23 May 2011

Of Hives, Cruises, Homestudies and STRANGE DREAMS.

  It's been too long.  Over a month this time.  I really have to make time to make this blog a regular thing or there's really no point in doing it.

  So, college is going well.  3 As and a B+, and my current average in the classes I'm currently enrolled in are both As.  Military History seems to suit me so far, but 8-week semesters are a challenge.  The cruise kept me away from the keyboard for a week and I'm still feeling kind of struggling to keep up.  I wrote my entire Clausewitz paper last night in a single marathon session.

  The cruise itself was pure bliss.  A week of leisure, visiting Jamaica, Grand Cayman and Cozumel- although my part of our landing party took a ferry to Playa Del Carmen for the day.  We ate, drank (more than I have in  years), vaped, hung out in the cigar bar, danced, basically had a GREAT time.  And yes, we did game on the cruise as we had promised to do.  Bobby Dean ran an amazing two-part Ghostbusters game in the ship's library.  It was done with the PCs playing themselves as ghostbusters, and was an great time.  Hooray for psychomagnatheric slime piped through a ship's fire supression system.

  So, while snorkling in Grand Cayman I managed to pinch the nerve of my left foot that runs down the top of the foot through a combination of stupidity and poorly fitting swim fins.  Upon my return, I was perscribed prednisone for the injury, and boy howdy do I seem to have a poor reaction to that.  Now, for what it's worth, it's very rare according to my Doc to be that sensitive to Prednisone.  It has side effects, sure, but most folks don't break out into full-body hives so angry and puffy it looks like you're wearing Martian digital camouflage when you're naked.

  It took me six says to get rid of the gives once they set in.  Worst case of itchy craptacularness I've had in my entire life.  Not fun.  Bendadryl and Zyrtec and Aveeno baths for a week.  I was in a perpetual state of groggy from the benadryl.  I'm back at work today, and I see no splotches on my skin, but I do still itch here and there.  Hope it's gone for a long time.  There is a good chance the allergic reaction wasn't to the prednisone at all but to something else - problem is it's impossible to tell what that is until I stumble into it again.  It was just perfect timing with the onset and the fade of the hives to the prednisone.

  Mary and I have now completed our homestudy, HUZZAH!  This was the last piece of our part of our foster care license.  Now we wait the six weeks or so for the homestudy to be written and submitted to CPS.  This means we may have children before the summer is out.  We are both very excited, and looking forward to whatever God has in mind for us.  Speaking of God, a big shoutout to the assjackets who caused the whole fuss and stir about the rapture occurring last week.  You're the reason people think all Christians are nutcases.  Thank you for the wonderful publicity.  I'm a Christian, and I'm as normal as the next guy who likes to spend his weekends pretending he's a MechWarrior, Starfleet Officer, ancient wizard, WWII paratrooper, or some other flavor of fantasy or historical character.  I also like mustard on my fries from time to time.  But perfectly normal, yes.

  OK, last night I had a very vivid, but very odd dream.

  I was at my college campus, but it was a different version of my campus with a large atrium.  Apparently it was also run by a general.  This general had a daughter who was wronged by some sailor in the past, and there was a curse placed on the campus that the first male to walk across the atrium on a given day would be struck by lightning in diabolical vengeance for the deflowering of the general's daughter.  First of all, I'm not making this up- it really was in my dream.  Second, I found out about all this third-person from the comical musings of two maintenance men who were working on power lines as the obvously dangerous storm clouds approached.  They regaled each other with the legend of the curse in expository film fashion, alerting me, the dreamer, to the impending danger.
  But I wasn't there to worry about curses, no.  I had a computer lab to run.  Apparently, it was the same computer lab I ran in 1996-8 at Northridge for the CIS department, right down to having old 386 and 486 PCs running Windows 95.  But it was lunch time, so I took the elevator down to the hospital (WTF?) and walked to the other building, which was a large asian grocery (Again, WTF?)  I am struck as to how things that are jarringly incongruous in the light of day seem perfectly normal in a dream state.  Anyway, the asian grocery had some wonderful wonton soup and sushi, and I just missed my wife as she was coming off the other elevator as I was headed down.  She was apparently waiting for me in the lab when I got back.  But I never quite made it back.  I ate my soup, and had some difficulty with getting the sushi I wanted, so I headed back to the hospital to return to the computer lab.  While in the hospital, I ran into Stana Katic from Castle and we shared an incredible kiss - I mean absolutely toe-curlingly amazing.  It was a total non-sequiter moment, that made no sense even in the context of this screwed up dream, so Stana and I just kind of stared at each other awkwardly for a moment and made a silent vow never to speak of this again.  I then continued on back to the lab, where I arrived just as my wife was leaving...  I walked her down to the ground floor where she got in the car and went back to her work.  This is when I saw the ominous storm clouds circling right over the campus.  I was rather annoyed that I had to deal with the curse when there were hard drives to replace, so I stalked past the still-chattering maintenance workers and into the atrium, where I walked right across the part of the floor we were told we aren't supposed to walk across lest we be the recipient of a lightning bolt from on high and basically dared the annoying curse to try to zap me.
  A giant snake appeared out of the clouds, itself being made of cloud-stuff.  I had glowing eyes and fangs and writhed its way down to about 150 feet above the ground, where it looked at me and issued forth a lightning bolt from its mouth as the two maintenance guys ran for cover.  I just raised the palm of my hand, knowing that God wouldn't let a gaint cloud-snake kill me with a ligthning bolt on my own campus, and the lightnign bolt harmlessly impacted my hand and the snake disappeared in a puff of clouds.  I then went back up the elevator to my lab and began pulling the yellowed beige-colored case off a CompuAdd 486.

  What a dream, eh?

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