Apr 21

I’ll bet this never happens to you

I was just chatting online with my brother when, from his point of view, I suddenly disconnected and vanished. When I managed to reestablish the connection a few minutes later, I explained what had happened: “My keyboard has a Power button, and I just found out what happens when a rat steps on it. Windows shuts down and the computer turns off.”
If you’re thinking that I need to call an exterminator, you aren’t familiar with my household. (Hi, Gail!) Our rats are pets, not vermin. They live in a cage, but we let them out to play and explore. This wasn’t the first time one of them has walked across the keyboard while I was chatting, but that normally just generates some random characters that I can easily get rid of with a few taps of the backspace key. Having the machine shut down is a little more difficult to recover from!

Apr 16

Resistance is futile

Here is a meme, which I encountered on Caterina’s blog:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Sure, why not? The sentence is:
“But fair and noble as were the forms in which they were manifest to the Children of Ilúvatar, they were but a veil upon their beauty and their power.”
It’s from The Silmarillion, which just happens to be in my backpack today. “They” are the Valar, the angels of Tolkien’s universe. Ilúvatar is God, and the Children of Ilúvatar are Elves and Men.
Because the preceding exercise is a meme, you must perpetuate it on your own blog. If you don’t have a blog, you must start one in order to propagate the meme. (Actually, I made that last part up. But if it motivates someone to begin blogging, then maybe it’s true after all!)