Daydreams of a better job, two paths:

• What I want is a job where I don't have many responsibilities, but I do have to show up and be presentable. I think night clerk at a motel might be just the ticket - something where I wouldn't get in trouble for reading, where in fact that's what they want - somebody quiet but dependable, but most of all just somebody there - to answer the phone <1> and handle the rare visitor.
• What I want is a job that isn't so cerebral, where more physical creative action is required, not just working a keyboard in an office but something more (but perhaps not entirely) blue collar. Something hands-on. I just got the first in a series of books about how to build your own machine shop (using only an electric drill) and it's fun reading about how to build a furnace from a vacuum cleaner but to do real foundry work I'd need a basement and a backyard and I don't even have, in fact have never had, a house.

Driving around Los Altos I see the houses decorated with all their colorful holiday lights, and memories are triggered...

Back in high school we'd roam around our suburban neighborhood at night, very occasionally committing acts of vandalism and minor mayhem, depending on the amount of alcohol in our systems. Two winter incidents involving lights and U stand out - in the one, he an I stealthily gathered blue light bulbs from outdoor trees throughout a region of several blocks' radius around U's (parents') house and then changed a small, nearby tree's color from red to blue <2> - in the other, we were so out of it that U was literally pulling lit strings of lights off of front bushes, and it wasn't that late - a front door opened and a homeowner appeared, hollering at us with guests visible behind him - we just laughed maniacally (or guffawed drunkenly) and ran away into the darkness. This house, which was located among those of the most wealthy, was quite close to the Mercedes we "got" on an earlier night, when it wasn't cold - for that prank we'd loaded our pockets <3> with numerous ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles from our local hamburger hangout. As we (a whole carload) pulled alongside our target, all bottles were deployed and we squirted the condiments onto the chosen vehicle. (Nice boys, huh? Teenagers'll do anything when they're drunk.) Another time we achieved that same crazed state (beware!) at a party in a friend of a friend's high-rise apartment. This was a very cold winter's night, and the complex' swimming pool was visible to us from the balcony (I'd always insist on a balcony inspection if one was available: the higher the better). This pool hadn't been drained, so its water was frozen. Looking down at the Michelob bottles in our hands, one thing led to another and we discovered that these bottles didn't break, even when hurled onto ice from a great height. More bottles were needed - once the party's supply of empties was exhausted, we had to leave the apartment in search of more missiles... a pole-lamp fixture was found, discarded in the trash chute room, and I recall the host wondering out loud why we were dragging this stuff through his living room - when we emerged from his balcony a moment later, sheepish, empty handed and still laughing, it was time to go - our welcome at that particular address had just expired.

Signed up at theglobe.com as a test - I read somewhere that they were a better free web-site choice. My initial reaction was positive, except for one major complaint - their pop-up banners are lethal! They crash my favored version of Netscape when I kill them immediately. Does GeoCities' do that too, now? Another geocities.com question - did their "watermark" stop moving or is it just me? (That version of the browser (3.01) doesn't seem to have the ability to display it.) I thought initially it always stayed at the bottom of your browser window (hence many complaints) and now it's static, at the bottom of the page (fewer complaints).

Found a new journal, the kind of quality discovery which mean I'm reading it from the beginning; not such a chore since it's only been up since March. She's a mother in Texas, with two small boys.