I have these stupid nagging dreams; I guess they are intended to remind me I am behind on something or need to be prodded to proceed on something. Last night's was a beaut: we were traveling with friends and I was always behind. At one point I had missed breakfast because I had been doing something else and now everyone was leaving and I was starving. (I woke up at this point and was actually hungry.) In another section of the dream, we were staying in a house that was an old Victorian house that our friends (no one I knew) were remodeling. The house was a mess; a warren of small rooms and peeling wallpaper and water damage, but in places some spots of real beauty, like original wallpaper that was in good shape that they were going to save, and a bedroom that had been a woman's bedroom and had a headboard made of cerise satin, like a 1930s film star might have. Another bedroom was also a woman's bedroom, and it was so big she had had a big, curved partition made at one end where she had a big washstand and bowl on one side and a reclining sofa on the other, with swinging doors to get inside. The final scene in this dream was James and I with the dog, and him warning me to keep Tucker out of the dog poop that we were standing next to. Bizarre.

Not to mention that I was interrupted at least twice waking up because my nose was clogged and I'd come awake because I couldn't breathe because the inside of my mouth had dried out.

At eight o'clock I heard James stirring. He'd already changed out of his night clothes, tested his sugar (he was at 59!), put the towels in the hamper...I looked at him out of glazed eyes (we'd gone to bed about 12:30) and asked him why on earth he wasn't asleep. I can't sleep, he said. I told him he wasn't trying hard enough. I felt him lay back down and then went right back off to sleep, and there we stayed until almost eleven.

No way we were going to "beat the Baptists" to Kroger, so we took our time and ate breakfast before heading out.

We ended up just going to Kroger. It was bad enough taking Tucker out earlier, but now it was the ninth ring of Hell, The sun feels like it could strip paint off your car—or like the heat lamps they use at the grocery store for the rotisserie chickens. You can only put your hand in for so long before you feel your skin scorching. We bought Those Damn Bananas, burritos, some soup for lunch, and a few other things and just came home. We ended up lolling in the living room watching Holmes on Homes. I had a 60% off JoAnn coupon and a 40% entire purchase coupon for Michaels (which I usually love because I buy little inexpensive thing for craft projects all at once) and I didn't even want to go out for those.

About four o'clock we roused ourselves from our torpor and went downstairs and finally killed the frog.

You know there's that saying that if you eat a frog first thing in the morning then nothing worse can happen all day? On the decluttering Usenet group I used to be on, we used to call any chore we didn't want to do "a frog." Well, we've had all the Christmas decoration containers and the winter decoration containers and the Easter box and the spring decoration stacked up in maze fashion in the library since after Christmas so we could reinforce the mounting of the shelves they were stored on. I haven't been able to shelve the completed books I took down there because all the holiday containers were in the way.

A couple of years back I related that one of the wire shelving units in our master closet pulled away from the wall and collapsed. It was pretty overloaded with winter coats, all my jeans, and James' dress pants, plus the suitcases on the shelf on top. When we did the repair we realized the installers had just missed fastening the shelves into the studs. I checked in the downstairs storage closet and none of the shelving supports were set into studs either, and some of the boxes have ceramics in them and are heavy. For the past ten years the shelves have held the containers okay, but I've been worried since the closet incident. So we installed four supports in the studs, two for each shelving unit. We couldn't put any supports into the two studs on the longer shelf, the ones closest to the closet door because the drill kept hitting something hard. We thought it might be metal put in to guide the electrical conduits for the switch and electrical plug on the other side of the wall in the garage. So we put in those two extra supports using wall anchors. Not as good as studs, but better than nothing. Then James helped me replace the sections of the Christmas tree and the containers. The three heaviest containers are still on the floor because it hurts James' back to get them down anymore.

We finished at six and had supper about seven: shrimp scampi over spaghetti. Should have thawed another package of shrimp; we only had nine each, and these were only medium sized. We scarfed all the spaghetti, and I had some of the rest of the scampi sauce on bread. Later we had some ice cream for dessert.

We watched part three of Sons of Liberty, which I recorded last year not realizing I started with chapter three of five. Not sure what I think of it. It was a "dramatic presentation" based on the events leading to the American Revolution, not a documentary, and some people were not happy with the casting or the "sexing up" of the story. For instance they had Sam Adams as a young handsome athletic man (I can't think about Samuel Adams without remembering Johnny Tremain's description of him—or maybe it was Rab Silsbee's description—as "a dog fox with a fat pullet in his mouth") rather than a greying chronic debtor. I did like the way they showed Boston as a small town, a working town, not the bright set-like place Disney gave us in the film version of Tremain. It looks like a working port, and the workingmen looked particularly grimy as they should. Some people took umbrage with the portrayal of Franklin in the bathtub lusting over the pretty ladies, but I gather from my own reading on Benjamin Franklin that he indeed did love to spend long hours in the bathtub, attended by young ladies, and he was quite the roué.

Tried taking Tucker out before the sunset was even gone from the sky, but even encouragement from the little boy down the street didn't help; he wouldn't pee at all. It's been popping and cracking and booming out there since way before the sun went down.

Labels: chores, dogs, dreams, food, history, holidays, pets, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:27:00 PM

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