Round-trip Roundup

In Harlan Ellison's Eidolons, there is an ultra-short story within a story (maybe just 500 words) that begins:

"I awoke at three in the morning, bored out of sleep by dreams of such paralyzing mediocrity that I could not lie there and suffer my own breathing."

The remainder of that paragraph-long piece tells how the protagonist's boredom was "cured" by an unimaginable sequence of horrible calamities.  The piece ends with the only possible reflection:

"Somehow, the universe always provides."

Well, for me, the universe is providing.  :-)  No horrible calamities as yet (fingers crossed), but getting ready to move across country is making for some big-time disruptions that my goodly wife and I haven't experienced since our 20s.  I got home yesterday from a quick trip to sign an apartment lease.  Finding a place that's okay with our four felines was stressful, but luckily the in-person part was completed in just one day.  A red-eye flight got me home before a big snowstorm hit the Rockies.

But!  The chaos of packing has unearthed some interesting artifacts.  I found the colorful plastic name-tag from my first job: picking up garbage at a Six Flags theme park.  (No image to post, but just think of the "pieces of flair" from Office Space.)  I found a copy of the Norse myth play that I wrote at the age of nine.

A more recent layer of strata revealed the robot costume that we made for my son when he was 5 or 6...

A bit of garage mold necessitated a ceremonial disposal, but not before fully documenting the find, like good archaeologists.  :-)

There were also a few things that connect with the history of this blog...

Yup, this was pretty much a true story.  Below is the most surprising find...

...which completes the documentation of the Alphabet of Neptune that I previously revealed to the world.  The above symbol, by the way, is the "Interplanetary Peace Sign."  Nice.  If there's interest, I could conceivably post a translation of the whole booklet.

There hasn't been much time for writing fiction, but on the plane I added quite a bit to the copious notes and outline for the story that I talked about last time.  My characters now have names.  :-)