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ambien and spirits
Wednesday, September 14 2016
I felt a little foggy this morning from having awaken in the night and then staying up at my computer, drinking a beer while waiting for 10mg of ambien to kick in. I have a theory for why inanimate objects around me start subconsciously seeming like benign animate (and possibly even human) companions while I'm under the influence of ambien. I suspect that it takes real mental effort to know that objects in our environment are inanimate. But once something is done to weaken the power of the mind (and ambien definitely does that), it becomes harder and harder to sustain that effort. And so the world around me becomes alive, much as it must've seemed back in primitive times before human cultures began accumulating and passing on the fundamentals of science (such as they were).
Meanwhile, doses of Advantage placed on all the cats yesterday seemes to have destroyed all the non-human sources of blood in our house for the remaining flea population. Today Gretchen complained about flea bites for the first time in this entire infestation, and announced she would once more be deploying an anti-flea fogger in the bedroom. But that has still not happened.
Meanwhile, we're still reorganizing our furniture to account for yesterday's influx. I've got a new chest of drawers, and, while there's more overall volume for storing clothes, the drawers themselves are actually smaller. This means I will have to segment my clothing differently (for example, no longer storing my shorts with my teeshirts). My old chest of drawers has been moved out to the teevee room, where there is a lot of under-utilized space in places where the sloping ceiling limits headroom. Gretchen will be storing her overflow winter clothes there instead of in the basement; they'd had a tendency to get a bit moldy over the summers.
Gretchen's parents had asked me to rip a BBC performance of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream from a live webcast and then burn it to a DVD so they could watch it at their leisure. But between the low-bandwidth of our broadband and the flaky nature of video ripping technology, it was easier just to get the performance off Bittorrent. Once I had that, I had a HD video file. I hadn't actually ripped video to DVD in many years, since DVD is, to me at least, as quaint of a technology as cassette tape. Doing some research, I found that there is Windows program called Movie Maker that can do that, but it wasn't on my computer, and, though one is supposed to be able to just download it from Microsoft's website, I couldn't actually find a download link anywhere. Microsoft has an infuriating habit of burying download links behind layers of wordy pages with headers like "About Blah Blah Blah." When I'm looking for a download link, I never want to read anything, I just want it to be obvious. It was so not-obvious on the Microsoft site that I eventually gave up and downloaded a different program, one called DVDFlick. But that took over ten hours to process my 5 gigabyte .mp4 file, and the result (of course) was SD, not HD video. I should've just explained to my inlaws that DVDs suck and given them a thumb drive with the file. (Most modern televisions allow you to play media directly from USB devices.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
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