I awoke this morning exhausted and tense, sweating from dreams of death and destruction. I don't know why my nightmares are almost always apocalyptic in nature (actually, I do know why -- if you read about supervolcanoes and megatsunamis and mass extinctions, etc., and are generally a stress case, it's bound to happen). But I had three unrelated nightmares in a row, which is v. rare for me. The first involved being on a plane that couldn't land and was being escorted by fighter jets -- although to be fair, the real nightmare in that situation was that I was late checking in on Southwest and almost got stuck with a middle seat (trauma!). The second was the worst of the three, and one I've actually had before -- I was standing on a barren plain, with rubbish and ash all around, and a child was playing in front of me. He picked up a bone and tried blowing into it like it was a whistle, but no sound came out. Or rather, a sound that I couldn't hear came out -- because it attracted hordes of these awful machine-like aliens who scuttled across the landscape and ate the fucking kid right in front of me. Ugh. The third dream involved holing up in an apartment while the apocalypse raged outside; for some reason Bruce Willis was there, but he promptly escaped and left me to my own devices. And for some reason I had to help an old woman find her blood pressure meds. Weird all around.
So after those visions, the rest of the day pretty much paled in comparison. I drove down to train with Alyssa and was almost fifteen minutes late due to traffic; luckily, this is the last time I'm training at 10am, and we're switching to 11am next week, which should improve the traffic situation. (side note: I've had multiple discussions with people about how easy I am to track via the blog, so if I disappear, check the IP logs). She punished me appropriately, and I had to do step-ups onto the tallest step they have in the gym -- easy peasy for most people, but I'm short enough that the tallest step is slightly taller than my knee joint, which makes for a steep step indeed. Doing that 60-80 times on each leg means I'm going to dislike stairs tomorrow, but I suppose it's all useful if I end up having to run from the apocalypse someday (if the apocalypse consists mostly of small machines that can be thwarted by climbing some stairs).
Post workout, I messed around with my hair, then had a long lunch at Sprout in downtown Palo Alto, which I haven't been to in months. After eating my salad, I went to Stanford campus, where I stood in an unnecessarily long line at the post office to mail something, then went to the library and wrote for awhile. Or, to be fair, I took a nap for an hour, and then wrote for awhile. I've returned to Ellie and Nick's Regency story, if only temporarily, and wrote approximately four pages -- not bad for the amount of time I had and the fact that I've callously ignored them for two months. Then I left the library and met up with Heather (aka dear respected madam) and Elizabeth (another old coworker) for dinner at the Counter; I hadn't seen Elizabeth in months, and Heather and I have barely seen each other because of my travels this summer, so it was great to catch up. Heather and I did subject Elizabeth to an intense discussion of THE DARK ENQUIRY, which we both recently read, but other than that we were on good behavior. Post-dinner, I went to Heather's car to grab a bag of books I'd loaned her, and then ended up sitting in her car for another hour discussing books, etc., which was nice as nice could be.
By then it was already after eight o'clock, and I'd told Katie I would call her half an hour before that. I tried to call her, but she was on the phone, so I got gas, ran to Starbucks, worked on the story a little bit, and waited for her to call back. I was just about to give up when the call came in, and we ended up catching up for forty-five minutes or so -- it's too bad that they moved to Denver instead of San Francisco, since I doubt I'll be able to convince them to move here now that they've discovered that they like Denver, but at least I can visit them in a much cooler city than Dallas (no offense to the Texans out there). After our call, it was 9:30pm, and so I hightailed it home, where I had a scant forty minutes to unwind before getting in the car again and picking up Terry at the airport. She's been safely retrieved from Fashion Week (that bitch), and so I expect we'll do a lot of catching up this weekend.
And now, my dear readers, I must go to bed; the writing actually went half okay today, when I ignored the fact that I had no idea where I was going with the scene I was writing, so hopefully I can get into it again tomorrow. Goodnight!
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