Batch

06-13-2014 -- Very strange shifting dream. I am at the Hickory House, probably back to being a kid again, because I am running around the house in the alley, and interacting with Dave and the DuFours and the house is exactly the way it has always been. Then as I walk the couple of doors back to my house, I kind of age, and I am showing up for a visit. I wander a couple of doors down and am talking with Jeff and his parents, and it is pretty late in the evening, something like 9:45 or so. I am telling them that I have to go back home and get something, then come back and speak with them, but I promise it will only take about 15 minutes. They say no way ... too bad. I had bought them a valuable necklace worth hundreds of thousand dollars, that is a very powerful piece of magic, and may save everybody in the area or something. And now that they will not allow me to talk with them about whatever dangerous thing is happening, they will lose out on the protection.

So I walk back home, and it is now the middle of the day, instead of late at night, and as I walk up, the UPS guy or someone has just finished leaving a package. Melody has also just pulled up, and has boxes of stuff. And there are several other boxes and things waiting at the door as well. Turns out it is just a day or two before Christmas, and Melody is telling me she has a nice Christmas present for me, and don't worry, I don't have to wait until Christmas to get it. I am telling her I have a nice present for her, too (thinking about the necklace), and thinking I'm not so impatient that I can't wait until Christmas for presents. Besides, I am very happy that I noticed several boxes from amazon.com among all the stuff waiting in the front yard.

I walk inside to say hello to mom, and then start grabbing the various boxes and moving them inside (while not looking too closely at them to avoid Christmas spoilers) and Melody is talking about how the place is a pig sty and working at cleaning things up. I expect she may want my help, and am explaining that if we are going to work on some cleaning up, I may work on cleaning my room. It isn't too bad, so I am thinking if I can spend just one hour cleaning my room, I will probably be able to get it almost perfect. Meanwhile, we are both walking outside to clean up all the trash in the front yard, and Melody has decided to put her cat, Boots, outside while we are cleaning, but he doesn't want to go, and is digging his claws in and things. Once he's out the door, I pet him for a bit and explain he is still loved and wanted, we just need to clean things up.

So I am gathering up lots of trash in the front yard. Empty boxes, crates from mailing stuff, styrofoam, and a lot of empty pizza boxes, and cramming it all into a very large, but very beat up trash can, which is on the edge of coming apart. As I am doing so, I am telling Melody that as soon as Christmas is over, we may want to replace the trash can. I start telling hew how beat up it is ... and then I notice how it has an address painted on it that I have never seen before, for a street I know isn't anywhere within a mile of here. And I recall a strange sound while I have been driving my car the last few days from Florida to get here, and wonder if I dragged it all the way from Florida under the car, which might explain how bad of shape it is in. Meanwhile, Melody is looking at some of the Christmas decorations, including the angel on the wall with a crown of blinking Christmas tree lights, wondering if it is broken because she doesn't see the lights blinking. I explain they are working fine, and I can see them blinking, but I am looking from further down the front steps and it is darker, which makes it easier for me to see the lights.

I am almost done with the trash, and I need to go to the bathroom, and I can hear the house phone ringing inside, and everything is happening at once. We have a sort of extended family gathering going on, and I think my cousin Lyle has just pulled up outside, and I need to get to the toilet, and that blasted phone is still working. So I run inside and down the hall to the bathroom, just as my cousin walks in the door, but it isn't Lyle, it is Luke ... Skywalker. And he is screaming at me "Answer the @#$%& phone! You never answer the @#$%& phone! Damn it, answer the @#$%& phone, already!" I am sitting in the bathroom, and the whole house is under some construction, and half the bathroom wall has been removed (the top half) and people can just look in at you, and we are in the middle of putting back in the shelves along the bathroom wall. And I yell back at him "I'm in the freaking bathroom! I never answer the phone when I am in the freaking bathroom! Do you?!?"

Meanwhile, everything is changing. The reason we are doing all this construction on the house is that mom eventually sold the house, and the person who bought it was Rosemary (an ex-landlord), and the house that I lived in for several years (in Florida) was the Hickory House, but they changed it and expanded it, and we're now in the process of changing it all back, since we've bought it back again. I finish going to the bathroom (though I am now running around in my underwear. It doesn't seem to bother me any, though.) And I walk up to Luke Skywalker, and tell him I have words for him. I start forcibly explaining how I quit answering the house phone when I got my own cell phone, and I did it for a very good reason. Mom owned the house phone, and if I answered it, and took messages for her, some of them would get lost, and she would never get them. But if I stuck to my phone and she stuck to hers with her own answering machine, we both got all our calls, and we were both very happy. By this time, I am explaining calmly, and explain that I only answer the house phone when I told an important call is expected, and to please answer when it came in ... and nobody told me he would be trying to call.

We are having this discussion in Rosemary's living room, which has somehow replaced my bedroom which was in the house just five minutes earlier. Luke compliments me, and tells me that it was very well explained, and very well thought out, and he is impressed with how I calmed myself and the situation down, with how he had started it all off by yelling at me, and we step outside the house to find that everything has changed outside as well (from when I was out here five minutes ago.) It is still the Hickory house, but instead of being all block it is now half block and half wood. It is still on Hickory Drive, but instead of being a straight, level street, it is now the top of a significant hill, and the street curves out of sight where Holly used to be, to connect with Crescent. The house next door has been torn down entirely, and we have put up a sort of storage shed tunnel sort of thing like the house next door on the other side used to have, and I am saying "I was only gone for a year-and-a-half, how on Earth has everything changed so much?!?" Never mind that it has actually only been five minutes. "How has everything changed so much in under a year? How has the street changed? How are we now on a hill?" I glance toward what should be the intersection of Hickory and Crescent, where there is now a freeway interchange. "How is there a freeway inter ... you know, actually the freeway interchange explains all the other changes. But an entire new freeway in under a year ... that's rather impressive."