Out of the closet

*hack, hack* *wheeze* *perish*

I spent a sizeable chunk of today cleaning out my closet, and moving the clutter that had been taking up space in my room into the aforementioned and newly roomy closet. Net result: two garbage bags of clothes to donate to Kiwanis, including some things I've had since high school; two more garbage bags full of actual treasures garbage; a box of books to sell to Bill at Dawn Treader; all of my hanging clothes on hangers, with seven precious hangers left over; lungs full of dust; and a significantly tidier bedroom. There's more to be done still, but I feel a bit more...streamlined. Or I will, once I haul things out to the dumpsters tomorrow. And I can lay hands on nearly all of my possessions without first needing to undertake a serious excavation.

(Don't tell anyone, but this may indicate that I've been influenced by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I'm getting a new computer in a week or two, and wanted a clean, uncluttered space for it to live in (and for me to work in). Whether this is more or less sad than a total makeover for the sake of some chick is unclear.)

Kendra made delicious baked stuffed potatos tonight, with bacon and sour cream and scallions all blended in. I haven't yet decided what to bake for dessert (tomorrow, at this point), but if I can fetch some cream of tartar tomorrow I may attempt a chocolate cream pie with meringue on top. (Hmm. If I make two, we can have a traditional, but brief, pie fight.) In lieu of dessert, I prepared hot cocoa with a cayenne pepper "zing" for K, for her to sip and get sleepy with as she read her mystery and I toiled in the depths of my closet.

I found no Fraggles, alas, though I did alarm a small surveying party of gnomes.

Dream a little dream

I had a very vivid dream last night about tapas and psocoptera. I had just flown down to meet them somewhere; it felt like a Chinatown in the jungles of South America, but may have been an alien world. We had rented a summer cottage there. I remember feeling a little disoriented, as though jet-lagged, upon my arrival. The parking lot for our building, I discovered, overlooked a spectacular valley, dropping in overgrown terraces down to a thick wall of jungle, from which granite bluffs rose. Psocoptera was sitting by the concrete wall, working on her computer, and she explained to me that Tapas would be back soon; she'd gone exploring, down one of the narrow paths that led to the jungle far below. I spotted something, then, in one of the small drains (or aqueducts?) that led from the parking lot to the jungle: a leech, the size of my forearm, and with a nest of tentacles around its mouth, had wriggled all the long way up from the jungle, following the little rill of water. I took pictures of it. I tried to take pictures of the valley, but the sunset had gone, and it was too dark.

There was more—we had trouble with the Chinese landlord, who left me a note inside a cheese sandwich (and by "cheese sandwich" I mean two slabs of cheese with a note inside), and there was some gaming tournament we had to win. That's a little fuzzy. But that memory of expectation, in a parking lot high in the air, gazing down into an alien landscape while the native fauna squirmed a long way up to meet me, is quite clear in my mind. I may have to set a story there.

After I awoke and showered and shaved and dressed, I carried several loads of detritus out to the dumpsters and recycling bins, then walked into town in search of cream of tartar. That was trickier than expected, but I did find Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus in trade paperback for $3.98 at Afterwords. I was eventually successful in my tartar quest, and have already rolled out the pie crust (which was more successful than some of my pie-crust-rollings of the past) and made cinnamon-sugar pie crust cookies for Kendra and myself from the scraps. After our stuffed-potato supper, I'll attempt a chocolate cream pie, and K and I will watch the Sopranos DVD we rented (season 4, disc 2).

This is the flip side of taking someone's shift last Friday: a Monday off. Mmm.