I keep a small box of tissues on my nightstand. They are all the way over on the far side of the nightstand, because the near side is filled with books and a lamp and my ancient Sony clock radio and a glass of sparkling water-like beverage. When you open a new box of tissues they are so tightly packed in the box that, unless they are in a location where you can use two hands – one to pull out the tissue and the other to hold down the box – they tear off in tiny shreds. When the box is too close to being empty, it’s too light to stay in place when you pull on a tissue and you get not just the single tissue you need, but the box itself. There are only a few tissues somewhere in the middle of the stack where the balance of weight and friction and the energy you exert to remove the tissue are in perfect balance and a single tissue can be easily extracted, with no tears or shredding. These are the tissues Goldilocks would choose. Tonight we went out to a going-away party for my boss who is leaving our company to become COO at another software company. After 17 years with the company, there were many stories to tell about him. He's an accomplished pianist (he turned down acceptance at Julliard to attend a prestigious technology university), and we gave him a print called The Honky Tonk Piano Player as a gift. His musical claim-to-fame was as the pianist on the theme song for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It will be so strange not to have him to blame all my stress on anymore. Exercise: Standing in 95% humidity, swatting away the bugs at the party. Books: They're beckoning from the bedside table. Cats: They were *really* hungry by the time we got home. I thought I saw Hercules eyeing Xena a little strangely before we put the food out. Dreams: I was back in a college again (another strong thematic element in my dreams), and was living with one of my real-life college roommates, whose first name is the same as mine. She and I were going through CDs that appeared to be covered with bar codes and were trading them like playing cards. She was going to go on a trip and the train ran right past the place we were living, so we could hear when it approached. The train stop was right behind our apartment house, and as she heard the train pull up she made a comment about not wanting to leave, but she picked up a suitcase and walked out the door. She was wearing something in a burnt orange color, very 60-ish (although I went to college in the 70s and had to live through the beginnings of disco). I have no idea why this dream assembled itself from the random bits in my mind; it might be easier to interpret if there was a tunnel.