My email has been down all night, but I didn't really mind. I've been playing with Style Sheets and Rollover scripts in GoLive instead. (I admit it, I'm an HTML wuss, I've always worked with Pagemill and GoLive, though I can go in and fix my own code when it's screwed up). The CSS thing makes a lot more sense now, but I think I screwed up my pretty little Java rollover by redoing some images. I've always worked strictly in HTML, and I feel like a bit of an amateur now that I've seen all the tricks I can do with CSS. I've given up for the night, too much code gives me a headache after awhile.

Todayís dream starts off with my hanging out in a New Age/Witchy shop, sort of like the cool one in ìThe Craftî, another recurring theme. Iím wandering around admiring at all the pretty things, lots of silver jewelry and crystals. Itís sort of a New Orleans or antique warehouse style store, with the front completely open. I know the people that work there. One of them is a large black man who comes up to tell me that the people have arrived to talk to me about the Batgirl game idea. Cool, I walk up a concrete ramp (like in a parking garage) to go up and see them...

Upstairs there is a table and some chairs set up and there are several rather devious looking, almost mafioso types that are there to speak with me. I start explaining my idea for a new game, Batgirl vs. Catwoman. About halfway through they interrupt me, though and someone says ìHey, she canít be a part of this, sheís a Mooreî, and my mom is suddenly there explaining that sheís the Moore, Iím adopted and she pulls out some sort of brochure that has a picture of me as a child, which is apparently what they are complaining about. I ask why they wonít tell me who they represent, and they say Iíll never find that out, to forget about it, theyíll never tell.

Iím trying to remember the rest of the dream that follows... Suddenly Iím on the run being chased because of something I know (recurring theme). Iím one step ahead of them, sometimes hiding out on the same elevator as them, but they donít see me. I end up in a restaurant, pretending to work there, though I canít figure out the difference between a microwave and a toaster oven and the workers start to become suspicious that I donít belong there. There are two other girls with me who realize we need to get the hell out of there right away, so we run and jump onto a moving train only to see our pursuers running behind us, but unable to catch the train.

Then Iím on the train with my husband, who for some reason looks like a young Dick Van Dyke. We are working as some sort of strange, highly skilled pickpockets, justifying taking other peopleís money out of desperation for our cause. We are fleeing by car, motorcycle, on foot, and eventually out running through a strange landscape with lots of sudden dropoffs into huge gorges, that I jump over fearlessly and easily, though my husband is afraid (Iím very afraid of heights and falling, so this is very empowering!). I think I wake up when I realize that weíve finally managed to escape because there is no way the people chasing us could ever manage to cross the gorges, so we are safe for now and can stop running.

Normally I really hate having the ìbeing chasedî dreams, I always wake up panicked and exhausted from them, but this one wasnít bad. It somehow made me feel smart and clever, and incredibly athletic. All in all a pretty good dream as dreams go.

Now I'm off to bed for the 10am vet appointment, I should manage to get at least 5 hours of sleep.

The full moon tonight is the "Mourning Moon", appropriately named with all the weird things happening today. I jinxed myself by saying I was looking forward to another day of tossing and turning, I got what I asked for. After about 4-5 hours of sleep my husband wakes me up to tell me he's going out to run errands and to "watch the dog". We have an elderly Lab mix who's finally showing her age now at 16, trouble walking, some cognitive problems. Very sweet dog, though.

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I spend every night watching her (he gets the day shift), and of course as soon as he left the house, she got up and started wandering around so out of bed I came to follow the dog around. Watched a bit of MSNBC with the sound off ("oil spill in Spain is predicted to be worse than the Valdez spill", that's nice), and after the dog settled down again and I crawled back in bed and am finally dozing off, the phone rings, then they person hangs up, and calls right back. That'll guilt you into getting back up, what if it's my husband, what if his car broke down, what if....

It's the vet, calling to leave a vague message about the dog's bloodwork, she needs more tests, OK, no problem. Poor dog's on as more medicine than I am.

Just dozing off again, husband comes home, overreacts to the fact that the vet called, back on the phone (I'm the official medical/legal/etc. translator around our house, even when I'm half asleep), bring her back Thursday (morning! ugghh) for the tests. TV blasting in the other room, talking heads on one of the news stations (doesn't he get tired of non-stop news, I have to watch something just for fun occasionally, my favorite mindless choice is the Home & Garden Channel), fall back asleep...

I have the recurring dream again, I've been having it almost nightly in one form or another for months. My husband and I are moving into a huge old house where the other people are still there and I'm trying to get their tons of junk packed up and get them out of the house while moving our stuff in and trying to find a clean restroom to take a shower in. There's trash in the shower drains. There's so much stuff in the house it's overwhelming, but it's a really cool house so I keep on. Sometimes the dream is that we're buying or have inherited an old house that still has the former owners belonging in it and I'm having to try and sort out what we can keep, what's worth keeping, sometimes it's really neat stuff and the dream is really kind of a treasure hunt.

Other parts of the dream that are recurring are: for some reason the house or rooms can't be properly secured or locked, there are windows missing, broken locks, etc. I think that can be traced to my childhood where I shared a connecting bathroom with my little brother and one of the dooors never locked correctly, always made me feel insecure. Another element is that I'm always searching for a proper bathroom, that's clean, has doors on the stalls, has a private shower, etc. And sometimes the dilemma isn't moving in, it's that we have to move out of a huge crowded house and I'm trying to get as much packed as possible while having to decide what's really worth taking and what I have to leave behind.

Psychology-wise, I'd say the dreams interpret as: I'm overwhelmed, insecure, and have too much stuff. And have a deep need for privacy. All true, especially the last year or two. I left my fulltime job for a medical leave a few years ago and have been trying to make a living on the internet and Ebay, and did quite well at first but the last year has been very slow, but then that's true for every business.

At the end of the dream, I have a "dream within a dream" that I can't wake up and I've overslept and it's like 7 pm. So when I do wake up, I'm in a slight panic, thinking this is true (years of shift work will do that to you also). I wake up exhausted, but relieved to find I have another hour to sleep, though I'm not certain I want to go back to the "house". Start dozing off again, and in comes husband, he's been depressed all day because of the dog (she's really doing quite well, honestly), he's going to take his afternoon shower early, so I have to get up again. Oh well, the end of sleep for today.

After he finishes, I decide to shower and try and wake up too, we're actually going to get to go out to eat dinner tonight. Our first thought is to go to our favorite Chinese restaurant, but then we decide on the Black-Eyed Pea (nice filling American comfort food). With Thanksgiving approaching, I've been craving turkey and dressing and theirs ain't half bad. We're both still in rather somber moods, go to the used bookstore afterwards but I'm just not in the mood for it. Normally you can't get me to leave once I'm there, but today the aisles of books just seem to make me dizzy and disoriented.

I get home, check my email and I have three unhappy Ebay customers (I have 6000+ positive feedbacks so this bothers me). One person has an expensive damaged item (in the Netherlands of course, no cheap shipping refunds for me), one person hasn't received their necklace (OK, look through the shipping records, I don't see it on my postage receipts, no problem, send another, fortunately it's something I have extras of), and the third person bought a movie collectible item apparently expecting a retail item and is being wants a refund. OK, that's not my problem. I spend a lot of time taking photos and writing descriptions and this one is exactly as described.

Yikes, I just want to go back to bed. I'm sipping a really nice 10 year old Port trying to get rid of the "crawling skin" feeling as I type this. I don't feel very productive or imaginative from lack of sleep. I feel like I have a bad case of PMS, though it's not time for that yet.

While I'm getting things out of my head, had an even more interesting dream the night before last. (I drive my husband nuts when I try and explain these dreams to him, he rarely remembers his, and he thinks I'm nuts!) We're in a huge old house that was some kind of student dorm and it was Halloween. I was trying to go upstairs but every stairwell had some kind of haunted house monster on it blocking the way, ready to jump out at me. So I try a different way, but it's a moving stairwell, you had to jump on it, like and elevator and I can't do it. Then I find another stairway, and there's a monster on it, but it turns out to be my husband in a mask, so we both go upstairs. We get up there and there's a little girl in a room with big open spaces where there should be windows and no door, just an opening in the wall. There's a big black panther stalking the halls and we realize that we have to get to a room that we can close before it catches us. We're running from room to room, sort of a live video game, avoiding the panther, trying to warn people. I think I woke up then.

Still with me? Thanks, my entries aren't usually this long, but as I mentioned, it's a full moon... I think I'll go to bed early tonight.

Miracle of all miracles, I actually finished all of my Ebay� work before midnight and got to spend the evening surfing the web. I began in search of meaningful and unique webrings, wasted hours on Ringsurf's� slow as molasses server, but found one� that was actually what I was looking for. Then I went through my bookmarks of political and activist sites of interest and added a whole slew of those (see Left Field links below). I've been making new pretty little banners & buttons for my main website� also, playing with Photoshop and preparing for my eventual site re-design.

I've been suffering from the sinus infection that won't go away since sometime in October (or perhaps September, I've lost track). After two doctor's visits (actually my annual physical in two parts because my new insurance company won't pay for "preventative care"... huh?), the only useful things I've found are that my cholesterol has reached an all-time high and that Xanax isn't as great as it used to be...

Or perhaps I've become acclimated to Benzodiazepenes after years of taking Klonopin to sleep. I'm actually not an addict, I suffer from a neurological disorder that creates lots of side effects, including insomnia and horrendous muscle cramps. And I'll lie in bed wide awake for hours if I don't take something to knock me out. Lately, though, not much of anything seems to help. I've also developed an allergy to any form of antihistamine (yes, really), and suffer from year-round allergies, even food allergies and can't take anything really useful (my doctor gave me a steroid dosepack last time I went in, that's what I need, something to make it even harder for me to sleep).

All of my life, on top of my normal daily allergies, I always get an actual sinus infection about this time of year. Usually antibiotics will clear it up, but they're not working this time. It started with a general sense of dizziness in my inner ear, then developed into the stabbing pain in my sinuses (where the entire left side of my head was unbearably painful), and now I've settled into alternating between the earache and dizziness and a really annoying drip in my nose. I've found saline usually keeps these infections at bay, but this one latched onto me before I could stop it.

The weather in Houston has not been helping either. We've gone through periods of non-stop biblical rains and flooding, then after almost two weeks of warm and rainy, it's suddenly cold and windy. Then back again. With each weather change it feels like someone is trying to suck my brains out through my ear. So I've been spending even more time than usual in bed, though when the dizziness hits even laying in bed is uncomfortable.

I've been on the Atkin's diet� since summer, and was doing really well for about a month or two, but my cholesterol rating is evidence that I've been sneaking too many carbs. I was on Atkins several years ago and my cholesterol went to it's lowest level ever, and I even lost some weight, but I haven't looked at the scale in the last month or so (gulp). My husband lost 20 pounds without even trying just by the modified diet I've been serving him, but I think I stopped at about 8 pounds and have been holding since. Oh well, I need to start weightlifting again, or yoga, or something I can do at home that I'll enjoy. And drop the carbs again... and the holidays are almost upon us!

Oh well, almost 6am, off to bed for another day of tossing and turning and way too vivid dreams (not that there's anything wrong with that...).

Get out and vote on Tuesday! In case you haven't noticed lately, the US is hurtling towards a bleak future with idiots like Bush running the country (pending nuclear holocausts, world war, stock market crashes) and the only way we can make this madness stop is for everyone with a conscience to get out and vote so the Democrats can keep the tentative lead they have as the majority.

I know lots of folks want to vote Independent, and technically I'm actually a Libertarian, but the only logical thing to do at this time is to vote out as many Republicans as possible before they've completely destroyed what's left of our economy, and set off WWIII.

So PLEASE get off your butts and go out and vote Democrat on Tuesday!

I'm both sad and relieved at the same time, the trick-or-treaters have visited, the party's over... Though it IS Halloween year-round at our house, at least I'm "off the clock" so to speak for Halloween obligations.

The party went well, everyone had fun, our guests got a bit rowdier than usual (much cleaning ensued afterwards), but we had a good turn out despite the rainy weather. We had lots of creative costumes and lots of enthusiasm. My costume worked out pretty well, though I traded the granny boots for ballet slippers about halfway through the party, little black ballet slippers. My wig refused to stay put but since my hair is black anyway no one but me seemed to notice...

We actually ran out of candy for the trick-or-treaters this year, and my husband handed out pennies (no one complained). We had a first this year, a trick-or-treater was talking on his cell phone when we answered the door (damn teenager, no costume). We're keeping the decorations up through the weekend, just to enjoy them. The pumpkin will remain on the porch till it rots (our record to beat is March).

Off to bed.. I've been trying to get back to real life (and work). I got ambitious last night and opened an Ebay store� to organize my auctions and provide a better way to sell my antique postcards (don't laugh, it's a really addictive hobby). I made a pretty little logo and the page looks nice, now I need to add new items so they won't all be lumped together. I've been good this fall and haven't bought any postcards for myself, I went crazy last year and have a really impressive personal collection. Check out my Halloween Postcards page to see some of the really classic ones I've managed to acquire and to see why collecting the darn things is so fun ;-)