Octopodial Chrome

Girls smell nice; I first noticed this back in college, when I found that Baker Hall where I lived smelt mostly of urine and BO, whilst Clyce Hall (where I & my friends chased the gals resident there) smelt nice. Well, this was brought home to me once again this morning. After my friend had completed her ablutions, I performed my own---and when I entered I discovered that my bathroom smelt nicer than it ever has. It's really quite amazing how they do whatever it is they do. Perhaps they use nice soaps or something?

This complete set of hematite dice (4, 6, 8, 2x10, 12 & 20 sided specimens) is just too cool for words. The same vendor makes obsidian, rose quartz, jade, agate and other semi-precious stone dice, but I want hematite. And amethyst. And carnelian. And (synthetic) opal. And…

A nice side effect of having a friend visit is that it gives one the impetus to clean one’s place, and so my condo is finally rather nicely squared away. I’d really like to have more folks by, actually, so that I can show it off in a good light.

What I’d like to know is why it always takes two days to clean my place. It doesn’t matter if I spend a month cleaning ahead of time, but it’s always a disaster area until two days beforehand, when suddenly my cleaning starts to work, and I end up finishing with 4–6 hours to spare. It’s really quite remarkable.

An old friend of mine was in town this weekend and so we got to spend some time together, which was very nice. It’s funny: we don’t agree about a lot of things (the joke is that each thinks the other completely, horribly, awfully wrong about everything—save for the things we agree on), but nonetheless we’d a very pleasant day (yesterday evening & most of today).

Something I’ve realised with Shaima’s visit, and my own visit to see Phil & Jess in Texas (along with all the others I saw) is that friends—not acquaintances, but real friends—are one of the few key things in life. It’s not so much the frequency that one sees them, but that one sees them at all, that one has a few kindred spirits out there. C.S. Lewis wrote much more eloquently on φιλία than I ever could, and his words are worth reading.

One of the bad things about seeing one’s friends so rarely, though, is that it takes time to fall back into things, although as I’ve noted given a short amount of time it all works out. That’s definitely an issue which more time together rather than apart would help.

So if someone would just break the laws of the universe and invent a teleporter so that I might see my friends every week, no matter where on the globe they are, I’d be much obliged.