Drive By's

It's barely 9 AM and we've had about eight people sort of drive by the yard.  They're all looking for books or magazines.  

Yard Sale

The madness begins.  Mark is going around the neighborhood putting up "Yard Sale" signs.  

He and my Dad decided it would be a good idea a few days ago -- we do have some large items we don't use taking up space... but my inner pack-rat isn't exactl pleased.
 
And there's no tea in the house.  Looks like it's going to be a Pepsi before 9 AM day.

Pollen, Still

Wow.  I think this has been the worst year ever for me.  I was drivng the car to the library the other day; when we got close to where a park is, my eyes started to water.  That's never happened before.  I flicked the car's air to recirculate.  I'll be glad when this is over.

I guess it's time to do a scratch test and have the doctor tell me specifically what I'm allergic to.

---

In a different topic, I was taking a peek at the "real live footage" of a space alien looking into somebody's window.  

I used to be really psyched about the thought of aliens landing and saying hello.  I wanted to go with them.  Now the thought of an alien peeking into my window gives me the shivers (not the good kind).   

I don't know when that changed.  

Dreams of Magic

Odd dreams.

Bit one:  I was levitating in the top of a bell tower.  I think it was night, or at the very least dark in the tower.  I might have been wearing a poet's shirt, or at least loose clothing.  As I floated at the top of the tower, I held out my left hand, palm inward, and started spinning counter-clockwise (or widdershins).  From underneath my cuff streamed snake skin -- the scales were yellowish, brown, and grey.  The skin coiled around and beneath me and down the shaft of the tower in a long, trailing streamer.

Another night:  Well... it wasn't quite Hogwart's, and it wasn't quite the New York School of Dance and Art (or whatever the "Fame" school was called.  But it was a school, and it was a dark place.  I almost think we borrowed our wardrobe from "The Matrix," -- everyone wore lots of dark and black trenchcoat type clothes.

The first thing students had to do was choose "metal" or "wood."   I chose metal.  I think that may have been why I had to wear black (later on in the dream the Wood folks were all in brown).  Lots of surreal images; I'm afraid that the only one I really remember was a kind of disk of silver (or possibly two intersecting disks) with a polarized finish on it fashioned such that different parts either reflected or absorbed light.  

The "mascot" of the metals was a flying, black stone gargoyle.  For some reason I decided it would be fun to paint it white (it was some kind of group prank).  Once I did so, the gargoyle transformed into our head professor -- a kind of Snipe character -- played by David Bowie.  The beaky white face melted into Bowie's, and then he took off a white shirt (the paint somehow had become a shirt) and changed into some black clothing.  We were sort of in trouble, but I don't remember what happened next.  

Hot Day for Mail

Whew, the last few days have been too warm for my liking.  Oh well, on the up side, our heating bills are lower.

This weekend I got a lot of stories in the mail.   This is a good thing.   April, I let things slide as the rejection letters came.  Now I have to polish the first drafts I have and send those out, too.

On the dream front, my dreams have been kind of dark lately.  One night I must have been channeling my inner Jay Lake because I dreamt I was mistaken for a clown -- this was a bad thing because clowns in the gritty dream city I found myself in were the leaders of gangs.  Imagine Ronald McDonald with a switchblade and pistol.   I think that was the dream involving tossing someone from a very high window.

Then there was the Escape from Arcosanti dream, with revolutionary residents bombing the construction.  

When You're Down And Out...

Sigh.  It's an Annie Lennox day.  Somewhere between "A Thousand Beautiful Things," "Have Mercy," and "Honesty."   

Muriel continues to be a needy irritant.

Pollen and Scrivener

Augh!  Pollen!  

Spent most of Saturday morning on an antihistamine buzz.  Man, that stuff really dries me out, but it makes my hands and feet feel like they're being radio controlled by my brain.   

Not too surprisingly, I dreamt that black crows of doom were flying to people to present them with charred bits of bodies (mostly arms and legs, I think).  The scene that impressed itself into my memory the most strongly was the cook who thought he was safe from the crows when one appeared before him without any grisly bits.  Just as he though he was safe, his oven popped open and there were the charred remains.

Ummm... lots of back to school dreams, lately, too.

On a slightly related topic, I've been playing around with Scrivener, an outlining and editing tool for the Macintosh.  I'm loving it; I've started to import drafts into it, and at the very least it chunks daunting edit jobs down into manageable pieces.   One potential difficulty is that most of my editing is done on Windows machines and the iMac really is for family use.  Oh well...

Keys

Humph.  I locked myself out of the car yesterday.  It was the classic, carefully put my keys into my shoulder bag, carefully put the bag in the locked car.  Mark thinks I need to get a key lanyard (or maybe a bracelet).  So of course the bits of dreams I was able to remember this morning involved cars somehow.

Writing has been a chore the last couple of days.  I'm making scattered progress on several stories.   The non-fiction readers are getting back to me and now that the excitement of writing the piece is over I'm thinking I need to re-order it.

Dreams and Grandma

The dream started out in an aquarium... or an ocean science movie. In any case, I was watching a hippo or a porpoise frighten a squid. The squid was a puffer-squid, and when it got frightened it would expand and a bunch of quills popped out of it. The hippo-porpoise was having a fun time frightening the puffer-squid. It got a little repetitive, with the hippo-porpoise popping out from behind a rock (in the lower left-hand field of vision) and frightening the puffer-squid (in the upper-right hand).

I think I said something about the aquatic scene looking like a ballet, and suddenly, Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty" overture played and I was choreographing three ballerinas. They were traipsing in front of a castle curtain wall toward a fourth, but it wasn't working quite right. The opening dance kept repeating as we tried to work it out. I think my old dance instructor, Pam Hoffbur, appeared at this point and we tried some other things.

I finally decided that we needed to rotate the castle forty-five degrees on the stage with the corner of the castle wall in the lower stage-right area. The lead male, hunched over a sketch of the set in the castle, came up with the same idea independently.

When Pam brought it up to the main theatre instructor, the two women got into a discussion of how the set needed to have a bridge in it so that the theatre instructor could use it for a production of "Waiting for Godot." (Although now that I think about it, it should have been a production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.")

---

Saw Grandma today. Umm, wow; she's really thin -- I guess the last time I saw her she had a long-sleeved blouse on. She said she was fine the several times when I asked. I hope I didn't tire her out with reports from the outside world.

She'd just woken up from a nap when I arrived; so my attempts to get her speaking by asking her advice on things like gardening worked less well than they have in the past. She still has her humor and smiled when I said I was glad I had inherited Lillenas hair (I hope at 98 my hair looks half as great as hers does).

I think the next time I'm just going to bring the harp and not have one sided conversations.

Cool lights and unpleasant dreams

I've lost my soul to a Mathmos Airswitch tc light. It's a light; it's a toy; it's high theatre. In terms of shear coolness, it's right up there with harmonographs, theremins, and kinetic marble sculptures.

Ah well...

Strange and disturbing dreams this morning. I was in a jumbled setting that combined bits of my 1980's college rental, my last rental, a frat house, and a restaurant. I kept waking up part-way thinking, "Gee, that was unpleasant" only to fall back into the dream again....

At first, I was trying to walk around the setting without waking up my housemates, who all seemed to be sleeping with their significant others in unexpected places (and none of these people were the folks I went to college with; I think there were some contemporary folks). There was something about somebody's dad wanting to use a computer to check his stocks, and he had sort of hijacked my session with an unknown program; I couldn't get the machine to stop running it, even with a reboot.

There was a break, and suddenly I was in some sort of custody kidnapping movie or something. A bunch of shaolin monk types trouped into a small, bare apartment living room. They used a sort of bowed huqin or sanxian (and incense, I think) to get a feeling for the room. One spot that they traversed made the musical instrument howl -- an indication that something horrible happened on the spot.

There was something about being served breakfast or dinner or something although I was from the wrong dorm, and very soon after, I found myself being shown out of the building by a malicious maitre'de who pretended not to recognize me. It didn't help that my dream clothing shifted to just a bathrobe and my feet were muddy.

At one point I was fighting a pint-sized ninja while the people around me watched. I wished they would help, but they didn't. In the end, I had the ninja by one arm and one leg, and was trying to keep him from kicking me or slashing me with some sort of ninja knife. I'm not sure if I was in a bathrobe or if my dream attire had become more daytime. Eventually, I had to release him, and for my troubles he painted to F's on my left collarbone, saying, "failure!" each time. This was a type of counting coupe, and someone informed me that I could look forward to having my shoulder broken/stabbed in nasty painful ways in the near future.

Mr Pint-sized Ninja (he was about two or three feet tall) started leaving harassing tassels of red and black fabric around the house to show that he had been there.

The dream ended with a kind of fight in the restaurant's colonnade between three gangs of various ethnicities, with the rest of us trying to stay out of the way. Probably the most interesting piece of gang apparel were black and gold hexagonal pointy hats (sort of like three-tiered pagodas)... but at the time I was too busy trying not to get hurt to pay too much attention.