Dreams

You know, I do occasionally have nightmares.

In this one, I could talk to cats, and I was bonded to one in particular. We evacuated a building, and she ran back in, and I ran back in after her, and there were all these cats in the building. I knew there was a fire somewhere. Some of them wanted to die, and some were just too confused to find their way out.

The latter, I got out. The former, I encouraged and gave directions.

Then I was in the attic (where I'd started). I found her there, and the fire as well. I was about to leave with her safely, when I awoke, though.

So a nightmare, but not one that left me panicked or anything.

Nonetheless, tonight I'd like to dream about something sweet or, at the worst, merely surreal.

...it's October.

Finally. Finally. It's fall in Oregon. It knows it's fall.

I went out to the car this morning in the medium-thick fog of an Oregon fall. (Which is to say you could easily see far enough to safely drive the speed limit; but the sky and more distant objects were blurred into soft grey, and nearer objects were shrouded, though still visible.)

It's draped over everything, and it's glorious. I felt so very awake in the cool sliding cover of the water.

I get to work and everything is still misty, coated, the trees made into soft blurs of black or grey, yellow or green or purple. Near the entrance, as I passed underneath them, two trees with clouds in their branches, above the last deep red berries (in almost three years in this building, this is the first time I realized they had berries). The leaves were almost the shade of the berries, already curling to fall off.

The view out my window now is similar, the building opposite us (but at a distance) nothing but a blurry, misty shadow-outline without windows or doors. The cars in its parking lot are almost as indistinct, and the deciduous trees between our lot and the road are solider shadows, but only that.

It's lovely.

Ooops.

I do this about once a month, which is coincidentally (hah!) about how often I get my prescription refilled:

I have a whole new bottle of claritin (my antihistamine). Which is at home, because I did not put it in my purse. In my purse, I have the previous bottle, which is, you guessed it, completely empty.

I should take my claritin now. Looks like I miss it for the day. I'm not going to go home and get it; experience says this is usually nuisancy, nothing more, except May through July, when it's worth the drive to be sure I have it.

Wish me luck. Especially wish me luck with remembering to put it in my purse so I have it tomorrow, at least....

Nnnnn. 'Scuse?

Oh I hate managing people who are lazy and slow on the uptake. HATE.

"This needs to do 'X'. Copy the behavior of the 'Y' notification, except without the check to see whether to apply it."

A full workday later, he comes back to me trying to figure out what a "notification" is, having gotten mentally trapped in a source file where the activity will need to take place, without EVER having looked up Y, despite repeated attempts to tell him about Y, despite it being mentioned in an email about the matter.

(And a search in the source code on "notification" alone would've turned up the crucial stuff. Hands-down.)

He was worried about, won't it do this - or that - or the other - show it to the wrong person or flood people's screens?

No, the behavior for notifications is already written...you just need to tap into it.

*sighs* Yesterday I felt guilty, for culling the "simplest" of the tasks for him, and giving excessive time to do it. Today, I'm glad I did...and I feel guilty for being glad, but you get what you get.

Spanish class.

Oh thank goodness. I was really dreading tonight and finding it hard to go, after last week's jokes.

But it went fine. I went in with enough to say that I didn't even get to half of it (because I didn't know what I'd want to talk about when I was there)...plus, instead of putting us in two groups of three, she put us in one group of six. (Of course, it was one group of five till another student showed up a bit late.)

I knew - and I was right - that saying at one point in my life we had 40-odd cats would be enough to derail everyone's mind for a bit. *grins* Apparently I outdid the lady next to me, who has a miniature cow, miniature burro, miniature goat, dog, two cats, and a lovebird. Eek.

I also got a good laugh when I mentioned that my parents had a cat named "Basta". Hee. I was going to talk about Basta but the conversation side-tracked and derailed...later on, I griped about the coworker who brings his black lab into our office and lets it run off-leash.

All nothings, but enough to reassure me I spoke "enough" and maybe will not be teased so much.

Tomorrow we are supposed to talk about the state we are "from", namely, the one we were born in. Ugh. I lived in the state I was born in for about a year and a half and then we moved to Oregon, I spent all my life here, basically. I don't want to talk about California! It has some very, very nice people in it. It's a state. It's probably perfectly nice. But it's not my state. I'd have to do - eek! - research to talk about it, and even then I'd stutter and stumble.

Blessedly, no one in my class was born in Oregon, and another woman was born in California, so the instructor decided it was okay for me to talk about Oregon.

Let's see. I've lived here - excising the time I spent in Iowa for college, and the time I spent in California before we moved here - over twenty years. Yes, I think I'd rather talk about Oregon.

Oregon is my home. It will be, even if I move somewhere else and live there for years.

Another topic I can deal with, at least partially. Well, we're supposed to talk about our home state, and the Basque region, but we have an article for that. I can manage this. I can do this.

The guy in our class managed to say something crude about his dog (unfortunately, I missed what), whilst trying to say something else. Then again, he's also the one who noted that his dog's name is Sara, his fiancee is Tara, and he occasionally interchanges their names! Needless to say that had the rest of us laughing and wincing.

It was awkward. I mean, it wasn't like being with friends. But it wasn't bad. It wasn't last week.

Let it stay this way, and I'll keep going. Let it revert - and I'll change my mind.