beowabbit

Tonight, in rapid succession:

Go to sleep first. [pause] Eleven Twenty-Two Nineteen Sixty-Three. [pause, then with gleeful delight:] Yay! Shave the hairs!

(It was actually a bit more like “Shave a hairs”, but kind of hard to tell.) I can only presume that in the dream I had just agreed to shave after giving her a prickly kiss.

Around 5:00am I got up to run to the bathroom, and told

plumtreeblossom where I was going. She woke up enough to say that she’d go after me, and then said “I should be clumping.” “What?” I asked? “Clumping. Climbing trees. It’s how they hunt prey. But it’s not my day for it.” I wish we knew what dream that came out of!

At 6:00am, before the alarm had gone off: “Wellp, I’ll just have to have this baby.”

I just had a dream that Hell was in my basement. (Which was more or less the basement of the house I grew up in, only somehow large enough to fit all of history’s damned.) It was kind of a hassle, because whenever I had to deal with the furnace or flip a circuit breaker or do laundry, I had to struggle through the crowds of tormented souls, and some of them were kind of annoying.

I’m not saying I’ve lost my faith in the basic goodness and responsibility of my fellow human being. But trying to give away furniture for free on Craigslist tends to test it a bit.

“I love you so much my cheeks hurt.” —me to

plumtreeblossom tonight

I’m sorry, LiveJournal! I have to confess: I’ve been cheating on you with Facebook. I don’t know why I do it. You’re my muse. You support me and help me tell my story. I feel good about myself when I’m with you. Facebook... well, Facebook is fast and easy. There’s that furtive thrill of tapping out a few words on my phone, wherever I may be. Of pasting a link with hardly any commentary. Of expressing an opinion and not bothering to cite anything to support it. There’s that seductive “Like” button, just daring me to click it.

Can you forgive me? Will you take me back? I promise not to stray again.

Well, not until tomorrow, anyway.

What I do, explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most:

I help computers do the things people want them to do and try to fix them when they do things people don't want them to do. I help people who use computers to learn about computers and about how computers can do things that people do like speak and walk and move things. I especially help people use computers to send notes to each other. I work in a crazy building that looks like blocks knocked over.

(Tool — Original inspiration.)

Yesterday I had two social engagements. I was—

Uh, you may want to sit down for this.

I was on time for both of them.

Yes, I was on time for both of them. Me.

Considering this rationally, the only plausible explanation is that I’ve been replaced by some kind of duplicate, like a pod person.

Well, I had my first significant problem of this stormy day: My desk chair broke. (Not broke as in “dumped me on the floor”, but broke as in as in “suddenly dropped six inches and tilted at an unsettling angle, while making a snapping sound and depositing a substantial pile of rust on the floor below it”.) Since the closest thing I have to a desk chair now is a folding wooden chair, there go my plans for the all-night World of Warcraft marathon.¹ But I’m still warm and dry and happy, and the rain seems to have let up quite a bit.

¹ I understand World of Warcraft is a thing the kids are doing these days, and it has something to do with sitting at computers.

OK, thanks for the suggestions, all! Here’s my first draft of the Do-Gooder Phonetic Alphabet:

A	COCOA
B	SUBTLE
C	INDICTMENT
D	HANDKERCHIEF
E	QUEUE
F	HALFPENNY (pron. HAY-puh-nee)
G	SIGN
H	HONOR
I	BRUISE
J	MARIJUANA
K	KNICKERS
L	SALMON
M	MNEMONIC
N	DAMN
O	LEOPARD
P	PSYCHIATRIST
Q	LACQUER
R	SARSPARILLA
S	ISLAND
T	BALLET
U	~~BUOY~~ BUILDER
V	MILNGAVIE (pron. mill-GUY, a town near Glasgow)
W	ANSWER
X	PRIX
Y	PEPYS
Z	RENDEZVOUS

BREAD EARLY, LIMB LAMB, MUSCLE CZAR, WEDNESDAY HANDSOME, MORGUE, HALFPENNY, FOREIGN GNAT GNOSTIC, RHETORIC HEIR HOUR, FASHION, KNEE KNIFE, CAULK, COLUMN LIMN AUTUMN, PNEUMONIA CORPS PTOMAIN(E) PTARMIGAN, RACQUET (maybe KABBALAH, but only if you spell it that way), CORPS, HUSTLE, UILLEANN, WRIST WRAP WRITE WRONG WRY, MONTREUX FAUX XHOSA (in English; in Xhosa it’s a click), PRAYER, CHEZ

So, since SALMON and PSYCHIATRIST are the phonetic-alphabet¹ spellings for L and P respectively², I'm curious what the rest of the alphabet is like. Some letters are obvious, of course, like DAMN for N, HONOR for H, and WRY for W (or should that be ANSWER?), but would anybody care to make suggestions for the rest of the alphabet? The vowels seem particularly hard; I mean TAOISEACH is great, but is it the spelling for A, O, or E? Or should we just go for maximum efficiency and use it for all three?

¹ In the radio spelling alphabet sense, of course.
² According, of course, to that authoritative and reliable source for all such topics (including mathematics), Red Shift, Interplanetary Do-Gooder.

There are some odd little white pawprints about the size of a cat's paw on my kitchen floor. I wonder hou that could have happened!

In unrelated news, I primed the formerly unfinished side of my office door, off the kitchen.

A couple of no doubt haphazard and unrelated observations:

My cat hasn’t been getting enough attention lately. (I can tell because when I come home she’s very clingy, and tries to distract me and get between me and whatever I’m doing if it isn’t paying attention to her, like, say, putting away groceries.)
Blueberries are surprisingly difficult and time-consuming to sweep up from the kitchen floor, and the hallway floor, and the living-room floor, especially when you’re a bit frazzled about getting the Zipcar back on time.

Behind the cut, why you should always wear safety goggles when using a weed whacker.

( Why you should always wear safety goggles when using a weed whacker. )

That’s something analogous to a bruise or a blood blister on my eyeball, from a piece of grit getting thrown into my eye at high speed. Whee! It hurt right when it happened, but almost immediately felt completely fine (and still feels fine now several hours later). If it had been a couple millimeters over, though, that might have been a very different story.

Don’t try this at home, kids! Wear eye protection!

PS — And of course after this happened (and I’d taken a look and satisfied myself that the damage wasn’t too serious), I went and found the safety goggles I’d been too lazy to look for before starting.

A word to the wise: Do not try to trim your beard when you have just woken up and are still groggy. You might discover with the first stroke that you forgot to put the spacer/guard on that controls how much beard to leave.

Well,

plumtreeblossom was commenting the other day that my beard was getting shaggy. It’s certainly not that any more.

I have to wonder what it says about me that I just decided to mow my lawn¹ at 1:30am², because I genuinely think that’s the most appropriate time I’m likely to get in the foreseeable future.³

¹ Well, the most visible portion of it, anyway.
² Mind you, this was with a manual rotary mower.⁴ I don’t want to wake up my neighbours.
³ For values of “the foreseeable future” approaching “before a possible deluge delivered by the dregs of hurricane Earl”.
⁴ Which does not in fact actually cut any grass stalks over a certain height, which, plus last week’s rains, mean it was not so much a matter of “mowing” the lawn as of “pushing over” the lawn. But it still looks better than before. Or at least I hope it might, when there’s daylight and I can see it.

All I can say is thank heavens I made it through the Great Blizzard of Ought-Ten! It was terrible, I tell you, terrible. I spent seconds at the door checking whether there was anything to shovel! There was a slight draft coming in around the storm door while I had the regular door open. I was chilly while I was standing naked in the shower, until I turned the hot water on. This’ll be one to tell the grandkids about!

Many thanks to

plumtreeblossom for taking the userpic I’ve wanted since I created this account. (And for a lovely, lovely weekend!)

I got this meme from joyeous:

Please reply to this post with three boring things about you. [If you feel like it.]

I am nearsighted, but I wear glasses or contact lenses, so I can see.
In the winter, I get cold sometimes.
Sometimes I put twist-ties on my desk, because I think I might need to use them soon. But usually I don’t need to use them soon.

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beowabbit

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Another former LJer, now mostly on Facebook

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Further Adventures of Sleep-Talking Woman

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Hell

No good deed...

On love

I’m sorry, LiveJournal!

Up-Goer Five job description

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My first significant problem of the day wasn’t so bad

Draft of Do-Gooder Phonetic Alphabet

Phonetic alphabet

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A couple of observations

Actually, it’s all fun and games afterwards, too!

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Things not to do at 1:30am

Thank the gods Boston survived!

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Boring meme from joyeous

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