jamie is the bomb!

I love getting random presents!! Yesterday I awoke to find a package full of goodies awaiting me, courtesy of jamie-gimp-no-more. her delectable dried apples, blue chocolate, sparkly candle, and paint-on tatoos made my day. now i must commence the compilation of a care package for my vermont friend.

one hen
two ducks
three squawking geese
four limerick oysters
five corpulent porpoises
six golden rings
seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array
eight brass monkeys from the sacred, ancient crypts of Egypt
nine old men on roller skates who will hall and stall at the corner of the Quibby and the Quay, all at the very same time

Today’s shopping excursion resulted in the purchase of some Villeroy&Boch coffee mugs. I also finally found the perfect sandals (Steve Madden) but could not justify buying them since they were the only ones in the store not on sale.
Yesterday I did get a new top; white w/blue sparkly stripes and turquoise bra straps – it has kind of a punk/sailor look.

I realize it’s still wintry for rest of the country, but here in Fla it’s been summer for a while (in fact, it never stopped being summer). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not gloating over this fact. I hate perpetual warmth. One of the reasons I went to college in upstate NY was so I could enjoy having four seasons a year. I don’t handle cold very well, but I do like bundling up in sweaters and wearing flannel pjs.

I got my monthly video from my uncle in Japan; he tapes my favorite show for me every week. So I spent tonight watching 6 weeks worth of SMAPxSMAP, a variety program starring the five members of SMAP (a Japanese boy-band w/100 times the popularity and talent of the Back Street Boys).
My job hunt for a teaching position in Japan is still fruitless. I have to find something by May, so something had better pop up soon.

I think I could listen to 'Angel' by Dave Matthews for the rest of my life and never tire of it. It's too pretty to describe.

Bugger this -- I've spent the last few hours trying to prettify my blog, and blogger is having such issues that I can't tell if I'm doing something wrong or if it's the site's fault that this is so yucky looking. Anyway, I have my new Dave Matthews Band cd on repeat play, and a new Stephen King book to read, so I'm going to give up on the html madness for now and enjoy the rest of the night.
I realize that I have yet to actually describe a single one of my dreams, but they've been rather too obviously reflective of my life lately.
For instance, I dream constantly about my cat, and in the dream there is always a reason why I can't touch her or hold her or speak to her...there's no obscure symbolism here, my cat died months ago.
I've also been having horrible dreams about my 'friends' from college, whom I haven't seen in almost a year. In my dreams they're horrible to me, and that's pretty much how I see them in reality.

Arg. As an html novice, the best I can manage right now is to change the font and text color of this blog.
The splendiferous graphics will come later, one hopes.
Anyone familiar with that ancient comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, will know that Nemo's strange and wonderful dreams are attributed by his parents to the food Nemo consumes before going to sleep.
For anyone interested, here is a list of the things I eat (not all at the same time!) shortly before turning out the light:
-Shrimp Flavored Chips
-Cadberry's candy-coated chocolate eggs
-cheese bagel
-gummi bears
-spicy Japanese crackers
-Toasteds (onion flavor)
and yes, I ALWAYS brush my teeth.
Another factor in my remarkable dreams may be my nightly dose of Conan O'Brian.
He makes me laugh a lot, and there's something about him that just makes me happy -- so maybe all the endorphines released from smiling and laughing screw up my sleeping brainwaves.

I don't think I am unique in this, but I tend to have explicitly vivid, vibrant, absurd dreams. For someone whose day-life is remarkably tame and uneventful, I find that my night-life is unproportionally wild. Sometimes the significance of a dream is obvious, other times I have a hard time believing that my subconscious could harbor such ludicrous, fantastical nonsensia (my own word). And thus the name of my blog, "Slumberland".