Year: 2009

I don’t frequently remember my dreams and when I do remember any of my dreams it’s usually only a single scene with very little detail. This morning when I woke up I had a couple of scenes from the same dream still in my head and then more detail than I’m used to. So I figured I’d share it with you. In part so I can remember it, but also maybe it would make a decent start to some sort of RPG or something. *grin*

Group of students, various ages meet together outside school building, each is holding some sort of personal item, most are rackets of some sort. They concentrate on the rackets, which glow, expand and then go over the owners’ heads and slide down. As the rackets go down, each student’s appearance changes becomes perhaps more idealized versions of themselves. Also the students now are standing in a lush forest area not in front of a school.

The students start racing off into the forest after one of them says something I didn’t catch. The last 2 students to head off are the student I’m tracking1 (a very young boy) and a female student. When they crossed over to the Otherside, she took on the appearance of almost a Greek goddess and he aged/got taller/grew a bread/suddenly had different clothes (maybe armor). He refers to the girl as “the Spider” when he asks what she’s planning.  From the way the boy talks to her, I get the impression that they are not exactly friends but he does like her (sort of a proto-crush perhaps). Her reply seems to indicate she knows a little about what the other students are up to, though it’s vague.

They take off after the other students but they don’t move like kids running through a forest but with far, far greater speed more like cheetahs or leopards. When they catch up to the other students; all of them seem to be drawing more & more power to themselves from the clearing where they’ve stopped. The boy I’m tracking views this power they are drawing as something dangerous, alien and/or possibly an enemy. He starts streaking away back to where they crossed over, making some sort of comment to “the Spider” as he does so. Whatever it was he said was sufficient to have her follow him away from this place.

Then the dream scene fades out. When it resumes the boy I’m tracking has crossed back into the real world and is now sitting in a classroom. Where it becomes obvious the boy has skipped a few grade levels. It’s also obvious the teacher in this room is a pompous ass who won’t listen to the boy and the boy is extremely agitated. It feels like the teacher is picking on the boy, perhaps the teacher doesn’t appreciate having such a young/gifted student? The boy tries to explain what happened in the Otherside, but the teacher keeps cutting him off. Eventually the boy gets angry with the teacher and starts making threats. Still the teacher dismisses the boys concerns and that’s when the boy start demanding the teacher let him go speak to Lord Embries2.

When the teacher still dismisses the boy’s concerns, he simply walks out. He heads down the hallway towards the office. He gets up to a counter/reception desk for the Gifted3 students. He just starts to demand to see Lord Embries with just a bit of explanation of why he wants this, when a another young student runs up and gives a note to the woman at the desk. The note is from the pompous ass of a teacher and is all about the boy acting up in class, being threatening and demanding he be punished.

And that’s all I can remember from the dream now. Have a happy Friday!

1 Frequently in the dreams I remember, I don’t take part personally but sort of hover over the shoulder of one of the dream characters as they move about in their world. This is what I refer to as tracking. Though occasionally I will also see things though the eyes of of a character but have the impression that the dream character I see through is me.
2 I get the impression that Lord Embries is the founder/header of the school but also a feeling of him being a combination of James Bond & Albus Dumbledore. That is caring, wise & powerful but also young, dashing & heroic.
3 Gifted in this case refers to the ability to go to the Otherside and not to just being smarter than any other kids of the same age.

Just a couple things floating around inside my head, longer than 140 characters but less than full-fledged blog posts.

The Smile Experiment

I don’t think people are unhappy so much as they’re effectively asleep behind the wheel. People are creatures of habit but we also find repetition boring. So most people will drive the same roads to/from work every day. After having driven it a few times, we start spacing off or at least thinking about anything but what we’re doing. And since we’re mentally living elsewhere, we let our faces go slack which tends to look like frowning most of the time. And it’s not just smiling in your car that can turn another person’s day around. I remember once while having a less than wonderful day I went to the grocery store, I saw a woman turn around with a pleasant smile on her face. I have no idea who she was or what she really was smiling about, but I remember seeing that smile and feeling almost like the smile was for me. It rather made my day back then.

Family Gatherings

Is it just me or do many people actually feel more comfortable around their in-laws than their own extended family? When I go to some sort of family function for my wife’s family, I might feel a bit like an outsider but it doesn’t bother me much. I guess I expect to feel like an outsider there. But when I go to one of my family functions, I tend to get tense & annoyed over how much an outsider it makes me feel. My best guess on that is it comes from having not grown up with these people who’ve obviously lived most of their lives in close proximiity to each other. Whereas when I was a kid, my dad was in the USMC for 20 & 1/2 years; we seemed to move about every 5 years and we didn’t live near my relatives. Sure we’d visit during the summer and did eventually move back to the same general area, but I already felt like an outsider then (probably didn’t help there weren’t any relatives around my age when we visited).

I have been very near-sighted since I was in 3rd grade. After the optometrist completed my first eye exam, he called my mother in to ask “how did this child find his way to school?” As you might imagine, this makes me no stranger to wearing glasses. But during my high school/early college years I tried wearing contact lenses. I found them to be more hassle than they were worth, so I ended up going back to glasses. However while I had been wearing them, one thing I greatly enjoyed was having sunglasses.

One pair of sunglasses that were particularly nice had a blue tint to the lenses. It cut out all the glare and made dull, grey days seem more pleasant (grey skies would look blue). Since I’d gone back to wearing to glasses, I’d given up having sunglasses as prescription lenses cost too much for me to buy a 2nd pair. I tried glasses with clip-on shades but the clip-on broke and later pairs of glasses I chose didn’t come with them.

Then this year back in February I decided to try ordering a pair of prescription sunglasses online. I’d read several reviews of Zenni Optical and it sounded promising. So I poked around their site and ended up ordering a pair of titanium frames with mid-index, polycarbonate lenses and a 80% blue tint. Total cost $58.85. Compared to $251 for just a new pair of lenses from the local optometrist.

So if price is your only criteria, then Zenni Optical wins. However price isn’t my only consideration, for one thing it took over a month to get my glasses from them. Over a month with no communication from them on the status of my order until I wrote them. Then when I did write them, it took them several days to reply. Additionally it’s hard to correctly judge how the glasses will fit from just a picture and the measurements. I suppose if I’d paid more attention to the measurements given, I might have had less trouble but that’s how the cookie crumbles1. Also the images they have of how the various custom tints do a poor job of showing how things will look through them. It would be better I think to have a reference picture of something with know colors (e.g. banana, stop sign, etc…) and then various shots of the same item though lenses with the various custom tints. Something like that would have given me a better idea of the very, very bright a blue my 80% tint would turn out to be2.

Still they do a good job against bright sunlight and against snow-glare, which I had been somewhat concerned about. “Fortunately” we had several inches of snow fall around my house last night and so my new glasses got a good workout vs snow-glare.

Overall I’ve been pleased with my purchase but Zenni Optical’s customer service could use a bit of work.

1 The glasses don’t fit badly but the arms of the frame are a bit shorter than I’d like.
2 I’ve been told my new sunglasses look like “hippy-shades”.

Bit behind on the old blogging, so here’s all the news fit to print… Or something like that. Generally I try to post about pleasant subjects but events of late have not been conducive to doing so, but I am trying to post more this year so bear with me.

Picked up Guitar Hero World Tour (Wii Edition) the other day. I’ve played some of the previous Guitar Hero games but hadn’t purchased any of them until now. Then Amazon had a lightning deal on it and I was able to pick it up for $60 (vs the normal $100). Talked about it with my supervisor at work and she made the interesting comment of comparing the concept of Guitar Hero to Simon. Now that I wrote that I’m not sure why I found it so amusing or apt, but I did. *shrug* In any case, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. We did try picking up a second controller for the game, so the wife and I could play the game together but most places around us are sold out currently. One of the used, game shops had a used controller but it was missing the plastic cover which holds the Wiimote inside the controller. Meh.

Yesterday our failing US economy hit home a bit more directly. The company I work for announced all employees will be taking a 8.33% paycut effective April 1 through at least June 30th and if that wasn’t bad enough we all have to take 1 week off without pay. Either one of those is bad enough but both at once really hurts. Especially since that paycut effectively wipes out 2+ years of raises. I’m trying to be positive about it (e.g. I’m still employed and I’ll get a week to do some work around the house) but that’s hard when you see new reports indicating the company’s board of directors paid themselves 2 million dollars in bonuses and changed the rules on their bonuses so they could take the entire bonus in cash1. *sigh* The situation blows away all our plans for having fun this summer and kills any plans we had for painting the house this year. Epic suck.

1 In previous years, they were required to take a minimum 25% of their bonus in company stock. Rather disheartening to have them grabbing all that cash for themselves while they cut our pay.