I had a very weird morning. I slept in waaaay too long, after having a crazy dream that woke me up at 5:30 AM and kept me up for a while. (To summarize: I had flown to Toronto for the day to visit the Yarn Harlot, and had a great time hanging out with her and her daughters, who were really silly and fun. One of them was dressed up for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I apparently left home without a printed itinerary, which is very unlike me, but I had written the time "9:30" in my planner. At 9:30 I said it was time for me to get to the airport. Then I remembered that 9:30 was the departure time for my flight. So I try to call home on a very weird telephone, and one of our friends answers the phone--the name not matching the person's voice--and I hear little kids playing in the background, as if there's some child's birthday party going on. Yeah, crazy dream.) So I got ready for work in under fifteen minutes, drove to work (where I was tailgated by a Division of Highways van, nice)--and at the door to my building is a huge Canada goose (damn things), guarding the place. There was a nest behind the building last spring, and the geese were very territorial and threatening, so we've learned to avoid the things. I waved my arms in the air and started yelling at it, but it didn't even move. I ended up using the back door. Anyway, weird.

On a serious note--and I hate even changing the subject this way--a girl I went to school with died the other day. We'd known each other for 25 years, and were even in Brownies together in second grade, but we weren't close after elementary school (I blame the bus route changing in middle school). She was nice, though. I suspect things at home were not so good, or maybe she just fell in with the wrong crowd or something, but there were some rumors about her getting pregnant a few times in middle school. She did have a baby when she was fifteen, a daughter who is now about seventeen. We reconnected on Facebook a few months ago, and if her activity is any indication, her daughter was her whole life. She'd been going through a rough patch lately, but it was beyond shocking when her sister posted that she had died a few days ago--of a heart attack, in her early 30s! She was a sweet person who had a pretty rough life. I can only hope she has found peace, and that her family will get through this. My husband lost both his parents suddenly (his father at sixteen, and his mother at twenty-two), and I just cannot imagine what that's like, but I know that he and his siblings are successful people who did eventually learn to live with their grief. (Not that it was easy--Mark had a few really awful years after his mother died where all he did was work crazy reporter hours and eat McDonald's and go out drinking, and he still has sixty extra pounds to show for it.) So I wish that for her daughter: success in spite of a terrible, heartbreaking loss.