Confessions of a woman from British Columbia.

The other week I met a woman from British Columbia who was in town for a trade show, and like often happens, she just confessed stuff to me.

Like, four members of her family have been hit by lightning, since they like to stand out on the prairies and watch lightning storms come in.

And, back in 1910 in Ontario, her great-grandfather raped his daughter with Down's Syndrome and got her pregnant, so his two other daughters arranged a hunting "accident" and killed him, and a year later their brother committed suicide, that family unit was so fucked up.

And, her grandmother always told her that "there's nothing uglier than a pretty woman who's a mess in the evening," so with every beer she'd order a glass of water and hold it up and say, "Safety first!".

Party chitchat (2 of 2): A Quebecois guy's New Age-y grandmother.

At that same party, I met a Quebecois guy who started telling me about how New Age-y his grandmother is.

For one, if there's someone kind of Asian-y who passes through her town and they make claims to secret wisdom, she just starts following them.

For another, years ago when he was moving to Chicago and first told her that news, she was like, "Oh, that's where the book of Urantia are from!".

For her, that was the one thing she knew about and associated with Chicago.

Party chitchat (1 of 2): Computer science socialists.

The other week I went to a party for some people who I had met through unionization, and it turns out that a lot of them studied computer science, and were socialists.

"Are most computer science people socialists?", I asked one of them.

"Socialists?", he was like.  "They're not even social!".

A neighborhood sight (2 of 2): No water.

The other week I took a stroll to the quarry park and saw that everything was very green and verdant, but for some reason the fountain hadn't been turned on, even though it's already well into the summer.

When I saw that, I wondered if some internal mechanisms in it must have broken.

A neighborhood sight (1 of 2): Tricycling child.

The other week when I was working from home and working at my table with a sight of the street with my windows open, I saw:

A small girl in a bike helmet that makes her look like a unicorn, tricycling slowly past my window and chanting "rain rain go away," and about eight feet behind her a parent meandering and keeping an eye out on her while she was tricycling and doing her thing.

A dream of my friends the swingers.

The other week I dreamt -

I'm standing in line outside a ticket box office between two doors opening into a theater, and I see the swingers coming up behind me, very well-dressed as if going to some elegant event.

I'm fortunately carrying the copy of this one book about the evolutionary biology of animal mating that I wanted to recommend to the swinger woman, so I pull it out to show her, and she's interested, but a bit busy and they move to go into an alternate entrance to the theater, to wherever glamorous they were going, not brusquely or anything, but just because it was an odd moment for me to bring that up to them.

. . .

(I actually had been reading a book like that, and had been meaning to email the swinger woman to recommend it to her, since it's the kind of thing she'd like.)

A dream of coffee creamer.

The other week I dreamt -

I'm at an open supermarket fridge display case, and am looking through cartons of milk for a carton of coffee creamer.  There's all different names, and somehow I end up looking at a carton advertising high milk fat percentage, and I wonder if that's coffee creamer.

. . .