More weird Russell dreams

So there's a consequence, apparently, to my watching Master and Commander just before I go to bed: I had me another Russell Crowe dream. And in what has clearly become the tradition of my subconscious, it was one of those 'meet famous person and do otherwise completely normal stuff' scenarios.

Except, well, this was a little abnormal. In the dream, solarbird and I met RC at a convention (a science fiction convention, just to be clear; we don't attend any other kind). I remember what apparently prompted me to actually talk to him was that he had his kid with him, and I piped, "Can I see him?" He lit up and even let me hold the kid (who, although he is a toddler in real life, was an infant in this part of the dream). So we got to talking, just a sort of 'hanging out in the con suite' conversation. RC lets us take a picture of me with him, for 'I actually met him and I have PROOF!' mileage.

The weird part came in when I later realized that I didn't have the picture. I have this jumbled memory of Dara and me calling him, or something; he had the picture and sent it to us. But then he asked us to come to Australia for six months and babysit his kid!

(This is in fact the second time I have had a dream involving me caring for Russell Crowe offspring. Apparently my subconscious does not want to bear his children--it wants to be their nanny.)

Anyway, we did it, and then I remember scenes of being at his big ol' ranch in Australia. His wife Dani was there, and suddenly the kid was indeed a toddler, and I played guitar in one of the rooms of the house (though I think I was trying to play Carbon Leaf ditties, specifically "Desperation Song" since that was in my head when I woke up), and we had what my dreaming brain apparently decided was some variant of a Maori dinner. I remember being around a table with others, and we were serving each other little bits of fish. There may also have been green prickly fruit involved--pulled in from the Galapagos scenes in M&C.

When I woke up I told Dara about this, since she figured prominently into the dream. She said, "I'd do that for a million dollars! Except if the kid turned into fire or something."

I said, "RUSSELL! You didn't tell us he was a special needs baby!"

I have a very strange subconscious. But a very funny lifemate. ;)

iPod surgery!

And oh yes, I forgot to mention--despite the battery connector problems, and despite breaking off part of one of the tabs that holds the silver part of the iPod case to the white part, the iPod surgery does appear to have been successful.

It turns out to be pretty darned easy to get the iPod taken apart. I took the screwdriver they sent me (a small flat-head type) and gently pried it in between the back and front of the case, roughly just above the halfway point between the bottom and the top. Then I worked the screwdriver back and forth--again, gently--till the case popped open at that point, and once that happened I was able to make my way around the whole thing and pop it open all the way around.

There is not a single iota of wasted space inside the iPod. It's all hard drive, a very thin motherboard, and a battery. The hard drive is cushioned by blue rubber, and it's easy to get the hard drive out; you lift out the top part of the rubber, then you gently work the hard drive out of its connector, then you lift up the bottom part of the rubber so you can reach the battery. The tricky part was getting the old battery's connector cable out from under the corner of the motherboard, but once I did that I was able to get the battery out with no problems.

Trying to get the white connector off the end of the cable on the old battery was the hardest part of the whole operation, and Dara had to do that because I couldn't figure out how to do it. But she did it without breaking it, so we were able to get that connector onto the cables coming off the new battery. Trickiness, again, to get the cord tucked back under the corner of the motherboard was hard--especially doing it so that the wires didn't pop out of the connector. Eventually I got the hang of it, though.

Then I put the hard drive back in, put the top part of the rubber back on, and popped the case back together. I had a brief scare when I then tried to turn on the iPod and got the scary folder-with-exclamation-point icon, which apparently means there's a software problem on the device. So I took it apart again, reseated the hard drive, and put it back together.

Then I did a reset, and suddenly, BOOM, the iPod was live. I had to let it charge up for three hours, but it's done that now, and as I type this I'm giving it some play time to see how long the new battery holds up.

In conclusion: replacing the iPod battery is totally doable. And way, way cheaper than buying a new iPod.

Writing revelations

Carbon Leaf's "Life Less Ordinary", which is fast promising to be my initial favorite off Indian Summer, is striking me as a hugely appropriate song for when I'm working on Faerie Blood--because this book's all about Kendis' life getting a lot less ordinary very quickly. I can almost hear Christopher singing these lyrics to Kendis:

Live a life less ordinary, live a life extraordinary with me
Live a life less sedentary, live a life evolutionary with me
Well I hate to be a bother, but it's you and there's no other, I do believe
You can call me naive, but...
I know me very well (at least as far as I can tell)
And I know what I need

And especially most of the chorus, which I really like both rhythmically and lyrically:

The night you came into my life
Well it took the bones of me, took the bones of me
You blew away my storm and strife
And it shook the bones of me, shook the bones of me...

If Faerie Blood has a soundtrack in my head, this song is definitely on it.

Also, just as a general point of reference, fight scenes are HARD. Even magical ones. Going through the beginning of Chapter 15 tonight, I find myself reworking the opening pages in great detail, scrutinizing every single word for proper pacing to make damn sure it's a word I want in there. It's amazing what being on the third pass through a book and being hugely anxious to get it done so I can fire it off for an editor's inspection is doing to my word choices. ;)

But GAH, I need to make it through this. Tonight's progress has been slower than I like, and I'm almost trying too hard, I think. I'm stressing, and it's getting in the way of the words that need to come out of my brain. I had some tea, though, and hopefully that'll help. I expect to be up a while tonight yet, just because I'm too awake to go to bed. Maybe by the time I do I'll have more of this chapter out of my system.