tsunami premonition
Topic: Nature
[index] [bot]

19:16 Monday, 17 January, 2005
Endwell, NY


At dinner tonight, my mom was talking about an American she'd seen on Oprah telling about his experience surviving the tsunami in Sri Lanka. He went into vivid detail about swimming around in the wave and such, and it suddenly reminded me of a dream I'd had in December, long enough before the tsunami hit that I didn't remember having had it until today. Here's my diary description of it from the following morning:

<<<
10:13 Wednesday, 15 December, 2004

I was bushed last night after work, so I went to bed at 10pm.... I woke up in the middle of the night because of a funny dream. Actually, two of them. In the first one, I'm not sure where I was, but I was out on the edge of land near the ocean, and had gone out on some narrow, low-elevation peninsula. While out there, some sort of storm came, bringing high winds and strong waves, but the sun was still out. I knew I had to get back inland to safety, but when I tried to get back, parts of the peninsula were submerged. I got to a highway ramp that would have sloped up onto the mainland, but the ramp had waves washing over it, and it moved with each wave such that I was afraid to walk on it and got knocked off into the water. So my only choice was to head back out to another peninsula, this one with a square of palm trees on it. I basically had to jump from one patch of grass to another until I got onto the roots of an over-turned tree, and there I determined to wait, and just hope that the water didn't get any higher so as to submerge my little spot also.
The next dream also involved water. In this one I was treading water in a large pool of some sort with a friend or two. I had three or four hamsters with me, and they were swimming around me. My attention became focused on just one of them (which resembled my first hamster, Chubby), who was swimming around in front of me. He was swimming under water and was looking for air, and so I watched him to see if he would find it, and if he didn't, I would bring him to the surface. Anyway, he swam down and started biting my stomach. It didn't feel like real hamster bites (they have very sharp teeth), but more like someone's fingers pinching. After a few pinches, I brushed him away, and he swam around? and started biting me more, and this time he was so persistent that it woke me up. It was only like two in the morning, so I wanted to fall back to sleep. I did after about ten minutes, but I slept lightly after that, not really realizing I'd fallen back asleep.
>>>

The second dream doesn't seem to have much to do with a tsunami, but the first one certainly could. It was much more calm than the tsunami that hit on Su-26-Dec, which probably didn't involve wind as my dream did, but it strikes me that I had a dream of this nature a mere ten days before the worst tsunami ever recorded hit SouthEast Asia. It's not much of a psychic premonition or anything, since it wasn't major and only involved me, but it's still pretty weird. I guess the psychologists would say I'd never have thought anything of the dream if the tsunami hadn't occurred a week later, which is true. But even at the time it was a weird dream for me. I usually have pretty life-like dreams, usually involving things familiar to me, but this was pretty totally foreign. And I also don't normally dream at 2am, even when I go to bed early. My dreams (or the ones I remember) usually happen in the morning. So, anyway, this is kinda creepy to me. The images are still clear in my mind, such that I could go into much more detail. The best thing, however, would be if I could take advantage of a strange phenomenon I heard of in a couple of my classes, one in high school and one in college. I don't have all of the details, but there was a person who could somehow look into the lens of a camera and click the shutter, and whatever was on his mind at that moment would be developed on the film. It was considered one of those crazy psychic abilities or a well-planned hoax, depending on whom you asked. But I wish I could stick a video-camera up to my eyes and replay that dream in my head and have it on film. Maybe if I were an artist I could draw the whole thing or something, but I'm not.


[index] [top]

...the images 'Winter Wonderland' was written about.
Topic: Nature
[index] [bot]

14:35 Friday, 14 January, 2005
Endwell, NY


It's a gorgeous day outside again today. But gorgeous in a very different way from yesterday. The temperature fell enough over-night, and those buckets of rain turned into two inches of snow, which stuck to all of the wet stuff, creating the images 'Winter Wonderland' was written about. Every branch of every tree is covered with snow, on all sides of them. I love it when that happens. It's only a few times a winter that this occurs, because of the conditions required, but I absolutely love it. It gives the entire world this surreal appearance. And the silence, too ? the snow on every surface just muffles all sound. It's beautiful.

For those interested in statistics and numbers and such, I looked at Weather Underground to see just how much rain we got last night. When I went to bed, it comes coming down hard. It actually rained eight tenths of an inch from midnight to 6am this morning. That's a lot of rain. The temperature also dropped 30?F, the most significant change occurring in the fifteen minutes between 02:45 and 03:00, when the temperature went from 50?F to 37?F. I would like to have been outside at that time, because that's a change that would be noticeable just standing out there. Our Earth is simply (complexly, rather) amazing.


[index] [top]

...this 60-degree-craziness.
Topic: Nature
[index] [bot]

00:16 Friday, 14 January, 2005
Endwell, NY

It's an amazing night out tonight. Right now it's 59?F. At midnight. In the middle of January. *Summer* nights aren't normally this warm. It's beautiful. Warm air, warm breeze, the kind that makes me want to walk and talk with someone all night long. It just has that feeling to it. Granted, this type of weather always brings a storm, but enjoy it while you can, right? The temperature is supposed to steadily drop from here, until it's 33?F at 7am, and snowing. And then it will continue dropping, and never rising, until it bottoms out at 15?F Saturday morning. Insane. It should then never get above freezing for another week. That's about normal for this time of year, but not this 60-degree-craziness. All that beautiful snow we had? wasted. Start again from scratch. They're actually having flooding now because of the snow-melt mixed with the rain. That's not supposed to happen until March. Weird.


[index] [top]

Civ and Chunky Sledding
Topic: Nature
[index] [bot]

00:08 Monday, 10 January, 2005
Endwell, NY


I just wrote this in my personal diary, but it should be fun to read, so I'll put it up here, too.


Man, what a bad idea. I had to go and figure out a way to make Civ not get boring and monotonous, and, as a result, I absolutely can't stop playing. Like, it never ceases to be fun. I went to sleep around 01:30 last night or something, and got up at 09:30 to pick up the kids at church. A little shy of eight hours, but I'm still well behind from the other day. So I showered and went to the church at 10:30 and played with Precocious and Gumby in the nursery-school room. They were having fun, and I was playing back-gammon on my phone, so I figured I'd just let them stay and have fun there, rather than drag them home for no reason and make them sit at home and watch TV and play computer. I figured this was better for their brains. Anyway, PaperBoy came down and also agreed to let them play a little longer, since they were playing relatively nicely, so he and I shared a game of back-gammon. He won. Oh, well. So when we finally decided to go, Gumby threw her usual stupid fit. I don't get it at *all.* Anyway, they left, I went upstairs briefly and was bored by the guest sermon reading a fiction story about the three wise men., so left.

Home, I decided to wait for M+D for lunch, which I only thought would be half an hour, but turned out being an hour. Just before I came down to eat, Gumby called and asked me to go sledding with them at the high school, so I ate quickly, bundled up, and went down. They were waiting there, but hopefully not for long. We sledded a bunch. Because of the rain we'd had, the hill consisted of broken, 1?-inch chunks of ice which made for bumpy travel and difficult steering. But it provided little friction, and the flat field at the bottom was intact, so the sleds really went forever. I saw kids regularly having to stop themselves before falling in the creek. So for all of the times we've been there and in different conditions over the past twenty years, this was, by far, the best for distance. The hill itself was a wreck, and it was far from ideal, but it was fun. The chunks of ice were also very sharp, and we saw a few people (including one with a huge, six-person tube) literally shred their snow-tubes. Stupid people. We'd left ours home, knowing the ice would be too sharp. Anyway, the sleds were always spinning around because the ice didn't give at all, so the keels under the sleds couldn't dig in and provide tracking for the sled. Therefore, the heaviest part of the sled (which was the back if one were sitting down) always wanted to go down first. The sled would turn sideways, but then catch that huge edge on a chunk of ice on the surface, toppling the passenger down the hill. This happened to everyone. Except Gumby, who was in the circular sled, which is designed to go down with any of its edges facing down-hill. It was perfect. She just squealed and spun around in circles while zooming off down the hill and across the field. So I decided to try it once, and I quickly remembered that the plastic on the bottom of the circular sled is much thinner than on the rectangular sleds. As a result, I bruised my bum hitting a chunk of ice, and it's still sore now. So I only went down twice more: once on my stomach (too fast and bumpy on the chest, so I had to stop myself by tearing up the hill further with my boots and gloves) and once in a sled on my butt (carefully; it actually didn't hurt that badly, but I was being cautious and still didn't like the idea of abrading my gloves so much on the ice). The kids got tired, so we pulled them up the hill a few times, but then said that was it. They still wanted to sled, so they went down and then sat at the bottom for a while waiting for us, and PaperBoy and I just lied at the top. They finally came up, but then still claimed to want to go down again. They did once more, but after it was so difficult for them to again come up, we took them home. Gumby complained some again, but not too badly. Precocious borrowed my Nalgene, and he was very grateful (he must have been very thirsty, since he had asked to walk over to the church to use the water fountain, which would have been locked and would have taken more time than driving home).

Back home, I returned to the game, then went to the Giant and made burgers with Dad while watching the 50's half of Back to the Future II. Mom was at a bridal shower. Civ again, and I finally dragged myself away now. Tomorrow I'm going to try to contact the train job and check on my application. I want it!

Hm, I just realized (when I typed the date to save the file) that today was theoretically the day I would have been leaving home to pick up Boundless and drive to wherever we'd have found jobs. I'm very ready to leave in some respects, but not in others. If I get one of these jobs which start in February, I think I will be very happy with the timing. I actually think I would have been ready to leave today if I'd just had a few weeks' warning. When it was less than a week ago that I might be leaving right now, it was very nerve-wracking.


[index] [top]

Tsunami
Topic: Nature
[index] [bot]

02:02 Saturday, 08 January, 2005
Endwell, NY


So there was this tsunami in SouthEast Asia. Major big deal. Like, second- or third-worst earth-quake in recorded history, and certainly the most-devastating tsunami ever, unless (as has been theorized) the lost city of Atlantis had 200,000 people in it and they were all killed in a tsunami. The next-nearest was like 22,000 people, and here we have at least 150,000. Incredible.

And I've got this web-site, a type of forum for the discussion of things, and I feel I should have something important to say about this matter. But it is so over-whelming for me that I really don't know what to say about it. I've written a few small things about it to my friend, Sleepless, but was trying to wait to write something big a profound about it all before posting these smaller discussions of it. But I fear it will be a long time before my mind can grasp it all to make an all-encompassing statement about it (as, in case you've noticed, I haven't managed to say anything about the outcome of the presidential election in November, which was also devastating), so I've decided to just include the excerpts of what I've written about elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the tsunami has affected me tremendously, and I pray every day for those whom it has affected personally.

Written 01-Jan-2005:
<<<
Something funny happened to me today. We were in the car on the way back from Philadelphia, listening to the news radio because there was an accident ahead which we wanted to avoid the traffic from. They were giving the news about the tsunami, and said something like 'the death toll has now risen to one hundred twenty-five thousand people' or whatever the number is now. I hadn't heard the number yet today, but knew it was already over 100,000. So I was listening for the number, and, just as they said it, a guy on a Harley bike revved his intentionally-noisy engine (this is a major pet peeve of mine, because the owners illegally alter their exhaust systems for the purpose of making their bikes more noisy and annoying, which is damaging to the environment and everyone's ears) so that all I heard was 'the death toll has now risen to one hun ? sand people.' I thought that this just perfectly represented the average American's level of caring for what happens in the rest of the world. Granted, he wasn't listening to the program I was listening to, so it's not like he meant to cover that number, but it's the representation as a whole.

This reminds me: At last count, the U.S. had given $350 mil to the relief effort (they pledged this yesterday), and today Japan said they were giving $500 mil. I'm curious to see whether the U.S. will increase again so that we stay on the top of the list for most support, which is what happened earlier in the week when Spain's $60 mil was higher than our $35 mil. I'm not saying we should or should not be at the top of the list, I just wish the list didn't exist and people gave based on what they felt they could instead of based on trying to look good. Some people in and out of our country have been criticizing the U.S. for being stingy in this matter, and Bush made a statement in response yesterday, saying the we spent however-many billions of dollars in aid in 2004, so stop making it sound like we don't care, basically. The sad thing here is that he's counting the billions of dollars we've spent taking over Iraq as 'aid,' and I pray the rest of the world has the brains to see through that lie.
>>>

And in response today to Sleepless sending me an e-mail from a friend who is in Thailand right now, helping look for missing people:

<<<
Hey, keep sending this stuff; I'm dying to know what's going on over there. I have many thoughts about it all and can't put them together to say anything functional. But one thing I did want to say as I was reading this: I'm curious why they are making these huge mass graves for all the bodies. They need to get them covered quickly to stop the spread of disease, I understand. But all they're going to do is rot in the ground and pollute the water supply for the future. Why not cremate them all? I know, people don't like to think of these bodies, and there are more important issues at hand in all this, but I've been wondering it every time I've heard about the piles of bodies and the mass graves. Isn't this going to be trouble down the road? And, honestly I think the cremation is more respectful in this case. I saw film on TV of them dumping the bodies into these mass graves using dump-trucks and bucket-loaders, and it just reminded me too strongly of the Nazi concentration camps. Nobody wants to be near a mass grave, but it seems like a funeral pyre is a respectful thing, and people might actually have a ceremony surrounding one. Just a thought.
>>>



[index] [top]