Have I Mentioned How Frustrating This Is?

I've said it at least a dozen times today: "This is killing me," or, at least, "I hate this." No, it's not really killing me, but it is frustrating the heck out of me. What the heck am I talking about? My online CPA review seminar thingy.

Here's the basic problem. My accounting courses at the University of Phoenix began in early 2003 and ended around the fall of 2004. This means that the last time I was exposed to Earnings Per Share, Loan Impairments, and a thousand other accounting concepts was over four years ago, in some cases closer to five years ago. While it's true that I've worked as an accountant since then, doing a variety of tasks, roughly 90% of what I've been studying recently has little or nothing to do with what I've done for a living to date. My practical knowledge is limited and specialized, at least compared to the breadth of knowledge required to pass a CPA exam.

Now, I knew this going in, and expected to have to work hard to refresh my stale knowledge of all this stuff. The problem is that this online seminar I'm attempting is not calibrated for the staleness of my knowledge or, God help me, the ability of my aging brain to relearn it quickly. Even this 61-day course, the longest available, has more material due in a given time frame than I can effectively cover. On nearly every unit (or lesson or segment or topic or whatever it's called), it takes me significantly longer than the average student to complete, as reported by the software. In order to finish by the time the assignment is graded, I find myself memorizing the dollar amount of the right answer rather than the concept and calculations used to arrive at it. Needless to say, remembering for the next 30 minutes that the answer to the question about Bee Company is $24,000 will avail me nothing in a CPA exam six months from now.

And yes, I admit that I got a late start on Assignment 2, but that only exacerbates the problem. It doesn't cause it. If I start right in on Assignment 3 at midnight tonight, and spread it out over three days as I should, it's still going to take me far longer than other students to understand it all and retain it, as opposed to getting the answers right once by a combination of answer memorization and guessing and sorta-kinda understanding parts of it. If I were working, it would be flat-out impossible for me to do this FAR course in 61 days, short of continual cheating that does no one any good. Even without a job, I've been at this computer for 11 hours to do eight lessons, minus an hour in which I went to the dog park, read half a lesson there, and hit the Taco Bell drive thru on the way back. And that's with only a vague understanding of half of the stuff I supposedly just "learned" (or "reviewed"). To do it right would have taken far longer, which renders my achievement, such as it is, nearly useless. In order to actually pass a CPA exam, I'll pretty much need to study the same material all over again. In fact, I'm seriously thinking about rereading my Intermediate Accounting textbook and redoing some of my old homework from four years ago, just to ram all these concepts back into my head.

Now, I'm not saying the course is deficient or poorly written or anything like that. The truth of it is the equivalent of that old break-up line: "It's not you, it's me." If I had taken this review course when I was four years younger and fresh out of school, I'm sure I would have done better. It's meant to be a review of stuff I know, not a retraining from (almost) scratch.

Maybe it will get better as concept builds on concept, or I hit more areas that relate to past jobs. More sleep (although I got 7 hours last night) and better study habits would also help. So here's the plan. I've going to give Assignment 3 my best shot, spreading out the work, trying for lots of sleep, and taking twice the time anyone else takes to do it if that's what I need. And if that doesn't work, I'll drop the damn seminar again, and do the AUD (Auditing) one instead. That's even more likely to be far from my recent experience, but it's less math-oriented and more conceptual, I think, and there's just plain less of it. Over time I can try to get through FAR on my own, and then maybe use that seminar for review when it actually is a review, after I relearn most of the material, one way or another.

Y'know, I can be fairly arrogant about my intelligence. But this thing knocks the wind out of me.

Aargh.

Karen

Moths in My Head

a butterfly or moth or something, May 2008

There are visual gags and bits of cultural detritus that go back many decades, that my generation and the ones after me know primarily from old cartoons, comic strips and maybe, for fans of that sort of thing, early comedy films. When I was a kid, I was always bemused by pictures of some comic strip character (Nancy or Sluggo, possibly) getting off an annoyed quip as he or she set off to run away from home. We knew the kid was running away because he carried his or her possessions in a handkerchief tied to the end of a pole. Huh? Who does that? Who ever did that, and you know, why? I researched this a little, and only came up with handkerchiefs on poles as a signal that someone is shipwrecked or dinner is ready.

More glimpses of time long gone, or that possibly never was: traffic lights that display flags reading Stop and Go. Police dispatchers ending with "That is all." Being so poor that you try to eat shoe leather.

And the definite gags: sleepwalking with arms straight out in front of you is one of them. Another is reaching in your pockets or wallet - and moths fly out. (Here's a page about one politically incorrect example from Tex Avery.) I never quite understood why there were bugs in there, but the message was clear: the person is broke. Well, maybe. Another page I came across tonight, this one about the symbolism of butterflies and moths, says it can also mean the person is so stingy he hasn't opened the wallet in a long time. The same page explains the significance of the bugs: "Apparently, this has come to be a cartoonist's way of saying 'It's been so long since there's been any money in here, moths have had time to invade.'"

I was thinking about the buggy pockets tonight as I tried to come up with an entry for this blog. With Doctor Who over until Christmas, the Doctor Who Forum is suddenly so dead you can hear the virtual crickets, another cartoon convention. The dogs haven't done anything noteworthy today, except for Cayenne making a grab for my turkey wrap. I haven't done any job hunting yet, because I found out yesterday that my job runs through September 9th. I had miscalculated. So my brain is running on empty, not enough sleep, not enough of the right stimulus. I open my head, and moths fly out.

But there is something underneath the moths, and usually I can get to it. I didn't work on it tonight, but I'm on page 465 of my Heirs of Mâvarin edit, less than a chapter and a half from the end of the book. I'm really pleased with the way that's going.

I'm not so pleased at the time at the corner of my computer screen right now. Whoops! Gotta go! Good night!

Livin' La Vida Distraído

Cassandra and "the boys" at Gallifrey One

As you know, Ace, (that's an exposition joke) the plan tonight was to get through a bunch more of my writeup of the Gallifrey One convention, on the grounds that I no longer have a fanzine in which to publish such things. I figure the text should be of interest to Doctor Who fans, and the costume photos may be of interest to a slightly wider audience, 'cause costumes are fun even if you're not familiar with the characters depicted.

Three shots of the moon as it started to be eclipsed.

More and more, however, I find that my brain very seldom does what it's told, at least not when it comes to allocation of leisure time activities. As of 11 PM, I had yet to edit a single photo tonight to accompany this entry. Worse, I failed to go back outside after 8 PM to catch the lunar eclipse at its eclipsiest. Drat! I just plain forgot about it. I do that a lot, I'm sorry to say. Forgetting to do stuff, that is.

Moon over Speedway - but which light is it?

Am I suffering from the beginning of Alzheimer's, three weeks shy of my 51st birthday? Have I a touch of dementia, brought on by a TIA or two or three? No, and no. And no. (That's a King Jor joke; don't worry about it.) Am I cognitively impaired due to sleep deprivation? Again no...well, maybe a little, occasionally.

Solarization applied to the aggregated moon shot.

No, all this has to do with distraction. Whatever it is I'm supposed to be thinking about or doing, more often than not my brain decides that now is the perfect time to obsess about something else entirely.

So what have I been doing tonight instead of editing photos, writing my "con report," working on my RR database or taking bad photos of the moon after 7:20 PM? Was I indulging my Wikipedia addition, watching DVDs, or reading the Doctor Who Forum, perhaps? Not to any significant degree, no. I haven't made a single Wikiedit today, watched only one House episode, and have only read new posts in a few DWF threads. The main thing I've been working on tonight - and this is the good news - is my Heirs of Mâvarin edit, and updating that darn outline.

The moon over St. Michael's tonight looked like a comet.

What happened is this: I thought I had chosen the right timing for that one problematic scene I wrote about a week or two ago. I went back through Chapter Eight, changed a few sentences so that Jamek arrived in the morning instead of the late afternoon, and revised several other passages while I was at it. When I was done, I updated my word count spreadsheet and immediately started on Chapter Nine.

My best one. Several of Scalzi's readers got great shots.

Turns out, the first scene in Chapter Nine makes no sense at all if Jamek arrives on Mâsheldu morning. Jamek has to remember the camped tengremen soon enough after arriving to be plausible. He then has to go see if they're still there, come back, and be sent to find Albi, who has to be far enough away by then to arrive only in the nick of time. I don't expect you to follow all that, but the point is that the timing is critical to making this whole section of the book work. And the more I looked, the more I saw problems, and realized a quick fix wasn't going to resolve them.

This isn't going to work.

I've often thought that a board game, or possibly tokens on a giant map, would be the best way to figure out which characters should be where, doing what, on any given morning, afternoon or evening. But I've tried it, and it doesn't work any better than outlines, index cards or counting it out in my head, which is to say, not very well.

So instead I'm falling back on that outline, updating it chapter by chapter. I'm up to Chapter Three - or was, before I got distracted again an hour ago after I started this entry, first designing a Mâvarin game board and then editing eclipse pictures. With the Gallifrey stuff still to do, photos to edit, the Weekend Assignment and Round Robin coming up, well, it could be a while before I get the timing of scenes in Chapters Eight and Nine straightened out.

See what I mean?

Karen

What Do You Want?

As I left work this evening (a little early because I worked through lunch, I was at a stopping point, and hey, it was Friday), I found myself asking myself the following question:

If I could have anything I wanted right now, what would it be?

It was one of those almost-random thoughts my brain throws at me when I'm tired; it doesn't necessarily mean anything, except in a very vague and general sense. Nevertheless, I decided to try to make sense of the question, and answer it.

First of all, what kind of "anything" did my subconscious have in mind? Anything to eat? Any situation? Any possession? Any goal? Any experience? Perhaps I meant all of them, so I started answering each of the variant questions:

Food? Not hungry right now, thanks.

Situation? There's always the world peace thing. But I also found myself wishing for an equally implausible, more personal situation, such as suddenly turning up in another world.

Possession? Well, a time machine, obviously, and a personal teleportation device (transmat).

Goal? Well, you know that one: Karen Funk Blocher, author of the bestselling Mâvarin books, the first of which she has adapted to screen as a major motion picture, coming soon to a theater near you! Yes, that's another world too, isn't it?

Experience? That's the big one. As I got in my car, I thought of a number of ways life could suddenly get more interesting, if the multiverse would only cooperate:

• Driving home beneath a swirling pink sky
• Having a conversation with a talking dog
• Really, really meeting Kate and Ariel
• Visiting Mâvarin
• Meeting Walt Disney
• Saving the world from some surprising menace, with the help of a mysterious stranger
• Discovering I can do magic

See, I don't want much, just the impossible! I want to do something ever so much more interesting than making numbers add up, or watching DVDs, or even going to Disneyland. I want excitement, adventure and really wild things, but not the sort the real world has on offer. I'm never going to go to Guatemala with other St. Michael's parishioners, hike into remote villages and set up clinics. It's just not gonna happen. But I can handle chatting up a talking dog beneath a swirling pink sky, as long as neither one kills me or totals my car.

And it occurs to me that this is one of the main things fiction is for. We can't go around traveling in time or saving the world; at least, most of us can't. We can't meet a handsome and mysterious man on a windswept hill, or thwart the plans of Russian spies, or solve a murder that baffles the local police. But we can read about those things and experience them vicariously, in the safety of our own homes.

It's probably not that rare a dream, either, wanting outrageous adventures without sacrificing personal safety. I was thinking tonight about good old Del Merden, Rani's best friend. He's always been a sort of Tom Sawyer character, a teenager with an active imagination, a sense of adventure and a knack for getting into scrapes. But there's more to him than that. Sure he's bored with doing chores in his uncle's stable, but when he leaves home it's not just wanderlust. He wants to help Rani, and he wants to find the missing King. In short, he wants to do something that matters, to really make a difference in the world.

And what about you? What do you want? Tell me what Food, what Situation, what Possession, what Goal, what Experience would please you about now. Better yet, write it up in your blog and leave a link back here. Do you want a safe and comfortable life, or a dangerous and fantastic one? I really want to know!

Karen

typos fixed later, after 9+ hours of sleep!

Crashing - it's a good thing

I'm in the midst of one of my periodic crashes tonight, when my body makes its demands and I obey. I went to bed at 9-something PM for a "nap," woke around midnight, went back to sleep, and woke again at 1-something AM. This seems an excellent opportunity to give myself what I need, so no stories tonight, no rants, no photos. I'll be back Saturday evening, ready to entertain you - presumably!

Yes, I know. I should sleep on a regular basis and all that. Meantime, though, I'll take what I can get!

****

Paul asks,

So, was the typo in the title intentional?

(It said "ir's a good thing.")

No, it wasn't. But I've slept now, and that should help. Maybe. A new keyboard with visible lettering would help even more.

Umm...!

It's 3:25 AM. I spent the day in bed with this virus-y thing, and managed to watch my way through almost the entire 2006 series of Doctor Who today and tonight. Now I need to get my blog entry in, and I have no clue what to write about. What trouble can we get in together?

This blog has had a higher hit count than usual this week, presumably because of the post about John Scalzi in Scottsdale as well as the usual Round Robin Photo Challenges influx. To those of you who may have found your way here in the last week or two: welcome! I'll try to keep things interesting.

Umm....

As I sit here listening to my ears ring, I'm reminded of the sound of a conch shell held to the ear, the whistling roar of emptiness, of nothing. I know that my head is not, in fact, empty; it's full of all sorts of things: guilt for calling in sick, even though I was sick; a fan letter to David Tennant that I've been writing in my head; a whole list of things I should be reading or writing or doing. Most of it is under the surface, though, not strong enough or interesting enough or enough a part of my conscious mind to motivate me, especially when I'm not feeling well. And below all that is the stuff I don't even know about: fragments of dream or fever or nightmare, bits of story simmering (I hope!) for later synthesis, countless memories and concepts and emotions stored in synapses, needing only the right stimulus to bring them forth.

Karen's Fried Brain, February 2007

Our brains are full of all sorts of fascinating things, most of which hide from us, most of the time. Reason and emotion, sanity and madness are all there in the things we do and say, influenced by what our brains have stored away. Maybe this blog entry has its roots in something that happened when I was 6, or 16, or 46. I'll never really know, and in a sense it doesn't matter. We are all the product of our accumulated experience. I could call up a dozen memories right now, the gamut of love and rejection, joy and desolation, and they would still be only a tiny part of the enormous puzzle labeled Karen's Brain. It doesn't really matter which puzzle pieces I pull out first to build tonight's bit of sky. It's all part of the big picture, sooner or later. All we have to do is take the result, and make sure it all fits together in a way that makes sense.

Still, there is only one thing I required from my brain tonight: an idea for this blog entry. My brain essentially whistled back at me, revealing nothing. Instead we're stuck with this rather pointless musing about the human brain itself. Best I can do for tonight, I think.

Maybe it's because I've been sick. Maybe it's because I actually got some sleep today. Weird stuff tends to surface more often when I'm sleep deprived than when I'm well-rested, which is one factor in my bad habit of not sleeping enough. If I didn't have to work for a living, I would probably stay up all night, every night, and into the next day, until the barriers between conscious and subconscious would start to fail and I could harvest ideas for later use before going the heck to bed. As it is, though, even though now we're up to 4:22 AM, I'm not tired enough to produce such effects.

Gates Pass sunset, March 2005

On the old laptop, currently up and running just a few inches from this one, a slideshow screensaver is showing me all sorts of images that were stored on my computer as of two years ago. There are images of Gates Pass, and Disneyland and Las Vegas, trees and lamps, Scott Bakula and Anthony Stewart Head, Randy Johnson and Zorro, and even Sylvester McCoy standing in front of a fan-built TARDIS with Paul McGann. In a pinch, I could tap into these technology-assisted memories, and write about some of them. But not tonight.

And maybe by tomorrow, my brain will have something more interesting to say. Maybe I'll analyze what makes certain heroic characters more appealing to me than others, or report progress on the agent query front, or consider whether the Doctor is clinically depressed this season on Doctor Who. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

Karen

P.S. Apparently my listing of images on that screen saver has Google promising images of Scott Bakula in this entry. Let's see what I can rustle up! I'm pretty sure these are both Billie Mason's work, not mine, but here you go anyway. - KFB

Good Morning Peoria

Shock Theater

I'll follow up with a proper entry about this before the weekend is over. - KFB

Not Settling for a Puppy or a Kitty

Weekend Assignment #162: Reincarnation is a fact and you are going to come back as some type of animal. What kind would you prefer and why?

Extra Credit: Do you think you have good Karma or bad? Do you believe in Karma?

Let's start by defining the premise a bit further. To my way of thinking, any world in which reincarnation of humans into animals is a "fact" is clearly not the one in which I sit tonight, typing these words. So. Let's make this theoretical world of reincarnation an interesting one, with animals worth being reincarnated into. No cat or dog is gonna cut it, or even the tiger of my childhood thought experiment. The whole point of a person is what goes on in the mind and soul, and our household pets simply haven't the capacity. No. If you are going to cram the salient parts of Karen into the brain of another species, I'm holding out for one that's big enough and complex enough to let me be me - more or less. That pretty much requires a species that doesn't exist on this version of this planet. Yeah. if I can't be human, I'd just as soon be a tengrem.

A tengrem. Art by Sherlock.

Of course, in a way I've already been a tengrem. I've spent a good bit of time inside the heads of Rani Fost and other tengremen, exploring what it's like to be rational part of the time, and operating on instinct at other times. Really, it's about the most fun part of writing these books.


If you disallow a tengrem for reincarnation, then I'll settle for a dragon, preferably a benign one, like a luck dragon or a gold dragon or one of Sara's dragons or a McCaffrey dragon. And if you disallow even that, and limit me to the species of this world, then I've got to go with a dolphin - preferably an Adamsian one.

As for karma, I believe that actions have consequences. I have a karma bill building up from my bad habits - too much bad food, not enough exercise, not enough sleep. But in other ways I suppose I do all right.

Anyway, it's late, and I should have been in bed hours ago. For tonight, so long, and thanks....

"progris riport"

It's been a day of battling three uncooperative entities: the Computer (broadly conceived), Time (as usual) and my own brain (no surprise there). By and large I've prevailed over #1 and #3, but #2 is a killer. Perhaps one reason for my fascination with time travel is my frustration with time as it appears to be in everyday life, that inexorable vector that pushes me toward the future one smooth second at a time, whether or not I'm ready to go there. There are never enough of those seconds to do all that I want, the goofing off as well as the vital tasks and tardy obligations. I want to read Snopes.com for three hours and not feel guilty about it. I want to crack the top 10,000 on the Flixter neverending quiz leader board. I want to sleep for ten hours, mess around online for ten hours, read for ten hours, and write for ten hours, all between now and 9 AM Saturday morning, a little over six hours from now. But alas, Time won't let me use those seconds, minutes, hours more than once each.

Last night I posted my blog entry later than usual for a weeknight, and in two different blogs. "The Clone and the House Guest" now exists in two places in Musings from Mâvarin, once at the Outpost and once in Messages from Mâvarin. Two of those appearances date back to November, 2005, when I first wrote the thing. It wasn't until this morning that I noticed:

1. I had a typo of the word "If" instead of the word "Is", resulting in a sentence that didn't make sense.
2. One paragraph suddenly veered into past tense, while the rest was (by design) in present tense.
3. Two of the postings switched to a different font in the middle of the dialogue. When I tried to fix this, one of them put all of Karen's lines after the font switch into the same red as Kate's lines.
   

And it wasn't until tonight that I noticed the weird links I snarfed from the AOL Search screen didn't work as blog links. Phooey.

All this comes less than a week after John sat in our Tempe AZ hotel room, finding numerous typos in the blog entry I'd posted the night before. When I find I've put up something with that many errors in it, the humorous typo warning on my sidebar just isn't sufficient to assuage my embarrassment. I worry that you will think I don't know the right spellings, the right grammar, the right words for which I've substituted the wrong ones, and the right punctuation to make it all work. When there's an error every 50 words or so, the whole thing starts to look like a sequel of Flowers for Algernon. What I have to do is slow down and proofread some more, and of course sleep more to keep the brain sharp. This is not a new insight.

You've now read my time complaint and my brain complaint. But the big battles of the week were with computers and software and files. The WordPerfect file I've been trying to open from church turned out to be over 11 MB instead of around 300K. No wonder my computer was having fits! So today at lunch I went to the church office and showed the parish administrator how to paste text from that huge church bulletin file into he body of an email. It wasn't perfect, but it worked, much better than the original file would have. I also suggested that she paste the entire bulletin into a new Word doc, because Word is more compatible with what I and others are doing, and easier to use. But in Word that 11 MB of text and graphics was all compressed into one overlapping paragraph. Double Phooey.

I gave out a few suggestions and moved on to check in with Rev. Angela. She had a different question for me, all to do with an email that wanted to defy all reasonable margins. I gave her a few pointers on what the problem was and how to fix it, but really it's a bit of a mess to figure out.

Tonight I managed to put together a huge news and schedule update to the St. Michael's news blog, copied from the stuff we'd pasted into emails. Later on I cleaned it up to look better, updated the schedule page as well, and even converted the following week's bulletin (only 413K!) into Word (138K) and cleaned it up, in hopes that it can be used as a template for later.


There were more computer-related battles. At least once this week my computer at work failed to shut down properly, and generally behaved oddly. Here at home, my attempt to optimize the hard drive with Speed Disk has gotten hung up repeatedly. Blogger was down at one point, and AOL seemingly banned my sidebar portrait for a while on Musings. And...well, there were other incidents and annoyances, but time and my brain insist that I go to bed now. I'll resume ranting some other time.

Karen

One of those cryptic postings I find frustrating as a reader

The world is treating me bad. Misery.


I can't tell you what's going on, but if you were to guess, you'd probably be in the neighborhood of being right. I can't ask your advice, and I can't expect your sympathy.

John is fine. My dad is presumably fine (and I must remember his birthday next week!). Tuffy is fine. The online world is fine.

To hear some people tell it, I'm not fine. They're not entirely wrong.

To say more would be to cross boundaries I've set for myself, so I won't.

Forgive me.

Karen

Listening to My Inner MAD

No, I'm not angry, and no more crazy than usual, thank you very much. But a few minutes ago, as I discarded, just for tonight, the ambitious post topic I've been turning over in my head this evening, I remembered a bit of advice on study tactics from MAD Magazine, circa 1965. My brain doesn't have the exact quote handy any more, except for the last six words. But the gist of it was this. The night before a test, you have two options. You can stay up all night and cram, and then be too sleepy to remember anything when the time comes to take the test. Or you can get a good night's sleep, and be wide awake the next day, ready to concentrate and remember all those facts you would have known had you "stayed up all night and crammed."

I'm not in school now, but the point seems relevant tonight anyway. As much as I absolutely have to get done this week - and trust me, the stress level at work is rapidly approaching "11" - I wasn't up for anything tonight except to buy and cook dinner, watch House, check my email and watch the Doctor Who story "The Christmas Invasion" for about the tenth time, along with some DVD extras. I didn't go back to the office; I didn't select photos for church; I didn't wash dishes. I didn't even edit John Scalzi's entry on Wikipedia, as I've been contemplating, except to remove someone's addition of an upcoming novel that doesn't exist. Personally, I hope he runs with the idea and writes it, but right now it's just a mock book cover someone made out of a truly outstanding photo Scalzi posted on Whatever. But I gather someone fooled someone else into thinking it was real, and that someone else announced the spurious book on Wikipedia.

But I digress. And that's rather the point. I got almost six hours of sleep last night, but coming off two nights in a row of three hours each, with a four hour nap in between, that's clearly not enough. I'm distracted and unmotivated, just when I need to be concentrating and powering my way through all this stuff I really need to get done. Part of that is my natural tendency to get "avoidy," to use a Buffyism, when faced with high pressure obligations. But mostly I think it's the sleep thing. Which is why I'm going to bed now. If I don't lie awake in bed, which has happened a lot lately, I've got a shot at very nearly eight hours of sleep.

Then I'll be awake tomorrow to face all the work I didn't get done tonight. Maybe this time I'll be able to concentrate, and get a lot more of it done than if I'd "stayed up all night and crammed."

Meanwhile, winter has returned to the Old Pueblo, just as I was starting to consider the possibility that for the first time ever (in my reckoning, anyway), that Pennsylvania groundhog was onto something. No it didn't snow, but it got chilly, and it rained, and my windshield is all covered with dusty dried raindrops. It's not dramatic like what's been happening in Ohio and Oswego, but it caught me off guard a little. If it gets really cold again by Tucson standards, I'll let you know.

Karen

Never Too Tired to Be Weird

Lines in the sky: cirrus clouds and power cables

I've been working on a crackpot theory. It's largely unprovable, irreproduceable, and possibly applicable only to me. It is this: there are states of exhaustion in which some kinds of work can be done only with extreme difficulty, while others are actually enhanced.

An actual purchase order itemizes time travel at $75.

Take tonight, for example. When I left work, I had reached the point at which my eyes focused on the screen only with great effort and the frequent application of water. My concentration by then was marginally better, but it was clearly time to go. I was exhausted!

Impressionist filter and other adulterations
show off an actual rayed light effect at dusk.

Yet I had no trouble seeing and photographing an odd pattern of light when I got home a few minutes later. The camera still has that noise issue for night shots (Julie, can you explain further?), but that's the camera's glitch, not mine.

Solarization and pointillism tools and I-forget-what-else produced this.

I then went shopping for light fixtures with John, intelligently discussed Valentine's Day, jazz, language shifts and other subjects over dinner, did some good work on the Wikipedia article about "The Unicorn in the Garden," explained to someone who withdrew an invitation to his fictional kingdom (after an equally fictional coup) that Mâvarin is also suffering political instability "due to certain romantic entanglements and the expected death of King Jor," read half of my email (mostly the AOL alerts), and did some truly wonky photo editing, as you can see on this page. I even contemplated typing up the beginning of the Jor and Fayubi scene in Messages, but I guess that can wait for tomorrow. Yes, I'm tired, and yes, my eyes hurt, but none of those activities were at all difficult. This level of tiredness seems to bring the subconscious closer to the surface than it normally is, so that creative thinking escapes into the conscious world that much more easily.

I have no idea why the raw image seemed full of raindrops. It
hasn't rained. All I did was lighten and adjust hues and saturation.

On the other hand, being exhausted is bad for the typing and proofreading skills. And beyond a certain point, the brain can't concentrate enough to do anything productive with the stray thoughts and ideas. When that happens, there isn't much you can do except a) load up on caffeine or b) go to bed.

Good night!

Karen

Karen's Fried Brain: a Recipe

Take one sleep-deprived human brain, female.
Add four hours of sleep.
Hit the snooze bar four times, but do not allow any additional sleep.
Add one Hershey's Kiss for breakfast.
Add one caffeine pill.
Add two ounces of diet cola, flat.
Fill with senseless numbers.
Place in ungreased frying pan.
Turn up the heat. Cook for 5 hours.
Add 1 chicken salad sandwich and 6 ounces of diet cola.
Increase heat. Cook for additional 6 hours.
Add two tablespoons of self-pity, and 1/4 cup guilt.
Mix thoroughly and pour into blog.
Season to taste. Serves two dozen.

(Alternate edit)

K.