Nazrax

October 12, 2013

A third-person memory
A dreamsign
Missed opportunity

At the beach
I'm standing by the road near a beach. From where I'm standing, there's a steep, rocky incline to get down to it. Along the beach to my right is an impassable wall of rock; to the left, the beach goes on forever. Now I'm down on the beach. I've come here to feed the birds, but there aren't as many birds around as I'd expected. I remember there's supposed to be somewhere nearby where there's a cabin in the water that the birds like to flock to.

Now I'm inside somewhere, sitting at a table with some other people. We're trying to figure out where the cabin-in-the-water is. Someone finally figures it out: it's a nearby Crab Shack. I can see it now: it's a small building, made out of wide, dark boards, covered in strings of big Christmas lights, sitting out in the water and accessible by a 20 foot long pier.

We have no desire to go there, but thinking about a restaurant has made us hungry. We try to figure out where to go. Now we're at a restaurant, looking at the menu board. We're disappointed: all the options are either incredibly cheap ($7 for the whole family, which seems questionable) or very expensive ($40+ for one plate).

Now I'm sitting at a small table, looking at a "magazine." Across the pages I'm looking at are thumbnails of the other pages in the magazine. I somehow choose one of the thumbnails; now I'm looking at the full-sized page. It's a super-hero comic book / graphical novel of some sort. I'd been interested in this for a while, and I was excited to find a copy; but now that I'm looking at it, it's very revealing. I have no desire to look at this kind of material, so I close it and put it back on the table.


Working for Maudia
I'm at a large house meeting with a woman named Maudia. She's interested in having me do some work for her around the house. Now we're in a large tool shed, and she's showing me a drill bit that's about an inch wide and about 3 feet long. It comes with a special tool that hooks onto the drill that pushes it forwards as it drills. I ask her what she could possibly need such a large drill bit for. She explains that they needed it when they were working on some pipes. From the end with the faucet, the pipe went back into the wall for a couple of feet, then hit a 90 degree angle and went down. They needed this drill bit to go along from the faucet end and put a hole in the back of the angle piece. With the hole in place, they were able to stick a feathery something in that hung out the faucet end. It all sounded pretty strange, but it was somehow involved in a publicity stunt, so it was supposed to be strange.

This is actually the second time I've met with Maudia. I first met with her a couple of months ago, and she went over her list of tasks with me then. I apologize for not getting back to her sooner, and she accepts my apology on the condition that I don't do it again.

Now I'm filling a collander with water. Even though it has lots of holes, it's holding the water easily. Now the son is in the same room as I am; he just ignores me. Now Maudia's husband is talking to me about a project he wants me to work on with him. It's something to monitor the house while they're gone, and it'll involve both hands-on electronics work as well as a fair amount of programming. I ask him what kinds of alerts he wants available, and he starts out with both phone and email alerts. I explain that email is easy, but that phone alerts would have a number of additional challenges. As an alternative, I suggest both SNMP and RSS, and he approves. He also wants a nice web page to go with it. I explain that I'm a backend guy, and while I can build a web page, it'll be functional yet ugly, and that a modern second grader could probably make a better looking web page than I can. I'll design the site to be very modular so that someone else with more design skills can come along later and reskin the site without having to touch any of the logic.

Now it's night, and I'm with him in the car. He's driving, I'm in the front passenger seat, and his daughter is in the back seat. She keeps tapping me on the shoulder, trying to get my attention. When I finally acknowledge her, she says she found stuff in the back seat that belongs to me, and she's been waiting to give it to me. She gives me a handful of coins and a key. I'd been given the key so I could get into the house, but then I promptly lost it.

Now we're at his office building. We walk into his office, which is a large room with a single fairly large cube in the middle. He gets something - a key - from his cube, then walks over to the corner of the room. He sticks the key into a crack in the wall and pushes, revealing a secret door. I ask him about it; all he'll say is that it's a "red room," which means it's not on the blueprints. I follow him in, then close the door behind me. I become self-conscious and ask if I did the right thing, but he shushes me. He walks over to a pair of laptops on a shelf on the other side of the room. He logs into the first laptop by speaking: it recognizes his voice. He then logs into the second laptop by doing a perfect impression of his coworker's voice. Some kind of video conference is started between the two laptops.

Now the room is changing around me - I think it's using holograms to appear different. It's also projecting many people - the place looks like a dinner party with people mingling and talking. No one seems to notice me. I see a few famous people walking around, including Patrick Stewart, who walks right past me.

Now my host is lying on the ground, dead. Someone says that he knew that next time he threw up, he'd die, and it'd finally happened. He must have known it was coming on; that explains why he was moving so quickly tonight. Someone finds a blanket and wraps him up with finality.

Now I'm back home, walking up a long driveway to a house in the woods. To the right of the entry stairs is a large hanging garden. I walk up to it and insert the key into one of the beams.


Sidewalk work
I'm in the office with two of my daughters. I hear some odd noises from the outside and go to the window to look. A construction crew is doing something in my front yard. Now I'm downstairs looking out the front window at what the crew is doing. I'd forgotten that, as part of the work they'd be doing, they'd have to rip up and re-pour the sidewalk leading up to the house. They're ripping up the sidewalk now and are nearly done. I'm momentarily confused when I notice that the sections they've already pulled up are already overgrown with grass, as if there had never been a sidewalk there; but I don't give it any furthe thought. To remove the old sidewalk, they first use a hammer-like tool to knock holes in the concrete, then they use a narrow white tube (looks like a piece of paper, rolled up) to deliver a blasting charge into the hole. Once they've prepared an entire segment of the sidewalk in this way, they blow it up. I realize my son would like to see this.

Now I'm upstairs in his room. His bed has some kind of lid to it, and it's currently down, closing him in. I know he closed the lid because he likes to sleep where it's really dark. I open the lid and tell him he needs to come quickly if he wants to see something neat; but since he's still really groggy, I pick him up and carry him. As I pass the office, I tell the girls to come too.

Now I'm back downstairs. I'm disappointed that the workers aren't outside any more. A worker lounging in one of my chairs inside says they finished a long time ago. I take my son over to the window and start to point out what they were doing so that my getting him up wasn't a complete waste. As I'm pointing things out to him, I see a fish tank near the street. Inside the tank is a doll in the act of throwing a basketball into a doll-sized basketball hoop. I remember the workers told me the kids could practice throwing a basketball if they wanted to, and I realize they meant they could use this piece of junk. I'm glad I turned the workers down and didn't get my kids' hopes up for nothing.


Women at the airport
At an airport, my viewpoint is following a young man who's up to no good. He goes up to a ticket booth and starts talking to a young woman inside, who is very taken with him. An older woman in the ticket booth scolds the younger woman for being too easy. She explains that any time her thoughts stop syncing properly, that she gets very excited; and that once her thoughts get back in sync, she doesn't remember any of the out-of-sync period. The older woman doesn't accept this explanation and keeps scolding her.


Fragment
I'm trying to find something, and I finally remember that it's in my wife's purse.