Zydrate Comes in a Little Glass Vial

I'm awake, and having paid off my sleep debt by sleeping for 9 hours, I'm rather alert as well, which is a new and unusual thing for me--at least, the combination of being alert in the morning is... Not that I would have normally had a sleep debt, as it's the holidays, but I'd only gotten about five hours of sleep between Saturday and Sunday and Sunday is usually a quite busy day for me.

It's only been a week since the last post, but it's still been a pretty packed time--not very, not at all, but things have happened and so I shall be my usual loquacious self about them; though, of course, my memory is hardly the most trustworthy source of information around, it's still the only source of information about those things. Heh.

Last week I and the FYP-mate met up to attempt to make some progress on the FYP; it wasn't too long before we both found the machines that we wanted to use occupied (apparently the holidays are a very popular time for people to catch up on their FYPs) and found that some of the information we wanted unavailable and both the professors weren't to be found in their offices. So we decided to do the literature review--with two people working on it we managed to get the rough draft finished in 1.5 days, and the next portion will be the polishing--and in the meantime one of the professors has been ascertained to be away on holiday, while the other did reply our email. So we're meeting again in about half an hour to discuss revised parameters: at our original plans we'd have had to make a good 900 pits, each of which requires anywhere from one to two hours to make; I'm thinking of maybe revising it to 64 pits (approximately 1/16 the original!) which is still up to 128 hours' working, which is still a challenge--the lab's only open 5 days a week and of those it only works for 8 hours; which essentially still means 1.5 weeks per sample, and we do want at least three samples to work with. So that's one of the things we'll have to figure out as we go.

But my main reason for writing this post was that I had two rather odd--decidedly unsettling!--dreams last night. Or technically this morning, since I'm relatively sure they occurred after midnight. But they were still unsettling; I don't know what caused them, and I've no idea if they say something about my inner self or something. But I shall record them, and all you Freudians or Jungians can dissect them as you please.

Dream #1 was set in the grandfolks' in So Hour; I and the Gobbler were there, and I was eating instant noodles from out of a polystyrene bowl. We were both in the dining area, though the Gobbler wasn't eating anything. Suddenly two women walked in, both in professional dress; both the women looked like grown up, grown out versions of the Brats, and they seemed to know the Gobbler. Being curious even in my own dreams, I eavesdropped (though they were all talking loudly and frankly everybody could have heard them) and it soon transpired that the Gobbler had rendered them some kind of service at great cost to himself, and they had promised reimbursement, and this visit was to tell him that the reimbursement was not forthcoming. Upon which it got louder, as he was irate and they were defensive, and I was irate as well and went up and poured the Maggi over the head of the one who looked like the oldest Brat, upon which the other Brat-like took out a camera, smiled in an oily fashion, and snapped a picture. The rest of the dream was a rather bloodthirsty sequence of events, in which I was roundly abusing the Brat-likes--curiously, nobody intervened--while they threatened exposure, expulsion, etc. And then I woke up and lay there for awhile, and then fell asleep again.

Dream #2 was also set in the grandfolks' at So Hour, but this time I was there with the Empress; Youngest Uncle was there, too, and behaving oddly--very misogynistic, very sharp of tongue (admittedly he'd always been, but not to family--not very much anyway), that sort of thing--and oddly, again, nobody seemed to notice. And all the time I was getting more and more agitated about it, and finally on the night before I and the Empress were due to travel away from the house (though I've no idea where we were going to travel to), I finally burst out: "Wasn't he supposed to be, you know, dead?" For Youngest Uncle has been dead for over a year--the funeral is documented in the blog for that time--and I was there to see the cremated remains, the urn, etc.--and the Empress didn't seem to notice the question the first time. I asked again, and she shrugged. "Cannot come back meh?" She took the intervening silence, during which my jaw was busy picking itself up off the floor, to wonder whether the next day was a public holiday.

After that I woke again and lay in bed until the alarm went off--maybe ten minutes or so...

This morning when I woke up I found several SMSes reminding me of things I'd totally forgotten about, which goes to show how bad my memory is and how loose my grasp of time has become. Neither of which is a good thing, of course, not when school's due to begin in less than fifteen days.