I don't smoke, unless I have a good reason to, and when I do, I just puff. There's something about the ritual that's appealing. Tonight was a good reason. It was supposed to be too warm for snow, but how often are the weather forecasts actually correct? Walking to the bus station from work was a light dusting--stepping off the bus at home: big fat wet flakes calling out to me.

So I sat on my stoop, cigarette in one hand, red wine in the other, imagining I could hear the sound of snowflakes landing in the infrequent silences between the passing cars.

Okay, not exactly, but since getting a blackberry phone, it's a different experience. My computer systems tend to do a good enough job screening out all of the offers for software, pharmaceuticals, Nigerian ___(fill in the blank) schemes, and various body-part enlargements. Not so with the blackberry--most all of these get through the defenses or lack thereof.

I've had several encounters with helper dogs in the past couple of months, two of which seem noteworthy...

In the thrilling world of my eyeballs and general mental stability, I have reached a conclusion. As the savvy reader may remember, in an effort to relieve some eye strain, I turned off text smoothing on my computer, thinking that the blurry-ness of smoothed text on the monitor was contributing to headaches and tired eyes. The resulting look was just terrible. So, furthering the experiement, I returned to the text smoothing and compared reading on a LCD screen versus an old-skool CRT monitor. Conveniently enough, both are connected to my laptop.

The result? LCD: crisp and easy on the eyes; CRT: blurry and headache inducing.

Well, my computer interface now looks like butt, mostly, but I can report a decrease in eye fatigue. Have I just been reading less on the computer? Perhaps I'm reading things that are properly designed with enough white space. It's hard to tell after only one week.

However, my current level of general fatigue is up--too little sleep + too much drink. I'm getting too old for this.

Lately I've noticed rather extreme eye fatigue while reading on the computer screen. Hadn't happened before that I can remember, unless I was reading lots and lots of text for a long period of time. Part of me figured I'm just getting old (which is absolutely not true!), or still drinking too much on the job.

I decided to take my indoor kitty for a shoulder-ride out into the carport (kitty liked shoulder-rides, and had been known to leap onto my vertical chest if I didn't go straight to her and pick her up). Older neighbor (now deceased) noticed and came over to pet Cheaumea (said kit's name). We chatted for a few moments, then he returned to what he was doing (blowing leaves or edging the sidewalk or something).

Short and sweet is the order of the day, though not the order of this docu-drama about the last days of the Third Reich, and more specifically of Adolf Hitler. Bruno Ganz is a force of nature playing a physically and mentally declining Hitler. The film was based on the book by his secretary, Traudl Jung, and pulls out all of the stops. (I'm really going for cliche here.) It's powerful. Hitler has no compassion for his civilian followers (and he says so, even)...

On Wednesday I saw John Waters on the street, then on Saturday I bought a new pair of Levi's. Coincidence? I think not.

On my commute in to work, I have one fairly important subway - bus transfer. If I don't make it, it adds about 6 long blocks to my walk, which is not always a bad thing, but today I was in the mood to bus it. As I climbed the stairs out of the subway, my head cleared ground-level and I saw the bus pulling into the stop across the street. I made a dash for it, realizing that I'm starting to look like an old man when I run. The crowd was too thick and the bus pulled away just as I got to it. Cursing my luck, I set off for the long walk, slightly comforted by the Radiohead playing on my ears.