( More dreams. )

And as for the other aspect of Miriam-land that frequently winds up on this lj, ( books (not spoiler-y, I don't think). )

I'm back in NoHo. My travels were interesting, and I shall perhaps write an entry on them, but not at this particular moment.

Instead, I shall provide you with a brief account of a complicated dream:

We were racing cell phones. On model trains. There weren't nearly as many tracks as trains, and the rules seemed about like those for pod racing (in that there weren't many at all, although I believe you could only disable your oponents' trains in certain specific manners, given that trains are rather more easily destructed than pod racers). I won. One might say I cheated, since the cell phone left the train after the engine became disabled, but there weren't rules against it . . . There also weren't any rules about my dad helping to speed things along.
That's really all I remember.

( Another dream )

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.

I had two or three dreams last night, one of which may or may not have been a continuation of dreams I've had before, and while I remembered them quite clearly when I woke up at 7:00 the first time, by the time I got up at 8:30, the only thing I could remember was a very small fragment.

This dream featured Emily and perhaps Gwen, and we were discussing clam clamps for culinary pursuits. (Don't ask me what a clam clamp is; I didn't even know in the dream, beyond the fact that it was some portion of a clam.)

Emily or the other person who might have been Gwen said, "I haven't the foggiest idea what a clam clamp looks like. I do know what a clam looks like, though."
And the other person who might have been Gwen or perhaps this one was Emily responded, "I don't know either, but we did eat all of the cucumbers yesterday."

And not only did this make sense in the context of the dream, but the comment about cucumbers was insightful and perhaps a solution to the problem with clam clamps. Mind you, even as I was dreaming it, some portion of me was aware that this was completely ridiculous.
We did eat the last of the cucumber salad yesterday, though.

In other news, I used the last of the undyed roving last night. It's a good thing that I got more at the Webs sale. It would help if I could remember what the first lot of stuff was.

A great many people have left. Some of them, I will miss very much. Others . . . no. It's very bizarre to sit and watch people pack everything and go, knowing that I myself don't need to complete the packing part for another week, and that even then I won't really be going anywhere (mind you, I'm sure that the other side of campus will seem plenty far when I'm hauling boxes (and Lucinda!) over there). I have done a lot of my packing (I plan on having one more tub for the trunk room and hauling everything else with me), but a lot is not the same as all, both in the way that the room feels and in the amount of work that still remains to be done.

That said, I am enjoying hanging out with those who are still here, and with those who aren't but pop in to visit and to help people haul boxes.


I had another dream about the SpecFic exam going badly (and this one was actually a bad dream). Most of the class was in a large room somewhere one evening, studying and getting ready for the exam. Bill Oram showed up to hand out self-scheduled exams for the evening slot, and while I hadn't quite finished studying, I decided that I might as well take it and get it over with. So I got an exam, too. It seemed to involve reading an article and writing about it, and for some reason I decided that the best way to do this was to write while reading. The whole exam structure was rather odd; I was writing in my notebook, and several of us seemed to have knitting or other fibercrafts, and even though we were in the middle of an exam, we didn't seem to feel any compunction not to talk to each other. The room got darker as the evening went on, to the point where it was hard to read the article or to see which of the round things on the wall was the clock and which was temperature and which was barometric pressure (and it was hard to read all of them). vorindi suddenly announced that it was close to the end of the time, and I still hadn't finished reading the article, much less writing my essay, and didn't really have a clue what the article or the essay was saying or how the latter ought to be concluded, so I scribbled a note to this effect on the bottom of the paper in red pen, and then accidentally put the essay back in my bag and had to fish it out again (and noticed, in the process, that it looked like I had shredded the corners of it; terribly unprofessional), and put it in the envelope and did the seal and sign thing and handed it it. The odd thing about this dream is that in this dream reality, I'd already taken the first SpecFic exam, and this was our second self-scheduled exam.

Now one might think from the number of dreams I've had about doing poorly on the SpecFic exam that I was terribly stressed and worried about it, but the funny thing is that I wasn't at all; I figured that an English test is an English test is an English test, and that there's only so much harder they can make it in college than in high school, paticularly if you read all of the material* and liked a large portion of it. And English tests are something I'm good at. And I feel like I did just fine on it.

Which leaves me wondering about the dreams. Perhaps my subconscious is dealing with stress by completely freaking out and making up situations in which I'm bad at things that I take for granted on the grounds that I've already worried about things that I'm not as confident about, so it freaking out about them wouldn't have as much oumphf. I hope you can follow that sentence.

So those are my ramblings this morning.



*I did read "Breathmoss." Admittedly it was a year and a half ago.

So this morning the VERY IRRITATING alarm in the stairwell went off, the one that doesn't actually mean anything and we can't do anthing about but call PhysPlant and hope that they send someone quickly (which they generally don't), but it turned off again after five or ten minutes (which I attribute more to the capriciousness of the alarm than the attentive ministrations of PhysPlant). And now Jeff or someone is testing a something - probably a Permapower - and I have the charming boom of Check one-two, Check onetwothreefour-five . . . in a bass rumble permeating the back room and spilling over into the consultant desk.

I think that this is conspiring to tell me that it was a poor idea to not get enough sleep last night.
But social knitting is fun. And I'm not sorry (at least not yet).



Last night I had a ( dream )

My subconcious seems to have been very church-y last night. I had no less than two dreams about churches, the first about my home church and the Very Distressing Incident that happened a month or two ago. I don't remember much about that one, but it seemed to bring some sort of closure, and I rather suspect that it was brought on by my mother mentioning that the church secretary has quit without notice because he disappoves of the way the VDI was handled.

For the second, I made up an entire church, complete with church politics and a sexton who would occassionally go insane and attempt to shoot people. Actually, now that I think about it, I rather suspect that this dream was also sort-of about my home church, although it wound up getting turned around and mixed up with some kind of spy thriller.
Have I mentioned that I hate the politics of relatively small communities?

Anyway.
I just got an e-mail from my mother wondering if I had any spring pictures that she could use as a desktop background because her coworkers are telling her that the winter picture she has now is out of date. My response was more or less, "Spring? What's that?"

The talk by Princess Zulu last night was good.

. . . and now I should stop wasting time on the internet and finish the homework I was procrastinating on yesterday.

I had a dream last night. This isn't too surprising; I had two dreams the night before, and at least one the night before that - I believe that this is a function of getting nine or ten hours of sleep a night and lazing when I wake up, rather than becoming awake at seven and getting up more-or-less immediately (more immediately if it's a day when I think I'm in danger of falling right back asleep again). I tend to do a lot of dreaming when I regularly sleep in a bit-but-not-lots.
So. ( The Dream )

Wow, I'm tired. And I'm willing to bet that a third of those sentences are odd in terms of grammar (if not outright wrong) or completely unintelligible in terms of content, but it's getting late. I'll probably edit it in the morning. And I'll tell you about the puppet theater, too.

Edit: So. Dream. While I've had weirder dreams, I don't recall ever having invented anything quite like the Three Post-It Note System before. Unless you want to count the mountain-climbing Rescue Nuns. Which were just as weird, but not nearly as complex, so I'm not going to count them.

And the theater. Last night Mom, Isaac and I went to see A Christmas Carol at the Mum Puppet Theater. I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy it, but was playing the part of the thrilled, cultured daughter because Isaac was doing The Teenager Thing where he wasn't interested in anything and had to be bribed by the offer of dinner at a restaurant of his choice (he picked Mama's - home of the unhealthiest cheese steaks in the Greater Philadelphia Area. The sandwiches are huge, and greasy (by which I mean considerably more greasy than most cheese steaks), and absolutely delicious. It was lovely having a cheese steak with the meat done properly and actual cheese and the real kind of bread - even if the Mama's cheese steaks are smaller than the ones I remember when I was a child. Isaac's memories concur, but I'm still not sure if this is a function of the changing size of the cheese steaks or a function of growing up). Have I mentioned that Isaac is really, truly a teenager now? He acquired the Teenager Attitude years ago - actually, it's a family joke that I turned 13 and he became a teenager - so he would have been eight or nine, but now he looks the part, too. His sweatshirts have been getting baggier and baggier over the past several years, and I was surprised to notice that he now has the Hooded Teenager Slouch as well. Ever since he claimed the mp3 player mom got me for Christmas (I'm not going to go into the story of my mother being lied to by salespeople, but suffice it to say that I wanted an mp3 recorder, and despite blithe assurances that all mp3 players record, this one doesn't.) he's even had earbuds glued to his ears. And his voice changed over this past fall.

Anyway. The puppet theater. The show was performed with two actors, one of whom played scrooge and the other of whom acted some characters and manipulated puppets or props for the others. It was really well done. The theater was necessarily small, so it was very intimate, and when they were making it scary prior to the ghost's arrival, it was quite scary. Isaac said that it wasn't scary, and mom said that she didn't feel the arrival of the ghost made it any less scary, but I find the idea of being alone in an old house with noises that you can't identify and that aren't there when you go and look to be much scarier than a well-done papier-mache mask (particularly if the mask's hair is made with a scraggly ostrich feather). The candle blowing out was a nice touch, but I anticipated it (it occurred to me that it would be good for the candle to go out right about now, and I was just wondering how that could be arranged when it did). The Ghost of Christmas Past was excellent - it was essentially a lighted head on a stick with long flowing gauze, which was manipulated by the second actor. He could stick his free hand through the layers of gauze of the spirit needed to be more material, or waft the head around the room if it needed to be more ethereal, and the lighting was just right so that it was mostly impossible to see the actor doing it. The lighting was really good for the whole show, actually.
I quite recommend it if any of you happen to be in Philadelphia over Christmas.