XKCD Dreams

http://xkcd.com/430/


I often feel like this. I dream intense, fascinating, confusing dreams almost every night. Most days, I've forgotten what they were about before my eyes are open.

Smart Baby

I just wanted to share what a smart baby I have! Today, we had to go shopping, but I didn't want to wake her up from her nap to do it. So when she woke up on her own, I fed her and put her in the carseat. She patiently sat as I drove to the post office and three stores -- looking bored, but docile. When I get home from any outing, I have to stop halfway into the driveway, take the baby out and take her insde, then take the groceries in, then fold in the rear view mirrors and pull the car forward into our very tight driveway. Elizabeth waited patiently in her carseat through most of this, but when I came into the house after pulling the car forward, she started complaining in her, "I'm tired of being strapped into this stupid carseat" voice. I quickly threw the perishable groceries in the fridge and freezer and knealt down in front of the carseat. She stopped complaining and grinned at me, wiggling happliy out of the seat as I unstrapped her.

I thought it was really cool to see how sh was familiar enough with the various situations to know that complaining at the store wouldn't get her much, but complaining on the floor at home would likely get her quick attention. I sure hope she coontinues to be willing to be patient with shopping trips in the future, and I hope that she really does understand that I'll do what I can to meet her needs when it's possible to do so.

More dreams

I've been paying a lot of attention to housekeeping lately, and I even frequent the flylady forums, so it shouldn't surprise me that I had a house cleaning dream. We were trying to get the house cleaned before the babysitter came, and I needed Peter to help me. For some reason there were dirty dishes in the bedroom, a lot of them, and they were all full of that nasty cold greasy dirty dish water. So we had to pick them up very carefully and dump out the water in the bathroom sink before climbing through the two Christmas trees that were blocking the doorway between the bedroom and living room (Don't ask me why there were two Christmas trees there. There just were.) When I sent Peter to the store to get milk and groceries he returned home with a sixpack of IBC rootbeer (actually there were just five bottles since he had drunk one -- even though Peter DOESN'T drink rootbeer) and almost nothing else. Then the baby started crying. I went into the bedroom to pick her up and found that Peter had laid her in the wire cube shelves, and she had wiggled into a position where her head was on the shelf, but her bum was over the edge, and the middle of her back was pressing so hard on the wire at the edge of the shelf, it was making a deep red line. Her legs were sticking straight up, and her feet were stuck in the little wire squares of the shelf above her. No wonder she was upset!

Compare that to the dream I had the other night. I was at somebody's house in the subdivision Grant Thompson built at one of the Metroparks (this subdivision is a regular feature of my dreams. I've seen the entire construction and landscaping. My brain is sure it exists). The back porch of the house looks out on a beautiful large pond. I went out to watch the sunrise over it, and there were flocks of pretty yellow birds. Then a herd of horses came down to drink and swim in the lake. They were happy and playful and there were several baby horses with their mothers. It was such a peaceful, happy scene. Somebody came and brought me hot chocolate, and I just sat and sipped, and drank it all in.

Dreams

Peter thinks I should write down my dreams -- not because they make sense in any plot sort of way, but because they don't seem to make any sense at all. Last night we were living homeless -- in a cheerful Bohemian sort of way. We slept in a couple of different places: a community center with a couple of hundred other people bedding down on the floor (they all seemed to be there by choice having given up the materialism of ownership); a big bed on somebody's veranda with a couple of other people, where we could wake up to watch the sun rise over the ocean; a dingy hotel where Dad was staying for some reason; and a very posh hotel where Mom was staying for some reason. I have the feeling that Mom was on the lam, and had some sort of contraband hidden in her backpack under the knitting. At the posh hotel, we went to a concert of experimental music where a lady played a drum accompaniment to the sound of various types of bread and fruits being fed into a wood chipper. At the intermission, everybody went up and ate beautiful hors d'oeuvres made of the chopped food.

Seven Random Things

1. I don't like food. I don't like cooking, and in general, I don't like eating. Occasionally I'll enjoy really good food at a restaurant, or some really flavorful fresh produce, but if I could survive without eating I would.
   
   
2. I'm a packrat. I love to collect and organize things, and I love to have a complete set of something. I do give myself space limits, though, and frequently purge in order to keep my house from overflowing.
   
   
3. I memorize things easily -- often without trying. Other things, I just remember exactly where to find the information which is almost as good.
   
   
4. I'm very shy socially. Many people don't believe this because I try so hard to do things to make up for it, but meeting new people is incredibly hard for me.
   
   
5. I like to make origami. Many people, when they see my origami collection (or my crocheting, or cross stitching or any number of other things I do) say they'd never have the patience to do that. I respond that it's not patience that accomplished them, but nervous energy -- I can't sit still.
   
   
6. I think hedgehogs are some of the cutest animals in the world, and I know how to say hedgehog in over 40 languages.
   
   
7. For my job, I get to do English adaptations for several manga series. When they're first translated, depending on the skill of the translator, the books are more or less written in Engrish. It's my job to smooth out the grammar, throw in some slang, and generally make it sound like native English. The hardest things to do are puns--sometimes the translator doesn't even try and just says, "Insert pun here." It's also tough to know what to do with phrases that just sound dumb in English like, "I will show you the power of my Justice!" (BTW: I work on +Anima, Silver Diamond, Dazzle, GetBackers, and Kyo Kara Maoh)
   

As for tagging somebody else to do this, everybody who reads my blog and has a blog of their own has already done it, so I guess it's a moot point.

Peter looks like 'Lizbeth

Here's a comment I made on Peter's Mom's blog that I thought I'd post here too:

I do see a lot of Peter in Elizabeth -- and occasionally a bit of Elizabeth in Peter. A couple weeks ago when he was sick, I went into the bedroom to ask him if he'd like some soup. He had been drowsing, and when he jolted awake, he flung his arms out, and stared around wide-eyed just like she does.

Heater vents

Today a man from the utility company came to do an energy efficiency check on our house. He put in 10 CFL's, replaced the showerheads, and checked for links in the heating ducts. Something about the whole process stirred a childhood memory that I want to share here.

When we lived in the white house in Michigan, there was a heating vent in the living room under an end table. When the heat came on, I (and my siblings) liked to crawl under the table and just soak up the hot air from the heater. We also liked to put coats over the vent to get them nice and toasty warm before we went outside. Mom allowed this, but only on a small scale. every so often, she'd come in and tell us that we had to move away from the vent because if we kept it covered, the hot air would never reach the thermostat and the furnace would stay on indefinitely. As a child, I could never figure out why this was a bad thing. I liked sitting by the heater when it was on, and sitting by the heater made it stay on, so why should I move and let it turn off?