Last night got a little weird for me. Not that anything was happening per say, but I felt strange. I decided to meditate to see if that would clear it out. I ended up meditating for half an hour, which is a really long time for me. Usually if I stop moving and close my eyes for any length of time, I fall asleep. I’m not very good at sitting still. I have friends who remind me that I’m a “human being” not a “human doing,” but I really am not wired that way.

I will say that I slept really well though when I did finally go to sleep. Had a really pleasant dream too, which I might not have recalled except for the fact that I decided to meditate a bit more when I got up this morning and while I was doing that, this really vivid, nice dream surfaced. It was almost like it wanted me to remember.

Today, I’ve still felt like my mindset has been slightly misaligned. I must have hit a speedbump too fast and knocked my steering out (grin). So writing didn’t get done this morning. Instead, I worked on my mindset and did some class videos. One assignment made me assess my writing over the last five years. That was an eye opener. And a little irritating, mostly because I wanted to roll back about 3 years, slap myself upside the head, and shout, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I know I had my reasons (I was trying for more balance), but dang! If I’d tried a little harder, it would’ve helped so much. There I go back to that “human doing” again.

But, when I looked at it overall, I’m really not too bad and I had to settle myself back down.

Then I tried to get to writing, but my son had other plans for me. He wanted me to look over his cover letter. We worked on his resume a couple days ago. He’s trying for a couple of really nice jobs. I hope he gets one of them. I think it’ll really grow his skills. The kid has an amazing eye for design. He always has. We’ll be walking through the mall and we’ll look at the movie posters. While I just think they are eye candy, he actually has logical, thoughtful things to say about the design and composition. He’s been that way since he was little.

I made dinner while he was working on that. I made spaghetti. I’ve been craving it for a couple days now. It worked out well since he was busy trying to get the cover letter and resume off. I guess that’s why the universe had me get the stuff for spaghetti out last night. It all works out.

Tonight I was downloading reports and writing up instructions for myself. Last year, I started building myself a very cool database with PowerBI and Power Query. When I get it done, I’ll have so much data at my fingertips that it will be awesome! For now, it’s just become a way for me to simplify the data entry for my bookkeeping. Because it’s still a work in process, every time I get more data to go in there, I run the risk of something breaking or discovering something not quite working according to plan. That’s what happened tonight. I did eventually solve it, though it would’ve been nice if it had told me where the error was at rather than giving me a funky, obscure message. Literally, the start of the message read: “Feedback Type: Frown (error).” Go on, tell me that’s not hilarious. Thanks, Microsoft.

The problem was in my table relationships. Ah, you didn’t know that tables had relationships did you? You thought it was all clinking champagne glasses having all the fun. (Sorry, my humor is probably out of alignment too. Unless you laughed. Then we’re good.) Tables in databases can have relationships. Sometimes they don’t know each other at all. Other times, well, things get convoluted. That’s what happened on mine. It read the tables as a 1-1 relationship meaning that there would only ever be one of each on both tables. I needed a 1-many so that one table would only list the item once, but the other table might have it multiple times. No, I will not make another relationship joke here. (But wouldn’t it be funny if Loki had to deal with data tables at some point — oh, that could get evil. He’s liking that idea. Title of the book would probably be 1-800-nerd-out, as only people who like data science would read it. Although, I just realized that might work for the 9th novella really well.)

I didn’t get to the data entry part of my bookkeeping, so I still have work to do there. Sorry, had to pause there to ask my son a question about his computers. My brain is on full computer geek mode today. Maybe rather than being out of alignment, I’m rebooting. (LOL!)

Let’s reconfigure the power coupling (that means turn it off and turn it back on again).

Yeah, sorry.

I hope there is an alternate reality out there where I really got into computers and data. Who knows, maybe I’m a hacker in one of the universes. In this one, I’ll leave that to my characters. I don’t have nice words for people who do that kind of thing. In an alternate reality, I could see me really messing up people like that. Or — yeah, let’s stick a pin in that. Someday, I will write that book.

For now, I’ll be off on the next adventure. Until next time!