My Amish Dad, Part Four: The Letter W.

Egad. Sometimes my dad solves his IT issues for himself. Sometimes his solutions just make me want to bang my head against a table!

My dad's computer at home is a Apple MacBook Pro, about three years or so old.

Dad: The "W" key on my computer fell off.
Me: Have you been writing George Bush's name too often?
Dad: No, it just fell off. But it's OK, I've fixed it now.
Me: [Somewhat dreading the answer I might get] Do I want to know how you fixed it?
Dad: Araldite!
Me: Araldite???
Dad: Yeah, there was a little plastic bit and a metal ring, so I glued it back on. And now it works again. Well mostly.
Me: What do you mean "mostly"?
Dad: Well, it stands up a bit from the other keys now.
Me: Does it at least create the letter "w" when you type on it???
Dad: Most of the time...

*slaps head*
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, my dad uses Araldite to fix everything. I remember when a shelf fell down in his old pantry years ago, and he somehow fashioned a huge lump of this stupid glue into a kind of structural member, holding two of the shelves together!

Baby City

Man, I thought I'd reached that certain age a few years ago - that age where all your friends start having babies. All that is but the committed dinks couples anyway.

But it seems there's another wave... Either I've made new friends or some folks just forgot about it till now. Two of my oldest friends - Julie and Dave, who I met at RMIT in 1994 (gah, that's seventeen years ago now!) are cooking a baby. The girlfriend Deb's brother and his wife are also pregnant. And then of course there's the newly created, three and a half week old Hamish. And my fifteen month old niece, who has started to walk and who's favourite game at the moment is bouncing on a bed. She also loves the "Incy Wincy Spider" song, trying valiantly to do the actions.

Hey, don't look at me! I ain't quite ready to go there yet. Soon, but no yet.

In support of this we have a pile of baby clothes here, mostly from said Niece, which we are about to deliver to various current and prospective parents. Some of the things are so cute, like the little pairs of shoes.

Damn Weird Dream

Lets see how much of this I can remember. I had this dream yesterday morning, so it's already fading fast.

Somehow, a peculiar deity (or cult or possibly both) had gotten a hold of me, and I had to show my loyalty with a small set of Lego pieces and a Lego baseboard. At regular intervals I was supposed to click the Lego blocks onto the baseboard in certain configurations - if I didn't, unspecified bad things would happen. I kept it by the window in my bedroom.

I resented this imposition after a while, and I started getting visits from two gentlemen in bowler hats and long raincoats, looking for all the world like they were from a Magritte painting. Their sole reprisal was to ask me why I wasn't doing the correct things with my Lego blocks...

Somehow the dream then moved on to a cafe somewhere, where there were a number of people who were possessed in some why. Not badly, or like zombies, just not themselves. Or themselves but modified somewhat. I was determined to work out what was going on, and quickly traced the cause. Not sure if this was the same cause as the Lego Deity mentioned above!

The thing that was possessing people was a glass jar. A very ordinary glass jar, media sized, with a missing screw top. Empty. The kind of thing you would have jam in. This jar, it turned out, had been possessing people for decades. It thought it was doing a good thing (er, it's not quite clear how it was explaining this to me...) since it only took hold of people who were at a low ebb, going through a rough patch. Damn, I thought, just like most religions!

I threatened to break the jar, and at that point all of the folks it had possessed started approaching me, a little bit menacingly but also a bit like they were about to mount a hug attack. I had a stern word with the jar, and it finally realised it had been doing a bad thing.

So as I walked along with it, it started to melt, starting from the screw top end. I held it upside down and flicked bits of it about as it melted. However, I discovered to my annoyance (that was all!) that all the people it had possessed were also melting!

What was that all about? I think I've been watching too much Doctor Who...