I screwed around for too long this morning trying to get NS to see my pages the way that I want it too. Got to sleep after 13:00 and got up at 19:00. That just ain't enough sleep. But I can guarantee that I'll do better tomorrow! I just love having a spell checker (with Homesite) because I never can spell guarantee and it fixes it for me. I've looked that damned word (and many others) up so many times. I think that I have a learning deficiency for non-medical words... and some medical words too.

Why do the slow drivers only bother me when I'm in a hurry? I know, this is a question that has bothered mankind since the big bang (or shortly thereafter). Anyway, coming to work tonight, I was a little late getting started. So, on the 35 MPH streets, there were people in front of me doing 20 MPH. On the 30 MPH streets they were doing 15. This doesn't happen when I have plenty of time... no, it doesn't happen, it's not that I just don't notice it.

I think that the changes are kinda finalized to the front pages. The next step will be to streamline the journal pages. This is going to be a little more difficult for me, because I really like the way they are now, there are just a few little things that bug me. For one thing, I want to increase the column width by about 25%, but I don't want it going off of the edges of people's browsers. I just hate it when somebody does that. I also want to decrease the grafix load without losing the effect. Much easier said than done.

I just thought of a way to do it... if I can get it to work in MSIE and NS it will be a miracle, or a bunch of hard work anyway.

Thinking about old friends, and how people get to be friends and how people get away from being friends. I have never "lost" a friend, except by death occasionally, and that's a whole nother story. But I have had quite a few just drift off. If I run into these former friends, we are happy to see each other, but generally, the common thread that has run through our lives has been lost. And I have never really been able to re-establish that friendship except in the most superficial way.

Common interests, common circumstances and common friends/acquaintances bring people together, but they don't necessarily cause them to form friendships, but rather partnerships of a sort. When the commonality is gone, so is the friendship. No matter how close these people may be for a time, these are acquaintances, not friends.

Real friends, true friends, are those people who are friends in any circumstances. And they are few and far between. And very, very dear. And they last a lifetime, they last through separations of time and geography. They are people who, even though you haven't seen them for five years, you can call and chat with and tell your problems to without boring them. And they can do the same with you.

In a nutshell, friendship is just about as easy to describe as love... veritably impossible. There is a spark there, a bonding that is priceless.

This was brought on by seeing an old friend tonight, and neither one of us recognized the other, or at least I didn't recognize him until the opportunity was lost. And I feel terrible about it.

It's almost time for the daily hip parade... so named because the nursing home personnel make their rounds about now. The people who have fallen out of bed are then sent to the hospital, many of them with fractured hips. It's hell getting old, it's hell dying young. This dying thing has to be done just right or you will either suffer the loss of a lot of time (dying too young) or suffer a lot of pain and humiliation as your body parts go separate ways through the ageing process. Doing it just right requires that you are at the end of your useful time and you suffer an accident or fatal medical problem, thus saving you the pain and suffering, physically and mentally, of dying slowly. Very few people are going to go willingly at this stage, hoping for miracles or just afraid of dying. Suicidal thoughts are best acted upon while the body and mind are still able, and most people fritter away the opportunity with hoping or praying.

I only hope that I can recognize my time.

The main problem with that is that when we look at old people and their physical ailments, we have a tendency to think, "I would rather be dead than have to live like that." You never know until you get there what value some people put on simply remaining alive, and I condemn the rush to judgement on this subject. Since we have no way of knowing what is going on inside the brain of someone who has had a stroke or some other problem that prevents them from speaking, we have no way of knowing whether they are happy or unhappy.

The very most pitiful circumstances, though, is when a patient says to you, "Kill me, please, I don't want to live any more... help me to die." You know that they are sincere, and you know that you can't help them. You want to say, "Dammit, you should have thought of that earlier, when you could do it without implicating me!"

Well, I'm much too tired to be messing around with honing my HTML (non)skills, I'm just going to put this up and... (chorus) Go To Bed!