Blink. Blink.

Woke at 5:30 in the middle of a strange dream about living in zero gravity (more like Larry Niven's Integral Trees than space colonies, though it was never explained what was holding the air in -- it seemed to bother me somehow), which somehow morphed into zero-gravity blogging and thinking about how to add blogging to my sprawling websites using make, WebDAV, and code stolen from blosxom and nanoblogger. Maybe it's just as well I don't normally remember my dreams.

The flower_cat and I went to two holiday parties yesterday: the Baycon staff party at Chef Chu's at 1:00 (with me going as the tag-along spouse), and the Ricoh party at the Flea Street Cafe in the evening (with roles reversed). The Ricoh dinner was followed by a fantastic chocolate tasting -- eight milk chocolates (I only sampled one), eight darks, four 80% or more (YUM!!) and three astoundingly different kinds of unprocessed nibs.

Both of us tried hard not to eat too much; the Cat skipped the chocolate entirely (poor thing!). She blew a number of people away with how good she's looking these days; a gorgeous green dress with a sparkly jacket helped, but most of the effect was the weight loss. Last year she weighed a lot more, and was in pretty bad health besides.

In between we went to Fry's for a little Christmas shopping. At least I did; the Cat stayed in the car to let her back recover from the restaurant seating. We took surface streets home (Foothill Expressway, Homestead, Newhall, and Park) to look at the lights.

[edits for clarity 12/11]

Sunday evening

Got a late start this morning -- feeling lethargic, and didn't get out of the house for my walk until after lunch. I did make a little more progress on the office unpacking, though. Went to Fry's looking for a new DVD player and didn't find one; ended up getting a Panasonic at Circuit City for $80. (Would have been nice to get one of the JVC's I saw at Fry's so that it could share a remote with our TV, but the only ones left were the floor models. No thanks.) Got a nice metal monitor stand with a shelf, as well; the shelf clears my keyboard by mere millimeters.

I was going to offer to take the flower_cat out for a drive this evening, but she's currently in bed with an upset tummy. Too much good food yesterday, perhaps.

Reminder: New Year's Eve at the Starport

Just a reminder, if you think you might be in the San Francisco Bay Area on New Year's Eve, to keep a little time (or the whole day) open for our party at Grand Central Starport. This one is in celebration of our 30^th anniversary, so it's likely to be a big one. There will be food, filking, and the fantastic conversation for which the Starport is justly famous.

Bad habits I need to break

For years I've been in the habit of putting my elbows up on things like chair backs, the car's window-ledge, and so on. Lately I've noticed that it sometimes causes a little pain around the shoulder, armpit, and upper arm, especially on the left side (probably because I do it a lot while driving). Since pain in the left arm is also a symptom of a heart attack, and since it's annoyingly in any case, I'm trying to keep my elbows down.