Right.  So.  Another day of coding, y'see.  Did you know that after a day of messing with things like timezone conversions in PHP, your brain takes on the consistency of mashed potatoes?  It's pretty impressive, in a frightening and appalling sort of way.  Much was accomplished today.  Quarto is intended to be based off of GMT (ok, ok, UTC), but I wanted to convert the GMT timestamps to whatever the administrator chose as 'local time.'  The only place that I'm leaving dates in straight GMT is in the usage log.

"Oh, God, not THIS guy again."

Our local deity, being uncharacteristically busy with the lives of the other billions of people on this planet, chose to overlook the fact that, even under the best of circumstances, I cannot stand tech #89.

"Best," of course, not being the day after a series of days where you've had to continually reboot the cable modem so that you can test your code. Nor is "best" the day that your quest to buy groceries turns into a multiple-grocery-store chase, just to find the [damned] Gruyère cheese for tonight's dinner, immediately followed by racing back to ensure you were home for the 1p.m.-5p.m. window that the cable guys always demand.Therefore, in the global view of things, I suppose it wasn't any big deal to send tech number eighty-nine to our house.

To Gareth:

I'm trying to figure out what I'm in the mood to listen to today.

eh, screw it. I officially declare this as yet another snarky Steely Dan Day.

It's never a good sign for the rest of the world when I declare something like this.

Oh, right. Hi, everyone. Miss me yet? I decided to stick to my guns and not post for a couple of days. If any of you had actually come over to the house and seen me, I would've attributed the muscle tics, verbal glitches, and general twitchiness to Quarto.

Lately, the constant struggle between the need for privacy and the need for release through writing has been tilted strongly toward the "need for privacy" end of the spectrum. The end result: sporadic entries, many about Quarto, and relatively few about the actual events taking place in my life.

Today, arriving in an airport an hour and a half south of me: Monica, for a visit that's been in the making for several years now.

It becomes difficult to explain a friendship when you realize that you can barely remember why you became friends in the first place. A quick bit of mathematics tells me that we were off just a bit when we did some phone calculations the other day; we were fourteen when we met. She might have been fifteen. She had the neatest handwriting I'd ever seen, had far curlier hair than I did, and she knew the worst puns in the world. Loved them. Gloried in them. (All these years later, I still remember the punchline "Kicks are for Trids!" even though I cannot remember the joke itself.)

At four p.m. on Monday afternoon, I lost my mind.

Standing in the laundry room with a pile of temporarily-dirty clothes, with a cat twining between my feet and a half-finished song lyric bubbling through my vocal chords, I was completely unprepared for anything out of the ordinary.

BANG!After gravity reasserted its hold on my feet, the Panic List took over my mind. OhmyGod…burglars-gunshots-mutant-furry-cockroaches-in-the-garage-ohmyGod-ohmyGod-hiiiiiiiiiiiide!

Tenzing continued to twine himself around my feet, purring. We like to joke about how they wake up in a new world every thirty seconds or so, but it was so plainly obvious that he'd already forgotten that the noise even happened.