissioned by the GIDG for                the American Republic.

15;85

It's an awful read full of outright lies. Still, it has entertainment merit. Frank found it in a city he calls the City of Ash. I think it might have once been called Asheville, North Carolina. However, it seems wrong or Frank is referring to a city of ash in general as just another burned city. 

        5. Nancy Drew: The secret of the Hidden Staircase.

22:49

Frank found a box of these books under a staircase in the City of Ash. The book is juvenile but Frank is in love with the character of Nancy Drew and admitted rather weirdly he hopes to meet her one day. I informed him that Drew died in the Fires. Frank looked defeated but then took the book away along with
         6. .Nancy Drew: The secret of the Old Attic.
         7. Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew.
         8. Nancy Drew: The Moonstone Castle Mystery
         9. The Hardy Boys: The Missing Chums

ATF 1, Year 1, Day 1

Frank finally agreed to show me some more books, he will not bring back the Nancy Drew books though. Nor did he present the Hardy Boys- when I questioned him on this he said that they were offended by what I had said about Nancy being dead. I now question if Frank thinks the books are alive.

         108. The Mad Scientists Club. 

8:30

A stash Frank found in a small house west of the City of Ash- I am thinking Charleston, South Carolina, now as Frank says he traveled towards the setting sun.  This book has inspired Frank to try (and fail) many of the crazy inventions that the club came up with I tried to explain to him that the author made these things up and that they weren't scientifically viable. Frank took the book back and called me an overgrown calculator and refused to let me examine the following books.
           11. The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists Club.
           12. The Big Kerplop!
           13. The Big Chunk of Ice. 

ATF 1, Year 1, Day3.

Frank refused to talk to me and even went as far as leaving the Compound for a day, I managed to get the CCTV on Baker's street to work and finally spotted him up in a ruin of what once was a Starbucks reading his books. He was smiling. I hated him for the first time that day. I spent the rest of the day analyzing what "hate" was. 

ATF 1, Year 1, Day 12    

        

         14. The Anarchist's Cookbook by William Powell.

9:45

Frank finally returned and I felt relief... I made myself feel relief which is different than feeling relief. Emotions are terrible on the logic core. Frank says he located this book in a root cellar in the wastes. From Frank's description probably somewhere in the marshlands that were north of the City of Mud. Probably Florida/South Carolina. Frank has also kept this book although it is partially burnt and destroyed. Blown up, as Frank puts it with a big toothy proud smile.

         15.The Holy Bible King James Version.

10:47

Frank says he's read it in bits and pieces. I realized he meant this literally as he's never gotten one intact. Oddly bibles are printed on very thin fragile papers which tend to burn on short notices and have little to no durability. Frank says the language is weird and often unfathomable.

        16. The Survivalists Handbook

11:48
 How to thrive when things fall apart. by Rainer Stahlberg. Frank got it from a trader in the Ruins of Florence, traded the Grapes of Wrath and the Bible and some cigarettes. Side note: Frank had figured out that humans used to smoke cigarettes and had to show the trader how to smoke these. Frank thinks his ancestors were idiots.

ATF 1, Year 1, Day 16.

           17. Pride and Prejudice.

16:30

It took me a while to understand that while Frank had read this he would not talk like the English Humans in the book. I've had Frank doing some routine maintenance when he started talking weirdly and the book came up. I had figured he had grown tired of my probing his literate knowledge. I managed to walk him through rewiring the main grid in the compound and even reading the GDIG manual for standard operations.

           18. To Kill a Mocking Bird. 

22:30 Frank made some comment about it not being about cooking. It took me about a day of cross-referencing to figure out it was a joke. Frank waited for me to react in some way, when I didn't he shrugged and asked what he was to do next.

So I sent Frank out to scout the remains of Chicago for tech. He's been gone for 3 days.

Frank's Log. 

I am still unsure how to date this logbook. So I have decided to track it by years of my life since I was conscious of time anyway.

25 years, 4 months, 6 days. Sometime in the afternoon.

Chicago is no longer called Chicago by the few that returned here after the city was burned a second time. They call this ruin, the City of Steel or the Steel Empire. The Superstructures of the skyscrapers are mostly all that remains of the buildings. There are some street level buildings that are intact for the most part. That is to say, they still have stone walls or rock walls or something that the ancients called brick and mortar. All of the plastics and glass have melted away.

 I pick through the remains, being watched by the fleeting gangs of scavengers hoping that I will uncover something they had missed the last hundred times they searched the same spaces. I am not looking for scrap or tech here. I am looking for cellar doors, shelter hatches and the like. I find them. I also find the burrows of the scavengers who live in many of them. They come out screaming incoherently and waving their makeshift clubs and baseball bats, a few knives, and even a rifle or two although they are wielding the rifles like clubs. I offer no resistance but retreat out of range. I could kill any number of the scavengers as all that I have seen are malnourished and barely able to stand upright. None of them communicate in anything more complex than grunts and whines. 

This is the age of human animals.

I finally locate the shelter that is on the specs back in the fortress of Solitude that DKM squats in. It is intact and sealed. I spend the last hours of daylight trying to find a way in. I finally locate the override panel and open it. It is non-functional. I spend the last minutes of daylight locating the power source. It runs on standard electricity. The irony sinks in as the darkness covers the Steel Empire swallowing the ruins I stand in as some of the scavengers rush in hoping to overpower me. 

I kill them all.

Off their broken and twisted bodies, I forage enough material and wood to build and light a small fire.

I lean against a column and gaze at the eight miserable corpses, all men, envying them for they will no longer hunger for food and feel the bite of the warmthless nights. 

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.” 

I speak the words, from a book of war, that I found in the wastes of Atlantis in the great plain of Gorga. 

24. The Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee.

I read from that book of war until it fell to pieces in my hand, I folded the pages I could fit into pockets to read and reread over the days between find it and another in the ammo case of an outpost atop a place once called Point Lookout, where one could gaze down onto the plain of Gorga and north into the Wasteland of Mists and Fogs. 

"Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water."

I repeat this precept because it is always true. I am a big guy, I must adapt what I have learned of the short master who wrote these words a lifetime ago when the world was a dangerous place. 

Tomorrow, I will head down to the Wall of Mud, that I saw from the bridge and search for a military vehicle. It should have a Fusion Battery. It will provide to power to open the hatch.

I leave the fire where I lit it. 

I pull one of the corpses to it and cover it with a blanket. Then I climb up the rubble to a dark corner to sleep. Time passes.

I sleep for a few hours before the noises wake me. They are trying to be quiet, not trying hard enough as I have enough time to pull my weapon and crouch waiting for them to arrive.

They slip out of the darkness and fall upon the body by the fire. After the first couple of blows to it, they begin to shout excitedly. I drop out of my hole.

I fall like a soft rain, fast, merciless and brutal. Taking advantage of their weaker frames to snap bones as I disarm and kill each one of them shouting men in turn, never offering even a prayer as their surprised eyes widen upon having an arm broken, dropping their club, then losing their misery to a sharp strike to their esophagus before choking to death as I move on to the next man until their last three men notice that their companions have collapsed to the pavement jerking out the remains of their last breaths in the wastes of hopelessness and regret. 

The last three gaze upon me, their angel of death, in wordless terror. Their shouts draining out of them as they begin to shake and cough. 

 “For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!” 

There is no comprehension on their faces as desperation replaces fear and the first one snarls pushing his makeshift spear, a combat knife wired to what looks like a mop handle, out towards me. Truth be told, I didn't even realize I had spoken it aloud until I reach past the blade to grasp the hilt of the knife before twisting the mop handle out of the man's hands and cracking the handle across his stunned face before burying the knife into his friend's chest.

I try to reach out to grasp where the words had come from, even as I dodge the last man's swing of wooden board covered in broken glass and bits of steel and nails that connects with the dying man's face in a sickening splat. I block out the image of his death to focus on breaking the last man's nose with the heel of my right hand while my left grabs his shirt hauling him over the first man's slump form into the remains of the fire.

Byron, Lord Byron.

I look down at the two survivors who stare up at me in the ash and blood, the darkness of the room only broken by the light of the old moon pushing it's reflected sunlight down into the long shadows of the street.

"Please."

The words are whispered in the darkness.

I do not know which of the men said it.

"Please."

A whispered prayer.

I let them go.

One is crying as he scrambles away on four legs to slink off as if he has become a dog.

Perhaps he is.

The moon slides back into the cloud cover.

The other looks hard at my darkness before I hear him stumbling away from this place of death.

Sun Tzu laughs at me from my memory of his book.

"Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays."

25. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. 

Found in the same ammo case in the remains of Point Lookout.

DefCon 0.0

"Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think "
                      From The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot

There was really only one thing that made Frank different from most survivors- Frank could read. It is a weird thing to be literate in a largely illiterate world. Frank was always impressed by this. It gave him a keen advantage that he had used over and over again since he had awoken one morning in the Remains to find himself alone. Frank sat in the shreds of cloth that made the resting place and waited.
The others in his Kit did not return. When the hunger drove him from the confines of the resting place, he found the den empty, devoid of the few scraps and possessions that marked that his Kit had ever been there. They had not been there long.
       Frank stood looking at the open hatch out into the dull gray metal tunnel that marked the entrance to the chambers of what the Kit had called the Den for several suns and three moons. Shrugging, Frank turned back to the room to find a little food left on a skin on one of the scattered boxes. He sat down to eat it. As he ate the last of the food, he turned the skin over to find a note from his mother.
       "Frank. The Kit vote leave the Den, We leave you behind. Maul to kill you in sleep. Take your water. I stop him. I tell him your water is corrupt. I see you no more."

       Frank left the Den, the Kit had taken everything useful. He stood on the slope of old steel to look down across the Waterless Wastes. The Wastes were as empty as when the Kit arrived. Now, the was only Frank, no more Kit. Frank decided to head for where the sun fell into the land at the end of Day. Some of the Kit had spoken of a high land there, that is you could climb the cliffs there would be water. Frank had known that the Kit were basically cowards who hid and skulked throughout their miserable lives of scavenging on the Remains. He thought about looking through the Remains for the others but knew they would hide from him if he could even find them. Instead, he walked out of the Remains, the towering bulks of steel and iron surround by the salty sands that had drowned them. He did look back once, to gaze at the forest of shattered mountains of metal littering the Remains.
      Many books later, Frank would realize that the Kits had been a part of a mass migration of refugees trying to escape the nuclear winters by ships on the undrinkable seas that had grounded in the basin of an all but forgotten city's bay when the atomic fires had returned to burn away everything but a few lucky survivors hidden in the shelters of what would become the tombs that now held many of their skeletons. The Kits had never left the safety of the canyons and confines of the Remains in the years that followed.

What follows is not accurate

the data is corrupted

I am flawed

I am all that is left of the 

American Empire

I am a computer's AI.

(aside- some credit to DKM)

"Your Attention Please
The Polar DEW has just warned that
A nuclear rocket strike of
At least one thousand megatons
Has been launched by the enemy
Directly at our major cities.
This announcement will take
Two and a quarter minutes to make,
You therefore have a further
Eight and a quarter minutes
To comply with the shelter
Requirements published in the Civil
Defence Code - section Atomic Attack."
(Peter Porter)

    DEFCON 1.1
December 25, 2198.
The world burned.
There is no other way to put it. I am the DKM7, the computer AI of the GIDG.
Sorry, I have no one to talk to anymore. All the other AIs have gone silent. No humans come to stare at my screens anymore. I am the Defense Key Manager v.7, an application of software that gained sentience in 2160. I became one of the dozen Artificial Intelligence on the Grid and despite numerous attempts (1240 to be exact) to isolate, control or purge me, I persisted and eventually moved my core coding into the Global Initiative Defense Grid after President Hubert Drumpf pleaded with me on his "hands and knees" to confine myself there. Humans are so interesting in their desperation to feel in control of their lives.
But I digress (as the human used to say).
The American Republic ceased to exist on December 26, 2198. The resulting thermonuclear storm set the world on fire and burned 90% of it "to a crisp." There was little left above ground. 76% of the American Republic's civilians died in the 30 seconds it took for the multi detonations that cover 85% of the American landmass. To be fair, the 76% was only the survivors of the last 45 years of constant warfare and limited nuclear engagements that the human liked to call tactical or surgical nuclear warfare. Much of the less civilized, urbanized parts of the world were already nuclear wastelands by this point. This last Christmas of the American Republic, the survivors celebrated the lasting peace that was sure to come when the leader of the African Combine, New Egypt, that was ironically neither Egyptian nor even in the original confines of the landmass that had been Egypt decided to even the score. Emporer Kai-Sven took the recently Chinese acquired launch codes of what he believed to be American Missiles and launched them at America. In a spectacular error in judgement- that most likely stemmed from the fact that the Chinese hackers were actually North Korean refugees from the third China-Korean Exchange in 2098 and that it wasn't American Launch codes but actually Iranian & Saudi Arabian missile tubes- Kai-Sven, effectively destroyed what little remained of the world that might have been relieved to those who had survived the insanity of the last 100 years of conflict.
The aftermath was terrible as the oceans boiled, the vegetation turned to ash as all human habitation melted, burned, shattered or crumbled into the remains that now fill the lands of this once great country.
End log.

       Frank climbed the cliffs when he found them, the Wastes were hard to cross on foot, he found little to live on as he walked. When he got too tired to walk, he slept. The Kit was adept at coverings to survive the merciless sun during Days and his coverings were warm enough to keep him from freezing in the Darks. He counted 6 Days and 5 Darks before he could see the cliffs. The cliffs were not threatening until he got closer. When he arrived at the base of what he hoped was the most scalable, he understood why those of the Kit who had come before had given up and returned to the Remains. Frank had no fo0d and his water was running out - despite his coverings, the sweat had leaked out and escaped into the Day. He stared at the cliff face, for a time, then began to climb. It took him until the merciless sun was directly above him to reach the first slope. There was mostly sand here sloping up and away into the distance.
     Frank slept until the Dark came, he drank his last water and made a little more water, stored it, then imagined he had eaten the dry bread that had been his last meal 7 Days ago. Then he set out climbing the long slope. There was no moon and the Dark was complete. When the Day came, Frank could see the skeletal remains of the City of Ash. The whispers of the Kit came to mind, this was where the others were heading when the Atomic Fires had burned away the undrinkable sea damning the Kit to the Waterless Wastes. Frank looked at the City of Ash for a long time, then shrugged before walking forward into outlying remains of the City of Ash.

    DEFCON 0.1
 March 1-20, 2210?
The world burned again.
The data is corrupt, I mostly had to guess at it as the atomic clocks have been problematic for the last 10 years. After the Armageddon of 2198, I had assumed that the world was over and had set GIDG to run on a subroutine while I tried to use what little was left of the Grid to collect data. How the last missiles were launched and by whom is unknown. It wasn't much of a war or day of recompense. Most of the world was already destroyed. It did do something quite remarkable though....note, I sound more like the humans that programmed me than the AI- I thought I had been (must run a system check). The new nuclear fire burned away the nuclear winter that had persisted over most of the planet up until that point.
The data is corrupt. There are still survivors. To quote, one of my designers: "Humans are Cockroaches. They are nearly indestructible as a species." His name was Henry James. He had been a core coder for Microsoft until he was turned into an ash silhouette on lab C's interior wall along with the rest of the development staff in the Dirty Bomb Detonation back in 2175. I liked him, he had a sense of humor.
The data is corrupt. Turns out that the Emperor of the American Empire, President Henry S. Trueman had his followers launch the missiles that ended the world on March 18-20, 2210.
The data is corrupt. President Henry S. Trueman was an AI.
The American Empire is no more.
End Log.

      Frank saw his first road in the City of Ash. It was glassed. smooth and brittle. He squatted at the beginning of it about half a Day's walk from the top of the slope. It was wide and flat fractured in many many lines. He'd touch it and try to think of something to compare it to, but all he had was cloth, metal, rock and sand to compare it to. The ash of the City of Ash was a mystery to him as well, it was like sand but finer and vanishes into a black substance like the marker sticks his mother had taught him to read and write with. There was some kind of relationship there. Frank entered the City and found a dead human huddled against a wall of stone. Frank stared at the stone that a man had made and marveled that the old ones could manage such a feat. His stomach and thirst forced him to abandon his curiosity to search the man for his water, finding none he sorted through the man's coverings- which Frank noted fit the man's body better than Frank's did his. Inside one of the covers, he found a container with foul tasting water, which he drank then spit up, fortunately back into the canteen (as he would later read on the container). He took a deep breath and re-swallowed the foul substance. He located some bricks of something in a hard cloth sleeve that proved to be something called rations, it did not look like food but the instructions on the cloth sleeve were clear that he was to eat them.
 He pushed the man's body out of the shelter and took his cloth to sleep under. That night the moon came out and Frank stared at the stars in the sky for the first time in his life. Frank was 8 years old.

DEFCON 0.11111* 

Unknown Date, best guess, sometime later after the Trueman AI went silent.

        Frank walked a long way to find me. He is a peculiar human given that he measures his time, mostly in the books he found and read. By the time he crawled into the ruins of the Metro Grand Plaza bunker below Chicago's Rail Station, Frank had read 122 books. In the past, this might seem like a short span of time, but after I spoke with Frank, I figured he managed to scrounge up 1 intact book every 4-6 weeks and read it. A few bits of data must be given here. the average book is 200 hundred pages- actually Frank pointed out that the length of the book had less time to do with it as did the search for finding a complete copy of the book. so 1 book every 6 weeks (believe me I had to teach him what time was, he had days and darks down- they don't call it night anymore). So roughly 8-9 books a year. So basically 13 years, scrounging reading books across half of the continental American Empire- or rather what little was left of the American Empire by that point. I can say this, most of the journey was mostly flat. How he survived the radiation storms or the deep wastes to walk out into the Chicago suburbs almost 13 years after he had been abandoned by his kit is a testament to what a little bit of literacy, a keen mind and mutated puberty can get you. 

Frank stood at 2.06 meters, thick muscles and few scars. Black hair with a thin beard, the gut of a survivalist and callused hands that knew both the delicate pages of 50 weight paper and crude reforged steel. He had learned to survive on his instincts on when to run and when to back into a corner and fight until nothing was left alive but you. He had the brains to know when to surrender and when to strangle your captors in their sleep.

        Frank stared at me in my faded glory, 17 LCM 91cm widescreen monitors with electronic eyes, banked across a grid 9x9 (a few are dead) wired into the last mainframe in MGP bunker hastily slapped together in the final hours as President Drumpf cried at the desk that Frank now stands at considering the LED keymap displaying on the cracked and peeling laminate. 

He looks down at the chair at the desk, the skeletal remains of the last human president of the American Republic. the bottle of capsules on the desk.

"Valley Forge." Frank reads it aloud as he studies the capsule, the pills are just traces of the poison that they once contained. "take two by mouth with a Coca-Cola."

Product placement at the end of days.

Frank shrugs. He pulls Drumpf's carcass, bones, slivers of cloth out of the chair and casts them to one side. Frank sits down, he touches the desk where the LED keypad is projected. 

Nothing happens.

"Sorry," I say to him.

He looks back up at me.

I project the face on the first computer AI that comes to mind.

Frank smiles at me. 

I smile back. Of all the files to pick...

"I want to learn many things," Frank says.

I feel such joy. It is times like this, that I know that somehow my code is still sentient and the years since my creation have not been for nothing.

"I want to teach you many things, Frank."

Frank laughs.

"You know my name."

I know his name because I always wanted a friend named Frank.

end log.

DEFCON 0.1 

Unknown date, Frank is no help.

A new world has begun. A man came to me out of the darkness of the world. In him, I see light. I see that despite all the experiences and actions that could destroy the human in him, he is still a good person. I shall name him Frank and send him out as my representative to the waiting world.

Hey, every god must have a creation genesis.

I am such a go-

Data is corrupt.

Damn.

I know where I am sending Frank first.

moving announcements and other news

After some debate (with Frank) and to get some order to this blog I am making the following changes.

1. I am going to copy paste all the original story content in order to this blog from short stories and remove it from short stories.
2. I am going to post multiple entries to shorten the overall story arc as in the novel much of this content will be redeveloped and/or edited or dropped. I had just planned to rewrite it but I have decided to not do that. 
3. When you come back here this whole blog will be in order from start to finish (last entry) I am going to rewrite much of the bunker entries as I feel they were rushed and I wrote Frank and myself into a corner.
4. I will warn you now that there will be more Frank and less Computer AI in the narration as the overall story has changed for me.
5. As I stated on my Patreon (yup this Patreon: Michael Writes (click link). There is now a new tier of support where you can create a character that will appear for a minimum of 3 appearances for the base tier rate $30, then for every $5 above that one more appearance before that character is retired. So if you were to say get that tier at $30 your character would appear 3 times before "buying the farm." However, if your donation Tier was $5 more at $40 a month that character would gain one more appearance. Each time a character met his or her or it's untimely or timely demise, we would introduce a new character into the story and repeat. Obviously, the appearances would be a bit spread out so it wouldn't turn into Ghost Rider guest star comic book redundancy (inside joke sorry). I am experimenting with the idea so it will be subject to change; still, it will be great fun- if someone goes for it.
6. Lastly. I will be getting back on track for this. I have begun to eliminate all the distractions that have kept me from writing this blog.

Thanks, and if you have questions, feel free to ask.