Everybody was in their usual positions, although I brought Ike down from his “top of the wedge, bartending, in the dark” position down to my left side, and snuggled Overcow while a space Digital Blasphemy iPhone background glowed from goodNite and my Kindle read, in its dreary little monotone, Agony Booth’s recap of Star Trek: Voyager‘s “Threshold”.

As a result, dreams were very boring. When I woke up, I remembered a little of the boringness, and now they’ve pretty much evaporated.

Last night, in order to be able to snuggle in the heat, I closed the door of the bedroom and used the box fan to pump out hot air only out of the bedroom through the window. This brought temperatures down to 72ºF, at which point I closed the window and everything was pretty okay. I could also sleep under my duvet, which is actually another anti-nightmare buff for me. I never had duvets until the West Coast.

Hot weather dings my sanity for other reasons. Cooling mechanisms employing fans (which include the air conditioners) can trigger me if they’re too noisy. This is because when I was little, we were too poor to buy fans that didn’t squeak, nor to fix the apartment air conditioner unit that squeaked. The squeaking could drive one a little mad, but it just meant that my father would scream at me and sometimes beat me for the squeaking at random intervals.

So. You know. I try to buy fans that won’t squeak. I feel better when they sound like the fans in laptops and computers and even supercomputers (along with their high-quality air conditioners that will never squeak) because I used to be a sysadmin who was immersed in those sounds. I could sit in the datacenter room with its secure locked door and locked windows and just work and not be afraid. This was while my parents were trying to stalk and kill me on campus.

(Is it any wonder that I prefer to work for companies where security locks and detail are present? This limits my options, and people are sometimes stupid and let unauthorized people in, but on the other hand, being able to access a red phone at all times does wonders for my sanity. No security is ever 100% secure, just like no slice of swiss cheese is without holes. The key is to pile swiss cheese slices with different patterns of holes on top of each other so you get something almost solid.)

Anyways, I need to eat breakfast. Apparently one must eat a good big breakfast of some kind to feel better later in the day. The guy on my team who is over 7 feet tall says so, and he probably would know.