I’m occasionally taken in by a good story, I’ll admit. I didn’t see the ending of Sixth Sense coming. It’s probably better for my enjoyment that way but it does occasionally make me feel foolish.

So here’s a little tale, completely true, about a visit to Sea World I was on with some cousins of mine. They won’t mind me telling the story since even if you knew my real name you couldn’t guess which cousins it was–I have a lot of them.

So I’m sitting next to my cousin, we’ll call him Stu, at the dolphin show, with his wife, we’ll call her Jane, on his other side. Gorgeous dolphins with incredible hang time, yay Sea World. They bring a family out–man, woman, daughter–to let the little girl give the dolphin a treat for its tricks. Aaww. The trainer suggests that Mom go up on a little bridge between the audience and the trainer area to take a picture of Daughter interacting with Dolphin. Aaaww. The next thing we know, Mom is in the water, she’s fallen off the bridge. And she’s freaked. She’s flailing and screaming as if there are barracudas in the pool instead of cuties who like to nudge you with their noses. A dolphin comes over to her and she goes even more berserk, screaming and splashing at the dolphin in a panic. Clue #1: No trainer had dived into the pool at this point. The sum total of their action consisted of encouraging the woman, via the microphone, to swim to the front of the pool where there was a ladder. I turn to Daddyman demanding to know how anybody can be such a total panicked loser twit that they would scream and splash instead of making nice with the dolphin and enjoying the accident of a lifetime. Probably his silence on this point was to spare my feelings. The bozo mom is making her way, with much trembling and drama, to the front of the pool, and still no trainer has taken charge of the situation. About this time, both woman and dolphin go under and suddenly the show finishes with some finale human-dolphin trick that I can’t remember right now. Oh.

I turn to Stu, deflated but giggling, “I feel so stupid. They really had me going.” Cousin Stu turns to me with a matching grin. “This’ll make you feel better. They took me in too … until Jane said, ‘You idiot, they got you with this one the last time we were here.’”

Eah. He works in the industry which is one of my primary areas of consumer input–Hollywood. I suppose a reasonable–reasonable, I said!–dose of credulity is an advantage for people who work on or just love good stories.

I’m behind on my editing. I’ve finished the red-pen work on the hard copy, but after that I have to do notes and bibliography electronically, in Word documents. I’ve been working feverishly on the notes, working in the morning and thus taking time away from my son (I usually work after he’s in bed, but I procrastinated), and I got it done today. I’d been using Ctrl-S all along, saving every few pages. I hit Ctrl-S one last time and closed the document. Then I had a cold chill. The document was an attachment from my boss, and I realized I hadn’t saved it as a separate document but was making changes right there in the attachment. Well, no big, Ctrl-S Saves, right? No, unlike Jesus, Ctrl-S does not Save no matter what. There is no copy of the document anywhere that I can find. It did not save in the attachment. When I open the attachment document, it is manifestly the original document with none of my changes on it.

Any of you savvier-than-I tech folks have any idea if the computer is hiding something from me or if all my changes are gone forever? I did Windows’ search function already. No joy.

I am so upset. Five hours’ work down the drain.

Update: Nevermind. I’ve got the green light from the boss to take the extra time to do it over and Daddyman (The Bean’s dad and resident tech around here) says Outlook Express doesn’t keep temp stuff around like Outlook proper sometimes does. Oh well. Next time, Gadget.

Update x2: SAVED! Daddyman manipulated that handy bug known as Norton GoBack and got the document back in its next-to-last iteration–meaning I have only about one page (out of sixty) to do over again.

Whew.

…to deserve a nightmare about Sylar coming after both Venomous Kate and me, with lethal intent, and other bad things happening, reminiscent of 9/11, in NYC?

It was slightly mitigated by the dream right after, which seemed somewhat post-apocalyptic but also in which I was involved with Greg House. Excellent.

Hellooooo, Vancouver!

Can those of you who live there please tell me what the cost of living is like compared to the rest of Metro Portland? What kind of house or condo or rental or apartment would $37K per year get you? How much more than that would a family of three need to bring in to live comfortably?

A friend of mine from the Midwest wants to know. Any info appreciated!

Thanks.

Son: “How old is Papaw?”

Me: “Fifty-nine.”

Son: “When I’m fifty-nine I’ll be big enough to smoke.”

Me: “…”

As long as he waits till then, I guess.

TheOneRing.net is down temporarily, and we may have lost some data permanently. The staff is looking into who has what and which can be saved and restored, and Corvar and Calisuri are looking at a jumpstart on the redesign they’d been planning. Ouch. On the up side, this may make it easier for Green Books to return to active posting. The static pages where our essays were kept were started in an era (I love the internet age; individual years can be the sum total of their own eras) before self-posting was widespread; we Green Bookers were far less on the technical knowledge side than on the thematic Tolkien side, and we had to send our stuff to an individual tech person who would then convert it to HTML and post it for us. This gradually became a bottleneck (although I don’t wish to defame our posters; we all gradually fell off in our duties, too, due to life, babies, documentaries, books …). Perhaps now we’ll get a self-posting system, like a blog, that will leave Green Books no excuses outside ourselves. I don’t know who we’ll get back besides me; it’s been a long time, and people have lives … babies … books … films …

I know I haven’t done any Tolkien stuff in a while, and I think it may have lost me at least one reader. Ouch. It is hard to keep talking about one subject. I’ve been doing Tolkien posts only when my heart is really in it, because I’d hate to write nonsense about Tolkien worse than not to write about him at all.

But I went browsing tonight through the sites of two of the artisans who do really wonderful Tolkien work. TORn was heavily affiliated with Badali Jewelry back in the day and still has a lot of Badali’s ads. Badali made those brooches that our folks got to give to Peter Jackson et. al., the ones the crew tended to actually wear at Oscar ceremonies. I was always fascinated by his One Ring, though I never bought one because I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing it. (Now Corvar, though, has been waving his ring hand, trying to turn me into a wraith, for years.) It’s gorgeous nevertheless. I love the script carving.

And Wandering Fire Pottery & Tile Works is now Verdant Tile Co., but they still have a few of their beautiful Tolkien-inspired designs. I think I have to order a couple of these this week–always intended to, but never got around to it.

No, I’m not advertising for either of these companies, in the sense that nobody asked me or paid me to do so. Just remarking on some beautiful, fascinating work. And remembering.

Update: I ordered the Athelas Kingsfoil tile and the White Tree tile. A little bit of Gondor for my living room.

This is the second recall of Thomas the Train wooden railway toys we’ve participated in this year. Our recalled items this time are “Toad” car with brake lever, the green maple tree top, and the green signal base. I’m not too fussed about it since The Bean is too old to chew toys, but might as well be safe. Plus, they send you an extra train unit for your trouble in packing stuff up and sending them back. Guess which unit they sent us as a gift for participating in the first recall, earlier this summer?

“Toad” car with brake lever. Can’t wait to see how soon the next gift is recalled.

Took The Little Bean, age four, to the local high school football game tonight, between the public high school (1-4 going in) and the Jesuit high school (4-1 going in). I saw a public HS twit with the following legend magic-markered (I guess it would be “Sharpied” nowadays) on his shirt: “We don’t need Jesus to win.”

I don’t think Jesus, or Jesuit’s star running back, liked that at all. Jesuit walloped the public school 42-zip.

In Oregon you’re not allowed to pump your own gas. I pulled into a station tonight, waited as the attendant stood slackly beside the car of two morons arguing over what cash they had when he could have taken my waiting credit card and started my gas in the time they took to settle on an amount. I listened to the pump filling my car shut off. And then waited, along with three other cars, for the attendant to return and take the nozzles out of our cars.

And waited. And started counting backwards from thirty, getting out of my car at twenty-five and craning my neck around the islands for the attendant. He wasn’t there. He’d gone into the building for some reason impenetrable to me. And the three other cars and I waited.

Somebody honked. The door to the building was propped open and the interior lit (it was apparently an office, as the convenience store part was closed and possibly completely unoccupied). I yanked the nozzle out of my car, twisted my gas cap shut till it clicked several times, and slammed my gas door. I hope he heard me.

I got into my car as he was hurrying out to the cash-morons’ car. I drove away.

I’m from Indiana. I can handle the damn gas pump. Just one more little annoyance among those that are making me tired of living in Oregon.

Son (after Mom’s remarks on his weight from the perspective of somebody he jumped on): “You’re hefty. You’re fat!”

Me: “Am not.”

Son: “How many inches is fat?”

Me: “More than me.”

Son: “I think it’s three hundred.”

Son, Age Four: “Will you be thirty-three in December?”

Me: “Yes, I will.”

Son: “I’ll make your cake with black frosting.”

Boston weekend starts tomorrow! I’ll probably have pictures to post when I get back.

Sippican Cottage has been posting helpful and descriptive information about Boston all week. How did he know?

Demonstrated for you this morning by the Portland-area man in the silver sedan whose actions so dumbfounded me that I didn’t get the make or tag number but if I had they would assuredly be published here: Not only turn your head to get an eyeful of the stroller-pushing, exercise-walking mother who took off her jacket because she got too warm because she’s out of shape, thereby revealing her perfectly decent yet cleavage-boosting tank-bra top, which she pretty much expects and doesn’t mind much, but bring your car almost to a stop in the middle of the road to prolong the ogling process as if it’s your God-given right to cause a traffic accident because you spotted some unexpected boobage. Get a life.

Note to self: Consider investing in a sleeveless jacket.