Dream: cat, toilet, toothbrush, fish

There was this underground river that was being navigated, and there was something to do with reheating corpses from caskets? Blurry. neitherday may or may not have been in the party; there was something around that "felt" like her.

But then I had to rush home, and I was trying to get in bed (the room was all cluttered with stuff, and there was a slim blonde woman* with a boyfriend who was my roommate/bedmate (as in, there was only one bed, and no one was going to be sleeping on the floor) and then when I woke up in the middle of the night, or came into the room suddenly, sure enough, eris_raven had not only knocked my toothbrush into the toilet, but she'd fished Fire Blossom and Water Blossom (my bettas) (fish, not readers) in there as well, and was playing with them.

Incidentally, the room was a mish-mash of my own room here and the bathroom back home, for those who are keeping track.

There was discussion on how to best keep the fish safe. They nearly got killed in all the fracas, because one of the proposed ways was to put them in those little plastic easter eggs and have them swallowed by a human so the cat would not get them; this was about to be done when I realized that the eggs would be too big to get out the bottom of the stomach, so that plan was cancelled. And then there was something involving laundry detergent, so I had to wash off my fish and make sure all the nasty stuff was out of their gills.

My poor fishies!

But they seem to be all right this morning, now that I'm awake.

Awake and sneezing, I might add. What came into bloom?



*Yes, probably Buffy.

Whewh. Homework crisis averted.

The rest of the class rather panickedly checked with Barnes, and she reassured us that the homework was not, as advertised, due tomorrow, but in fact a week from tomorrow, which is a good thing.

This makes for a happy early-morning Loony.

Freewill Horoscope

Gemini Horoscope for week of July 24, 2003

http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/gemini.html

Gemini (May 21-June 20)
I have a miracle to report. A large HMO in Northern California is now offering homeopathic treatment at one of its clinics. Most American doctors still regard this system of medicine as a kooky New Age craze, on a par with acupuncture and reiki, but here it has officially become a mainstream treatment. Who pulled off this feat? A versatile Gemini friend. For years he has been split, working as an M.D. for the HMO and maintaining a private homeopathic practice. But recently he lobbied the HMO's administrators to let him practice both skills, and they agreed. I suggest you make him your role model, Gemini. Like him, you're primed to create a role that'll blend talents you've always had to keep unconnected. Will you change the course of history, too?

Huh.

---

Cancer Horoscope for week of July 24, 2003

http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/cancer.html

Cancer (June 21-July 22)
The recently released "World Wealth Report" came to a sad conclusion: The global supply of millionaires was up only 2.1 percent in 2002, the slowest rate increase in seven years. On a happier note -- at least as far as we Cancers are concerned -- my sources say that a disproportionate number of the new moneybags were born under the sign of the Crab. The trend of increasing wealth among our tribe has continued in 2003, but will soon peak. During these last few weeks of abundant financial luck, I suggest you intensify your efforts to cash in.

Get a good job soon, love...

Written but Unsent:

Dear Blondie,

It's yet another chilly morning in the lab, with errors and bugs and so forth flying around, and I miss you, yet again. DeVry feels like you should always be here with me, or I should always be here with you. I never learned this school without you. I didn't learn myself without you, I suppose the problem is, and I feel like you should always be accompanying me as I walk through my mind...

...On the bright side, beloved, my web page is creating errors as it's supposed to be. I feel happy, secure, and validated as a programmer, even though Homework1/index.html does not exist when Homework1/headererror.asp erroneously redirects to it.

The demon-child is doing just fine. He starts school in a few weeks. I'll have to start waking him up when I get up in the mornings, so he'll be used to that. Then I can just go ahead and figure him into my mornings, and walk him to school and then walk to mine... ahh, the joys of having a first-grader. Scared yet? I am.

I'm terrified about the prospect of having a kid, even though I never gave birth to him, and he isn't biologically mine. I know you'll let me know that I'm doing all right with him, and certainly better than his grandmother, and that I'm not alone in this. But still...

I miss you. It's the constant knowledge that we're best friends and therefore belong together, let alone anything more that might or might not ever happen... might not, based on your current outlook... but regardless of if we're ever anything more than best friends, we're still best friends and therefore belong together.

I'm babbling.

I miss you.

Buffer error.


Yours,
Joanie

Good bits from my homework...

Barnes asked us to define some terms.

Syntax Error: When the programmer writes words, and they are disarranged or misspelled or just plain wrong in such a way that the compiler cannot understand them, then this is a syntax error.


...pretty much.

I love school.

Sadism in the classroom

There are very few things as academically ominous as the teacher carrying a large bundle of pink paper, with that "I am fresh from the print shop" way of stacking about them, with a stack of Scan-Tron sheets, especially when you haven't read the appropriate chapter in the book.

It doesn't help the scenario that the teacher's default facial expression is 'slightly evil', and when he smiles, he looks more evil, and he's smiling now...

Public Service Announcement: State of the Journal

Am swapping over to S2. Readers please not to be alarmed at the frequent shifts in color, especially the frequent shifts in color of the vocabulary of the Lunatic.

Happy Loony.

Well, that's all good. I've got the setup on my journal to a place where I can live with it for the time being, though I will eventually go through and tweak this and that.

I also want to go in and put in some overrides so that the font won't be that teensy little shit, and will be something that will actually, you know, show up. I guess they didn't do much testing of how it looks with light on dark vs. the normal dark on light.

(I prefer light on dark on computer monitors as easier on the eyes: less light being thrown at the poor things. Paper is best dark on light, because that's reflected, not projected.)

Icon Happiness

One of the things about my previous journal style that had always been bugging me was the icons. Specifically, I wanted to see icons on my posts just like I saw them on my friends page.

With this style, I do! Yay! I'm happy-happy.

I'm also delighted because I am starting to recognize that the whole % thing in the overrides bit is probably server-side scripting, and that I can totally start to dig now.

I really do need some form of geeky-me usericon. *sigh* But I don't want to give any of these icons up! They're all so lovely and useful!

Home is where the stylesheet is

I think of the net as sort of a dreamland.

I know that bits of places I've considered 'home' ever have started to blend in my dreams. Alaska and Arizona mesh together; bits from home-with-my-parents and home-in-my-apartment mesh together, as witness last night's dream where some of the layout of my own room and the whole bedroom thing melded with the bathroom in my parents' house to form something that my undermind knew was my room, but temporary.

I spend much of my day on the computer. I have started to consider my web presence as 'where I live', because it's where my friends come to visit me. It's where I go to entertain, to kick back and relax, to bitch, to let my hair down and tell it how it is. I even pay rent.

If someone cracked my account and vandalized it, I do think that I'd feel about as yicky as the time when the one psycho-lady tried to break in to my actual apartment.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that I really do want to make my web presence between sites as seamless as walking around between Arizona and Alaska in my dreams... ...and make walking between my physical life and my written life just as easy.

*happysigh* Home.

Lit class was nice. Met another witch. Ahh, the power of admiring jewelry.

Came home and took over from yaksha42, who seems to have a new roommate.

Little Fayoumis is supposed to be good all day today. This has resulted in him being... antsy. Very antsy. He keeps asking if he's been good all day. I keep telling him that it hasn't been all day yet. (He's supposed to be good all day every day, but that's another thing.)

He's not been watching Pokémon movies around me, mostly because I'm taking action on the common grump that he's a little too fixed on them. Right now he's happily watching Flight of Dragons, after coming to me with a technical error: he puts it in, and it keeps stopping, in both VCRs! Admonished him that this was why he is supposed to rewind after watching a movie, every time.

Kids.

Darkside wasn't answering the phone when I called a bit ago; I'll try again later.

Interesting. (mind-management)

garnetdagger's post about being sorry about unnerving wibbble has turned into quite the discussion.

Latest interesting thing: of course I use my journal for backing up my mind in case of an utter system crash that requires a recompile.

...Just one of those things that I of course know, but have to remind myself every now and then, as it's something so basic, so elementary, that sometimes I forget about it. ...I back my mind up lest I forget. All these state-captures, and files...

I have a "psychic psycho-sense". wibbble got curious.

Do you do 'threat assessments' of people you meet? A poll.

When I encounter someone, we look at them quickly to see if they're likely to be a danger to us. (City. Female. You do the math.) It's an automatic thing. Are they "creepy"? Are they carrying? Could I take them? Could they outrun me? Could I shout for help? Would I do something to provoke them?

Sometimes, if there's someone we're going to be interacting with more in-depth, we do more. We judge their physical state, their mental state, and we probe their ports, so to speak. That's not automatic with everyone. If there's someone joining the crew, I do a threat assessment on them. If someone asks me. If I have doubts about someone that aren't cleared up by the automatic assessment. If they're interacting with our baby. If they're interacting with our beloved. If they're interacting with our Pretty. If they're interacting with our sisters (biological and not). It's not always imperative under those circumstances, but it's far more likely...

's an interesting thing.

Grrarh.

There seems to be no place for general override code in the Components style. Drat, drat, and triple-drat.

General Announcement

As some of you may or may not know, I have a Pretty. (No, grifyn, this won't get explicit.)

Mostly, I've just been talking about her by that title, as "my Pretty".

She is sithjawa. My Pretty!! *giggle* *happybounce*

(no subject)

"I count myself as more of a player." --Darkside

Yay.

Guess who has vacation right now? Guess whose vacation ends next month?

...Yep. Darkside. He's busy job-hunting, but not so busy that he can't take 97 minutes out of his day to spend some time on the phone with me, mostly reading me D&D message boards. He also chatted with Little Fayoumis for a bit, talking about chairs and floors.

I miss him.

"We'll see" is not a very encouraging answer about hanging out sometime, but it's better than nothing. (I miss him.)

He is at least getting less touchy about me using endearments on him (dear, sweetie, et cetera). We're silly together.

Ghaaa. (Her family. Ghaa.)

That Woman, Grandma, and Jewel stopped by. Jewel was coming back from CA, and That Woman was picking up the spare fishtank (finally we have that POS out of here!) and Grandma was the ride.

In preparation, I put on some music (we couldn't find the rap, so it was Playing with Fire instead) and lit some incense (couldn't find the jasmine, so cinnamon instead). I'd already cleaned house earlier.

(You see, That Woman doesn't like "nigger music", and jasmine gives Grandma a headache. Cinnamon is for banishing.)

The cats were skittish and tried their best to disappear. That Woman remarked at how beautiful eris_raven's face-markings were. Jewel gave me a gummy worm.

They invaded the West bedroom to look at the turtle, but soon everyone was cleared out and on their way home.

No untoward incidents, unless you count me mentioning that ah yes, California, I visited my girlfriend there this winter. (*snicker* Did I mention a homophobic family as well? With a grin leaving no doubt as to the type of girlfriend I meant? Hehe.)