I have this continuing problem where I run very close to the edge of Little Elvis’s memory abilities because there’s so little disk space available that the RAM functions threaten to come to a halt. This especially happens when I’m porting over my old cassettes, a true memory hog (the program doesn’t release the temp files until you shut down the machine, which is nice if it crashes and need to recover but murder if you’re trying to do anything else simultaneously). Until I can figure out a way to convince Little E to use one of the ancillary drives for temp files, if ever, I need to keep him as empty as possible, which is really hard. I’m lucky if there’s 2 gigs of his 30 available even with constant vigilance; Little E is one fluffernutter away from crashing all the time. Last night I dumped RCT (which I haven’t played in a while, and I’m sorry, but I prefer the versions prior to V3), but didn’t get much from it, but then I found about 3 gigs of audio backup files, so all of a sudden I’ve got over 5 gigs available of 30 (well, 27 you can actually access), and Little E is as happy as if he were being appointed Special Government Agent Extraoirdinare by Richard Nixon. I’ve barely made a dent in my transfers of cassettes to MP3s (last night I ported over some Phish), and with all this extra space, Little E and I are in memory hog heaven. More Phish tonight. And maybe some early Steve Earle. If only this didn’t have to be done in real time. That’s the story of my life: not enough real time. And not enough hard drive space. You can never have enough time, money or memory (static or dynamic). Always buy the biggest hard drive they sell, and max up the RAM. Trust me on this.
Anyhow, in the continuing debriefing on the short trip, we tootled up to Newport after New Haven. I’d never been to Newport before, but heard good reports from everyone. We stayed at a B&B near the center of things, and mostly walked around just soaking in the place. It’s old, of course, and there’s one part of town with mostly 18th Century houses with tiny well-kept gardens that you walk through and feel you have to photograph each and every one of them. These are the kind of houses that, if you went into them, you’d keep bumping your head on the ceiling because, well, that’s the way they built them then. People were not Lilliputian a couple of hundred years ago, contrary to the popular delusion. We have grown an inch or two, but not enough to throw off the scale of our living quarters. The idea of building big spaces to live in simply didn’t make a lot of sense in pre-central heating times (warm air rises, so why have high ceilings?). Ostentatious housing did indeed exist at the time, both here and in the Mother Country, of course, but that was for the gentry. But normal people lived in normal accommodations, some of which were quite nice, thank you very much. Of course, eventually a certain gentry in the 19th Century discovered the pleasantness of Newport, and ostentatious housing began to be built on the outskirts, and the other half of visiting the town today, in addition to the old area with its restaurants and tourist attractions and historical area, is visiting the mansions. Some of these are paradigmatically “piles” in the worst sense, some of the ugliest buildings you’ll ever see, albeit in their day some of the most expensive. Granted that salt water is destructive of many building materials, you still don’t have to have something that looks like it’s chiseled out of lead. The interiors of these places, on the other hand, define grandness, varying depending on their periods and what was popular at the time, from neo-Gothic to Victorian to Arts & Crafts, so what you’ll like depends on, well, what you like. They’re well worth seeing, in any case. My personal architectural fancy runs more to public than private spaces, but it is nice to imagine yourself dining with the nobs on a summer’s night at the turn of the (19th) century, all duded up and lah-di-dah and witty as all get out. I have the same vision of the great country houses of England, dropping by for a Brideshead weekend, tennis and cocktails and Bertie and whathaveyou. Very evocative.
So in the account book, Newport is definitely worth a stopover. Since every time you turn around you’re eating a lobster, even if you hate walking through people’s old houses, you’ll still have a happy day or two.
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