Wacky dreams

I'm sure I've enumerated here before my repertoire of stress dreams. The travel ones are the most ubiquitous--forgetting to pack, forgetting what day the flight is and missing it, losing my luggage, forgetting my luggage, etc. There's even the one about forgetting to leave the hotel room once I get there. I'll dream that I'm on vacation at the beach, but totally forget to go to the beach until it's time to leave! That's the weirdest one, I think, and one that I imagine means something, if only I could figure out what . . .

Then there are the dreams about being lost, either walking or driving. Walking in a strange part of town, or a strange city, and not being able to find where I want to be. Or getting lost while driving, or wandering through a large apartment complex or hotel, totally unable to find my apartment or hotel room (this one has happened in real life, in those huge, rambling, every-building-looks-the-same resorts at Disney World).

There are two other major themes. One is stairs--huge, winding staircases like the ones at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books, or the bridge over the chasm where Galdalf fought the Balrog in Lord of the Rings. Tipsy, wobbling stairs, or bridges, ones with open spaces that I have to jump over. The other is water or ice. Driving through water, or driving over a bridge over water, or driving near the ocean, or driving on ice, always with the fear that I will drive off the bridge, or drive into the water, or the water will pour over me, or I'll slide off the ice into the water or off the bridge.

Oh, and the bathroom ones, although those aren't stress-related, I don't think. I dream a lot about not being able to find a bathroom, or finding one and the door is broken, or there is someone in it who won't come out, or the plumbing is stopped up or broken. Those are always resolved when I wake up and go to the bathroom.

I had three of the above one night last week. Oh, wait, I guess it was four. No, five. Travel, broken bathroom, stairs, being lost, water. I was on vacation, staying in a beautiful white stucco house at the beach. I needed to go to the bathroom, but couldn't find it. I finally found the bathroom, but the door was broken. It (the door) was leaning up against the wall outside the bathroom with a sign that said to just prop it up in front of the doorway, but there were people standing around, and I didn't feel comfortable doing that.

Then I was at a Mexican restaurant, and my friends were at a table on the second floor, and to get there I had to climb this set of spindly, rickety stairs, and then get in some kind of little cable car thing that would deliver me to their table. Then I was at a hospital. My mother was having some kind of test, and I had taken her there, then instead of waiting I had left. But as I was leaving I was thinking, oh, I shouldn't leave, I should have just waited, but I hadn't made note of the room she was in, or even what part of the hospital, and I had no idea how to find her again. I ended up wandering all over the hospital, frantically trying to find her.

Then I was back in the house at the beach, sitting in front of a big plate glass window, watching the tide come in. It came right up to the windows, and I wondered what would happen--would the water crash through the windows? Surely not, surely it must do this every night, surely the windows were strong enough, but what if they weren't?

Last night added a new dimension.

I have gotten in the habit of taking my cell phone upstairs to the bedroom at night when Bob is out of town. I started out doing it just so that when he called, I'd have it, but usually now he calls earlier and I'm usually still up. But I decided it made me feel more secure to have it there, so I'll take it upstairs when I go to bed and leave it on the bedside table.

Then that turned into taking my purse upstairs, but only when he was gone. That also made me feel more secure, although it also felt like kind of an obsessive-compulsive thing, and I wasn't sure it was good. But still, certainly not a bad idea not to leave my purse sitting downstairs for someone to grab if they broke in -- might as well not make it so easy. But I didn't want to be paranoid or obsessive (or any more than I already am). I mentioned it to Bob, though, and he said he thought it was a good idea--he'd been talking to someone about it, too, coincidentally--and he asked me to get a key hook to hang upstairs in the bedroom, like the one we have downstairs.

So I did. I found a little rack with four hooks, and he put it up in the bedroom, and when we come home at night we hang our keys on the hooks, and he brings his wallet and things upstairs and keeps them on the dresser rather than on the little table downstairs, and I put my purse under Doña's stool that sits next to the bed on my side.

We've only been doing it a week or so, and pretty much every morning I get ready for work, start to leave, and have to come back upstairs to get my purse. Sometimes I go downstairs with it, and have to come back up again for my keys.

Last night I dreamt that I was in New York visiting someone (the only person I know in New York is Misty, but I seemed to be visiting my brother). I had put my purse under the stool next to my bed, then left to drive home, and on the way I was going to go to a job interview. I was driving in a strange place, I had no idea where I was, and the streets were covered in ice. I made a turn and realized that I was driving through a bank drive-through the wrong way, and there were piles and piles of ice, as if they'd moved slush into piles and it had frozen that way.

So I'm driving -- bumping -- over these piles of slush, the wrong way, and I glance over at the passenger seat of the car and realize that I don't have my purse, that I left it in New York under the stool next to the bed. I call my dad (somehow I had my cell phone even though I didn't have my purse), hoping that they haven't left yet (at this point it seemed like we were visiting my grandmother), and asked him to bring my purse home with me. He said he would, and asked me if I was having any trouble finding where I was going.

I said no, no, everything was fine, I was sure I would be able to find it, thinking all the while that there was no WAY I was going to be able to find it. And I was late, too, of course. And then I thought, what am I going on a job interview for anyway? I like my job. I can always go on a job interview later, when (or if) I actually need a new one. That was kind of a revelation. I still didn't know where I was, though.

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Continuity

I was driving to the gym on Saturday when Bob called to tell me that the Pope had died. Bob is Catholic, so I suppose the Pope means more to him than he does to me, although I admired him, and also I've always been sort of fascinated by the pagentry and process, probably ever since I saw The Shoes of the Fisherman. Kind of the same way that I'm fascinated with royalty, probably. They're so different from us, but yet the same.

When I got to the gym, I changed my clothes and went upstairs to the treadmill. I had my iPod, but I also kind of like to have some kind of visual stimulation, so I turned on a television, and turned it to CNN, where they were showing crowds gathered in Rome and in Krakow. So many grief-stricken faces, some holding candles. I turned on the iPod, switched it to shuffle, and out of the 1,000 or so songs on it, it gave me "What if God Was One of Us?" It made me smile, and cry a little bit.

The broadcast talked about how long the Pope had been in power, and how so many of the world's young people had never known any other Pope, and it made me remember how my father said that when Franklin Roosevelt died, he (my father) thought it was the end of the world, because he had never known any other President in his life. I'm not much of a history buff, so I asked Bob, and he said yes, that Roosevelt was elected four times, but only served a short portion of his fourth term before he died. I think my father was about six when he was elected the first time.

Nice to have that kind of continuity in life.

This weekend I did get to the craft store and bought shiny black paint ("Black Sequins," it was named), and I put a coat of that on the black cabinet, and put another coat on the Moss Green one. At this rate, I might have something finished within two or three years . . .

I've just been stressed out and swamped at work, and haven't had a lot of energy left for other stuff. I came home last night after a particularly stressful day, Bob gave me my dinner of creamed spinach and salmon with dill sauce, then we went out and drove a few blocks away to pick up a sandwich for him. We got home, he went upstairs with his sandwich to watch the basketball game, and I sat down at the computer. By that time it was a little after 9:00 and I thought, wow, it's way too early, but I think I'm just going to go to bed.

Especially this early after the time change, I can't help but think, well, it's really only 8:30. But using that logic, of course, I got up an hour earlier, so even though it's only 9:30, I've been up the same amount of time. Or, no, that doesn't hold up, does it? Yikes. I hate the time change. I do, however, like getting home while it's still light out.

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Weekend

There was scant progress on the artistic front, but I did manage to put first coats of paint on two of the little cabinets.

The one on the left has a thin coat of "Moss Green" acrylic; it will definitely need another coat. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but now that I've got the color on it, I think I might put some mosaic tile inside because, if I'm remembering the colors correctly, I have some that would look nice with that green. Although who knows. I'm just going to do whatever seems to work at the time. If it doesn't end up working, no big loss. I can't just hold out until I know the ideas are perfect. If I did that, I'd never do anything.

The black one is a mistake. I was thinking black lacquer, kind of a Chinese thing, and I was glad to see that I had black paint, but it turned out to be the wrong kind of paint. I knew it wasn't "lacquer," but I thought I could paint it and then varnish over it, but the black paint was antiquing glaze, so it didn't cover well at all, and I'm not sure if it's even ever going to dry. If it isn't dry tonight, I'll wipe it off. And stop on the way home and buy real black paint.

I also painted a birdhouse that I bought at the same time that I bought the little cabinets. It was, I think, $2.99, and also unfinished. I painted it with a "Gardener's Green" color stain, then put on a light coat of outdoor acrylic varnish. I don't mind if it weathers a little bit, and I didn't really care if it was perfect. I filled it with birdseed last night and hung it up, and I think it looks pretty cute.

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Book report

I haven't been reading much lately, but what I've been reading (and listening to), while meager in quantity, has been great.

The last book I finished was Terri Farley's Seven Tears Into the Sea. It hasn't actually been published yet--I do Terri's website, and she sent me an advance copy because I'm going to be designing a new site for her. Terri writes the "Phantom Stallion" series of books, but Seven Tears isn't part of that series, it's a young adult fantasy, and it's wonderful!

It's about a teenager who goes to a beachside resort to help her grandmother, who owns a bed and breakfast. The girl spends the summer with her cat in a little cottage on the property where she used to spend vacations with her parents when she was a little girl. On one of those vacations, something unusual happened that caused them never to go back, and she's a little reluctant to go back now, but her grandmother needs her. She's afraid that the townspeople will think she's strange because she claimed she met a selkie on the beach that day seven years ago. But they don't all think she's strange. Some of them believe her.

It's a wonderful story, and I loved every word of it.

I'm currently reading Lawrence Block's latest Matt Scudder novel, All the Flowers are Dying, which I'm enjoying, although the narrative switches back and forth between Scudder and Elaine, his former-callgirl wife, and a serial killer, told from his perspective, which is a bit unsettling. But it's good, Block's stories are always good.

I'm also reading Perfect Circle, by Sean Stewart. I started it after getting a free "extended excerpt" download from Fictionwise for my PDA. I loved what I read, and was surprised that Fictionwise didn't have the full-length novel for sale. I ended up requesting it from the library.

Perfect Circle is about Will "Dead" Kennedy, who sees ghosts, and has since he was a kid. He's a divorced dad who's still in love with his ex-wife, just got fired from his last dead-end job (he got fired for eating cat food at his petstore job; he only did it to prove to the harpy who brought it back that it wasn't stale) and who wants nothing more than to earn enough money to take his daughter to Six Flags. Which is why he agrees to try to "exorcise" a ghost for his cousin. Not surprisingly, it ends badly . . .

As far as listening, I'm currently listening to Twisted, from Jonathan Kellerman. In a departure from Kellerman's usual Alex Delaware novels, this one is about Petra Connor, Kellerman's female detective protagonist from his 1999 novel, Billy Straight.

I just finished listening to another Terry Pratchett book--Going Postal. It's set on the Discworld, where the protagonist, con artist Moist Von Lipwig, has just been hanged. Fortunately (or unfortunately, perhaps), he didn't die, but was rescued by the patrician who runs the city and given the job of reinstating the Ankh Morpork post office, which has fallen into disrepair, being made redundant by the advent of the "clacks," the semaphore-based message system.

It starts out a little slow, I thought, but I was soon riveted by the story, which includes some quite wonderful characters, including golems and the woman who runs the golem employment office.

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Little altars everywhere

I had an awful lot of fun in the craft store this weekend. I can't even remember now what my reason for going was, but I ended up buying an armload of miniature cabinets that just really piqued my creative imagination. I bought too many of them, and I shouldn't have, but they were only 99 cents each, and a lot of the ones on the shelf were broken, so my thinking was that if I really loved working with them, I would end up not being able to buy any more, so I should get them while they were available. Especially since they were so inexpensive.

I wasn't able to do anything with them this weekend, because I spent basically the entire weekend doing website work, and the part of the weekend that I wasn't doing that, I was doing laundry, or cooking. Well, except for the time when I was in the craft store, of course . . .

Anyway, my idea is to make little altars, or shrines, I guess, out of them. Paint them, or stain them, or maybe collage them, and fill them with little, interesting stuff. I don't know, I won't know until I start on it, I guess, but I've got a shoebox down in the basement full of collage elements--pictures cut out of magazines, and foreign stamps, and things like that. And seashells. And I have a box of paints, and somewhere there's a box of dollhouse furniture . . .

I'm not sure what I want to do yet, but it's so exciting to get that creative flow going again, and I was sad that I didn't have time to do anything about it. And I probably won't this week, either, but hopefully next weekend I can. I did spend some time last night looking through a couple of issues of Somerset Studio. The thing I have to keep reminding myself of constantly is that art doesn't have to have a "reason." I keep trying to justify it, saying that, well, I could make them for gifts, but that's not necessary--art exists for its own sake.

I guess it's just hard to justify spending time on something that seems so much like play, when there are other things that need to be done, like cleaning the house or doing laundry, or doing work that pays. I was talking to a friend about it last night, and he said that play isn't just a luxury, it's a necessity, particularly for creative types, and I know that's true.

I've been struggling with some mild depression for the past couple of weeks, but the time I spent prowling around the craft store and dreaming of what I might make from these little wooden boxes was almost euphoric. Or obsessive. There's that, too . . .

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