Portable Brain
See this thing right here?
That is what I call my portable brain. It’s my hard drive from my MacBook Pro that I took out last week.
It’s still good, it didn’t crash or anything, it just got filled up with thoughts, photos, videos… my life. Maxed out 100 gig. So I ordered a 320 gig and cloned the old drive with Super Duper (free software, yay) and dropped the new one in my machine and I’m good to go.
I wish I’d thought of this sooner. I had this massive photo scanning project going since last summer, about 10,000 photos in the dining room. I got about half way through and ran out of hard disk.
So there I was stuck in the middle of that. I didn’t think to get a bigger hard drive, the plan was to get the scanned photos sorted (decades of them which began before my dad was even born), move those over to an external HD and then finish the job of scanning.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the dining room has been a massive mess that I tried to pretend didn’t exist. Although I don’t usually roll that way, I managed for almost a year and surprisingly, Blane did as well.
So when Kara’s hard drive failed and we had to take her computer apart to replace it, I got the idea to do the same with my computer. Ah, the ideas that flow when backed into a corner with a gun to the head.
Okay, so I’m all sorted out with the computer things and the photo project is back on, piles are getting smaller, and the dining room is getting back into shape as the useless room that it is.
Here is a photo I scanned from my dad’s old box of negatives. I’d never seen this photo before, my parents must have sent the paper copy to family.
I just think it’s amazing to find something like this. It’s like going back in a time machine.
The boy with the big head is my brother Jim, the other is Shane, and the baby trying to break free is me. Funny thing about any baby photo of me, I’m always trying to get back into my dad’s arms. They used to tell me that I didn’t walk until I was three because my dad carried me all the time.
Back then it was considered a bad thing to hold your kids all the time, but my dad didn’t play by the rules. He did what he wanted to do and I’m glad he did.
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I love this graphic so much I stole it from Ruth.
I got the headphones and opened them.
Now I feel like this:
Life is short.
Just Writing
I’ve been so busy rewriting my script I haven’t had much time to comment on blogs or write posts. It’s screenwriting contest season.
Great news, I’ve entered my screenplay in the Nicholl. That is officially the very first time I’ve submitted any of my writing in a competition. This is a huge step for me as I’m actually a timid writer.
Austin is next and they’ve extended the deadline to June 8th. This is fantastic as I’ve lost a week rebuilding my daughter’s computer (hard drive failure, had to take it apart and replace it. This is an iMac and I think an appendectomy is easier to perform).
Anyway, one of the things that helped me do the rewrite was to have a goal. I told myself if I won Nicholl I would buy myself those Dr. Dre headphones I’ve been coveting.
After walking around with dark circles under my eyes from severe sleep depravation, I decided if I’d just make the first cut, I’d buy myself the headphones. I even went to Fry’s yesterday and tried them on again. To make sure.
I’m pretty damned sure. So it’s still on, right. And hey, I can up my chances if I enter Austin’s competition. If I place in that one, I get the Dre’s.
Wish me luck.
Maniac running loose in my dreams
I rarely have nightmares or night terrors. Most of my dreams are about singing and dancing and fun things. Blane has nightmares almost every night and he gets to fly in his dreams.
I’d never flown in my dreams until this past week. In my dream I was aware it was a dream and there was a huge puddle of water. I floated up like David Blaine, slowly flipped horizontal and just hovered over the water said something like, “Well, I can fly in my dreams, apparently, but not fast like a jet plane or higher than four feet, so this is pretty much a useless skill.”
That was last week. Last night i had a rare, violent one.
It starts out as a family vacation to some US city with an amusement park. The girls are about 10 and 12 (funny how dreams do that, de-age people) and we are in a minivan. Blane’s driving. There are two parallel roads, one with heavy traffic, the other we are on alone. I ask Blane why it is this way, a road to a fun place and there are no other people.
We get to the amusement park and there are no lines. We have the place to ourselves and this place is brand spanking new. No rickety rides, all zoom, zoom, zoom. As we are leaving, we notice some park workers following us out and they try to kill us.
But we make it out of there and we know why they were trying to kill us. They want our organs. (I swear to God I did not make this shit up)
Next thing, we are in our hotel room which happens to be stocked with knives, pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles. Next morning we load up the minvan with all that junk and go back to the parallel roads. This time I say, “No wonder there’s nobody in this line,” then, “Why didn’t those cowards tell us?”
We get to the amusement park and all I can remember is a bunch of dead bodies and Kara stabbing the lady at the ticket booth.
Go back to the parallel road and yell out of our minvan that it is okay now to go to the amusement park.
And that’s it. That was the dream.
A few days ago Blane told me about a dream he had.
We were sacking out on the floor at someone’s house on some nasty, matted up carpet. I flipped over the coffee table and there was a spot of brand new carpet, about four inches of plushness. Then I took that spot.
He was laughing when he told me about that dream as if this was so typical of me to do something like that. I shook my head but couldn’t really shake it from my thoughts.
I am sort of like that, if there is a better spot somewhere, I will uncover it and go there. But I do share, jeez.
