I have had this Randomly Thinking file started for two weeks but have not had enough material or enough time to put it together. Since I don’t have anything for Fiction Friday today, I figured it would be a good day to post it, though I usually post it on Wednesday or Thursday. 

So, without further ado, my random thoughts from the last few weeks.

***

My husband posted on Facebook a couple of weeks ago that he had been having trouble sleeping so he had decided to count sheep. I told him I couldn’t count sheep because when I do they just repeat all my worries and problems back to me as they jump.

 “Did you look at your bank account today? baa…”

“What in the world is going on in Israel now? baaaa….”

“You don’t have an ending for your next book and that book on writing you read said you have to have a beginning and an ending planned before you even start writing. Baaaa…”

“What’s with Donald Trump’s hair anyhow? Baaaaa…”

So, I just don’t count sheep anymore. Noisy little things anyhow.

***

I make oatmeal every other morning and I always try to put only the smallest amount in, so I don’t end up with too much. I am very bad at this measuring by the eye thing, I guess because every single time I still end up with a huge bowl of it. No matter what. 

“It expands, Lisa!” I yell at myself every time.

I mix it with peanut butter and a few (hundred) drops of maple syrup so it is sort of like a no-bake cookie.

***

About two weeks ago small grasshoppers and katydids started showing up in our backyard and Little Miss decided she needed to capture them and keep them in small containers so she could look at them or something. I don’t really know why she wanted to keep them. All I know was that my living room soon had four plastic canisters full of little hopping insects and that those containers didn’t keep them contained very well. 

I had planned to release them after Little Miss went to bed or the next morning but before I got that far, I spotted the kitten in the kitchen with one cornered ready to eat it. Neither the kitten nor the child seemed able to catch it, until the next morning when the kitten ate it in front of The Boy while he was waiting for his grandpa to pick him up for work.

Luckily, the grasshoppers and katydids have hopped off to somewhere else for now. If they show back up, I’m letting Little Miss that if she wants to look at them outside, that’s fine, but no more bringing them into the house where they can escape and possibly crawl on me at night.

***

Speaking of creepy creatures in our home, one night last week I thought I saw something fly in front of me while I was sitting in our living room. I have eye floaters, so for a moment, I thought maybe it was something like that. Or I was having a stroke. Instead, the dark streak I saw in my vision was a bat.

Yep. A bat.

It had somehow got into our house and was flapping around the living room, trying to figure out how to get back out.

I wish I could say I was calm about it all, but I was not. Not at all. 

When that thing kept flapping toward me, where I was sitting on the couch, I kept picturing its little face and then imagining it gripping my hair in a panic, getting stuck there and flapping around like a crazy person.

Little Miss knows all about animals, of course, so she was delighted by it all and kept running around, giggling and telling us facts about bats and how they fly by sonar. I didn’t care what they fly by. I just didn’t want that thing in my hair. She was very excited when the bat landed at one point and she got to have a good look at him with “his cute little ears.”

I called my parents in the middle of it all to ask how Dad had gotten the one that had been in my room one time and my mom suggested I put a blanket over my head, so I did. I placed a pill and blanket over my head and screamed anytime it came near me while my dad scoffed on the other end of the phone.

I don’t think the fact we had watched The Birds, the Alfred Hitchcock horror movie, a couple of weeks before, had helped. 

I was legit terrified and finally ran to the downstairs bathroom while my husband and son opened the doors and eventually convinced it to fly out our back door.

I spent the next week thinking I could hear bats crawling in the wall or squeaking, but so far, no more have shown up.

***

My children aren’t excited by this next piece of news, but I am. I ordered a large chunk of their curriculum two weeks ago and it arrived last week. I was so excited to open the boxes and check it all out. I wanted everyone else in the house to be excited too, but they weren’t. The Boy rolled his eyes. Little Miss grunted and the husband said, “Cool. Have fun.”

Oh, I will. I will.

I honestly can’t wait for September 1 to get here.

*** 

I was chatting with someone online about the ability to imagine scenes, people, or events in vivid detail, which made me think about vivid and lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming is when you recognize that you are dreaming and then you change your dream while it is happening.

I have been able to do this a time or two. The one time it stands out the most for me is when I had a dream about an elderly friend and his wife who passed away 13 years ago.

My friend, Rev. Reynolds is in the dream with a dark background and a bench in front of him and he says “Oooh, Leeesa (as he always pronounced my name this way in his thick Northern Irish accent), I’m so happy to see you. Come and give me a hug.” He gestured with his arm toward the bench after I hugged him. “Let me get Maud for you. You’ll want to see Maud.” Then he turned slightly like he always did in life when summoning his wife, “Maaaaud! Maud! Come see, Lisa!”

Usually when he gestured, though, he was suggesting Maud make me some tea.

In the dream, I suddenly realized I didn’t want to see Maud. Maud was dead. Maud might look like a zombie. I didn’t want to remember Maud as a zombie. 

Then, before I could stop it, there was Maud on the bench and her face was normal at first, then it began to slowly deteriorate into blackness on one side, decomposing before my eyes. I held up my hand and turned away. “No! This dream is going where I don’t want to go.” 

In a room that was more like a cave in front of me were “people” or figures sort of golden on the edges, staggering against each other and moaning but I was already turning away and saying, “No. I don’t want this dream. I’m going to wake up because this is not how I want to remember my friends.”

And I woke up and ending the dream.

What about you? Are you able to change your dreams? 

***

Every once in a while, as we will be eating steak at my dad’s and he’ll say, “It’s not too bad. For being bought off the back of a truck.”

 Either that or “Grabbed this up on super sale. It was probably about to expire.”

We never know exactly what to say. 

***

Little Miss attended a church camp last week. She and her little friend were the only children at the camp but had a lot of fun.

Some of her comments during the Bible lessons were hilarious, but also a little nerve-wracking for me. At one point the young lady leading the group was talking about the story of Joseph and asked, “What would you think if you had eleven older brothers?” 

Little Miss responded, “Oh man. That would be so annoying.” She then proceeded to explain how annoying her older brother could be at times and how there are times she just has to punch or kick him. Sigh.

The young lady then told the story of Joseph being throw into the well and Little Miss said, “I might punch my brother or something, but I wouldn’t throw him in a well. That’s crazy.”

Later the young man told a story and he said something about a golden scarf. Little Miss, however, thought he said golden skull so when the young man asked what the girls thought of the story she said, “Well, I think that’s creepy.”

“What do you mean?” the young man said.

“That man pulled out a golden skull . . .” Little Miss said.

I laughed and let her know that he had said “golden scarf” not “skull.”

“Oh good,” Little Miss said. “That’s much better.”

***

Those are my random thoughts for this week. I actually had another random story/thought but I decided to break that one off for a separate, future blog post, so next week keep your eyes open for the blog post about my son and dad finding the cat I had as a child more than a decade after he died.

How about you? Any random thoughts? Let me know in the comments.