Let’s start domestic

Over the last 6 months I’ve been trying to concentrate on finishing that Masters dissertation that keeps getting mentioned. I figured that if I didn’t write much in my blogs, I would be more focused on the Masters. It was OK up to a point, but when I hit a low patch mid-April, I wasn’t producing much anywhere in my life, let alone “on paper”. Now I’ve decided to stop pressuring myself to finish the dissertation and just let my efforts at writing come as they will, although there have been so many possible topics, choosing just one for the plunge has been hard enough.

So here’s a short dream; quite mundane; probably no meaning – but it’s a start.

Last night I had a number of dreams, including an unfortunate one involving someone donging me lightly on the head with a heavy saucepan! The dream forced me into wakefulness because I lunged out with a left jab and punched poor Spotrick in the head!! I awoke as my knuckles met their unintended target! Thank goodness he was a reasonable distance away and I have short arms! [Sorry Spotrick xx]

Apparent house interior

That wasn’t the dream with the most detail- here’s that one:

I was at a friend’s place helping her with a big casual lunch for a group of about 15. She is a real friend, involved in a social media job, but she’s never had me help her IRL [in real life]. We put piles of crockery and cutlery on an outside table, then brought large platters of food out for everyone to share. Everyone chatted on cheerfully until all the food had been consumed and most people had drifted off home. A few people stayed to clear up and we loaded the dishwasher.

So many dishes

Then disaster struck. The dishwasher filled with water, started to wash, then made some alarming pop-clunk sounds and stopped, dead. Nothing we tried worked, so we had to take everything out and make piles of dishes all over the kitchen table and benches. It looked ominously like about 3 or 4 sink-loads of manual washing up. Blerrgghh

Anyway, we sorted ourselves out to work in pairs, doing a wash and rinse for each pair. I was sitting on the sofa doing some red knitting when the sounds of breaking dishes came from the kitchen- uh-oh, more trouble. I ditched the knitting and went out to help. What a mess! One person started crying and another one hugged her and decided to take her home, leaving S, C and I with the debris. Yuck!

Meanwhile, “back at the ranch”, there was a knock at the door and who should appear but my friend J, wondering if he could help! Goodness knows why he was there as we were in a suburb miles away from ours [and the house more resembled an old maisonette I used to rent than the actual house owned by S!; but it's a dream...].

Maisonette

Apparently he had been walking past and heard our dish-clunking noises, deciding to investigate, as knights in shining armour tend to do.

In came J and attacked the dishwasher. He thought he could fix it. However, when he took a closer look, it seemed to have turned into something like an old-fashioned wash-copper! It appeared as a cylindrical appliance on short metal legs, with a round lid!

Old wash copper

Definitely NOT a conventional dishwasher. J quickly admitted defeat and shooed us out of the kitchen. He proceeded to wash, dry and put away every single load of dishes, and what’s more, he apparently vacuumed the whole house as well!

Goodness knows where I was (or the others), as I seemed to have fallen asleep with my knitting on the sofa, completely oblivious to the washing up and vacuum-cleaner racket! I was awoken by sounds of two loud female voices coming into the house (god knows who they were – probably 2 characters out of “The Bottle Factory Outing” which I had been skimming IRL before I fell asleep on the sofa!) Anyway, the chief complaint of these two (who claimed to be the owners – poor S had suddenly been evicted and dispossessed, LOL!) was that J had put all their shoes on the beds when he was vacuuming! They thought this was dreadful and wanted to give J a good talking to! Meanwhile, he had vanished without being thanked or scolded by these crazy women.

Red knitting

PS. J had trodden on my knitting in the dream and made it all brown and yucky looking and I was NOT pleased! Where did this stuff come from??

Another dream, another toad…

I just awoke from this dream as Evangeline opened the front door, so some of it has been shocked into the subconscious!

The dream started somewhere I can’t remember, but the first bit I can remember is when I was getting into a single bed (rather like my cousin Beth’s bed when we were kids and I stayed with her parents). As I pulled the blankets up to settle down, there was a little twig-like thing on the edge, so I pulled it out and chucked it on the floor. Then some bloke came in to say goodnight (not my Uncle Alan, but a stranger) and was telling me about a slight “pest” problem they’d been having- a few mice and rats in the roof. Then he spotted the “twig” I’d tossed out and pounced on it, saying “Oh no- we must have a bird problem as well… that’s a little, shriveled bird foot!” I wasn’t too alarmed as IRL our cats are always abandoning little birds’ feet about the yard.
So off I went to sleep, unconcerned. The next morning I was in the city with some other people working for some government office. We had to get some lunch and travel to some other site for a meeting, so one of them went off to get some take-away stuff for us to eat on the train. I ordered a hamburger and chips and a soft drink and this guy went off to get everyone’s order. When he came back he had got various hamburgers, chicken, sandwiches and chips, but handed me a barbecue chicken in a bag. I was a bit miffed, but took my bag onto the train and tried to settle down. However, a heap of people got on and crowded us out of our spot near a window- there were several small children, a few older ones and a few extra adults- the little kids just stomped on most of the food- a Macca’s burger went all splatto across the seat, which put me right off!
A while later I got settled elsewhere in the train and opened my chicken bag- BUT-inside covering the whole upper side of the nicely browned chicken was a huge floppy toad, looking quite slimy and stunned! Eeeergghhh!!! I slapped the bag shut as it moved a bit!
I went back to my friends sitting with the kids to show them, but when I got there, one of the toddlers had just got another, smaller, darker toad jump onto his front and everyone was trying to get it off him, while he shrieked! A man who seemed to be the same one as had been saying good night before, said he was the child’s father and that he had been receiving some of these animals in mailed packages for some weeks.
The scene moved then to a stairwell- maybe in a station and I was walking up- as I rounded a corner, a pale green thing wound around a steel brace- it looked rather like a snake! (How Freudian!!!). As it looked rather sluggish as well, I grabbed it behind the head and held on tight, taking it out into a corridor. This turned out to be the corridor of a laboratory building or university. I ran with the “snake” (it seemed to have some rudimentary dinosaur-looking pale green legs at times) into a lab with benches and yelled- “Someone get me a container for this thing!”. Everyone started to scatter and run away- I let go of the now writhing and jerking thing and it hurtled across benches and floor towards the windows. I yelled at everyone to get to the other side of the room and out the door- some hardy types (blokes in lab coats mostly), immediately went to have a closer look at the thing. Somehow I knew it was not particularly harmful or venomous and wasn’t panicked, although I didn’t want it to bite me anyway. A guy came along from another department and said it was the Pale Green Jungle Python from Ethiopia (??!!).
Without much ado, I was back with my colleagues from the train, going to our meeting. We got off the train onto a bus and set off in the rain; (it had been sunny before and overcast). We got off the bus at what seemed like the long boring stretch of Ayliffe’s Road, before it descends past the Shepherd’s Hill Reserve. There seemed to be nothing there except a tall thin Asian man with a briefcase standing beside the road.
Meanwhile it got quite dark, and we’re walking along the road- which now seemed to be in a fairly level suburb with lots of peak hour traffic, rain and traffic lights. As we rounded a corner on foot I noticed that a heap of large gravel was piled up with lots scattered across the lefthand turn lane. Then I looked out into the intersection and noticed that a car seemed to have fallen into a big sinkhole in the road! It was full of people- 8 of them in fact, and had filled with water up to road level! I looked them over and got out my mobile phone to call an ambulance and police- meanwhile one of the passengers stood up (it was a large convertible with top down, in the rain!), and started pressing 000 on her mobile as well. Other passengers didn’t seem able to move or get out so I moved in front of the car to direct traffic/make it stop or whatever, while a colleague attended to the passengers. Suddenly all the street lights and traffic lights went off and it was a bit hairy standing out there in front of the oncoming traffic! However, the cars still had their headlights and I figured my hands would look white in the lights and people would see me waving them about and not hit me!
As we waited for the ambulance and police to turn up, suddenly someone I had seen earlier in the dream in a shocking pink suit, turned up. She had been sent out by some government minister to personally investigate claims that the transport department was letting things go to the dogs, and here she was right on top of a supporting incident! We seemed to know who she was, so we grabbed her and started making her write down our sad tale about the accident, the road condition and the disorganised trains and buses we had been travelling on. Then the front door opened and I was awakened- no more dream!
What the?? Figure this one out!!

Dreams of beach compounds…

There was a crumbling and rusty large gravestone in my dream and a long epitaph written there, which contained phrases like:
“He saw red enamel…
He spoke of beach compounds…
..
He dreamed of Antarctica’s health…”

There was a whole lot more that I desperately tried to remember in the dream so I would remember when I woke up! This is all I can recall at the moment, but hoping there is more…

The dream was long and involved the story of a doctor and his speech and language expert wife who had three sons, one of whom was quite autistic. The dream followed them from a time when the kids were quite young and playing on a beach, riding bikes and running around the house screaming and laughing, to when the sons and wife were dead and the old doctor was old, grey-bearded and rather tottery. Somehow I was in the dream at various stages of this family’s life. I remember going for a long walk with the father and the two non-disabled sons. We were chatting about all sorts of things, including listening to the sounds our joints made quietly as we walked! The autistic son was mainly educated at home and I can’t recall the details of how he was managed on the days when both his parents worked. Anyway, he wore a helmet to prevent him doing too much damage to himself and ran about saying weird things, squealing and flapping. He could read a bit, made up odd stories that did not make much sense and found it impossible to ride a bike like his brothers, even though he tried for years. When he died- and I think the epitaph may have been for him- there was a reporter from a large newspaper at the family home to do a story on him. While they were discussing what should go in the story, the doctor brought out some old films and videos of things happening with the autistic boy.
The doctor and his wife also put the helmet on and imitated some of the antics the boy went through- they were hilarious! There were some crazy things on the films and videos that had the journalist cacking himself!
I could see the house as a whole in its setting at the end, with some small industrial city in the distance a few kms away. The house was a modern, multi-roofed house on a small hill overlooking the city. The grave with the epitaph was in a field next to the house covered in golden dry grass.
I remember speaking with the doctor on the occasion of his farewell dinner from the local community when he retired at 65 or so. I was talking to him about what it had been like for him to be a patient for the first time when he had suffered a small prostate cancer [this must be related to one of my former jobs where I did interview several older doctors who had recovered from it]. He was philosophical and explained he’d been a bit embarrassed, hadn’t approved of some of the things that had happened to him, but decided he had been treated OK overall and wasn’t complaining!
There was a bit about the sons not receiving some awards from their church youth group because a crotchetty old pastor had blown some incidents with the autistic boy out of all proportion, and blamed the other two boys. [weird!!!]
The house I can see as a rambling house with plenty of yard and not much garden- it appears to be in a sepia print! I could sketch it, or find a similar photo to illustrate how it looked.
The image of the old doctor left on his own at the end, shuffling around the house with no other occupants is warm and only slightly lonely. The doctor had a grey beard, trimmed but a little longer than when he was young, and his hair was thick and white and growing over his collar. His clothes were a bit crumpled- with a broadly checked shirt and a brown cardigan! Perhaps we have the beginnings of a movie script or at least a short story here!
It’s also probably relevant that I have known many families with autistic and Asperger’s syndrome kids and have spent a lot of time in their homes- but none of them match this particular family in the dream! And none of them lived where this dream is set- in a dry part of the US interior with rolling, grassy slopes and fields of corn and wheat stalks!
Well- maybe more to this if it comes back to me, maybe not…

The house was like this with multiple roofs, but modern large windows.

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A Frank Hurley Photo of Antarctica 1915

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Tags: Frank_Hurley, 1915, Antarctica, copyright_free

I was so amazed by the set of Frank Hurley’s photographs on Flickr via the State Library of NSW that I had to blog one! Most are free of copyright and shown in the Creative Commons group on Flickr.
It has been my ambition for a long while to go to Antarctica via the Falklands and South Georgia, so this photograph may spur me on. I don’t know that it will have much to do with getting me a job so I can earn the money for the fare, though!
I still can’t adapt to not having at least a part time job with some sort of continuity. I miss the intellectual challenge of work, working with other people, having people to talk to at mealtimes, producing something which might be useful to others- contributing to the world in general (well, maybe the illusion of it…). I just don’t seem to adapt- sure I’m never llonely, but I do feel under stimulated and under utilised. I’m sure I have qualities to offer which would be an asset in some workplace, but the right sort of advertisement doesn’t seem to come up. I have no more real networks in the job world as it’s ten years since I worked fulltime for one boss. I know a few people who have given me small bits of work but have no connection with anyone who might keep me in mind, as no one knows what I can do any more.
When I’ve gone for interviews, people seem surprised and then rejecting..”You wouldn’t be able to do this sort of thing these days” etc- it’s either a reference to my age or there’s something wrong with my CV or my referees are talking me down. What is it? I’ll never know.
So all I can do is dream of that Antarctic trip and try to stay on the upside of the gulch that’s opening in front of me. I think I’ll probably have no job or income to speak of for another 8 years when I reach the official pension age in Australia- and by then they’ll probably shift it on another 5 years! I don’t like this life.