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WE'RE
LATE!!
(OR, AC VERSUS THE KIIIER WINTER of '94) Unless you've been away on a Caribbean vacation the past three months, you've probably seen the news about the severe winter we've had here on the East Coast of the USA. The sub-zero temperatures, numerous ice- and snowstorms, power outages, and even an earthquake thrown in for good measure (I'm not talking about the Big One in L.A., I mean the 4.6 temblor that trashed ACs offices a day before California got theirs) have wreaked havoc unlike anything people in these parts have ever seen. The time normally spent editing AC instead got spent shoveling snow, hacking ice with a pickaxe, scraping ice from the car, recovering from sore muscles caused by overexertion and falls on the ice, and worst of all the monster traffic jams that saw me arriving home late from work night after night, half-frozen and exhausted from hours of white-knuckle driving. As of this writing (the second week of February), the Killer Winter shows no sign of letup (we got another 18 inches of snow/sleet last week), and I'm grateful to have thus far survived without serious accident or illness. Production on this issue of AC began on schedule the first week of January and was moving along just fine when the first of several nasty ice storms knocked out power for 4 straight days, during which I went without heat/light/power in sub-zero weather and half the vacation time I'd reserved to work on the magazine got sucked into a Black Hole. I didn't shave, bathe, or change clothes for 5 days, and slept in front of the fireplace with my shoes on. Upstairs, toothpaste froze in the tube and matters of personal hygiene became, well, rather challenging. A half-cord of seasoned hardwood, plus the loan of a kerosene heater from a friend when the wood ran out, saved the plumbing from freezing. Work resumed on this issue around the middle of January, only to be set back by the cleanup from the 'quake (no damage, but a huge mess when stacks of magazine-related files and papers ended up in a jumbled heap on the floor). A few days later a "rolling blackout" during another ice storm wiped out all the progress I had made on this issue since power was restored after the first ice storm. Around the end of January there was a brief thaw, commuting time approached normal, and during the first week of February slow progress resumed on this issue and the editing of our Software Disk was completed. In the 2nd week of February we got clobbered with two major snow/sleet storms that once again slowed things to a crawl (and also crumpled the roof of my toolshed, crushing an expensive lawnmower). Progress has been slow and painful (literally), and we'll be doing well to see this issue mailed out in March. Readers should also expect the April issue to be about a month late. - Ben Poehland, Managing Editor |
Article from Atari Classics magazine