A little more of the house is painted every day. Mostly ceilings and trim today. The odor has gotten worse because the trim paint is oil-based which has a much stronger smell than acrylic. None of the rooms with the dramatic colors has been painted yet, so I don't know if I've made any horrific mistakes, or if I'll be wonderfully happy with the results.

Books: Project X by Jim Shepard. A couple of disaffected teens hatch a Columbine-like plot. The language and dialogue is very true to teenagers. You can feel the sense of alienation and the bond that forms between kids who don't fit into any other group. "Everybody's in a group. Everybody spends all their time thinking about their group. Or how they want to be in a different group. It's a big shitpile with everybody shitting downward, so you want to be as high as possible." That pretty well sums up life even after you graduate from being a teen to an adult. The rest of the two paragraphs that contain the descriptions of the specific groups, which ends with "Behind them, us. Our group is a group of two." is superb.

Dreams: When I travel I pack a small plastic container that holds vitamins and a couple of medications. In the dream I had the container with me, but couldn't find one of the medications (even though the pills appeared to be in the container, I apparently thought they were not the right ones). This made me frantic, almost like in the "have an exam today and have never been to the classes, much less studied" dreams.

Speaking of school, in another part of the dream I was talking with a woman who was the admissions officer for a college either I wanted to get into or Caitlin was applying to. She had shoulder length red hair and wore a soft, mossy green suit. She was asking me about how I would approach an activity that was required for admissions. This consisted of jumping off a ledge or out of a tree and grasping onto the top of a stone wall that had jagged rocks protruding from the top. It seemed like a dangerous thing to do and one in which you could hurt your hands on the stones. I told her I was afraid to do it, which was the wrong answer because she just shook her head and clucked her tongue. It would be nice if all these anxiety related dreams actually resulted in a reduction in waking anxiety. Tomorrow we start our annual user's conference - 6,000 people all expecting to be entertained, educated, wined and dined between tomorrow and Wednesday. Perhaps that could be where a little of this tension is coming from?