Singing with the world's stickiest head

I could write a whole blog about the songs that get stuck in my head. Seriously. A typical entry would go like this:

First I got "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" stuck in my head and then I got "Oh Susanna" stuck in my head, and since I don't know more than the first couple lines of either of them, my brain merged them into a version of "Oh Susanna" that replaced the words "Oh Susanna" with "Argentina." But it still only had the first couple lines, so my brain grabbed the first rhyme it could think of and built it into something that went like this:

Argentina, don't you cry for me
Cause my first name's Angelina and my last name is Jolie

which my brain found so clever that it considered adding more verses and making it into a satirical song about Angelina Jolie, but then realized that such a project would require knowing at least five times more about Angelina Jolie than I actually do, and I wasn't interested in doing that kind of research, so I just sang those first couple lines over and over in my head for the rest of the day.

I have the world's stickiest head. If only I could understand and remember enough of the words of any song that I could hum the whole thing sometimes.

My website

Just letting you all know that my website, which used to be at zekibaka.com, has moved here. That's why my picture on blogger.com is dead-- it was a link to a copy of a pic on zekibaka.com, and blogger keeps crashing when I try to change it. Hope it at least lets me post this.

Site still has pretty much all the same stuff-- my writing, my art, and information about my books and speeches. Some new stuff on the jewelry page.

Just thought I'd let you know. Now must try and get ready for bed.

Website downtime upcoming

Our website at www.zekibaka.com will quite likely be down for a day or so at some point in the near future.

See, zekibaka.com is hosted by Midphase, and our other site, johnanderikaspeak.com, is hosted by Bluehost. The renew deadline for Midphase is coming up and we can't afford the extra $100 right now, so we've decided to move zekibaka.com onto our Bluehost account.

It'll still be on the same domain-- you'll still get to it by typing www.zekibaka.com -- but it'll be hosted by Bluehost and covered under the same fee we're going to pay Bluehost in February, so we'll have both sites up for the price of one.

But it may take a day or so to get back up... just letting you all know.

"Christ won eternal life for you. It's a separate download."

I just got a spam email with one of those blocks of randomly generated text, which was pieced together from a religious essay and a set of instructions for some computer application... some of the juxtapositions are simply hilarious:



Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. sitemap files in your application. See Isaiah and the Gospel of John. This package is a series of sample ControlExtenders that attach to existing controls to do some really cool stuff. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. Your phone is "busy". Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method. It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
It'll work most of the time," said Prosise. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. Initials instead of having to do it manually. It's still enjoyable to read.
God waits to be gracious to each person that knows they need to be forgiven. So the easiest way to do it is to split the string with a space character, and grab the first letter from each resulting string.
Of course, you can add a lot more information to your OpenSearch provider.
this is very important, Satveer.
Beats having to click a bunch of checkboxes, huh?
It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
Didn't you know, man? Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. Select the assembly, and drag it onto the Toolbox, in the tab you want the controls to be in. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
com e-mail address instead. at some moment in time, yet? Take some time to get acquainted with this power-filled Jesus. He said He'd be back, and He said it first.
This is the us-versus-them trick.
"; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself.
Christ won eternal life for you and said so. It's a separate download from the main "Atlas" release, but I would assume that this would be rolled into the "Atlas" releases at some point.
This is the us-versus-them trick. Initials instead of having to do it manually.
no doubt with good wishes! sitemap files in your application.

Sometimes a lizard is just a lizard?

Forget Freud and his book of what things mean in dreams. Yes, dreams have symbolism, but it is different for every single freaking person.

The other night I had a dream where a lizard symbolized an aloe plant. Seriously. In the dream I had a couple of pet lizards that kept running around and getting their tails cut off in various ways. Like, I tried to keep them in my locker while I went to work, but I closed the locker on their tails and accidentally cut them off. I suppose they must've grown back, because they got cut off a lot of other ways too.

But the point is that when they lost their tails, the tail stump wasn't red, it was translucent green, like when you cut a leaf off an aloe plant. And then when I woke up, I noticed that my aloe plant had fallen off the shelf and was lying in a big pile of dirt on the floor. I mentioned it to my husband, who said that it had fallen off the previous day, but I hadn't noticed it and he hadn't gotten around to telling me.

So I must have noticed it subconsciously, and my subconscious mind was trying to let me know that my aloe plant was in trouble. Except instead of telling me directly, it had decided to symbolize it with lizards getting their tails cut off. Have no idea why it chose that particular symbol, except that I dream about lizards a lot, and I also have a lot of dreams about pets suffering horrible fates due to human neglect or stupidity. (I suppose that has to do with the fact that I had a lot of pets as a child, and some of them did get hurt or killed because of errors on my part or my parents'.)

Freud said that dreams use symbolism because there are things your mind can't handle thinking about directly. Supposedly almost anything sexual was in this category-- which is stupid, because people think about sex more than they think about anything else, and I'd certainly rather think about sex than think about lizards losing body parts. I personally think that dreams don't symbolize for any good reason, they just do it because they're confused and mix things up with each other.

Or maybe it was just a coincidence. But in any case I'm not asking Freud what it means when lizards lose their tails in a dream.

Moving and selling stuff

Random stuff:

Voptras and my pointy ear headbands, two of my inventions, are available for sale on my website.


I'm also selling my dollhouse and its contents on Craigslist, and I think it's worth what I'm charging for it-- at least I don't want to sell it for any less-- but I haven't had any offers yet. We'll see.

OK, I promised an update on moving into our new apartment...

Husband's parents and a friend helped us move at the end of September. It is a great apartment-- bigger than our old one, which means that we can actually walk in a reasonable fashion around our pieces of furniture instead of holding our breath to squeeze past them. Better than old one in many other ways too. Wonderful big French windows. Kitchen has a garbage disposal. Electric stove, as opposed to old apartment's ancient gas stove with pilot light that kept going out for no reason and flooding kitchen with methane. Old landlord wouldn't even try to fix it; said there was nothing he could do. We had to go in with a screwdriver and turn off the valve to the pilot light, and light it with a lighter every time we turned it on. Husband also had to improvise a stove vent out of a big plastic bowl and a length of duct pipe that led to the window, but the new apartment has a stove vent built in.

Has a pool that we'll be able to use come summer. Has a rental office on the property, and maintenance that reliably comes and fixes problems soon after we call. Laundry room has three washers and three dryers, unlike old apartment which, inexplicably, had three washers and two dryers. Washers don't unbalance nearly as easily as the old ones, too. And there's a quarter machine in the rental office.

And there's no extra price for all these improvements-- the rent is actually $50 less than the old apartment. Probably because it's on the freeway-- but we don't mind the noise, and we like the convenience.

A few little problems: the window is drafty, and the walls are not very thick (one neighbor complained about our video game noise all the time, even when we had it turned down so low we could barely hear-- until one day she knocked on our door when we weren't even playing video games, and we let her in and showed her that the noise she was complaining about wasn't even coming from our apartment, and since then she's been very decent to us). Our upstairs neighbor's footsteps sound like a dinosaur, and our downstairs neighbor probably thinks the same of us... the floors seem to amplify every sound.

Also, the bus routes to the Target where I work are not as good as from the old apartment-- they sometimes involve transfers at places where I have to wait up to twenty minutes. But that's okay because in January my Target is going to rebuild itself into a Super Target, and while it's rebuilding, the employees going to be moved, and I'll be moved to a Target that's practically in the backyard of where we live now, and I'll be able to walk to work. They might want to move me back when the rebuilding is done, but I bet I can get them to let me stay.

I was having a lot of stresses and obsessive worries, but stuff has calmed down lately. My mom says she'll help me with psychologist and psychiatrist visits if I need them, but for now I'm emotionally fine. Our financial situation still sucks-- any extra money we get always goes to buy necessities that we'd been holding off on when we didn't have enough money, so we haven't been able to save a cent-- but there are some promising career options occurring to my husband now, so things are looking up. Also the new publisher is going to start printing my book eventually, and I'm in the editing phase of my new science fiction novel, so at some point that will be at least a little source of extra money.

That's it for now. Got to go.