Ducks, dreams, zombies, work, and rain

[annathepiper]

+0: Ducky goodness, part II from apel!



?1: I am just not sure what it says about my brain when I have me a dream that includes elements like 'a long bike ride through my childhood neighborhood in Kentucky', 'riding with my cat (who suddenly is able to talk) clinging desperately to my shoulders with her claws (of which she has a reduced set in real life) so she won't fall off', 'getting diverted off my route home by biking down a huge hill which never existed in my neighborhood in real life', 'stopping at a restaurant and asking them to make a smoothie out of my big cone full of rainbow sherbet, so it'll be easier for me to bike with', and 'Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea and his beloved (who is, it must be noted, NOT ME in this dream) having had a child who I have promised to babysit so I have to get home NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW'.

And for those of you who are playing along at home, yeah, this was another incident of my being in the middle of deep REM sleep when the alarm clock went off. It's been a LONG week.



+2: In related news, though this is only a vague recollection at this point, I'm pretty sure dreams earlier this week involved zombies. I think this was triggered off by learning that the gent responsible for Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead has another one in production: Land of the Dead, in which the last city of living people on Earth has walled itself off against the zombies. And the zombies are evolving.

Which kind of makes me go 'what, wait? Isn't the whole POINT of zombies for them to be mindless, shambling, decomposing, brain-eating machines?' Evolution does kind of imply there's actual life going on there, still. Which is an interesting statement to make in a zombie flick--28 Days Later did it, so maybe Romero was paying attention? Guess we'll find out!

(I blame gamera_spinning for pointing me at this amusing article about a USA Today reporter who got to be an extra on the set of this particular zombie flick. I am, in general, amused by a middle-aged lady whose life goal is to be a zombie. Good on her! ;)



-3: General public announcement to developer types: if you ask a tester for information, and she tells you THREE TIMES that you can find the information you want at a specific URL and that you should go there and look at it, please don't keep asking her for the same information. It'll only piss her off.

Guh. Trying to slog through figuring out why a couple hundred test cases are broken is in no small part why I've been so drained this week. A lot of these cases are ones that were not properly updated when folks decided to shift over to a new style of automation, and so now they wonder they break. Here's a tip, folks: if you're going to try to shift to a new style of automation, update all the affected test cases. But at least I can point at some of these guys and say, 'Okay, this breaks if I run it with the new-style automation, but it works if I run it with the old style. What do you want me to do here, people?' So there's some progress.



-4: Can we have a little less rain during the hours when I'm going to or from work? Kthxbye.

Comments

party

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

I can't seem to find your email addy - trifocal failure...

email me at jjkaren at msn dot com and I'll email you back our address and directions.

Re: party

[annathepiper]

Email received, as you know. :) solarbird and I will be down there in a while; she's got to shower and stuff and we need dinner. Hopefully the traffic won't suck; the weather out there is craptastic right now and the commute home blew.

But I had hot cocoa. Mmmm.

See y'all in a little bit!

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

And for those of you who are playing along at home, yeah, this was another incident of my being in the middle of deep REM sleep when the alarm clock went off. It's been a LONG week.

Hrmmm... I have nothing to offer here, but... "interesting"... I have those dreams all the time... And even though my grandmother often shows up in a lot of dreams (and she's been dead these past 9 years) I still can't process the fact that they're only dreams... What really boggles the mind is when features from one location I've lived in turn up in another location (ie. the dream where I was being swept downstream in a susquehanna river flood, and ended up in Presque Isle bay in Erie... ::shrug::

-4: Can we have a little less rain during the hours when I'm going to or from work? Kthxbye.

Heh... It's done nothing but rain here all week... and I've been lucky enough to get a ride to and from work most of the week... just not looking forward to tomorrow (meaning Sat). I have a split, and no ride either way... and they're calling for mixed rain and snow ... yuck!

[annathepiper]

In further dream-and-sleep-related news, since I'm experimenting with lowering my caffeine intake, I have noticed a definite alteration in my sleep patterns. The last couple of nights I've slept much more calmly. I will have to see if this keeps up.

I blur locations in dreams all the time. My childhood home in Louisville frequently shows up, as do what I think are mutated versions of schools I attended and various malls in Lexington and Louisville. They all jumble together into a mishmash of a dreamscape, without rhyme or reason.

And it's not the rain so much that bugs me, just that it rains when I have to walk out in it. ;) If it could conveniently rain oh, say, while I'm in the lab all day at work, or rain while I'm asleep, or rain just in short bursts while I'm on the bus, I'd be okay with that!

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

Lowering of the caffeine intake should help... I, too, have tried to stay away from it lately...

::nods about the rain:: only the past couple days, it's been snow... yucky, horrible, cold and wet snow... grrr... and I've yet to find a pair of boots that fits :-\

[annathepiper]

The lowering of caffeine intake, I find, is working well with me when specifically coupled with drinking more water. I think I needed to do both. So far I've lost a pound and a half as a result of this exercise. :)

Bummer about the lack of boots, though!

Ducky goodness and bicycle hill dreams

[howlinhobbit.livejournal.com]

I have an online friend named Bambi who posts in some of the same ukulele freak boards as I and her little sig is: "The secret of life involves ukuleles and ducks"

Though I haven't had it in a while, I have had a (frequently) repeating dream where I'm on a bicycle going down a loooong hill through a town. It got to the point that I'd recognize the dream and start pumping real hard because I knew at the bottom of the hill I'd go through an industrial area, then across a river (on a bridge) and just on the other side would do a little veer to the right and start coasting -- yes, coasting -- up this other long hill.

It is all tree-lined and lovely and at the top was this little lake with a fishing lodge and such. That seemed to be the goal of the dream... coasting all the way to the little lodge.

You Freudians out there can feel free to analyze this but please don't share it with me as the concept scares me enough as it is.

HH

Re: Ducky goodness and bicycle hill dreams

[annathepiper]

I have never played a ukelele, but they are close enough in my brain to mandolins that I am nevertheless quite charmed by them. ^_^ And there's even sort of a 'missing link' instrument that could bridge the gap between them: a piccolo mandolin!

Also, there are very few things finer than ducks.

The whole "I have to get somewhere" aspect does seem to show up in my dreams on a semi-regular basis. But not as much as the "I have mysteriously forgotten that I never took <fill in a random class here> in high school so my DIPLOMA ISN'T REAL and AAAAAH I have to go back for more classes twenty years later aaaaaah!"

I hate that one. :)