Dream Journal 8/7/17 | Strange House

I was sitting on a quilt-clad bed with my toddler, who was cuddling an old teddy bear. We were in a very large room, adorned with furniture and toys for young children.

Dream Journal 7/16/16 | Murder At A Concert

I was waiting backstage, holding my clarinet, getting ready to go out on stage to perform with people from my childhood and high school years. I recognized several people from high school, some from middle school, and some from district music festivals, even though we were all adults, and I hadn’t seen any of them in eight or more years.

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Daily Prompt 3/13/2016 | Incomplete

In response to The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt 3/13/2016 | Incomplete

My apartment is currently a disaster. I’ve been sick for three days now, and my tiny toddler is using up every ounce of energy that I have left in me, which isn’t very much at all. I have a long list of things that I desperately need to accomplish, and just haven’t had the time to do.

Fun fact: Just because you are a stay-at-home parent, and spend the entire day inside the walls of your home, that does not mean that you will have tons of free time to get things done, and clean, and make your home beautiful. Nope. Basically the exact opposite, actually.

I thought I would share with you my list of things I need to get done, and share with you my excuses as to why they remain incomplete to this day.

1. The Dishes
I’ve written about my dishes before, and it hasn’t gotten any better. The dishes used to be Kyle’s one chore, even back when I was working full-time, and he was unemployed, I only tasked him with the chore of doing the dishes, and it was such a fight to get him to do them more often than once a week. For those who don’t know, Kyle is my fully grown, adult husband, and not a teenage boy.
After the baby came, I stopped working, and Kyle started working full-time, and getting him to do anything, especially the dishes, was impossible. At one point, and I am embarrassed to even be telling you this, our dishes had gone undone for 3 months. Every few days, I chipped away at the top layer of dishes, but the ones at the bottom… absolutely disgusting. After a few weeks, I was able to get them done, and they were easier to keep up with after that.
Recently, Liam has been in this needy, clingy stage, and will not let me leave his side to do anything. I can’t pee, I can’t cook, I can’t do the dishes or clean, or get on the computer, or he loses his mind. The only free time I get is when he is sleeping, but my apartment is so small that I can only do quiet activities (like sleeping…), which means no dishes. So, they are stacking up again. Ugh. I’ll pay some one to come do them for me. Please?

2. Toddler Proofing
My house is reasonably baby proof. The outlets are all covered, and dangerous items are high up, and out of the reach of my tiny human. However, my apartment is NOT toddler proof, and I am learning very quickly that my 13 month old son is way smarter than I give him credit for. He has started climbing, and opening, and grabbing, and getting into so much trouble. I have a book shelf in my living room, which contains Liam’s baby books on the bottom two shelves, and a miscellaneous assortment of not-for-baby objects on the top three shelves. Well, my toddler is now tall enough to reach all but the top shelf, and keeps getting into our stuff. Same goes for my desk, and the DVD shelves next to my desk. I am running out of places to stack my crap, so I really need to actually clean up my living room, and organize my stuff, so that it looks presentable, and safe. I was prepared for a baby, NOT for a toddler!

3. My Toilet
Anyone else have a man in their house who always manages to get pee on the outside of the toilet? Or on the floor? I find myself constantly wiping up after the grown man in my life, and it drives me nuts. Honestly, I blame the toilet. Our seat has been broken since we moved in, and the toilet is REALLY small. Kyle and I have lived in several apartments together, and this was never a problem. I find myself having to clean the toilet all the time, and I hate it. I also recently decided that I would invest in bleach tablets or something for my toilet, which means I am now a certified adult, right? I hate cleaning the toilet, man.

4. Liam’s Crib
I’ve been avoiding it for a while, but the time has come to drop Liam’s crib down to the lowest level. My 13 month old is just getting too tall, and has been trying to climb out recently. He can’t climb out yet, but I want to be proactive, just in case he figures it out. Where has the time gone? What happened to my tiny baby? I have this nearly 3 foot tall child now. WHAT? I also have a toddler bed sitting in the closet, waiting to be put together, but that won’t happen for a little while yet. Ahhh!

5. Landlord Crap
I’ve never met my landlord. Instead, I go through a realty company, who then relays messages to him. This is a bullshit, awful system, and nothing gets done. Last spring, I called realtors to tell them that none of our windows have screens on them, and thanks to the spiders, lady beetles, and misc. stinging insects that reside outside of my apartment, we were unable to open our windows at all. We also have no central air (which they lied to us about, another story entirely), and did not have an air conditioner at the time. The woman I talked to said she would send someone out immediately to measure our windows. Yeah, that never happened. Almost a year later, we still don’t have screens, and the weather is warming up, and I have to call them. Again.
Not only do we need screens, but our back door is crooked and bugs literally just waltz into our apartment, along with debris and weather from outside, but we have also had a hole in our ceiling, as a result of the leak in our ceiling that we experienced during our FIRST NIGHT in our apartment. The leak was fixed. The hole was not. Renting is just so fun.

Those are just a few things that I need to be completed, that probably won’t get completed any time in the foreseeable future. Ugh. Adult stuff. Ugh. Stress.

Thanks for reading, friends!

Jan

Dream Journal 2/29/16

Past.

I was a teenager, and I was in a large barn with several other girls around my age, give or take a few years. We were all wearing large electronic collars around our necks, and were dressed in dirty, ripped clothes. A man walked in and yelled at us to stand in a straight line. We lined up, from shortest to tallest, and he grabbed the tallest girl on the end, a pretty blonde, and dragged her outside. She was screaming.

The girl to my left was crying, and she kept repeating that we needed to run, but no one would move. I grabbed her hand, and we ran to the back of the barn, where there was a large door, which was wide open. We ran out of the barn and into the woods, but the girl with me dropped to the ground and started screaming. Bolts of electricity were shooting out of her collar, and she was convulsing on the ground. I tried to roller her back toward the barn, but her body went limp and lifeless. I tried to pry my collar off with a large stick, but it wouldn’t come off.

I went back to the barn, but all of the other girls were gone, and the inside was dark. I walked in and tripped over something on the ground. I looked down and saw the body of one of the girls from the group. I covered my mouth to keep from screaming, and stumbled into one of the empty horse stalls. There was blood everywhere. I could hear the sound of a girl screaming somewhere outside, and ran toward it. The man from before was holding a gun to the head of an older woman, dressed very modestly, and she was begging him to let her go. He laughed at her, dropped the gun, and hit her with it. She fell to the ground, unconscious.

I dropped down and crawled back into the barn, and found a blowtorch in a pile of hay. I used it to burn off my collar, but it didn’t burn me. I found a black and white painted horse in one of the stalls, and rode him out of the barn. The forest looked more like a rain forest now, and there were very large, bright flowers scattered everywhere. I could hear low growling from somewhere, and my horse kept trying to buck me off of it’s back. We rode across a large bridge, made entirely of sticks and branches, yet somehow held us. There was another barn in a clearing ahead of us…

And then I woke up.