Hmm. Also grump.

msagara posted about online friendships. And something went click in my brain, and suddenly I have a new idea for one of my works-not-in-progress.
( Whinging cut for your reading pleasure )

There's been a chilly wind all day, but the sky was clear blue.

New Computer at work continues to astonish with the variety and ingenuity of its screensavers. Some of them are downright headache-inducing, some of them are beautiful; nearly all of them are distracting. One of them involves a chessboard beautifully rendered in 3-d. I think I'd seen that one go by before, but I hadn't realized until this afternoon that the pieces were actually moving -- legal moves, culminating in a checkmate after which the board faded away and was replaced by a new one.

Buttons

Two things that came up last night made me realize afresh how easily my emotional buttons can be pushed, and how much I dislike that.

One was that I finished the first volume of that Edith Pargetter trilogy I posted about last week. And it made me cry, even as I was muttering to myself that I didn't believe any of it.

The other thing was Sean O'Keefe's resignation. Six months ago, I was in the room when he spoke to the American Astronomical Society. That was the speech that announced the request for proposals for robotic expeditions to repair Hubble, but most of it was ... well, harping is probably too harsh, but at the very least dwelling ... on the Columbia deaths and how (while not being risk-averse) he wouldn't take the slightest chance of something like that happening again. It was moving, but in that very annoying way that happens when one knows full well that someone is doing that on purpose. And then he said, basically, that he'd be interested to hear what the National Academy had to say, but his mind was already made up that there wouldn't be another manned mission to Hubble, and it was his decision to make. Now, apparently, it isn't.