Leftover odds and ends

[hrj]

Just a few miscellaneous items that I kept forgetting in the last few posts:

Sometime over the weekend (I think maybe it was Wednesday night) I had a dream that had the feel of a Meaningful Dream, but with some symbolic vocabulary I haven't interpreted before. I was at work, in my current job (which doesn't include hands-on production work), and was supposed to inoculate a fermenter with cells. In the dream (as in real life) I hadn't been trained to do this procedure, and in the dream I wasn't being supervised (which is required if you aren't qualified on a procedure yet) and hadn't read the SOP in advance or even looked ahead in the step-by-step production documents. No, I was winging it based entirely on my vague recollections and impressions of how it worked. And, of course, I screwed it up. I set the pump speed too slow, and the temperature went way out of bounds, and since I wasn't monitoring it properly I didn't start trying to correct the temperature until way to late, and then I was just fumbling around not sure what the right procedure was. And so the whole production run was going to have to be terminated and started from scratch. And then some of the real production workers came in and I had to explain that I'd made every single bone-headed mistake in the book -- exactly the sort of thing that I'd be reaming them out for if I were investigating the incident. And I had no good reason for having done it. There was no reason for me to go cowboying off starting the procedure by myself without at least a supervisor present.

Now, the basic symbolic vocabulary is fairly clear-cut: I'm involved in, or about to be involved in, some project where I feel unprepared and I need to knuckle down and do my homework. What isn't clear is what real-life situation, if any, was the stimulus for the dream. (Dreams about work don't have any particular correlation with anxieties about work.)

I had a very successful time keeping up my fitness and nutrition program at Darkovercon. The convention hotel has a more-than-adequate mini-gym, so I was able to get in my standard daily 400+ cal/3+ mi routine on the elliptical and a reasonable facsimile of my weight-machine routine. In fact, since I got in gym time every day I was at the con (normally I skip weekends) and only missed Wednesday due to travelling time, I ended up with an extra day's credit on the routine. Wednesday evening a bunch of us made a trek out to a local grocery, so I stocked up on my usual b-fast and lunch stuff (V8 juice, soups, rykrisp crackers, pears, and a crudite platter) and skipped the hotel buffet for those meals. It meant I also skipped having cafe-socializing for breakfast and lunch, but in general I end up eating those meals alone at cons anyway, so it wasn't a major loss. This meant that I could hit my avg daily target with ease despite the hotel's T-day buffet and the traditional Sunday night steakhouse dinner. Success.

GoH Esther Friesner has this Thing about hamsters. And evidently part of her convention schtick is to do Cheeblemancy (Divination with Hamsters) as a fundraiser for her favorite charities. Cheeblemancy involves placing a (plush) hamster in a hamster wheel, having the subject turn the wheel, and interpreting the resulting position of the hamster. It's an absolute hoot. It also struck me as a truly inspired way for a big-name author to encourage people, who might otherwise be too shy to say peep, to come up and interact with her. Should I ever become an intimidating big-name sf author, I think I'll have to come up with something similar.

Comments

[stitchwhich.livejournal.com]

*cough* You are already an intimidating author - I suggest Chemocyclemancy - coming from the Bay Area, I believe that you are well trained in the art of divining the future via a wheeled vehicle on a hilly road that will end up *somewhere* after it speeds down the hill (track). Just take a HotWheel car and a bit of track for it, and maybe a wall of pretty retro-victorian houses for it to land by/on...

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I confess to being intimidating (evidently) and an author, but I have yet to achieve being intimidating as as author.

[mariedeblois.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I find that most of my Meaningful Dreams are remarkably clearly about exactly the situation that's stressing me out. This is actually really annoying.