Is there such a thing as Adult-Onset Motor Dyslexia? Because I think I’ve got it. Lately it seems like there’s a crossed wire in my cortex that is turning every day into Opposite Day, at least as far as my hands are concerned. They seem to be diametrically opposed to my wishes.

This week I have pulled the following blunders:

• Kept a candy wrapper and thrown my keys into the trash
• Repeatedly switched to the wrong car key to start the car even though I had the correct one in my hand just a split-second before
• Poured myself a glass of milk, set it down on the counter next to a glass of old ice-melt water, then picked up the milk and pitched it into the sink
• Hung up on someone instead of hitting the hold button
• Typed my password in username fields, and vice versa

At this rate, they’ll be pulling a Dr. Strangelove routine any day now.

I was playing a round of TF2 CTF just half an hour ago as an Engineer, when suddenly I heard the achievement guitar riff play as I stepped onto my teleporter entrance. Startled, I looked down at the bottom of the screen to find that I’d gotten the achievement “Selfish Teleporter: Take your own teleporter 5 times in a round.”

Now, I’ve taken my own teleporters more than five times in uncounted rounds of TF2, so I knew it wasn’t some long-neglected General achievement. Intrigued, I did a quick Google search but found nothing. I searched the Steam forums. Nothing! Puzzled, I looked back at my list of achievements. It did not appear there under any category. Now, I’ve never heard of custom/server-specific achievements before, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. But I couldn’t find any mention of them on mod sites like FPSBanana. Of course, I didn’t think to take a screenshot.

So I’m wondering; has anybody else seen or gotten this achievement? Did Valve silently/accidentally roll out part of the upcoming but unfinished Engineer update?

I put a couple of MacBook Pros into production the other day for our Communications group. Shortly thereafter, the users informed me that I’d neglected to add any printers to their machines. Whoops. So this morning I traipsed over to their office to add ‘em. Though I had no problems correcting my oversight, one of the printers (an HP 2015dn) reported its location as Boise, Idaho.

Of course, I felt compelled to print a test page or seven just to make sure my content came up on the printer in front of me, and did not, instead, start spewing paper in some Farm Bureau office out in Karcher Junction, much to the bewilderment of folks there. But no, print it did, right here. I haven’t the foggiest idea why the printer says it’s in Idaho, though. It seems happy enough to think it’s there, so I just let it be, dreaming its little potato dreams of the rugged north.

Wow. I really don’t update this thing much these days. I blame two things: general business at home and Facebook. It’s interesting, in a way, how Facebook has sapped the “will to blog” by providing a channel to constantly emit little bits of opinion here and there, acting much like a pressure cooker regulator- and lessening the perceived need to publish larger amounts here.

An additional consideration is that I know my boss reads this blog (hi, Steve!), so I’m not completely comfortable with some of the more cutting remarks I might make about the office, even though the chance of negative repercussions is probably not high. But then, sometimes I just feel that perhaps this blog has run its course, that there’s no more steam left in the boiler. I don’t know. We’ll see.

The first thing the cats did after they woke up this morning was to jump up on the bed and settle down for a nap. Their languid demeanor and slow, comfortable stretches were evocative of a sort of whole-body yawn, and flickers of regret for leaving the cozy confines of the covers briefly ran through my mind.

As the cats settled in for another long period of inaction, I thought about yawning- in particular, how contagious it is. You know the drill; someone next to you yawns and you can’t help but repeat it. While I didn’t see either cat yawn as it curled up for its snooze, they certainly do yawn voluminously when it suits them. But is a yawn transmissible between species? Maybe I should confine myself to bed today (regretfully ignoring the day’s chores) in order to observe the potential behavior firsthand.