Still More Stuff What Happened...

Just remembered another bizarre moment from my Party on Saturday...

My wacky ex-housemate, the hirsute Richard, turned up carrying... A jar of stir-in pasta sauce. When queried, it turned out it wasn't a present for me. He'd had some time to kill on the way, had wandered into a supermarket (as you do) and discovered his favourite sauce on special. Go figure!

(BTW, Richard is the famed maintainer of the TISM Discography. Explains a lot really :-)

More Weird Dreams, part 94

Ok, the other night I dreamt I was being pursued by a Terminator-type half man, half robot creature. Around the back yard of the house I grew up in in North Boring. Somehow I managed to strip him (it?) of most of it's mechanical power, so it became just an ugly human. Who kept pursuing me, including through the roof at one point - as in we actually punched a hole in it! Later I found him regaining strength by hugging a kind of fruit tree in the garden - which had about six really big red pears growing on it. Not long after this, I defeated it (him??) with a a jab to the head with a sharpened bamboo pole, around the side of the house this time, and he imploded or collapsed in on himself like a snail into its shell, or something being sucked into a black hole. At this point I woke up...

Then, this morning, I had another one. Stupid brain.

Crap, can't remember it now.

!hctulC

Weird... I started typing before this page had fully loaded, and look what happened to the title!

Anyway, it's supposed to say "Clutch!"

Fuji, the aforementioned wonder car, chewed up his clutch last night. It had been playing up a little in the morning as I drove into the city - shuddering when moving off from the lights etc. But seemed to be ok-ish.

On the way home, however, it started acting bizarrely as soon as I started out from the bowels of the telstra dome. Almost bunny hopping, shuddering, it was kinda amusing.

Heading home through Carlton, the clutch pedal started relaxing in a big way, so it was almost sitting on the floor. I decided it was probably time to admit it needed work. I was looking for a place to stop so the nice RACV chaps could give me a tow, when I figured - well, it's working enough for me to keep going, if it can survive ten more minutes I'll be able to just make it to my mechanic (who's in Clifton Hill.)

So I carried on. By the time I was passing the top of Melbourne Uni, it had started making the most impressive grinding and squeaking noises. It still engaged - just - so I carried on, crossing my fingers.

Shuddering and squeaking and giving off burning rubber smells, I actually made it to the good old Melbourne Service Centre (take your car there, they're very good) and with great relief pulled into a parking spot outside the place. This was at about 7.30pm, so there was no one in attendance, obviously, so I hopped on the tram back to Northcote.

I've been told Fuji would need a clutch for over two years now, so it was only a matter of time. Thankfully it didn't fall over while I was on my way to Geelong, say.

This morning I popped into to drop off the key and tell my tale of woe to the mechanic. He'd spotted Fuji when he got in - it's a fairly distinctive car, what with all the stickers - and wondered what had happened. Fuji's a regular there. I explained that he'd finally chewed his clutch, he told me it could be a few days before he can even look at it. No biggy, I hardly drive these days.

I briefly toyed with buying a new car yesterday - such as this nice diesel Peugeot which is sitting in a car yard in Ballarat. Why diesel? They're far more efficient than petrol engines, so short of getting a hybrid, it's one way to help save the world. But as I said, I drive so little, and it's still cheaper to throw money at Fuji, even if he only lasts another 18 months, than having to pay off a new(er) car. If I ever get another job where I'm commuting by car, I'll think about it, but for now my 17 year old silver Subaru station wagon will suffice.

Er, and I'm rather sentimentally attached, aren't I? :-)
Not to mention the mass of stickers I've spent years attaching to the back and sides of Fuji. It's a work o' art now.

This is going to put a dent in my "savings" however. I want to move house next year, which ain't a cheap activity... I'll work something out.

Second Weird Dream

Ah! It's just come to me!

I was driving down an odd angled road, which I often dream about - don't ask me why. It heads down a hill towards another road, and joins it at quite an acute angle. This is just behind a bunch of low-rise shops and offices, and there's an odd cement structure on the triangular piece of ground between the two roads.

This is the really odd part - they road and the area has been improved since I first started dreaming about them, like the local council has been cleaning the place up, resurfacing the roads and redoing some of the cement. I think it's an area behind the local shops near where I grew up.

My brain is weird.

Anyway, evildoom_bunny and I end up in the back of a ground-floor office, which has been rented to us as a new place to live. So there's a double bed at the back. The place is, however, still being used as an office, for some obscure branch of the government it would seem. So while we're trying to go to sleep, a number of people finish work late and leave the place, passing through our area from a side door. I try and lock the front door, without much success. Then I discover some inner doors with a series of serious locks and bolts on them, so I pull them closed and press all the bolts shut.

The office - which is long and thin, and painted a neutral institutional color - has a left wall which is mostly glass. Which I realise only at this point looks out onto a tiny creek. So close that parts of it are running against the glass itself. I also discover that there are two grey cats sharing the room with us - one is a cat my mother used to own - I called it String, but it had a another name - and the other is just a generic grey cat.

They both want to get out. String manages to wiggle out a drain pipe which passes through the glass, and is half full of water. This doesn't seem to bother the cat, she gets wet and makes it outside. The other cat discovers that the glass wall doesn't actually make it all the way to the ground, and that in fact, part of the creek is in the room with us. So grey cat two simply ducks down and is outside.

I follow the stream to the back wall, where I find a medium sized (I guess - I have no scale to work with) octopus clutching the rocks at the top of the thing. Half in and half out of the water. For some reason I decide it's a bit threatening, and throw something small at it. This has no effect, so I heave a rather large rock in its direction. The octopus catches it, or at least absorbs the impact, and then throws it back! Then somehow I know that it's got angry with me, and its big eye turns and looks maliciously in my direction... Which scared me enough to wake me up...

evildoom_bunny remains asleep in the bed the whole time all this is happening!

Now, what the HECK was that about?????????????????