Twosda’s Theme Music

Mood: coffeetoxicated

It’s raining abundant sunshine down on us on this, Twosda, January 21, 2022. Temperature is up to 30 F after landing at 26 F overnight. ‘They’ inform me that today’s high will exceed 50 F. It’s all possible, from the general appearance, and we did do it yesterday.

All this is better than my sister’s world back in Pennsylvania. She texted me that it was either snowing heavily or the wind was blowing the existing snow around. Either way, there was a lot of white stuff obscuring vision. She was at work on her midday when she reported this to me. She reported that the temperature was 5 degrees F. That’s barking cold, brothers and sisters.

Today’s music came from a mental exercise. I was on a news blackout yesterday. So I was unleashed in my net surfing. I soon hooked a clickline about the 50 greatest one-hit wonders. I decided to brainstorm and see how many I came up with. About half was the reckoning. Guess I needed more coffee. One song that I missed was “Criminal” by Fiona Apple. Weird thinking of her as a one-hit wonder, because I know a few other songs she released which were hits, but here we are. Naturally, after seeing it on the list, The Neurons carried it into the morning mental music stream, where they’ve released it on a loop. So I share with you to free myself.

Coffee has offered to pour into my mouth and invade my system and kick my energy into a higher gear. I gladly accepted. Here’s the music. Let’s light the fuse on the day. Cheers

January 21, 2025 0

Loading Problem Fixed

So, some things were not loading in any browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox). Not everything; it was an odd mix. Updates had been conducted, diagnosis run, etc. Wasn’t deeply affecting my ability to surf the net so I mostly just ignored it. I figured some update would be installed at some point which would fix it.

That didn’t happen.

Then it grew worse. Suddenly my ‘puter began telling me that I was in Airplane mode all the friggin’ time. Again, not a serious issue but annoying to me and also a concern that there may be deeper issues at work.

So, on a whim today, I ran updates on my drivers. Turned out my WiFi driver wouldn’t update. Ran some stuff to fix that, and all the network stuff just disappeared. Adapter wouldn’t turn on; didn’t even show up. Wireless switch didn’t work. For all intents and purposes (or intensive purposes…chuckle), my laptop’s wireless didn’t exist.

With a deep-throated GRRRRRRR building in my head, I pulled out an ethernet cable and went wired with my laptop to connect to the net. Next I did some brief searches about the problem. Really inane and simplistic solutions were offered. Like, “Check the wireless password and ensure that is right.” That was just red meat to the GRRRRRRR within me. But finally, with patience, I found a site that knew what was up. It directed me to my Services where it was revealed that Windows had turned off my WLAN AutoConfig. WTF, right? Right-clicked that puppy and joy was achieved. I was wireless again and everything loaded.

We have joy in mudville once again.

January 16, 2025 4

Thursday’s Wandering Thoughts

Yesterday was Wednesday. Per tradition, our local beer group met at a local brewery, Caldera Brewing in Ashland. The group’s name is Brains on Beer. It always makes me cringe, but we inherited that name.

Two new members joined us last night: Darrell James, engineer and novelist, and Dr. Pepper Trail, forensic ornithologist and poet, author of the collection, Cascades-Siskiyou: Poems. Mr. James learned of our group because, besides being a semi-retired engineer, he’s an energetic person who does home repairs for several members. Dr. Trail worked with and for several of our members, and they thought he would enjoy our company.

Whenever new people join us, the telling of the group’s origins is done. And I realized as I sat this morning and thought about last night, the whole story of the group’s beginnings is rarely told.

What is told is that four men came together to talk science and have coffee each morning. They shifted to meeting once a week, at night, to have a beer and talk science and technology. The four men cited are Lt Col Michael Quirk (Ret, US Army), Professor Frank Lang, Dr. Ed Shelly, and Michael Hersh. All are deceased. But while they were the first four BoBs, a woman was responsible for the group being formed.

See, Michael Quirk’s wife was a social worker. Through her work, she noticed that many men age into lonely, solitary lives. She knew that a strong social life helps people remain mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy. So Diane encouraged Michael to start the social group and shift from coffee in the morning to beer in the evening once a week.

Since that start around 2008, we now have 23 members. All are liberals, BTW. It’s not a rule, but that’s how it’s worked out. Ten to fourteen people usually show up each week. We had thirteen last night. We have one person named Bob in our BoBs. From engineers, we now include medical doctors, forensics scientists, microbiologists, botanists, teachers, an ornithologist, journalists, photographers, database administrators, graphic designers, architects, and firefighters in our numbers. We also have three female members. Since we began the habit of rounding up the bill and donating to STEAM programs in our valley, we’ve donated over $43,000 to buy computers, tubidity meters, and microscopes, among other things, while supporting local robotics teams and Ashland ScienceWorks.

And it all started with one woman’s idea.

If you’re ever in Ashlandia, come on by and meet us. We start at 4 PM every Wednesday. We usually collect $20 per person. Your first visit is on us.

January 16, 2025 2

The Fish Dream

I dreamed I was a fish. Apparently a youngish fish, I was gold and orange with red highlights. Swimming alone, I became aware that I had a pretty good memory, for a fish. I developed understanding that there were fish swimming around who unknowingly carried messages on their skin, and that there were some fish who carried memories and knowledge in their minds. All of these kinds of memories and knowledge had a short life and would fade, even though it all lasted longer than most of the other fish ever remembered anything. I began hunting out knowledge and memory fish after I established that I could transfer their knowledge to myself, keep it longer, and use it. I observed how several knowledge fish would swim together in schools, and other fish would join them, using information from knowledge fish to make decisions. But schools of fish avoided other schools, even if they were the same kind of fish. So knowledge would often not get spread past a school, keeping all of the fished dumbed down.

I began resolving to change that, to become a fish that spread and shared knowledge between different kinds and schools of fish. I felt that making all of us smarter would help preserve knowledge and maybe improve our lives.

Then the dream took a turn where an individual was lost and confused, and it sort of dissolved.

Then I went into another dream. In it, I was back to driving some silver, stunningly expensive sports car. I was alone in that one, and just driving along a blacktop road. Rising and falling, the road cut through an emerald green land under a blue sky. I would sometimes stop and exit the car just to gaze at the land and feel the sun and wind. I was much younger, but better looker than real life, with a dark beard. I never saw anyone else in the dream; just some dark birds silently flyin through the sky.

January 16, 2025 1

Three Pieces of Dream

A long and chaotic dream won the morning memory. There was another dream about having sex with a French woman in a desert after being accused of some crime, but it’s not a sharply recalled.

First I was with a group of friends, all males. We’d been out having a good time in the outdoors and were now filthy. Many of these people were real life familiars from across my stretch of existence and life stages. I was young and it was sunny. Many more groups of similiar people were out there on a large, dusty, gold-sun plain, like knots of bison congregating around a larger herd.

A sudden call to go get a beer put us in motion. We ran along, laughing and eager. We were going to have a beer! “Don’t worry, I have chits from last night,” I shouted, holding up discolored pieces of white paper. I reached a table and sat, still outside, but now on a plateau. My friends were coming but were behind. I pulled out the chits and discovered, they were chits; they were just torn pieces of paper. Some fluttered out of my hand and dropped into the mud as my friends arrived and I explained, “I don’t have chits after all.”

We all set out to go somewhere and were now downtown in what looked like a small city. Without preamble, I decided that I’d had enough and started in another direction. I was soon running in the streets alone but as I turned a corner, I saw ‘my crowd’ running in parallel in the other direction. They saw and recognized me and called out, but I’d kept going in the other direction, alone.

I arrived at my wife’s mother’s house. I knew that’s what it was even though it was nothing like any of her places in real life. My wife was there, along with my sister-in-law. She was sitting crossed-legged on the ground. As I see her in that scene after awakening, she looks as she did as a young pregnant woman in a photo taken of her when she lived in New Mexico. Giving no warning, she pulled her breast to feed an infant. I was a little surprised but then went, okay, she’s comfortable with it, and my wife, beside me, showed no reaction, so I should be okay, too.

I went off because I noticed my mother-in-law was busy digging. In real life, she passed away about six years ago. She was about the age she was when I first met her, mid-forties, in my dream. I spoke with her briefly but don’t remember what we said, and then wandered around the yard to see what she was doing. She’d dug a moat around her house. Then, I thought, she expanded an existing moat. It wasn’t large as moats go, about a yard wide, and didn’t seem deep. Water lilies floated in places. I discovered little tiles. Two inches square, I realized that she was going to ourline her moat with them.

The first one I turned over was scarlet. I put it in place on the moat to see what it looked like. Next, I found one that was yellow. I took out the red one and put the the yellow one in. It was a soft yellow, not as bright as a lemon. Next, I found a sage green tile. As I was going to put it in, I heard a man calling. A tall male stranger, dressed in a tie with a rust colored corduroy and tan pants and large, handlebar mustache was walking up, telling me how much he liked the yellow tile because it was a bold and striking color, and he approved my choice. I was just beginning to explain to him what was going on when another man in a charcoal business suit came up, urging me to go with the first color, the red, because it looked sharp against the water and grass. As these two began talking about the tiles, I turned over a third one, which was sage green. That was my preference, but I also thought that a pattern using all three colors could be made.

I went back to tell my MIL that, which is where the dream ended.

January 10, 2025 0

Thursday’s Wandering Thoughts

My wife and I were talking about a study about coffee-drinking. The headline hook: “Limit coffee-drinking to this time window to lower early death risk, study suggests“

What prompted me to mention it to her was this line: “The researchers identified two patterns of timing of consumption: morning and all day.”

I’m a morning and early afternoon drinker, for the record. But she told me that she mentioned it to her coffee group yesterday. All her age or older, they’re intelligent people with good recall skills. As a group, they came up with all the other things we’ve been warned about over the years, only to have them roll over and say, “Wait, our bad. New data is in.”

So, you know, we take this study and its revelation with a little reservation. And maybe a cuppa coffee.

January 9, 2025 0

Some of the Good Stuff

One of many bloggers I follow, and one I’ve written of before, is Jill Dennison at Filosofa’s Word. Writing about news and politics, she also gives us daily music posts and doses of humor and snark. She also reminds us of stories about people being good, kind, nice, helping one another in the way that most of us hope a good society does. I’m sharing one of Jill’s post about “Good People Doing Good Things” today. As news inundates us with stories of death, hate, and bigotry, Jill’s recap of some feelgood stories are a satisfying antidote to the darkness and negativity which threatens to take over. Hope you find as much comfort, satisfaction, and hope in these as I did. Cheers

Good People Doing Good Things — Little Things Mean A Lot

January 9, 2025 0

Wednesday’s Wandering Thoughts

Breaking out of writing mood, I check the news. I don’t care about the politics at the moment. I’m worrying about winter storms. Southern California wildfires. War in Ukraine and Gaza. Perusing these matters remind me that I exist in a small, sheltered bubble. Scary what else is happening out there.

Those are but the big stories. We know that other fires are burning which are just as meaningful to those involved, even if they’re on a small scale than what’s happening in California. People’s houses and businsses burn down all the time. As for the weather, legions of homeless and poor are enduring bad weather and trying to survive all the time. Below the fold of headline news, shootings are going on across the country. There will be robberies, homicides, rapes. Children are being abducted. Sickening things regularly take place.

So do beautiful things. New songs are being written. Couples destined to be great loves are meeting for the first time. Somewhere, someone is finding an ill person and helping them get up. Nurses and doctors are working to save the sick and diseased. Parents and grandparents are welcoming new children into our existence.

Existence and being is a forever busy place. Then again, how much of this is real?

Listening to the coffee shop blaring music from the eighties, sipping a cup of coffee, gazing out the window as sun flashes off cars hurrying by with people on private missions, don’t ask me. It’s all a mystery.

January 8, 2025 0

Satrda’s Wandering Thoughts

There’s a disturbance in the force. I mean, the Internet. It doesn’t appear Trump related. Doesn’t seem to be politically connected at all.

The short of it, many games won’t load on my laptop. I’m running Windows. Surfing on Opera, Chrome, Edge. None will load the games in normal or whatever ‘stealth’ offering the browser provides. Started yesterday afternoon. Research on the net about it is useless. Search engines focus on one aspect of the question posed. In this case, they’re all about giving me answers to games. Answers to questions I didn’t ask. Information which I don’t desire.

I’m not talking multi-role games. This is Connections and Wordle at the NYTimes. Sudoku at the Seattle Times and NY Times. Spelling Bee plays fine, as does several other games. Error messages say things like, “Yikes, you’re offline.” Yet I’m not offline.

Actually, I just tried a new, broader variation of the question on DuckDuckGo. ‘can’t play games online’. Answers remain useless but at least it’s focused on my issue. Must be your connection, they tell me. Your browser. Your firewall settings, or security. Nothing that touches the nub that the rest of the net works fine, and no settings were changed and all settings are per usual, and diagnostics show nothing. My wife’s Mac laptop doesn’t share the issue. And yes, the cache has been cleared, of course. Yes, I powered up and down. Yes, everything is updated. No, the sites are not reported as down. No issues are reported on them.

Overall, it’s a small thing. More first world blues. Just annoying to me, personally. I like playing my games and getting a little rush from completing them. The larger question is, is it my machine? Or is it the net? My bet is on the latter but it’ll take time for that to be revealed.

Guess I’ll just read a book instead. Halfway through ‘The Library at Mount Char’ per my wife’s recommendaton. It’s sucking me in. Gotta go out into the gloomy day and write soon anyway.