Category Archives: introspection

Another Month Gone!

Posted on by

Welcome to May! April was, to be honest, a very strange month. It had a little bit of everything, both good and bad. I can’t say that I’ll miss it, but parts of it were pretty nice. I don’t remember exactly when we started working from home, but I’m pretty sure that it was before April – which means that I’ve spent all month at home (with a few trips to the grocery or liquor store).

And I’ve really enjoyed working from home. Being completely honest…I don’t want to go back to the office. It’s nice to be able to take long walks in the morning, get home, have a leisurely cup of coffee on the deck while catching up on the news (maybe even eat breakfast!), then take a shower….and still sit down to work a full thirty minutes earlier than I would have if I’d have gone to the office.

On the other side of the day, it’s nice to put in a full day, then shut down the computer, take another long walk, then have a leisurely drink on the deck, cook dinner, watch some television, and get to bed before 9:00.

I love that kind of a schedule!

To be sure, April also had some downsides. The most glaringly obvious one to me is that I’ve developed some serious anxiety about being around other people. It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to figure out why: I had some chest pains after going out a month ago, I associated them with COVID-19, I couldn’t really call anyone (other than an ambulance) for help, and it freaked me out. Since then, I’ve experienced some degree of chest pain every time I’ve gone out to a store or have had someone come to my house (delivering packages or coming to give me home improvement estimates).

The good part of that is that it’s been so consistent that I know beyond any doubt that it’s psychological – and knowing that has allowed me to block it out and rebound back to normal pretty quickly the last couple of times that I’ve gone out. This is a big plus, because I’m really NOT “that guy.” I don’t get wrapped up in my health. I don’t worry about it. So worrying about it as I have been – to the point of having anxiety attacks about it…well, THAT bothers me more than the actual worry does. When I start stressing over something I really can’t control, that’s when I start to just give up.

On to more pleasant things. I’ve decided to get serious about fixing up this old house (and landscape) over the next however long it takes. Big-ticket items that I’m looking at getting fixed now are the roof, the retaining wall in the back yard, the deck, all of the floors, the half-bath, and – maybe – the kitchen. Lots of work, lots of money, lots of time – but these are things that need to be addressed and I’ve put them off for too long.

The roof has been leaking for a while, and I’ve had the insurance company out again in the hopes of convincing them that it just needs to be replaced. I showed them damage inside the garage – the ceiling and walls – and in the foyer (front wall and floor). At least this time around, the guy they sent out admitted that he saw holes in the roof. The last one wouldn’t admit to any damage at all. What I’m hoping is that the new guy won’t give me $1000 and tell me to patch the holes. The roof is over 30 years old. It needs to be replaced. If I can’t get insurance to cover it, two things are going to happen. First, I’ll be getting a new insurance company. Second, I’ll be refinancing the house and pulling some money out of equity.

It’s obviously important to have a good roof over my head, and it’s made more important by the fact that I simply cannot replace my floors until I can control the leaking coming in to the front hall of the house. When I replaced the front door a couple of months ago, I pulled up most of the hall floor because it was so water damaged it was like walking on wet towels after a storm. Since doing so, I’ve had a literal towel next to my front wall to keep the water from pooling at the foot of the stairs after every rain storm. I’m not spending a penny on new flooring until I know that it will stay dry.

Heading to the back yard, my retaining walls need to be replaced (as pictured in the post entitled “Solutions”). This is somewhat vital because my upper lawn has been slowly washing away as the retaining walls fail. The level of the upper lawn has dropped about 8 inches over the last twenty years. One casualty of this slow slippage has been the deck.

The deck has pulled away from the house by a couple of inches, and has begun to list to one side as the earth underneath it erodes away at different rates. While it’s still standing – and fairly stable – it doesn’t take a genius to see that it’s not going to be either of those things for more than a year or so down the road. I had a contractor out this morning (the second in as many days) taking a look so that I can get estimates on repairing it vs. replacing it vs. a bit of both.

Both contractors are also giving me estimates on repairing/replacing the retaining walls, and I plan to get at least one – probably two – more estimates for both of those projects.

The half-bath project is something that I’ll be doing on my own. At first, I was just going to re-seat the toilet, as it has been leaking (I’ve turned off the water to it), but I’ve decided to go ahead and gut the room and use it as a learning experience. New floor (which will stretch out into the laundry room in front of the half bath) will let me get an idea of how I want to handle flooring for the rest of the house. A new sink will give me an idea of what sort of effort and expense will go into replacing the cabinets in the kitchen. Lighting, painting…it’s just a good project to let me get my hands dirty with home improvement – and if I completely screw it up, it’s in an enclosed area so nobody has to see it, and it’s small enough that it should be fairly inexpensive to get a pro to fix my mistakes should that become necessary.

Through thinking about all of these projects – and I’ve thought a lot about them – I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that I’m not retiring next year as I’d hoped to do. For one thing, it’s going to be expensive and take time. For another, my 401(k) has been CRUSHED this year – I’ve already lost over $100,000, and I don’t have any reason to believe that that’s going to rebound anytime soon. So I’m just going to hunker down, do my job, try to enjoy it, and hope that I live another 10 years so that I can enjoy a funded retirement when I’m 65. By then, I should have the house paid off (or very close), even if I have to refi, it will be worth a lot more than it is now, and I can decide if I still want to move to the woods or if I’ll be happy just living where I am.

Lots of questions, yeah – but I’ve got sort of a plan, and that makes me happy.

It has been a beautiful day today, and this weekend should be more of the same. Looking forward to getting in some good walking to finish out the week (shooting for over 100 miles for the week), and to beginning to tackle that half-bath project. Should be fun!

More on the Health Front

Posted on by

My last entry, written last Sunday, indicated that maybe I’d caught the virus, and – if so – it wasn’t all that terrible. Man. I need to learn when to keep my mouth shut. Six days later, I’m not going to make that mistake again.

After resting through most of last Sunday and going to bed early, I felt pretty good on Monday morning. Told my team as much, indicated that I wasn’t at 100% and that I’d be in and out during the day, but that I’d be working. And, for the majority of the day, I did.

Then came late afternoon.

At around 4:00 or so, my chest once again tightened up, my neck started to hurt…and back to bed I went. I sat in bed and tried to decide whether I was having a heart attack or dealing with the virus. I looked up symptoms of both (they’re basically the same). I did my best to fall asleep, with very poor results. I worried myself basically to death and felt completely helpless.

When you don’t know what’s happening, but you do know that if you go to a hospital these days you’re probably either going to get sent home or get sent to ICU – and in either case, you’re going to be on the hook for a few thousand dollars – you feel helpless.

So, eventually, I just lay there. Pretty much all night. I got up at some point to pee and had major chills – which actually came as somewhat of a relief, because that let me lean more towards COVID and less towards “heart giving out.” I still didn’t have a thermometer, but having the chills helped; because (after peeing) I could just curl up in a fetal position under the covers and wait them out. My chest was still tight when I took deep breaths and my neck still hurt when I coughed, but those two things were no longer keeping me awake – which was a huge relief.

I only managed to get about two hours of decent sleep on Monday night, though. I told my team on Tuesday that I would not be working. I had Jenny bring a thermometer and some expectorant to the house (she left them in the garage), and I spent most of the day in bed. Unfortunately, the thermometer consistently showed that I had no fever (was, in fact, a degree LOW) and the expectorant did very little. So, as I lay in bed all day, I tended to magnify every little ache or twinge and wonder if I was about to die.

Felt better on Wednesday morning after getting a pretty decent night’s sleep, but again told my team that I’d be taking the day off to continue to rest. Which I did. Drank a lot of hot tea, took my temp regularly (never high) and my BP (fairly normal for me) and my heart rate (normal), and dozed all day. I felt a lot better after late afternoon came and went with no chest tightness, so I took a shower and went back to bed. Slept okay.

Thursday, I worked normally, though by then I was stressed beyond all recognition because I still didn’t know what the issue actually was. Every time I felt a twinge in my neck, I’d think, “My carotid artery is about to explode.” Every time I’d feel a tingle in my arm or neck or chest or leg (and guys, I’m getting up there – twinge happen!) , it felt like an indication that something was terribly wrong. And every time I got stressed, my heart rate went up, which stressed me more and…you get the idea. Not a happy camper at all.

So on Friday, I made the call and made an appointment with a vascular surgeon. I’ll go in a week from next Monday to find out exactly what type of blockage I’ve got in my carotids, what my heart is doing, etc. At that point, I’ll have to make a decision (maybe) on surgery. But at THIS point, I can at least tell myself that I’m taking steps to do something. I’m doing something, even if it’s just asking someone else to do something. And I’m can hopefully stop stressing myself out.

Not a fun post, this, but it’s getting the facts out there.

In NORMAL news, I did a lot of yard work today, particularly when it came to cutting down trees (well…SMALL trees – diameter of under 3 inches) by my fence at the back side of the house. Cleared out a lot of them, and discovered that I’ve got a fairly large tree on the right side of the house which is leaning towards the house and is going to have to go.

So I guess I’ll be looking for some tree removal people. Can’t do that one myself.

More yard work planned for tomorrow (need to mow the back lawn and I still want to trim SOME of the branches that are scraping the house), but for now it’s bedtime. I put in a lot of work today and I’m looking forward to sleeping like a log tonight.

home for the holidays

Posted on by

It has been quite a few winters since I’ve attempted to put together any sort of year-end review, but I’ve got some time this morning, the house is empty (Scott’s gone home to MN for the next week or so), and I can only play so many Arban exercises on my tenor horn before growing weary of my mediocrity.

2012 has been a year of newness, both pleasant and un.  I began a new walking regimen in January, met a new lady in March, started a new job in May.  I visited new places in June and July, tried new camera equipment during October, got a new computer in November, and saw a new symphony in December.  Throughout the year, I worked a variety of new schedules, found new places to play, tamed some new cats, and dreamed about a new car.  So let’s take a look back and see what I can recall.

For about the first three quarters of the year, I took walks nearly every morning ranging from 2 – 12 miles.  I began doing this mainly because I wanted to play with a new exercise application on my phone that drew my walking paths all over a map.  So caught up in the maps and the statistics was I that I almost didn’t realize that I was walking further and faster over time – and losing weight and lowering my blood pressure.  The walks became more sporadic beginning in about August when my work schedules started getting flaky during the week and football season began to monopolize the weekends; but I’m still getting out there when I have the time, the light, and the lack of rain required.  Today, by the way, does not fit into those three categories – it has been raining for two days now.

Long strings of windmills along I-65 in central Indiana became a regular sight
during 2012 as I drove to and from Waukegan, IL

In April, I attended the 30th annual North American Brass Band Championships (in Cincinnati), and almost literally stumbled into the woman of my dreams after coming down a flight of stairs where I’d been photographing the events.  Amy and I are still getting to know each other nearly 10 months later with no immediate plans to cease doing so, and she’s played a huge part in many of the other events of the last year.

On the first of May, I started a new job – leaving the one that I’d held for the previous 4 years in the face of looming outsourcing (though the company still refuses to call it that).  To say that I’m less than thrilled with the new gig would be the understatement of my life; but if you’ve read any of this blog since May, you’re probably quite aware of my feelings for the current gig.  I say in all modesty that it is a tribute to me that I have neither quit nor flown completely off the handle at my management – though I’ve come frighteningly close to doing both on several occasions.

Over the summer, I did quite a bit of travelling.  There was a trip Vermont to visit with Cy and “T” and participate, with the Georgia Brass Band, in Middlebury’s annual summer benefit concert for the Sheldon Museum.  I also attended a brass festival in Gettysburg – mainly to catch the performance of an all-female brass band in which Amy was playing.  I returned to the hallowed shores of Ahmic Lake in Magnetawan, Ontario, this year after having to miss that luxury in 2011.  After about a week of tennis, swimming, card games and food with family and friends, I headed west through Ontario, brushed around the top of Lake Michigan and ended up in Waukegan, Il, to spend another week with Amy in her hometown.  I camped on the lake’s western shore, took in a renaissance fair on the Illinois/Wisconsin border, sampled the food at a couple of local diners, and took pictures of all of the above.  It was the longest of three trips that I took to Waukegan during the summer, and Amy visited Atlanta a couple of times as well.

Football season was both a disappointment and a joy.  As my team struggled to a wretched 2-9 record, I vastly improved my photography with the aid of some rented lenses and a top-notch camera body, and I closed out the season as a “real” professional photog by shooting two games for the Greenville News.  I still haven’t been paid for those games, incidentally.  Maybe I’ll spend some time today making up invoices.  The trips during the season were enjoyable as always, though somewhat tiring.  In addition to the regular drives to Greenville, I had a couple of long days on the road (to Burlington and Boone, NC).  With the exception of one early game, however, the weather was fantastic on each Saturday and the drives were pleasant.  That one exception, though….wow.  Tornados, downpours, game delayed by nearly an hour….and we lost in triple overtime, which portended the season to come.

Near the end of the season, I found a watering hole quite near my house that boasts both dart boards and (holy of holies) a pinball machine.  Scott (my renter) and I have amused ourselves over the last few months by regularly playing in weekly “blind draw” darts tournaments – quite often placing in the money – and by seeing just how hard we can shake that pinball machine without tilting it.

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

The feral cats have come and gone over the last year at their whims.  At one time, I think there were as many as 5 scrambling up the steps of my deck each morning to dive into the food that I put out for them; but their number has dropped to just two in recent weeks.  Both of those little guys were born last summer and both are about as tame as feral cats can be.  Free food, a warm and dry place to sleep, a nice guy who’ll scratch their heads and coo at them.  They know when they’ve got it good.

In November, I made the last payment on my Audi and immediately began sniffing around for a Subaru Outback.  As of this writing, however, I haven’t found one that I’m willing to drop $25,000 on; so – for now at least – I’ll just keep driving my car as hard as I can and using that non-existent car payment to cleave through other debts.  Maybe in a few months, I’ll take the plunge; I’m not quite ready to do that yet.

Also in November, I got to meet Amy’s family and have Thanksgiving dinner with them; and just two days ago I returned from yet another trip to Waukegan during which Amy and I attended the Midwest Music Conference (my first time) and also caught a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (also a first for me).  Both of these events were things that I’ve heard about for decades – and both lived up to the hype.

And that brings us pretty much up to date; though I’m certain that, as soon as I click the “publish” button up there, I’ll remember amazing things that happened during the year and will immediately berate myself for not including them in this rambling epistle.  Suffice it to say that, on average, 2012 has been a decent year, with only that minor annoyance – the job – scratching the otherwise shiny brass and silver coating.  So, as I begin the last week of the year – the last week before I’m 47! – I’ll look forward to figuring out how to deal with the employment situation and will wish all of you reading this a most delightful and rewarding 2013.  And, though I don’t have her permission to do so, I’ll finish this up by quoting from the end of Cy’s annual letter, wherein she (or, perhaps, “T”) beautifully advises us that

“…we are, indeed, blessed.  We have what we need and more, and it is incumbent upon us to share.  No one of us will ever be able to eliminate all sorrow or alleviate all pain or worry.  But we can do our part, every day, to make some portion of our world a little better.  It is the gift we can always give, in any season and in any place.”

Think about that. 

TWD

 

still not rich

Posted on by

So the Powerball lottery jackpot went up to $555,000,000 this week and I, along with millions of other people, spent $10 on five tickets.  I didn’t win.  I didn’t expect to win.  For my $10, though, I got to spend about three days dreaming of what I’d do if I had.

Hope you’re not looking for anything exciting here, as I’m completely convinced that sudden overwhelming wealth would have very little effect on  me.  Obviously, my lifestyle would change a bit.  For starters, I sure as hell wouldn’t be working at AT&T.  More than likely, I’d look for a part-time gig doing something that I really enjoy – photography, working at a library, mowing lawns…I don’t know.  After paying off all of my debts, I’m pretty sure I’d go shopping for a new vehicle.  Not sure if I’d go the RV route or not, though it would be tempting.  It’d be nice to be able to live out of an RV for the next 10 years or so, but I’m not convinced that I’d like driving something that big very often.  Maybe something like a Hummer would be more to my liking.

The brass band would certainly receive a sizable donation, if the board could give me a good reason for needing it; and the new stadium that’s being built at Furman would have my name on it.

Prominently.

I think there’d also be a new endowed scholarship at that school with my website’s name on it.

After spending on those little things, I’d be left with around $335,000,000 (remember, I had to pay taxes on the original half-billion), so the fun could really begin.  I figured to give about $2,000,000 each to my siblings and Dad (if he wanted it – he certainly wouldn’t have to worry about money at any time, at any rate).  The way I figure it, a gift of $2,000,000 is perfect – you use about half of it to pay the taxes on the gift, and you put the other half into an account that pays 4% interest.  If you’re not a complete goob, you could live off the interest for the rest of your life.  Not in high style, mind you, but not in poverty, either.

So I’m down to $325,000,000 now.

There’s a decent possibility that I’d buy some land in Vermont, but not a lot.  After all, I’d have to pay property taxes on it.  One idea would be to buy the land and put a certain amount – we’ll call it a million bucks – into some sort of vehicle that would automatically pay the taxes out of the interest earned in perpetuity.  Not sure exactly how that’d work, but I’m sure that there are accountants who’d know how to do it.  I wouldn’t mind paying the taxes.  I just wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle if it could be avoided.

So let’s say that I’ve dumped two million on the Vermont deal.  I still have $323,000,000 left.   My renter would get about $500,000, Jenny would get a few million, a very small handful of friends would get one or two million each, and I’d find a cause or two that I think should get some money – a zoo or two, the humane society, maybe a youth sports organization (though I’d have to think REALLY carefully about that one).

And that’d leave me with around three hundred million….with which I’d have absolutely no idea what to do.  Some of it would have to be used to screw people or organizations that I don’t like, but I’m  not entirely sure who or what (or how).  The rest?  I guess I’d open up a few hundred savings accounts or something.  I mean, I’d never be able to spend that much, but I’d want it to be FDIC insured anyway.  When it gets right down to it, I figure that I could live an incredibly full life on about $5,000,000 (face it- that’s 50 years worth of a pretty good salary).  After paying off debt, there’s no reason to have any more than that, and why anyone – ANYONE – wants to have more than that is honestly beyond me.

But, at least for now, I don’t need to think about it anymore; because, as previously noted, I didn’t win the lottery.

Night Lake

I mentioned in my last post that I spent several days in Waukegan last week and had a good time.  There was one slight downside to the trip, and I’m still not entirely sure how it happened.  I got two voice mails on Tuesday afternoon.  The first was from a photography store in Calumet, IL, and the second was from the fraud department at Discover Card.  Apparently, someone managed to steal my Discover Card information during the 20 minutes that I spent paying bills (online) from my hotel room last Wednesday afternoon, and they used the information to buy a $17 e-card (online postcard, I guess) and to attempt to buy $2,500 worth of something at the photography store.  Since I’ve – literally – never charged anything to my Discover card, their fraud department was all over it; and my card was cancelled (and all charges were dismissed) by 8:30 Tuesday night.  On Wednesday, I talked to the photography store, let them know that it was a bogus charge, and learned that whoever stole the card information also learned my correct mailing address, though they were having whatever they tried to buy shipped to Maryland – in my name, apparently.

I’m not thrilled that my mailing address is apparently obtainable from the act of spying on my online bill-paying, but it appears that no harm was done.  While paying the bills, I also paid my mortgage and two other credit cards, and I’m not sure if it would’ve been possible to grab my bank account information from those transactions or not, so I’ve been keeping a close eye on all of those accounts – so far, all seems to be normal.  I’ll continue to watch.

Lesson learned, at any rate.  I will never again pay my bills from a hotel room.  I can do most of the bill paying from my phone, anyway.  I just like to keep a spreadsheet, which is why I normally use the laptop.

Today’s picture is one that I drew with my little paint program (Fresh Paint) on my surface, and I call it something catchy: “Night Lake.”  I’m certain that, at some future date, it will be worth that $5,000,000 that I need.

TWD

who am i?

Posted on by

I’ve been watching Breaking Bad for the last week or so (I’ve become completely addicted to it) and one of the scenes made me start to think hard enough that my mind wandered and I had to pause the program.  In the scene, Jesse Pinkman is in a post-rehab meeting; and the meeting leader says something along the lines of, “You don’t come here to be a better person.  You come here to learn to accept the person that you are.”

As I said, it sort of made me think.  As far as I know, I accept the person that I am – but I’m not overly sure that I really know myself.  I tried coming up with one-size-fits-all adjectives to describe me honestly, but none of them really fit.  This exercise, of course, depressed the hell out of me and has caused me to wonder  what the answer is to today’s blog entry:  Who am I?

More specifically, what defines me?  What is it that I like doing?  What don’t I like doing? If money were no object, what would I do with myself?  What talents, if any, do I possess and are any of them worth pursuing from an “I like this” point of view?

So I’ve been thinking about this on and off for the last few days and decided I’d try to figure it out – in bits an pieces – with this little FN blog.  Not all at once, of course; and I’m not going to turn this thing into a tell-all (that’s what my original blog was becoming, which is why it is no longer open to the public).  As I think of it, though, I’ll try to hash things out.

I really like photography.  I do.  I’m not that great at it (and I do wonder if getting my stupid eyes checked would help), but I honestly enjoy it.  The feeling that I get when a really good photo comes straight out of my camera is one that I can’t describe.  I want to show it to the world, hang it on my wall, and – perhaps most importantly (and most maddeningly) – do it again.  When I see a great picture taken by someone else, I get jealous.  Not necessarily because I didn’t take it, but because if I take the same picture – even if it’s just as good or better – it still isn’t mine.  Somebody else did it first, and anything I get after that is just copying.  Screwed up, huh?  I might still love the shot that I get, but on some level I’m annoyed with myself because I didn’t think of it first.

In other news, I saw a suggested topic from one of those “Post-A-Day” blogs today that went something like, “How do you decide on your New Year’s resolutions?”

It’s an interesting question in an odd sort of way.  How do you decide which resolutions about which to be resolute?  Is that the question?  Or is it, “Why do you keep making the same promises to yourself, year after year, whether publicly or not, when you never succeed in keeping those promises?”  I mean, if I wanted to set a goal for myself and be relatively assured that I’d make that goal, it’d be something along the lines of, “I resolve that I will not wear soiled underwear during the entire 2012 calendar year.”

Now, this might be a no-brainer to some of you; but try keeping that goal when you’re camping for a few days in the middle of nowhere.  It’s not a completely safe goal if that’s the case – but I could keep it by just going commando.  So there’s that.

Those other goals, though (and I do make them – or at least think about them – every frigging year), have almost become pointless.  I mean, if there’s this “resolution” that you want to make (and keep), then why haven’t you made it and kept it previously?  Furthermore, most of the “big” resolutions are always negative.  As in, “I will not smoke this year,” or “I will not drink this year,” or “I will not eat chocolate this year” (that last one, by the way, is one of those goals that I could fly through).  And, with those negative goals, what does the person who makes them always do on December 31 – the day before those negative resolutions go into effect?

You got it.  Mr. Resolve goes out of his way to binge like hell on the very thing(s) that he’s determined to give up.   And he wonders why he’s already failed to live up to his expectations by about January 3rd.

Why not make some positive resolutions?  “I will put $5 into a cookie jar every week.”  That of course, doesn’t limit you from taking $3 out of the cookie jar every week…

Anyway, I don’t know what makes me think I’ll be able to do/not do something next year that I’ve been not doing/doing for long enough that I think I have to start/stop doing it; but I still make the damned resolutions every year, and I’m sure I’ll do it again in a few weeks.

This time, though, I think I’ll just make my resolutions on a weekly basis.  Who knows?  Maybe I can keep one going for 52 consecutive weeks.

TWD

well…that was interesting

Posted on by

I had a lucid dream last night.

I’m fairly certain that this was a first for me, though I’ve tried to have lucidity on and off for years.  Basically, a lucid dream is one that, while you’re having it, you know that you’re dreaming.  The theory goes that, if you’re aware that you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming, then you can make just about anything happen in your dream.  You can try to solve problems or experience things that you want to experience (like flying, etc)….or you can tell yourself to knock it off.

I was able to do the last two things on that list last night, and I’ve got to admit that it was pretty cool.  Here’s what happened:

I went to bed fairly early last night and woke up at about 1:00 this morning.  Had a pee and watched a bit of television before attempting to go back to sleep around 2:00.  At some point between then and 6:00, I began dreaming that I was house-sitting for Cy and “T” at their large Victorian house.  I was also charged with taking care of their dog, a black lab named Snots.

Please note that Cy and “T” have neither a black lab nor a large Victorian house.  Those two facts figure into things later.

In my dream, I awoke from napping at their house and realized that I had no idea where Snots was.  I couldn’t remember having seen him for a week, and Cy and “T” were due home the following day.  Alarmed by this, I got out of bed (in my dream) and attempted to find my way from one end of the house to the other, but got hopelessly lost and kept winding up back in the bed where I had been sleeping.  So I went back to sleep (in my dream) and – some time later – woke up (still in the dream) and once again tried to find my way to the other end of the house.  This happened several times and I got more agitated each time, but I finally ended up outside the house and I began frantically to look for Snots.   It was drizzly and cold outside and the ground was slick.  This didn’t feel good at all, as I was dressed only in a bathrobe – no shoes.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but I ended up standing on the top of a curved metal building (think of a knight’s helmet the size of a conference center) and I was having a great deal of trouble getting down, which is not surprising because the only way down was along a curved strip of metal, much like a slide on a playground; and did I mention that I was now carrying a large silver sousaphone? Don’t ask me where THAT came from – probably from the same place that the shirt, pants, and shoes that I was now wearing did.  In the drizzle, all of the clothes were soaking wet.

But I had to find the dog, and I knew that I couldn’t drop the sousaphone, and the only way off of this building was to slide down the slide (standing up), so I very carefully did so.  And I made it all the way to the ground and started walking back towards the house.  Unfortunately, there was a lot of water on the ground between the house and me, and footing was treacherous.

And at just about that point in the dream, I thought to myself, “Wait a minute.  Where’d this sousaphone come from?  And where’d these clothes come from?  And since when do Cy and “T” live in a house like that and have a black lab named Snots?  This has got to be a dream.  I’m freaking dreaming here!”

Right on the heels of that thought, I came up with two more: If I were dreaming, I could change the color of the sousaphone from silver to red; and I should be able to just sort of water-ski back to the house if I wanted to.

Guess what?  The formerly silver sousaphone turned into a red fiberglass one, and I managed to propel my way along the stream in front of me with no effort at all.  It was fun.

I was still relatively frazzled, however.  Sort of a dream-hangover from the previous attempts to find Snots and not knowing how to get out of the house and being stuck on the roof, I guess.  So I told myself to wake up and determined that the best way to do that would be to shake my head – which I did, and which I was doing when I woke up in my own bed.

I took a few minutes for me to realize what had happened.  Basically, I was in disbelief that I’d actually been consciously aware of my subconscious; but when I came to terms with it, I thought it was SO cool.

I still do.

Hope I can do it again soon.

TWD