These Certain Musings

I'm watching Mystic River this morning. I do so love this movie, for so many reasons. The experience is somewhat marred by Gambit's seemingly insatiable urge to make his new dog toy squeak. Even Ty is trying to ignore him.

I had end-of-the-world dreams last night of Walking Dead variety, set in one of my dream-brain's stock locations. (It's as if my sleeping self decided it had already put enough effort into set-building and would rather focus on other dream elements from now on.) This one was the brick-terraced garden that at first looks like an over-built university campus, but opens in the back to endless cultivated rolling hills crisscrossed with barbed wire fences beneath a huge set of power lines. I don't remember much about the dream, but do remember a single scene in a greenhouse, when almost-thirteen-year-old Ty Handsome the Wonderdog leapt onto a shelf as high as my shoulders just so he could lick my face. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty nice thing to remember from a dream about rampaging zombies.

And it's worlds better than the dream I had last week--the dream in which I'd been shot in the head, and was stumbling around in search of help. Everyone I met acknowledged that yes, I had been shot in the head. But the usual response was, "But you look like you're doing all right, so no problem," and a return to whatever had been occupying the person before I arrived.

This is my second week of vacation. Most of the first was spent catching up on everything domestic. I scrubbed my house top to bottom, end to end--a task I tend to do in autumn rather than spring--then reorganized some stuff in the garage, purged extra stuff, and sorted out financial information. I did also write a little, but not too much.

That's what this week is for.

Well, it's also for hosting my nephews on Monday and Tuesday so they can see their father--who can rarely find time in his currently-unemployed=but-supported-by-pregnant-girlfriend schedule to see them--over New Year's Eve. I plan to continue my goal to become Auntie Awesome by cooking homemade doughnuts and the like. Before and after, I'll also be trying to cram in visits with friends I haven't seen in far too long. And on Friday, I'll head to downtown Indy with a friend who is thrilled to teach me about geocaching in the city. We'll do some caching, then head to the Slippery Noodle for dinner and music. Best of all, everything in that Friday trip is research for Crossroads!

So... That's it. Nothing all that exciting. Not even a 2013 retrospective or 2014 goal-setting. Maybe I'll get to that later.

In last night's dream Debra Doyle and Jim MacDonald (mist_and_snow) picked me up from a small California airport.  In walked through the plane's door, down the roll-up stairs, and right over to their car.  We drove up the coast, looking at massive houses and beachside settlements that looked like a mishmash between the Cotswolds and last-century South Pacific.  Dr. Doyle acted as tour guide, telling me everything about... well, everything.

Then we pulled off the coastal highway and into a large parking lot with only a few cars in it.  A massive hedge--green and thorny and forty feet tall--ran along one side of the parking lot, broken only by an arched opening framed in carved wood.  As we parked, I looked out the car window and through that arch.  A massive waterfall stretched across a huge valley: falling water and swirling mist for as far as I could see, below distant mountain peaks.

MacDonald turned to look at me over his shoulder and said, "That's the secret."

And then I woke up.