Bits and Pieces

Here's some random stuff about what's been going on since I posted last:

I had a dream a few days ago about Crunch, the dog that I used to take care of for my friend Judi (Buzz's predecessor). In the dream, I was taking care of him but I was working nights so I was confused and got up to look for him in the house (he was asleep in his usual spot in the dining room) and then I went back to bed to try to get some sleep. I woke up with a start, like, woke up for real, because I thought I had forgotten to feed him and let him out of the house and I had to wake up and ask Dave if he had done it. It was so real, that part, real life real, that I had trouble for a moment with whether I were asleep and dreaming of taking care of Crunch or awake and having to taking care of Crunch. He's been gone for years, poor boy. 

I texted Judi about the dream and she asked me how he looked. Was he well fed? 

Jesus, I'm crying now. I loved that dog. 

I told my therapist about the dream, too, yesterday during out usual session and she tried to relate it to my situation. Am I not taking care of myself? I'm not, but I don't think the two are related. Anyway, I'm taking care of myself to the extent that I didn't cancel therapy. That's something, right?

Between perimenopause and PMS, my sleep is a mess. I've been staying up half the night, unable to go to sleep, watching a lot of crap online. Of course all the screen time also wrecks my sleep. 

I started reading the Hemingway, too, but my god. It is a dense kind of overwhelming thing to read right now. I adore Hemingway and this is a concentrated dose. He was at the absolute height of his abilities in this book, only about a year away from dying by suicide, and it is an incredible, overwhelming book. I'm only about twenty pages in, because it's impossible to read more than a few pages at a time. He was something else, Hemingway. We will never see the likes of him again.

For a long time, I read a lot of Hemingway adjacent work, including works by his children. He was, as you can probably guess, a pretty shitty father. One of his sons wrote a book about him, Papa: A Personal Memoir, that is so wrought it is hard to read. (Of course it was a best seller.) The author, Gregory Hemingway, was a doctor and an addict who underwent gender reassignment surgery (becoming Gloria Hemingway) but continued to live as a man. Can you imagine the internal conflict? Much has been made of Ernest Hemingway's mother dressing him as a girl (she apparently wanted a girl and treated him as such until he started going to school), so I wonder how Hemingway felt when one of his own sons turned out to be transgender--that is, if he even knew, as he died more than thirty years before all this happened. 

That family was a mess.

But that's got nothing to do with me except that I know it because I have long loved Hemingway.

Continuing on:

I got up early this morning after a terrible night of almost sleep because I had an appointment with the NP at my clinic at 8:35. I got a call a bit after 7:00 telling me that my appointment was going to have to be rescheduled because the NP had called in. That was fine. I rescheduled for Tuesday and went back to bed until around 1:00 p.m. 

I got up and had breakfast (a baked potato, a veggie burger, some leftover sauteed zucchini and mushrooms) and then...what did I do?  Oh, yes, I had started a new quilt yesterday, so I continued working on it this afternoon. So far, I have several blocks done and I'm trying to decide whether or not I'm going to turn it into a Halloween quilt. The blocks I am working on now are crumb blocks that I'm sewing into half-square triangles with an orange fabric that is the color range that quilters sometimes call "cheddar." It's not quite the color of boxed mac and cheese, but only just. I have some recently purchased fabric, cute-ish ghosts on a purple background. The little ghosts are reading orange covered books (ghost stories, of course) and eating popcorn out of orange boxes. So...I may add them as large squares bordered by the half-square triangles. We'll see. 

I'm behind on my 365 quilt squares, because ennui or whatever passes for it these days.

What else?

Dinner last night was from the local Japanese restaurant. Dave had karamiso ramen and I had raw tuna on cold soba. I also had seaweed salad and Dave had cucumber salad with chile and pine nuts. Tonight we had to go out and run some errands (prescriptions, mail) and we stopped by the Co-op. We went in for soy milk and walked out with almost $100 bucks worth of groceries (everything fit in one bag because the Co-op is quite pricey), including tonight's dinner of vegan tamales (which we had with guacamole and salsa and chips). After dinner, I finished off a piece of flourless chocolate cake that was Dave's sister's birthday cake. Her birthday was on Wednesday and the cake was so rich that it took me three days to finish one piece and that last push really should have been broken into two days because now I feel kind of sick.

I think that's about it for now. I'm going to get back to working on my quilt.