Just when I thought I would be taking a break, something worth while happens that fits in with this time of year Last night I woke up, swore I saw a dark shadow creeping up over the bed, kicked at it and started screaming “No!” really loud. Then of course I came to my senses and John woke up wondering WTF was happening.

When I looked around, I saw no dark figure. When I thought about it, it had its arms outstretched and a funny hat on. It reminded me of Freddy, which reminded me earlier that day in Philly I saw a kid walking around with a red-n-green Freddy like sweater on. The influence? I don’t know. I’ve woken up and thought I saw this weird figure in the bedroom before. Aliens? I really hope not on that one!

I am sure it’s not the influence of watching “One Missed Call 3: Final” before bed, cause that movie just sucked hard core.

Last night I did not fall asleep until around 6am this morning, which I guess counts as this morning and not last night. I just COULD not get to sleep. When I finally did though, what dreams!

I dreamed I was back in Glen Cove in Fairfax, Va; where most of my childhood was spent. However someone had painted our old house in this ugly hippy design, attaching all these giant artwork butterflies and stuff to it. I decided to take some photos to put on Facebook. Then I went around back to where the old woods we played in were. These were town homes, and I found almost everyone either had added these silly shacks onto the back of the house, or had trailers back there. It was for all the extra kids they had and didn’t have enough room for in the house! So I took photos of that too. Oh did I mention by this time it was dark out? Well some woman though I was a pervert and started chasing me with intent to kill. Running from her I ended up running into a giant black bear, which then started chasing the both of us. As I’m trying to use my phone to simultaneously take photos and call for help, it broke. Then I realized I had two days to get it fixed before the year warranty ran out, cursing myself for not buying the apple care for 2 years.

Then I finally woke up. The iphone 3.0 software update is out today. Clearly that influenced my dream

Well I didn’t get out hiking, hopefully next week though! I overslept, but not that it would have mattered if I didn’t. With it being a busy holiday weekend for the farm, John took the car to run various farm related errands (picking up and delivering produce).

I’ve been having most horrible dreams as of late. A lot of me ending up in public naked. I know it’s a classic anxiety dream. I usually don’t have the naked dream though, usually the ones where my teeth fall out. I also keep having the dream where I have taken up smoking. I’ve never smoked a day in my life, so it must be from a past life. I wake up even remembering how the cigarettes tasted. They didn’t taste good either from what I recalled.

The ant problem in the kitchen seems to be better now. I don’t know if it was the ant traps that did it, or spraying the counter with Windex Jamie told me to try that trick out, and it seems to have worked. Makes me feel like I’m in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” though. Here . . . . try some Windex!

I always mean to get some kind of earplugs for when I come home to Virginia, as my room is in the center of the house, downstairs, right by the stairs and thus I hear EVERYTHING from it. It can be somewhat annoying, as I wake up to every little sound. I got all these sleep enhancers for my iPhone, but forgot to bring a wall charger home :-\ It will drain the battery without them. I have become accustom to the large sleep-number bed too I think, as I have not been sleeping well in my old old childhood twin sized bed. Thus I have been having some bizarre dreams. I tried to tweet them when I first woke up and they were fresh, but the phone was too bright and I turned it off as it hurt my eyes The room has zero light, no windows, so I was a bit sensitive when I woke up.

The first nightmare I remember was that aliens were destroying the world. Thank you Fox for showing the commercial for “The Day The Earth Stood Still” constantly! I was for some reason in Las Vegas when it was happening. They started blowing up all the hotels. Somehow I survived, because me and others got to the top floor of the hotel we were in. The top few floors didn’t get blown up, they just plummeted and landed on a sea of water that flooded the city. Where the hell the water came from, I don’t know. After it went away to where it came from, we walked out and surveyed the disaster that was.

The second dream I’m a little foggie on. It was some kind of soap opera threesome serial killer dream. I’m pretty sure I was sleeping with a woman in it too. See, I told you, nightmare! I think for some reason though I looked like Patrick Muldoon, which wasn’t all that bad really.

There was a third dream which I can’t recall. I’m pretty sure I was back in high school though, and it probably had to do with Marching Band. I was searching through old photos while I’m home to scan and embarrass myself fully

I had the most bizarre dream last night. We were on our annual cruise, and it was a disaster. For starters for some reason I was with my brother and mom and not the BF. The room was tinier than usual, and we had no bathroom! We had to use a public one where all the showers and toilets were just sitting in the open for the whole world to see you doing your business.

My brother finally found our bathroom though, it was apparently hidden away and somehow we didn’t find it at first. It was a filthy mess of a nightmare and it looked like nobody had cleaned it in forever. So we were left with the dilemma do we use the dirty bathroom or the public bathroom?

My friend Keith was on the cruise with us, and as usual in the room next to us. He started text messaging me to come meet him down at the shops. For some reason he wanted me to buy some jacket or something. However I was unable to text him back. I was getting his texts on a watch, and I had no way to return them. I have no idea what that was about as I don’t even have a watch, I’ve used my phone as one for years. I don’t like wearing them.

The creme de-la-creme was when my mom and brother left for dinner, and I somehow lost my room key-card. For some reason I needed it to do everything, from get on the elevator to get into the dining room. So I had to take the steps all the way down to the pursers office to get a new card. No big deal, as usually the steps on cruise ships are really nice. For some reason though I was condemned to this dank dark stairwell inside the walls of the ship.

I have no idea why I had this dream at all. I think it reflects Black Friday

Last night I remember waking up, looking at the person in bed with me and thinking “Who are you?” “You aren’t supposed to be here?”

I remember looking and seeing the face of someone who wasn’t my BF. I remember the face clearly actually. Then I remember touching and feeling and thinking “You feel right, you just don’t look right.”

Then I remember struggling to remember who was supposed to be in bed with me and what they were supposed to look like, but I couldn’t! I eventually gave up . . . and went back to sleep with some strange person in the bed.

Odd . . .

Today I completed, or should have completed, week 4 of the C25K program. The problem is I pooped out on the run. I normally do my runs in the evening when the sun has gone down and when I’ve been up all day and eaten food. Because of plans to see “The Dark Knight” and then have movie night with Emily, I decided to run this morning. Mistake! I’m not a morning person, the sun was shining and all I had was some yogurt. I pooped out at the very end, and feel like I have to get three complete runs in for week 4 to “graduate.” I guess I’ll be doing another!

I’m still avoiding the Wii Fit, mainly cause I keep hitting plateaus. It tells me I am not moving at a fast enough pace to reach my goal in time, blah blah blah. So then when I do finally use it, it tells me I haven’t shown up in umpteen some days, blah blah blah. I keep saying I will show it some love, since I don’t seem to be getting my butt to the gym lately, but I don’t. I just usually don’t want to do anything on the days I don’t run, cause I’m sore.

The abstract for my conference paper is almost complete. I need to fiddle around with wording a bit more, but the meat is there. I probably should have asked how long it should be, as I could probably include a bit more detail. Oh well. It’s going to my advisor and if he thinks I should add more I will. I’ll share it when it’s done for the curious. I also have to remember to register and book a room for myself. I’m somewhat dreading this conference, as in the past I always knew fellow students would be going to hang out with. I don’t think they’ll be there this time around honestly.

I was going to include a bit about the delightful pet surprise I woke up to this morning, but won’t. I’m eating lunch right now and don’t want to think about it more than I have to.

I had bizarre dreams last night that I dyed my hair a brilliant glittery red color. Yes somehow I dyed my hair and it came out glittery. My hair also was longer, down to my chin and styled like that of a woman’s cut. What the hell? Come to think of it, it looked an awful lot like Renny on “Big Brother 10.” I have to stop watching that before I go to bed!

It is time for a haircut. I’m dreading going in as I know I’ll get a lecture on the bleach job and how bad it is to do that and how if I want that done I should come to them so they can charge me 100 dollars to do it. Yeah, I think the 100 dollars is the key, it’s probably just as bad for my hair if they do it! I have contemplated just dying it back to brown first, but I really want to see what it looks like after it’s cut. It should have that cool “highlight” look to it.

Anyway, I’m off to “The Dark Knight.” My thoughts on it in the next post. I’m sure I’ll love it, I am constantly hearing how amazing it is.

I took this with my iPhone, to test out how well photos come out with it. Pretty damn good, much better than any other camera phone I’ve ever had. Anyway, this here is what is left of poor Jason Vorhees, who was hanging up on my porch last year as part of my Halloween decorations. I had left him on the porch and had PLANNED to unstuff him, wash the clothes and then sew the shirt to the pants for next year to make him look more human (he was a little top heavy last year). That never happened, and eventually I just left him on the porch thinking “Well pretty soon I’ll be hanging him back up again!” Oh yes, I’ll be doing it again this year and I’m sure I’ll even add some new stuff in.

Last night for some odd reason I had a dream that I was in a horror movie. I was in this giant old mansion of a house running around trying to get away from some monstrous freak, who for some reason was Jason Vorhees. However he didn’t look like Jason, he had no hockey mask. He did have a deformed face and long stringy nasty hair though. For some reason I was running around with some screaming little girl who wouldn’t shut up, which of course made it easy for us to be found. Oh and I’m pretty sure I was a female myself. It was more like I was watching all this happen from outside my body. Hmmmm. We were running up through the attic and then all the way down to the cellar, where we finally escaped out the back door and got to a car. As we drove away Jason watched us from a window and another woman stood in the front doorway of the house in a nasty black dress. For some reason I felt this was his step-mother, why I don’t know. I don’t recall all the details, just that I remember it was very scary. Maybe someone is telling me to make it into a story or a movie.

I realized I hadn’t updated my “dreams” blog category in ages. Lately I’ve been having some doozies, which I should post about since I don’t seem to be finding much inspirations elsewhere. I do have that farm video blog I promised though, I haven’t forgotten!

Well I thought I’d share this one as it was just bizarre. I honestly didn’t remember it until a day or two later when I was taking a run. I saw a cigarette pack on the ground (damn litterbugs) and it all came back to me. I remember having a dream where I smoked. More than that I remembered the physical sensations of what it was like to smoke: the taste and the feel. This shocked me more than anything, because I’ve never smoked! I’ve never even tried a cigarette! Growing up I had friends with parents who smoked and I couldn’t stay more than an hour in the house without getting headaches. I suffer migraines, which came on when I hit my teens, so clearly smoking wasn’t something I ever felt the need to take on. To this day I can’t stand smelling like cigarette smoke from bars and what not. I will shower when I get home before going to bed to get the smell off me. This dream was one of those whoa, past life experience moments.

So it is the end of the semester. All of the sudden it comes to my attention, I’ve been registered for 2 classes I have not attended all semester long except for the very firsts classes. Somehow with my very busy schedule, I just forgot I was registered for them and didn’t go to them . . . for the whole semester. This means of course two Fs and automatic expulsion! Nooooo! There are variations of this dream of course, such as I attended half the semesters, but didn’t do half the reading and now have books upon books to read before next week’s final. When I have nightmares lately, these are generally it!

I am supposed to graduate by the end of this semester (May), so says the school My time is up, and I either have to give up or apply for yet another extension. This takes me beyond ten years, which could be an issue. When I first started, 10 years was the limit. To get beyond ten years you had to have a really good reason and the school had to approve it after some petitioning. Now though that 10 year figure has gone poof in the guidelines, you simply have to keep applying for and being allowed to have extensions. Why the 10 year figure when away, I’m not sure, I have my theories that it might have something to do with how long it is now taking people to finish undergrad alone.

I am determined to get this dissertation done once and for all by the end of the semester, to end these dreams once and for all, to close this chapter of my life. Plus I’m currently working at getting stress out of my life, the dissertation is a major part! I’m a little over half way to finishing it. Actually probably more, since I already know the majority of the results. They just have to be typed up and proved with statistical graphs I’m currently making (but I know enough to know what the graphs will already say). Come next month I’ll be working on the dissertation full time 7 days a week (hint hint), something I have not been able to do and has dragged my progress down. Therefore I expect to have it done come May. However editing and getting my committees’ approval to defend by then? Well that’s another story at this point! My advisor though has me applying for graduation in May, when the time comes we’ll deal with what needs to be worked out.

Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes! Big ones coming up in my life, soon and fast! I’ll get that post up about that big decision too, but something tells me enough of you have enough info now to figure it out