The onward march

It's eight months today since Jody passed away. This, too, is a Monday. Like then, it's overcast. It's quite a bit colder, though.

Last night I had a dream about Jody. He was with me on a Greyhound bus, or something of the kind, roaming up and down southern Ontario. In real life, Jody never made it to Canada, but we mused on occasion about him visiting. He was talking about doing so, tentatively, in the summer of 2004, when he would have been well for a year. As it turned out, he died that summer instead.

In the dream, we were riding the highways under threatening skies. I remember us stopping at some sort of restaurant or hotel. It was built completely of wood, in some sort of faux cabin style; the wood stained a deep red-brown... very dark inside. I remember another scene in which we stopped at a gas station. The gas pumps gave change, like a vending machine. Dollars and dollars worth of coins that people had just walked away from. Jody and I went from pump to pump, scooping up change. I don't remember too much more of the dream. In fact, when I woke up, it took me a moment to even remember it was Jody who'd accompanied me in the dream. Jody and I never got together face to face in life, though we spent the equivalent of months, maybe even a solid year, together online. Last night's dream is the very first I can explicitly remember being about us being together. Naturally, I don't have a very well-formed idea of what that would be like. Jody was quite a bit shier on the phone with me than he was on ICQ or online. I suspect our initial face-to-face would have been an awkward adjustment.

It's the first monthly anniversary of his passing that doesn't make me feel really down. It's because of this dream. I can't explain it. I know he's gone. I do understand that. But somehow, I feel like we... I... accomplished something in our relationship last night. Does it have to make sense for me to be happy? Well, no... happy's the wrong word. Soothed, maybe. Eased, somehow.

On other matters, last night, I slammed my DVD remote down in frustration. Now it's not working. The DVD player is, just fine. But since there's no way to control it, it's now essentially a three-pound perfectly-functional piece of garbage. I can't afford to replace it for a couple of weeks, but when I can, I'm going to look for something that's got at least basic selection controls right on the unit.

On Saturday, P-Doug and I wound up buying the same 19" monitor... HP 91. They were $129 each, and in really good shape. Unfortunately for me, my digitizer card doesn't seem to like monitor settings higher than 1024x768, so I have to keep changing the settings when I want to record anything. I also picked up a couple of cheap speaker sets, powered by my USB 1.1 ports (oh, which I superseded with 2.0 ports a few days ago). The don't have much chug... in fact, they suck... but they do allow me to modulate the signal leaving the digitizer and entering the sound card, so I can finally (I think) tape stuff without ever spoken "s" sound bursting my speakers.

Friday night I went out with Alan for the first time in over a year. He looks thinner than he did. He works in Vaughn now... long drive... close to that new mall, Vaughn Mills. Ha ha. How clever (it's a rip off of fifty-year-old Don Mills, if you're not from around here). It's a huge mall, stuffed to the gills with yuppie clothing stores. He and I ended up eating in a bowling theme bar. No kidding. Lucky Strike, I think it was called. We had a couple beers and — shame on me — burgers and fries. Man, that was a good burger. First I've had in ages. Before that, we wandered into Cinema One, a movie store that used to be in the mall near me, but left. Now I know where it went! I got the 3rd season of King of the Hill for $38, and an old tape of cartoons of The Inspector for $4.

Sunday... jumping around here a bit, aren't I?... I went to Wal-Mart and bought a water purification system for the 10-day purge I'm trying out. Maple syrup, lemon juice, cayenne, and water. Stuff's hard to get down. We'll see how it goes.