Friday, February 11, 2005
I dreamt last night I was helping someone dust off a bookcase that hadn't been used in a while and I had to find a new location in a house for it. I also dreamt that there was a transportation network specifically for Hispanic and Latina women who didn't have any other transportation resources. In any Hispanic or Latin neighborhood you could call out a destination and polite, smiling men would come out to offer to take you in their cars to the destination you had called out. I also dreamt that I was at a car wash. I wasn't in any car but had approached on foot. A whole lot of cars had lined up to get washed and the car wash shop was run by a single man running a garden hose. (I didn't see any soap stage—only a rinse stage.) Somehow I had gotten hold of a garden hose as well, and I saw that Chris and Nate were waiting in line to get their RV washed, so I took the hose and did a pre-wash—just getting it wet for when the real car wash guy got to them. The RV they drove had solarium windows on the side—the kind with dark brown tint and angled roofs that you see in restaurants all across America. The weird part was that on top it was not all sealed. It wasn't damaged, but in between the windows on top there were spots where water could fall into the RV. Once I realized this, I moved the water to other parts of the RV. This led to the discovery of spider nests lodged in cracks of the RV's shell, such as behind rear view mirrors or where the cab attached to the rest of the RV. I distinctly remember an observer next to me yell out, "Spider nests! Ugh!" Almost exactly as he said that, the spiders seemed to multiply at a great rate, and next thing I knew cobwebs stretched from the top of the RV to several yards away, and they were filled with fist-sized spiders who were either sleeping or just waking from slumber. As some of them turned to crawl toward me, I turned the water hose on them, and they were washed away. I sprayed and kept moving to keep them away. Sometimes my water would die for a few seconds, and I kept looking over to the real car wash guy to see if he was doing something to cause that, but I couldn't figure out why it was happening. It lasted only a few seconds, but it happened often enough to cause a tense situation to build. (In hindsight, this must have just been the work of *the writers*.) I looked down at my feet and there were thousands of tiny crickets—each about the size of my thumbnail—and they were all chirping. It reminded me of how in real life in Southern California after a rainstorm the sidewalks would "sing" like crickets as some kind of basic science interaction took place among the concrete, the air, and the water. Fortunately, the crickets in the dream were not malevolent.—Usual breakfast at the cafeteria. Linkchecking. Updated one migration page based on feedback from Forrest. Migrated a laptop to the new campus domain with Kraig's help. Other maintenance for Chris's laptop. Lunch: usual lunch from Panda Express. Joel and Melissa accompanied me in our food gathering (tho Melissa didn't get anything). Chris's laptop took a long time (70 seconds) to log in to Windows XP, and although there appear to be many possible solutions for this the one that worked for me was Article ID 840669: "Group Policy startup scripts do not run as expected on a computer that is running Windows 2000, Windows XP Service Pack 1, or Windows XP Service Pack 2": Set GpNetworkStartTimeoutPolicyValue to 60 and restart. (60 worked for me.) Dinner at home with Patrick: non-Chilean sea bass, mac and cheese, Nicoise salad. Tony Q picked me up and we drove to the Castro and got parking instantly in front of 2225 Market. We went to BriKelJess's—he met them all for the first time. It's BK's birthday, and pretty much everybody was in the house: KH, Fruity, Hussein, Nina, Eddie, Simma, Catherine, Amy, Adrian, Nico, Brian V, Nick, Brian T, Chris, Trudy, JJ, Nicole. Two birthday cakes: one round and one log, Dreyer's vanilla ice cream. BK got an iPod sock hand-crocheted by Brian V, Star Wars 4 5 6 on DVD and lollipops, a fancy wine opener, an arrow and kewpie keychain doll, ferrero-rocher candies, a Pasquini coffee grinder from the hawk, a Virgin recordstore gift card. I gave him a Pac-Man t-shirt. Since the last time I saw them, they have a new HDTV and a tiny Playstation. The game of the moment was one in which you play a sticky ball and roll around picking things up. As you get larger and larger you're able to pick up larger things such as people and fences.