Dreaming, Vol. 3

Last night's dream:

I was living in a dorm or apartment building of some kind. The building had a big, open common room where there were couches and ping-pong tables, and where the mailboxes were located.

For some reason, I had placed a bunch of possessions on one of the couches and was going back and forth between the my room and the common area. Maybe I was moving in or out.

I went to place some letters in the outgoing mail slot, and then gathered up some of the things on the couch. Another guy I didn't know was there, and he glanced at me, then picked up my sleeping bag (the really good one I have in real life) and started walking away. I thought that he thought that these were someone else's things, and that we both were making off with some loot.

"Hey, put that down. Are you trying to steal that?" I yelled.

He put it down, and kind of hurriedly moved away. There were others in the room, and I called out to them that the guy had just tried to steal my stuff.

That's all I remember.

----------------

After waking up, I felt kind of bad. I wondered if the unknown guy had been trying to help me carry the stuff to wherever it was I was going. I had just assumed he was stealing.

Should I feel guilty for rushing to judgment on someone who doesn't exist?

Power outage

The power went off tonight, somewhere around 6 p.m.

I'm obsessive about power surges ruining my computer - even though I use a protective power strip, I unplug even that when I'm not using the computer - so the fact that everything flicked off when I was online caused me immediate concern.

My house is in some disarray, but fortunately I remembered that I still had my winter storm survival pack assembled - and it contained a headlamp. I dug it out, checked around the house (the dog got scared and left the comfort of the recliner for the cocoon-like safety of her crate), and then did about the only thing I could do - bury myself under some blankets, turn on the battery-powered radio and read by the light of the headlamp.

I thought about how much my life requires electricity - especially in winter. No power means no heat (the furnace and space heaters are all I've got), no water (the well requires electricity, though I always keep some pitchers / jugs filled for these situations), no cooking. I think I can manually open the garage door, but even that would require some figuring out because it's attached to an automatic opener. At least my neighbors have a fireplace that can heat their house, so I know I wouldn't freeze in a prolonged power outage - though my house's pipes would.

After maybe 15 minutes, the power came back on... and a couple minutes later, it went off again. Another 15 minutes and it came back. It's been hours now, and no further issues.

I'm not sure what caused the outage - no snow today, relatively warm weather. In any case, the house is warm, the dog is back on the recliner and the computer seems to be fine.

Semi-detached

I did a bad thing a year or so ago.

I watched "Duel."

Stepping back for a moment, I am a person who has issues with horror or suspense movies. It's not that I'm scared. Actually, if I watch one, I usually enjoy it. It's just that sometimes the disturbing characters and images contained within those films kind of stick with me, and, say, pop into my mind as I head into the dark basement.

So, "Duel."

Screenshot of the truck from "Duel" (image from Wikipedia)

----------------------

I had heard of the movie before. Released in 1971, it was Steven Spielberg's first feature film. The basic premise is a man driving on a remote stretch of highway in the Desert Southwest gets into an ongoing brouhaha with an ominous, unseen tanker-truck driver (you see the truck, not the driver). The unseen truck driver keeps trying to kill him.

I caught it while flipping through channels, and proceeded to watch the whole movie. It was a good thriller. But then tonight, as I was driving home from work, it came back to me.

I was about to turn up Mesaba Avenue when a plain, unmarked semi came barreling up the boulevard. It was kind of jarring, because you don't often see full-size semis tearing up Mesaba, and because it was 1 a.m.

The truck had to stop at the next light, and I passed it in the left lane after the light turned green. I saw it in the rear-view mirror - anonymous, big... and "Duel" popped into my mind.

I found myself driving kind of fast, and actually felt a bit of relief when I made it through the light at Mesaba and Central Entrance - and watched it turn red before that truck could get through. I was safe... from what, I'm not quite sure.

Dog rivalry

I took Yukon for a walk down the gravel town road behind my property a few days ago. A little ways down the street is a house on the south side of the road, with an open field of untouched snow directly across the road on the north side.

As we approached the house, a big yellow dog started howling. It was tied up, standing in the driveway in the below-zero morning cold. It quieted down a bit while we neared, and Yukon tentatively stepped toward it (though because it was tied up on private property, I wasn't going to let them meet up close).

Just as she stepped forward, the yellow dog launched a massive barking salvo. Yukon jumped back and skittered away down the road. Here is a file photo of Yukon running:

Well, the walk was an out-and-back, so we had to pass by the house again. Right as we got to the driveway, the yellow dog started barking again. Yukon stopped, looked at the tied-up dog, and then leaped out into the open field across the street, jumping and bounding in circles through the snow in full sight of the other dog. She jumped back over the snowbank into the street where I was waiting, and we continued on our way.

It kind of seemed like an "in-your-face" moment aimed at that other dog. Maybe there is some attitude to go along with Yukon's insatiable appetite.

My own mini-"Friday the 13th"

One of the things I like about going back home to West Bend to visit is that I know my family's land and the surrounding area well enough to walk it on a dark night without a flashlight. There is a plot of about 12 acres of woods I can traverse - on or off-trail - on a moonless night, and another several hundred acres surrounding it in which I know all the trails by heart. It's something I'm quite proud of - and it's something I'm working on at my home in Duluth.

Even with all that knowledge, though, there still is a sight that puts a tinge of fear into my mind:

It's a motion-sensor light atop a shed maybe an eighth of a mile from the house, at the far end of the yard, on the edge of the woods. Its purpose is to light the way if you need to get something out of the shed at night, but every so often when I'm home alone - and it happened again while I was visiting earlier this week - the light flicks on when I'm in the house.

"It's just a deer," I always tell myself. And there is a 99.9 percent chance it is just a deer that tripped the light. But there's always that one-tenth of one percent chance that it is a homicidal maniac skulking around the woods on a dark night, or a lone mountain lion waiting to pounce should I go out to investigate.

I was never a big fan of the Friday the 13th movies, and I've only seen bits and pieces of a few, but looking out the kitchen window and seeing those bare light bulbs flick on in the distance, when I'm home alone, on a pitch-black night.... it always makes me think of those films.

Scavengers

I've read stories about Great Lakes shipwrecks in the 1800s in which the cargo from the doomed vessel washed ashore, providing a windfall of loot for people living in lakeside communities. As the stranded ship broke apart on a reef offshore, residents would gather on the beach to collect whatever boxes of cargo floated in on the waves.

I visited my hometown over the holidays and was reminded of incidents from my childhood that were kind of the same. I grew up on a rural highway that curved along the shore of a lake, with houses on one side and the lake on the other. The road proved difficult to navigate for someone not paying attention or driving impaired, and a few times some unfortunate sap ran off the highway.

The biggest "incident" happened one evening at dinner time. Our kitchen table was in front of a big patio door that looked out over our yard down to the road. If you were driving west near my house, the road curved a bit to the south (to the left). If you did not make the subtle curve and went straight ahead, off the road, our small "school bus stop" shelter was dead-center.

That's exactly what happened on this summer evening. I probably was 6 or 7. We heard a crash, looked out and saw a car crashed into the rock wall of our garden down by the road, with the shattered wood remnants of the school bus stop strewn on and about the car.

To make matters worse, for us kids at least, is that during summer vacation our school bus stop was used to store all of the inflatable swimming toys for use at the lake across the road.

My memories are a bit hazy, but I remember the whole family running down to the road to see the crash scene, the sheriff coming, etc. The guy was not injured, and had either fallen asleep or was drunk (again, hazy memory). What is clear in my memory, though, is that my brothers and I picked up all kinds of auto parts off the guy's car. We each had our own boxes where we put cool stones, deer antlers and other stuff found in the yard - and to those we added tail lights, bits of grille, maybe a hubcap, etc. We were kind of like those Great Lakes settlers of the 1800s - this treasure trove of cool stuff had fallen into our laps, so we gathered up all the stuff we could get.

I'm not sure what happened to the bits and pieces of wreckage from that particular incident, but when I was home earlier this week I discovered, tucked away in a corner of my room, two other random pieces of cars I had collected around the same time:

On the left is a taillight from a circa-1978 Plymouth Volare that I picked up after some kind of car-jumping or monster truck event at the local Ford dealer. It was one of the wrecks that got crushed during the event, and afterward I scrounged around and picked up the taillight. Around the age of 6 or 7 or 8, I really liked Plymouth Volares because I thought the name sounded cool: Vo - lahr - eh. That may have been just about the only reason to like a Volare.

On the right is a burned-out headlight I snagged from our family's circa-1979 Plymouth Horizon. My dad commuted 60 miles a day in it for the better part of a decade, until it was replaced with a 1988 Dodge Shadow (which years later became my first car). One cold, snowy December night, we were due to visit my great-great aunt in Milwaukee, and our van was in the shop. So, our entire family of six crammed in the Horizon for the 30-mile drive to the big city. I think I sat on the center console between the two front seats. We survived to continue our scavenging ways.

Busy

I am terribly, terribly behind on making a new post here. However, I've posted a couple stories / incidents from the past week on Perfect Duluth Day. So, for now, as I continue to finish Christmas cards and gift acquisition, these will have to do:

Blizzard

Crushed mailbox