The Gentle News

I have scary dreams, just like most people. But most of my scary dreams really don’t seem scary when I look back at them. They’re just scary while they happen, and I don’t know why. Last night I had one of the scariest dreams I’ve had in a long time. I’ll try to recall it as best as I can.

The weirdest part is that, in the dream, I was sleeping and having another dream. I don’t recall whether it was the dream-within-a-dream or the dreamt awakening that scared me the most. In the dream, I was sleeping and I dreamt that my brother cut the legs off of my stuffed animal, Wal-Mart. Wal-mart, in real life, is a zebra-striped cat that usually sleeps with my wife. In the dream (and the dream-dream) Wal-mart was mine.

I awoke from the dream-dream very upset, in tears. I ran to the den (we don’t have a den) where Bonnie was doing some sort of craft. Knitting, macaroni art, I don’t really remember. I told her about the dream, and she said, in a very calm and emotionless voice, that I might feel better if I played the piano.

There was an ivory-colored, 88-key, digital piano sitting on the hearth. I did not recognize it, but I sat down and began playing. At one point I stopped and asked her where the piano had come from, since I had never seen it before. She continued her crafting and said, without looking up, that she had gotten from a friend at school. It was a very nice piano. I don’t remember what I played on it.

I don’t remember anything else about the dream, but I woke up (for real this time), still very frightened by who-knows-what. Shortly thereafter, a cow-orker called me because he was having network trouble and had “urgent” business to do. For the sake of expressing how asinine the “trouble” was, let’s just say that I told him to plug in the network cable and everything was fine.

This guy is NOT one of our Ph.Ds.

LC didn’t come in to work today because of car trouble. He worked from home in the afternoon.

I spent most of the weekend replacing most of the Dell laptop batteries that had been recalled weeks earlier, putting together a huge proposal to spend a lot of money on some much needed computer equipment, and setting up some new Samba shares for protected access to some company files.

Oh, and saving the company $2000+/mo on our phone bill. Hopefully. That’s still in the works.

I came home at about 7 and vegged in front of the nerdbox for a while. Then I started cooking dinner, spaghetti. Bonnie came home from school at about 9:30 and we ate the delicious pasta. I watched a bunch of videos of people being hit with a TASER.

I just turned on the soaker hoses, and now I’m ready to go to bed. I’m going to ask Bonnie to turn them off before she comes to bed. We really need to start hand-watering the lawn more often, since we can only water unattended once a week. The grass looks half-dead. It really isn’t dead, just very thirsty and ugly as all hell.