First, please: No more references to Ronald Reagan as The Gipper.

(Reagan died this afternoon, if you’ve been doing your weekend chores and not checking the news).

I always blamed Reagan for the recession in the early 1980s that ruined any chance of my generation enjoying the prosperity enjoyed by our parents. This might not’ve been true where you lived, but in my hometown in downstate Illinois, Reagan’s presidency was a disaster.

Caterpillar Inc. laid off something like 20,000 people; most of ’em never got their jobs back. From the end of World War II right up to, well, the day I graduated from high school, it was a cinch to get a job at Cat and kiss your fears of poverty goodbye.

By the summer of 1982, everybody in my circle of acquaintaince — including my dad, who had over 20 years of seniority at a wire mill — was out of work. My dad sat around for five months before he got desperate enough to take the worst job in the plant — running a machine that galvanized nails. It was hot, nasty work nobody with any seniority ever had to do, till the Reagan Recession.

I moved away from Peoria that summer and stayed away for most of a dozen more. The one fortunate outcome of all the good factory jobs disappearing, though, was that I had no choice but to get myself a college degree, which was the best thing that ever happened to me.

So I guess I owe Reagan thanks for ruining all my prospects and forcing me to find new ones. Maybe we all needed some tough love back then, but we had to endure one hell of a spanking. Twenty years later, the sting’s pretty much gone and there’s nary a scar to be found.

Reagan’s crowd didn’t suffer much pain back then, as I recall. Which has tended to make me suspicious of people who want discipline for everybody but themselves.

I can’t help admiring Reagan’s optimism, though. Think about it: a guy with a forgettable career as an actor goes into politics. What were his chances of becoming, say, governor of California, much less president of the U.S.A.? Slim and none to to the “realists” of the world, but Reagan was undaunted.

You’ll see that among almost anybody who makes it big: A belief in what can go right vs. what can go wrong.

I don’t speak ill of the dead, it just strikes me as bad karma. So as long as the flags are at half-staff I’m setting aside my gripes about the Reagan era. We’re all gonna need that spirit of forbearance as the coming TV news weepathon tries to deify the guy.

In any case, you gotta give this to Reagan: how many other politicians inspired songs by the Ramones?

If people see me wandering about with the look of a man without a country, it’ll be because all my toys — computer, stereo, etc. — are being boxed up.

I’ll keep the laptop out, though, in case the urge to post or surf becomes unbearable.

With any luck I’ll have some pix to post Sunday night.

I’ve imported my Prints the Chaff entries here so they can remain online.

Certainly generations to come will be thankful.

I also cleaned up my archives and zapped a zillion individual/daily entries. Now all my permalinks go to anchor points within each of the monthly archives. It’ll be a bit cumbersome for people clicking on the old posts, but from here on out I expect at best a few posts a week (more reasons for our progeny to be thankful), so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, relax. It’s a sign of sanity.

Yes, we’re moving again. A week from Monday we’ll be in a new place.

This’ll be our third address since coming to California in the fall of 1999. The first two places have been in apartment complexes; nicely appointed, brand new and about as interesting as dry toast.

As long as we’ve lived here, I’ve been fascinated with driving mountain roads in the ranges around Silicon Valley. You see about an even split of tech zillionaire estates and horse farms. Either one would be fine to live on, but lacking the requisite millions required to buy land in these parts, I figured it’d be interesting to see if any of these hill dwellers are renting cottages that a working-class couple like us could afford.

Last Sunday I did some poking around and found an amazingly interesting place just 10 miles from the Mercury News, 20 miles closer than our current abode. It’s a two-bedroom cottage built over a workshop about five miles up into the hills overlooking San Jose. I’m told the city lights are visible from up there.

I mentioned it to Melissa and she said, in effect, “OK, let’s think about it.”

By Monday, Melissa was determined to have a look at the place, so we dropped by for a look and it was, as they say, love at first sight. There’s an actual corral on the property with two horses, and plenty of places where Melissa can plant flowers and otherwise dig in the dirt. Here’s what it looks like:

The one downside to this bucolic setting is that my Internet connection will be dialup. I could pay way too much for a slow satellite connection but I don’t need to be online that badly. What I need most these days is an excuse to do something else with my life besides cruise the Web. I’ve been hopelessly hooked on it for going on eight years, and it’s high time to, uh, dial that back a ways.

That’s one of my motivations for retiring Prints the Chaff, which developed a small but loyal following. I felt bad about bailing on all the people who’ve encouraged me all along, but the prospect of spending every morning of my working life combing the web for stuff to write about just made me more and more depressed in the past few months. It got to the point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

I still need an outlet for writing and photography, though, so I suspect I’ll keep posting words and pictures here now and again.

Just be patient, as I’ll be cruising in the slow lane.