Aw Diddums

Mood: Smiling
Listening to: Ghostly music - rather faint and far away

As you might guess, I have 'special occasion' wallpapers which are only trotted out on my desktop when the time is right. Last night I was sorting through my Halloween folder to make sure all the Halloweeny pictures were lined up in the right place and ready to roll.

You begin with the clear guidelines of "bats, witches, pumpkins, ghouls, guisers, cobwebs etc", and find yourself adding sinister fractals with dark backgrounds, ghastly supernovas, dragons, dinosaurs, perfectly respectable owls, spiders minding their own business, Damocles's sword, the shark from Finding Nemo, octopuses, very dark and foggy landscapes, seascapes with predators lurking in their opaque depths, moody forests, fiery sunsets with a hint of menace to them, scudding clouds and forks of lightning, castles and fortresses, howling wolves, many scenes dominated by the moon (depending on the general atmosphere) and anything with a black cat - just because. You even add the Terminator and the Tuxedo... how else would cheerful Jackie Chan end up in a Halloween folder? Though it's reassuring to know he's in there... just in case.

"Anything that chills or scares me, or seems even slightly supernatural," I thought. "Hmm."

It seems it's not just me who does that. In town today I was looking at Halloween displays in the charity shops. Many added anything that could be considered mythical or scary, such as Shrek and his mule, Gollum's head, a framed Disney poster that had nothing to do with Halloween (it had Mickey Mouse in it - nuff said), dinosaurs (again), and models of alien monsters. One shop saw an opportunity to push their sales of videos; those had been placed very close to the Halloween display as though to suggest "why not have a nice evening in watching TV?"

In one shop window when I stopped and looked in, all the usual was to be found there - conkers, toadstools, bears dressed as little devils with pitchforks, pumpkins, plastic or rubber skeletons, rubber spiders, a copy of The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy, children's wizard outfits... and a tiny Furby baby.

Odd what spooks some folks...

Mood: Pale
Listening to: Droning tinnitus

I'm still feeling very disconnected, and it all started with the editing work. I was rattling along in full flow, getting on with things (redecorating the house mostly), then the editing task arrived, and I came to an abrupt halt. I'm waiting for more that I've been told is on the way, but it's been silent.

I feel somehow as though I've no resources left, and that's daft - but I think the kind of resources I'm groping for are motivation and optimism. It's sort of, "what's the point?" Again.

I wonder if playing with the desktop wallpapers is a method of escape, but I can only take that so far - I eventually run into rock (gloopy Bryce 3D rock). All evening I've been feeling sick, and it's nothing I can figure out. It's rather like earlier today, when I was in Superdrug. I bought something at the till, and was turning away thoughtfully - but Mum said something, so I forgot what it was. I just knew my heart had dropped into my boots for some reason - and just because I couldn't remember why, that didn't mean it had hauled itself back to where it was meant to be.

Then I remembered again - the guy at the till had asked for the total, and I looked round automatically for the little screen that shows the total to the customer. And there wasn't one. Or rather there was, but if I remember right, all it said was "thank you for your custom." This is happening more and more frequently - the shops switch to the computerized tills, and the little screen vanishes. I depend on it as I don't usually hear how much the assistant is asking for.

I thought we were supposed to be progressing, not going back to the Stone Age? I thought our options were set to increase? Sometimes life is an uphill task - people around you making sweeping changes without checking with you first. I know we all have different needs and priorities, but... sometimes it just gets to you.

I feel like saying, "No, I don't want to have to deal with this. Just change it back!"
The 'sick' feeling is because you know they won't.

Mood: Fuzzy-headed
Listening to: Tapping of keys

I woke up this morning to find a whole bunch of comments at the wallpaper site, and have been added to someone's list of friends, which means they want to be notified when I post my 'works of art'. Heh - I wonder what I was grumbling about last night.

As for other types of wallpaper...

It's awful working on a house. The more you do, the more needs to be done. If you start out just freshening the hall, the other rooms look dingy in comparison and you end up doing them as well. Then you decide it would be a good idea to have a lock on the inner porch door, and the new door handle exposes a patch of unvarnished wood. Or you put one of those draught-excluding brush strips along the bottom of the kitchen door (to keep the slugs out) and that needs to be painted because it's raw wood. Or maybe we'll just let the slugs varnish it.

And so it goes on.

We were going to keep my hall lino, but one thing led to another, and we ended up chucking it out. We've been looking at carpets and linos, tending towards lino again. We were in the carpet shop yesterday (the one where I left my notepad behind) and I was expecting a lovely time browsing around for some exciting brand new flooring... instead, the selection of carpets was incredibly dull. You could have cream, sand, coffee or chocolate. Or chocolate, coffee, sand or cream. Plain or speckled. Maybe a pinkish mushroom if you're lucky. I got very excited when I spotted a flash of green, but closer inspection revealed it to be a carpet's backing. Sad times when the backing looks better than the carpet.

I didn't say anything to Mum, but she turned round and said exactly what I'd been thinking. "What a boring selection! In fact I would hardly even call it a choice! The thing is.... this is what sells."

I found myself getting angry at the thought... that I would have to buy carpet that I find boring simply because it's what everybody else likes.

"It's the fault of all those property programmes," I said. "They keep drumming into people, almost as a religion, that everything has to be neutral."

What happened to the pale blues and golds? The gentle floral designs? Something nice and modern and muted, but not plain beige?

I did read a couple of housekeeping magazines recently saying that "pattern is back". The wallpaper vendors seem to have understood that - suddenly there's a rash of those black and white floral papers and curtains - but the carpet people are lagging behind the times. Unless it's a case of getting plain carpets to offset the fancy wallpaper - that's possible, I suppose. But they still only have them in various shades of mud.

The choice of lino was much more interesting. But we'll see.

Mood: Slightly on edge
Listening to: Mum's house muttering to itself

I don't know why, but my comma keeps eluding me today. I keep trying to include it in everything I type, and it just oozes away and says "not today, thanks, I have a headache." GET IN THERE. "Alright, alright, take it easy, can't you?" Maybe I'm just typing too fast, stabbing at the keys.

Earlier I said to Mum that younger people (myself included in those long-ago days! heh) tend to take things too seriously - sort of "this is all such a big deal!"

Mum said wisely, "do you know what my granny used to say?"

I waited breathlessly, as this great grandmother is such a shadowy figure to me - I've seen a photo of her in a long winter coat and a dark hat, looking away as though to check the door was locked. That's all I really know about her. What sort of things did she think?

"It will all be the same in a hundred years."

I rocked on my feet, thinking "but that's what I say! I had no idea it was my great-grandmother's expression." Why stop there? Maybe it was her expression because it was something HER great-grandmother used to say, day in and day out till folk were sick and tired of it. But it's true.

Moving on...

The other day I was looking through my wallpaper site and there was a message to say one of the other fractalists had died. It wasn't anybody I had spoken to, though I seem to remember getting a message from her in answer to one of mine, but maybe I'm getting her confused with someone else... sigh. How can I not know? These little things turn to mud in my mind after a matter of weeks, when in my teens or early twenties I would have been absolutely crystal clear on that point.

She had very distinctive wallpapers, anyway, and I had some of them in my 'favourites' gallery. It took me by surprise how shocked I felt about it, especially as she was only a couple of years older than me.

Could this be my fate? You never know. Perhaps I'll be one of the early departed, and I'm not that sure it would be such a tragedy! You'll all be rushing to see what I said on my blog, and my every word will be worth its weight in gold.

Anyway, I don't mean to be flippant, as flippant wasn't how I was feeling. When I read about it, all of the sudden the silence seemed to stretch and become heavy, and I found myself leaping up to put my little hi-fi on. I needed some life around the place. I'd been going to have some fun making some fractals and there I was, surrounded by whispering shadows.

Later I went to her gallery to look through her wallpapers again, and got a few more - there were some lovely ones that I'm amazed I missed on previous visits. I chided myself for not paying more attention. And suddenly, as those wallpapers show up on my monitor, it feels as though she's not so far away. Tonight I posted something on the site I thought was pretty good. One of my regular visitors said "that's lovely!" and then it all fell quiet, so I felt rather flat. Then one of the other girl's wallpapers showed up on my monitor. I thought, "she would have known what that felt like, too," and felt completely comforted.

Mood: Happy - just found an After Eight on my desk
Listening to: Ghostly song in my head: 'Wandering Star' by Lee Marvin

My goodness me - Blogigo is back. I was starting to think it (and my blog) had gone forever.

Snide remarks aside, my spirits have a tendency to lift when any search for Blogigo turns into a white vacuum with yellow warning triangles saying "not found". It makes me wonder - hope - that some of the old problems have been ironed out.

This is what I was going to put up on my blog over a day ago:

We had too much stuff in our store cupboards, so I dug out every single tin I could find, and lined them up in order of 'best before' date. Mum's cat Cheeky came and watched me disapprovingly, as though to say "well - are you or are you not going to eat it?"

We had 97 tins, ranging from May 2001 to some time in 2012. (The longer lasting tins were predominantly corned beef and tuna).

Only 7 were out of date, including two tins of golden syrup (ending in years 2001 and 2002), one of Carnation milk, two of chicken tikka, and two - which I suspect came from my house - of peeled plum tomatoes.

In the edible collection, we had 23 tins of cat food, 46 tins of human food, and 21 tins of either/or food (tuna and salmon). Well, that was earlier - we have now eaten the ratatouille, so we're one tin down.

89 tins to go.

Mood: Happy - just found a half-eaten Mars Bar on my desk
Listening to: 'American Pie' by Don McLean

After visiting Planet Zog on business, I seem to go through a severe backlash, disappearing off to Planet Diddums to play. It was so quiet up here that Mum appeared in the doorway looking disgruntled, and said "I thought you'd died."

I was lost in my own little world, exploring fractals. I've already tried Tierazon, Fractality, Xaos, Chaoscope and Fractal Explorer with varying degrees of success. Now I'm sucked deep into the vortex of Apophysis v. 2.06. beta.

No wonder I feel giddy.


The thing starts up with 100 random fractals (randomly generated, not randomly chosen from a library). I didn't get the distinction at first; I thought they were samples of other people's artwork, though some seemed pretty spartan... I assumed they were there to display what different effects and shapes could be achieved. When I discovered from some tutorials that they were untouched by human hand, I was both awestruck and horrified. I feel it's my duty to go through each of those one hundred fractals to make sure I don't lose a beauty from the world. It also causes me to think, uneasily, that every minute not spent checking lists of random fractals is a minute wasted.

On the other hand, every one I save is a bonus - if I had never tried Apophysis, all those fractals squirrelled away into my hard drive might never have appeared to mortal eye. Is this why I was born??

Then I spent ages collecting, creating and organizing gradients. A long while ago I was delighted to discover that Paintshop Pro gradients could be used in Photoshop Elements, some of them based on favourite gradients I created in ClarisWorks, way, way back in the mists of time. I probably used the eyedropper tool to save those ancient shades - it's the best invention since sliced bread.

Now I find I can use all those gradients in Apophysis, though through a rather laborious process. In fact I can use photos and pictures to generate brand new gradients in Apop. This sounded such fun I trotted off and opened up lots of my pictures for Apop to chew over. My bears, fractals, books, even a screenshot of my blog... everything was grist for its mill.

This went on for a number of days, and then I made a discovery that stopped me in my tracks. ALL those gradients were automatically saved into a file called smooth.ugr - not just the ones I saved myself into a file of my own. So now I had one file full of hundreds of gradients, both wanted and unwanted, and another file containing many duplicates.

Most of you would think "fine, I've got the gradients I want" and delete one file or the other, but my brain doesn't work like that... I'm the one who feels obliged to rescue all the poor little fractals, and now I had these unique gradients clamouring for a good home. I couldn't recreate any of them - if I opened the same picture again to be processed, the results were somehow different - I accidentally overwrote a few nice gradients because I didn't realize that.

Then I realized something else - and a frisson of horror tingled down my spine. If I were to accidentally process a picture I'd already processed weeks or months before, I might be destroying a favourite gradient, possibly even affecting the saved parameters of completed fractals. I might be wrong about this, but anything seemed possible all of a sudden. The only way to be sure of avoiding that was to save them myself as I had been doing - with different names to a different file. While I was at it, they should be organized into separate files with names such as didsphotos.ugr, didsabstracts.ugr, didsscreenshots.ugr, didsPSPgradients.ugr etc. Just so I could search the gradients by source and not overstretch any one file. In other words, don't put all your colour schemes in one basket.

It sounds a quick and simple process; normally you drag and drop the files into organized folders, but Apop gradients do not work like that. As far as I know at this stage, the only way to get one gradient into another file is to save a copy into the new file and then delete the original gradient from the old one. Or maybe duplicate the files many times over and...

Anyway, that's why Mum thought I'd fallen off my perch. I was saving millions of computer pixels from eternal oblivion.

Mood: More alert
Listening to: Ghost song in my head: 'Seasons in the Sun'

I've been busy editing - that's not an excuse, it's a reason. It disrupts the chain of thought and leaves little room for anything else. I did try writing this a few days in, but didn't have time to post it.

---

"Will you be finished tonight?" enquired M.
"Only if the next report is a short little one," I said.
I opened it up and it had 60 pages, largely complex tables and forms. I tried updating the Table of Contents, just in passing, and Word froze up and had to be force-quitted.

I went all the way to Planet Zog and now I'm forcing myself home for a visit. All around me: clouds. can you see them? They're a bit white - not black and heavy. I'm deeply absorbed in editing and it's quite frightening. I'm vaguely aware I'm at my computer desk at Mum's, but it's the desk I used so much at home that I feel I'm back there in the little pink room at the corner by the fuchsia bush. The curtains were wide open and it was dark, and I thought - it was more a subconscious 'seep' than a thought - that all the neighbours and passers by would see me working there unless I broke off to close the drapes. Eventually I glanced up, and outside the long window were just treetops. Oh yes. No people.

Sometimes I believe I'm alone in the house and am disturbed to hear Mum's footfall in the background - even though she's been there all along and I knew about it. If she comes in, I'm not quite sure what she might be coming to talk to me about or if I'll be able to rally enough to pay attention, and the confusion throws my stomach into turmoil.

When I'm working, I don't know what time it is or where I am; I've forgotten to walk the dog next door, put the washing out, get food, watch The Eggheads (the clock has ticked on past). And when I do drag myself down to eat and watch The Eggheads, my thoughts are so much elsewhere I can barely comprehend what the questions are.

I woke up enough to observe CJ - I don't know what to make of him. I like him, and at the same time not really. I think he would be constantly shocked at my ignorance. I woke up even more when someone (not an Egghead) said Paddington was the Bear with Very Little Brain. In the very next quiz (or maybe the one after that) somebody said she had no interest in children's books - and suggested Mildred Hubble was from A Little Princess (I'm not sure I'm remembering right so it might have been another book - certainly not The Worst Witch).

I remarked to Mum that folk don't understand why I still read children's books, then they sail off to quizzes and are stumped when presented with questions every three-year-old knows the answer to. But now I'm as superior as CJ. I would be every bit as lost if asked about Eastenders or Coronation Street.

Sharky says he misses me. He come over from the sofa at the back of the room and paws me with increasing desperation. He says I'm not quite all there and he can't talk to me any more.

I need to sleep now, though things are just as bad there. Half asleep, I think about the sofa I'm lying on and the layout of the sitting room, then realize it's a proper bed, in a small bedroom upstairs. I'm still not where I think I am.

Just rolling over and going to sleep in that state of confusion is not good, and I need to get back in touch with the here and now. Hence the scrawled blog post at 2 a.m.