At least I'm getting some good sleep.

There was a lot to this one, and it's fading now.

I did dream I was in Rupert, Idaho, one of the towns in the area I grew up. At one point I was excited about this; I could look around the town and so on and think about it. This was going to be good as I write about this place a lot.

I dream we were waiting around for Rice so we could go eat Mexican food (a great part of the world to eat good Mexican as, at least at one point, 50% of the population was migrant farm workers from Mexico, Texas, etc). We finally got there, but Rice's gluten intolerance was acting up and it didn't work out. We ended up at home and Rice was asking Winter (who was evidently with us) if he'd like beef tonight and pork tomorrow.

Later he left, and I think I was supposed to be meeting up with him at some point, but I was also supposed to be looking for my mother, the biological one, you know. I was going to go pick her up, and then I ran into her, walking down a street in Rupert. (She's legally blind, so maybe this wasn't such a good idea on her part.) I was driving a Jeep, red, I think, automatic. I kept stopping in the middle of the road and highway and interstate for stupid reasons. Are there any good reasons to do such a thing?

I finally ended up at a grocery store, with mother and children in tow. I was looking at all the wonderful produce. (Well, that's unusual ;).) I finally found my mother in the back of the store with two religion instructors, I believe. At least one of them was -- he was a fabulous Hebrew scholar. My mother was talking to them and some young woman, perhaps a pharmacist (I didn't really see her) about something, and then she had a closed petrie dish filled with liquid, swirling around, and working on changing color. She held it out to me and I asked her if it was hers, or mine, and it evidently became apparent it was hers, and she was pregnant. (I blame Reenie ;).) Now that's odd. Theoretically my mother is a good Catholic and hasn't been boinking anyone since she divorced Dad. Theoretically. Also, she no longer has all the necessary female reproductive organs. It was a bloody miracle. I wasn't quite sure what to do about that.

So we went to Thanksgiving dinner....

At this guy's parent's house.

The guy is a new friend of ours who lives down the hill. In the dream, however, he was an old high school friend of Rice's. He was our age, but not -- he was younger, and he lived with his parents still, and it was cool. It wasn't as if he was a slacker, so maybe early college aged? His little sister was there, too (a little girl). The majority of the floor in the house was just like my kitchen floor. I continued to think this odd.

For a while, the guy and I were sitting on a couch with his computer. The computer itself looked like one of those old keyboard-computers -- you know, where the computer and keyboard are in one piece. The wall was the screen. Pieces of blue paper rotated around, like a scroll, with the type. My friend says to me, "And it's really smart. Say 'The Crying Game'." So I did, and a picture of the poster for The Crying Game came up on the "screen".

I checked to make sure I was wearing a wedding ring; he kept hitting on me. Finally, I went back over to Rice, and then looked out the window. Coming up the drive with his parents was my friend A___, who died eight years ago in August. He had let his hair grow out significantly into sort of a Billy Ray Cyrus mullet, only longer. And his hair was less blonde and more brown. His teeth were less perfect on one side than they'd been. We grabbed each other and hugged and I wondered why we hadn't seen each other for so long. He was wearing some big, chunky rings with things like orbs and skulls, which would have been very unlike him.

Soon we were sitting down for Thanksgiving. There were two large tables for the adults and a children's table. My mother had already been given a chair. I was helping Avi sit down, and was trying to find a place for Rice and I and A____, so we could sit and talk when Avadore woke me up, asking for water.

Oh yeah, Avadore has caught a heck of a stomach bug -- his stomach hurts, he hasn't been eating, he's been losing all liquid in his stomach, and he has a fever. He is, my friends, a very sad panda. :(