"By the black pearl the woman is still standing, looking far down the street to where the buildings come together at the horizon."
"I had my eyes closed. My hand was on the smooth stone; it felt cold under my fingers."
"He and Jenny will be coming back in August. Last night they walked together on the beach for a long time. I heard them come in after I was in bed. They were laughing quietly, I think."
"The sky is a luminous grey. The shapes of the world are impossibly complex; reality cannot be captured. I still long, there is still longing, for death and its sweet surcease."
"Kindness, she told me, is a sign of fatigue. She was sitting in a worn red armchair, in a long limp skirt and an old sweater."
"He cannot account for how he feels when he sees her, or knows that she is nearby. It would be impossibly wrong to call it love, or to call it anything else."
"She came home from the zoo smiling as she had not smiled in a long time. For three hours, she had done nothing but watch the lion, far off in the grass, lying on a rock in the sun and, every so often, roaring a deep rumbling roar to itself, daydreaming."
"When I got to the peak, I found that someone had arranged the stones, the small stones and the heavy round rocks, in an elaborate abstract pattern, like a seashell or an ear, curves coiling numinously back on themselves, spread out under the sky. I went off a little to the side to have my lunch."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Hello."
"Lovely to see you, as always."
A reader points to a very notable "21st century, pan-cultural koan: [link]".
Joel on Software exhibits considerable clue about Customer Service. One always hopes that people like this thrive.
In Second Life news (yay!), I won a lovely investigative reporter at a charity auction (and got mentioned in her weblog). Well, okay, I won a "date" with her; same idea. *8)
Haven't actually gone on the date yet, and not sure just what we'll do given that we're both happily married and not looking for mates. Maybe go waltzing somewhere, or explore the jungles, or fly around Platonically in UFOs or something.
Speaking of exploring and UFOs, I was wandering around in Caledon the other day, and when I looked in under the ground to see about basements and stuff I noticed a biplane quite a bit below the surface. "Neat," I thought, "someone's lost an aeroplane, maybe I can return it to them".
Imagine my surprise when, on zooming my camera down there, I found that the craft was occupied! (The tiny figure top-center is me, way up at sea level standing on the beach.) I IM'd the occupant but got no response at first. Some time later he replied, saying that he was having considerable trouble with SL that night. No wonder, given that he was in an aeroplane buried dozens of metres under the sea off the coast of Caledon!
In random other news, I think I'm finally completely over the replicator infection (touch wood some more), the little daughter is having a great time in Spain (and the teachers have been sending daily emails with digital pictures 'cause it's the XXIst Century 'n' all), I've been getting a litte more sleep, and it's cold outside. I've downgraded my Audible subscription to the ten-dollar-a-year plan (to partly make up for my Second Life land-tier fees hee hee), I still can't smell things, I still love chocolate, various numbers are still prime, and the stacks of books by the bed continue teetering and occasionally toppling over messily.
And I've posted in my weblog twice this week! *8)
How are you?
A reader writes:
"nothing very bad would happen?" What about having your liver eaten by eagles?
Hm, yeah, there is that. I seem to have escaped so far, so no one rat on me, eh?
Thou hast broken thy tacit vow. Mighty Unu demands updates bi-weekly! Repent oh red-haired one, for His wrath is swift and awesome!
O Mighty Unu, I repent! In some sense! (Like those politicians who say "I take full responsibility", while actually meaning nothing whatever.)
I was going to post more this week, I promise! But on Monday some replicator took hold in my body here, and I spent much of Monday and Tuesday afternoon, and pretty much all day on Wednesday (modulo some snowblowing) lying in bed more or less asleep. This was very effective against the replicator, but didn't do much for weblogging (or "work").
And lying in bed doing nothing is very nice in itself. *8)
Another reader writes:
broken kroans
Sadly, we have only broken koans. Haven't posted more of those in aeons, have we?
Not spending quite so much time in Second Life (and not I don't think only because we've been asleep so much). Just as a snapshot of where we are: logged on yesterday evening, did a little inventory sorting, followed a Group Notice to a nice little live music venue and listened to a guitar player for awhile (who was actually performing in his RL studio or something and streaming the sound into SL), accepted a TP invitation to a dance-party at the opening of a club / gallery belonging to a friend of a friend, after dancing and chatting and looking at the art there for awhile accepted another TP invitation to a "Boudoir show" on Caledon (the Victorian area) which was very nice (artsy Victorian-style pictures of attractive simulated persons in their underthings), after talking to the folks there and looking at the art for awhile accepted another invitation by another friend to come and look at her house (she has no land, but she got a huge house somewhere and once in awhile rezzes it above some build-enabled but idle-looking land just for fun), then went dancing with her at a jazz club (where we also had soup; one of the few places in SL I've found that actually has 'food'), said goodnight, did a little more inventory sorting and Lucky Chairing (the opposite of inventory sorting hee hee), and then finally logged out and went to sleep.
And interspersed in all of that, IM discussions of scripting with a couple of people I've been writing scripts for in exchange for shoes and art and eyes and stuff, and on the general Scripters of Second Life group IM channel, as well as random IM chatter with friends.
So that's that. *8)
(Oh yeah, and we were a girl pretty much all of that time, heh heh. Being a girl is phun.)
Couple of random SL links for the day: Cubey Terra (who does really cool vehicles of various kinds), and Second Life Games (a weblog about games within SL).
Thing that I want to try to remember to build in SL o' the Day: a little shrine to the Goddess.
In RL news, I'm reticent as always to talk about family stuff in any detail, but I will mention that (a) the little daughter is going to have to start working seriously on college stuff soon, which stresses the heck out of me for some reason, and (b) she's going on a trip to Spain next week which is stressful in pretty much completely different ways. (The little boy gets to be an Only Child for a week, heh heh.)
And also: it's real cold!!
