Lawnmower Man

I slept about 2 hours. I laid down at 6 am to try and sleep a few hours until 9 . . . but I couldn't sleep. I was too tired to continue working, my brain had gone to mush, but too wound up to sleep -- I hate when that happens! So, I told myself that even being peaceful and just lying there would help rest my mind a little. I laid there until 8'ish when Sherry came for her morning walk on the treadmill and then I got up to see Anna. She's at that perfect age, she'll never be cuter or more adorable than she is right now (at least I hope not, because I couldn't stand it!) Soon enough she'll have a full vocabularly and be big enough to run around and scream with the other kids and I'll miss the way she is right now. That's what has happened with all the kids -- they're so much fun at this age, everything is so simple . . . I think it changes when they start expressing their own opinions ;-) That takes some of the fun out it. The older kids are perfect little people now, with opinions and ideas and thoughts and questions and demands and stories and favourite things and things they don't like and . . . well, they're just more complicated, more adult, and adult just isn't as fun as toddler. Not that I don't have fun with the bigger kids, I do. It's just different now, more questions and explanations and concepts. I'm very lucky, being the aunt I get to only have the fun without any of the discipline.

Anyway, I got up to play with Anna and then went back to bed shortly before 9, slept until around 11 and dreamed a thousand dreams in between. I swear I did get more rest just lying quietly but awake for a couple of hours versus sleeping and dreaming. One dream was a recurring one I have where I'm a character in a book I've written that I'm reading aloud to a group . . . except I don't realise immediately that I'm the character until all the things I'm reading from the book start to happen in the room and likewise anything I say that isn't in the book, the text changes and it's added to the book. It's all very comical and the me who is off to the side watching the dream unfold, knowing I've dreamt it before, knowing full well that it is a dream, likes to put words just for fun into the mouth of the character from the book in the dream (who is also me. The me off to the side had a good time changing the number of the people in the audience at the reading from 10 to 9 to 8 to 7 to 6 to 5 to 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 and then none. Yeah, these are the crazy types of things I dream.

The dream I was caught up in just before I woke was slightly more sinister. I dreamed that I was in the kitchen with Mom and Dad. My aunt Julia kept calling on the phone. She had gossip about a murderer on the loose, driving a red three-wheeler, dressed like a mechanic in blue coveralls. She insisted there was a write-up in a flyer that had come in the sales package . . . on a pink sheet of paper . . . and that we needed to find this and read it. She called about this over and over about five times. Everytime she'd call we'd look around a little for this pink sheet of paper but we couldn't find it and really we didn't seem that concerned. It was a beautiful summer morning and we were eating toast with peanut butter and drinking tea. Then I heard someone pull up to the front of the house. I looked out the picture window but it was like looking out the window of a basement apartment. I could see a pair of legs wearing blue work pants feet tucked into beige brown workboots that looked brand new. The legs were standing next to what looked like a red ride-on lawnmower. I grabbed the phone and called Julia to tell her I thought I saw the killer, that he was here, but she didn't seem interested, said the details weren't the same and that I needed to find the pink paper. I hung up and called 911, but the line was busy. The legs were walking around the window, it seemed like the guy was sizing things up. Then all of a sudden he drove a round-point shovel into the ground in front of the window and I woke up gasping thinking, "Someone has died." I laid there for about five minutes pondering this when the phone rang. It was Sherry calling to tell me they've taken Granddad to the hospital to put him in palliative care. He doesn't have long left now.

Mood: Dazed
Drinking: Coffee
Listening To: the clock tick
Hair: tousled