Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, all! I am on my way down to Portland, OR, today to spend the holiday with Aunt Sally and Uncle Bruce et les chiens. It is a beautiful day outside, chilly with blue skies and a few colorful leaves left. I think I have a cold, which makes it less beautiful, but I am not at work, which makes it more beautiful. One can't have everything, but one can be thankful for what one has. Right, One? I feel like the mayor's wife from "The Music Man." Have a great Thanksgiving!

Birds Gotta Dance

Go here, you animal lovers. It's great. I love it.

fever dreams (2)?

I woke up this morning (with headache) from a complicated, visually detailed dream that included hang-gliding (someone else was doing that), a huge ox, my grandmother sitting in the back of a car and me trying to do laundry in the front of the car, airports, my bridesmaid's dress from last year, and some other things, I think. Oh yeah - Christmas with empty stockings. The hang-gliding and ox were impressive. My dream started out as a documentary on someone hang-gliding near the coast, full of mountains and streams and estuaries - very neat. I'm impressed with the visuals that my subconscious can create, since I can't create them when I'm awake. Then, it switched to a scene where a man was driving a cart, pulled by the biggest ox you could imagine. He kept poking the ox with a pitchfork, which looked like a toothpick compared to the size of the ox. The ox turned a sharp corner in the road, and got caught up in telephone or electric lines, which was ironic since the rest of the scene was very pastoral and appeared to be pre-industrial. The ox gave up and went into a barn or building or under some eaves or something, and rain water poured off the eaves. Then we were at the bank of a river, and an American Indian came up, but as he approached it turned out that it was a film, and the actor was an Indian Indian in the role of an American Indian, and it didn't look quite right. Then I woke up or the dream morphed into the grandmother/car/laundry/airport/Christmas stocking dream, which was a pretty frustrating dream. I was glad to wake up. I passed a large blue jeep yesterday with a license plate that said "Bloo Ox," which made me think of Paul Bunyan and Babe, and I think that must have been where the gigantic ox in my dream came from. It wasn't blue, though.

dreams come true?

Speaking of dreaming of whales, this morning we saw a pod of killer whales from the ferry. So neat! I think I saw 5. I saw the first one before the captain announced them, I think. It was far away and just the dorsal fin was above water, and I wasn't sure if it was a whale, shark, or diving duck (since it kept disappearing). After the captain made his announcement, I moved over to the windows (amazing how many people did not do that!), and saw three whales traveling in tandem (although now I am not sure I know what "tandem" means), and then a single whale that was breaching quite a lot. They were moving. I took the 12:20 boat home this afternoon because I have some sort of bug, and I saw fish jumping, probably salmon. Maybe that's why the whales were there in the first place. It was an interesting day on the Sound, yesiree.

FYI, we do have sharks in Puget Sound. We have at least one species of small shark (dogfish) and probably more, and a few years ago, a UW professor discovered that there are sixgill sharks that live near the Sound floor. They are big, and I ride over them daily. Hmmm. And apparently, they have good, strong family values.

not much to say

It's Monday, and I had forgotten that I had a blog. So sad. Poor little neglected blog. I have nothing very interesting to say. I am trying to stick to the Weight Watchers thing, and my motivation goes up and down. I couldn't exercise this weekend because I have a sore leg muscle (the same muscle that marked the beginning of the end of my productive time at the gym, though there have been many since then), and I had bad cramps and all the things they entail.

I dream of cake and cookies and things like that. I dream that I am making them, or that they are just here and I will get to eat them. I never actually do eat them in my dreams, but I look forward to it. It's odd, because in real life I would not have had cake since I started at WW, and I may or may not have made cookies. Probably not, but maybe. And it's not as if I have sworn off them forever. I intend to have some at the right time, and other yummy things, too. And I have apple cranberry crisp in my fridge right now (and am not eating it right now, amazingly - we'll see how long that lasts!). When I first got my nut allergy, I dreamt about nuts. Mostly I dreamt about eating them and then freaking out, whereas the cake dreams are about the anticipation. And they are beautiful cakes, too. And I am looking forward to Mom's birthday cake, which was featured in last night's dream. I would never dream (ha!) of foregoing that cake. But I wonder if I am mourning cake and cookies. Actually, it's mostly cake. Cake that I get maybe two or three times a year - it hasn't been a big part of my diet. I should be mourning cookie dough, but I guess I haven't really given that up. Weird.

I also dreamed about upside-down six-gilled sharks and humpback whales and orcas and things like that, right outside the little dinghy I was riding in. Very exciting!

Mom and Dad are leaving for Italy tomorrow, so now I will be nervous until I hear that they are safely at home again. Someone said that worrying was the one kind of prayer he approved of. Who was that?