Dreamed last night that I was struggling with a particularly persistent and inventive band of car thieves desperate to get their hands on my poor innocent Clio. I walked up to my car to find them lurking around it and obviously trying to figure out how to get in. I shouted ‘OI!’ at them, but they just looked at me briefly and ignored me. So I pulled my mobile out and called the police. They watched me with amusement for a few moments, then casually sauntered off down the street. After they were out of sight, a police car turned in to the road. I sighed with relief and unlocked the car. Policeman promptly jumped out of police car, sat in my car's driving seat and started the engine, then turned to me to reveal that he was one of the same group of car thieves. I somehow managed to open the driver's door, kick him out and drive away, whereupon my car developed some sort of fault and he came after me in his phony police car.

At about this point I woke up, thankfully. I often have strange dreams, but very rarely have actively bad ones; but that was definitely one. It wasn't so much fear for my own skin; the bad guys at no point gave the slightest indication that they had any interest in causing me physical damage. It was the sheer feeling of helplessness at the thought that everything I could think of to get rid of them had been anticipated and prepared for.

I think I preferred the previous dream, which was much more fun.

I just had a very silly thought.

Fully formed into my brain sprang the idea of the US Constitution displayed as a LJ or other blog entry. At the bottom there would be a pair of links along the lines of

27 amendments | Add an amendment

and if you clicked through to the ‘comments’ page, the first comment would start off

F1RST 4M3NDM3NT!!1!

I was almost tempted to actually mock up a page or two, but that really is too much effort in the pursuit of such a small joke…

I was planning to lay off the Chinese food last night and see whether it helped my Sunday-night insomnia. However, after the extreme hangover of doom I decided that my sleep patterns were likely to be completely disrupted anyway and I'd probably manage to have insomnia no matter what happened, so I ate Chinese anyway and will do the experiment some other weekend when it has a better chance of being controlled.

Good job too, as it turned out, since I was completely wrong in the other direction and slept like a log. If I'd avoided Chinese just before that happened, then I might have wrongly convinced myself that it was to blame, and sworn off it unnecessarily! That's pretty scary. I hadn't fully considered the risks of this business until now.

In other news, songster pointed out a blog entry suggesting that at least one other person had the same problem as I did with the Star Wars trilogy, so it doesn't seem to be a one-off. How depressing. My second copy has apparently already been dispatched, as well; I bet they just shoved another one in an envelope and didn't actually check it was OK…

Well, this hasn't been a terribly productive weekend.

Yesterday I took delivery of the newly released Star Wars DVD box set, and decided a good way to relax after a long week at work would be to sit on the sofa watching some number of the films. Unfortunately the box turned out to contain Return of the Jedi, The Empire Strikes Back, and … another copy of Return of the Jedi on a DVD labelled A New Hope. I've made arrangements to return it for a replacement; I hope that this time the error will turn out to be a one-off. If this is a problem with an entire production run like the fiasco with B5 season 3, Lucasfilm is going to have enough egg on its face to make the world's biggest omelette.

Then to the party at Milton Road (or ‘Lemoncurdistan’ as someone dubbed it in the pub on Thursday, in honour of its new domain lemoncurd.org.uk). Generally a good party, but several upsetting things managed to hit me all at once part way through it; I probably could have coped with any one of them at a time, but between them they gave me a serious desire to go and get properly drunk. So I did that (on Merlot and rose, uncharacteristically, since I've never got on well with either of those types of wine; but the alternative was a Shiraz so egregiously bad that even those were an improvement), and then went and nattered to Rachel/xanna about life, love, the universe and everything for some hours, and eventually emerged to find that it was 3:30am and everyone else had gone home. So I did that too.

Woke up this morning and really wished I hadn't. Any thought of doing something useful today after relaxing yesterday was immediately dispelled by a horrifying hangover of death. After a very long bath and some self-pampering I'm now feeling almost human, but not quite.

I can tell this for two reasons. One is that I changed over to my winter quilt last night. I reckoned this would be a good idea, but I wasn't prepared for just how good it was; I slept like a log and feel ready to take on the world today.

The other, annoyingly, is that the Dension has begun to have trouble in the cold again. Time to start taking its hard disk indoors overnight, I fear.

Prue came round last night and I cooked her Mum's fish pie, and this time I really got the recipe right. Some days I think a passing layperson might find it reasonably hard to distinguish me from somebody who can cook :-)

It's amazing how being an incompetent gibbon can work out in your favour.

Yesterday I broke the Gallery's networking. I had logged in to their firewall remotely in order to fiddle with VPN-related stuff, and I managed to hose their outgoing network connectivity to the point where I couldn't log back in to start it up again. So when I got home from work I phoned the Gallery, got through to lzz, apologised for being a buffoon, and offered to come round and fix it. She was delighted, because she'd assumed it to be an NTL problem which would take them days to sort out. So the net effect was that I got to see Liz (which I wouldn't have otherwise since she was too busy to go to the Calling), and furthermore she was effusively grateful.

It's not just her, either. When we had the PuTTY security hole last month, not one person wrote to us to complain, and lots of people wrote to thank us for our prompt response; in fact our steady trickle of small donations from random grateful users took a major spike on that day.

I know that everybody's human, and humans all make mistakes, and the occasional mistake is to be tolerated if it's fixed promptly. I can understand merely not blaming me; that's fair enough. But it does strike me as downright odd that incidents like the above would seem to be giving people an incentive to make mistakes (provided they fix them promptly, of course); it doesn't seem to me to bode well for the human race.

Last night I found myself in the rather strange position of hoping to be unable to sleep properly.

I occasionally have mild insomnia. I've noticed over the last few months that it tends very strongly to be on Sunday nights, making me even more zombie-like than one would expect on a Monday morning. Last week I mentioned this to Owen, and he pointed out that on Sunday evenings I usually eat Chinese takeaway with the Gallery, and that my insomnia might be a reaction to something in the food (probably MSG).

As it happens, Gareth was away this weekend, and since yvesilena and the_alchemist were having a party on Sunday night, the usual gathering didn't happen in the usual way and I went to that instead. So I ate non-Chinese food to see what would happen to my sleep. And since (of course) I really want it not to be Chinese food that gives me insomnia, I was rather hoping that I'd have trouble sleeping as usual.

In fact, I did sleep better, but on the other hand the whole of the rest of my Sunday routine was disrupted as well, so this hardly points the finger conclusively at my diet. Next week I may try changing just the food, and see if that helps.

The appropriate response to a fire is not always an extinguisher.

Just occasionally, it's a bellows.

Uuuurgh. I've felt a bit grotty all week; my theory is that I've been putting off getting ill and have now finally succumbed.

If I stay in bed I just lie there feeling uuurgh and not sleeping; but now I'm out of bed I sit here feeling uuurgh and not feeling like doing anything.

*sigh*

It's one of those mornings on which I'm uncertain of whether I'm ill, tired and annoyed, or merely tired and annoyed. And, of course, although the dividing line between the two states is too fine for me to be certain which side I'm on, it makes all the difference as to whether or not I can reasonably go home and back to bed. Not that I'd be able to do anything useful, like sleeping, if I did.

(Well, to be fair, it was partly my own fault too.)

I recently persuaded my mum to provide me with her recipe for fish pie, which I have fond memories of eating in huge quantity through the later parts of my childhood and which tends to be the first meal that springs to my mind whenever I think ‘you know, I haven't eaten any fish in quite a while’. She gave me lots of detail on the ingredients, methods of preparation and so forth; I managed to fill up an entire sheet of A4 with my illegible scrawls. The one thing she omitted was any hint of quantities in the recipe.

As a result, when I tested the recipe on elise last night, it was slightly short of fish (the Sainsbury's fishmonger insisted that if I was cooking for two then I didn't need more than that much, and on reflection I think he was simply wrong) and extremely overendowed with cheese sauce. Still, that didn't make it inedible by a long chalk, and I'm sure I can do somewhat better next time, so yum anyway.

Cooking still seems to be something with a direct line to my ego. Doing it badly tends to make me feel utterly worthless for the rest of the day, but doing it successfully is a big boost and makes me feel really good about myself. And inviting someone round when I'm cooking a recipe that I've never tried before and know I don't have all the details of – well, that's just scary. I don't think I managed to finish feeling nervous until we'd almost finished eating it.

I can only hope that at some point I'll stop feeling that way about cooking. I used to feel the same way about driving when I first got a car, and I got over that after a while. So there's hope of recovery.

Good grief. The PuTTY team has just received an email containing the following highly impressive header:

X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, af, sq, am, ar, ar-dz, ar-bh, ar-eg,
       ar-iq, ar-jo, ar-kw, ar-lb, ar-ly, ar-ma, ar-om, ar-qa,
       ar-sa, ar-sy, ar-tn, ar-ae, ar-ye, an, hy, ast, az, eu, be,
       bs, br, bg, ca, ch, ce, zh, zh-cn, zh-hk, zh-sg, zh-tw, cv,
       co, hr, cs, da, nl, nl-be, undefined, en-au, en-bz, en-ca,
       en-ie, en-jm, en-nz, en-ph, en-za, en-tt, en-gb, undefined,
       en-zw, eo, et, fo, fj, fi, fr, fr-be, fr-ca, fr-fr, fr-lu,
       fr-mc, fr-ch, fy, gl, ka, de, de-at, de-de, de-li, de-lu,
       de-ch, el, ht, he, hu, is, id, ia, ie, iu, ga, it, it-ch, ja,
       kk, ky, ko, ko-kp, ko-kr, la, lv, lt, lb, mk-mk, ms, mi, mr,
       mo, nv, ng, ne, no, nb, nn, oc, om, fa, pl, pt, pt-br, qu,
       rm, ro, ru, sg, sa, sc, gd, sr, sd, sk, sl, so, es, es-ar,
       es-bo, es-cl, es-co, es-cr, es-do, es-ec, es-sv, es-gt,
       es-hn, es-mx, es-ni, es-pa, es-py, es-pe, es-pr, es-es,
       es-uy, es-ve, sw, sv, sv-fi, ta, th, tr, tk, uk, hsb, ve, vi,
       vo, wa, cy, xh, yi, zu

Now that's what I call a polyglot!

(I particularly like the two ‘undefined’s. :-)

It isn't often that I go to sleep at night and dream of the very next morning; and it's very confusing when I do.

In non-dreaming news, one of my fingers has been itching vigorously since yesterday. My best guess is that I dipped it in some irritant chemical, but no plausible recent incident springs to mind. Bah.

*blinks*

I've just received a bounce message from msn.com about a spam that was forged to look as if it was from me. That's not uncommon, but I like the wording of this particular one:

You sent the message below to an e-mail address that is not monitored for incoming mail.

… how did they know?!

Ho hum. I feel unusually empathic at the moment. I'll read on LJ that some particular friend is unhappy, and five minutes later I'll be thinking ‘hang on, didn't I just hear that the world was ending, why am I still sitting at my desk?’. Then I'll remember exactly what it was I heard, and although it isn't good, rationally it doesn't present any reason why I should start panicking, so I'll tell myself to relax a bit. And five minutes later, same story again. My subconscious is amazingly good sometimes at picking up really subtle hints, but often astonishingly bad at taking in things SHOUTED AT IT LOUDLY AND CLEARLY.

On the other hand, it might not be empathy as such. I've also been rather ineffective recently when it comes to (e.g.) believing people care about me, so it may not be that I'm unusually empathic so much as that I'm unusually pessimistic at the moment, and eager to find any excuse at all to believe the world's ending…

Oh, I'm sick of this.

When you buy little boxes of pills – pretty much any kind of pills, be they painkillers, antihistamines, indigestion tablets, or something more serious – the box contains one or two sheets of plastic with the pills embedded in them, plus a sheet of paper giving the instructions. That sheet of paper is typically bent in a U-shape around the pill sheets.

Therefore, if you open the box at the end furthest from the bend of the U, you can take out a sheet of pills easily. Open it at the wrong end, and you are confronted with the instruction sheet, and the most convenient way to get at the pills is to close it again and open it at the other end.

I honestly cannot remember the last time I opened a box of pills and found I had gone to the right end first. I'm convinced I get the wrong end nearly every time, which means I'm doing significantly worse than I would if I flipped a coin each time to decide which end to open it at.

In fact, perhaps I should actually start flipping a coin.

Bah. I've lost my umbrella again.

This time I think I can remember where, though. I definitely had it when I arrived at Pizza Express on Monday night, I remember hanging it on their coat stand to dry, and I'm pretty positive I didn't pick it up again when I went out. When they open today I'll phone them and see if they've still got it.

It has without a doubt been Strange Dreams Week for me. Last night's was some sort of a cross between Doctor Who and a zombie-and-monsters movie; I think I was the Doctor's companion, but about half way through I got rather confused about which one of the Doctor and the zombies I was trying to get away from, and then ended up trying to escape from both by catching a train, but was foiled because they were all delayed. (I'm sure I've had train stress dreams before. I don't even use trains that much, but there seems to be a running theme here.) The night before I spent on the moon, only it was a moonbase designed by a second-rate sci-fi author who didn't see what the fuss was about airtightness; I kept running around complaining about this, but everyone ignored me and stubbornly carried on breathing regardless. The really odd bit was that what was mostly a sensibly futuristic-looking moonbase also had a small annexe containing a rather large and perfectly ordinary Sainsbury's.

The previous two nights weren't any more sensible, though I can't remember any of the details any more. I don't think there's been a morning this week on which I haven't got out of bed muttering to myself ‘Now what the hell was that all about?’.

Work has also been moderately odd, owing to a large design task which is currently hovering at the point of completion; it's now at the stage where I think I've got it right this time, but may at any moment suddenly realise it's all doomed and I'm back to the drawing board. Which means I'm unsure of whether to feel satisfied or apprehensive or what, which contributes to my general feeling of surreality.

And as if that wasn't enough strangeness in one week, on Wednesday night elise completed her quest to show me all of Neon Genesis Evangelion: a series which starts off strange, gets stranger 2/3 of the way through, and somewhere in the final four episodes we watched this week it went completely off the rails into utter bizarreness.

It has therefore, without doubt, been a very weird week.

Bah. This is now peak hayfever season as far as I'm concerned.

Every year, at least for the last few years, I have watched all my hayfever-suffering friends dissolve into little puddles of agony around May or June, sniffed experimentally, felt fine, and wondered if I was actually going to get away with it this year. Then, around mid-July, the first sneezing fits start to hit me and I remember that I just get it later in the year than most people.

I don't think I've heard anyone else complain about hayfever for weeks now. But I nearly exploded when I went out to buy lunch an hour ago, and my pills are not helping.

In other annoyance: the animal rights protesters came back today and blew their stupid horn outside the next office building again. And a colleague tells me that one of them has come over to our car park and has been sticking leaflets under everyone's windscreen wipers. Bah.

Unusually for a Monday, I feel more rested today than I did yesterday.

Saturday night was the house-cooling at Impropriety. The theme was ‘come as something improper’; lacking the means and the motive[1] to follow the spirit of this theme, I decided to hide behind the letter, so I put a sticky label on my T-shirt bearing the improper fraction 5/3. This got a wide range of reactions, from blank looks through groans to one or two honestly delighted laughs and/or hugs, so I think on balance I did OK there.

As I left the party at nearly 2am I heard noises behind me suggesting that it was just about to get really improper. I seem to have a knack for leaving parties just at the right moment…

Sadly, I still left too late for comfort, since after spending an hour at home airing out the house before going to bed it was nearly 3am and I needed to be up for noon the next day to have lunch with Mum. Still, I got there only ten minutes late in the end, so that was all right. And my surprise present to Mum seemed to go down well, so that was good too. Unfortunately, by the time I got home and guests began to arrive for the roving Doctor Who gathering, I was feeling pretty awful, and had little patience with either the Doctor himself or the board game we played in between episodes. But a good night's sleep has done wonders, so I'm feeling better now.

[1] Arrgh. I lacked the means and I lacked the motive. I'm unable to decide whether I should therefore say that I lacked the means and the motive, or that I lacked the means or the motive. Where's Augustus de Morgan when you need him?