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I dreamed that I was at home, only my parents and little brother were different people from my parents and little brother, and I seemed to have acquired another younger sibling or two. We had a neighbor, a fabulously rich old lady who lived in a very large house with a bunch of servants. I, sometimes accompanied by the eldest of my younger brothers, liked to sneak into her house and either steal napkins or handkerchiefs as trophies or slightly rearrange objects in her house as a practical joke so that she'd know that we'd been there (things like removing a napkin from the dining room and dropping it on the floor of her bedroom so that she'd find it there in the evening). She didn't like us very much.
One wintry day my brother and I were wandering around her house looking for a particular washcloth with a ketchup stain on it. (I don't remember exactly why I wanted this washcloth, but I think that the last escapade had been especially marvelous and had somehow involved getting ketchup on this washcloth (but no ketchup mess everywhere else, or property damage; we didn't go in for that sort of thing), and so I wanted the washcloth as a trophy.) We were investigating rooms along a hallway on the second or third floor. My brother found a handkerchief in one of them and took it with him, intending to relocate it at some later date. I poked my head into a bathroom and discovered a servant washing the washcloth in question. Since being seen by random servants was not part of the plan, I just grabbed the wet washcloth and ran before the servant could do more than stare at me in befuddlement. When I dashed out of the room my brother immediately picked up on the fact that things had gone awry and so dashed for the front stairs and the front door. I headed for the back door because nobody had actually seen my brother and I intended to keep things that way if possible.
Upon reaching the back door, I discovered that there were police waiting outside and I knew I was caught, but I made a run for it anyway, even though it was snowing and I was only wearing polartec socks (don't ask me why - I haven't a clue). One of the policemen chased after me, and in addition to being fitter than I, he was actually dressed for the weather, so I just led him back to my house. On the way over I explained to him that I probably shouldn't tell him this, but that I just snuck into the neighbors' house for the thrill and the challenge to see if I could do it as she made her security tighter. I didn't mention that I also liked seeing her get riled up, but he probably guessed because he was a young policeman and seemed to have a healthy sense of humor. I let us into my house/my not-house by the back door and my parents/not-my-parents were sitting at the kitchen table, and I decided that this would be a good time to start cultivating contrition.
And then I woke up, and spent the next while wondering whether it would be a better tactic to try to present myself as still practically a teenager and not old enough to know better, or if it would work better to dress and behave conservatively in order to convey that I was actually capable of acting like a responsible adult.
I have an appointment with the Spanish Consulate. I will be in Boston on the 12th.
The school for social work started today, and this morning in Seelye I dealt with things from the basic ("Is there a lab with PCs in it?" (Welcome to the AWESOME of Mac Intel Dual-boots. No, I didn't actually say that.)) to the complex and esoteric ("So I've put this .pdf into a Word document" (Really? I didn't know you could do that.) "and I shrunk it a little bit, but when I print it it comes out all munched-up, and I'm afraid that I don't have the original document I scanned it from." (Um . . . um . . . how about taking a screenshot of the .pdf and inserting it into the word document as a graphics file? Which actually worked surprisingly well.) or "I'm looking for one of those cassette recorders where you can record your own voice along with the tape." (. . . I asked Steve about that one, and he didn't have a clue what I was talking about and I had to remind him that cassette tapes normally wipe previous data when you record over them rather than layering new and old data. He seemed to feel that this was really archaic technology. I wonder if I should tell him that I'm fairly sure my dad still tapes Prairie Home and the Puzzler every week on cassette tapes, and that our stereo system still has a record player (not that it works; my parents gave up on it when they bought a new stereo system and the same (pricey) part broke twice within a month of purchasing the thing). Or maybe I should casually mention that I had a class first year in which we had to watch a video on laserdisk. I think I'm still in a parenthesis. I'll close it now.)
And then I spent an hour this morning scanning slides. It was kind of cool, even though it was annoying and tedious.