Tablesaw!

The Gardeners for the house behind mine decided to come late today, and work extra long today, and work extra slow today, and wake me up for about two and a half hours today. It was not fun.

When I finally did get back to sleep, I dreamt I was at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Things were different than I had expected, though. The first puzzle (and possibly others) was not complete when we received it. Instead, we everyone got just the grid. Then Will Shortz read out clues in random order, making it like a crossword version of Bingo. To my surprise, the grids were collected before anyone was finished. My neighbor at the table, Kiran Kedlaya, explained that this was sample data that was going to be used to callibrate the complex measuring system now in place.

But I remember most about the dream was that, as a tribute to Bob Keeshan, he had altered his nametag to read "Kiran Kangaroo."

The special guest star in my dream today was shadesong who was in town for an unnamed semiformal event. Dream Shadesong looked nothing like shadesong, and yet, was still shadesong. At one point, she was described by wjukknibs' brother-in-law to an old friend from Cherubs as "Tablesaw's hot chyk friend." The event ended with a fun and exciting game of Pyramid. Unfortunately, I cannot remember any of the categories or clues.

After about eight hours I had started to feel run down. ACRONYM Headquarters was divided into three rooms, a working room (where we solved puzzles), an anteroom (where visitors could be entertained without worrying about them seeing answers on the walls) and a sleeping room. I went into the last of these, and stretched out on a table. I wrapped my winter coat around me and closed my eyes.

It had been a hard eight hours. After a strong first round, we were starting to get worn out. I was, at least. There was still a bunch of shredded paper, there was a whole new round of puzzles that I hadn't looked at, and it was very, very, very, very, very, very cold. That last one bugged me the whole weekend. I was starting to wonder how much I could really help, and what I was doing there. Slowly, I drifted off to sleep.

I didn't stay asleep for long. I was restless. There was so much work to be done. It was cold. Also, they past eight hours had been very frenzied, compared to a very slow, relaxing, rejuvenating week in Providence. So I lay on the table with the coat over my face. I could see a faint light from outside the window, and two years away. From two rooms away, I could hear Sax's voice explaining something. I couldn't understand what it was she was saying, but it was present enough that I couldn't return to my brief, blissful slumber. It was like a splinter in my mind, bringing me back to life, toward reality. I pulled myself up, rubbed my eyes and went back to work. I was about to realize what I'd gotten myself into.

( The Matrix )

( Round Three )

( Whoa--I Know Training )

Boy these things are long. Next episode: Round Four, the Acme Fight Song, Acme starts to Hint, Climbing the Stairway to Heaven and the Round Two Metapuzzle.

I've been having a harder and harder time remembering my dreams. Here are some snippets I remember:

• I went to a party with my future Mystery Hunt team to practice and get to know one another. Several people whom I know will be on the team were there. So was trentm. He may have been a representational stand-in for davidglasser, but he still looked and acted like Trent and everyone called him "Trent". He did no magic, though.
  
• At the party, there was a game/puzzle that was a tiling puzzle and word search. I remember working on it in my dream, but my dream manipulations didn't get me very far.
  
• At the party, we played a strange form of billiards on a badly homemade table. Some of the balls were fruit.
  
• After the party (I think after; the chronology is sketchy), I took a wrong turn coming home and ended up walking through a suburban wonderland where everyone was getting ready for prom, including someone who was related to George "41" Bush.
  
• In the same area I came across several high school alumni, including wintercolours wearing a sexy bathing suit with another friend from high school whom I had run into a few weeks ago. Why was wintercolours suddenly a member of my high school class? I don't know. For that matter, why can't I remember more about the part of the dream with the sexy girls in bikinis?
  
• There was a lot more stuff involving puzzling people, including what may have been a crossword tournament in a preschool. Why was I there? I dunno. But trentm was there again.
  
• There was also a lot of stuff about cameras, video cameras, home movies, and extended sequences with me in the bathroom, unable to "go", having long conversations with people.
  

Having written this all down, it occurs to me that it would seem as though I remembered quite a lot. However, I can recall that there was a lot of conversation (unusual for my dreams) and realistic, incidental action which is lost to me. Bug.

fauxpas is official my dream girl for the year, making her fourth noteworthy appearance in my dreams. Last night, she and I were paired up with Jesus (no, not that Jesus; well, maybe that Jesus, we weren't sure) and trying to discover the source of some mysterious mystery. After searching through the many mansions on the street for clues, we had found only questions, dead bodies and missing people. Finally, at the penultimate house, we managed to get some information. There was a man there, going insane and wasting away in the attic who was willing to give us some cryptic information. It all seemed to do with a tattoo he had. Or didn't have anymore.

See, there was a "cult" of some sort that was using power from the ancient gods to take control of the area. But something had gone wrong, and it seemed to be this guys fault. The power was supposed to be imprinted in massive complex tattoos, but he had altered the needle to make the process go faster. The result was that the tattoo had imploded on itself, and threatened to pull in the rest of the man's skin into whichever strange place it had gone.

Armed with this new knowledge, fauxpas, Jesus and I set out for the last house, a mansion filled with danger that would take us a long time to search. And I woke up to watch The Sound of Music.

I slept in late yesterday, and thusly missed Survivor. I did have a very intriguing dream, however, so I count it no great loss. (Because missing Survivor is normally such a great loss...)

( A dream )

---

I conquered another realm of bachelorhood today, locating and successfully using the local coin-operated laundromat. Hooray for clean underpants. I'm probably going to make Monday or Tuesday mornings my regular time, since it will get me in early enough to have lots and lots of machines.

---

The reason I've entered myself into NaNoWriMo is that I have had the germ of an idea for a novel for a while now, but didn't really have anything to do with it. I'd rather not discuss it too much yet, except to say that this idea came to my while in the bathroom, for no apparent reason. I'm not a person who does much thinking in the bathroom, but there you are. Or there I was. Or there I went. Whatever.

Anyway, now the wheels are kicking up on it again, though, of course, I'm not writing any text down yet. The working title, Compact Photo is horribly off-base, but it does incorporate the two most important items of the original image. More in November.

---

My journal is starting to get filled up with notes for my Muses puzzle. You can't see them, but they're there all the same. I've been making more good progress, and am close to having one of my more thorny puzzles worked out. I still have to buckle down and write that flat, though.

Last night I fell into a nap while Conan was on the TV. Although I was asleep, I suspect that he did one of his old "driving the desk around" skits. Now, I can't be certain, since I was asleep, but I suspect that, since he no longer has Andy to ride shotgun, he pulled an audience member to aid with the comedy-jokes. I suspect all of this, because this is what happened in my dream, and the skit ran in and out of the foreground of my dream for quite a while.

Here's the kicker: in my dream, the guy who was riding with him was very clearly this guy. Why? I don't know, except that I happened to see his picture while looking through my FOAF page. I've never met him, and I didn't even read the entry that I saw his picture on, yet there he was. With Conan. Driving the desk.

It's been two weeks since I switched my journal to friends-only. Two weeks where the first thing on my journal page is a request to contact me. Two weeks that someone hasn't.

When I get home, I'm going to retroactively de-friends-only-ize my journal, with a longer explanation. Till then, some shorter notes.

The deadline for the August Enigma is soon. In fact, tomorrow, so I need to buckle down and get some stuff in. I already completed one, a collaboration with tahnan. I've got one I need to revise and two I need to finish. So, the cavalcade of clerihew is a bit postponed. But in keeping with my NPL bent:

davidglasser's
One of the harassers
Asking me to mete
Out hints for a flat complete.

saxikath
Makes up math
Problems about cattle traders
For second-graders.

The Fourth of July with wjukknibs and company was a lot of fun. It makes me wish I were going to Vegas with lots of people I'd like to spend more time with. Actually, no. It makes me wish that all of those people had decided to go somewhere more interesting.

Speaking of going places interesting, I need to start planning for travel again. My cousin is getting married this fall in Portland, which makes me wonder if I should also try to swing up to Seattle. Then again, veek might send me psychic bombs of death vibes if I don't visit Boston/Providence. And wjukknibs is going to be going to Vegas again. (At least, I assume he is. He always seems to be.) Choices, choices, choices.

It was tough sleeping yesterday. I had to take a very active role in my dreams. I was aware, on a very basic level, that the only reason I was asleep was because I had a light mask on my face and was dreaming. If the dream ended, I knew I would immediately return to consciousness and be unable to get back to sleep. So I had to constantly think of new and interesting places to take my dream, to be sure that I got enough sleep.

MonNYTX: 6:30. Made some mistakes, and also nearly dropped my lunch on the floor. MonLATX: 5. TueNYTX: 4:30. TueLATX: 6:15. Who the hell is 24A? WedNYTX: 6.Under the circumstances, the clue for 52D is fantastic. WedLATX: 8:15. 54D? ThuNYTX: 20. Bleah. ThuLATX: 6:30. FriNYTX: 11:30. FriLATX 7.

Has LiveJournal become a part of my brain? Most certainly. How do I know? Yesterday, I had my second dream involving a person I do not know, except from their live journals.

A few weeks ago, I had a dream featuring fauxpas. I was flying into a city (unnamed) and meeting up with her. She had recently been complaining about her coworkers in her journal, which was accompanied by an extensive streaming video of her playing indoor hockey against them, and acting as a damn good goalie, with near psychic powers. But when I arrived at her house the various decorations of her living quarters led me to believe that her real trade was espionage of some sort, or possibly burglary. I confronted her about it, and she told me the truth, but that truth is lost to the mists of my unconscious. This was odd, because all of the online pictures of fauxpas have her face blurred out. Her face was not blurred out in my dream, but the camera angles of my dream conspired so as never to give me a clear view of her face.

Last night, my dream featured luxnightmare which is even odder, since I've only just added her to my friends list. Odder still, she seemed to be part of the entire night of dreaming, rather than just a segment. Normally, I dream in discontinuous episodes that my brain later fuses together into one. Yesterday, however, these segments were connected by a series of episodes that took place in something akin to the Big Brother house in construction, where I would meet up with luxnightmare and talk about what had happened during my "day" (that is, I would talk about the dream segment I had just experienced involved in). We seemed to be there as part of some teacher-training program, and there were other inhabitants, but I never saw them. Then I would sleep, wake up instantaneously, talk with luxnightmare again, and go into another dream. Before one segment, we agreed to meet for lunch during the day, so during the dream (which was a strange conflation of Hamlet and the Old Testament that took place in a melded church/library/desert) I was occasionally wondering how I would explain that I had to miss lunch because of King Claudius of Judeah causing it to rain. I also recall thinking to myself on several occasions, "Tablesaw, it's really weird that you're dreaming of someone you only know through her journal of a few days," but the dream continued.

I had similar experiences as I got involved with ifmud, but since I've have now actually met many of those people, dreaming about them tends to take on less significance than it did a year ago. Perhaps it will be like that with livejournal, eventually. For now, it's still very odd.

FriLATX: 8:30. FriWSJX: 20. I'm having trouble convincing the New York Times that I'm allowed to use my credit card to renew my Xword subscription. Hopefully, that will clear up soon.

It's settled. I'll be moving into my Aunt and Uncle's soon-to-be-renovated guest house come the end of the summer. The rent is a bit steep, but utilities are included and it will be mine-all-mine. I also got a new personal phone number, but since I'm about to be given a free phone on Saturday, I'm not using the new number yet.

It was an awful day of sleep. I've been plagued by long dreams, dreams that seem to stretch on for hours and hours, but only take an hour or two of sleeping. It confuses my brain and makes me think I've been asleep for longer than I actually have. This wouldn't be a problem, but I have to be at the DMV in five hours to get my car officially transferred to my name.

I think it's the TV. There was a time when it was hard for me to sleep without the television on in the background, but recently, it's been very distracting. I tend to leave the television on when I need to wake up early; that way, after my alarm rings and I turn it off, it's harder for me to fall back asleep. But today it seemed that the extra stimulation from the television was just causing more problems for my sleeping brain to deal with and was probably preventing me from falling into deeper level sleep. I think I'm going to have to rethink this strategy. Maybe I can go back to listening to Steve Martin reading Pure Drivel on repeat and hope I don't get dreams filled red guys.

For now, I think I want some fresh donuts.