My mind goes all cinematic

On Sunday, I was Indiana Jones. Dressed in white robes for high desert, I had just escaped from a high, round tent to find myself in a compound filled with angry looking, vaguely Indian or Pakistani men. Kashmir, maybe. It was early evening, already getting cold. I had to escape. I snuck around the edges of the compound, found some high explosives, and arranged them in a tripwire pattern so that they cause one hell of a distraction. I got away.

On Monday, I was Indiana Jones again. Same place, same time. It was hot now. The explosives were gone, though. Somehow, I managed to jerry-rig an ancient truck to drive in fast, widening circles, running over tents and wrecking stacks of rifles. The distraction was enough. I got away.

On Tuesday, I was Indy once more. The explosives were gone, and now the truck was secured. At one end of the camp, which I saw now was more of a permanent installation, I discovered a strange sort of small bottling factory, filling large soda pop bottles with a dark liquid and capping it. I realized that I had to figure out how to use the bottle cap machine to create enough kinetic energy to wreck the factory, causing the distraction I needed to escape. I don't think I figured it out in time, and I don't know if I got away.

On Wednesday, I was myself. Very odd. And I was with Kouryou-chan. We encountered Robert Redford and Paul Newman, looking as if they'd just walked out of The Sting, taking up residence in the room across from us in a Hilton hotel near DisneyLand. We learned the next morning that they'd robbed a bank. After a confrontation and a fist fight, Robert Redford fled with the cash, but Kouryou-chan successfully finagled Paul Newman and I in a hotel room and locked the door behind us. Through the door we could hear her on my cell-phone, calmly talking to the police. "Does she do this often?" Paul asked me.

"Yeah," I said. "She's good at this kind of thing."

On Thursday, I was myself again. We were sitting on folding chairs in the cupola of the International Space Station. As I watched, calm and detached, the ISS re-entered the atmosphere, then made a water landing. Water splashed over the cupola. "This can't happen," I said to the guy next to me.

"But what if it did? What if you needed to evacuate the station in an emergency? Would you know what to do? What Would You Do?" He then walked me through a series of procedures for opening the hatches in an emergency.

What the hell is going on with my dreams this week?

My neighbor got robbed, and I screwed up...

Damn. Remember when I had the arborists out at my property to cut down a couple of trees that were threatening the house?

The day before that we'd had one of their people come out and scout the property. One of the things I tried to do was contact the neighbor and tell him what we'd be doing. The tree's bases were on the "unimproved" portion of his land, after all, although since they were threatening my property I was within my rights to get an emergency contract.

The contractor, Omaha, and I walked along the footpath through the woods to the neighbor's house, which was deeper and more isolated from his slowly suburbanizing surroundings. Omaha and I knew that the neighbor had left for Idaho and fishing season, but we didn't know when he'd be back, so it was worth the effort to see if he was around. As we did, we came upon a beat-up Ford Bronco, and two shady-looking men, one with a ragged thick mustache, jumping on something in the back of the Bronco.

Omaha and I have had to chase homeless people camping out in the forest before. We've even done it already once before this summer. Mustache stared at the three adults, his eyes wide. Then he and his buddy got into the Bronco and tore hell out of there. In the back of the truck, we saw a dirtied ATV. That's another problem we've had in our neighborhood-- assholes tearing through the "unimproved" and sometimes the streets on dirt bikes.

We put it out of our minds. None of us got the license plate. They were gone, problem solved. The neighbor's in his mid-70s, and lives quietly in the woods. He wasn't back yet, so we started back to my house. Along the way, we saw a pile of new stuff left in the woods-- including a pretty nice bicycle. Omaha and I reasoned the shady pair may not have been here to ride, they were here for illegal dumping. So we called the cops.

The cops said it looked like a straightforward illegal dump, not a dump of stolen goods. They couldn't take a report from us, just the neighbor, who wasn't home. Oh, well.

The neighbor came back today. We told him about the trees, and he was happy we'd done the work, he'd been getting worried about those old alders himself. We also told him about the homeless people we'd shoo'd out, and the two guys with the Bronco.

It turns out he'd been robbed. That had been his ATV. That and his dirt-bikes, and all of his tools.

Damn, I really wish I'd gotten that license plate.

Why the Oxford Comma is important

I debated, in my last post, writing either

The contractors, Omaha and I ...

or writing

The contractors, Omaha, and I ...

This is known as the Oxford Comma debate.

This is why it matters: ( Image, so behind a cut. May be NSFW. )