Furniture!

I'm sitting here writing on our NEW COUCH. Yes, we have a couch again. How long has it been? A year, I think.

When I was out at my folks' house last weekend, they were talking about having so much stuff, and worrying about it, and saying they needed to get rid of things, and my mom was talking about having kept so many old things thinking that we would want them some day, but then realizing that we probably don't have any more room than they do (and we don't). They said, "Is there anything that you want or need?" and I said, jokingly, "How about a couch? That's really the only thing that I need," and they said, "Yes! Take ours, please."

I said, what? Are you kidding? and they said no, that Daddy had never liked their new couch (they had bought a new one a year or so ago), and Mom liked it, but it was really too large for their living room, stuck out too far. I said well, yeah. I'd love to have it, but had to ask them several times if they were sure. I said that I would ask Bob what he thought, and let them know, but I figured if I wanted it, Bob wouldn't have any objection, and he didn't.

I guess it's not exactly what I would have picked out if I had been picking, but it's fine, and it's a couch, and it was free, so what's not to like? It's practically brand new, they never really used it unless they had company, so it's hardly used at all.

Bob and John went out and picked it up today in John's pick-up. The cats checked it out thoroughly, of course.

It apparently passed muster.

Here's another cute guy who wasn't in the office the other day when I was testing out my camera, Dan:

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New toy, cute guys, and a contest

Our new camera came today. It's a Canon Powershot SD200 that I ordered from Amazon. The price has been lowered another ten dollars in the couple of days since I bought it, and I got 10 free holiday cards, but they've upped that to 25 now, so that's worth another twenty bucks.

As soon as the UPS guy delivered it--and I opted for free shipping, but even though they said it could take up to two weeks, I got it in five days (I ordered it last Friday), so I sort of feel like they made up for it in the shipping--I plugged the battery in to charge, and flipped through the manual. Once it was charged, I took it down the hall and took pictures of the guys in the art department (Dave, Jeff and Kurt, and Simon, of course). Aren't they cute?

I've absolutely fallen in love with the products from Indigo Wild. My health club occasionally has this kind of weird, rough-looking soap in the bathroom, and it smelled wonderful, but I never really paid any attention until this weekend, when they had some little sample bags by the soap dishes, printed with the Indigo Wild URL. I, of course, checked it out when I got home, and it's a local company that makes this wonderful, natural aromatherapy soap and other body products.

I requested a catalog, and they sent me an email coupon for a free bundle of sample "slices" with an order, so I placed an order for another bundle of sample slices, plus a couple of sampler bags so that I could try out the rest of their products. In addition, they sent me more samples--several small body lotion samples, more soap, a perfume sample, etc. Everything is lovely, and it smells so good. And I love supporting a local business.

So I was thinking--my birthday is in a week, and in the elementary school tradition of bringing treats on your birthday, I thought I'd give away one of the sample bags. I can't find it on the website now, so they may have discontinued it. Anyway -- oh! I can take a picture of it!

So anyway, I thought I'd give it away. A little mini birthday contest. So send me an email with the subject "Birthday Contest" and I'll draw a name on my birthday--which also happens to be Thanksgiving (I love it when that happens!)--and send the sampler bag to someone.

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Map

I mentioned this in the weblog, but I don't know if everyone reads it -- I created a Frappr! Map where you can put a virtual "pin" to indicate your location, and leave your name and a message. It's kind of cool to see where everyone is from, and see pictures, so if you can, please go add your pin!

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Psychic dreams

I've had some kind of interesting dreams lately. And while I know that almost no one is interested in someone else's dreams, the one Saturday night had kind of an interesting twist.

On Sunday I went out to my parents' house for lunch. I ended up spending the whole day there--they had birthday gifts for me, one of those wonderful big stone "heads" for the garden (I'll take a picture of it once I'm allowed to get up--Dinah is lying on both of my arms while I type), a clear glass candy jar shaped like a snowman, a set of cats-in-baskets salt and pepper shakers, and a gorgeous copper bee thing for the garden--and we had a lot to talk about, so I stayed from lunch and on into and through dinner.

For some reason, while we were eating dinner, I was reminded of my dream. I dreamt that I was living in an apartment with three other women, but I was still married to Bob, who apparently didn't live there. Bob was mad at me, so he was going to go on a date with one of the other women. I asked him how he knew her, thinking that he had set up a blind date after having met her online, but he said no, that he'd known her for a long time. I said, "Well, I'm not going to tell you to have a good time!"

I was laughing about that as I was telling my folks, and I said, "Oh, and there was a Christmas tree suspended from the ceiling!" My mom said, "What?" And I said, yeah, there was a Christmas tree that someone had hung from the ceiling. We had high ceilings in that apartment.

My mom said, "I saw that on television last night!" She had been watching some kind of decorating program or something, and they showed a Christmas tree that had been suspended from the ceiling. She said it was suspended point-down, and the one in my dream was trunk down, but it seems pretty clear to me that I got a psychic message from her, that she had been thinking about a silly Christmas tree suspended from the ceiling, and I ended up dreaming about it. I mean, why else?

Later, for some reason we were talking about my Uncle James--my mother's brother--who was in the Navy in World War II, and who was on the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier which was sunk in the Battle of Santa Cruz in October, 1942. My mom remembered that before they had heard about the ship sinking, she and her mother had gone into town to shop and have lunch--a rare treat, living in the country--and to see a palm reader who was visiting the town.

My grandmother, who I am named for, had her palm read, and the palm reader said, "You have a son in the service," and she said that "something terrible" had happened, but that her son was safe. And he was, he had been rescued. The article I linked to said:

A small bomber attack twenty minutes later did no damage, but as Hornet's list increased to 18 degrees, it was clear she was doomed. Captain Mason ordered "abandon ship", and over the next several hours the destroyers and cruisers were kept busy picking up the men - most of whom were in remarkably high spirits - and fending off the small attacks which continued through the afternoon, scoring two more hits on the battered ship.

I think my grandmother, and my mom, and my sisters are I are all a bit psychic. Well, even my father--I remember him telling me about a dream that he had about my brother being somewhere odd, and it turning out that my brother was actually there. My grandmother had several prophetic dreams that I know about. Every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder how many more of my dreams are about actual events, but that they just don't seem important enough to mention, so I never know. Or I don't mention them to the right people.

This morning a friend of mine mentioned someone he knew who had been asked to take care of a cat while its owner was out of town, but she totally blew it off, and said something like, oh, the cat's fine! It can take care of itself.

My dream this morning was that I was on vacation and had asked someone to take care of Doña, but the person I had asked to watch her showed up without her, and wasn't concerned about it at all. I had to rush around and get dressed and run off to see if I could find her, and I was worried that, even if I could find her, how could I keep her safe?

It's interesting how these "psychic" dreams seem to happen all at once.

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Personal chef

Bob's in the kitchen cooking, and I'm in here polishing my toenails and staying out of his way. We have a small kitchen, and there isn't room for two of us in there. I did the grocery shopping--he was waiting for vegetables and herbs that I was buying so he could make beef stew to take on a hunting trip tomorrow--and I was hungry when I got home, but I grabbed a banana and a jar of peanut butter and came in here with my snack while he started cutting things up.

I think once he gets the stew finished and it's cooking, I'm going to make Reubens for dinner. We had them one night last week and they were really good, and I still have some sauerkraut left that we might as well use up. We're also having Caesar salad--does that go with Reubens? Probably not.

I had a good day today. I did all my usual stuff, went to the library and the post office and the bank, I went to the gym and worked out, and I spent an inordinate amount of time at Target. I love Target, although I have to say I was disappointed to read this story about Target supporting its pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions.

Liora wrote and asked about which iBook I bought; it's this one, the smallest (12") one. I had always wanted this one rather than the larger one--smaller=lighter/cuter--but also I've recently found out that the larger screen isn't as clear as the small one. It's larger size-wise, but not larger as far as resolution, so I'm very glad I made the decision I did.

When I had looked at them earlier, it cost considerably more (around $300 more) to get the dual drive, i.e., CD burner + DVD player, which is the main reason that I hadn't bought one before. $1,000 was pretty much my limit, so when I saw that the new models had larger hard drives (40GB), more memory (512 MB), faster processors (1.33 GHz), and the dual drive, all for a few cents under $1,000, I decided to go ahead and get it. It's a business expense, after all, so I can sort of justify it that way, also getting it before the end of the year made sense.

And Amazon was offering a $100 rebate on it. All in all, I'm very pleased with it and I think I made a great decision. Oh, and it comes wireless out of the box now, no additional Airport card, so all I had to do was turn it on, and I was immediately online using the wireless network that we already had installed at home for Bob (and at work--I'm wireless all the time on my G4 at work).

Later . . .

With all the cooking, Bob wasn't hungry, but I was, so he made me a Reuben and a bowl of soup, and now he's back in the kitchen cooking. It's awfully nice having my own personal chef.

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