doubting thom

After writing yesterday about no longer remembering my dreams, this morning I remembered a chunk of the one I was having when the alarm went off.

I know there was more before the part I remember, but it was fading. In the dream, I was living in my parents’ house, in which I grew up; I was my current age, with my current life, but in the dream appeared to have been living there for some time. My parents were away on a trip, and I was supposed to mow the yard. I had a robotic lawn mower–I think such things exist, but the one in my dream reminded me somewhat of the robotic vacuum cleaner I saw in the Skymall catalog on my flight to Tucson. It was round and looked sort of like a metal trashcan lid. It was supposed to move in an ever-widening spiral.

I came outside to check on its progress, and discovered that it had done about half the yard just fine, then had gone apparently haywire. It had veered off in a straight line toward the woods, cutting a swath through several rose bushes in the process. I went looking for it, but couldn’t find it in the woods. While searching, though, I found an abandoned rusty bicycle from my youth; oddly, though it didn’t seem at all odd in the dream, of course, the spokes were picking up transmissions, and were giving me snatches of my dad’s conversation to my mom, though I can’t recall now what they were discussing.

Then I was back in Tucson, at the desert museum. There was an exhibit of creatures that live in the desert foothills, but when I stepped outside and looked at the foothills, they were simultaneously real and an abstract two-dimensional painting of the hills (in glorious shades of purple), with moving but still two-dimensional abstract representations of the various flora and fauna, like living indigenous artwork.

Roger was there with me, and we wandered through the exhibit to a picnic area. There was a bbq underway, though there was no one else present. The grill, rather than being fueled by charcoal or gas, was peanut-butter powered. Similarly, it was clear that someone had tried to fashion plates and paper sacks out of peanut butter as well, but when they discovered that didn’t work (there were vaguely plate- and sack-shaped lumps of peanut butter around the tables), they had cast them out of peanut brittle instead.

And that’s when the alarm woke me.

I need to start finding humorous sites to visit each night before bed. Saturday morning I noted a site that had made me laugh the previous night, lightening a dark mood and allowing me to get to sleep. Last night I had a similar experience, but made even nicer by sharing it at the time with both Roger and Lee.
I hadn’t yet explored the Weight Watchers Cards of 1974 (poundy.com), so I started off looking at those and sharing the URL with Roger and Lee. That site reminded me of the material at both drokk.com and at one of my very favorite sites on the web, lileks.com, most especially the Institute of Official Cheer. There was some new content at lileks.com that I hadn’t yet seen, which was nice, but it all feels fresh again when laughing over it with friends who haven’t yet experienced it.
These sites inspire the kind of laughter I mostly only remember from years ago, when I first discovered David Barry (whom I don’t find nearly so funny now, but twenty years ago considered his work to be riotous) and The Straight Dope, the kind of stuff that could make me fall off the bed from laughing so hard. The commentary with the recipe cards on poundy.com, and with everything on lileks.com create the same effect; I was laughing out loud, with tears streaming down my cheeks. It was a great way to end the day and hit the sack.

Just registered two books at Bookcrossing, Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, by Diane Duane, a surprisingly disappointing work by one of my favorite authors, and The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time, a touching posthumous collection of various Douglas Adams speeches, essays, columns and a draft of the beginning of what might have become the sixth volume in the Hitchhikers trilogy.
I read Elf-King on the flight out to Tucson a couple of weekends ago, but only got around to registering it tonight. Finished Salmon of Doubt around the middle of last week, but haven’t returned it to the library yet.

Entered the monthly Washington Post neologism challenge (washingtonpost.com) today. I entered this a few times in the past, and even got a few honorable mentions, but have forgotten to do so in a while.
Won’t see the results, though, until the first or second week of May.
I’ll have to check out yesterday’s Style Invitational; I used to enter that occasionally, as well, and it’s weekly, at least. Gives my mind a challenge; I don’t get that from much else these days, and certainly not from work.

Well. Saturday night was a real crash and burn. I haven’t even been able to write about it since then, and didn’t post at all to the journal yesterday.
These mood swings–well, barely swings, since I’m not really having any manic phases, just oscillating between relatively flat and depressed–are becoming more pronounced and more–oh, I almost typed the word “debilitating,” but that’s really too extreme a word, maybe “annoying” or “distressing.” And now they’re being accompanied by severe stress headaches.

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After being away from Alex for five days a couple of weekends ago, when I was in Tucson, I felt guilty about leaving him alone (even though I had both Jay and Craig come over to check on him/play with him). So I bought moist food, something I haven’t given him since early in our relationship, because he’s been satisfied with dry, which also allows him to free feed throughout the day.
Giving him any at all again was mistake #1. Mistake #2 was in, after a few days of only giving it to him in the evening when I return home from work, giving him half in the morning before work and half after. Now, of course, he expects this routine every day, and doesn’t understand that on weekends, especially when I’ve been up until 4 or 5 am, I don’t want to get up at 7:15 just to open a pouch of cat food.
Sigh.

I was starting to feel depressed and anxious again very early this morning, and was procrastinating about going to bed, when I came across a link to this site parodying the iconic figures used in the guides on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s paranoid affairs, er, I mean public affairs site. Some of these caused me to laugh so hard I very nearly fell out of my chair. I sent them to another insomniac friend, and he said that I was causing his cat to look at him funny from his own response to the parody. I’m now heading off to bed, feeling amused and much more relaxed.

Went with Craig and his girlfriend (and my former co-worker) Laura to see Stephen Lynch in concert tonight at the Birchmere tonight. What a riot. Tears-streaming-down-my-face, pounding-my-hands-on-the-table funny. If I thought he was funny on Comedy Central and on the radio, well, this was 100 times better; as wicked and witty as his lyrics are, they’re only enhanced by his physical comedy and presence. And oh, he’s even cuter in person, if that were possible.

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Talked to Dad on the phone last night. I hadn’t heard from him or Mom on Wednesday, the day they were heading back to Richmond to the Transplant Center. On Thursday evening, then, I tried to call my sister, but her line was busy, so I turned on AIM to see if she were online, which she was. We chatted for awhile, and then I asked her if she’d heard any report from Mom and Dad. She told me they’d gotten back Wednesday night.
So I called Dad; he was very apologetic that he hadn’t called me yet, especially since he had said on Tuesday that he would call me back from Richmond when he had some news. They’d gotten in so late Wednesday night, though, that he was too tired to call.
He still doesn’t know much more. The doctor drew some more blood, and is going to make more changes to Dad’s meds, to see if this can get the white blood count back up where they want it. So we’re back to just wait-and-see at this point.

Gene Cowan, in his excellent blog Just as I thought, wrote on April 5 (I just got around to visiting again earlier today) that Verizon never learns. This reminded me of an experience I had with Verizon myself on Thursday that I meant to post about but forgot.

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