On not moving

I dreamed last night that I was making my way from here to Seattle, broke and on foot, like in a video game. Sometimes I had companions, sometimes not, and we got into all kinds of adventures and distractions, and if I made the wrong choices I'd just fade out and end up back at the beginning, not always knowing what I'd done wrong. I'd just about made it and was noticing that the mountains made me a little uneasy when I woke up.

I've stopped talking about moving with my family. We're still trying, or still trying to try; but the house isn't selling and job-hunting isn't easy in the current economic climate and particularly not when your two-month-old is crying whenever she isn't feeding at night and your two-year-old wants to be played with all the time and wakes up at six. I don't know if my family figures I've given up or is bored with the topic or is just trying to give me a break. I hate that we're not leaving. The house isn't right for us and neither is the climate, either geological or sociopolitical, and Eric doesn't want our daughters in the local school district and I miss my family more than Eric seems to think he'll miss his; but we can't go. I've already wasted my youth in the Midwest (why did I decide I wanted to experience the Midwest?) and it's so much harder to move with a husband and two kids.

Blah. I will try to get to the job-hunting as I can. I will continue with all the little things that are nice about our life. Maia is now stopping in the middle of nursing to smile up at me. It's inconvenient, but it's very endearing. Chloë can do complicated sentences and minor reasoning and her hair is long enough to put up into pigtails. It's ice cream and tomato season. And work is slow enough that I can write every day. These are good things.

Various weirdness

I woke up crying this morning. I'm pretty sure my hormones shifted during the night, causing me to have a sad dream; I don't know whether the crying was from the dream or the sadness itself, since the urge to cry wouldn't go away for quite a while. This pregnancy thing is weird.

I'm also having an urge to share the dream itself, even though I keep tearing up again when I think about it, and I didn't with Eric because it was about him and he didn't ask when I told him why I was sad and solicited a hug. So here it is:

Eric was dead. The circumstances were confusing, in typical dream-fashion, involving the placement of eight long wooden rods over a monkey-bars-like frame, but it had killed him and I knew that it had been either an accident or suicide, but I wasn't sure which, and not knowing was torturing me. I was then given an opportunity to step into a parallel universe for a short time to try to find out. (Do people who don't read SF have these kinds of SF elements in their dreams?)

I accepted the opportunity and found Eric. He was very happy to see me because in his universe we'd had a big misunderstanding (similar to the one we actually had at the beginning of our relationship) and had just figured things out. In the course of talking about this he mentioned the accident he had almost had, so I knew he hadn't been trying to kill himself. He kept apologizing for the time we'd lost during the misunderstanding and saying that now we had so much ahead of us, and I didn't say otherwise because I didn't want to disrupt his happiness, but I knew that soon I'd have to go back to my own universe where he was dead.

It sounds tame, but it was horrible--though much more coherent than a lot of my dreams, I notice, and I could probably make a good story out of it if I were a different kind of writer. I think I'd like to just try to forget it, however, except maybe to note that while I'm quite sure that I love Eric, it tends to hit me most viscerally when I'm feeling I've lost him (as before during The Situation, when I once told him I was severing communications--I meant to do it for six months but didn't get farther than twenty-four hours). This love thing is weird, too.

I dreamed last night I was Christmas shopping with M and Z. Z went to try on a white butterfly shirt that I said would look good on her, only it was attached to some sort of decoration with meat hooks on it so I was worried. M and I wandered around the rest of the store, where I watched people pushing each other in the aisles and wished I had stayed away from the stores as I had intended to. Then Z came out and had us all try on suits made of carpets.

I made my first by-the-seat-of-my-pants bread Saturday. It was pretty good, but not a complete success. I put a little too much oil and salt in, and not enough yeast. The amount of rosemary was good, though, and it was nice to have some bread to snack on. And my sourdough starter is nearing readiness (I think) so I'm going to give that a shot soon. I also have to figure out what kind of bread to make for Thanksgiving. Sourdough's out, as half Eric's family doesn't like it. A rustic loaf? Rolls? Both?

I also made two batches of apple butter, sour cherry jelly (which is indeed very good, and it even jelled the first time--after I added half a second packet of pectin), and an apple pie. Plus feeding the sourdough starter and cooking meals. We own two sets of measuring spoons and three sets of measuring cups, and when I was finished I had a two-thirds cup, a one-third cup, a one-quarter teaspoon, and a one-half teaspoon left in the drawer. I even used the one-half tablespoon and one-eighth teaspoon spoons. (I did not, however, use the auxiliary set of measuring spoons--dash, pinch, and smidgen. They're not in the drawer; they're hung up on the wall.)

The next cooking step is a bunch of birthday ice cream for Wednesday. Brenda and Michelle have birthdays around now and are sharing a "family party" dinner. Originally we planned to make peach ice cream, which they both love, but the peaches I bought and lovingly ripened inside my green tomato box (rapidly turning mostly red) turned out black inside and mushy and bland. Michelle's second choice was vanilla and Brenda's was butter pecan, so those are the ones I'm proceeding with tonight. Plus I noticed Brenda's "birthday cake" was lemon bars, and I decided to try to make lemon bar ice cream. I may or may not release that to the family, depending on how the test run turns out.

Don't run and they won't chase you

I dreamed last night that I was in the Cincinnati airport (which I have never been in, except for a single gate when my plane to Baltimore was diverted in 1999) and the central hub was a series of smooth hills and curves like slides, frictionless so that you jumped in and glided to wherever you needed to be, and I thought, this would be a great place to write a chase scene.

(There were also enormous alligators roaming around. They didn't attack as long as you didn't run.)

Saturday, the mothers, Michelle, Eric, and I went up to Ann Arbor. First to Shar to get Michelle a violin (to rent; her accelerated program is doing Suzuki violin with fourth-graders and she wants to practice at home), then to Trader Joe's, where we introduced Edith and Michelle to the beauty that is Trader Joe's. Eric and I were more profligate than usual, buying chocolate-covered bananas (bad) and lemon cookies (good) and orange-peach-mango juice (very good).

At some point, we discussed chocolate-covered raisins (dark or milk) and Eric said something about But Jenny doesn't like raisins, so she won't eat them anyway. Brenda, voice full of laughter at her own wit, said, "Jenny. How can a vegetarian not like raisins?"

I said, "How can an omnivore not like cheese?" There was a pause, while Eric put an arm around each of us and grinned, and she said, "Good point," and we all laughed. Sigh.

My brother called me last night, finally returning my call of several days ago. His surgery is today. He wants to go to culinary arts school, he thinks. He told me that and then about how you can't get a good job as a chef and he wouldn't want to work in the apprentice-level jobs, so I doubt anything will come of it. Still, I'm thinking of sending him a book on opening a restaurant, since that's one possibility for getting to the top without working his way there. Maybe he can read it during his convalescence

Being sick in the garden of exploding eggplants and weddings

Being sick is lousy. This is not exactly an original thought, nor an original excuse for absence; but that's all I've got. Sniffling, nose-blowing (and accompanying Vaseline-itizing of my nose, a slightly disgusting but pain-saving measure), coughing, and popping aspirin have been occupying most of my time the past...two weeks now, though I was getting better last week and had this annoying resurgence. I'm sure my colds didn't used to last this long. I must be getting old. I've still got a dry cough that only responds to lots of liquids--medication doesn't seem to be helping at all. Yuck.

I've been anxiously awaiting planting weather, and it will be here Wednesday. I've never looked forward to spring quite like this. We bought raspberry canes and blueberry bushes and one grape vine this weekend, and I'll be planting them this week. I'm trying to decide whether to put the blueberries in containers, since they like somewhat acidic soil, or to plant them in the ground and put strawberries in the container instead, which will free up more room in the raised bed for parsley, which I want to grow for tabbouleh this summer. So many choices. Good for occupying my mind, though, since it requires no work and that's about what I've been capable of (or at least inclined for) until the last few days.

One night near the beginning of the cold I dreamed that I had planted zucchini and tomatoes in my bed, and I was trying not to move so that I wouldn't disturb them. I was disoriented for quite a while before I woke up enough to realize that there were no plants in my bed whatsoever and there was no reason I couldn't get up and reapply some cough syrup. (This was before I realized the cough syrup wasn't actually helping. All that horrible taste for nothing.) Another night I dreamed that my cousin Bev had planted eggplants and asked for my advice. I told her that the ones that had fallen backwards were fine, the ones that had fallen forwards were in trouble, and the ones that had shot their fruits up in the air like firecrackers were unusual but not a big problem.

We have two months and eight days until the wedding. This has scared both of us. The invitations are about half printed--it's on vellum so we're going slowly so as not to smudge them--and the map that Eric is spending way too much effort on is almost finished. We've decided that wedding stuff must now have first priority. We'll see how that works in practice. The house is a mess, partly because I haven't been on him quite as much to put stuff away, and I want it to be in good order (not just cleanliness-wise but things like putting up shelves, mulching the flower beds, putting the books away) for the relatives who will be coming to see it and the after-party that will be held in it. Not to mention a possible wedding shower Edith is--maybe--throwing for us. It's a nice thought but she seems to want us to do all the work, and neither of us are inclined to plan our own shower, especially since there are only two months and eight days until the wedding.

The river and me

Up until yesterday, the river had actually started to thaw. I drove to Andersons the day before yesterday, the sun beating at my cheeks, making my car almost uncomfortably warm, and crossed the river that was dark and flowing, and I wanted to cheer. My usual commute to work involves taking the big, I-75 bridge across the river (the Maumee, incidentally), and instead of being flat white it looked like a junkyard, or--better--like a beach after a rainstorm, sandy slabs piled over one another, cracking and crumbling, the water rippling and shoving from behind.

Yesterday, though, it was cold, and today it's snowing. I heard a weatherman say on the radio today that it's good we're getting cold weather in March, because if we didn't we'd be getting it in April. I'm still not used to this prolonged winter, and I've lived in Ohio for, what, four years now? (Christ. And another two to go.) I went to Andersons for soil and seeds to start some plants going, but I haven't employed them because I've fallen prey to a cold. I don't know where it came from, unless my seat at the symphony Saturday was germy, but my head aches and my sinuses hurt and yesterday my muscles hurt, and I've been having boring, stifled dreams. I had hoped that would be a fluke, but no, it seems that boring dreams are here to stay, at least when I'm sick. This is completely unfair. Last night I dreamed I was trying to start my garden, only I kept getting interrupted because I had to answer the questions: What is a garden? What is life? What makes for a good philosophy? etc. because they were crowding around me, blocking me from doing anything. And then I had to make a grid of all possible coordinates for someone. Blechh. My boss's boss is taking us to lunch today, as a thank-you for holding down the fort last week while half the department was gone, but I think I'm going to skip it and read Pride and Prejudice (I started it last night; I was in the mood for comfort reading) instead. We were going to Tony Packo's so it's not like there would be anything for me to eat anyway.

Here fishy fishy

I had my usual aquarium dream last night, only with a twist. (Well, first I dreamed I was in some sort of service program and we were going into space for a day, and I hadn't told anyone because I figured they'd be worried about me, and I was frantically packing my things because everyone had already left and I was afraid I was going to be late for launch.) Poking around my room, behind an interesting hand-blown asymmetrical glass vase Phoebe had given me (she hasn't), I found a glass globe. "Oh, it's my fish tank," I thought. And then, with unusual clarity, "There can't be anything in there, I don't think there ever was and I haven't looked at it in months." But I moved the vase and looked, and lo, there were lots of tiny fish, different colors and sizes, zooming around, and plants and algae dotted here and there. The aquarium was apparently quite happy being self-sufficient. Normally my aquarium dreams involve me realizing that I have an aquarium I haven't checked in months, and it's dirty and neglected, but there are always a few fish left alive. I guess my fish are doing better these days.

(I haven't owned an aquarium since...2000, it must be. These dreams must mean something, right?)

I just woke up.

My phone woke me out of a dream that I was S. L. Viehl and writing a writing advice book based on a trip with her granddaughter to a futuristic Eddie Bauer. (I don't know why S. L. Viehl; I haven't read her books or thought of her in quite a while. Eddie Bauer I visited a couple of weeks ago looking for clothes. The future I'm always in dread of.) I decided to take this as a sign: not only is my subconscious crazy, not only did I sleep too long, but I should probably start the day with writing rather than proceeding with my current quilt project. Summer Sunrise is coming along nicely, thank you, now that I've actually worked on it; I spent a lot of the past two days doing that, originally to free up the space on my sewing room floor to get to the closet to put up that $#~!-@#% shelf (it's--the quilt, that is, not the shelf--a bunch of colored squares and I have no internal eye for color, so I had to lay it all out to make sure I wasn't making a horrible mess) and now because I've remembered why I love quilting. I'm not sure I love it enough to attempt quilts for my two aunts who are both contributing to the wedding, but certainly enough to make a couple of baby quilts for my cousin and my future sister-in-law and my old coworker. I feel like there's a bandwagon here I'm missing. Presumably it'll show up at my door, big banners plastered on its sides, when I get married.

I'm rambling rather a lot. I'd say best to get it out of the way now rather than in my draft, but it's a first draft so there's probably no hope. To work with me, then. And later to lunch at an Indian place with the person who was on the phone, and then to Joann Fabrics to get more wedding stuff with the coupon they sent, and then some quilting or perhaps putting up that shelf. It's been a lovely, reasonably productive week off, but I'm glad I'll be going back to work on Monday.

Strange dreams, Fortinbras

Two nights ago I dreamed that I was in my future mother-in-law's immaculate mansion, where Eric and his ex-wife were walking around with their arms around each other's waists. This bothered me, so I went off and talked to, I believe, a cat, and then was told by some guy that we were playing 'Orchestra,' meaning every time a green light came on overhead we had to lie on our stomachs and cover our heads. I kept asking the guy what the rules were; he wouldn't tell me, but I eventually figured out it was a game of Murder. Later that day (i.e., the next REM cycle), I visited Eric in his garage and he said curtly, "Look who's here," and I discovered he was jealous of the guy I'd talked to at the party. I then told him I didn't like him walking around with his ex-wife. He hesitated and then said, "Well, some chicken's feet smell good, but I wouldn't want to eat them."

Last night I dreamed I was at work, and my computer and monitor were under my desk. I set them up, but I left for some reason and when I came back they were back under the desk. I went through a couple of iterations of this and eventually realized my coworkers were doing it to tease me. I went to my supervisor, not to tattle but to get help, and he kindly told me that nobody liked me and made me watch a video to help me be friendlier.

Today I looked through my notes at work and realized that, partly but not entirely because of the not-believing-in-work thing, I haven't been doing what I'm supposed to--instead of offering advice before it's asked, or wanted, I've been waiting for the other person to indicate what he or she wants. And it bothered me. So I started being more...not quite pushy, but communicative, I suppose. And it made things better.

I also participated in the talk at lunch with my coworkers--sort of (I also realized that our company's main communication pathway is through gossip; this is why I never know anything)--and informed Eric I would not tolerate him fraternizing with his ex-wife in that way. He assured me that there was absolutely no chance of this, and also, I have the weirdest dreams ever.