Archive for August, 2007
yoyo
Yoyo moods. I seem to be dwelling in a passive aggressive state directed towards myself. I've been fair, kind, and hard working all my life. It's empty though, and something terribly flawed about the way it has proceeded. I know it's me, but don't suppose I'll ever know why. Nothing to fix at this late stage. Maybe other people feel that way, maybe not.---
Friends are having a BBQ this weekend, so I'll make a nice macaroni salad with crab and shrimp. The husband said he'd learned to play the banjo this year as project and was seeking a project for next year. It would be fun to listen to him play at the bbq, so I suggested he ask people to make up a verse to sing along to his music. He said. "Well...blues and banjo don't really go together."
Sure it does...there's the old time gospel-ly bluesy music, like Wayfaring Stranger, although I don't think I've heard it played on the banjo. They don't own a TV, so I don't suppose they remember "Hee Haw" from the 60's-(70s?) and the silly/sorrowful wailing cornfield verses played on the banjo. "Where oh where, are you tonight? Why did you leave me here all alone? Well I searched the world over and though I'd found true love, but you found another, and *#@!# you was gone."
Sounds bluesy to me.
Ogre ate his pet
I ran into Ogre online yesterday. It had been a long time. We discussed the storms in his area, and I asked about his pet pig. He'd sent out a photo some time ago, of this adorable little piglet. It wasn't a farm pig, but the cutest little thing with stripes, some sort of wild boar. He was feeding it out of a ketchup bottle.I thought, "Wow, he's really a nice guy...you know with feelings for the small animals of the field, la la la."
So yesterday he says that his pig made some fine sausage. I was a little shocked! It's not that it is unusual. My neighbors in childhood had a wee farm and raised two pigs named Sally and Arnold. She wrote me that summer from their farm saying, "We butchered Sally and Arnold." She wasn't unhappy at all....just normal farm life in ND. How do you eat something you named?
They were pets, but Sally and Arnold were destined as dinner from the beginning. It's been awhile since I've been around farms, and people here sometimes have pet pigs that they keep like dogs.
I told Ogre "You ate your pet!" I felt deceived, thinking about the earlier picture and imagined the whole time he must've been contemplating a whole lot of Fall breakfasts. "But you named it!," I declared. "I will never trust anyone in the world again."
He said "Great, you should never trust anyone in the world."
He's probably right.
I asked him what the name of his pig was. He said "Porkchop", and I remembered he had told me that last year.
If I were at all astute, at that time, I would have recognized what lay in the frying pan ahead.
dream – remote control of the universe, and other ramblings
Last night's dream was a lot of fun. It was very linear in storyline but complex because each scene had to be considered from two points of view. In the dream, the only person who could see enough of what was truly occurring in his/her surroundings to actually take action was the person holding a little box with a couple of dials on it. Everyone else lived in a subdued version of existence, seeing life and danger in a limited manner, perhaps only what they expected or wanted to see. The box was yellow and shaped more like the control to an electric blanket than a remote control (but I'll just call it a remote.) I'd hoped to remember the details, but don't. I had the remote for awhile, and remember a scene of some giant lizard creature (a dragon or an ankylosaur) crashing through the main square of a big city. People were getting wiped out and noone seemed to notice. There was someone in the dream with me (no idea who) and we shared the remote, so both our minds were flipping between the two views.There were other parts of the dream that didn't fit in with the whole save- the-world theme. In one scene, we were hiding behind a car in a supermarket parking lot, because some people were trying to mug us. And through most of the dream I had an animal that I kept with me. It was a friendly animal..I thought it was a dog, but when it was time to release it to the wild, I left it in a pond. It was probably a big fish.
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Analysis - I thought the dream could make an interesting story and tried to think of influences. There's "Dr. Who" which I haven't been watching. "13 Ghosts" is a movie I've seen a few times. Maybe I was just thinking about the stockmarket. I can't make any sense out of the differing views from news commentators from one day to the next.
I don't know what would make me think of muggers in a parking lot.
Big Fish is a game company, and I've been enjoying one of their computer games.
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Hoarders
It has come to my attention that my house is full. This weekend and every day from now, I will work at least an hour a day to get rid of some of my junk, since I can't get rid of my mother's junk. I've plenty of my own.
I'm thinking of sneaking up on some unsuspecting yard sales and just leaving items on their tables.
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Things that seem ridiculous to me
Johnson and Johnson is suing the Red Cross over use of the red cross icon.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-08-redcross-lawsuit_N.htm
Both have been using the symbol for many years.
I heard The Olympic Committee is going after a fellow who runs tours of the Olympic Peninsula here in our state. They don't want him to use the word Olympic.
play ball
The days are getting shorter and the neighborhood kids hope to stretch the hours of the last few weeks before school begins. They were playing in the lot adjacent to the house with an assortment of bats and balls. There were wooden bats and plastic bats and plastic balls and tennis balls. I don't recall seeing a softball in the bunch. It makes me a little nervous, because the living room window could easily be broken. So far, there've been no accidents.Tonight they played until about 10:00 pm, well after sunset. The kids wanted to continue to play and asked me to turn the porch lamps on. I told them that it was late, so I'd rather not. An hour later, there was the sound of running back and forth on my porch, an incredible amount of racket, so I opened the main door (which I normally don't use) and peered out to see a girl at the door waving a big shovel high over her head. She was somewhere around the age of 12, and was not much larger than the shovel. For a second it seemed menacing, because she faced me with a grip on the shovel like a baseball bat.
I and asked quietly, "What do you think you're doing?" She looked startled and said "I'm trying to keep the light on!" There's a little motion activated light in the corner which will stay on all of three seconds when activated. I suppose for the last half hour or longer she had been swinging the shovel around the light to keep it going. I told her she looked like she was prepared to break something. She looked at her hands and at the top of the shovel and said "Ohhh, Noooo." I laughed to show I was joking.
"We can't leave until we get her out," she explained motioning with her head towards the far end of the field. I couldn't see "her", but there was something out there...a dark form that quickly dissolved into the shadows of a nearby home.
They seem like a decent bunch of kids. I just thought it was hilarious. The next time you see someone at the front door waving a shovel over their head in the middle of the night, they may just be playing ball.
nightmare
I had a nightmare last night, but it was all day residue, and yesterday residue and the day before yesterday residue.I dreamt I was in a park and met with Jean, who set a deadline for me to travel to fetch something in Minneapolis at 6:00 am the next morning. It sounded very interesting, but I also ran into Pam and Al from work, and they mentioned that I was forgetting another commitment, which made me feel a little stressed, but I decided I would leave at 6:00 am anyway. It seemed people traveled in this park by golf-cart. I was on foot. I walked off and entered a building that appeared to be for storage. there were several doors to enter or exit. It was dark and seemed like a large barn or warehouse. Someone was following me. It was a not so tall person in a yellow hooded garment (a rain coat, yet not shiny.) I asked who it was a few times, and there were more, up to five additional folk and they were all exactly the same as the first. Because they were so bizarre, I felt assured they meant me harm, and only let one get close enough to see the face, which was a mask that was like a doll's face. It almost looked real, although none of the features moved. The face had no eyebrows, and was plastic, but again not shiny. So I started to run from them, and all these eyebrowless, masked, short, potential murderers in bright yellow were chasing me! There was a door and I was trying to scream for help, but couldn't. As I reached the door, I awoke, and caught myself yelling "Help!" outloud. Thankfully I yell quietly and no one heard.
Why would I be afraid of sunny yellow, plastic faced little people?
I'd e-mailed Jean about a project and focused on photos for the night, some with repetitive pics of people. I needed to get into work really early to close some modules before others arrived, so there's the 6:00. The bridge collapse in Minneapolis is still on my mind. The park. I'm always around the park, and have been around parks in other places. We had a particularly savage murder at the local park a few years ago, and they were pretty common in the park across the street from my former residence in Texas. I worked at a golf course in that state, so that could explain golf carts. The other day, I saw a local person sun themselves as is done in the Pacific NW with all the clothes on, long sleeves, long pants and shoes, sometimes parkas, spread out, unmoving, flat out on the ground.
I always wonder....so are they alive? I want to walk right over and say "get up!" Any self-respecting North Dakotan knows that you need to wear less clothes if you're going to sun-bathe.
It's nice to know why something bugs you, but it doesn't always explain why it's bugging you today. I see people dozing in the park all the time, really. I don't know why it is enough to turn a dream.
But it turns and becomes macabre with little, unshiny people in raincoats chasing you around. It reminds me of an old horror novel, Du Maurier "Don't Look Now."
