Whoa. This has been a totally weird week. The company I'm contracting for announced they're being acquired by Wachovia. So either I'll be asked to clean out my desk (won't take long) next week, or they're extending our contracts through August 25th.

Either way, I'm signed up to dog sit in Alameda May 27-June 29. Don't even ask me how that happened.

And this morning I was asked (again) if I would be available for an interview for an article with Alameda Magazine about -- which seems to be on the brink of disappearing.

I keep trying to get back to the right place at the right time. Thought I was back on track, but now not so sure.

News Flash!!!! (this just in from Larry)

Buzzcocks will be at Mezzanine Thursday, July 27; tickets go on sale on Saturday, May 20 at noon. They are also going to be on the bill of this year's Warped Tour, at Piers 30/32 on Saturday, July 8 (the day after Rev Horton Heat plays the Fillmore), along with Joan Jett and a host of others.

Ok, I've got a waypoint plotted back to the right place, right time. I'll just hope for the best.

So, I had this dream last night that (e:PMT) came to visit me (a peep can dream, can't she?) and I was so excited they were going to stay with me and I could finally show them around San Francisco.

Flash forward to Thursday night in my dream. I'm driving home from work and all of a sudden I realize, OMG!!! (e:PMT) have been here for almost a week and they've been trapped in my place and couldn't go see anything on their own because I took the car to work! I was so freaked out. In my head I kept calculating just how much of their time I had wasted -- and wondering why didn't they come last Friday or Saturday so we could have a couple weekend days first? But it all boiled down to me taking the car.

So I get home, ready to make amends, and there's (e:PMT) with my Dad. I don't know how Dad got into this dream, but he's grilling a huge steak for us to eat, so obviously I have to let him stay, haha. Dad loves his meat rarer than rare, but for some reason, it's taking a long time to grill this one. Since it's already 11pm and I know I have to work again tomorrow, I decide to sneak out and plan a sightseeing itinerary for (e:PMT).

I wish you could have been there for this part. It's the typical harrowing gamut of all things feared in your life. I'm thinking, "I can't map this out for them! I know how great the view is at the end, and even I don't want to go here!" Then I realized I had also forgotten my camera, so I couldn't even take a picture for them.

For some reason, I was convinced they couldn't see what I wanted them to see unless I showed them, or took a picture. And I was also convinced I couldn't change my schedule so I could go with them myself.

It's kind of like this whole long-distance blog thing, when you think about it. haha.

So anyway, if anyone decides to visit me here (before hell freezes over, that is), I really am a dedicated tour guide. Mi coche es tu coche.

In my dream my mother and grandmother are still alive. We were all traveling together and something suddenly happened that killed my Dad. We had to travel back home and it was a long and difficult journey. When we were close to home my grandmother said when we get back we should take my mother out to a nice place for dinner - some place where she could wear her white suit. The night we got back my sister had to go for a fitting for a wedding she was in, so I knew she couldn't have dinner with us. For some reason I thought my grandmother couldn't eat until 7PM, and with my sister not being able to eat with us, I decided the best thing would be for a family friend to take my Mom for dinner at a nice place at her regular dinner time. When I picked Grandma up and drove to our restaurant for dinner and my mother wasn't there, it suddenly dawned on me I should be with my mother that night no matter what. My grandmother thought we were meeting my mother there and she kept saying "where's Sonja? We have to be with Sonja now." Which obviously is so true.

I hate dreams like that.

I'm sure there are many personal inadequacies illustrated in that dream, but the one that stands out most for me is my tendency to overthink/overorchestrate things to the point where I miss the heart of the mattter. I don't think I was ever so heartless in real life as I was in my dream. But no doubt if my life were ever audited, the shortcomings would speak for themselveds.

More to come, but my friend Steve just called...

I had a weird dream last night that I finally decided to take advantage of the health care coverage I started shelling $162/mo out for last month. When I went in for my appointment, I chatted with the woman at the front desk for a while, then she gave me a form to fill out. I started filling out the form and realized it was a job application. All the people manning the front desk were busy chatting up other applicants, so I just kept filling it out, thinking maybe I'd end up getting a job with paid health care benefits, then I could make a medical appointment later. This guy comes over and asks me if I want to help test out the new ping pong table - I can finish filling out my form there. I go over and sure enough, 2 people are playing ping pong on one side of the table and they have 3 chairs set up on the other side and one chair is free. I sit down to finish the form and this facilities-type guy asks me if I want a Pod workstation? The guy who invited me to the ping pong table answers '"no, she wants a kneeling workstation like everyone else." I'm thinking wait a minute, what's a Pod workstation? Or a kneeling workstation? Do these guys know I haven't even finished filling out the form yet? I try to go back to the form for the third time and I'm still at the question "Have you been distracted much lately?" At this point we discover there's a hole in the carpet under the table and decide to tear it up to see what's underneath. There are a few other layers of crappy carpets, then what looks like it could be a nice wood floor.

Then a whole bunch of other crazy sh!t happens. But to finally answer the question, YES! I HAVE BEEN A LITTLE DISTRACTED LATELY!!!

Before I get distracted again, let me respond to (e:Jim)'s [inlink]twisted,288[/inlink] comment. Yeah, I did add more memory. Like so many things in life, if I had it all to do again, I would do things differently. Not that I'm unhappy with the ways things turned out so far, but I spent a bunch of time researching the best deal, which probably would have been to use the Macworld value code (MWSF) at Eunitek to get the $1649 promotional price. But when I went to do that, the price came up as only $1,614.05! Wow! But when I actually added the 20" Core Duo to my cart, the price stayed $1,614.05, but the item in my cart was the G5. I called them up and walked them through recreating it, and they told me to call on Monday to place my order. I said the point is, there may be a lot of unhappy customers ordering an iMac Duo but getting a G5, or being charged the wrong amount, or both. He had no answer for that.

Between that and a number of other near-misses, fantastic treatment at the Apple store where they let me try out the wireless mouse even though there's no way to keep one out for demo purposes and have it secured, free shipping from Apple.com and the $100 rebate for the printer ($50 more than any where else), I ultimately decided I would gladly give Steve Jobs my last cent. Which ironically is pretty much [inlink]twisted,288[/inlink] what happened. Ha! Post-Macworld euphoria might have had something to do with it too.

I had them put in a 1G SODIMM in place of the standard 512MB for an extra $100. Which is crazy I know because I could get the 1G for $100 and end up with 1.5G (my ex gave me the same advice). That is definitely one of the things I would do differently. If I had, my iMac almost certainly would have shipped a day sooner, and I would have gotten the full rebate (I'll still get $50 from Canon), which would have paid for the memory. D'oh! Best laid plans...

I also did not upgrade to the wireless keyboard and mouse, mostly based on reviews/advice to look at other manufacturers or wait for a multibutton wireless mouse from Apple. My ex says a single-button mouse would drive me crazy after being used to multibuttons/scrollwheels with my PC. I'm not so sure. I long for a wireless world in the worst way. The jury is still out on that judgment call.

So, between the mini-vacations to [c]secondlife[/c] and [c]there[/c] plus my usual loitering around the 'strip, I've been spending a fair amount of time directly or indirectly with (e:paul) lately. Now he's actually crossed over to my dream state in kind of a weird way. Maybe I shouldn't admit this but I've had (e:strip) dreams before, and that didn't alarm me. But this is different. Apologies to all the dream diarists out there that I can't remember details of the dreams themselves, but the thing that was weird is the formatting of the dreams. In the lower right-hand corner of my imaginary field of vision was a fixed, semi-transparent, scaled-down userpic, kind of like the station ID logos you now see watermarked on all the TV stations. Except this was (e:paul) 's blinking eye userpic. I can honestly say I don't remember ever having a dream formatting issue like this before. It was freaky and comforting all at the same time. I have no idea what it means.

Hey, estrip dream journalists -

Check out www.slowwave.com, a collective diary of dreams submitted by different people from around the world and drawn as a comic strip by Jesse Reklaw. You can submit your dreams there and they may end up in his weekly comic strip, although neither of mine did. Oh well.

The strips are archived going back to 2002.
I even bought some of his self-published dream comic books

This article will give you some insight into how he chooses which dreams to draw.