Thursday, May 12, 2005

The Frank Sinatra Pudding Bowl

This phrase came from the dream I had this morning... there was something to do with werewolves, a struggle with a member of a civilized group of werewolves living communally (of which I was the leader) and one of its members who had turned wild. Apparently part of our civilized werewolf day was lining up each morning at the Frank Sinatra pudding bowl, and I suppose it was a little humiliating to do, as I quite understood my friend's desire to leave our commune of vegetarian werewolves and join a rock band of flesh-eating werewolves.

I don't think the werewolf part of the dream means anything... the werewolves came directly from the movie I watched last night, Ginger Snaps Back, but the commune part is kind of odd. Still, when I woke up with that dream fresh in my mind, the phrase "Frank Sinatra pudding bowl" leapt out of my mouth and made me laugh.

On the other hand, I have been dreaming about dogs a lot lately. Though part of me insists that these dream-dogs are largely due to the fact that I really want a dog of my own, I nevertheless consulted my dream dictionary on the topic: it said that dogs represent the relationship between our animal nature and our civilized mind. I haven't come to any conclusion about how the dogs in the dream were representing that relationship, nor have I given much thought to the concept of werewolves as dogs and the little drama played out over the Frank Sinatra pudding bowl, but it certainly gives me a little food for thought.

All of this dreaming, or rather all this remembering of one's dreams, is a lovely side-effect of not working... I get to sleep in of a morning, and wake up slowly and comfortably, with none of the traumatic shocks of alarm clocks or dragging myself out of bed at a particular hour to chase the dream memories from my conscious mind.

Now that my cold has gone, and my allergies dulled, I am finally enjoying my time off. I'm getting loads of sleep, spending entire days doing nothing, spending hours reading and watching television. Yesterday I got a good bit of exercise, I was babysitting my uncle's little dog Patty (again with the dogs) and she was pining at the door, so I took her for a long walk around the hills of Piedmont above my house; and while I was out enjoying the sunshine and Patty's antics (she's half shih-tzu and half Scots terrier, black and tufted and utterly adorable and rather lively), I made a bunch of phone calls, using up my cell minutes while catching up with people I haven't talked to in too long.

I've been making a little headway with the job-search, which is quite satisfying... I was called in for a skills test for one of the jobs I applied for at a particular large health-care organization, and I aced the exams, getting 100% on the medical terminology test (about half the questions were things I knew from crosswords and television, but the rest I learned from a textbook Caroline lent me for the purpose), and scoring 62wpm on the typing test; I know I type fast, but I thought I averaged about 60wpm when I was typing out of my head or from dictation, and dropped down to about 50 when I was typing from copy... but not only was I typing from copy, but it was small-written copy, and there was no auto-correct feature. And although I don't really want the job for which this skill-test was ordered (hospital admitting clerk, ew), it was really nice to have my skills affirmed so highly. It was like getting a good grade in school, like getting a gold star stuck on my folder.

And now today I am getting some writing done, which I've wanted to do for some time but haven't... I'm working on the rough drafts of Chapter 3 of Worst Luck, and will hopefully have something better and more polished to show for it in the next day or so. But the main use of my computer time these last few days has been devoted to a new CAD program I got last week... those who know me well are aware of my great love of floor-plans, and this new program is better for drafting floor-plans than my old 3-D house-planner (which was better for getting visuals of spacial relationships). I've drafted beautiful plans for all of the houses I've used in my story so far, and have started work on the next apartment to be featured before I got the novelty of the program out of my system. I'll upload them later on the Worst Luck website so you can have a gander at them.

I'm also going to upload some more pictures there, creating pages of visual references for each of the characters as I go. That way you can see the creative process at work, and I can find out from you if I'm describing things the way I think I am. Besides, I expanded my web domain space a month or so ago, so I really ought to upload some more beefcake... I'm starting to get tired of the galleries I have to choose from.

Imagine getting tired of someone this beautiful:

(PS: before we get to the beautiful boy, I finished Chapter Three this evening, it took considerably less time than I'd feared... I made some significant changes with very few actual edits or additions, and am quite excited by how the chapter turned out. Next, the murder scene and the police! I also uploaded the floor-plans I mentioned earlier, and here are the links to Danny's, Marshall's, and Valerien's apartments. And now, back to your regularly scheduled eye candy...)

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