entering the whirlpool

Things continue stressfull on the personal levels; my child went through a week or three of losing her little mind (or at least her ability to follow rules & directions) after "graduating" preschool, and we continue to have periodic household health crises. I've been teaching/hosting an informal sewing class for some of the preschool mothers & the kids' former teacher once a week. Next week is Princess Ballerina camp, so that's scheduling for the mornings, & her Megatheriosity is planning to co-ordinate her headband with her ballet slippers.

Current events... are living up to my 13-year-old self's pessimistic impression of the world at large. (Two years of American History punctuated by being part of someone's "Let's teach 6th graders about the Holocaust" grad project followed by a civics class taught by someone I didn't like were not helpful to my worldview. Also, at the time I insisted that I wasn't 13; I was being 12 for a second year instead.)

But I had a lovely dream last night, in which I was driving about the British countryside with a couple other people trying to figure out an obscure map & someone said, "Wait, you don't know about Salk shops?" Which turned out to be little rural places at odd-angled crossroads, built of rustic wood & slightly sketchy engineering that sold odd little handmade bits and bobs and all the herbs & river rocks & fresh carrots a wandering witch could ask for. Apparently they were all over the British isles, strictly women-run by Salkwives (tho younger male relatives could help run the till or whatever, but "Sorry, the salkwife isn't in" was kind of code for "I can't help you with that.") and they all had chicken coops.

Now I am very sad there are not actually Salk shops, and that I can't imagine there'd actually be sufficient market to keep a hedgewitch's equivalent of a 7-11 in business.

I had a ridiculously stressful dream last night in which grauwulf decided we were moving to some place in western Maryland with a house on a small lake that he was trying to convince me was better because it was twice as big, despite the neighbors having paved over their entire lakefront edge. And just as I was sort of getting resigned to the idea (or at least doing some research to figure out what the local amenities were) he up and said, no, we had to move to Detroit for work. (In real life, his company is in Baltimore.) And there we were looking at this weird rectangular tower building that was kind of like a small apartment complex, only supposedly a single family home, and I was desperately trying to think if I knew *anyone* even remotely close to Detroit when I woke up. I have been trying to convince myself all day that actually, nobody I know has any desire to move to Detroit.

---

It was a glorious day yesterday, and we were out in the yard for a bit after naptime when the robins started chirping their little heads off around the quince-I-think bush where there's a nest. I went over to see what the fuss was about, and discovered a black rat snake with its head in the nest, eating eggs. I saw the lump of at least one going down its throat.

This is the essential problem of wildlife gardening: at some point, you'll be called upon to pick whose side you're on.

In this case, this or some other batch of robins had already lost one nest-full (which they *may* have made in the gutter, based on the fact that one of the two splatted egg w/ most of a nestlings we found was on the back porch) and the snake had definitely already gotten at least one of the eggs. Also, I am prone to meddling. So I pulled the snake's head out of the nest, and peeked in to confirm that there was at least one egg left. The snake, tail still coiled firmly in the bush, stared at me for a bit and then headed off into the azaleas. (At this point the Megatherium had climbed up the steps to the porch and wanted me to go let her inside, so I wasn't inclined to further snake wrangling.)

Four or five robins, a mockingbird, a house sparrow, and possibly another bird or two danced about on the fence & bush tops yelling for several minutes thereafter, presumably until the snake departed. Then one of the robins began chasing off the mockingbird, so presumably that was the end of the excitement, and Ms Robin returned to her nest.

The moral of this story is that if we ever find someone who will return our calls so we can pay them to build a larger back deck, I will be putting up nesting shelters suitable for robins & mourning doves. They'll continue to ignore them and nest where the snakes can get them, but at least I'll have tried. (I like snakes. I want them to eat rodents & decrease the tick population, not go after birds' eggs. So picky.)

I had a very complicated dream that involved house hunting bits clearly inspired by the_impassive's recent rental and a conversation yesterday evening touching on the first house I remember living in and one of grauwulf's years of elementary school. And then there was a bit where I was finishing up a class that involved playing something that was half computer game and half arcade-style hitting things in a spread-out whack-a-mole sort of format (only with a kind of puppet theater backdrop, and without the unpredictability of whack-a-mole) which I'm pretty sure was inspired by *someone* drumming on my insides off and on all night.

( belated year in review with a bunch of questions )

Xposty from dreamwidth.

( really creepy dreams and too many cookies )

So, let's see... I've been contemplating daytripping Capclave, most likely on Saturday-- is anyone else I know likely to be there? I think Scott Andrews (of BCS) said he was going to be there, but I don't think I've heard about anyone else who, er, knows me by name. (Because at this point I know all sorts of people who have no idea who I am...)

Also contemplating Philcon, and as yet undecided as to whether I want to pick a day or actually (gasp) get a hotel room. Again, is anyone else planning to be there?

And then heuchera tells me that Lois McMaster Bujold is doing a reading on November 17th at the B&N in Willow Grove, PA, which I've tentatively agreed to come up & join her for. I think I even remember how to get into the parking lot. (That end of Willow Grove mall is weird & complicated.)

And then I need to schedule a thing or two that we're hosting, because otherwise this living room will never get all the way cleaned up.

Xposty from dreamwidth.

Still waking up at 3:30, but the last couple nights have been cold enough that at that point I just turn off the overhead fan and crawl under the covers to go back to sleep. Which has worked out fairly well, except that I've been having (or perhaps just remembering) extremely bizarre dreams.

The night before last, it was something in which I was visiting my grandparents and aanna_t had driven down for the afternoon (apparently my subconscious thinks CT is a nice short drive from central NJ... not that I blame it for forgetting the existence of NYC) and she decided to invent a bunch of very weird food allergies for dinner so that my family wouldn't think she was boring.

Last night was something rather more complex at a conference with humans and several non-human fantasy races (faeries, for one; I'm not sure who all else was there) in which it came out the that the Tiend was actually a forfeit [not necessarily made up of people] paid for environmental destruction, and several of us were attempting to spearhead a movement where instead of burning our good things as a punishment for breaking the world, we instead put an equivalent amount of effort/resources into mitigating harm done. (Thank you, subconscious. Would that it were so simple. However, still better than lying awake worrying about things I can't control.)

Xposty from dreamwidth.

Sleeping in lasted to all of about 8:20 this morning, but now I am back up and scrutinzing plant lists for what I want to get from the plant sales on Sunday. I had a rather peculiar dream in which I had just arrived on a beach (er, which was sort of in a hotel room, but never mind) with some people who'd come out for some of matociquala and scott_lynch's present publicity tour, and a nice large oceanliner built on the Titanic/Queen Mary sort of style with big blocky robotic legs walked down from the shallow water and disappeared under the surface. Unfortunately at that point Grauwulf's alarm went off, so I shall never know what was going on, or if it was actually supposed to do that.

There are about four or five different entries I could write fighting over my brain right now, and in consequence you get none of them, but I suspect there will be more later on. Either that or I'll read some of these books that have been piling up on the coffee table...

Xposty from dreamwidth.

Like most semi-mindless tasks, painting tends to inspire fairly tight thought spirals that retread a great deal of the same ground over and over. This can get slightly boring, though admittedly I haven't been at it quite long enough to start designing thematic playlists I'm never going to get around to making and suchlike. More than half of the bedroom ceiling is now a nice dull yellow, and I think I'll be able to manage with the single coat and touch-ups, which means I shouldn't have to buy a third gallon of that color. Touch ups, to a 8-16 foot cathedral ceiling, will involve almost as much moving of ladders and climbing up and down on them as the initial painting did, however. And I'm bound to miss a few spots and be annoyed by them for the next decade.

At any rate, one of the randomish things that occurred to me the other day is that post VP, I know people who know nearly all of the "famous" people that I have any interest in. (book people, of course...) This must be that fandom thing they go on about. Apparently my subconscious decided to take this up a level into the faintly ridiculous and I had a convoluted dream in which the bit I can remember involved someone having introduced me to Mandy Patinkin, who was going to critique a novel for me. Thanks, brain. Interestingly, it wasn't a novel I've actually written.

Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.

Dreamed I plunked down my purse & laptop bag on a chair in a place kind of like a bar & wandered off, and and came back to find them gone. That horrified sinking sensation where you realize you've just done something incredibly stupid and can't go back woke me up around 4:30 and I'm still feeling foggy & slightly traumatized. I think I will not be leaving my computer in a locker if I go to Natural History this afternoon before the VP meet/write-in. Possibly I should pack a backpack for easier carrying, instead. Also, running time machine before leaving the house. Oy.

Dear Subconscious,
NO LOVE. We had a nice deal going, wherein I worry about everything while I'm awake, and you don't fling this kind of crap at me when I go to sleep. Now get back to it.
--me

Meanwhile, the house is still flirting with almost done. We have an electrician back today, and the front siding continues *almost* finished, and there's not just sanded mud, but primer up on large sections of the walls. Kind of exciting. I think I also never got as far as posting the pictures of the back porchlet & railing, so perhaps I'll do that at some point, too. Some day, I might even have a house to myself for a while where I'm not worrying that nobody is here & working on stuff. Crazy.

Yeah, ok, back to breakfast, & Mara throwing a wrench in palace intrigue neither of us understands because she can't imagine why everyone's being so stupid.

Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.

Along about the start of NaNo (er, when I started writing a bunch, rather than revising & poking at things, though I'm not sure what's actually relevant here) I started having dreams about VP. Normally I don't dream a lot about people who actually exist, but there was about six months at the end of college where I had dreams about fencing or people on the fencing team at least two or three times a week; I think this may prove to be another variant on the same thing. I'm seeing an element of cool people, and element of house stress, and a bunch of tag ends of whatever everyone's been talking about on the internet all rolled in here:

Anyway, Monday/Tuesday I dreamed that aana_t and I were wandering around at something-vaguely-like-VP (doing something I can no longer remember, if indeed I ever knew) and returned to the hotel to discover that in fact the week was all about staging a play: the students were actors, Teresa was directing, and the staff had made costumes for everyone but aana_t and me, as we hadn't been there to remind them of our existence when taking measurements. Teresa was Not Pleased, and there was much wandering around in a huge yellow-lit underground space that was part basement and part partitioned theater storage & workspace. Honestly, the room is the bit I remember most: huge, with pillars and carpets/tapestries hung up to make partial partition walls, and pools of yellow-tinged light in the bits where people were working. Much nicer than the basement at the Island Inn, though admittedly probably less conducive to taking notes.

Last night was a lecture in a suite of two very large stone rooms where I think Patrick and Teresa lived (kind of an ancient school sort of motif); very informal, but Teresa was telling a bunch of us about various historical writing things. She had a notebook with stuff copied out in order by theme and chronology-- there was something my sleep-brain identified as a medieval plainsong in about the middle, written out with the syllables all marked up & things (um, all this was modern english, apparently) and gave us an assignment related to that. Then she went off somewhere & let us poke around the reference books related to the assignment, which were all half-shelved and lying around in that books filed in a cluttered bedroom sort of way. I was about half-way through the notebook (hence why the plainsong in the middle is memorable) of taking notes on things, and looking stuff up in other books, when a couple people who I'm fairly sure don't exist in real life waltzed in, picked up a bunch of stuff including the notebook, and walked off with it. (Apparently this meant they were intending to plagarize their homework... my subconscious symbolism doesn't really stand up to the light of day here, but whatever.) Shortly thereafter, Patrick & Teresa came back, with several other people, and I was just working out how to say, "hey, these people took your notebook" when fwilde started showing us how to play the aforementioned plainsong on... an instrument that didn't actually resemble a piano in any way, and did harmonies all on its own. Also, Teresa was using it as a chair. (And further description would probably go downhill from there.) Suffice it to say, it was kind of cool.

Somewhere around there I woke up to find that the cat who doesn't think it's safe to sit on people was sleeping stretched out along my chest, with his back legs tucked up about at my collar bone. Of course, then I breathed too heavily or something & he went away again, but it was very cool.

Ok, off to eat something, & find out if they actually took the giant hunks of concrete out of the yard before putting down topsoil.

Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.

The grauwulf has decided to go visit his grad school for the first 4 days of December (that's leaving here the evening of Thursday the 1st and returning the afternoon of Sunday the 4th) and is taking me with him to subject me to a hockey game. So the question is... will I be wandering around Harvard Square by myself while he visits professors at Boston College, or is there anybody I ought to be meeting up with? Or in fact anyone I could convince to turn up so that I could meet up with them? 'Cause that would be awesome.

(The question of crash space was also raised, but I'm fairly sure if I don't know for certain that I know anyone in Boston-proper, I don't know anybody I'd feel comfortable imposing upon.) Nev mind, hotel has been booked.

---

I am behind on posting about construction, and other things, and the fact that I had not one but two VP dreams last night, but they were both slightly stressful: first, there was one in which Patrick & Teresa & both Steves were visiting us for some reason, only the main thing I remember in the dream was waking up and realizing I'd gone to bed and left the four of them (and maybe someone else?) talking around the dining room table without actually giving anyone a place to sleep. So most of the dream was taken up with me rushing around and making apologetic cookies and dumping out the collection of screws & nails that lives in the ash tray on the front porch and never actually getting to find out what they were talking about. This was followed by a dream in which I was playing Thing with a group of people who kept wandering off; in the end I identified all the Things (mainly because they were the only ones who stuck around) and won the game, but only because Jim Macdonald, who was supposedly running it, wasn't paying enough attention to notice that I was the only one voting to test anybody.

More later, I guess, when I stop having anxious dreams about everyone going away, or catch up to my wordcout. But I'm fighting my way out of the paper bag this novel started in, so that's nice.

Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.