I picked the broken stool and sat down. It was far enough away from everyone else, and it felt right in the circumstances. I ordered the least bad beer I could and fumed at the bottles on the bar back, as the car sat cooling and fuming itsowndamndeadself across the street.

It was hot yesterday, and rather warm for sleeping last night. I had weird dreams involving a lot of urgent chasing activity, some of it inside this giant sporting good store. (WTF?) **Unpleasant detail warning**

Seldom has a phone call left me crying after. And that surprised me a bit, because I was fully expecting this call -- it was pretty much inevitable at some point. But there I was, blubbering on myself as soon as I hung up. Things feel better now, but still.

I woke up at 3:30 am, and that was mostly that. I lay there for a while wishing for sleep whilst driving my brain at about 45 mph, then I finally gave up. I read in the tub for a while, once further sleep was determined to be an impossibility, so that was good.

The great period details from very early Craftsman times were covered under a couple layers of green paint. But it was only a couple layers!! How hard can it be to strip that off??

She was making this wiping motion, and wouldn't stop as much as I pushed her hands away, continually circling and playfully pawing -- not in a mean way, but smiling. It was like she thought this would be good for me or fun or something . . .

Um, no. Wrong at so many levels.

Last night, or on the very cusp of this morning, I was racing.  Then the night before last, I dreamed my perfect information appliance.

For various reasons, this is going to be the place I do my writing for a while. I'll still keep up with email, of course, but I'm over the board and other time sinks like it.

I've spent untold hours reading and blabbing over there, and I'm not presently feeling all that great about that focus. Still love the people I've loved for a long time, and I still appreciate so many of the others. But many have become mere acquaintances, and some of the usual suspects don't have that much to say to me anymore nor I to them. Plus, I divert too much effort there.

I'm convinced that a more focused, less reactive model would be a better outlet for my writing skills and a better way to develop my point of view. In any case, I'll have somedamnthing to show for my time.

Last night I saw this room-sized map that transformed to show different collections of data about the area -- flora & fauna, industrial production, demographic distributions, stuff like that. It worked like the timetables in European train stations, where little tabs flip-flip-flip-flip-flip until they get to the right ones. The person using the map could ask for a particular data set, and the map would clatter away until that's what was displayed. Kind of cool.

The whole thing also involved a lot of angry-sad interactions with the wife, but I don't clearly recall how the map was related to that.