Batch

08-10-2013 -- Kind of a cross between Doctor Who and a Runescape quest, though much more has faded than I would like. Sigh. Anyway, early on there are some bits where the 10th Doctor is running around, but eventually he seems to more or less disappear, though somehow he is still speaking to me and giving me advice as things continue, some sort of mental connection. He may be in danger, or perhaps I am. I find myself in a large building, wandering around, and trying to get things done.

Somehow I have this giant flute, sort of. It is about five or six feet long, and kind of hard to play. It has five or six holes in its length that allow the playing of five or six notes, and I know I am supposed to play all the notes in order as part of the quest. But it is so big, it is kind of difficult to get it to play the notes, and takes a lot of air. I manage to play the first four notes fairly easily, but the fifth note is very difficult, and I seem to be getting nothing but air. It is also getting harder and harder to hold the thing, and I am finding it more and more difficult to remember which end to blow in, and it keeps trying to roll over in my hands, and can't be played if it is upside down.

I finally manage to blow enough air to get the fifth note, and continue on to the sixth, which takes the same hard work, and as I finish blowing, a small, glowing ball of 'stuff' pops out of the end of the flute. Something jamming it up might be why it was so hard to play the last couple of notes. The ball is about two inches in diameter, and glows a light blue, and seems sort of goopy if you get what I mean, when I kind of scrape off the goop I am left with almost a small sort of amulet or medallion with a sort of a logo or crest on it, and it is the new crest that I have earned to represent myself with the finishing of this quest.

I soon run into Dale, who seems to have been working on the construction skill, because he has built a large new home, but is worried because he hasn't built any furnishings for it, though he has decked it out with tons of flags and banners and some pennants showing his colors, crests and accomplishments. I get a whisper from the 10th Doctor that I ought to see about adding some new flags and pennants to my rooms making use of my new crest, and Dale is a little hesitant about this, not knowing anything about this odd Doctor Who quest that has somehow found its way into Runescape.

We seem to be discussing this at church in Buena Park, and I am guessing a service has just gotten over, because we are in the process of leaving, and dodging around slow moving people who are just standing around talking. When I reach the parking lot, I find myself approaching my Jimmy, which is pulling a small trailer, along the lines of one a landscaping company might use. It seems I am not used to pulling it around, because my parking takes up not two spaces, which I would expect, but four (2x2), because I couldn't get the trailer straight.

I load up and start to drive out of the parking lot, but I seem to have sat my red cell phone on the roof of the truck as I was climbing in, and forgot it there because while I am driving out the driveway along the side of the church, it falls off the roof and comes apart as it hits the ground. I curse to myself, put the vehicle in reverse, and back up 10 or 15 feet to where it fell off, and get out to pick it up. I find a bunch of people are standing around in the road just chatting and talking, and one of them is a slightly odd looking fellow, looks like the young teep with the thin mustache from Babylon 5, the one who looks slightly odd. He is fiddling with my phone and trying to tell me how badly I broke it, and he gets mad as I take it away from him.

It has sprung apart, and inside it looks more like a hard drive or something (with the ribbon cables and things) and it seems he has been twisting and wrapping the cable in odd ways that couldn't have happened in a simple fall like that, and has been messing the phone up far worse. He seems to think because I dropped the phone, he has a right to take it and do what he wants with it, and I don't have any right to pick it up again and try to fix it. But I take it, straighten out the ribbon as best I can, and try to fit it back together. It isn't perfect, there are now a couple of cracks where things don't fit together as perfectly as they used to, but it stays together pretty well, and starts up when I turn it back on, though there are some glitches on the screen that remind me of the night it fell in the toilet, before it dried out inside the next day. Still it seems to be working all right.

I climb back into the truck (which somehow involves having to pull it down from where it is floating perhaps 10 feet in the air, so I have to drag it down far enough to climb in) and am trying to situate myself and get it in gear, all while holding the phone in my hand. I manage to get in and get moving, and turn out of the parking lot onto Page. As I am driving along Page, this crowd of people stays with me, and the punk who wants the phone keeps trying to get it from me while riding along in his wheelchair. Somehow the damaged phone has half turned into a damaged room to the truck, which no longer fits tightly, so he keeps sticking his hand in and trying to steal the phone from me. He is annoying me enough that I half try to run his wheelchair off the road.

Soon I turn onto Stanton, and am heading toward the Buena Park Mall, just moving along, when suddenly we are all walking rather than driving, and as I feel my pocket, I realize my phone is missing again, and turn around just to see the same punk playing with my phone and trying to take it apart as bold as you please. I take it back from him yet again, remind him it isn't his, and he doesn't have the right to steal it from me, and give him a spanking to try and get the idea across!

07-16-2013 -- This one starts off with mom somehow driving me to church at the Buena Park Church of the Nazarene, though I have no idea what she drove me in. We park in the parking lot, and head inside for services. The church is very crowded and there isn't a lot of room in the pews. I head up near the choir loft, but I have no voice, so I know I can't sing with them. For some reason I don't feel much like a full, organized church service today anyway, so I take one of the hallways to the back of the building and up the stairs to where we used to meet as teens.

I figure I'll find an empty room and just kind of hide out and read my Bible, but they've converted the entire upper floor into a single huge room without even a corridor, and I know I don't belong there. They are (politely) throwing out another adult who doesn't belong, but I turn around and head back down the stairs without needing to be asked to leave. I walk out the back door and just stand there for a minute or two, looking at the freeway and wondering if I want to walk home from here, remembering some of the trouble I have run into doing so in past dreams.

While I am thinking about this, a huge bus pulls on to the median and stops, across the way on the freeway, and Brazilian tourists come flooding off. For some reason they are pulling down the fence separating the freeway from the road, and soon they are storming across the road to where I am standing. It must be the Christmas season, because both of the rear doors have strings of lights around them, and three huge colored light bulbs, as well, and for some reason the Brazilians decide they are going to steal our Christmas decorations.

I try to stop them, but there are too many. I threaten to call 911, but they laugh at me and say they'll be gone long before the police can get here, and start back to their bus, our decorations in hand. They seem to have trouble with the bus, though, and can't leave as quickly as they want to, and I rush across the street to try and see the license plate of the bus before it drives off, but it moves too quickly for me, causing another accident.

Almost instantly after that, the police arrive, trying to find out what they can about the accidents, and the bus that just drove by. I try to tell them about the tourists and the perloined Christmas decorations, but they don't want to listen, feeling the accident is much more important to investigate. I try to explain it was the same bus, and give them my information, but they refuse to hear me and I finally stalk off in disgust, and walk back to the church to talk to the assistant pastor, Terry. I apologize for 'losing' the decorations, and he admits it is not that important, and decides perhaps they needed them more than we did.