10:51 p.m. - 2003-03-03
lavendar
There is a bus shelter at the bus stop nearest my home. Unlike the truly enlightened municipality of Denver which, we are told, provides heating in theirs, our shelters are constructed simply to keep out the wind and the rain. Some days, though, it is better to brave the elements. This morning, even though there was a bitter wind at about -20 C/ -5 F, I retreated to the steps of one of the neighbours' homes. They have a retaining wall made of old railroad ties, to shelter behind. The reason? The bus shelter is about half a block from a very busy corner. This morning, the roads had glazed over in sheet ice. Nearly every car coming around the curve skidded toward the shelter. Having worked in a hospital, I've seen what happens to human bodies that are caught inside a shelter when a car goes out of control. Too much chance of that today.
When our bus approached it couldn't stop, but instead, slued at an angle of about 45 degrees to the true, straddling both lanes of traffic. Fortunately everyone was driving slowly enough that there were no collisions. However, it still does not feel very nice to be boarding, by walking into the middle of traffic with vehicles approaching from both directions. It was so icy that the woman in front of me nearly slipped under the bus when she tried to step up into it. Hyperalert - all the passengers in that vehicle.
Number four son caught his bus about an hour later. One vehicle actually did skid into a car parked just the other side of the shelter while he was there, and traffic was moving even slower because of all the accidents that littered the road by then. No wonder so many people here think hockey is a great game - it's kind of a controlled replay of the morning commute in winter.
Got called into T2's office by B first thing this morning. Could I explain why the records in the smaller bundle that B had given me about a week before were attributed to me? No, it was just as big a mystery to me. I hadn't generated that report; B said the PC had. Could B produce a list of the documents I worked on for project one. I had one at my desk already to go.
At about 8:30 D came by to ask me if I knew what had happened to the PC on Friday. No. "Well her contract was terminated and she no longer works here." "Oh." Stunned silence - what should I say? Nothing seemed my best bet, and I stuck to that for the balance of the day. I wasn't certain why neither T2 or B had bothered to mention it when we had met an hour earlier and I don't think I really want to know. The balance of the day was very quiet. Pleasant.
A dream tonight about moving. Seemed I had been living in a three storey home with my family, who had all grown up and left. I had decided I didn't need anything so large anymore and that it should be used by a family that needed the space. Structurally the home was fine, but it needed a facelift. It was apparent that I had tried to replaster the walls without much success. Obviously pretty true to life so far, except the size of the home. The results of my efforts there meant that some serious sanding was going to have to occur before the walls could be repainted. I had done a much better job on the floors. They were wood. I had managed to strip them and bring out the original patina. They glowed in the light and looked beautiful. Three young children belonged to the new owners - 2 boys with a sister in between. We were in the playroom on the first level. I was showing them how to use the patterns in the wood floors to create magical stories for themselves. Outside the French doors, sand stretched in all directions.
One thing that keeps appearing in all my dreams lately is something that is very deliberately lavendar. This time it was a dressy spring coat. At one point the coat was very deliberately picked up and draped over the oak chair right in front of me, to make the point it was there. Not certain why that colour is so important right now.
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