woah, lots of happenings for one little break... and i'm feeling a little weird today because of it.

last night was the house-warming party to start myself on into the new digs and although i didn't manage to remember to invite everyone i meant to invite, it ended up being freakishly packed. as with so many groups, there appeared to be one congregation point around the food and so i think at some point our dining room, which is actually a decent-sized dining room but not the biggest ever in the world, had about fifty people in it, or maybe it just felt like fifty. it was probably closer to thirty, but loud enough that the music didn't get heard until we were down to about ten.

of course, by the end of affair everyone was drunk enough that interesting happenings started to occur. in this instance, someone, although there is still some debate as to who, fell into the toilet and completely broke the tank. not just a hairline fracture, but a wound all the way through the bottom and up around the tank. i came in from watching the snow from the balcony with my roommate and friend, and found our other friend flailing around in an ongoing stream of water that had already permeated the trashcan, all floor space, and the towels he had found to try and mop it up. and then I cut my finger and wrist trying to reach past the tank shards to turn off the water pipe (wondering why the friend didn't come out to get someone to do that before the bathroom was near flooded... the embaressment factors in such interactions are so very high, i presume).

But the water was turned off in a few seconds and the bathroom easy to mop. Yet: what do you do when you have a broken toilet tank and four semi-drunk people staying the night (actually, I wasn't very drunk at that point... one of the perks of starting to booze it up during the food-prep time period and wrapping it up fairly early on. but the other three were, and I was very frightened about how the "get out the alcohol" system would end up working. ug, bathtubs.)

Anyhow, our landlady ended up coming over the next afternoon with a man who didn't speak English who told her she would need to replace the whole toilet, which just sounds like bunk to me. We lied to her and told her that c2 fell getting out of the shower... The landlady was okay about it, but told us several times how difficult it was to get a plumber on the weekend... and so, tomorrow it is. I, however, was fretting like a mad woman about my regular bowel movements and suchlike, and ogling the construction-site outhouse across the way.

I don't think I mentioned that not only is it snowing, but I managed to pull my "hip flexer" muscle (ow, it frickin' hurts, I'm an old woman now), and my mom said I shouldn't be taking too many stairs. Does walking two flights down to the snow-covered outhouse count though? Fortunately, our landlady (it was the first time I met her) reminded me that you can use buckets of water to flush the toilet, which took me back to our first cabin in Alaska when I was ten years old... I'm not sure if it's true, but it seems like I remember a year of bucket flushing. Perhaps too traumatic to remember in full details?

Yeah, and other stuff: certainly a Winter Holiday to make one doubt the reality of the version.

So I ended up being entirely exhausted today despite really really really needing to finalize (or start?) the coursepacket for the class I'm teaching. And so I fell asleep and had a dream that I'm now going to force you to listen to:

Certain people were the ones who died, and their closest friends were the ones who would materialize, on the day of their death, in the vision plain of all their memories and sensations and childhood and how everything came together towards the end. I entered one person's death, where a hurricane ripped along old country roads. Herds of cows were blowing like tumbleweed, upside down, and the the wind would pause and the animals would try to get up, lifting their hooves and scraping at the air. Maybe they'd get halfway up and then the wind would come again and blow them away. Carriages spiraled closer, ducking past me at the last moment. The sky was brown-yellow and full of dust (a scarf filter across my mouth). A pair of horses wrapped around each other, their manes tangling into each other's mouths. A shed drifted by. In the dream, I had a sense of purpose as the friend; we entered the death plains in order to communicate a last message, and in order to carry back a last message. And so, I walked along the dirt road until I found the friend and spoke to her about her death. About how she was dying. The wind still carrying trees and braying animals.

Anyhow, that was it, although it involved a number of different death plains, and different quests, some wars and dilemmas and adventures and fights only capable of being solved via that movement back and forth between the living and the dying. A pretty intense dream... nice since I haven't been remembering them for awhile. I guess that's what happens when you nap.

So. I plan on going to bed "early" tonight (1:30am), and getting up "early" to do a monster pile of work. Ug. And hopefully the toilet will hold water by tomorrow night... hopefully.