There is often nothing less interesting than hearing about other people’s dreams. They almost always start with “I had the strangest dream…” and are usually told with a self-absorbed “isn’t that odd” feeling. Calling a dream strange is like saying that a kaleidescope is showing the weirdest formations. Well of course they’re showing weird formations, that’s what kaleidescopes do!

That being said, sometimes I do have particular dreams that I find someone other than myself might possibly find interesting even if they don’t know or care about me in particular.

A few weeks ago I had a dream that I was turning forty. In the dream I wasn’t married and was a lamenting bachelor. A stranger showed up at the dream before I got there and got to know everybody. I had no idea who she was, but she knew a great deal about me. It sounded like we knew each other but I couldn’t figure out where from.

Turned out that it was a girl that had a crush on me in high school and kept tabs on my life periodically using Google.

The ending aside, is there a movie about this? It seems oddly familiar. What’s funny to me is that a movie with this premise could either be a romantic comedy or a horror flick, depending on the secret disposition of the stranger.

So has anyone seen a movie with this premise?

Every now and again I will see an odd couple where the guy is considerably less attractive than the woman. That’s not always so surprising when the guy makes up for his looks with charisma, but the odd ones are when I talk to the guy and he seems to have a somewhat dull and unremarkable personality.

I’ve finally stumbled on a the missing link between nearly every couple where this is the case that comes to mind:

What the guy lacks in appearance and charisma, he makes up for in tolerance. When I finally talk to the girlfriend or spouse, she ends up having an extremely obnoxious, cold, hypermelodramatic, and/or annoying demeanor. They’re not necessarily unkind to their man, but they find a way to be chalkboard-grating obnoxious even when they’re not trying to be mean.

I remember one guy I met whose girlfriend was so smug, self-important, and abrasive that I wanted to quietly leave the guy a note letting him know that yes, he rose above his station, but no, it’s definitely not worth it.

If we had known what Clancy’s schedule would be like in Estacado, there’s a better-than-even chance we would have ended up somewhere else for the year. We knew it would be worse than the second or third year of residency, but we didn’t know how close a call it would be to her first year.

She gets no weekends off. The entire year. She’s on call about six nights a month and works 10-12 hour days whenever she’s not on call. It’s proven to be pretty brutal.

The good news is that last weekend she got a brief respite. A couple lucky breaks had her fully awake, not working, and not tired for the first time since August. That kind of schedule can be a real drag on a marriage and there are times when our marriage is less than optimal because of it.

But the weekend reminded me what it is like to spend time with her when she’s not exhausted, not sleepy, and not irritable from sleepiness and exhaustion. I’d honestly forgotten what it was like. For one day I got my wife back.

Then this week, with both our families having driven out here because we couldn’t make the trip to either of our respective hometowns, she has been on call three nights two of which on 24-hour shifts.

I make this sound like it’s primarily hard on me and/or hard on the marriage, but of course it’s hardest on her. Even at the moments of greatest turmoil going all the way back when she was in her first year of residency, I can’t help but be in awe at the discipline, work ethic and integrity she displays throughout it all.

I am a very lucky man.

There is often nothing less interesting than hearing about other people’s dreams. They almost always start with “I had the strangest dream…” and are usually told with a self-absorbed “isn’t that odd” feeling. Calling a dream strange is like saying that a kaleidescope is showing the weirdest formations. Well of course they’re showing weird formations, that’s what kaleidescopes do!

That being said, sometimes I do have particular dreams that I find someone other than myself might possibly find interesting even if they don’t know or care about me in particular.

The IHOP/Denny’s post was prompted by a dream I had about Walt.

I was at a music show of one of my favorite independent artists. Turned out that his new guitarist was a guy that I knew from high school. He told me that Walt sends his regards. I expressed surprise that Walt was still alive and he said that it was all some sort of misunderstanding.

I thought in the dream that I would sometimes have dreams that Walt was still alive… and here he was still alive after all!

Then I woke up and he was painfully deceased all over again.

I found out today that my father in law thinks that his daughters think that he’s a homophobe.

I can’t speak for the other two sisters, but I don’t think that Clancy thinks that.

I also found it interesting that when I shared the fate of the Coffee Shop Cowboy, everybody in the room was outraged. Clancy and I come from generally Republican families and over 75% of the room voted for Bush in 2004. Maybe it’s a Country Club Republican thing?

From The Independent:

In the moments before the cell phone picked up the incident, Richards was evidently told by two black hecklers that he wasn’t funny. He turned on them almost immediately, telling them he was rich and could have them arrested and escorted out of the place if he felt like it. That didn’t go down too well, and the hecklers let him know they didn’t appreciate him lording it over them.

“Didn’t appreciate him lording it over them…” makes one thing it was a gentemanly exchange prior to the racial epithets and lynching threats.

Back when I was in college, IHOP was an institution both to those of us that were going to college and those of us that were not.

A new Denny’s opened up down the street from our usual IHOP. I can’t recall what it was that made us decide to go there as Denny’s is generally more expensive than IHOP (unless you get one of their Grand Slam meals) and the food isn’t as good. I think we went just tto check it out (because, you know, Denny’s is such a unique dining experience).

They’d been open a week and they hadn’t gotten their act together yet. Having worked at a McDonald’s that had just open, I could certainly understand. Even allowing for new-restaurant chaos, our water was one of the most incompetent that I’d ever seen. I’d had bad waiters before, but generally they had an attitude problem. This guy meant well but just didn’t know what he was doing. We felt a little sorry for the guy.

Everyone except Walt, anyway. Walt had a bit of a short temper, but often found ways to have fun with a situation to prevent himself from getting irritable. And so it was with our Denny’s waiter. Walt had already eaten, so he decided to just get a dessert. However, the chocolate sunday he ordered had somehow become a strawberry sunday by the time it got to him. Walt had actually been debating between a chocolate or strawberry sunday, so he was cool with it. He said, “Oh, strawberry. Well this will work.”

“Isn’t that what you ordered?” the young waiter asked.

“I ordered a chocolate, but this will be-” Walt started before the waiter swooped the sunday from his plate from under him and said that he would get a chocolate sunday to him pronto. Pronto at the new Denny’s meant twenty minutes after we’d all finished our plates. He was apologetic when he came back out. He said that they’d run out of chocolate which is why they gave him a strawberry.

“You’ve only been open three days and you’re already out of chocolate syrup?” He asked.

“Oh. Well we have chocolate syrup, just not a chocolate sunday.”

We all looked at each other confusedly.

“If you want I can put some chocolate syrup on your strawberry sunday.”

“Shouldn’t my strawberry sunday be melted by now?”

“Okay. Well I could make a new strawberry sunday and put some chocolate on it.”

“Couldn’t you just put chocolate syrup on a sunday without the straw-” Walt started before reconsidering. “No, that will be fine.”

“Wait,” the waiter said as a little light bulb magically appeared on top of his head. “I could just put the chocolate syrup on a regular sunday and give you a sort of chocolate sunday.”

“Chocolate on top of a sunday constitutes a chocolate sunday. But nevermind, you can give me strawberries. Or not.”

“So wait. Which do you want?”

“I would like my sunday now. However you want to make it.”

“Okay, but I can make it either way.”

“I’m not sure about that, but just do whatever is easiest and will get it out the quickest.”

“But…”

“Whatever is least confusing for you. Just do that.”

Walt’s tone was a little exasperated, but not angry. He was fighting off the irritation that comes with having had to wait almost an hour for a sunday, but fighting it off ably. The waiter didn’t even seem to understand that someone might be upset at this turn of events. We decided we would call that “charm”. “So what do you want?”

“Whatever is easiest for you.”

“How about I get you a sunday and put some strawberry and chocolate syrup on the side?”

“That’ll work. How quickly do you think you can get this done?”

“Five minutes, you can time me!” he said excitedly.

Without batting an eye, Walt pulled a stopwatch from his trenchcoat pocket. Walt was a martial arts instructor. He kept a stopwatch on him to time sparring matches or something. The waiter stood there in awe. “The stopwatch is going…” Walt told him with a smile.

It took a nick under twelve minutes for the sunday and its accessories to come out.

We left a fifteen percent tip. What he lacked in competence he made up for in amusement.

We never went to the Denny’s again. When at IHOP, we would often joke about timing the waitstaff there. It became a bittersweet comedy, more funny each time we told it. It was our way of smoothing over the fact that the night of the incident was the last time we saw Walt alive.

I passed the 50,000th word last night on my NaNoWriMo project last night. That technically means that I win even if I don’t do any more writing this month, though I am going to try to finish the novel this month like I did last time around.

The 50,000th word was “the”.

That was kind of anti-climatic. Last time around it was “burden” which was a much more appropriate word.

One of the costs of having big feet is that you tear through socks pretty quickly. Even the largest socks are made for people that are size 12 or maybe 13, not my size of 15. I’d gotten rather used to have socks with holes in them, though my wife Clancy hasn’t adopted this revised normalcy. In short, it bugs her more than it bugs me.

Since I am working on my novel this month, Clancy wonderfully agreed to do the laundry for me this month. I told her that if she felt so inclined, she could throw out any socks that had holes big enough for me to poke a toe through.

It’s been two weeks since we’ve done the laundry. I’m not sure how many socks there were that didn’t have holes in them, but there were only three that did not.

I realize that the blog has been kind of dull lately. I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this month and it’s sapping most of my free time. Things will return to normal next month and I may find some time here and there to post between now and then.

Anyway, so I figured to compensate for the dull blog, I thought I would put up something exciting. This picture is from a whitewater rafting trip we took in Shoshona last year. Yeah, I’m in the picture somewhere, but your guess is as good as anyone’s as to which is really me…

You can click on the picture to get a full-size image.

Last week I wrote about how I was a bad neighbor for not calling the police while my neighbor’s bike was being stolen.

It turns out that I’m not such a bad neighbor after all.

I noticed a few nights ago when I was coming up my outdoor steps that the bike was back in the yard. Not only so, but it was being ridden out for a latenight ride. Once again, the man was very quiet and peeked in the window to make sure that not a creature was stirring.

So while it’s possible that a thief keeps stealing the bike and returning it whenever he’s finished with it, it is more likely that I am not a bad neighbor. My current theory is that he is a bad husband. The most logical reason I can think of for him to be doing what he’s doing is that he’s sneaking out to meet someone else. So far all three visits have been late at night and he’s checked to make sure that the missus was asleep. He’s taken the bike each time instead of the car, probably to making any noise or having to explain himself if she gets up and sees that the car is gone. It’s much more likely that she would miss the bike.

This all would have been very uncomfortable had I acted on my previous suspicions, so three cheers for hesitance!