A Peculiar Blog

Do you dream in episode format? I’ve never heard of anyone else doing that.

I have had episodic dreams since I was ten. They’ve been continuing over the years. Each episode picks up where the previous one left off. Even if it’s months since the last one the next episode covers the time since then. In a very real way, I have two lives. One in the waking world and another that I’ve been living in dreams. Guess which one I prefer.

Over time various things about them change just as in “reality” I have changed over the years. However there is one constant. One person that is always in them.

Her name is Amanda, sometimes I call her Mandy. she is one class act from the word go. She could show up one day penniless wearing some cheap perfume and dressed in rags and still be pure class.

When I’m “awake” I find myself missing her terribly. Especially when there’s a month or three between the “dreams”. I have *NEVER* known anyone even remotely like her in “real life”. Nobody has ever understood me the way she does. Talking about this is literally like telling a whole life’s story and there’s times when the events of the so-called “real life” and those of the “dream life” can blur together.

Part of the reason that can happen is that we talk about what happens in “real life”. You see, when I’m with her, THIS is the dream (usually a nightmare to be blunt). Anyway, we talk about the stuff that happens on this side of the dream. She’s fantastic about that, she’s never doubted how real it seemed to me. Probably beause she also sometimes has very real-seeming dreams about another life, which we also talk about.

As I said, we met when I was around ten years old. She was a lot like me, a loner, kind of apart from most people, never quite fitting in with so-called “normal” people. Like me, kids gave her a lot of crap in school. We understood each other a lot. We laughed at each other’s jokes, like me she loved science fiction books and movies. While we shared interest in a lot of things, in spite of what you may think, we did have our differences.

She liked Top-40 music and I couldn’t stand most of it. She loves to dance and I always had two left feet and so on. I think our differences were just enough in just the right ways to bring us closer together over time.

We went though the rough times of our teenage years together and when we were 19, we got married. Yeah, I know, In “real life” when I was 19 I was a LONG way from even being close to almost ready to even think about marriage (I also didn’t have a girlfriend, let alone the ultimate girlfriend from heaven Amanda was). However in the dream things were different. We’d been in love for years and we had just kind of always known we’d be together that way.

Anyway, we’d gotten married. In 1979 when we were 19 we decided to pack up our things and start our new life together fresh in a new city. We were in love but we were also too clueless for words. We had no idea how difficult things could get (though we found out really fast). Our first apartment was a dingy little two room third floor walk up in East St. Louis. We both agreed that the only really cool part of it was that we could see the Gateway Arch from our bedroom window.

We ran out of money not long after paying the first month’s rent on that hole we lived in. We both got jobs in local food places. I slaved away in a McDonald’s making burgers while she waited tables in a small mom & pop restaurant. Niether of us made much money but the two of us together, along with her tips, managed to get by.

We didn’t live fancy at all. We never had much more than just enough to pay the bills and keep ourselves fed and clothed. For us, a weekly “night out on the town” consisted of going to someplace cheap (that neither of us worked at), having a meal that cost maybe five or six bucks tops for the both of us, and then just walking around for a few hours talking.

In a way in spite of our poverty it was perfect. We had what we needed which for the most part was each other. We could talk about anything. We found humor in all kinds of things. Many of which had people looking at us like we were lunatics from Mars.

We lived there for almost a year. Then I was looking in the paper for better jobs (we both did that pretty often.) when I saw a listing for a factory job. It paid almost twice what I was getting at Micky D’s but the thing is it was quite a ways away on the other side of the river on the west side of St. Louis. We talked about it and agreed I should go for it. Just in case I got the job we started looking for a place in that area. It wasn’t easy because the rent was higher there. Then I got a call, the job was mine and I started the next Monday.

That gave us like four days. We scrambled like crazy, selling everything we didn’t absolutely need and borrowing from friends to get the money to take the first apartment we could afford. Times got really lean for a couple of months there. I had the new job that paid better but she had to find a new one. Then we had to pay back a bit over three hundred bucks to people that’d helped us move.

Then about six months later when I came home from work one day, she told me something that changed our lives forever.

She was pregnant.

This is not a joke

So here I was, busily working away at a rapidly approaching deadline when Ralph comes waltzing into my office. I have two things to say about that right off.

First, he was literally waltzing his way in. He’s done that kind of thing for a long time now. He doesn’t just walk anywhere. He waltzes.

Second, I really need to come up with some secure locks. I keep my doors locked specifically because of these kinds of interruptions yet they don’t seem to stop anybody around here. Usually when i go to check, the doors are locked just like I had left them.

After all that I found out that he was here to complain that his insurance agent insisted that he had to have general liability insurance on his car because of the state law that requires auto insurance. He said that he didn’t mind getting insurance but that he didn’t want to go all fancy and expensive with general liability. He preferred something like captain liability or corporal liability because they couldn’t possibly cost as much.

It took me twenty minutes of my valuable and rapidly vanishing time to convince him that “general” liability just meant that it was basic coverage and that there were no other “ranks” of liability insurance. All he had to tell his agent was that he wanted state required minimum.

And people wonder why I’m thinking of moving out of Nutjob Hills.

The “dream system” I’ve been building (or trying to build) in on at least a temporary hold.

I did some more testing today, trying various configurations as well as clearing the CMOS memory. The result is that either the job I did of replacing those capacitors was borked or (this is most likely) the board is just plain dead on arrival because of the beating it took during shipping.

Well tonight now that the heatsink compound had arrived and started the build of my new system.

I got the whole thing put together. (I even recorded a video of the build which is rendering as I write this).

As I’ve said before it’s a really good system. A good ASUS motherboard, Nvidea graphics, a total of eight gigabytes of RAM and a two terabyte hard drive.

The only problem is that after finishing the build and powering it on nothing showed up on my monitor except the message that it’s not getting a signal from the GPU.

As you can imagine I’m ready to scream right about now.

No way could I have been able to get a computer with as much potential if I’d had to save up for a Retail System. For one thing it would have taken me at least another year and by then whatever I would have gotten would have been obsolete by the time I could afford it.

This system has the promise of being at least reasonably modern and definitely will, once it’s finally working, be powerful enough to let me do a lot of really cool stuff.

At the moment however it’s a brick.

For something over twenty years now I’ve wanted to be able to build a really fast and powerful desktop computer. Something that would be able to handle any task I can throw at it from video editing to 3D modeling with Blender to running games like Minecraft at full render distance and fancy graphics without lag or performance problems.

It’s finally starting to happen. It started when somebody I know on YouTube upgraded his system not long ago and decided to send me the still perfectly good parts that he is no longer using.

An Asus P5N-e SLi Motherboard, a Intel Core2Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU and four sticks of 1 GB Kingston HyperX PC2 6400 DDR2 800MHz ram.

I took the time to look up the specs on this stuff and I was thoroughly impressed. This is some pretty good stuff, capable of quite a bit.

There was a wierd quirky delay in shipping because for some reason the Danish post office sent it to Arkansas by way of Argentina. I had actually figured that it would probably be lost in Argentina’s postal system for a long time (if not forever). Then just about a week ago I was pleasantly surprised by it’s arrival.

For some time now I’d been trying to keep some money stashed away for the purpose of eventually getting the stuff I wanted to build that dream system. I took that money and used it to get a few things:

An 850 Watt 850W 120mm Fan ATX Power Supply with SLI-ready PCI-Express SATA 20/24 PIN connectors, A socket 775 Cpu Fan, Windows 7 Professional SP1 64bit to take full advantage of the 64bit architecture of the CPU & Motherboard (which I plan to dual-boot with the 64bit version of Kubuntu Linux), and a Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TERABYTE Hard Drive (which has more than twice the combined capacity of every other hard drive I have EVER owned!)

I was looking around at graphics cards when another person offered me an Nvidea GTX 295 (I checked the specs on this too, a VERY capable GPU) that was “sitting in a box on the shelf” and a third person, after looking at a list of stuff I’ve already got, said that the 17 inch VGA monitor simply would not do and is sending a 19inch Dell flat LCD display.

As of today the power supply, CPU heatsink & fan, Windows 7 and 2TB hard drive have arrived. Once the last things are here I’m going to take an afternoon and actually build the best computer system I’ve ever owned.

Who says good things don’t happen spontaneously?