A Summary, And Some Introspection

Weekend

Two important things happened this weekend.

First, my lovely wife's intrepid parents were up visiting, their last such visit before they depart for the clement south. It was great having them up here, as always. I'm going to miss them.

I'm looking forward to going to visit. I've never been to the Caribbean.

Second, my lovely wife and I shoveled, raked, seeded, tarped, untarped and otherwise manhandled five yards of soil and a couple of bags of grass-seed to resurface our front, side, and back yards. We've been at this for two plus years and to see it finally sitting there, seeded and waiting ... it's pretty awesome.

Hooray for us.

Weather Warning

Tomorrow is supposed to be our first big snowfall.

Fuck you, Winter.

Sore

After all the earthworks and related stuff, we're both pretty sore. This weekend is going to be a taking-it-easy weekend.

How My Brain Works

I got to thinking about how my brain works today, and I think I might be able to explain it in an understandable way.

I was talking with the Greek about Daylight Savings Time.

Just as an aside, DST is the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas that actually got embraced en masse. Seriously. Stupid.

Anyway. I was explaining how I can't intuitively go from 'spring forward, fall back' to knowing which way to reset my clocks. "Fall Back" just does not get me to "7am is now 6am" without some serious cogitation and then, finally, reference to wikipedia.

I explained it thus:

My brain doesn't like thinking of time in a directional way.

Which is true, if odd-sounding.

It is unnatural for me to think of future events as being ahead of me in a linear sense. Directionality in terms of temporal events just isn't a natural method of thinking for me. Whenever I need to talk about things which haven't happened yet or which have already happened, which are ordered in a particular way, I need to be like Joey and "get in the map".

This is compounded if the temporal distance and relationship between these events is the object of the exercise.

When I plan something, I don't mentally put it together on a time-line. I put it into a kind of UML mapping of dependencies. This means that I'm really good at catching and resolving problems, but really bad at managing timings, because for me, mentally, it's more a question of relationships and interactions, devoid of vectors or dimensionality.

I really do not have a normal conception of the passage of time.

A Link (or Three)

Slime Molds, a gallery.

Way more interesting than you'd think.

Is it bad that the first thing this made me think of was from Ghostbusters?

"I collect spores, molds and fungus."

Also.

From 2000, and now, from 2008.