No Way to Avoid What's Coming

Wednesday night I couldn't sleep. I never sleep well the night before school starts. I got about ninety minutes of sleep, then woke up and couldn't get back to sleep for hours. Finally, two hours or so before my alarm was set to go off, I fell asleep again. So I started school on Thursday at 7 a.m. with about three and a half hours of sleep.

I started with an exam. Yes, first day, first class. First two hours of class actually. (I just got the grade today, a perfect score.)

It was uphill from there.

After the exam, there were lectures. All the lectures nowadays are powerpoint presentations, so the instructors dim the lights and drone on while showing us powerpoint slides and youtube videos. It's not particularly enthralling, and with a sleep-deprived brain, it's numbing.

In the afternoon, we ran through a series of skills, some with needles. Yet again, I had to perform CPR on a mannequin. We worked in teams. My partner was Sam, a man I'd only met that morning, big guy, six foot seven or more, about four hundred pounds. Sweetest guy on the planet, and very funny.

I hate performing CPR on mannequins, but it's the most effective way to practice I imagine. Of our group of twelve, Sam and I did the best (as judged by a computer that keeps track of the effectiveness of compressions and breaths). So when your heart stops, just hope it's Sam and me that finds you.

That was Thursday.

Friday was more of the same, an hour or so more sleep, no exam. Hours of powerpoint slides in the morning with new skills in the afternoon. I ran into Chris on campus. She was smiling, happy with the direction her life is taking. Good.

I got home around 2:30 and napped from four until six.

In the evening, Dave and I went to Vanessa's wedding dinner. I took her a Daruma doll, a small one, and a gift certificate to Amazon so that she can buy what she wants or needs to. I bought the gift certificate online and printed it out at home before going to the dinner. Amazon lets you pick a design for the front of the gift certificate. I chose a simple, appropriate design, a stylized "Mr. & Mrs.", but when I printed it out, it said "Mrs. & Mrs." I swear I chose the right one. There was no way to print out another one, so I just wrote a note on the front explaining my error--really, Amazon's error!--and stuffed it in a card.

Saturday,  I stayed in bed all day until about 3:30, when I got up, showered, and got dressed. We met Judi and Paul for dinner at our favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. We stuffed ourselves and then Dave and I came home and I got back into my pajamas and got back into bed.

I've been having the craziest dreams, ones in which I am trapped. This morning I woke myself up because I was screaming my head off in a dream, trapped in an out of control elevator. Thursday (or maybe it was Friday?) I had a dream I was trapped in an underwater cave. There was just enough air at the top for me to breath. It was dark. The water around me was filled with several large, dolphin-like creatures. I could feel them brush against me.

We all know what those dreams are about.