One more cup of coffee

Incredibly annoying keyboard problem

My laptop (Toshiba M200) keyboard has suddenly decided that I am usually pressing the ‘Ctrl’ key. It’s like the key is stuck. If I keep pressing it over and over and over again, it will finally clear – for a few minutes. Then I’ll be in the middle of tying and suddenly I’ll be reformatting text, opening new windows, closing them again…

This sucks.

Cat: 1, Keyboard: 0

Right after I wrote my last entry, about the control key being stuck, it suddenly stopped happening. Yay :)

And then last night, Pippin jumped up onto the counter where I had my laptop open. Only he didn’t quite land right, so he grabbed on with his claws to hold on and snapped the F6 key off.

*sigh*

Things Nathan has learned

While we were on vacation in the last week, Nathan has learned several new skills:

• Clicking his teeth together. Followed about 15 seconds later by the much more exciting skill of…
• Grinding his teeth together. A week later, he’s still enjoying this. It drives me insane.
• Pulling himself up to a standing position. He was sort of doing this before he left, but he’s much better at it now.
• Talking (well, babbling). OK, he was doing this before, but he’s doing it a LOT now, especially during meals. He has learned that meal time is the time for conversation. :)
• How to pull open drawers.
• That cheerios crunch when you bite on them. Nothing had ever crunched before in his mouth. The look on his face when he bit down on it was priceless.

The idiocy that is our airport security

CNN reports on people who are finding that they can’t board airplanes because their infant children’s names are on the TSA no-fly list.

There are so many examples of how absurd our airport security has become; this is just one. With this, as with many such stories, one has to wonder if the people implementing TSA policies are (a) so micro-managed that they aren’t allowed to apply even the hint of common sense to what they do, (b) so in love with being able to apply power that they can’t resist given the opportunity, or (c) sheep that can’t recognize the absurdity of blocking someone from boarding because an 11–month-old child’s name shows up on the no-fly list.

I’m not sure which of the above three possibilities is more depressing.

My dreams have an engineering defect

It used to be that I never remembered my dreams, and only supposed that I dreamed due to the fact that, well, pretty much everyone does. Thanks to Nathan, I now know for sure that I dream. All that I needed to remember them was to be woken in mid-dream, an event that now happens with far more regularity than I would care to admit.

I still don’t always remember them, but over the last eight months, I’ve noticed a strange pattern in my dreams: in my dreamworld, cars have truly awful brakes. Last night, for example, I dreamt that I was in a car that went backwards over a cliff because the damned brakes sucked so bad.

If cars had brakes like they do in my dreams, we’d have a national speed limit of 12 MPH. My dreamworld needs better automotive engineers.

Off to bed

It's been a long time since I've been at work at 3:30 AM.

I remember why it's been a long time.