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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 23 December 2004 (Day View)

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23.12.2004 – Thursday 23 December – Cooktown & Flying Ants

Afternoon

• According to my journal, I didn’t get to bed until just after six o’clock this morning, which could explain why I didn’t feel remarkably joyful when Mum woke me up and said she was going to town as soon as possible. The trip itself was uneventful, apart from when the mudflap fell partially off, became stuck in the tyre, made terrible noises, and I had to pry it free with a long pointy screwdriver. I met Rachel and Andrew at the Mad Cow, both of who are now in the army, and had a chat for a while. I was asked to help reinstall one of the supermarket’s point-of-sale terminals, after its hard drive crashed. This seemed a bad idea to me at the time, particularly after the man who was supposed to be installing it mentioned that DOS seemed to have a problem connecting to the graphics device, and lacking the profit drive required to enthuse me in such a challenge, I left it to him. I also did not think that risking bringing their entire system down on what’s possibly their busiest day of the year was an extraordinarily good idea.

Evening

• I nearly didn’t go for a walk because it’s a bit wet, and I’d had a rather large milkshake in town, but I did. I should have stayed home. The walk out was without incident, as was most of the walk back. It seems there’s something about the last stretch before the Home Rule Bridge. I used to think it was just psychological – something to do with being the last canopy covered section (and hence dark) before the open road and on the “wrong” side of the bridge, but I am beginning to wonder. Tonight, as I was walking back through the gathering gloom, I walked straight into a swarm of flying ants. Flying ants aren’t the world’s most intelligent creatures. In fact, they’re probably on a par with Tasmanians, although perhaps not blonde ones. Anyway, me being all hot and sweaty, their wings all stuck to me. Flying ants are actually normal ants, plus detachable wings – wings that detach when they’re stuck to a sweaty chest, back, arm, cheek, nose, etc. This leaves normal ants, which crawl and bite. Fortunately for me, I was only minutes from the Home Rule Bridge where I could jump into the water, which might have been romantic under different circumstances – the moon reflecting off the quietly flowing water, while all around was silent. Under the circumstances though, it was icy cold, dark, I was covered in dying flying ants, and anything could have been lurking under the water. Then, as I was huddling my cold, wet and dripping self home from the creek, another flying ant flew into my eye, which promptly closed. This annoyed the poor little ant, who thoughtfully bit my eye to let me know it was there, before burrowing under my eyelid, leaving its wings lodged everywhere else. Something about having large portions of wildlife lodged in ones eye socket triggers a primordial sort of instinct – logic departs, and wildlife must be removed from eye socket with utmost haste, preferably without removing eyeball itself.

Who is Robin Hely?

• I had a chat to one of Neurocam’s operatives, and unmasked much of the mystery that had intrigued me last night.

Night

• Bronwen and I solved a few of the world’s more pressing problems, including such questions as “why?”, and “but why?”, along with more traditional dilemmas such as creationism vs. evolution vs. Erich von Däniken and how to hold a phone for nearly five hours without losing contact with your limbs. Then I decided to temporarily block my Peace and Protection site until my bandwidth accounting problem can be sorted out, found a 101 MB core dump filling up my web-space, searched for other core dumps but couldn’t find any, had apache shut down somehow resetting half my hit counters just as I was attempting to upload my modification, leading me to assume that Windows had broken everything while searching for core dumps, panicked, discovered the truth on my host’s forum (and to think some people travel all the way to the Himalayas), noticed flying ants beginning to invade, and went to bed, but not before using many commas in a rather long sentence.

Comment by sef – Friday 24 December 2004, 3:52 PM

  Are all your pets named Erich?
  
  Considering Däniken's infamous feline theory how can you even consider that evolution rubbish?

Comment by Ned – Friday 24 December 2004, 4:00 PM

  I don’t consider that evolution rubbish, except to convince other people of its absurdity. As for cats, haven’t you seen the movie “Cats and Dogs”? The future casts a shadow my friend.