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.