She put "It's time for change" on her Facebook so I put the same on mine. I can't bring myself to change the relationship status to "Single." I wanted the fairy tale ending. We both did. But promises were made that couldn't be kept. We released each other from the promises but the love is still there. Lives change and puzzle pieces get rearranged ... I guess it will take a while to figure out what pieces fit where in the new puzzle. I love her all the way to 11 but I don't know if we still have an 11 or just two ones.

Im feeling sad and tired and basically want to just crawl deep into a cave and hibernate like the bear I am. Choosing between being unhappy or unhappier is not much of a choice. But we all make choices and sooner or later you have to live with them. Mine have led to a heavy heart. But there's always a new day. Well, not always. But when the time comes that there isn't a new day, then ... Oh well. Not much you can do about that besides believe in a fresh start anyway. It's pointless to think otherwise.

Can't sleep. Can't sleep can't sleep. Can't sleep. Can not sleep.

Time for alcohol.

Last night something really fucked happened.

Tracy was out with friends of hers from work, and they had to leave to go get someone, so she was sitting at the bar, saving the seats, and this guy starts hitting on her and wouldn't leave her alone. Meanwhile I was on my way, but driving from Chicago, I wouldn't be in the area for a couple of hours.

At some point she either got up and went to the restroom, or turned away, or something -- she doesn't remember -- and someone, possibly the guy who was hitting on her, put a roofie in her drink. We pieced this together later because at first we had no idea what was going on.

By the time I get there, she's in the parking lot with her friends, getting violently ill, and is totally incoherent.

Tracy is about a third my size but she can easily drink me under the table. She can hold her alcohol. Her drinking skills were seasoned in the best of England's pubs. So it made no sense whatsoever that after three weak drinks she's become incoherently drunk and sick. Her friends had come back and rescued her from the guy who was hitting on her (thank goodness!) but sitting there, she realized she was far more inebriated than she should be, and soon after began getting sick.

By the time I arrived they were in the parking lot and she can't hold anything down, and she had no idea who I was. We were on the verge of taking her to the hospital but she became hysterical every time we mentioned it -- being that she's without health insurance at the moment, she cannot afford it. So after another 40 minutes of working with her, we finally got her to the point where we could get her home, and at home she started snapping out of it. But she doesn't remember any of this, and can't remember me arriving, or even leaving the bar.

That's when it occurred to me that someone may have drugged her, and that's when I heard that she'd been alone in the bar and there was some creepy guy hitting on her and not taking "no" for an answer.

So we looked up the effects of a roofie on the Internet and she had all the symptoms. Shivering cold, way too drunk for the amount of alcohol she'd had, numbness in the arms and legs, and a large gap in her memory. It all fit.

Of course we have no proof, and since she refused to go to the hospital, the drug is entirely out of her system now. Though she's still sick. This is the day after, and she's upstairs asleep, and I'm at her kitchen table typing this right now.

We plan to go back to that bar and telling them what happened, and hopefully they'll know who this guy was and we can bring the police in after that. But I don't know. It may be too late.

Still, this was quite a wake-up call. The more people we tell about this, the more we hear how common it is.

Wow. Fucking wow. I'm blown away.

When I started this Xanga site, I lived in the Dallas area. Now I live in the Chicago area.

The love of my life used to be "Lady Savina," who's real name is Tracy. She's still the love of my life.

We used to live 824 miles from each other, now it's only 157 miles. We see each other a lot more often, but still not enough.

I used to be a computer technician with dreams of becoming a professional writer. Now I'm a professional writer, photographer, and web master ... but I still end up doing tech support.

Tracy used to be my editor, then I became the editor, and now she does techie things -- as the Director of Technology at her place of employment.

We still love each other to no end. It's still erotic fireworks when we're together. No intensity has been lost at all. The depth of our love increases, which is amazing because neither of us thought it could grow deeper. Well, as it turns out, love is pretty much infinite.

We have been through a lot together. A lot. More than many people have in a long marriage. It's done nothing but made us stronger in our commitment to end up being together.

I know many of you are now my Facebook friends, and I haven't lost touch. Thank you for that. For all the ones I've slowly lost touch with due to me not being an active Xangaroo, I'm sorry, and I'm sad about it. I used to love you all.

I still do.

About 2PM this afternoon I started getting sleepy so I took a nap. 

I slept until nearly 6PM and I swear the entire time must have been one long intense dream sequence. But this is the weird thing. I was somewhere in Texas, some small town with a bunch of friendly people in this rustic bar, and a young 20-something girl with a cowboy hat comes in with bags of some plant she'd been out picking in the wilderness. Everyone in the bar is all excited and they all start rolling joints out of it and passing it around. At first I think they're smoking pot, but it's not. Its just some local plant. One of the girls keeps offering it to me and so I think, what the hell, these people seem normal enough and it doesn't seem to be hurting them, and they assure me it's not illegal, so I accept.

So there in the dream, I get incredibly high. I'm high in the dream. It was really wild, and fun, and there were colors swirling around, and I had a blast. Then I wake up, and I'm still high as a kite.

I get stoned on some dream weed and wake up and I'm still stoned. Wow. This means something, I thought. So I get up to make coffee and have something to eat -- because the dream weed gave me the munchies -- and I start coming down.

No ill effects. Everything is okay.

And then I wake up again. I had still been dreaming!

I'm still laughing about it.

Tracy (LadySavina) lost her mom last night.  I'm with her now.

She's doing okay.  I'm very proud of her.  

I love her.

I'm not really convinced there's going to be a "blizzard" but we'll see.  Weather.com reports one is a'coming.

I'm out at Lady Savina's farm where we'll be nice and cozy if one does hit.

I just wish she had a generator.

I had hoped to be able to spend this weekend with Tracy, but unfortunately she was indisposed, and so I had a weekend to myself, and went time travelling.

About 22 years ago I found I could project my old 8mm and Super-8 movies onto a silver screen and video tape them with -- well, not high quality, but enough -- and so I preserved a number of older films via tape.

Tape is a worse thing to preserve things on than old fashion film.  So about 6 years ago I took all the tapes that would still play, along with various other camcorder tapes mainly of my kids when they were young, and preserved them onto DVD discs.

This weekend I found to my horror that DVD discs don't hold up to time very well, either -- three of the 20 discs wouldn't play at all.  So I took a free program called ImgBurn and created disc "images" onto my computer, stored them on an external hard drive, and copied them to another external hard drive.  It's about 60 gigabytes of video.  The family legacy.

I'm able to take these disc image files and mount them as "drives" on my Mac, and view them as if I'd inserted them as a DVD.  But even better, I found I could take a conversion program and extract the movies to files that I can edit, keeping all the good bits and leaving out all the boring ones, and distill these down to nice little videos I can share on Facebook.

Imagine my kids horror when they discover Dad is putting old home movies of them for the rest of family and friends to see.  Yes, I'm evil that way.

But the really interesting part, to me, is that I stumbled upon my Aunt Bev interviewing me on a very early sound movie camera (you actually had to hold a microphone).  This was back in summer 1970.  It brought back vague memories of the event -- my late Grandma's 75th birthday party in Sacramento.

I don't think I'd ever seen this movie before, because it's a disc my Dad sent to me last year, something that another part of the family had sent him, and I filed it with the other home movies intending to watch it but never did.

Watching my earlier self, my 9 year old self, with sound, being interviewed -- I felt like Doctor Who had whisked me back in time to witness it.  That's me?  That's really ME?  I was so awkward, and nerdy, and "for godsakes" I kept telling myself, "keep your finger out of your nose!"  But it was definitely my voice, and my mannerisms, and my crooked teeth.  That's me alright.  

"Is this your first time in front of a camera?" Aunt Bev asked me.

"No.  But back in Arizona, we didn't have sound on our movie camera."

"Well now's your chance to be an actor!  Do you want to grow up and be an actor?"

"No," I said, as if it were repulsive.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" she asked.

As soon as I heard myself reply, I remembered saying it.  "A garbage man," I told her.  

Everyone laughed.  I remember saying it because I knew it would make everyone laugh.  They did, so did I, and I could see on my 9 year old face I was very pleased by the fact that I'd cracked everyone up.

All I could think, watching that, is:  That is so me.