Weird-Ass Dream

Just woke up from a weird-ass dream.

I was in New York City, in Central Park, where a Russian mud-flat and hot-spring was on tour. There were warm bubbling pits of sloppy mud, quivering mud towers that undulated and grew as the locals threw mud balls at it, twisted mud formations, and the piece de resistance was a huge brackish pool with a gargantuan alligator which seemed to be made of bronze.

All the plaques were in Cyrillic, and I had the hardest time transliterating them.

I woke up after some mud-hurling yabo and I inadvertantly wandered into that huge brackish pool to warm our muddy feet, and I saw the huge alligator turn toward me. I turned away and did not run, but walked deliberately as the yabo called out to his beer-swilling friends that the water was fine.

All the time, I was wondering how such a geologically unstable area could possibly go "on tour".

Zo, Herr Freud, WTF?

Daddy "DUH" moment

This morning, while herding the cats that are my two daughters into the car to take them to school, I saw my elder packing a bright pink plastic recorder into her backpack. For those of you with musical taste, a "recorder" is a medieval instrument which is officially part of the woodwind family, but it's the member of the family that dropped out of the orchestra and had to take a civil-service job. Schools like it because it's easy to play; listeners hate it because it's easy to play wrong.

Anyway, while merrily packing it, my daughter happily narrated "It's new and improved!". I vaguely recalled that she had a school-issued recorder before, and that it was a dull brown, so this was obviously a new recorder. But, being a dull-witted grown-up, I actually had to ask, "What's improved about it?".

My daughter gave me that look as if she were explaining the rules of "Tag" to someone who really should know them: "It's pink."

Of course. Duh.