Dream Journal: February 9, 2010

Every now and then I have one of those dreams which has nothing particularly weird in at all.  Those are the ones that freak me out the most, because I really wonder what’s up to lead my head down that path:

I was in a real estate office, signing papers to purchase a new house.  Only after I signed did we go to look at the house.  (Okay, so there was one weird bit.)

The house was in a residential neighborhood, at the end of a street with some trees beyond it.  The house was small, one story, with an attached garage.  Inside, one room was painted blue with white trim, and had a loose pile shag carpet of the same color blue, with white flecks in it.  (Lint would never show on this carpet.)  Another room was olive green, with the same style carpet, again matching.

The garage was small, only suitable for a small car, and it still had boxes in it from a previous tenant.  There were also a couple cool bookcases (with no books on them).  With the stuff in the garage, there might not have been room even for a car.  I remember thinking that the house didn’t have room for all my stuff and my boyfriend’s.

Beyond the trees was a small ravine with a rushing stream at the bottom.  I was worried that the stream might flood with the rains, but when we went into the house’s basement, it was well sealed (although I’m not sure how we could tell).

That’s it for the dream.  In the real world, my boyfriend and I have talked about eventually combining households, presumably selling our existing houses and buying a new one together.  But it wouldn’t be this house; way too small (and he’s got to have a garage or work space for his tools, not to mention all my comics, his tikis and masks and ethnic art, and so on).
 

Men in Uniform, Right Next Door

Unfortunately, they were firemen.

Not that firemen aren’t sexy, but they were working… if you catch my drift.

At 3:30 am on Saturday, I was awakened by a repeating, high-pitched “beep beep beep” sound from somewhere outside.  I sleep fairly lightly through much of the night, I guess, although the minimal traffic noise in our neighborhood never disturbs me.  It’s things which don’t stop which sink through and wake me up.  (Like the dog next door.  Rrrr.)

My first thought was that it was a car alarm — the California State Bird, as we termed them in the mid-90s.  I couldn’t catch the direction from the bedroom window, so I went out onto the deck, but I still couldn’t tell where it was coming from — the next street over, I guessed.  I closed all the windows, which cut a lot of the sound into the house (so maybe I could get back to sleep) and then I could tell it was coming from next door.

My first thought was that it was a burglar alarm.  Perhaps stupidly, I went out our front door and over to the neighbors’ front porch, only to meet Al and Linda coming down from upstairs.  (Their kids live in the downstairs part of the house.)  And I smelled smoke.

Long story made short: the kids were gone for the weekend.  Al got the door open and clouds of plastic-smelling smoke wafted out.  911 was called, and three police cars and four fire engines showed up (on our narrow street!).  Fire hoses and a big venting fan were brought up.  The source of the fire was found to be small, no major damage and no one hurt, everything calmed down.  The local TV station did have a cameraman there, just in case.

As best we can tell, it was a build-up of lint in the dryer hose.  The lint caught on fire — unknown reason, maybe related to the proximity to the furnace — and burnt the plastic dryer hose, and hence the smell and the smoke.  The fire definitely came from outside the dryer.  (Guess I should check our dryer this week, huh?)

Once the fire engines arrived, I woke Rusty up, but he went back to sleep a couple minutes later, figuring that I (or firefighters) would wake him if the fire was serious and threatened to spread.  Rusty’s daughter Sarah, whose bedroom window faces Al and Linda’s house, never knew anything was going on.

I swear, those two could sleep through Hurricane Ivan.

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Updated on April 25, 2011
 

How to Ruin a Carpet in Ten Easy Steps

1. 
   Decide to make a nice stir-fry for dinner.  Perhaps chunked mahi-mahi, radicchio, Napa cabbage, and edamame, seasoned with garlic and lemon pepper, to be sautéed in a light sesame-flavored dressing, and then served over couscous.
2. Set the wok to heat on the stove.
3. Chunk and season the fish, then begin prep on the radicchio.
4. Pour a couple tablespoons of virgin olive oil into the hot wok.
5. Say “Yow!” as the oil superheats and bursts into flame.
6. Don’t panic.  Take the wok off the heat.
7. Realize that the burning oil is also smoking, and that will set off the smoke alarm in a few seconds.  Flip on the fan on the range hood, and then scramble to open the door out to the deck.
8. Come back to the stove and see that it’s still burning.  Pick up the wok, still aflame, and make a beeline for the door to outside.
9. Say “Yow!” again as you curve toward the door and there’s a burst of flame right in front of your face.  Get outside and have burning oil slosh out of the wok, over the edge of the deck, and completely dissipate before burning anything else.  Realize that the previous gout of flame was a similar action.  Go back in and examine the melted pockmarks in the carpet.
10. Enjoy your meal.  Yummy!

Affected area is about the size of a dinner plate.