As I was walking home from CVS today, I saw The Phantom Ice Cream Truck — there is an ice cream truck that has been making rounds in my neighborhood, playing the same music-box song, for as long as I can remember and I had never actually seen this truck until this evening.

Now it was just like any old ice cream truck; it was white, rectangular, and had steel bars in the windows. The driver was bald and had on his face a sinister-looking grimace. An inscription above the truck’s windshield read: “CAUTION CHILDREN”

I found this to be very curious. Was this an imperative? Surely it was missing some punctuation. I pondered the possibilities:

CAUTION CHILDREN! Warn them about the ill-effects of ice cream on health!

CAUTION-CHILDREN: $1.50 each.

CAUTION, CHILDREN. Driver may be dangerous.

CAUTION: CHILDREN They are quite vicious!

However, since punctuation limits the meaning of “CAUTION CHILDREN” to only a fraction of the possibilities, it seems that leaving the inscription with a certain degree of vagueness is to the interests of both the truck driver and the children.

They clearly aren’t very positive on me. Summer’s been good, fairly productive, and there have been high points, but as for physically being at home (beyond the excellent weather) is, I think, taking a toll on me. Sure, my crazy aunt isn’t at home so often anymore, but with my parents it seems to have been endless down-putting since I got home last month.

I guess being away for most of a year has helped me look at things more objectively. I used to think expressing my point of view in a reasonable manner was one of the most important things when it came to having conversations, but it seemed (I guess) to my parents that everything I said was loaded and it all implied something I did not intend to say; that all came down to basically continuous argument. Taking this into account, I’m now not sharing my perspective so much and just saying “okay” to everything my parents say, whether I agree or not; I figured that having peace at home was ultimately worth more than the metaphysical good of idea-dialogue.

One day at dinner — I don’t even remember the subject of discussion — when my dad was throwing one verbal blow after another at me, I simply took some deep breaths, said “okay” after every sentence, and hoped it would stop soon. But after it did, I felt lightheaded and sick to my stomach, so I stood and left without eating. I wanted nothing more than to throw up, except, having eaten nothing… So I went to my room and eventually cried it out of my system.

I guess I’m dealing with it better, at least on the surface, but lately I’ve been having lots of weird disturbing dreams, some of which start out fine but all of which end badly. Grey wastelands, gnarled, bare trees, deserted litter-filled playgrounds, strange old women, malevolent beings. A few people in my life (both past and present colleagues) keep reoccurring, seeming to personify certain themes. “You’re a fake,” said one girl, with whom I haven’t gotten along for a while. “You’re an imposter; you have no real skills or ability and that’s why you’ve brought this evil thing into the world. You’ve been resting on other people’s laurels all your life — well I’m putting an end to it now.”

A friend of mine alerted me to an article in the Telegraph which claims that two German scientists at the University of Koblenz have somehow moved a photon some distance instantaneously. Now, the Telegraph is considered a fairly reliable source of news, as is New Scientist, to which Drs. Nimtz and Stahlhofen reported their findings, despite the fluffiness of popular science for which we playfully deride these magazines. Since many scientists submit their discoveries to popular news magazines and such before submitting reports to peer-reviewed journals, I don’t have too much to criticize there. But, as cool as it sounds, I’m keeping in mind incidents such as the Fleischmann-Pons cold fusion experiment and remaining skeptical until they actually publish and somebody repeats the experiment.

So… maybe I could’ve been doing something better with my time today, but here’s our new, bright, whimsical look! I also cleaned up my code a great deal, though, after having not seen it for over a year, I’d forgotten what I’d named all of the variables. Oops. There are probably bugs lurking around in here somewhere, which I will fix when I find them. (..or when you find them and tell me about them!)

…and her new layout!

Here it is!

I’ve been feeling a little nostalgia for my old graphics intensive layouts myself — hopefully I’ll have time to create one soon. I realized that I’d practically forgotten what all of those layouts looked like, so I went and dug up my backup CD from that ancient PC that runs Win98, on which I used to write websites and such. Scary stuff.

It turned out, in fact, that the CD-RW wasn’t readable on my laptop without a piece of software that was only available for computers runnings Win98 and WinNT. Luckily, there was a near-petrified NT computer lying around at home, which had a CD-RW drive, which let me copy all of the stuff on that CD onto one flash drive. Hehe.

So here’s a nostalgia-inducing thumbnail that I rescued from my backup CD. This was version 6 — from before I moved to snowcovered-dreams.net! (Back then, I was at Twilight-Reverie.net.) Anyway, I’m thinking of something graphics heavy, with bold, unique colors and shapes, yet still somehow minimalist and elegant. Probably a white background, so that I can use all those super cute animated smilies I made way back when. Possibly something orange (!)

Also, you may have noticed the new category app I installed, after being inspired by the same on Aditya’s blog. I guess I got lazy and just didn’t categorize most of my posts properly, so they’re all falling under “general.” Oh boo hoo.