Dreams in 2022

One of my goals for 2022 was to record my dreams more consistently. I was disappointed with my follow through on that, but looking over last year, I'm surprised at how many I managed to write down. I'm going to put a few of them on here.

Lots of my dreams included people I know in real life and information about my relationship to them. For confidentiality reasons, I won't include personal information. Some of my dreams were pretty dark, and some were pretty mundane, so I won't share those either because they aren't fun.

I'm a fan of dream interpretation, but because these spanned over the last year I'm not confident that I'll remember what was happening in my life at the time. I don't think I can offer much insight on the deeper meanings

Dream 1: I'm on a platform, gliding along a track. I get stopped by a fare inspector and instructed to tap my card on their reader. I tap it and they say that it doesn't show that I paid at the previous stop.

A person on the glider ahead of me tells me that there was a stop a little while ago where I was supposed to pay, and this one is for confirmation. I don't remember a previous stop and have to get off my glider.

I ask the security guards if I can walk back to the previous stop. They say they don't want me walking back on my own, but I can walk back with a musician they know. They say he's going to have to go back anyway because he's going to "bomb"

Dream 2: The forest spirits lost something and they tell me and some other people to harvest wild celery to help them find it.

Dream 3: Found three animals. They are woolly like sheep, have trunks like elephants, are the size of dogs, and meow like cats. I bring them home. Their original owners track them back to our place. We pretend not to be home, but they confront us and we give them back.

Dream 4: My brother talks me into pretending to be a masked supervillain and to try and steal something from a group of women. They attack me. I don't want to hit them so I wind up getting unmasked. I'm a lawyer, so I'm mad at my brother for talking me into committing a crime.

Dream 5: I'm conducting interviews and there's a woman who won't tell us her name. We ask her, but she gets awkward and changes the subject. We tell her that she doesn't have to tell us her real name, just something that we can call her, but she gets awkward again. We ask some people that know her and they also become awkward. Later we find out she filed a complaint about us because we tried to figure out her name.

(I don't remember why I kept saying "we", or who else was conducting the interviews) 

Dream 6: I move into a new apartment with my old roommate. He's taking care of the neighbour's dog. I open the balcony door and she runs out and jumps off. My roommate goes to find her.

After he leaves my cat Kieran runs out and jumps off the balcony too. I go out and find him crouched with big eyes. I remember that this behaviour is called the "church mouse".

I bring him into the building but he keeps squirming in my arms. He escapes and gets into some dirty water the custodians were using.

I grab him but he gets me covered in the dirty water and after this, everything I touch gets dirty. I see a sign saying there are surveillance cameras and I worry that I'll be caught getting dirty water everywhere.

Dream 7: I'm climbing a mountain and find a room built into the rock. I go in an find a freezer full of chicken breasts. I take one and leave a soft pretzel to replace it. I also leave a note saying what I did.

The guy who lives there suddenly shows up and is yelling at me, so I push him down the mountain. He's knocked out.

I'm irritated now so I take another chicken breast and take back my soft pretzel.

Comfort Inn Waffle and Trip to Doon Campus

Last weekend me and Lee-Anne were in Guelph for my brother's birthday and we stayed at the Comfort Inn. This is exciting for a specific reason. Six months ago we were in Guelph for my birthday and we stayed at the same hotel. At that time I was still fairly new to diabetes and I was being pretty strict with my diet. However, I got surprised by the person serving breakfast because I thought it was self-serve. So when she offered me a waffle I panicked and accepted.

I used strawberry jam instead of maple syrup because I thought the berries might offset some of the unhealthiness. Obviously it didn't. My sugars bounced out of target range, I think for the first time since diagnosis.

So this time I decided to intentionally eat the same thing that put my sugars out six months ago to see if my body reacted any differently. Same location, same meal, and even the same server. I asked for a waffle and I slathered it in strawberry jam. My sugars spiked but they stayed in range!

It's pretty cool to see that my body is capable of doing something it wasn't able to do six months ago.

Yesterday me and Lee-Anne went to the Conestoga College Doon Campus to meet a friend of mine who works for the college, but used to run a youth employment program in Guelph that I attended. If you don't remember, I graduated from Conestoga Doon. I'd spoken to this guy over video chat a few times over the past couple of years, but I hadn't seen him in person since he used to work in Guelph (which was a while ago), and I hadn't been to Doon Campus since I moved out of student housing in 2015.

While I was there I ran into an old instructor of mine. I've seen him in person before, as I'd run into him on the Iron Horse Trail and we'd caught up once over video chat. It was cool to see two of my primary contacts from the college while I was there. I think there's only two other people that still work at the college that I'm as familiar with.

The campus hasn't changed drastically. I got to see the remnants of their COVID measures. They had plexiglass barriers in front of the Information Desk, where I used to work. They had racks of medical masks available to the public with signs that read "Masks STRONGLY Recommended", but I think I only saw one person wearing one.

 I get it. The safety measures have been getting less prioritized but the messages aren't factually incorrect, so the language used for them seems kind of strong at this point but it's hard to know when to modify them. At this time we have a lot of signage that's a little out of sync with the current societal attitudes.

They added a Starbucks. Before, we only had a Tim Horton's and you could get Starbucks brand coffee at the cafeteria. So now you have one more option.

Vending machines still accept cash. At the University of Waterloo they have gone completely cashless, but Conestoga's not quite as close to the cutting edge.

Sandwich Central in the Cafeteria is now a sushi place. I wanted to see if they still had a stirfry station but it wasn't open. The daily soups were still in the same place.

The section of the cafeteria known as the Blue Room isn't blue anymore. They revamped it with more subdued and varied colours, but it's still called the Blue Room for some reason.

The Sanctuary, which was a a secondary cafeteria, smaller and slightly more intentional in design, is now called The Venue and it's a sit-down restaurant. When we went in I was surprised to be approached by a server.

The Coz-E-Corner, which is like a micro-cafeteria that has a Subway and a Pizza Pizza is still in the same place and branded the same.

The Aboriginal Services Office got moved to a new section of the school. It's not in as public a space, but they have more room and it's next to the Indigenous Garden. The person that used to run it left to work at the University of Waterloo, which I already knew, but when I saw that the office wasn't where I remembered it I was a little worried that they'd scrapped the concept once that guy left.

They've also fully rebranded to Be-Da-Bin Gammick, which means "Place of new beginnings". When I was a student, the guy in charge was trying to get away from the term "Aboriginal" because being "abnormal" means "not normal", so "Aboriginal" sounds like "not original" when they are actually the original people to live on the continent. But for recognition they had "Aboriginal Services Office, Be-Da-Bin Gammick, Place of New Beginnings" printed on the front of the office in entirety. Now it just says "Be-Da-Bin Gammick" without even the translation, which I think is cool.

They still had an "Expect Respect" slogan displayed. I used to work for the Respect Campaign, but at the time they were phasing out the term "Respect" for "Student Life Leaders"", so I was surprised to see that there's at least some remnants of the original Respect message this long after I graduated. Happy to see it.

The Atrium, which is like a really wide set of giant carpeted stairs where I used to hang out, looked smaller then I remembered. We went and looked at the house I used to live in, and that looked smaller as well. It's a pretty common phenomenon to think things don't look as large as they did in your memory, but that's usually only for childhood memories, and the reason is that the things didn't get bigger, you got bigger and so they look smaller in comparison. But I was fully grown in college, so it's weird that everything looks smaller.

Weather, Plastic, and Teams

We recently had a huge snowstorm. We've had a few really warm spells and there was a time that it felt like we weren't going to have a proper winter at all, but it seems it was just postponed because we've had a series of storms and wickedly cold weather as we near Spring. This wasn't the coldest or windiest we've had this year, but it beat the others in shear output of snow. Since we live in a basement apartment, I was wondering if it would be dangerous if the snow collected above our fire escape windows when I saw a bright flash. I thought I recognized the phenomenon, but it felt out of place and I didn't have time to consider why that was before a loud rumble confirmed what it was.

We were having a snowthunderstorm! I'd never seen such a thing before and frankly didn't know it was possible. I went outside to experience it personally. There was a lot of thunder and lightning accompanying the extremely heavy snowfall.

It felt so surreal. There was a time when I think I could have appreciated it simply as the awesome power of nature, but with all the talk of climate change any unusual phenomenon  sparks concern that its a symptom of the Earth's ill health.

Apparently thundersnow is an established thing, although considered rare. I didn't understand most of what I read, but I don't think it implied anywhere that it was a byproduct of climate change, so that's nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundersnow

Recently Canada banned a number of single-use plastics, including grocery bags and plastic cutlery. I approve of this but it seems kind of minimal. I'd guess that packaging and transportation are much more significant drivers of climate change. I wonder if the more common use of medical masks alone offset the positive effects of banning plastic grocery bags. Oh well, maybe it's best to implement these changes incrementally. We saw the impact of large social change during the COVID measures.

It must be the production of these things that are banned, not the use or distribution of them because plenty of places still offer them. At this point, I've seen Wal Mart and Food Basics operating without plastic bags, although they still have those little clear ones for produce. The closest grocery store from us is using compostable bags, like what you use for food waste. I'm not sure if this is actually a viable workaround or if they're just using up their supply. If it is a viable alternative, I wonder why the larger companies haven't adopted it.

Rexall and the LCBO are using paper, but they always have. I remember a time when most places gave you the option of plastic or paper bags. I think there was even a time when people thought plastic was the more environmentally-friendly option because paper was "killing trees". Of course, now we know plastic is overall worse because it doesn't break down. If paper used to be a lucrative option for companies, I wonder why most places don't use it now.

But I'm not actually trying to champion compostable plastic or paper. Most places are encouraging use of reusable cloth bags, which is probably the best choice.

The other day I ordered a salad at a community centre cafe and they gave me a plastic fork. I wonder when we'll stop seeing that, and what fast food places will use to fill that void.

My work life has been turbulent. Our boss retired at the end of January and the person on our team that had the most experience got promoted to his position. Then we hired a new person to fill the place of the person that got promoted. Then someone else on the team had to quit their job a couple weeks ago because of life circumstances and we're down a person again. So we're waiting on another new hire.

I don't think I've talked about any of this on the blog. We were given a little notice, but the information came to us before a lot of other people so I didn't want to make it public, even though this blog doesn't get enough traffic for that to be a huge concern. I could have talked about it a few weeks ago, but I let the events occur before mentioning it here.