Category: Diary (Page 3 of 38)

My spectacles, my white lab coat, my coffee, thermos, and my notes
I pat my pocket, I got the key, to the secrets of the observatory

Jethro Tull, “Astronomy”

We went for our biennial eye test last week. We should be going each year, supposedly, but the optometrist we liked so much has left town, selling her practice to someone else and we really have no idea if we were going to feel the same way about the new guy. So we put it off for a while. But now it’s done. I’ve been told I could do with glasses for reading. This doesn’t surprise me, I’ve been getting tired easily after working on the computer or reading for any length of time. It’s not that I can’t read or can’t focus, it’s just that it’s tiring. Apparently it’s a myth that switching to using glasses makes your vision deteriorate faster, so I’m okay with the idea that I’ll use them when I feel like it, otherwise not. Perhaps I’ll end up wearing them all the time for reading, working, etc. Perhaps not. We’ll see how it goes.

The most important thing is ensuring that I still look cool, of course.

Dreams are funny things. Mine seem to hit me between 4:00 am and 8:30 am. In fact, I have dreamed weeks of things that I know for a fact must have hit my brain between 7:00 am and 7:30 am. I know this because if I lift my head I can see the clock on the DVR. I couldn’t tell you the details of the dream because I forget them shortly after getting out of bed. Apparently most people do. Anyway, a few days ago I had an unusual dream that I do remember for reasons that will become clear.

I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. A headline caught my eye. I read the first paragraph of text below it: “Attorney General Gonzales said today in his usual ############ fashion, that he was…” I stopped reading. What they heck was that word? I didn’t understand what was written clearly in front of me. I spelled it out, letter by letter, building up the syllables: S-E-R-E-P-T-U-S-N-I-G-R-A-T-E. Sereptusnigrate?

“What does ‘Sereptusnigrate’ mean?” I wondered aloud.

At that moment, Josh’s friend Kevin was walking out the back of the house with a text book to study for an exam.

“It means, ‘Self-aware’,” he said over his shoulder as he closed the door.

WTF? I woke up. It was 7:00 am. I stumbled out of bed and went to find my early-to-rise wife. This means something… this is important I thought to myself. I found L in her office, working.

I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and scrawled the letters out. “What does this word mean? Google it,” I told her, incoherently explaining that I’d dreamed something weird.

Google told us that the word did not match any documents.

I returned to bed, and back to sleep. I can not tell you what I dreamed but I’m pretty sure it was something unrelated. When I woke up properly, I could not have told you what the word had been. I only know it now because I asked L to find the paper I’d written on.

What does this mean? Hey, I don’t claim to interpret dreams. I got nothing. The AG is an asshole though, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Some of you may be wondering what our latest house guest looks like. Well, here’s Meepo owning the bed:

She’s a little bigger now than when this picture was taken but potentially she still looks like this.

As of today, Kami is a sugar cat. She gets insulin twice a day, 15-30 minutes after meals. Sticking her with needles is a little scary but we’ll get used to it. She doesn’t seem to mind. Now, if it were in pill form, we’d be in big trouble. More on Kami’s state of wellbeing as it comes to hand. 

We’re back from our trans-Pacific exploits. OzFox 2007 was a lot of fun, thanks to Craig and the Talman team. It was great to see family and friends in NZ.

Now it’s back to regular work. But first, I’m gonna sleep in.

We’ve had some stupid weather recently so when the sky cleared up on Saturday I realised at about 4:00pm that this was probably my last chance to see Comet McNaught. About 15 minutes before the Sun went behind the mountains, I drove East with binoculars and camera to get a good view of the Western horizon, and sat in the car listening to KNPR. No sign of the comet. I was getting cold and I was just about to give up when I saw it. Much higher in the sky than I expected, and possibly I could have seen it earlier were I looking in the right place. Quite beautiful, but to me it did not seem much brighter than I remember seeing Hale-Bopp. Part of the problem is the Spring Mountains in the West, which threaten to obscure the comet before the sun has truly set. I tried taking a photo but I lacked skills and a tripod, and a more capable zoom lens would have been nice also. Here’s the best result, tweaked for contrast:

There are much nicer pictures out on the web, but this is mine, taken in Las Vegas on 13 January 2007, at about 5:00 pm.

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes for yesterday. I am once again in my prime. L has a hard time choosing presents for me, because I tend to be somewhat… choosy. This year, however, she got 98% of the way there without any help from me, which is cool because this way it really was a surprise. Here you can see a picture of my new precious which now replaces the other ones I’ve been using, which have suffered from various problems, like wearing out, or breaking, or the latest which was in spite of being cleaned and having a new battery, it stopped working. So, new watch? About time.

I may be a nerd, but regardless, I want you to pay special attention to the time shown by Mr Swiss Army Infantry #24654. Obviously I’ve set it special for the photo, but L will confirm that this was in fact the time shown by the watch when she spotted it under the display glass at the Ben Bridge store at Meadows Mall yesterday afternoon. On the 10 August, 4:06pm. Given that 6 minutes is a 10th of an hour… or you can take it the other way and say the watch is reading 41.

Either way, it is quite clear to me that I was meant to have this watch.

The backstory of how we came to go back to being a two-cat family is a lengthy one which I probably won’t tell here, but it is interesting, and involves trauma of several kinds, cat traps and kitten sacks.

But it’s really past time to introduce Sophie to the wider world. A few days before this picture was taken, we brought her over from Toni-across-the-street in a pet carrier and set her loose in the front room. She started coming out and exploring a few days later.

She is a one year old stray, and had just had her second litter of kittens, inflicted on her by some random tom cat. The kittens were all tortiseshell but Sophie is midnight black. The day before we collected her from Toni, she had just come back from being “fixed” – so you can see her bald tummy.

As I write this, Sophie is pretty much ruling the house like a little princess, and is very affectionate to humans that she knows. It is hard to believe that she was a stray for all of her life. Kami keeps out of her way, and hisses if she comes too near. This is safer than her original strategy, which was to pretty much ignore Sophie. Sophie took that as as invitation to beat Kami up, which she did very effectively for such a discrepancy in body masses. Kami received a nasty bite at least once.

Sophie is still very nervous, and will startle if we move suddenly, or speak up in a louder voice than usual, and is very nervous of other people who come into the house. Having said that, we had the kids here for a few days and by the end of that time, if they were sitting still on the couch watching TV, Sophie would come out and talk to them.

Sophie has an extensive vocabulary – street slang probably – and isn’t afraid to use it when she wants attention. Mostly things like, “Wak? Wak wak. Wak! Wak wak wak wak.”

We hear that most often at 4:00am in the morning. It’s getting to the point where we will have to have a discussion about shutting her out of our bedroom at night, because we’d both like at least one night of unbroken sleep…

I want to remember this url:
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/7037bc7fcaf682bd