Barb's Place

So, anyone going to Whedoncon this year? If so, are you interested in going in on a room?

Last night I was awakened untimely by some kind of cat shenanigans. I was too sleepy to actually get up and see what was going on, but too unsettled to fall into really deep sleep, so I dreamed a lot for the rest of the night. In one dream I was standing on a street corner, trying to read the street sign. The letters on the street sign kept changing, showing random strings of letters and numbers, including some Greek letters (I distinctly remember a theta) until I thought, "Oh, right, I'm dreaming. I can't read things while I'm dreaming."* I glared at the sign and forced it to settle on "83AOUN5," which I memorized, because it seemed terribly important at the time.

Then things segued into a long, frustrating sequence in which my mother was recovering from her broken hip, but we'd never sold her house, and she was insisting on recuperating at the house instead of going back to assisted living. So I was worrying about her, and worrying about paying for an assisted living place she wasn't using, and trying, with my brother's help, to clean out her house and sell all the things in the hopes it would encourage her to move out. Except for some reason, the back yard was the back yard of my grandmother's house, with the Big Spooky Garage (for reasons I never understood, the garage in my grandmother's back yard was built up on a huge slab of concrete, three feet high at least. There was a very steep ramp from the driveway up into the garage, and several steps leading up to the side door. Grandma didn't own a car, and it was full of boxes and old furniture that she'd brought from Connecticut when she moved to Arizona in the 1950s. I honestly have no idea what all was in there, but we were not supposed to go in unsupervised, and Kid Me always vaguely believed that there were ghosts in the back.)

Some variation of the Mom Dream seems to have become my go-to anxiety dream. I suppose it's a change from "Oh no, I forgot to drop this class and I haven't studied for the final!" and "Oh, no, I got a new job but I forgot to tell the old one I'm quitting so I have to work both!" and "Oh, no, we bought a new house but haven't sold the old one, so we have to pay two mortgages!" (Are you sensing a trend here?)

All that aside, I did get a few things accomplished this last weekend. I cleaned up the office room and took the very last box of estate junk that I hadn't been able to sell on Ebay to the consignment store. I finished the new skirt for my steampunk costume (I took some pictures, but fair warning, they are pretty crappy). The leather overskirt is put together from four leather skirts and a pair of leather shorts I got second hand, plus a few leather scraps and trim things I had on hand. It's not quite finished; I need to get two or three frogs or fancy hook and eye closures for right below the waistband.





I also made a skirt for my Ren Faire costume. Several years ago, we had a pair of very nice silk curtains in the dining room, and unfortunately, when we first brought Ma-San and Little Bit in, the curtains got ruined. However, I really loved the material (it was gold and dusky rose stripes). So I cut off the stained parts on the bottom, and kept the still-good upper parts, figuring that I would find some use for it eventually. They were floor-length curtains, so it was a fair bit of material. I pulled it out when I started work on the steampunk skirt, thinking it might work for an underskirt. I ended up using something else for the steampunk underskirt, but it struck me that the dusky rose in the stripes was a decent match for the dark red Puffy Shirt I bought at the Ren Fair last year. And the material was already lined and hemmed, and there was more than enough on the cut end to trim off and make a waistband, and so I did.

It came out really well -- I will have to get pictures of that too. The leather corset I have (the brown one) looks much better with the Ren Fair costume, so I have to think about getting another one for the steampunk outfit, one which will match the black leather overskirt better.

Next weekend we're going to go look at roses. The Don Juan we planted by the front porch many years ago has been doing poorly as the fig tree has gotten larger; it doesn't get enough sun anymore. This year it's finally given up the ghost, so we want to get another red rose and plant it somewhere sunnier.


*I used to think that I could read things while dreaming, but then I read an article about how that was impossible, and once I started to pay attention, I realized that I wasn't really reading; I was just sort of absorbing the dream-books by osmosis like Dark Willow (and as often as not, 'reading' a book would morph into acting out the story.) However, it always annoys me to be told that something is impossible, so from that point on, any time I started to dream about reading, and I was aware that it was a dream**, I would concentrate hard on forcing the text to stand still and actually reading the words. It's quite difficult to do this, as dream-print really does squirm around like that animated Batman episode, even as you're trying to read it. But I have got to the point where I can pin down individual words and numbers and sometimes even short sentences and make them sit still.)


**I am often, though not always, aware of being in a dream, or can force myself to become aware of it.