My back hurt so I picked up some Capzasin when we went grocery shopping.  Last night, before my wife went to work, I ask her to put some on my back where it was hurting.

     About 5AM I woke up, my shoulder blades were on fire.  I mean it felt like someone doused me in gasoline and threw a match on me.

     I got up and shaved and took an antacid pill (unrelated) and then I decided to go lay down for a bit as my shoulder blades now had a comfortable warmth, no longer on fire.

     I had a dream, someone I worked with had a Plymouth of some sort, early 70’s era, it was lunch time and he let me drive it.  As I was driving it, the brakes faded and although I could slow the car down slowly I couldn’t brake hard.  I told him the brakes were bad and I determined I would take a bus back.

     But where we were going to have lunch, I walked down from a hill to a Burger King (haven’t eaten at one for years, that clown King really creeps me out, even worse than Ronald).

     Out of the vents flames were coming out instead of just smoke or steam.  I went into the restaurant and I found all these things of fire and kids were being given these things to hold their burger in the flames to cook their own burgers.

     I complained to the staff that this was not at all safe.  They responded by putting tape lines on the floor that the kids weren’t supposed to cross.

     Still there was one young girl with really bushy curly blond hair who got to close and her hair caught on fire.  It was quickly put out but it rekindled my argument with the staff about the safety of their arrangement.

     I woke up at this point, now my lower back was on fire.  I took a shower and washed as much of it off as I could but too late at this point, nerves were well stimulated.  I could only wait for the burning to subside.

     I dreamt I invented a device that would magnetically nullify the effect of gravity on the object it was attached to. (Yes I know our science as we presently understand it doesn’t support the existence of such a device).

     I dreamt my device was bolted onto a 747.  The thing was you had to pulse it at a different frequency depending upon what it was attached to and there was no way to determine that frequency except by experimentation.

     I was inside the 747 tinkering with my device when I met with success.  Problem was, the rest of the air staff was gone and now that the 747 was in the air, I hadn’t a clue as to how to fly it.  Somehow I managed to bring it down on Aurora Ave.

     Had a dream where I was with a group of people and we were levitating or flying by mental will alone.  Except that it wasn’t exactly willing ourselves to levitate, more relaxing completely and as we did gravity would lose it’s control on us.

     We were doing this inside a large gymnasium like building with a high ceiling but I was approaching the ceiling and wanted to go outside and see how high up I could go.

     Then I had a thought, maybe I can go THROUGH the ceiling and I just continued to relax and let myself drift upwards and I could feel myself going through the ceiling or it going through me.

     I continued and got very high up in the air, right up their with jets and such things were cars were little dots on lines.

     Drive on my workstation started taking write errors Monday afternoon and by evening the machine started wedging and crashing.

     I copied the physical drive to another drive.  The old drive was 500GB and the new 1TB, so then I used gparted to extend the root partition to use all the space.

     Had some issues with duplicate UUID’s and the way grub was installed.  Got all that cleaned up and resolved by about 3AM.

     Then I started getting chest pains and they persisted through the night so went into the doctor in the morning and they did an EKG, heart is good they felt was probably GERD.  Well, I do tend to make mass acid when stressed and I was definitely stressed, so took a proton pump inhibitor and pain went away so probably right.

     So I napped from about 1PM to 6PM Monday, then went to bed around 11PM, and now Wednesday I’m almost back to normal sleeping hours but my body is sore, muscles unhappy, I tend also to tense up when stressed.

     Drive that was sick died hard the next morning so I got the data off of it in the nick of time.  I do have important things backed up but I would have had to do a re-install which with this Mac is tricky because I have to go back to Ubuntu 10.4, because that’s the last time they made a distribution for 64-bit Mac’s with 32-bit BIOS.  This is one of those ugly beasts.  Then I’d have to perform a lengthy slow series of upgrade to get back to 15.10.  I am so glad I was able to copy the disk.

     I’ve avoided Windows networking until now.

     I have a Linux workstation in my office upon which I also have all my music.  The speakers and sound system I have here are crappy.

     I’ve got a Windows-XP machine primarily used for games, but also connected to a decent sound system in another room.

     Until now I’ve been maintaining two copies of my music and transporting from one machine to the other with sneaker net, copying everything to a flash drive, then copying it on to the hard drive of the other machine.

     Today I managed to get Samba working on my workstation, shared my Music folder (read only, I don’t trust Windows not to do something bad with it), and then mounted that share on Z: drive on the Windows-XP machine.

     I would have liked this to happen automatically whenever it was rebooted, but I can neither get the Linux smbd daemon to honor guest OK, or to get the XP machine to remember the credentials.  Anybody know a fix for either of these it would be appreciated.

     Marshawn Lynch retired.  Who would have guessed?

     He gave us some good years, and I wish him the best in his retirement.  At least now he won’t have to get fined for not talking to the press.

     I doubt we’ll ever see another championship again.

     I remember when the Sonics won the NBA championship.  I watched them struggle to try to regain that again year after year but it never happened.

     Now I fear the same is true of the Hawks, and it’s just a matter of time until Paul Allen gets bored and they get sold off and moved to some other city.

     I got very drowsy again this afternoon and opted for a nap.

     While napping I had a dream.  I initially got on a bus heading downtown to the telco where I used to work 20 years ago.

     The bus went through downtown and kept heading south, all the way to Southern California.  The driver was a big monster body builder type and wouldn’t let me exit the bus.

     On the way, we crossed over a river, the bridge went way up super high, like 1500 feet, and then back down. The bus labored to make it up the hill to the top of the bridge and then seemed to be going uncomfortably fast coming down the other side. I was afraid the brakes would burn out.

     At the bottom of the hill we were still on an elevated part of the highway, about as high up as the bus was long.  We came to a section where the highway was missing, like where you expect those “dip” signs in Southern California.

     The bus driver got out and lifted the bus down to the ground below.  Finally he let me get off the bus, I was in the Northern portion of Los Angeles.

     I had a cell phone with me, and my mother was still alive here on Earth and hers was the only number I could remember off the top of my head.

     So I called her, and in the conversation stated that I wasn’t sure if I should call the telephone company and explain why I was not at work or stay and look for a job here.

     I haven’t been to Los Angeles for more than 40 years.  I know that it’s basically taken the same route as Seattle and the housing has become totally unaffordable.  The average person in LA spends 49% of their income on housing.  I know I could never afford to live there.

     So don’t know where the LA portion of this dream comes from.

     Today’s Our Daily Bread shared this verse:

     One of the things I discovered through my journey to prison and back is that God can use anyone and anything to his purpose, even people of different faiths.

     One of the most helpful things I experienced in prison was a Mindfulness Meditation course.  It was presented by Buddhist volunteers.

     This morning I was feeling a little anxious, having some difficulty getting centered and I stumbled upon this video:

https://youtu.be/0TIRmOJ2zMI

     It has many of the same elements as the mindfulness meditation course and by the end of the video I found myself very relaxed, quite a different and better state than I was in, and because I found it helpful I thought I’d share it with you.