Casually Blinded

I received my fourth submission rejection from a certain dream professional science fiction market today, but this time it ended with "I look forward to your next submission."

I'm not sure if this is a pinprick of light in the dark, hopelessness that is this writing game. Or if they've just recently updated their form rejection letter.

A Level Up

At midnight yesterday I was warned by a chirp that another smoke alarm backup battery was going flat. Unlike last time, I was able to remove the cover, extract the battery and restore peace with only five to ten minutes of suppressed rage and a single, vitriolic paragraph of pure expletives. I did not need to use any hand tools to break my way in like a castaway with walnuts and no nutcracker.

Success!

I guess my recent birthday actually helped me develop as a person.

Nash did not provide any assistance.

A Filament of my Imagination

Another one of the great things about the internet having more personal information about me than my own brain can hold is that I can look up what my most played song was on the week of my birthday for the past 15 years. I mean, it's not going to be completely accurate because I didn't have scrobbling on my phone before 2012, or my Samsung Pebble that year I played basketball in the rain in North Adelaide for hours, or that night at Shenanigans in 2006 when SexyBack must have been spun at least a dozen times. But it did well enough to make me a playlist for a sunny walk down memory lane and to the train station yesterday morning.

On my way home from the train station yesterday evening, when it definitely was not sunny, I did pass my favourite inedible plant in the world on this one house's fence, and noticed the first flower of spring had bloomed.

I love this jasmine plant, and the fragrance it gives the footpath for 0.00833% of my morning commute during Spring. I left for work thirty seconds earlier today so I could stop by again and appreciate it.

In Oregon a couple of months ago I drank a longneck of the Elysian Avatar Jasmine IPA and it reminded me of walking on that footpath. And this morning I was reminded of drinking that beer. And now that personal information is recorded on the internet.

The Richest Man In The World

I've survived on this planet for 35 years now. My reward from Vanessa was a month of desserts, culminating in a jumbo mousse cake, totalling over 8,000 calories. It tasted as good as it looks. (As seen here on the Official Bradism Raised Cutting Board for Tall People.)

Dusted and Done

I'd been contemplating buying a new PC. I wanted something powerful enough to render high resolution panoramas in Photoshop from RAW images. And with enough grunt to export short videos of the season movies in HD.

Before replacing my PC - which at some point in the past had not filled all levels of the townhouse with it's shrill High CPU Temperature warning when performing the above tasks - I thought I should try cleaning out the dust out of it. I couldn't remember the last time I gave it a good compressed-air blast to the heat-sink. I suspected it was before I got a golden retriever cross who sheds her winter coat for a summer coat every night in July that we put the heater on. I bought a can of compressed air from Office Works and with daylight as an ally on a Saturday morning I took my computer apart on the balcony and got to blasting.

I'm not sure what tolerance my CPU fan designers had for dog hair particles, but safe to say I'd exceeded them. While Nash watched from the comfort of the couch I got into every nook and cranny, sending puffs of dust and lint into the cool, August air. I was ruthless. I figured, if anything got dislodged or disrupted it would be a good excuse for upgrading to the new PC anyway.

Happily for Frugal Brad, the re-assembled PC ran fine, maybe a little quieter. And a test export of 89 high-resolution images from Lightroom did not breach any CPU monitoring metrics and in fact Chrome and Spotify ran along at the same time as well. My $3,000 PC budget was used to buy a $10 can of cleaning spray.

Blue

The sun was out today. In Adelaide, of all places. And I'd been looking for some hope, and signs of Spring. I found a rare, spare hour in my calendar to visited the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, and it was nice.