Recently in sleep Category

i can have everything i want in life, as long as everything i want in life is to wake up next to my beautiful loving wife and go for a wonderful run in the mind-blowingly excellent california weather.

what is steel, compared to the hand that wields it?

though physical activity has been the cornerstone of my life for a decade now, i still view it as a recent introduction, and am constantly amazed at the bliss i can generate just by moving quickly through my environment.

the sun and the movement of my feet are the cures to all that ails me.

I was visiting my parents' house when Justin Bieber came in for a visit. It turns out he's a great guy, funny, very smart, down to earth. We played some video games, had a bunch of laughs, and then, when he was about to leave, I picked up my parents' land line so he could call dopealope for a serenade.

Unfortunately, my mom refused with great vehemence, saying that she didn't want to pay the long distance charges that using the land line would incur, and also refused my offer to reimburse. Since the cell phone wouldn't do justice to the glorious vocal talents of the bieb, dopealope didn't get his performance, and that was the end of that.

why so many? i don't know.

last night sarah palin wrote me a children's book to explain why we need to update our production routers to the latest, untested firmware release. i was not convinced but i could tell that management would buy into it.

last night, i attended a very private function with sarah palin speaking. 20 or so guests, most of whom were my family members. after a short speech, palin asked if the audience had any questions. no questions were forthcoming, and she became increasingly agitated at the lack of worship. finally, amidst great tension, i raised my hand and asked, "in the future, do you forsee that all political candidates will have their own reality TV shows, or just most of them?"

sarah palin was not amused.

i'm nearing the end of stephen king's fractal, self-referential magnum opus, "the dark tower". the seventh and final book is a recapitulation of the pattern of all the books before, and it is, in my opinion, head and shoulders better than any of them. like any good story, it is invading my consciousness.

a couple of nights past, when it was especially hot in the bedroom, we had a fan set up and no comforter. throughout the night, the bedsheets would be blown about a centimeter up, then fall down again as the waves of hot air were blown toward the bed by the fan. i slept restlessly, and had a nightmare.

normally when i have a bad dream, it tends to creep up on me slowly, developing from a "normal" dream into a "bad" dream with such lack of subtlety that my sleeping overmind can take control, and either laugh in the face of my subconscious and turn things pleasant again, or, more frequently, demand that i wake up and end the nonsense. but this dream was quite different. i was in the middle of a "good" or at least "boring" dream, and then suddenly, with no warning at all, i was context-switched into the intensely vivid experience that the bedsheet was suspended four feet above the bed, and descending upon me to envelop me, and kill me, and drag me into some stephen king nightmare of malevolent, unrelenting, and totally enveloping evil.

(by the way, the use of the word "envelop" twice in one sentence, an affront to the language which i am normally staunchly guarded against, is meant as a tribute to master king. har har har.)

the whole experience lasted only a second or two, much shorter than the normal bad dream, providing me no time to shut things down. instead i fought back, punching and kicking at the descending cottony killer, and awoke with a start to find myself delivering perhaps the hardest kick i've ever inflicted on another human straight on to the shin of hops, sleeping next to me. she took things rather well, and seemed much less startled by it than i. i apologized profusely, hoped i hadn't broken anything, and went back to sleep.

the next morning, she told me i had punched her, too.

anyhow, i highly recommend the dark tower. it is invasive, in a good way, as long as you're not sharing a bed with me.

oddly coincident with my sudden obsession with tea, a tea shop opened up about 10 minutes walking time from our home. we walked down last night after dinner. it's run by a pleasant but very pushy young Chinese woman. We stayed for a while talking and tasting different teas, and I began to think that she wasn't pushy so much as very nervous and poor at English (though of course, as we commented, her English is better than our Chinese). Still, she had a notion that we were tea experts coming in to try our favorite tea, when in fact, it was quite the opposite: we were there to experience new stuff.

I wanted to try a tea I'd read about ("your favorite?" she asked, and it wasn't easy to communicate that it wasn't my favorite yet since I'd never had it!) called, in english, Lapsang souchong. She had no idea what I was asking for, but fortunately, my smartphone came not only to the rescue, but to the rescue in Chinese! I googled 'lapsang souchong' and the Chinese characters came up in the results. I showed her this and she said, "oh! souchong! We have three kinds!". We tried the black tea varieties (the third was an oolong), both high mountain and low mountain. The high mountain was thinner bodied with an aroma that was more dirt than smoke, the low mountain was darker, thicker, and more smokey.

She really wanted us to try all of her teas, and we tried several more, and even though I wanted not to drink too much, there was no place to dump the tea (no spittoon as in a winery), and it seemed like it would be rude to ask her to dump it for us, so we drank it all. she claimed that black teas have almost no caffeine, only greens do, which is pretty much opposite from my understanding and experience. needless to say, we didn't sleep much last night.

a very nice place she's got, and she said that she's got over 200 teas now, with more on the way. unfortunately, in our opinions, the location is so poor that she won't last long. here's hoping we're wrong.

hops and i were staying in room 210 of a beach motel, top floor. the motel was owned by a cigar merchant, and he was away at a conference. he had left us a bunch of cigars, labeled by number. i took one from the box labeled 210, since that was our room number. it was crooked, gnarled, and not particularly straight. when smoked, it tasted like an oatmeal cookie. in fact, the longer i smoked it, the less it began to look like a cigar (which it didn't look like to begin with) and the more it looked like a small, round, lumpy oatmeal cookie.

later the hotel owner sent us a nice paper letter from his conference. he said he hoped we were enjoying the #210 oatmeal cookie flavored incense chunks. no wonder they were so hard to smoke!

stayed up "late" last night playing portal, then hops decided that 6:30 was the time i'd be waking up today. recovering from dual workouts yesterday, plenty o crap to do today. bleh.

i dreamed last night that i managed to finally pull together a vacation trip that i'd been wanting to take for a very long time.  i had a lot of troubles getting it all set up, and once i was on the plane i began worrying about all that i'd forgotten -- did i have my passport?  i figured i must have, since i was on the plane.  did i have charger for my phone?  no, i didn't.  did i have clothes, cell charger, and paper for letter writing?  no, not really.  but i had a carry-on backpack full of something.

i worried that on arrival, my hosts would discover things about my heritage and lock me up in a dungeon and nobody would come to my aid.  that was a real problem, and a risk i was going to have to take -- since i didn't think of it until the plane took off.  besides, i figured, i wasn't important enough to warrant that kind of digging, although it wouldn't take much if the government was inclined to be thorough.

oh! i realized with a start that i hadn't told my boss i was going on vacation.  that would be bad, i figured, since he might notice a two week absence.  fortunately, one of my coworkers was traveling as well, though not "with" me, per se.  mr adam burns (ahem), and he had the boss's phone number.  i called him from my cell phone, cursing the fact that now my boss would have my private number, and told him i'd be out.  he said that was fine.

all that settled, i sat back to attempt to enjoy the long flight to iran.

the plane was very large, with few seats per aisle, tons and tons of leg room, and six foot wide aisles.  i got up to go for a little walk and felt the plane landing.  it was way too soon for that.  as the plane came down, i looked at the floor and could see tiled bathroom floor moving aft where the cabin floor should have been.  the plane was no plane at all, just a big metal skeleton full of chairs.  the plane came to a stop and my fellow passengers noticed that we had no crew.  we all went outside to look around, and found we were in a sandy beach-canyon area, with high, sandy sea cliffs and no sight of water.  we poked around in the sand for a bit and went back into the plane.

all our luggage was gone, including my bag that had nothing useful in it, as were our airfares.  it was made known to us at that point (by the dungeon master, i guess) that the people running this "airline" were notorious swindlers and scammers, and we'd been had.  there would be no trip to iran and no refunds.

that dream came to an end and i moved on to one significantly less pleasant.

i zombie-made my cereal, forgetting totally that i was going to have eggs today.