Random

It is late. I chuckle at stupid things.

Homecoming

adfamiliares made it home safely last night, c. 2AM, though we're still awaiting the arrival of her luggage. I didn't realize quite how tense and grumpy I'd gotten while she was away, but that corded and writhing knot melted away when she walked through the door. Everything seemed funny last night; she had the excuse of jet lag and 29 hours of travel, but I think I was just goofy.

We discovered we've both been sleeping on pillows we hate for six months, when we could simply have switched and been happy. Hers was too soft, mine was too hard, and I stole hers while she was away; then I tried to return it, only to hear "I hate that pillow!" "Okay, Mama Bear," I told her. "Uh, no, you're the Mama Bear here," she said. "...Dammit," I said. (That's an example of one of the things that was reeeeally funny.)

Now, we need to gear up for Pinewoods; we leave on Sunday, first to visit my mom in NH, then to our very first English-Scottish session. We've finally sorted out catsitters, I hope; it will only require three people and three separate housekeys. *sigh*

Memory trails

Today I remembered showing people around Saratoga last summer, and the hesitancy in my footsteps, the uncertainty about where things were—and I compared that to my footsteps now, the mental map I have that can take me anywhere in the city. Tracing the paths over and over has ingrained them in my memory, like an ant's chemical trail. Ants, of course, store their memories outside their bodies, in the minute quantities of scent they lay down wherever they go, and over time they fade or are reinforced, just like our memories.

Wouldn't it be interesting (I thought) if there were a culture—aliens, or artificial life—that stored their memories in the land around them? Instead of writing experiences to their brains, they would somehow bind them in the stones beneath their feet, or the trees around them, or ancient slumbering vaults of data buried in the ground. Returning to a shady grove beside a river might bring a flood of vivid experience pouring up through the soil—or, if it had been a long time and many other memories had been overwritten there, a soft glow of emotion, buried like embers.

In search of a plot: say that each individual is coded, genetically or via program, to access only their memories (plus, perhaps, a Fourier impression of a place's stored emotions—less vivid than ghosts). Say, then, that someone has discovered how to hack into someone else's memories, intentionally or accidentally. What might they see, that they didn't want to? Who would they be, if someone else's memories became theirs?

Moen, baby, Moen

Efficient home repair: 90 minutes from adfamiliares breaking the sink faucet to shiny new faucet installed by me. That includes trips to the local hardware store (closed), Home Depot ("You're looking for one of those? Ha! Good luck!") and Lowe's ("Okay, here's our Moen rack, let's flip through the catalog...is that it? OK, there's your part number. Good luck!"). Our catsitters will have access to water, hooray.