I'm sorry to postdate this entry too, but now I know, I won't have Internet access around midnight tonight. Sorry. I'll tell you about the hotel sometime later.
Something curious I've noticed about my office iMac, on which I haphazardly loaded MP3 copies of a couple of the music CDs I own until I noticed I kept the CDs right there by the machine anyway -- things like a Best of Allan Sherman, or the Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, or a Stan Freberg CD (apparently, culturally speaking, I live in 1962) -- is that when I do need to shut down iTunes for some reason or other it nearly always warns me that someone is connected to my shared library, and they'll be disconnected if I shut it off. I know this isn't just a warning it gives to anyone who tries to quit iTunes, since there have been times I didn't get the message, but they were usually when I was in the office at some weird hour, or on a Sunday or so. I would expect every now and then for someone to be connected, or if I had one of those monstrous, 482-days-of-playtime lists that other shared computers I see have I'd expect to have someone connected most all the time. But I've got a puny little library of maybe four hours, most of it humorous things from nearly half a century ago; how did I become a reliable entertainment source for Singaporean students? Alas, I never figured if there were a way to contact computers listening to my library, so I'll probably never figure it out. But what's life without a mystery or two like that?
Somebody reading between the lines of yesterday's piece may have realized rain was on my mind for good reason -- there's been a lot of it this week. Monday and Tuesday saw the heaviest rain in decades, and as I understand it the northern end of the island floated away and is now making its way past Johor Bahru. It came to the better part of a meter in under 16 hours in spots, and the evening news had lovely dramatic pictures of hawker centers trying to sandbag themselves into safety. At one condominium complex an party had to be called off due to flooding, and the koi from their decorative pond were able to escape. (At least one of them got caught again and was pictured on The New Paper front page.) Naturally, Monday was the night I'd expected to go to the Night Safari, but that wasn't possible (I think one of the intersections I'd needed to go through was impassable through flooding anyway), and Tuesday was the same. When Wednesday turned out mostly dry I leapt at the chance.
Wednesday night after getting back from the Night Safari (I'll write about what I saw, don't you worry) and after showering and posting and getting to bed, I had a lovely moment where I thought: ah, everything is taken care of. Now I can turn off the light, close my eyes, and go to sleep. I then opened my eyes, saw the light was off, and realized I had been asleep.
Trivia: Percival Lowell claimed he could make out sixteen stars in the Pleiades cluster by eye. Source: Planets and Perception, William Sheehan.
Currently Reading: Way Station, Clifford Simak.