Weird Dream Channel

I'm building a homework project, it's like a science fair display. I'm painstakingly gluing my rock collection to display boards. I'm in some kind of a student lounge, maybe a dorm shared space, because suddenly some really loud, bad music comes blaring out from the other side of the room. Someone has cranked up the stereo. A woman in that part of the room, who is wearing a pair of headphones and working at a table, writing in a spiral notebook, interrupts her work, holds up another pair of headphones yells something at some guy (which I can't hear because of the music and the distance) and he takes the headphones and the music stops. The woman goes back to her writing, and I notice it is Renuka, one of the women engineers I work with in real life. I wonder what she's doing here.

The scene changes instantly. I'm now alone in the same room, but now I have two of the three panels of my display standing up science-fair-mode, at the back of a long narrow table. I am sitting in front of the table, hunched over, gluing the last couple of pieces to the final board. Behind me the door opens, and it is my teacher, a tall thin man with a pale complexion, wearing an off-white casual shirt, black pleated pants, a black Artful Dodger jacket or maybe it's just an oversized black shirt, and a well-worn top hat. I'm in a panic because he shouldn't be here, and I'm not done (and I probably should be). He says something in greeting which I don't hear, and strides over to the collection, and plucks a piece out of one of the finished display boards, and examines it. I jump a little when he does that because I thought they were solidly glued in place, and besides it's pretty rude to just pluck something out of someone's display like that.

He says something about the piece, and puts it on the table, and plucks another. He does this three or four times. , I don't hear the exact words but I know it's complimentary, and his air is of a colleague appraising a friend's collection, rather than student-teacher.

---

And that's when my cats wake me up - they're having a fight by the bedroom door. This was tonight after work, I had come home, finished an eBay purchase, took two aspirin and laid down for a nap. I closed the bedroom door most of the way (I keep a hanger on the door knob so the cats don't accidentally shut themselves in - something they did the first day we were in this apartment). Domino had parked herself next to me when I got into bed, and Pumpkin had been downstairs out on the patio. The two of them do a lot of this game where one tries to keep the other from coming in or out of a room, and it works best if the door is mostly closed. The door mitigates the fact that Pumpkin is twice Domino's size.

Anyhow, there are some real-life links to the dream. One is I am taking a Perl class Tuesday nights,. and the instructor posted our next assignment on the class web site, and made it due next Thursday, though he had told us it would be due the week after that, because we have a quiz in class this coming week. The way he writes his assignments is he spends several pages on hints, unrelated information, extra reading assignments also not related to the homework, and then finally ends with three programs for us to write. It's annoying.

I've been cataloging and photographing my sapphire collection, and today the display trays arrived, and at lunchtime I put all my sapphires, which are in 1-inch circular display holders set 3x5 into foam inserts, into the trays. I have been waiting for a month for those trays to arrive (the company in Flah-dah I bought them from was closed Xmas-NYE week when I ordered them, but that doesn't excuse their taking 2 weeks after NYE to ship them.

Tonight, Tonight

After I woke up from my weird dream, I got dressed and went into the computer room to install the 2GB of Ram which had arrived a couple of days ago. I'm still waiting for two more hard drives, but there's one in there so I thought it would be a good idea to fire the thing up. So I dragged it to my computer table, plugged the video into the VGA connector (my monitor can switch between a digital and an analog card, so it can support both machines at the same time).

Which is when I noticed I only have one keyboard and mouse.

So I ransacked my parts bins, looking for my KVM switch, and instead found a spare DVD burner which I slapped inside the new machine - I'll use it to install the system, then after I've transferred my files from the current machine to the new one I'll take it out and put my newer/faster/better ones into the new case. Had to go downstairs and into the storage room off the patio to get the switch. Which required shifting the bicycle, and the bike's car rack, a big cooler, two cat carriers, and some camping gear.

Back upstairs, I set up the KVM switch, and fired up the new machine. It came up fine, showed me the motherboard splash screen, then turned itself off. It did this three times before I realized this meant something was causing a thermal fault. Sure enough, when I opened the case, the CPU heat sink/fan was kind of dangling. Only the bottom two of its four snap connectors were secure. I fixed that , closed the case up, and everything came up okay, and stayed up while I set the date and went through the BIOS settings. One puzzling thing is no matter which of the four SATA connectors I plugged the hard drive into, it kept telling me the drive was number 3 or 4, and the CD drive was the primary master. That's nothing critical - I'll have three drives in a RAID array together, it won't matter which physical drive is plugged into which connector. Just made me wonder.

That done, I went downstairs for dinner, and halfway through the salad my cell phone played the Hungarian National Anthem at me, which meant I had a text message. Usually that's a calendar item from Yahoo, or an outbid notice from eBay. This time it was Noi, replying to a message I'd sent before I left work. I had not heard from her in a couple of weeks, and decided to ping her. Her message was in pretty good English, saying she wished I would call. So I called, and we chatted for about 15 minutes, I found out a little more about her, and we discussed the possibility of me sending her a plane ticket so she could come visit. I told her it would be best to wait till after winter, because in Bangkok it never gets below 70°, and she would freeze here. And then there's the rain. Plus I need time to save up the fare and she needs time to get a visa. But it looks like it is do-able. It solves a lot of problems too - it's easier for me to take time off if I'm still relatively nearby, she can stay with me, so there's no hotel $$ to shell out.

Busy day tomorrow. After Fedex delivers the two drives:

• Go to K&S Photo in Palo Alto and shop for a macro extension lens and maybe a light stand
  
• Drive to Menlo Shell and have them inspect the tread on my tires (Midas claims they need replacement, but I only have 22k miles on 80k tires)
  
• Put a bigger tarp up over the patio so the cats can watch the world go by without getting soaked
  
• Vacuum
  
• Clean some windows
  
• Change the catbox and kitty water fountain
  
• Do my Perl homework
  
• Read the last chapter in Out of the Silent Planet
  
• Read the last story in my sister's creative writing thesis
  
• Plug in the two hard drives, fire up the new PC and install Windows Pro x64
  

And if I have time:

• Transfer my data files to the new PC and maybe start installing programs.
  
• Write down the words for a couple of Thai songs and translate them
  
• Listen to the Tata Young concert CD which arrived today (I already watched the video)