Travelin' Dog

So we've taken the dog on a road trip. He's riding with us in the van, and -- very sensibly -- he spends a fair amount of the travel time asleep on the floor. However, at one point we stop for a restroom/switch drivers break, meaning that Beautiful Wife and I go inside the rest stop while Secondborn and Crotchstomper remain in the van. 

I come back out first, and find that Crotchstomper has moved up from the center of the van to the passenger seat. Like, he's literally just standing there on the front passenger seat looking out the windows. Which is not okay, but it's kind of  okay because it's my turn to drive anyway. So I open the driver's side door, climb in, and give him the standard command for this: "Crotchstomper! Back! Get back! Back in the back!" 

He turns as if to go back to his spot... and then makes a full 360 and plants his butt so that he is now sitting in the passenger seat and looking forward, much as I have been doing for the last several hours. 

"I have an idea," says Secondborn, and goes to open the door. 

"Wait," I tell him. "Leave it. Your mom needs to see this." 

So Beautiful Wife returns to the van to find her loving husband ready to take over the driving, and her loving doggo ready to take over the passengering. Clearly, she is going to have to curl up on the blanket in the middle of the van; there's nothing else for it. 

"Crotchstomper," she says patiently, opening the passenger door, "Come on. Hop down." 

He obligingly exits the vehicle, and she closed the door behind him and the guides him back in through the side door. Anything to reclaim her seat, I guess...

Anyway, the dog has developed very definite ideas about how to travel in the van. 

Weird Dreams and Life Situations

More weird dreams this week, which is probably a good thing in that it indicates that I'm sleeping deeply and well enough to A) actually dream, and B) remember it afterwards. This is a distinct improvement over the majority of the last few years. (Seriously, if you take a look at the Dreams tag on the blog, you can see it in the way the dates are distributed. I've had several entries since I changed jobs; the last entry before that was back in March of 2023; then it jumps back to December of 2021; and if you keep scrolling down you'll find that I was having -- and blogging -- lots of weird, very narrative dreams right up until about the end of 2016.)

It's nice to have that back, even if the current crop are a bit troubled in tone. 

In the first dream, I (along with some of my friends) was playing D&D in some sort of Dimension 20-ish format, which was naturally complicated by the fact that I've essentially never watched that show. In the dream, we were all comfortably familiar with the D&D elements, but there were some cues and codes for the show format that none of us knew at all. Which... yeah, been feeling that way in real life a lot lately, so it's pretty understandable that my brain would reproduce that mood in a dream. 

The second dream involved being on a farm road sort of... facing off with a couple of truck drivers who were being pugnacious and recalcitrant about sharing the road. At one point they actually sort of drove over us -- not, like, to crush our care but so that the top of our roof was scraping across the underside of their flatbed. I wound up trying to chase them down and get a photo of their license plate so I could report them. But again, the general mood here was just that experience of getting run over like that, not endangered but just hugely stressful and a lot going on. I blame it on the latter half of 2024 just being a lot, and my brain maybe acknowledging some uncertainty about how to navigate it all. 

How about you? What's the weirdest dream that you've had lately?

Off-blog writing project

I've been fiddling with a writing project outside of the Blog o' Doom here, which -- in conjunction with some Big Life Changes that have thrown off the stuff I had going more regularly (Dark Armor, A Wolf In The Mundus) -- is why I don't actually have any significant content for this morning. So... music. 

Shall we go with some Metric? Sure, why not.

Weekly Challenge: Humor

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews. I have not been following along as reliably this year as I did in previous years, but I'm still participating! Kind of.)

Prompt: Describe your sense of humor

Addams Family meets Dad Jokes? I'm tempted to say, "I don't know, I only just recently got it back!" Which is actually more true than I'd really like to admit; turns out I should have moved to a new job years ago. Eh, live and learn, I guess. So all right, some examples: 

Example One

Me: "Well, the prerequisites installed just fine. The upgrade, however, did not."

Co-worker: "Why does it always have to be so difficult?"

Me: "Impiety."

Co-worker: "That is... not a word I hear very often." 

Me: "I mean, Herakles had his labors; Prometheus had -- or often lacked -- his liver; and I must therefore assume that I, too, have offended the gods. Probably by being better looking than them. Zeus gets real prickly about that sort of thing."

Example Two

Email to my boss about the same upgrade: "Well, I still can't get it to run. I shall now curse the gods for this unkindness and go to sleep. I'll try it again in the morning after food and some kind of pagan sacrifice."

Example Three 

There are small plastic skeletons in the breakroom. Just a few of them. One's on top of the fridge, one's inside a cabinet, another is on a windowsill, another standing on the top edge of the blackboard. There will be more of them, and in more areas, as we approach Halloween; I have bags of the things. Under no circumstances will I admit to being the one putting them in place. 

On a related note, there is a sign on our fence that says, "Caution: Velociraptor Enclosure. Licensed Handlers Only."

Bad Puns and Dad Jokes

If I fix myself myself a waffle and eat it in secret, would you consider that action syrup-titious?

If I were to fire up the old gene sequencer and cross a homing pigeon with a piranha, do you suppose it would come back to bite me?

Stone Walls, Iron Doors, part three

It was two weeks later when the guard named Nimod threw himself off the stone parapet. There was some discussion of how he'd even managed to get up there; the last anyone knew, he'd been asleep in the barracks. Still, there was little question as to how he died; nearby guards rushed over immediately in response to his scream, one of them close enough lean over the wall and watch him plummet to his death. They all swore that there was nobody else on the stretch of wall that he must have fallen from. 

Then again, he hadn't been known to walk in his sleep and his friends among the other guards swore that he wouldn't have killed himself. 

Caracas, securely trapped in his oubliette, learned this in passing from the friendly guard, who spoke sotto voce as he lowered the evening meal of vegetable mash and bone broth. 

"Why are you telling me this?" Caracas had asked, equally quiet. 

The boy had shrugged. "It makes me nervous, that's all," he said. "Can't say that to the other guards; I'd never hear the end of it. But I wanted to tell somebody, and I thought you might like to know."

Well, thought Caracas, once the young guard had gone, that was interesting.

Stone Walls, Iron Doors, part two

Somewhat to his surprise, food arrived the next morning, lowered in a small metal box at the bottom of a chain. Looking up, Caracas saw that the chain was ringed with spikes at various points along its length, likely to discourage any attempt to climb out. He opened the box and removed the tray, finding a bowl of gruel and a chunk of slightly-stale bread. 

"Ah," said a voice overhead. "So you live. After Nimod and Valkas pushed you in last night, I wasn't sure."

Caracas squinted at the silhouette of the guard above, then nodded and stepped back out of the circle of light. The box and its chain were pulled back up, and when that was done this new guard spoke again. "Next shift'll lower the chain again just before sunset. Take the food, and put the morning's tray and bowl in the box. If you don't, they'll stop sending down food until you do."

"I understand," called Caracas, "and I thank you." 

Then another voice called, "What're you doing, boy? We just feed 'em. We don't chat with 'em."

"Yes, sergeant," the guard replied immediately, and his shadow vanished from the circle of light on the floor. 

At least he didn't have to worry about how to dispose of his waste; that had been apparent immediately, from the smell alone. There was a hole in the floor, leading down to some sort of carved pipe that angled down until it came out somewhere beyond the fortress; he hadn't bothered tracing it any farther. It was still better then the conditions in the town, where sewage was dumped into the open gutters with no attempt at even basic sanitation. 

It didn't have to be this way, Caracas thought again. We could have made this world so much better.

Friday Morning

Finally managed to go to bed early, with the result that while I woke up feeling refreshed I'm still kind of logy and unfocused. My body is basically telling me, Oh, so you finally went and got enough sleep! You know what would go really well with that? EVEN MORE SLEEP. Which, after the recent string of late nights, I can't blame it. 

So we're taking it easy today, and hopefully for the rest of this weekend. I've got a couple of things to do, but nothing that should require too much brainpower. Might Baldur my Gate some more, or I might finally settle in and play Undertale. Oh! Or finish up The Entropy Centre. I have options, is what I'm saying here.

How about some music to get us through the day? This week, I'm listening to Mirabilis: 

Music: Kingdom of Cards

Bad Omens: 

College Dreams

Dreamt that I was going off to college, and having trouble sorting out everything that I needed to get done (find my room, get unpacked, figure out my schedule...). It wasn't a particularly long or elaborate dream, but it was very definitely a mood -- probably triggered by some combination of Firstborn being away at college himself (parents' weekend is coming up soon) and me settling in on the new job (which I think is coming along fine but there's still a lot I don't know). 

I'm also beginning to think that I might have some unprocessed trauma around going off to college so damned early myself, though I also don't know what we would have done otherwise.

Writing projects are currently at a stand-still; I think I need to give my brain some downtime. 

And sleep. Even with the weird dreams, I need to be getting more sleep. When I get enough sleep, everything else falls into place so much more easily.

Lordy lordy some late nights lately

So, the thing about trying to wrangle applications is that they're frequently, well, recalcitrant. And they frequently need important, unavoidable things like upgrades... that need to be done outside of business hours. This is true even -- hear me out -- even when when what you're upgrading is actually just a test environment, or one set aside for training people where they can't break your business if they make a mistake. 

You might think that those environments should be available for much more casual upgrades, since they don't affect the actual business that goes on in your production environment, and can be refreshed from Production if anything goes wrong. And in an ideal world, you'd be right about that. In actual practice, well, I had a couple of inconveniently late nights last week while trying to get an incredibly recalcitrant training environment to to fully upgrade so that we can start User Acceptance Testing over there before we just upgrade the production environment and commit our fate to the merciless hands of the Computer Gods. 

This would be a great opportunity for overtime, but here at the new job I'm on salary. Which is fine, and maybe even better, because not only am I getting paid more in general, if I have to (hypothetically) put in four hours on a failed upgrade Thursday Night and another four hours on a partially-successful upgrade Friday night, I can bloody well sleep in on Friday morning and again on, say, the following Monday. I need to inform my co-workers so they know what to expect in terms of when I'm actually conscious, but otherwise nobody cares. (And in fact -- kudos to the new job -- they encourage it.) 

I would love to be responsible for a piece of software that was well-documented, well-maintained, and properly tested for quality. This one is... not that, but that's part of the reason it's worth paying me this much to maintain it. 

On a possibly-related note, I woke up Saturday morning after a dream in which Vincent Price -- that bastard -- was in a wheelchair and trying to break open the bathroom door while I was getting into the shower, so that he could feed me to the marsh people. The marsh people had apparently lived here years ago, and been subject to cruel and horrible experiments; the one I was avoiding introduced itself as having been made from six other marsh people, and looked like a cross between a starfish and a stingray. So if I ever see Vincent Price in a wheelchair again, I'm going to murder him on the spot in self-defense. 

BUT THAT ASIDE, life is pretty good. I keep forgetting that Firstborn is no longer living with us, which is weird but otherwise fine; we've put Secondborn into some math tutoring because apparently middle school has taught him that it's both terrible and useless; the dog has very strong opinions about where we should go when we do walkies; and I'm running three different D&D games which I'm enjoying the hell out of in three different ways. 

If I get my sleep schedule back under control, I'll be unstoppable. 

Here's to you, my friends, being -- or becoming -- unstoppable too.

Stone Walls, Iron Doors, part one

Caracas fell when the guard shoved him over the edge. It was a good distance down, a fall to break bones; no doubt most prisoners made the descent with the help of a ladder, or at least a rope. These guards were looking to punish him well beyond the sentence he'd been given, and no wonder. He'd broken three of them, and they wanted to see him broken in turn. 

But the floor, when he landed, was stone; and stone would never harm him. His feet touched it and he rolled to the side, fetched up gently against the wall, and lay there. The chamber around him was shaped roughly like a vase, wider here at the bottom but narrowing as it curved up to the hole he'd been cast in through.

Two of the guards laughed when he didn't move, and Caracas marked their voices, matching them in his mind with their scents, the feel of their steps on the stone of the courtyard, the warmth of their bodies and minds. Down here in the dark, they couldn't see that he was looking back at them. After a minute or so, they swung the heavy iron gate shut over the entrance and slid the lock into place. 

When they finally moved away, Caracas considered his new environment. The walls were smooth, offering no grips for climbing, the entrance too high up for an ordinary man to reach. A shapechanger might manage it, but iron was widely known to imprison all manner of supernatural beings: beasts and spirits and sorcerers alike. 

So this is the Archon's justice. The judge, mistaking Caracas' reticent curiosity for weakness or at least humility, had declared himself merciful in sentencing the ignorant foreigner to be forgotten for a year and a day for his assault upon the guards, conveniently ignoring the fact that Caracas had been defending himself from them and not the other way around. It had been smoothly managed, too: Caracas had spoken his initial defense to the court, and then the guards had spun their story of his attack on them, and after that everyone had spoken of it as if he had attacked the guards.

After that he had held his tongue. There was little point in arguing with it, and even less in pointing out that he'd acted to prevent a rape and had had no idea that the perpetrators were members of the guard. More importantly, he didn't want to draw the attention of his cousin Jakar in his own demesne; he wasn't prepared to take on the gods. 

So: a year and a day in this oubliette, which was one of several along this side of the courtyard: close enough to daily life to hear it, but still easy to ignore even if he begged or screamed, and fully exposed if he somehow tried to escape through the grate. A land of laws, a domain of justice and mercy, would see him regularly fed and watered, even as it forgot him. Jakar's Imperium? He'd give it a week or so, just to see.

Caracas settled back comfortably against the stone.

Decisions, part seven

Antoinette opened the door and Chris went out, Elyssa following with the doll-child. He felt off-balance, distracted, out of control; he didn't like it. He wanted to grab the doll and race it to the rendezvous, to get this over with as quickly as possible, but he couldn't do that without revealing his full speed -- and Elyssa was making a real effort to cover for him. He wanted to tear apart their enemies, but their enemies were actually their co-workers; this was just a training exercise. 

He was trying to hold to that knowledge, but the image of a child tied to a chair... 

He shook his head, forced himself to focus, and wasn't sure if he'd succeeded. Thorin was nowhere in sight, which was simultaneously the worst possible scenario and exactly what he'd expected. "That way," said Antoinette, pointing. 

Elyssa started out, and Chris leapt up to an awning, and then across to a window sill on the far side of the street. If Thorin was tracking them, he'd take to the rooftops; Chris would have to make his way there more slowly. More likely, the great cat was off alerting the other two opposition teams, but it still wouldn't hurt to have eyes up at rooftop level. 

Half a block down, the rooftop was empty. Thorin was nowhere to be seen. So it's a question of who gets into position first. If Thorin and the others could set up an ambush, they could still lure the target in using the doll-child. If Antoinette and Elyssa got the child to the head of the house first, the House could withdraw and they would have effectively won. If everybody reached the rendezvous all at once, it would be a fight and the outcome could be anything. 

Chris shaped a tiny bit of Grey and whispered to Antoinette and Elyssa: "Move."

Decisions, part six

 They didn't just drive in here anyway, even knowing it was a trap. Surely they didn't... He could see it though: whoever had planned out this exercise understood the arrogance of the Old Houses. The head of the house wouldn't leave without the child; but at least they'd agreed to wait and let his team bring the "child" to them. 

Would the two other enemy teams realize? Would Thorin tell them? Probably. He's impressed with himself, but not enough to try to take on all three of us alone, and his magus is down. 

How fast could he get to them? "Give me the child," said Elyssa. "I'll carry her." She looked at Chris. "You run interference, but be careful." She turned her eyes to Antoinette. "Do you have enough Grey left to keep up with us?"

Antoinette said, "I'll do what I can." 

"All right," said Elyssa, and they started down the stairs.

Monday, again?

Seriously, why do Mondays keep happening to me?

Though honestly, now that I'm settling in at the new job I dread The Coming Of Monday a lot less than I have in years; I should have changed jobs years ago, probably right around the time that they tripled my responsibilities but left me at the same job title and paycheck. 

Fridays are usually relatively quiet, and I spent a chunk of last Friday going through old service desk tickets from people who are no longer here, then emailing people to find out what the current status on the issue happened to be. I was able to close some of them; the others got added to my To Do list, along with whatever supplemental information I'd been given about them. Top of the list for this morning is a support call to figure out why the command to refresh the information in the Training environment from the Production environment doesn't seem to be working. 

I had a nice, quiet weekend, which was good because last week was -- despite my best efforts -- somewhat fraught. I keep hoping that things will settle out into some kind of regular pattern, and things keep stubbornly resisting me on this. I've also started a new book, which I'm enjoying; I might add a review of it once I get a little further along. 

Ah, well. Onwards and upwards! Here's hoping, as always, for things to get better.

Passage of Faith, part two

Redrick huddled behind the locked door of his cabin and knelt to pray. "Beloved Xandria," he began. "I have done as you willed, and taken the amulet. It was my intent to keep it secret, but with everyone on the ship in danger I chose to place my trust in them instead. Please watch over the crew and the other passengers; the crew is trying to help, and the danger to my fellow-travelers is unjust. Please pay particular mind to the Aarakocra who claims to have taken me under his wing; I do not know whether you placed him here to be a guardian for me or whether the fates jest at my expense, but despite his manners he has more than proven his value."

There was a faint stirring in the back of his mind, and then a momentary image of a robed, winged figure with a palimpset and a pen: the celestial Ernost, Balancer of the Scales. "Ah, Redrick Gleamalong. I hadn't scheduled... well, here you are, so I suppose it was arranged for us." They glanced at the palimset, frowned, and continued: "I will do what I can on your behalf, for you serve honorably and well."

Redrick swallowed. He hadn't expected anything more than a very general message; a chance to ask questions was not to be wasted. "Will we be attacked again, Holy Balancer?"

Ernost nodded. "Yes. A rat may be devoured by a serpent, but it may also create openings for them to use. Until you are rid of this vermin, you will continue to be attacked... and after, if they find you again."

"Can I trust the crew of this ship?"

"They have no part in this yet, and no love for your enemies. You have done well with them."

"If I may... what exactly is this amulet?" 

Ernost hesitated. "This must be your final question, for I cannot answer it. It is a tool of the enemy, more of a danger than it seems, and a warning of greater dangers yet. More than this, I may not say and have not been told."

Redrick swallowed. "I see. I am grateful for the answers you have given, and will continue to undertake the charge that I was given."

"The charge given to you is a burden and a curse, and you are blessed for having undertaken it. Once the amulet reaches the Archive, more may be revealed." They began to fade.

"I will see it done," said Redrick, and opened his eyes to find that he was talking to himself.

Another One Gone

My mom's older sister has died. I'll be attending the funeral, which is going to make for a very long day since it's up in Oklahoma and I'd rather not stay the night unless I have to.

I don't know exactly what to say about this, because I didn't know her all that well; we mostly saw her on holidays. Still, I'm going to show up, in part because I don't think my own mother would ever have forgiven me if I didn't and in part because I haven't seen that side of the family in quite some time -- and I may not have that many more chances. 

She was very sweet, a dancer, and devoted to her family and her sisters. I once made a mixed tape for her to use for her dance lessons; it probably wasn't much help, since I was in my teens and most of what I had on tap was metal rather than dance music. And for all that I failed to keep in touch, she will assuredly be missed.

The rest of the world doesn't stop for anyone's death, of course; I'm fortunate that, at least for a single day, I can.

Decisions, part five

The impact was no more than he'd expected; the wards here were for warning, not protection, and he didn't intend to give them time for their warning to make a difference. The room he crashed into was barren, furnished only with a table, a few chairs, and a battered couch; he caught up one of the chairs and flung it at Sherri, who was sitting on her couch and looking at her phone. 

The chair smashed into an unseen protection, and fell to the floor; Sherri immediately rose to her feet, then glanced at her phone in confusion. To his right, the Thorin Tanelorn of the great cats was standing beside a chair with a hostage in it. 

The hostage was supposed to be a doll! It was a doll -- it had no scent -- but the magi had put a seeming on it for this exercise, and it looked like a human child bound to the chair. For a moment he was back at Pettibone, seeing another face in another chair, and he hesitated for the barest moment as Thorin dodged around the hostage and charged him, impossibly fast over this short distance. 

He felt the impact before he could refocus, before he could bring his arms up or get his body moving again, and caught Thorin's wrist for a brief moment, pulling the cat back and to the floor alongside him. Thorin broke the hold immediately, caught him under the shoulders, and hurled them both back out the shattered window just as Antoinette shimmered into place in the room and Elyssa smashed in through the no-longer-warded door. 

Thorin released him as soon as they were past the window, and they both began to fall; Chris landed hard, and Thorin landed softly and silently on his feet, still human-formed and completely unmussed.

"Sorry," said Thorin, "but that's how it goes." 

Chris shot a hand out, caught the cat by his ankle, and yanked him down. He came to his feet, dragging Thorin up after him, and flung him into a building. He was overreacting, he knew it, and showing too much of his strength. The trouble was that he couldn't stop it. Some part him was still seeing a frightened child tied to a chair, again, and that part had taken control of his actions. He sprang up, caught a ledge around the building, sank his claws in, and launched himself further. There was a lintel above the next row of windows, and he caught himself on it and pushed himself further up. 

He was just below the upper row of windows when Thorin caught his ankle and nearly pulled him off the side of the building; if Chris hadn't been sinking his claws into the stone, the cat would have succeeded. Instead, Chris thrashed and kicked down, raking claws across the cat's face and then his arm; Thorin dropped like a rock, landed easily on his feet, and started straight up the side of the building again. 

By then, though, Chris had found the broken window and rolled inside it, ignoring the broken glass on the floor. Thorin didn't follow him; the cat leapt past the window and up to the roof. 

Sherri was on the ground, thrashing around but otherwise immobile; Antoinette was speaking into her cell phone. "We've got the kid. Pull back. You don't need to make this meet, we'll bring her to you."

Elyssa asked, "Chris? Are you okay?"

"With this?" he gestured towards the doll that had been tied to the chair and was now held firmly in Elyssa's arms. "No. Not at all. I was about to--" He made himself stop. 

"Chris," said Elyssa firmly. "Take a deep breath." 

He took a deep breath. 

"Say it with me: it's just an exercise."

"It's just an exercise." He wasn't sure he believed it, but he was calming back down, starting to refocus. "It's just an exercise."

"It's just an exercise," Elyssa repeated.

Antoinette put her phone away. "We're going to take the kid out to her House," she said quietly. "What are we looking at?"

Chris shrugged. "The cat is still active, and there are two other magi and two other outsiders he might call in. We go now, quickly, and hope to be gone before he returns with help."