Woody

Another doorway substantially stripped. Next time, I will only do this on a day when I can open windows. The smell isn't bad, but it does linger, and probably isn't the best thing to breathe.

Finding it engaging and satisfying, like peeling a sunburn. Similar to the work I assist with many days, as surgeons dissect layers of tissue. I expect the final cleaning, probably with turpentine, will be far less enjoyable. For the moment, I'm simply removing the large amounts, to dramatic effect. So much more light, even in an internal hallway.

As the weather becomes summer, the doors will go outside, and I'll remove paint with the heat gun, then stripping compound.

I like watching the lovely wood beneath emerge.

Dreams of the dead. At work, in a large conference/lunchroom, charged with cutting the string off the flower buds so they could open, I had to untie a cord attached to the mouth of a dead man propped up in a suit. Once that released, he toppled over, as well as the other dozen dead men in suits put up in a display. Everyone agreed that housekeeping needed to come in and take them away, since they've all fallen over, although then we figured maybe we should call the morgue instead. I still had to cut the twine on the flower bud, but then the dream drifted.

Went with D to visit my grandma, she laid in bed as I always remembered her, but she was in better health, and spoke clear English. Guy from work came in, and I introduced her as my step-aunt, because my father had remarried. This is nonsense, but I was convinced of it in the dream. (She actually remarried, she was "cared" for by her daughter, my aunt, father's only sister, Madeline.) Grandma asked me to fix her an egg, everyone else now in the room asked for food, so I went in the kitchen to get various refreshments. Then I went back to ask her how she wanted her egg, and she said, "baked."

"I don't know how to bake an egg!"


The alarm chimed, I reluctantly got up, to see the lunar eclipse. Hard to focus, but once I got my glasses on, and despite the meager redness, still worth the effort to see an object that takes imagination to see as anything but two dimensional, so obviously a whole sphere. Cats very happy to have us up, and ran around cheerfully.

We dragged back to bed, me shivering and sweating by turns.