Morning of September 13, 1999. Monday.

It is my wife’s birthday and mysterious packages arrive in the mail, mostly all about the same size. However, we are living at my sister Marilyn’s house. Many of the items remain on the porch.

Over time, I see that they are rather small dioramas from the television show “Space 1999”. For a short time though, I think that one section looks more like the bridge from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. The model people are very small, not even an inch high. I contemplate on whether or not the computers work in these small models, but that seems unlikely. However, I remember that September 13th is the 256th day of the year, which relates to the number of computer codes (in decimal) for the number of bytes available (though the span is actually 0 to 255, not 1 to 256) and the first range of hex codes up to FFh. This seems significant for some reason, and I am trying to understand how there could be more than 256 days in a year, “day 0” being the start of the new year.

Then things go a bit more hazy. The whole house seems filled with incomplete pieces of spaceship models as parts of dioramas, mostly to the same small scale, and I am not sure who is sending them. I do not think that my wife is that interested, especially as there is not that much room to set them up properly. I learn that one diorama is indeed the open-top bridge view of the Enterprise (from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”) while another is an open-top view of the Eagle from “Space 1999”, or rather, just a smaller section of the inside. They seem to be in “communication” somehow. The Captain Picard character is actually glued to his seat in the model (in sitting position as if in the middle of giving an order), but I think some are free to move a bit. Even though he is less than an inch high, he seems to be “alive” at one point and asking how he can leave his chair. He seems to represent everyman and, even though he is interesting in exploring space and doing his “job” is literally glued to his captain’s chair and unable to leave the porch of the house. I almost “feel sorry” for him even though he is only a less-than-an-inch-high plastic man. It seems strange to have models - as in the back of my mind, I would think these figures get tired of standing or sitting around so long solely to “entertain” their “captors”.