Back Diagnosis

Saw the doctor.  The long and short of it was, do these exercises (instruction sheet included), swimming would help, sit up straight, try standing at the computer, take ibuprofen for the pain, and ice it if you want.  Since nothing is numb, tingling, or losing strength, it's probably not a pinched nerve.

In the dream department...  the other day I had a dream that involved brightly colored batik sun and moon puppets.  This morning I dreamt that I received two rejection letters in the same day's mail.  I prefer the puppet dream.

No rejections in the mail today.  

Off to critique.

More Back

Well... at least this morning I could get dressed without having to sit in a chair.   There were a couple of times when my back was pain free, but I can't figure out what (if anything) I did to "fix" my back (other than yoga-sit-up-stretches). 

Oddly enough, my sister is having identical back pain this week.  I hope this isn't some kind of strange psychic link.  

Aging

Today I got out of bed.  

That sounded easy, and normally it would be.  But today my back seized up, so I had to roll out of bed and walk carefully -- not bending my legs too much to keep my back from seizing up more.  

Do you know how hard it is to dress when you can't bend your legs?

Luckily, I figured out some exercises involving coffee tables, sit-ups, and some very basic yoga postures I remembered from a belly-dance class.

I'm really hating the aging process.   Oh; did I forget to mention that I'm getting to the point where my own handwriting is too small to read?

Losing Savoure Again

Alas and alack -- Savoure is closing its doors again; this time the retail part of the business is going away.  Not only will the shop close, but the retail web site is going away, too.  

Was September 2005 really only a little under three years ago?  I still miss the salon.  I don't know what I'm going to do without my Ceylon.  

Polar Bear

I spent a good deal of last night's dream trying hard not to be eaten by a polar bear.   

I'm not sure what I was doing in a kind of very large, empty concrete swimming pool.  It had a kind of mountain/island that was difficult for the polar bear to climb.  At one point I helped someone into a hovering helicopter while the polar bear chomped at my feet.  Then I spent a lot of time sort of holding the bear's muzzle open (so it wouldn't bite down on me). 

Slow Day

I think it's the allergy meds.  All I've wanted to do today is take naps.  

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.