Rain Update

We finally have had enough rain to display above the bottom of the chart.

The amount of rain and its timing are fairly random, but....

Here comes the rain again

Falling on my head like a memory

Falling on my head like a new emotion

I want to walk in the open wind

—Annie Lennox and David A. Stewart

This probably isn’t interesting to anyone except Suna and me. After an inch of rain over the last two nights, our ponds are finally full again.

The top chart shows we have had enough actual rain this year to climb onto the chart. Based on a completely unreliable model, we should have a fairly wet year this year. Last year, we finished with an slightly better than average year. But we had enough rain to meet that milestone by the end of June when the taps turned off for a couple of months.

The bottom chart shows when we get rain each year since I’ve been living on the Hermit’s Rest Ranch. While monthly distributions are fairly chaotic, it’s starting to feel more like a tropical pattern. That is, we get heavier rains early in the year, almost nothing through the summer, and light rains in the fall. Unless a tropical storm or hurricane brings a flood.

The pattern of rains, their scarcity, and the melting of the permafrost have been causing me nightmares of late. The climate is always changing, but is this the beginning of the apocalypse climate scientists are warning of? As my dad used to say, “We’ll see.”

Working for Another Grateful Monday

This lonely flower lived just long enough to bloom. Dad says we have to be more like plants and animals. They do whatever they can to survive. Maybe that’s why he has lived as long as he has.

This is a time of sadness for me. I have been having film noir dreams again about an alternate reality where I live alone in a dingy one-room shack somewhere on the Texas coast where I grew up. Last night I dreamed I awoke to go to the bathroom, where I knocked over the box fan that cooled the house and circulated heat from a space heater in the winter. Then I explored a countertop piled with debris, junk gathered over a lifetime but with too much sentimental value to throw out. All this with a sense of comfortable resoluteness and acceptance of such a fate.

I think these dreams—I can’t call them nightmares because no matter how horrifying they are, they are not scary until I wake up and think about them—must stem from the trapped feeling that unemployment brings.

I hate not having a job. I hate not being able to provide. And I hate that I had to sell part of a farm that has been in the family for more than a hundred years—even if Dad suggested it and basically told me who he wanted to have it. It is a bittersweet legacy.

But sometimes to prosper in the long term, we have to survive the short term. As Greenspan once said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” So I am grateful that I have that bittersweet legacy to help me survive the short run. I am grateful that Dad advised me to sell. And as much as it irks me to listen to him tell the same stories over and over, I am glad that he is still around at 85 to do so.

Mohammed’s Radio

Nine of Swords—The Nightmare Card
Photo Source: Learn Tarot

Everybody’s restless and they’ve got no place to go

Someone’s always trying to tell them

Something they already know

—Warren Zevon

As part of last week’s Friday Feast, I said that I seldom remember my dreams. That was enough to get my id upset. So two nights in a row, I have awakened in the middle of the night—OK, an hour or so before the alarm—after a bad dream. I can’t really call them nightmares because they left me more uncomfortable than frightened.

Endless Work Obligations

I was in a meeting at work. It was at ALE, in the department where I currently contract. My employers kept loading on more and more responsibilities and tightening deadlines in the way that ALE does. I was trying to tell them that I couldn’t possibly accomplish everything they wanted by the end of my contract. But all that came out was, “OK.” I couldn’t get back to sleep after this one and eventually woke Suna up a few minutes before the alarm. Sigh.

Wolves not drempt
Photo Source: Veracity

The “Wolf” That Wouldn’t Die

Suna and I were looking at a house in the country. It closely resembled a floor plan she showed me just before we turned in—a nice two-story that was sided in rough cedar and nestled between a couple of hills. I went out on the back deck to look over the lake. Suddenly, a wolf-like creature started running over the surface of the lake, almost directly at me. I knew this, even though the deck was probably 40 feet above the lake.

Luckily, I had an automatic rifle handy. I squeezed of a shot and missed. Then I missed again. I held down the trigger for a short burst. The creature went down, rolling over backward. Then it got back up. It ran past me. I emptied the cartridge. Again and again, it got back up each time I hit it.

Finally, I woke up. I was not scared so much as frustrated, and I had a very full bladder. I went back to sleep fairly quickly after crawling back in and pulling up the covers.

Now I don’t want to go into a deep analysis of these dreams. It is fairly obvious that I am worried about something, probably nothing that a stable job wouldn’t provide the right ammunition for.

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31 October. Another interpretation of the second dream, if not this sequence, is that I have been feeling my own mortality recently. Death stalks us all. We may knock it back a bit, but it always gets up. Just like in those stupid horror movies.

Báthory Dreams

Elizabeth Báthory:
The Bloody Lady of Čachtice Photo Source: Wikipedia

I don’t know what it is. First it was zombies at work. Last night it was Elizabeth Báthoryrunning a theme park in southeast Houston. The dream was plotted like a bad horror movie.

I started out looking for auto parts in what I think was Spring, Texas as it was in the early 1980s. I found out that I could get the part I needed but only if I traveled across Houston at rush hour. Somehow, that involved walking through a multi-level mall, where I became unconscious.

Still in the dream, I came to in a dungeon-like setting. The view zoomed down a long hall of rickety wooden stairs and dirt walls. I remember thinking, “That is a really cheesy effect!” And then we were at the room at the end of the hall. There was a very pale woman taking a blood bath, and I knew immediately that it was Elizabeth Báthory.

So she was a real vampire after all. At least, in the dream she was immortal. She seemed to be absorbing the blood through her skin like a sponge. It would run off of her skin like water, leaving the skin the color of limestone, unblemished and unstained.

Then the scene changed again. I was in a set of review stands. There were hawkers selling Elizabeth Bathory products to the spectators. A bound young woman was brought out to the theater floor. She was forced to kneel in the dirt and beheaded over a bathtub. The spectators all thought it was part of the show. I seemed to be the only one in the dream who knew it was real.

I knew I had to escape. Or to help someone else escape. But EB’s minions were loyal. Violence ensued. Then the alarm.

For such a dream, there was no emotional involvement, not even the involvement I would get from watching a movie. Not even dread. Just plodding through the plot. The characters were all involved. Even when the dream was in first person, I was detached from it. Strange really.