little helpers

The last couple of weeks have been utterly glorious. And the nights have been just as special. Save for one rogue weekend, the skies have been clear and starry and warm enough for a t-shirt still.

I had added another route to my deliveries and the car was filled with bundles of newspapers. I was running a little late and knew I needed to speed up my game a little, but I was slowed down by having to check the route list so often to see where my next stop was. As I was backing out of a driveway, carefully, to avoid hitting any of the many recycling bins, I suddenly noticed a raccoon in my side mirror. She was climbing inside my car through the open rear window. This was a little worrying. A quick turn around to see the back seat and I discover there are three little ones curled up on the bundles of newspapers. Then Mama is waving her arms and motioning me to back up, turn the steering wheel and "go". I'm wondering how I'm going to get to the papers. I pull over one from the passenger seat and toss it at the next porch. When I look in the rear view mirror the three little ones are sitting up watching me.  As I drive off, I see that they have organized themselves and one somehow manages to pick up a paper even while sitting on it and hand it to his sibling who folds it and hands it off to the next sibling who wraps it in an elastic band and hands it to me. We continue on this way for a while, getting into a steady rhythm. Soon we're all singing along to Taylor Swift on the radio. I reach behind to grab the next paper, but they are gone. Mama is grinning as she picks up a tabloid and opens it up and lets it fly out the window. One by one she does this, with her head out the window in the manner of a dog watching the papers float down the street. I'm laughing, even if it is slightly disastrous. I slam on the brakes.

And jerk awake.

best dream I've ever had.

springing forward

There was a shift in the air today. I flung the windows wide open.
Well, metaphorically speaking. I actually just slid them across, but I like the idea of flinging them open. I've always wanted to live in one of those large Paris apartments with huge windows that have a latch and open outward onto a little balcony. I can see myself, long flowing gown, flinging open the tall windows onto a street scene below, Paris skyline above with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, someone riding a bicyclette, waving some flowers in one hand, shouting up to me that he has croissants...

Oh, sorry. I'm back.

The breeze that blew in was fresh and smelled of ... S P R I N G!

Spring Forward.

The clocks will move ahead an hour this weekend, far earlier than we are used to (3 weeks earlier). But maybe that will mean Spring will follow quickly with flowers, and birds, and more sunshine, and warmth...

Until two years ago, the time changes came about on the first Sunday in April and again on the last Sunday in October. Now it is the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

Blogger ate my post where I tried to be both witty and informative about Daylight Savings Time. But really, I'd just as soon go back to my fantasy than rewrite it all.

Now, where was I ...

Paris ... spring ... croissants ... coffee

dreamlines

Well, I made a bit of a dent in my card signing. Most of them are scattered across the dining room table, waiting for me to pass by and add a signature to a few more and move some from one pile to another. It's rather like a jigsaw puzzle that sits and waits, patiently, not changing, or finishing itself by itself.

I kept getting distracted.
Then I thought: just how long have you been sniffling, anyway??
Damn.
Kleenex.
Bed.
Duvet.
Warm cat body warming cold feet.
Strange intermittent dreams.

I kept waking up every hour and wondering about this strange dream I was having that was rather like my brain trying to tell a long story. In serial form. Of course, it kept slowly disappearing once I'd woken up, so I'm not sure if each time I went back to sleep my brain picked up the story exactly where it left off, but I would wake up an hour later exhausted with the weightiness of the words swirling in my brain.

Then, I was reading The Unbearable Oddness of Stevyn where he had a link to a site called Dreamlines. And I thought: how apropos. So I spent many, many minutes watching the images swirl and morph on the screen as it transformed my keywords into a free association of images. This is all the ingenuity of an Argentinian artist who explains his process here.

I watched and waited for the image gallery to finish so I could enter a new set of words to see what would emerge. But it just kept on and on, reinventing itself along the same themes I had given it to work with. Some of the images were very clear, though most were not and mostly I could see no connection to anything. Kind of like my 'real' dream serial.

Try it for yourself and see what comes up.
I have no idea how he managed to save the images, so I can't show you mine.