I dreamed that I was in my kitchen with RJ about to call my mother on the phone. A woman answered it and started talking to me, asking me how I was doing, but I didn't know who she was. Then she passed the phone off to some other unknown man. I got irritated because I didn't know these people so I asked them to put my mom on the phone. I asked my mom who that woman was and she said it was my grandmother. In my head (in my dream) the woman's voice played over a couple times and I realized that it was really my grandmother. In my head (in my dream) the woman's voice played over a couple times and I realized that it was really my dead grandmother. Then my mother said that my grandfather (also dead) was there too, and did I want to talk to him? I screamed "NO" and threw the phone, trying to get itaway from me as fast as I could. Then I started screaming to RJ, "My mother has dead people answering her phone now!" After that I had a night terror for like 10 minutes and I couldn't fully wake up. I kept trying to push the phone away from me (even though it wasn't even near me) and I was sobbing. RJ didn't know what to do with me. I was also very hot and thirsty when I finally woke up.

I'm imagining this is because of stress. I had a lot of tough decisions to make recently, and also one of our gerbils (Sonic) died yesterday.

I haven't posted in forever because I no longer live in the city. I completely reassimilated into my country-self and I am quite content. However, today's events are publish-worthy.

When I came home from work around 3:45 I saw a cop car driving around. This isn't unusual for my complex, there is a cop that regularly patrols and keeps an eye on things. I settled down and relaxed for a few minutes, when I noticed there was a second police car, from the next district over, who was now talking to the original cop that I saw when I came home. I am nosey and I like to know what is going on, so I went on my balcony to "water my plants" and see if I could hear anything. All I managed to hear was, "They're still in the woods." Now my interest was perked. I decided to stay outside and see if I could figure out what was going on. The cars separated and the original cop circled the complex quite a number of times. Eventually he stopped outside of my apartment and started walking down the trail that goes into the woods. While he was in there my downstairs neighbor came home and we were trying to figure out what the cop was doing. Of course the cop left the woods after a few minutes, then he came over to talk to us. He said that they are looking for someone and "if a black guy comes out of the woods we should call the police." I have no life and I decided that instead of playing video games like I usually do while waiting for RJ to get home from work, I would sit on my balcony and read a magazine, hoping that I would get to be the neighborhood hero and catch these guys. An hour passed, no one came out of the woods, the cop circled 50 million times and then stopped in front of my place again. He got out and came over to talk to me. I got some more information: there were two men in the process of a drug deal about a half mile down the street at the softball field. The cops spotted them so the guys decided to run for it, leaving their car at the softball field. The cops chased these men all over through the woods, then lost their trail. There are a lot of police from 2 districts using the K-9 units and trying to locate these guys. They have to come out of the woods sometime, right? My conversation with this cop started to trail off onto how long have I lived here, when did I graduate from Buffalo (I was wearing my good old Buff State sweatshirt, yoga pants, and no shoes since I had just finished exercising), what is my degree in...? He said he was hungry and I offered him food, but he declined. He said, "Let me give you my cell number." I thought this was a great idea; that way I could bypass 911 if I saw the men and get a cop directly. Nope, apparently I was wrong in thinking this was his intent. He followed that comment with, "Give me a call sometime if you want to hang out." And at that I said, "Sure," ran upstairs, and almost peed my pants laughing. I cannot wait until RJ (my fiancé!) gets home so I can tell him about this!!!

(Right now there are two cops talking to each other again. It's 7:15.)

After this fiasco gets settled and I have the motivation, I will write all about the FOUR seniors pranks that have happened in the last couple weeks at the school where I teach.

I just heard this song on the radio. It is Big & Rich singing "Comin' to Your City"...

Well, we're comin' to your city.
Gonna play our guitars an' sing you a country song.
We'll all be flyin' higher than a jet airliner.
An' if you wanna little bang in your Ying-Yang, come along.

Well we flew through Cincinatti, an' we all got really happy.
Grabbed a bowl of that skyline chilli along the way.
Then we rolled on into Canton, scared the hell out of Marylin Manson,
And the party started happenin', hey, hey, hey.
An' in the middle of a Toston night, we ran into Jessica White,
An' a little moonshine got us right from smack insane.

An' we're comin' to your city.
Gonna play our guitars an' sing you a country song.
We'll all be flyin' higher than a jet airliner.
An' if you wanna little bang in your Ying-Yang, come along.

Well, we broke down in Greenville in the middle of a hay field,
But a Bud Light truck pulled up an' helped us out.
So we dead-headed up to Philly, partied down like real hillbillies,
Brought the music mafia an' rocked it out.
[size=m]Oh, an Chippewa's where we go when we're up in Buffalo:
Don't you know, those Yankees drink enough to drown.[/size]

Yeah, we're comin' to your city.
Gonna play our guitars an' sing you a country song.
We'll all be flyin' higher than a jet airliner.
An' if you wanna little bang in your Ying-Yang, come along,
Come along.

Instrumental break.

Listen up:
Now, LA's got the freaks an' finks an' fifteen dollar drinks.
An' San Antonio is a wild, wild rodeo.
An' in Pheonix, Arizona, we drink way too much Corona,
An' we woke up by the river, just sittin' low.

An' we're comin' to your city.
Gonna play our guitars an' sing you a country song.
We'll all be flyin' higher than a jet airliner.
An' if you wanna little bang in your Ying-Yang, come along.

Yeah, yeah, we're comin' to your city.
We're gonna play our guitars an' sing you a country song.
We'll all be flyin' higher than a jet airliner.
An' if you wanna little bang in your Ying-Yang;
If you wanna little zing in your zang-zang;
If you wanna little ching in your chang-chang, come along.
Come along.
Come along.
Come along.

Yeah, we're comin' to your city.

My cat named Fluffy died this morning.
She was 16.
My heart hurts.

i was in front of the school i work at which looked like a castle. this place was also where i lived. i was trying to get in the door i usually go into, but there was a concert of some sort going on, so that door was blocked. i walked a little way and went into a door that i had never gone into before. i was in front of the library in a huge hallway that was majestic like the inside of a castle, but the library part of the building was not enclosed and was surrounded by Greek columns. I started wandering around the hallway looking for my apartment. finally i found it. i was sitting in my living room and i looked to my right. i saw a door leading into another room and the computer tech guy from school was in there, talking on the phone in a huddled and secretive way and playing a game on his computer. i called his name and he turned around and smiled at me. i decided i didn't like it there because it didn't feel like my home. i went into the hallway and got lost again. i was trying to find my way out and back to my car. somewhere i stumbled across RJ. he was going to take his boss home because his boss was drunk. he wanted me to stay at home, but i had to get out of there because it was too weird feeling. i told him i would be back in just a little while. i walked with him towards the door. it was dark and RJ's boss sat down on the couch to put his shoes on. my mom was sitting on the couch and he sat very close to her which startled her. he was trying to sweet talk my mom, but RJ dragged him through the door. i saw my dad on a little platform over us, watching TV in the dark in his underwear. i told him he better put some clothes on, because down the hall were a bunch of girls getting ready to sing. he didn't seem to care. i was about to leave when my mom yelled at me and told me i shouldn't go. i told her she couldn't keep me there. she told me that yes she could, this was her house! i replied back that no, i live in an apartment which just happens to be inside her house (which also just happened to be my school and a castle). i finally got outside and saw that was it gray and rainy. i tried to go down the steps and to my car, but the steps turned fun house style and became a slide. i slid a little ways down to the bottom and then got stuck in some sort of netting. while i was trying to get out of the netting i heard some guy behind me yelling over a megaphone something about "who wants to guess..." i tried to ignore him and just get in my car, but he had some sort of control over my car and he made it so that i couldn't turn the key easily to unlock the door. i had to use all my strength but finally i overpowered him and got in my car. i drove away and was just starting to drive down the road when my phone rang. it was RJ. he wanted to know what was taking me so long and why wasn't i back home yet? i told him there was some trouble and i was on my way back home. when i hung up my phone i looked at it. it was playing a video that was Super Mario style graphics. it was Lennie and George from Of Mice and Men and they were eating each other. somehow cannibalism made perfect sense to me and totally explained the major theme of the book. i couldn't believe i had been so blind.

in my dream i was dreaming......

while i was dreaming i noticed this spirit entity, almost like a ball of light distortion that was following me around. i woke up and told a few people about this and they thought i was crazy. i was realyl creeped out because i felt invaded and iw anted to know what the entity was, so i continued to tell people about it. eventually i found 2 or 3 other people who had been experiencing the same thing. it turned out that it was not multiple entities in our dreams, but the same one travelling between us. we wanted to know what it was doing and why and whether or not it was harming us. we developed a machine that was able to track the entity in our dreams and take pictures of it, literally capturing pictures of whatever we were dreaming about and also capturing the entity.

...........then i woke up for real. we never figured out what it was doing, but i think that could be a pretty cool book or movie if i developed the idea a little more.

something about being at grandma's house and i ate too many beets. grandpa was going to be upset because there weren't enough for him. RJ and i left there and i decided to go to church. for some reason i had ruby wtih me. across the church an old lady's book caught fire. the church caught it fast so we all had to run outside. i was holding Ruby trying to keep her from running away. my parents and i were trying to figure out where to go, since their car had already caught fire completely and was gone. we decided to jump in Jason M.'s car with my mom in the driver seat, me next to her, and my dad in the back. jason's car had two steering wheels. I think Ruby had gotten hurt in the fire. i let her hop into the back seat with my dad so he could hold her. my mom was having ar eally hard time driving the car. turns out the only route we could take was the one my dad ran along which followed some train tracks. so we drove the car on the tracks, which was working out pretty well...until the tracks disappeared because people were tearing them up by our house to get rid of them. the car swirved to a stop and we all jumped out because we were really clsoe to home. i wanted ruby so i could hold her, but when my dad handed her over to me, the only left was her rotting head. she had died in the car. we laid her down on the ground and decided to bury her right there. i went back to the church to see what had happened. there were two men in the church and there were no longer any pews or anything, but there also wasn't any black or any apparent burn damage. the men were trying to figure out what had caused the fire that didn't leave any traces.

My 11th graders had to write sentences using their vocabulary words for the week. One student wrote:



:-D

a bunch of us were in the jungle climbing some trees. a road ran through the middle of it. we wanted to keep playing, but then we saw some big apes. the apes were mad because we were in their territory and so they wanted to kill us. so, we ran through the jungle to try to get away from them. they didn't chase us, just watched us and we were running downhill a little bit, so eventually when we looked back over our shoulders we couldn't see them any more. we crossed the road and ran down into a ravine and hid there. i wanted to go for help so i went off on my own. i ran along the shoulder of the road so i wouldn't get hit by a car. there was a fatherly looking man standing on the side of the road directing 18-wheelers where to turn to deliver their goods. i didn't want to stop running for fear that the apes were following behind me, so as i ran past i yelled to him that we needed help. he thought i was just some punk kid pranking, so he just continued his work. as i ran i slowly left the jungle and the area around me turned into wheat fields and farm land. off in the distance to my left side i saw a clearing and at the back of the clearing were some trees that looked good. i wanted to climb up them and just hide there. i didn't want people to find me any more than i wanted the apes to find me. my motives for running had chancged. now i just wanted to live in peace on my own in the woods. i ran to the edge of the woods because some people were walking along the road and i didn't want them to see me. i climbed up a small tree to hide, but as i climbed i realized i was climbing up a mirror. i thought this would still be good to hide behind so i stayed there for a few seconds. i glanced down and looked in the mirror to see what was behind me and i saw a beautiful white colonial farm house that looked empty. i decided this would be a better place to live than in the woods, so i decided to make a run for it. i managed to get to the back of the hosue without the people from the road seeing me, and so i went inside. i heard some noise coming from a room upstairs, so i decided to go up and investigate. it turned out that RJ had found this house a long time ago and had made it a place where we could get married and live in together. he was upstairs in the bedroom waiting to surprise me. the only catch was that it was all a secret, no one could know that we were living in the house. we snuggled up in a bed and were looking out the window at the fields in front of the house when i saw something coming towards the house. it was the people from the road that i was hiding from earlier. it was a man and a woman, the woman was wearing a wedding gown. we decided the best thing for us to do would be to hide in the bedroom and stay quiet. the man and woman entered the house and began to look around. for some reason i went downstairs. the house had changed and now ryan and i were in a guest house behind the main house. the man and woman were in the main house. i wanted to get a closer look so i snuck inside. i was hiding behind some stairs, but the woman found me. she wasn't mad that we were living in the guest house. they were only going to use the main house for their wedding. it turns out they had won the location through a radio station that was giving away weddings. i continued to talk with the couple about their wedding for a few minutes, when i looked out the window toward the guest house. in the upstairs window a television set was glaring bright. i said to myself, "good thing these people don't care that we are here, or else that tv would give us away for sure." rj and i decided that we would let these people use the house and we wouldn't live there. we began to walk back to my parents' house to tell them the news. when we got there my mom was running around the yard with the dog. my dad was videotaping her. i looked into the camera and it looked like she was wearing a pink flowing dress, but when i looked back at her i could tell it was just a trick of the light.

So...I was just driving home from work and I was in the left turn lane of my street. A car pulled up next to me with two guys and two girls, about my age or maybe a couple years younger. I glances over and took a quick peek at the car, then I decided to change the radio station so I looked down. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving back and forth so I looked back over at the car and the guy in the back seat was waving at me. He smiled and held up a disposable camera with a goofy grin so I laughed and smiled, and he took my picture. That was one of the most unique things that has ever happened to me. In retrospect I am now wondering if he took my picture because he thought I was pretty, or because he thought I was funny looking, haha!

PS: total miles driven on this weekend's road trip = 604