"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.
Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

― T.H. White
The Once and Future King

Jim came in to check on me while I was napping.

I don't know what I was dreaming about, but I asked him why he had ordered the double booked full wide english breakfast...

Is there a superperson who got their powers from protons?

I am getting a second chance at having an origin.


I am about to start proton treatments. I had my "fitting" appointment this week, and came home looking like a treasure map - my body was covered with "treasure here" X's, little lines of dotted steps, crosshairs and occasional tiny tattoos.


Time for an adventure

It's supposed to be auspicious to dream of Mt Fuji, a hawk and/or an eggplant on New Year.

Jim, however, was dreaming about "the dogs who built suspension bridges during WWII."

I've mentioned before that there are things I understand (or think I understand) in Tolkien that I have just incorporated into myself without ever expressing them in words, until something comes up and I find myself blurting out a sentence that surprises the hell out of me, and at the same time seems to have always been with me.

That happened to me this week during a discussion that was phrased: What do you all think would have happened in the storyline if Frodo did not stop Faramir from killing Sméagol and actually allowed it to happen?

The discussion was centered around what happens after this event. Except for me. Without a moments hesitation, I went for:

Faramir would never have killed Smeagol outright. But if Frodo had called his bluff, it would have broken the chain of Mercy that let the ring be destroyed.

Jim just said -what's with all this precipitation?

Since I had just moments before read my email from the NJ Patch, I was able to reply - Tropical storm fayfay! We are in the *red is for drowning* zone.

Tropical Storms seem to have moved all over the calendar since I was a kid. Did anyone else learn this poem:

June, too soon
July, stand by
August, it must
September, remember
October, all over.

Now we seem to get really slammed in October every year.

Jim often talks to me in his sleep, but only occasionally actually gets up and moves around.

Last night, I had to prevent him from getting out of bed to rub the time travel ointment on me....

I wonder if that was the right decision

Jim had to go in to work Saturday, a special project that needed him to go in early.

When he was getting ready to go, I woke up and found him doing something to the bedroom door with a screwdriver.

Turns out, the doorknob had been loose for a little while. I hadn't even noticed. But Jim had a dream that he was at work, and I called and told him the doorknob had fallen off and I was stuck in the bedroom. (This would not have been the worst thing that could happen - I would have a bed, a bathroom, a kindle, and a couple of low carb shakes. But still - trapped.)

So, he felt the need to fix the doorknob before he left for work.


Through an unlikely set of circumstances, the project could not be finished, so he called me around noon to say he was on the way home.

It took all my willpower not to remove the doorknob and wait for him in the bedroom. Had I not been so sleepy, it would have been a done deal.

During my nap, I had a dream about a valise-a-raptor.
She was having trouble putting the valise in the overhead bin.

I was just at youtube, looking at a musician's video, and they decided to cover what I was watching with a pop up asking me to sign Trump's birthday card....

I'm in a parallel universe, right? How do I get back?