Grass and Sky

So many dreams last night.

Dream 1) Babysitting at some random person's house. Very cool house, playing in all sorts of weird attic and basement spaces, having a party. But then I had a headache and the mom of the house directed me to a big bag of pill containers, saying there was Tylenol in there somewhere. After rooting through the bag for a while, all I could find was little plastic vials of unlabeled liquids. Yikes!

Woke up from that dream very crampy and in need of advil. Luckily, it was much easier to find than the drugs in the dream. I was awake for a long time after that, though, waiting for the advil to eventually kick in.

Dream 2) I had to take Tookie to the vet (in dreams, I usually still have Tookie, not Mal or Zoe) and I was driving this old VW Beetle. No trouble getting there or parking, but coming back out afterwards with Tooks - not in a cage for some reason, just loose in my arms and squirming like crazy - I realized I had parked at the far edge of the parking lot. When I got to the car, it was unlocked and someone was messing about at it. They weren't trying to steal it or anything, they just wanted to see something. So I got Tooks into the back seat and got ready to go. For some reason I was driving from the right seat even though there were also controls and a steering wheel on the left. And as is typical of my driving dreams, I was only just barely in control of the car. I was never really able to make the car stop completely, even when I had the breaks jammed flat to the floor (this is standard Meesh car dream stuff), I was narrowly avoiding collisions with people and other cars and then driving a little too fast and recklessly once I got on the road. My view of the road was more than a little bit obstructed, as well, by big lumpy things on this side of the dashboard. And then I came to the crest of a hill, with yellow caution lights warning everyone to slow down. As I went over the crest, I saw two things. One, it was a very long way down to the bottom of the hill. Two, despite other cars managing somehow to drive on the road, it's angle of decline was well over 90 vertical degrees and there was no way to stop myself at this point from simply tumbling off into the void. And as that tumble started, I gratefully awoke.

Dream 3) This one was equally vivid when I woke up but has become a little less distinct since then. But it was, in some ways, sort of like a Harry Potter world, although not at all like HP. There were two groups of people living side-by-side, but only one group knew of the other. That group may have had magic or something, although it certainly wasn't wand-waving, spell-chanting. I was more or less a non-magic person who'd been welcomed to the magic side by one particular family. And we had a variety of adventures, none of which actually involved anything even remotely like magic. But there was skiing, and a helicopter, and a group of the magic people who were vastly offended and felt threatened by my presence. It was fun, but I'm having a hard time describing it properly.

I got very little sleep after waking up for advil at four, just enough to cram those dreams into. And oh lucky me, today is picture day. Somehow, I almost always end up looking pretty rough on picture day. Maybe I'll just pull myself out of the group picture this year.

Did I mention that the cats have all been taking turns with a sneeze-o-rific cold the past few weeks? Zoe and Mal both had a few days of sneezes. Zoe gets sneezy all the time and it barely bothered her. Mal almost never sneezes and it freaked him out, poor boy. And now Maggie the loaner cat has it. And boy, she's not messing around. She's got the biggest sneezes you could imagine coming out of a little cat body, and then she huffs and snorts for a while, and rubs at her nose like she just inhaled pepper. She's not at all happy with this. Today is day three for her, and that's about how long it lasted for the others so I'm hoping she starts feeling better soon.

Hockey tonight. Go Pens!

To Do list for the weekend of May 3-4:

Go for a short run
Scoop litter box
Wash dishes
Do laundry -- Two loads folded and put away, one load still in the dryer.
Change sheets and flip mattress
Find old training certificates (2005 and earlier)
Tidy rooms
Vacuum living room and bedroom
Scrub toilet and sink
Scrub bathroom and kitchen floors
Make progress on job applications
Work on portfolio revisions
Go to grocery store
Babysit Saturday evening
Watch hockey game with friends Sunday afternoon

Well, that seems like enough to be getting on with. Especially considering how lazy I am and how unlikely it seems that most of that stuff will actually get done.

I did go for a run this morning. I kept it short, ran for about twenty minutes and did somewhere between one-and-a-half and one-and-three-quarters of a mile. It's hard to tell because I don't have the neighborhood mapped out in distances. But I ran at a faster than 'treadmill usual' pace except on the hills, which there were a lot of, so I think it was a decent short run. I missed my normal Thursday run because my foot was really sore (a combination of new running shoes that don't have as much arch support as they claim and then missing the bus and having to walk all the way home from work with the fourteen lb box of kitty litter in my backpack which seemed to bruise the sole of my already sore foot). I stuck my arch support inserts in today, but I won't be able to tell for a couple of hours if they made any difference or not.

Hm, I should probably go get to work on that nice shiny list I just made. I'd much rather just sit here snuggling with Tooks and watching Mal spaz over his toys, but that would be unproductive. And unproductive is bad. Yes, bad.

I ordered Tookie's meds last Monday, to be delivered overnight. This is because I was pretty much out of her meds. So, according to FedEx, they were finally delivered today.

First, it took until Thursday or Friday for my vet's office to give permission for them to ship it. Then they shipped it out on Friday, it arrived in Pittsburgh before seven Sat. morning and then just sat there until today.

I think that they now have Took's prescription on file, so they won't need to get permission from the vet every time I reorder, so hopefully it will be faster next time, but still, note to self - order early.

I had Comcast out here again this morning. Of course, with the way the universe works, my service hasn't gone out since Tuesday or Wednesday and the guy couldn't find anything to explain the problems. Great downloading speed (which I'm hoping means a quick dl for Robin Hood this afternoon), clear signal, etc. I am now on my third splitter and the modem/router/thing has been moved off the desk in case there was some interference from clock/radio, phone or speakers. But Cable Guy could offer no explanations and no idea of what would come next should the problem continue. So now I cross my fingers and hope that there will be no more problems.

Thor did his vanishing act again today, when Cable Guy showed up. He vanishes really well. Even though we were very careful at the door, I still half-thought he'd got out, since I couldn't find him in any of his usual hiding spots. Even after Cable Guy left, Thor refused to show himself, not even with the lure of kitty mush. But as I crouched in the closet, tapping the can of mush, I thought I heard purring and then finally made out the dim outline of a kitty head way, way, back behind lots of other things. I have no idea how he managed to squeeze back there, or back out again, but he's a flexible guy, I guess. He did finally come out a few minutes ago and seems as happy as always, especially since I followed through on my promise of cat food.

Tookie, who used to be such a little scaredy-cat, has in the past year completely turned around. She didn't budge off the computer chair, which she is pretty sure is actually her throne, the whole time Cable Guy was messing around just inches away from her. So she got some extra cat food as well.

Alright, enough blather, back to studying for my IT midterm.

The cats are off to the vet's office. They may never forgive me for putting them in their crates and abandoning them. lyda_pearl may never forgive me either, after spending an hour in the car with two yowling cats, each way. Tookie does not travel well, and I think Thor has decided he doesn't want to travel well, either.

I owe Lyda Pearl a bit more than a nickel for this one.