Category: life

Topics concerning that thing known as ‘real life’ and not virtual worlds.

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Recovering from TV addiction (continued)

Day 4: I made it through all of Saturday. Around noon I cut a hole in the bottom of my cardboard box TV to make a puppet theatre. With a few socks and marker pens, I found I could make a pretty decent sock puppet for each of the cast of Star Trek: the Next Generation.

Captain Picard says I’m doing a fine job, and if I keep up the good work, he’ll field-promote me to Acting Ensign. I think this is making the Wesley sock jealous, because he won’t appear in my upcoming sock puppet movie. He’ll keep doing the sock puppet conventions, though. The Deanna sock keeps distracting the crew with her low-cut poly-cotton blend, but I think it’s good for morale.

I’m very glad of the puppet shows. Without them, I’d go completely nuts.

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Ten thousand visitors

I missed the big event! At 7:49 am yesterday (Pacific Time), this site had its ten thousandth visitor. The lucky person is from the Russian Federation Zone 5 time zone and uses IE 5.0, but is otherwise anonymous.

To be honest, the visitor counter is a completely arbitrary number. After all, I started the counter back in February when this site had nothing more than the LEGO Mindstorms robots on it, and that was several months after I started the website. If I wanted to provide something more meaningful in terms of the blog, then I could say that at 9:03 am today, the site had its six thousandth visitor since August 16 (when I changed to a new web counter). The lucky six thousandth person was from Germany and landed on my NQC page.

The count is probably wildly inaccurate. According to my web server logs, half the visitors to this site don’t get counted at all.

Be that as it may, the counter rolled over to 10,000 yesterday morning. (There was much rejoicing.)

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Recovering from TV addiction

Day 3: It was all too much to bear. I called in sick and spent Friday at home, shivering. Where the TV used to be, there was now a gaping void that somehow seemed to draw my eyes to it. Its very absence became a presence that dominated the room. I couldn’t help but stare into that space, as if it were a black hole, sucking my mind deeper, deeper down into the black gravity well of insanity, from which nothing escapes. So I made chocolate chip cookies, which seemed to help.

Later in the afternoon, I fabricated a TV surrogate. That is, I cut a rectangular hole in a large cardboard box and placed that where the TV used to be. For hours, I sat immobile on the couch and stared at the surrogate. Unfortunately, it was only showing reruns of that MASH episode where Burns thinks he’s getting a promotion. You know the one. The same episode over and over. Thankfully, Rob and Lola dragged me (forcefully) away from the surrogate to a more healthy environment. Once at the Jolly Alderman, I began to feel more like myself.

The pub has a giant projection TV. I shouldn’t have, but I watched part of the hockey game out of the corner of my eye while pretending to talk to Rob and Lola. I shouldn’t have. I’m a bad, bad person.

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Bridges

Foot bridge in Stanley Park near Lost Lagoon. Dusk.

A foot bridge in Stanley Park near Lost Lagoon.

Wooden foot bridge in Stanley Park, also near Lost Lagoon. Also dusk.

Another foot bridge in Stanley Park near Lost Lagoon.