Terrifying squiggly lines

    Yes, yes I know. Dreams again. Hey, at least it isn't poetry!:)
    I had a nightmare last night where there were little blue lines moving around under one of my fingernails. Then they would migrate around, circling the finger. Sort of like "Alien" without anything popping out of my chest, or more like that "X Files" episode set in the Arctic.
    There were a couple of odd aspects to this dream. One is that it sprang up full blown in the middle of another dream, the more usual thing where I'm inexplicably living in a dormitory and equally inexplicably moving my stuff from room to room, or maybe trying to find my stuff.
    The odder aspect is that it was my finger from a past year. To move up a year, I whacked my hand on a hard surface. I suspected that the year in question was 1955. (In real life, this was 7 years before I was born.) So I whacked my hand repeatedly while somebody recited events from various years. I was hoping that eventually I would recognize an event and be able to couple it with a year and thus be able to count backwards to see what year my blue-line invaded finger was from. (Does this make sense? Does anything in a dream make sense?) Alas, I lost count when "The Godfather was mentioned. I thought I was up to 100 years by then, though. Apparently, in my sleep I'm really really really old.

New horizons in "Boy, I'm an idiot!"

    So after a hundred million brilliant ideas as to why my back hurts, it finally occurred to me that maybe staring down at a laptop computer six inches or more below the level of my head might not be the smartest idea. Back when my back problems were even worse, I got a breakfast-in-bed tray to use for laptop computer use in bed. Then my back got better and the tray got set aside, just keeping some cheap electronics off the floor.
    Big Lots used to sell adjustable platforms for laptops, but now all they have are ones that look a lot like... breakfast-in-bed trays. So I just liberated my own tray and raised up the laptop(s) 6-8 inches or so. And somehow, magically, my back and neck are feeling much, much better. Will it last? Will it turn out to be the next dumb idea? Well, we'll see.
    This is the 500th consecutive daily update. There's no significance to this of course; it's just a cool number.

Presence and Absence

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, I guess.
I guess it does
for a while
until the forgetting starts.
Then there is a lot to be said
for presence
too.

Kitchen ninja

    I'm starting to get pretty good at this stuff. I still think it's funny that I've gone from being a person who rigorously adhered to every recipe to a person who just wings it practically every time. For a long time, I've been eating chicken and chick peas with vegetables over brown rice. This time out, I tried it out on the brown rice/ flaxseed angelhair pasta I mentioned last week. Something seemed to be missing. So I added coconut milk. Something still seemed to be missing so I added chopped peanuts and now I have a wacky B-movie version of pad thai. I like it lots. But now I'm obsessing with the idea of peanut butter quinoa cookies. Hmmm... one tablespoon of peanut butter or two?

Conditional

    This might just be a semantic exercise. The Downtown U. Nine, or if you prefer, the University of South Carolina baseball team went to Omaha for the third year in a row for the College World Series. They won it each of the last two years. This time, they made it all the way to the finals, but fell short, losing convincingly to the University of Arizona. (And major kudos and congratulations to the victors.)
    It's hard to say how this makes me feel. They had no business winning in either of the last two years. They had no business making it to the finals this year. So I ought to feel purely exultant that they got that far on ninja magic and sleight of hand. But dammit, they made it all the way to the finals. Why not just two more miracles? (The final series is two out of three.) So there is a degree of disappointment there, but rather conditional given that, as I say, they had no damn business being there in the first place. (They had some losses to truly terrible teams this season, some at home.)
    Also, this being the University of South Carolina, where mediocrity is a tradition, the idea of being disappointed by finishing #2 in the country is kind of odd. They're having a little get-together at the stadium shortly for a few thousand of their very close friends (or in other words, Columbia is welcoming the team back from Omaha). I'm planning to be there. Sure another title would have been nice, but I for one am proud of the fellows. Yay!

Biggest memory

    This whole "Writing when the cat lets me" thing is getting completely out of hand. I never should have started playing with her with string. Now she nags and nags and nags (cutely, of course) to play with string MORE! Cranking out a couple of paragraphs is possible, but I'll have to get a headset and dictation software to write anything longer again. I'm just lucky she's a benevolent dictator.
    But that's not what I want to talk about. Some years ago, I got the brilliant idea to upgrade this laptop with all the memory it will hold, with the idea of being able to play better games on it. While it did bring the Windows Experience score from 2.3 to 2.7, it didn't exactly allow a lot of better game playing, since I didn't do anything about the graphics driver. But in general, the computer worked better, so it wasn't a total disaster, except...
    When you make a Restore Point in System Protection (they love their capital letters, Microsoft does), it takes a picture of all the memory. Why it would need to do so, I do not know. However, with all this memory, that picture gets to be pretty huge pretty fast. (Why it wouldn't be all the time, I also don't know.) Eventually, the hard drive nearly fills up, as I found it to be last night. All you have to do is turn off "Make a Restore Point" then use a hard drive cleanup program to dump all that crap, then turn it on again.
    But if you don't want to do all that, don't buy the maximum amount of memory that your laptop can hold. Learn from my mistakes! Hell, somebody ought to; I certainly never do!

Very vocal

    Amelia the cat is very, very, very vocal, even verbal. It's the other reason I think she's a Norwegian forest cat (besides that she looks like one), as it's a characteristic of the breed. (That and cross-country skiing.) She says words, even if they don't make sense, including English words like "hello" and "no" even if they aren't in the appropriate situations.
    I just agree with whatever she says. This is always my approach with females of my own species, so I figure I may as well try it with those from another one. I just hope that I'm not agreeing with anything too horrible, like "All humans must die" or "When my relatives from the Planet Where Cats Evolved Opposable Thumbs get here, you monkey-people will crawl!" I don't think so, though. She's a sweetie-sweetie-sweet-sweet with a very nice demeanor. Most of the time. But I'll play with string with her every day just to stay on her good side. Just in case.

Credit where it's due

    I've gotten out of the habit of watching TV, but they have one at the waiting area at dialysis. Sometimes, in the afternoons, it's tuned to CBS, where I have learned about Dr. Oz. I know very little about Dr. Oz except that his real name is longer than that and he seems to be a good egg. The other day, he recommended Hodgson Mill brown rice pasta with flaxseed. Being hip to try just about anything gluten free (and lucky enough to find it in the GF section of, of all places, WalMart) I gave it a go.
    I crazy-mad loved it. OK, I liked it fine; where the crazy-mad came in was later when I started craving it. I always find it a good sign when I start craving healthy stuff. I always feel that way about real brown rice, but never do about quick (parboiled) brown rice. And now I have another. Kudos to Dr. Oz, whoever he might be!
    Today at dialysis, there was an older lady in the waiting room singing spirituals to herself very softly. I wanted to tell her, "Sing louder!" but figured that that would be more than a lot presumptuous. But I wish she would have. (Volume was off on the waiting room TV today for some reason; maybe she's always done that but I couldn't hear.)
    Every day at dialysis, there are at least three women with Marshalls shopping bags. You start thinking, Do only diabetics shop at Marshalls? Do all diabetics shop at Marshalls? I guess Marshalls just has kickass shopping bags, and the word gets around. But it do make you wonder.

Still dumb

    So it appears that when you have no upper body strength, you have to go really really slow starting to build it. Anyway, that's my best guess as to why my back is hurting, or rather my shoulder blade. I think that even my very light dumbbell workouts are putting on too much strain, or too much uneven strain. A better idea might be-- well, let's face it the best idea is to hire a coach since I have no idea what I'm doing. But in the very short run, I think I'll do very short sessions (5 repetitions instead of 15 or 20) of exercises intended to exercise every muscle around my back that I can figure a way to move. Can't do much damage that way anyway.:)
    Last night's dreams were distinguished by a baroque level of both weirdness and detail. There was the usual business about incredibly detailed rehabilitations of a building of uncertain ownership. Then a couple whom I know slightly in real life were telling me very very specifically about their personal grooming habits. I definitely need to get a channel clicker for my dreams!

Like a sauna

    Where I live, we spend half the year in weather often described as "like a sauna out there." Yesterday was the first time that it paid off. Somehow I hurt my right shoulder blade, or rather the muscles in the vicinity. I was out in the weather just getting groceries and found that the heat and humidity eased the pain quite a lot. I wound up spending an hour or more out on my front porch, something I'd never done in 3 1/2 years of living in this apartment, just enjoying the weather. And my shoulder feels much better. Maybe I'll complain about the weather a little less often now. (Not likely; highs in the 100s coming up next week!)

Evil Empires

    LeBron haters think they want the Heat to lose, but I'm not sure that they do. Because you can't have an Evil Empire unless they actually win. In baseball, the Evil Empire is the Yankees; in basketball, traditionally it's the Lakers. In retail, it's definitely WalMart. In football, I don't know if there's anyone anymore; the Cowboys just don't measure up, the Giants are still somehow plucky overachievers, and the Patriots aren't quite making it over the top. If the Heat keep falling short, they and LeBron will start to be objects of pity. Your real LeBron hater should be pulling (silently) for the Heat to win, so a new Evil Empire can be anointed. Don't you think?

Psychic powers OK; memory for poo

    I wrote a few days ago about fabulous psychic powers, remembering the cool title but completely forgetting what I actually meant to write about. That was that when driving any distance at all, you nearly always have several routes to choose from. Where I live, the route you choose is important since I'm surrounded by active railroad tracks in every direction. (That's what "surrounded" means, isn't it? Oh well.)
    Now and again, my fabulous psychic powers give me a strong message that I should take one route rather than another. I nearly always heed these messages. Of course, there's no way to know if the road not taken would have been blocked or clear, but I always just assume that my fabulous psychic powers were right so I won't feel too foolish. Unless of course the route I chose instead is conspicuously slow. Then I do feel like an idiot. Fortunately, this happens seldom.
    Dreams last night were unweird! Guys on sports radio (which I had on in real life since the SC college world series game ran late) were playing a word game I had been playing on the computer earlier. So finally I have an easily comprehensible dream. I still thought it was funny, though.

String!

    I don't know why it took me so long to figure out that this kitty might like playing with string. Despite my protestations to the contrary, I'm really not a total idiot, but somehow it slipped past me. It might be because Alice's older cat Madeline never seemed all that interested, though she liked it when we swung a yoyo at her so that she could bat at it. I certainly always knew that cats are supposed to like string.
    Amelia loves batting at my shoelaces. So eventually I remembered that I have a ball of string that I bought when I was giving my futon away. So after six years, I finally started playing with string with Amelia. I have created a monster! My fluency in kitty-speak isn't a lot better, but I know now what "More string!" sounds like. I also have re-kittenized an eight-year-old cat. This is a wonder and a joy, and only slightly a pain in the butt.
    I don't know what anybody else's experience is like, but I find that she plays best and most joyously when I keep the string just out of her reach so that she can chase it. I like to use my left arm since it's less coordinated so even I don't know where the string is going to go. This plays best on my bed. Uh-oh. Gotta go. "More string!" (Double uh-oh; she actually pooped on the bed. Gotta go; gotta put her in a sack and take her down to the river.)

Fun with autism

    Today the dryer finished just a few minutes before it was time for me to start heating my lunch. And I found myself rushing to hang everything up as quickly as I could so that lunch wouldn't be late. As if the sun would fall out of the sky if I had to eat five or ten minutes past noon! I guess it's only funny because I'm mildly autistic; no doubt there are people for whom it would have been a struggle in deadly earnest. Then again, maybe it's not so mildly; I did get everything put away in time. So nobody has to worry about the sun falling, at least not today.

Facebook oddities

    My Facebook friends list just went up mysteriously by two. When I checked the list, I found two people I was pretty sure had left Facebook. One, a famous person, filmmaker John Sayles, didn't leave, he just went over 5,000 friends, which apparently blows up Facebook, so he was converted from a person to a page and we all became followers. The other non-famous one just left. I clicked on their profile pictures (tipoff: no picture, just the little cartoon man you get until you pick a profile picture) and a message popped up saying that it was an inactive account, that I could unfriend the person if I wanted.
    I just don't see the benefit to anybody. I mean, it's neat that my friends list is two larger. I'm relaxed about the idea of having imaginary friends. I just don't see that it's going to help their stock price having everyone have a slightly bigger friend list. But hey-- Wall Street has been chiseling and ripping us off for centuries; they just might be smarter than me.
    Dreams were even stranger than usual last night. Some guys, including Paul, were going to reconquer the Roman Empire. Apparently, they were going to use a piece of aluminum foil. Also, they were only a few inches tall, since they seemed to be living in something somewhere between a drawer and a kitty litter box, only with a shelf they could hide under. I wish them luck!
    In a brief but photorealistic dream, I looked up the weather forecast on the smart phone and it said the high would be 106. In real life, the weather has been almost unbelievably clement. But that's a dream that's likely to come true all too soon.

Big bam boom

    Yesterday there was a slip in my mailbox announcing that there would be a Flag Day party that evening right across the street and that all the neighborhood was invited. The hosts were nice enough to include their names and number, saying that if they were too loud just to call and they would pipe down. They were not however bright enough to include a starting time. So I planned to go over and say hi whenever I heard them start. But that never happened, so I went to bed at 11 like I always do.
    Then of course the party started. (Apparently, I've moved to Spain without knowing it.) I heard singing, or odd a capella records. Nice, but not terribly conducive to sleeping, but not a problem either. I just turned the radio on and turned it down. I was wondering what in hell a Flag Day party would be or why anyone would have a party on Flag Day. I found out when stuff started blowing up. It kept on blowing up for a long, long time. Still it didn't bug me, and I at least dozed through it.
    However, I seemed to have hit the perfect radio volume level for sleeping, because I slept in for the first time in, it seems like, forever. Dreams were, not surprisingly, sports radio oriented. I was sitting in a car in a gas station parking lot at 6 in the morning, listening to sports radio. Somebody I know who's even less socially adept than me turned up with a girlfriend. In real life I would have been thrilled. In the dream, I was bereft. Then for some reason, I went to a different gas station to get gas.
    But that isn't the ultimate expression of dream logic. THIS may be the ultimate expression of dream logic. Alice and I were in Center City Philadelphia, looking for the Hilton. (There wasn't one back in the day, so there probably isn't one now. What used to be the Doubletree filled in for dream purposes.) We went down in the parking garage to try to find parking, but found that you have to register first. There was no exit, just connections to further underground parking garages, some filled with tractor-trailers. But the great thing was that when we went down there, I had the car in my pocket. It was only that I found we had to register that I took it out and we started driving around pointlessly. I'm sure it has some deep meaning, too; I just thought it was inherently funny. Now of course I want a car I can keep in my pocket.
    Meanwhile in real life, a checker at Publix named Thomas reaffirmed my faith (such as it is) in the human race by ringing up a turnip without having to ask what it was. Yay Thomas!

Moral quandary in the night

    I don't think I've ever before had a dream like that. This guy who looked like Mr. Carlson from WKRP in Cincinnati (or if you've never seen that, think genial, round-faced and balding) told me that he was sure that he could get all the information needed to embezzle a good chunk of money out of a certain company. (In my dreams, apparently it's about 1950 because the information he needed was a letterhead and a signature.) Somehow, I knew what progress he was making (steady) and the moral quandary was whether to tell the company in question.
    Paul and I were at the company in question. For some reason, we were eating candy by the ton. I had decided to tell, but as of the time I woke up I hadn't found anybody to give the information to. Too much candy, probably. I don't think I have too many dreams with a plot. In even bigger strangeness for a person who very rarely remembers images from his dreams, later I dreamed I had a very large translucent big-toe toenail. I mean to the point where when I woke up I really thought I needed to trim my nails until I realized it had been a dream. GOTTA cut back on the chili, obviously.

Further male-female problems

    Or, I'm still an idiot. But at least they're still not boy-girl problems. I should probably check these things before posting them. A week or two ago, I posted about getting a male-female USB cable, bragging about the brilliant idea of getting another one thinking that that would get me back to a male-male cable. Ummmm, not so much; it just gives me a longer male to female cable. USB it turns out stands for Universal Serial Bus. Or in my case, Universal Short Bus. I'm soooooo dumb! Shows again that I'm no use with male-female questions.

I'm just a bad person

    So I got panhandled again, two days in a row, and can conclude that my earlier thought that it was an earlier panhandler's obvious attempt at an oblique approach that annoyed me was in error. I'm just a bad person. I don't like getting panhandled because I don't like being put in position to make that decision, nor to say no.
    These two gentlemen were anything but oblique. The first was on a bike, with a canned beverage in a brown bag in his hand, and tried me as I was getting out of my car at Publix. The second was inside Palmetto Seafood and tried me right at the counter. So two drunks, basically, with more chutzpah than judgment. I probably should have just given them both money. Then again, I could have had somebody call the cops on either or both of them, so I guess I'm not totally a bad person. The oblique approach seems quite refreshing on second thought. The next person who says, "Excuse me sir I'd like to talk to you," I think I'll just hand 'em a dollar.

I speak fluent kitty

    OK, so I don't. But I did finally decipher one more gesture. Sometimes, when I'm in bed at night, Amelia taps me repeatedly on the chin with her front paw. What this means, it turns out, is "Roll over on your side, stupid, and let me under the blanket!" See? I speak kitty.
    At this very moment, I'm learning more fluent kitty. Amelia STILL hates it when anybody touches her toes. She was nice enough to wave the claws at me rather than actually making contact with me. So there's that.
    Meanwhile, the US Postal Service still won't send me my mail. I forwarded Dad's mail here and then on to Margaret's, and apparently my mail went with his for a while, and then just went away. I checked and my auto insurance is still current; that's the only thing I might have gotten in trouble with. But I still need to find some way to get the USPS to give me my mail back. Apparently, neither snow nor rain nor dark of night scare them, but Olympia is just too tough.

Fabulous psychic powers

    I've had a running gag for years now about my fabulous psychic powers and what they reveal. Mainly, the gag is that the answer is "Not much." However, now and again, my fabulous psychic powers actually operate. More likely of course my other senses are just extra acute, but it's more fun to call them fabulous psychic powers. Regardless, when driving, when I reach a corner I nearly always know whether or not a car is going to be there. Could be psychic, could be really good hearing, could be self-reporting bias. I don't know, but it's cool.
    The fabulous psychic power I like the best clearly has nothing to do with psychic powers. That is eyes in the back of the head. Again when driving, sometimes (but very rarely) I know where everyone on the road is, even the ones in my blind spot. It's just a matter of looking around a lot, keeping abreast of the mirrors, and remembering everything. A trick of awareness rather than any psychic power. But it FEELS like a fabulous psychic power!
    As to fabulous psychic powers regarding communication or understanding of any other human being? Nah. I'd probably need to get out more.:)

Ask and ye shall receive

    Well I wanted a new kind of dream about a different housing situation, and boy I got one. This time I moved into a new apartment with two beautiful women whom I may or may not know in real life. They vanished immediately, so it's kind of hard to say. (That happens a lot in this dream.) Then inexplicably, I was in some place not entirely unlike the Guggenheim (not as far as I know in Columbia SC, but still) with a different beautiful woman. She and I were talking to a man from the state tourism agency. (There isn't one in SC, at least not per se.) Somebody told her that one of the people she was talking to had bad intentions for her. I was pretty sure it wasn't me. Then they vanished.
    Back at the apartment, I was distracted from moving in by trying to track down the fellow with bad intentions. The beautiful women, in spite of having vanished, were hosting another lady, whom I was sorry I couldn't entertain better, but I was too focused on the state tourism agency. I found a very old book that purported to tell how to find it. In spite of being very old, the book literally talked. Unfortunately, it gave directions by assuming you already know where you're going. So that was frustrating.
    Meanwhile, the construction guys took away my roses before I could move them into my new room. (Yeah, it didn't make any sense in the dream, either.) But it was a really, REALLY cool apartment. It had its own private entrance into an ice cream parlor. And another one into an adjoining diner, though the latter was closed. (I guess if it closes in the evening it isn't a diner but a breakfaster.) There was Latin music coming out of the empty diner though. This was odd in itself, but also odd insofar as my dreams don't usually have soundtracks unless I'm playing music out in the real world. Could have been a car going by, I guess.
    Next wish: a dream where the beautiful women don't vanish.

Storage Wars

    As I've noted, the dialysis facility has this strange love for showing A&E on the waiting room TV. Tuesday, in a departure from normal programming, A&E ran a marathon of "Storage Wars." I worked in the self-storage industry for entirely too many years, and I remember when this show was first being promoted thinking how badly it was going to tank. So it was a surprise to look it up and find that it's the biggest hit A&E has ever had, proving still again that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
    At least they don't focus the show on self-storage per se. It's about auctioning off the contents of units the rent on which is highly in arrears. We did this, too, but nobody ever made a fortune that I can remember. What I do remember is the crooked junk salesman guy trying to bribe me $100 to let him buy all the auctioned units. Memory draws a gentle curtain; I'd like to think I didn't take the money. I know I never called the guy again, which definitely suggests that I didn't take the money. But I can't say for sure. Still, probably not real captivating television. A good Russian novel maybe, but good TV? No. Still, kudos to A&E for making gold from dross by making a program about, well, making gold from dross. Magic!

Novel

    Turns out that I wrote a novel. Who knew? I found out about it in a dream. Apparently, the way you write a novel is that you copy and collate from real life. Sounds like a good approach to me. In the novel. Roddy McDowell was supposed to murder me, but he declined. So I had a murder mystery without a murder. This is what a lot of my writing is like in real life, too. It was probably all for the best, though, since I was also the narrator. Though I've fired a narrator in my time as well.
    Other dream was yet another one about my dad buying a new house. My mom always is alive in these, but usually in a pretty advanced state of Alzheimer's. There never seems to be much furniture either. I don't even particularly want to know what they mean anymore; I'd just as well that they went away, though. Though the houses tend to be pretty neat.

We bad, we worldwide

    I mentioned this the last time it happened, but only after it happened. For some strange reason, twice now I've had this unexplained influx of international visitors on this blog. Visitor stats are not terribly detailed; I can see which posts people are looking at, where they're from, how they got here and what platforms and browsers they're using.
    However, a lot of this information comes up blank, so for instance very few indicate what brought them to me. This may be, since Blogger is owned by Google, because they used some search engine that isn't Google. Perhaps one of my friends reading this might search me via some other search engine and surf in and then email me to tell me when you did this and I can check my stats and see if it shows up or not. C'mon! It'll be fun!
    Be that as it may or may not be (Alice always claimed that my NPR show would be called "Be That As It May"), every day, I'm getting one visitor each from eight to ten or more (Stats never show more than ten of anything) countries, with no indication as to why or how. I may have said it already, but it's like I'm on a really really unpopular international version of Tumblr. They are countries all over the world with very little in common.
    I get a kick out of it. They also seem to be looking at fairly random posts. Presumably, the recent posts showing up in stats reflect my friends and family keeping up on me, but I doubt friends and family are looking up random posts from a year or more ago. I can't think of any reason why anyone would pretend to be surfing in from dozens of different countries, or anything nefarious they would be up to. I have to assume that I've just hit some new search engines and Google, not being in the business of advertising other search engines, just doesn't share this fact. If you're ever in Tajikistan or Nigeria, do look me up. Or if you're already there and surfing in, hi!

A prank

    I used to have a store at CafePress called Impractical Jokes. In fact, I may still have, but you don't have to go visit since I don't think they'll pay me royalties anymore, as they kept adding hoops to jump through and I got bored with them. Regardless, the impractical joke is my favorite kind, and this is the least practical one:
    There's a retail chain called Tuesday Morning. I've always been bewildered by them because they seldom seem to be open. Wiki suggests that they're only closed for two weeks each in January and July, but maybe this was just a very bad location. On one of the days they were closed, I made up a little sign and taped it to the front door: "Hours: Su -- Closed; Mo -- Closed; Tu -- 6 a.m. - 12 noon; We -- Closed; Th -- Closed; Fr -- Closed; Sa -- Closed."
    I don't know if anybody else saw it. As it was taped to the outside of the glass door, nobody with the least brain function could think that it was any wise official. But I still thought it was funny.

Twist ties

    When I was small but not tiny, my mom called the plastic-covered metal doohickeys that seal bread bags twist-ties. There was a TV commercial at the time that called them twister-seals. I insisted that they were twister-seals. Eventually, my mother, who was a very nice person, went along and for the rest of her life called them twister-seals.
    I felt a little awful about it; I think kids fight you to fight you but never want to win. Anyway, speaking for myself, that's how it feels. In much, much later years, I halfway felt like trying to get her to go back and say twist-ties again. But that would just be the same autism all over again, and a fairly hollow apology. The problem with not sweating the unimportant stuff is that sometimes even when it's unimportant it calls for an apology and you never get around to it. And then you've missed the chance.

Time machine

    It doesn't matter when, because it happened many times and with many people. A woman shows strong signs of being attracted to me, and I do my best to show that I am attracted in turn. But because I'm both a Martian and a coward, the message never quite makes it both ways. She feels pushed away, or so I assume. I never get the post-mortem; just the random abuse. This could be from hell hath no fury, or it could just be that I'm just that annoying. I'll probably never know.
    I think if I ever complete that time machine and get another chance, particularly with the one I thought of as The Other One (ie, the other half of me), I'll try to keep my rampant fatalism to myself. It comes across as pessimism, though that isn't what it is. At this point, given my achievements in the wide, wide world, it would be surprising if I weren't comfortable with and even amused by my own failure. That's all it is.
    Of course, if she is The Other One, it would hardly be a surprise that she's fairly difficult. I guess if I get that time machine built, for my own part I'll try to amp back from just flat impossible.

Sicilia

    We were going to Sicilia. Who's we? Well that is the question. A brother and I, I think, though why he would call it Sicilia I don't know since none of us speak any Italian as far as I know. I think we were going to walk. Anyway, a trail to North Carolina was involved in the story somehow.
    I don't know if we ever got there. Suddenly I was in Los Angeles instead, in some kind of academic/ social work setting. Then I was riding about the countryside in a car. Fortunately it was a self-driving car, so I could sleep most of the time. Los Angelenos would be surprised to learn that their environs include grassy rolling hills populated by coyotes and sheep. It was the middle of the night, but bright as day. (Los Angelenos probably wouldn't be surprised about that.) I wanted to stop and photograph the wildlife, but the self-driving car wouldn't stop.
    I wound up back at the academic/ social work type place, but even though it was still the middle of the night, everybody was in a meeting, and everything was partitioned off. I think I wanted to know what was up with all the sheep; when did Los Angeles get moved to New Zealand? But there wasn't anybody to ask, so I took the self-driving car back to my hotel or youth hostel or whatever it was.

Male-female (though not boy-girl) stuff

    When two computers love each other very much, sometimes they want to make a connection. Unfortunately, sometimes the cables needed to make that connection are very expensive. Dollar Tree sells male to female USB connection cables for (you guessed it) a dollar. And I was mad, because I couldn't figure out how that could help me. Until this morning, when I figured out that if you get two (two whole dollars), bob's you're uncle and you have your computers hooked up. Those who know me well will hardly be surprised to hear that I'm not so good at figuring out the art and science of the male-female connection. Or any other, really.
    Now I'm trying to do the same trick for the iPod Nano, because it's the best radio in the house, but its radio only operates when the earbuds are plugged in (as they're also the antenna) and you can't hook it to the cradle (and thus speakers) with the earbuds plugged in.
    In other Dollar Tree news, they have Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels! I don't think those toys were a dollar even when I was a kid and they were made by dinosaurs. Of course they're probably smaller than they were then. But still!
    Did I ever mention that Dad's access clearing procedure went well? I can see looking down that I didn't. It did. Then yesterday, dialysis was so smooth that they actually got him in early, and out again before I could even open my book. Yaaaaay!