elainegrey

In brief: Fixing breakfast was the highlight of yesterday. Two hours of documentary on Northwest Passage explorers doesn't put me in a energized mood. I still itch. Edward is on walkabout. Apparently i'm a fit physicist in my dreams.

I sat around yesterday and ... well, i guess that's resting. Christine had requested a double Nova disk from Netflix that described in one hour a failed British expedition and in the second hour the first successful transverse of the Northwest Passage. She likes snow and seems to enjoy these documentaries about miserable experiences in snowbound extremes. There are failed expeditions to other locations, aren't there? I remember coming in to the living room a month or so ago to find her watching another miserable story about a trio of mountain climbers where one broken man climbs out of a crevasse where his climber buddy left him for dead and crawled down glaciers and scree to the base camp, where his climber buddy was mourning him and building up strength for the hike out. The stories are compelling -- i have a hard time leaving the room -- but i don't think i would ever seek them out.

I tried to do stuff with the computer while being in the same room as the documentaries but ended up just watching. If anything, they pushed me to a low-grade existential angst. I was having one of those, "My life is slipping away, and i'm doing nothing with it" moods, although i didn't actually think that thought. Mainly, i'm aware i have a couple hours of work to do before a 6 am meeting on Monday. I have spent much of the weekend trying to decide how i would apportion my energy for Meeting today, as it's both Meeting for Worship and then Business.

I'm also trying to decide if it's time to see the doctor about itching. Yesterday i hoped it was calming, but this morning i still seem to be developing new locations of visible rash. I just took another loratadine (Claritin generic).

Christine is distressed over Edward's absence. It's now 50 hours of no sighting since he jogged down the steps on Friday morning. I posted an email to the neighborhood watch list around dinner time yesterday, when on excursion i could find only three of the four orange cats. Luigi, Franky, and Marty were all hanging out at the end of our sidewalk. They were mum about where Eddie'd gone. I think i came up just before Marty and Franky pulled out their switchblades. I think Christine will be calling Animal Control when they open in an hour. I walked around the complex around 10 pm last night, singing, "Edward, Edward, Edward Katt, Where you at, oh, Edward Katt?" I can't tell you how i know i'm singing "Katt" instead of "Cat," but i am. Franklin was still out by the pool and took belly rubs, but he still wouldn't tell where Edward had gone.

My dreams in the early morning were more vivid than i was used to. In one sequence, we (i'm not sure who was in the we) had to leave a physics laboratory to escape... terrorists? and i scaled a chain-link fence (*snort*) and then pulled it flat down with my weight (*snort, snort*) so that others could cross it. I let go, and the fence then sprang back up so that no one could tell we'd gone that way. We went down a long bank, crossed a football field where -- like security lights -- the field lights came on with motion sensors, and then in the corner of the field we took to the woods, a piedmont North Carolina hardwood forest, with a broad leaf covered trail. I worried about the arrival of those following us: would the field lights go off before they arrived? Would they be alert enough to see the evidence of our passage -- freshly disturbed leaves -- on the trail? I lead folks into underbrush and woke up with the anxiety of being chased. I went back to sleep and dreamed i knew where a rope ladder leading up to a high platform was, but the "we" included a dog and i spent time figuring out how we would carry the dog up the rope ladder. My dream wandered back to the lab, and a discussion about how we would include folk's identity in the data schema (this an echo of a Friday conversation at work). I argued that folks might be making ad hoc measurements of cross sections, and need to attribute those measurements in the database, feeling uncertain if i was correctly remembering how easily one could measure a nuclear cross section. This morning i am more confident, but still not certain: a quick search turns up an abstract that confirms my memory of the ease of the measurement. On the other hand, all these numbers are well known, so i don't know why one would have to make an ad hoc measurement. I've no idea what the collaboration was working on.