Again pressed for heart's counsel, I was subsequently told that while such guidance as I'd ventured proved to be, if not quite what a friend hoped to hear, no less than "divine inspiration". Hmm. That was a new one. Far more simply happy to have helped, such "wisdom" as I shared exacted a hefty price: yesterday a growing pain in my jaw became almost intolerable.
 No longer will I be a pearl dispensary if the cost of the most brilliant of such gems is a wisdom tooth. The very last thing I need for the coming final week of rest from the Factory is the dentist's chair. Today has brought a respite for no good reason, but I can't ignore the sudden new signs.
All four of my sage teeth are slowly growing sideways. Tony says the word for this is "impacted" (animated teeth). A copious collection of X-rays of the bits of my anatomy to have taken blows of outrageous fortune no longer appears to include the jaw ones, but I remember them and am pretty sure my lower right gum is what that web site calls a "worse case scenario".
Both wisdom tooth and wobbly next-door molar will have to go.
The two-year-old geraniums in the window-boxes are, however, flourishing, to the surprise of Olya my florist, who says seasonal pollution has taken a heavy toll of such flowers in the neighbourhood. She wanted to be reminded how old mine are because she felt this might be a factor in the oddity in this picture. While it's a mediocre shot, do you see those spikes, like thick needle points, growing out of some of them?
I show this to the Faithful Five ¾ because, though experts, Olya and one of her friends have never seen humble geraniums do this before. Mine did, without ill effects, last summer too, irrespective of the colour of the plants.
The spikes come out of the middle of individual blooms and get longer by the week, but don't do anything but die with the flower after it eventually withers and becomes ready for pruning out. Any notions of what they are would be welcome.
 Far more commonly seen is this weekend's bunch of wild flowers for my true love, often to be seen in cornfields, though its meaning is for her to discern.
She must rest assured, I'm afraid, that the message is but a footnote to things said on an exceptionally prolific Full Moon Friday when a force some people call God purportedly worked its mysterious ways on my various writings and other doings.
All this was as open to different understandings as the closing scenes of 'Contact' (1997, iMDB), Robert Zemeckis's superb film of the story by Carl Sagan, who died before the scientific novel in which the astronomer offered one of the most intelligent accounts about how humanity's first encounter with alien intelligence might happen was finished on screen.
This was one of four highly varied movies I watched again during a very lazy Saturday after my shortest night's sleep of this year and while the raging ache in my cheek required the most lack of attention. It's probably worth adding that while I certainly wasn't going to study the whole film three or four times, I found what I did want to hear of the separate audio commentaries on the 'Contact' DVD, some by star Jodie Foster and the rest by Zemeckis and others behind the scenes was fascinating.
Less wise, given bits of my nature scientific friends sometimes think superstitious, is to keep the desktop pic that adorned the Mac for the best part of June. I'm not among those who alter these workstation backgrounds very often and dig into a rich stock of them twice a month at most. Some of my friends even like desktops that change once an hour, but if I let my computer do that I'd find it maddeningly distracting.
 However, given the big event of the past few weeks of my life, it's high time to say goodbye to this image for a new one.
The lady of the lamp here looks quite cheerful at her meeting with a big bad wolf, but it would be silly to make such assumptions about the woman I'm no longer mentioning in these blog entries.
This insightful beauty has cast so much light my way. But last week, it dawned on me that my perfidious subconscious mind might have chosen to work with the desktop, one of several I like by Belgian artist Niels Vaes, for odd reasons of its own!
Vaes's own 'Inner Dreams' web site has gone, but for others who sometimes have a taste for artists more or less inclined to tap the vein of fantasy, one good place to find some of his work and many others is SurrealPlaces, put together by Kevin Cappis.
7:11:19 PM link 
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