Went out to buy new boots (my old ones leaked the last time it snowed). Bought the boots - two pairs - one for going to work in, the other for shoveling snow in. Also found a pair of black slip-on casual shoes, a black coat and a pair of black gloves. Black is the new black.

Movies: One Night at McCools. I had seen this before, but had no recollection of it and it somehow got onto my Netflix queue. I can understand Liv Tyler's obsession with the house.

Something's Gotta Give. Pleasant enough, but irritatingly long. I generally avoid Jack Nicholson movies, although he was surprisingly restrained in this one. Diane Keaton has always seemed to play one variation on Annie Hall after another. She was flat and dull in this one, bouncing from little girl shrieks to pity-me middle aged moping. Once again, however, a house to obsess over.

Dreams: I had a dream on Wednesday night that was intensely frightening. Rebecca and I were on vacation in a large, evergreen-filled park in California. We were on a paved road that was heading downhill (this sounds rather like the old, addictive, text-only Adventure game). I was walking and Rebecca was on an old-fashioned red bike (very similar to my first bicycle, but more rounded and streamlined). Rebecca started going too fast and crashed. She was fine and picked herself right up, but her bike went skidding down the hill and plopped into a lake. I thought that Rebecca had also been carrying a pine tree with her on the bike and tried to recover it from the hillside that the bike careened down. The tree I tried to pull up was rooted to the hill and wouldn't budge.

While I was trying to dislodge the tree, Rebecca was running down the hill straight for the lake. Somehow I knew that this was a crater lake and that the bottom dropped off at the same steep angle as the hillside. I screamed for her to stop, that the water was too deep, that she would drown. Surprisingly, she didn't disappear beneath the water, and in fact appeared to be walking the lakebed, with her head above water. Further defying the laws of physics, the bike was bobbing gently on the surface of the lake. Rebecca retrieved the bike easily and waded back to shore.

I woke up shaking and with my throat sore from screaming.