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Last night, the dream involved a prolonged, alcohol-infused visit to my vet.
Anyone who’s met my vet will understand when I say this dream needs no interpretation. Several women I know own cats primarily as an excuse to go to this vet.
Lest you find the recurring theme of ‘what I dreamt last night’ less than exciting, I ask you to ponder this: I never remember my dreams. Brain people insist that I do dream, so I’ll accept that. But typically, I wake up every morning, completely oblivious to whatever wild imaginings my subconscious has been using to entertaining itself (unless it involves almost-sex with celebrities – those I remember).
For the last few nights, though, I dream and remember. There was the scary drowning in Ontario dream, the weird pooping kangaroo dream, and now the party with the vet dream.
So why, oh wise and knowing readers, do these ones stick?

Remember the Lake Ontario dream? Well, last night’s nocturnal episode was that we had a pet kangaroo and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how to get it to use the litter box.
At least driving my car into a lake and drowning is easy to interpret. Now it appears that my subconscious is on vacation and is playing someone else’s reruns.

Welcome to the world, Joshua Adam O’Keefe, and bless you for having the grace to arrive on your godmother’s birthday.
Not many details at present – Alison had a C-section this morning, and was delivered of a boy. I guess I’d better get back to that knitting!

Last night I dreamt that I was driving along a highway in southern Ontario and I knew that I was about to drive into Lake Ontario but I didn’t panic because I knew my window was open and that all I had to do was wait for the water to start filling the car and open my door and swim to shore.
Unfortunately, when the time came to open my door, my hands couldn’t apply enough pressure to push the handle. None of the other windows were open, and since they’re electric windows, I was stuck. Just as I was considering whether or not I could kick the passenger window open, I woke up.
I don’t know if this means that I feel like I am drowning in work at the moment, or just that I have a hitherto unrecognized terror of anything to do with Ontario.

This is my life at the moment:
Morning – teach two-hour class on critical thinking, reading & writing…
drive through various conglomerations of construction vehicles and the resulting traffic mess to a completely different college…
afternoon – attend three-hour Developmental Psych classes…
drive back (now at rush hour)…
evening – teach two-hour class on issues of identity in Canadian women writers’ works (and the last two evenings, this class was devoted to individual conferences with the students to review their writing skills, which means that last night I got home just after 9 p.m., and the night before, just after 10).
In between all this, I am prepping classes, reading the psych texts, writing journals and other assignments, finishing leftover assignments from the Assessment course, and preparing my portfolio to mark the completion of the first third of the program.
This morning I woke up in a panic and had to ask Dr. T what day it was – I had a dream (which seemed interminable) that I had forgotten my Thursday evening class, and that it was actually Friday this morning. My panic was not abated by the helpful newsreader on the radio who apparently had the same nightmare and kept referring to the weekend as ‘tomorrow’.
Four more weeks, four more weeks, four more weeks…

At the risk of sounding uber-Canadian, let’s talk about the weather. It sucks.
It is currently 11 C. Eleven!! It’s June 11th, and it’s 11 C.
(as always, for the benefit of our American friends: 52 F)
Now, granted, it is morning, and the forecast is calling for a high of 19, which is not that far from the ‘normal’ of 22 C (66 F and 72 F, respectively). But add to the temperature woes the fact that it has been raining for, like, ever, and you get some idea of why, once again, all we can talk about around here is the weather.
The rest of the week looks better, with highs in the low 20s and ‘variable cloudiness’ instead of the ‘incessant, mind-numbing drizzle’ with which we’ve been faced the last few days. But with all due respect to the meteorological Cassandras, they’ve been wrong before. Like last week. And the week before.
We’ll see. In the meantime, the furnace came on last night, the cat is damp and miserable, and the house smells faintly of wet towels all the time (I hasten to clarify that this smell does not actually come from wet towels).

This weekend, Dr. T took advantage of the beautiful, warm, sunny days and stayed locked up inside Chalet #1 at the Pierre Elliot Trudeau park in Cote-St-Luc, playing in the 24th annual Montreal Scrabble Tournament.
He won.
First place, first division. First time.
Those readers who have ever spent time in our home will recall the word lists on the bathroom door – they finally paid off (literally)!

Dr. T accepts his prize from Montreal club director Bernard Gotlieb
He gets a nice check for this feat, and he’s already hinted that he’ll use part of the prize money to get a bike so we can hit the bike paths en famille, so that kind of makes up for the weekend spent under fluorescent lights.
So, yay!

Whatever happened to little old ladies who aged gracefully?
A couple of my Lennoxville ladies came into Montreal yesterday, and we hit the bike paths, cycling to St. Lambert for lunch, back onto the island via Parc Jean Drapeau (we even got to bike on the Formula 1 track!), through the Old Port, and back to my place along the canal:
35 km.
For the metrically challenged, that’s about 22 miles.
The ladies in question are both retired, which is why they have time to drive into Montreal for a long bike ride on a Thursday. I’m pretty sure both of them could have ridden the same distance again, too. Meanwhile, I was puffing and panting and wondering if my thighs would ever forgive me.
Now, I’m no spring chicken myself, but retirement is not looming. These ladies have a few years on me. But they are both in phenomenal shape, and I am, well, not. I was able to go riding in the middle of the week because I am between semesters, and even when I’m not, I’m lucky to have a job that isn’t M-F,9-5 anyway. But I still find myself putting physical activity at the bottom of the list of things to do, concentrating instead on work, house, family, food, and so on- by the time I have time, I am more inclined to flop down on the couch for televised distraction or flop down on the bed for sleep.
Maybe I need to retire.
My mum, in her retirement, is as active as ever, if not more so – she is the reigning women’s tennis champion at the Knowlton club, both singles and doubles.
I’m not sure where my racket is.
Having said that, I had a great time yesterday – the weather cooperated, and I wasn’t puffing and panting anywhere near as much as I would have predicted. Yay for smoke-free lungs! Lunch was lovely – coquilles St-Jacques on a terrase with a lively conversation about male movie stars (we all agreed that George Clooney wouldn’t get kicked out of bed for eating crackers, while unfortunately Redford, Newman, Connery and Ford have lost their appeal).
When we got home, the ladies went downtown to meet another friend for coffee while I collected the kids, cleaned myself up a bit, and got supper underway. I convinced the ladies to stay for supper, so they had a chance to meet Dr. T and the boys.
So, great day, and I am already looking forward to our next expedition.
And, Mo, in case you’re wondering – just got back from today’s 10 km, to keep the muscles active 😉

We visited Mum & Dad this weekend, where we got a close-up look at the unbelievable accumulation of water that results when it rains for 12 straight days.
It’s been just as perpetually precipitous here in the big city, but due to what I assume is divine intervention, there’s been very little damage, other than psychological.

This mother raccoon has been raiding my parents’ birdfeeder, and you can see how damp she is.
The lawn at their place squishes when you walk across it. The rivers and streams are all overflowing their banks. People have been evacuated in Cowansville. The Foster golf course is one giant water hazard. Waves from Brome Lake are spraying on the ashphalt on Lakeside Road.
In short, it’s wet.
Thankfully, today was supposed to be rainy, too, but so far it seems pretty sunny… and the rest of the week looks more like the May we’ve come to kow and love. Keep your fingers crossed.