Dallas World Aquarium

It's the beginning of December. Beautiful Wife is busy grading, and has thereby discovered her mutant power of being surrounded by spikes of spirit energy that stab anybody who gets too close or otherwise attracts her attention. She needs time -- and solitude -- so she can make some progress, but the campus is closed on Sundays and there aren't a lot of other places to go. What to do?

Well, for my part, the answer was "bundle both boys into the car and flee the house!" Only we needed to stay fled for, I don't know, at least five hours. Twelve would be preferable. So... where to go?

Yesterday's solution was the Dallas World Aquarium. The boys have been there before, but it's an amazing place to walk around and there's always something you didn't notice before. (Secondborn: "Look! I found a secret door!" ...Which the staff uses to access the cages, but yeah: pretty cool. Not nearly as funny as having a manta ray swim up behind him in the Great Glass Underwater Tunnel and scare him right off the ledge, but pretty cool.) (Firstborn, meanwhile, wandered around pointing things out to anyone who got in range like some sort of miniature museum guide: "Look! The vampire bats are cuddling while they hang from the ceiling. They're soooo cuuuute! Cuddle-bats! Look! Right up there!")

So, y'know, it went pretty well. And it did keep us out for a good five and a half hours, though some of that was travel time.

Anyway, next Saturday I'm taking them to the Dallas Zoo if the weather holds. I'm going to see if I can gather my father on the way, and if any of you who live nearby want to join us, well... drop me a line, we'll make an outing of it. (The comments here work fine, or if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you can send a message that way.) Being the crowd-averse person I am, I'll be aiming to get there when it opens at 9:00 a.m. so we can get started before it really fills up. (Or maybe, if the dark gods favor me, it won't fill up.)

Onward and upwards! Nothing but good times ahead!

Mock Gathering This Saturday

The long-awaited [1] and much-lauded [2] gathering of friends [3] of the blog is scheduled for this coming Saturday! Be there, or... well... be somewhere else, I guess. But I hope you'll be there. I promise, I don't have footnotes in person.

There will be signs with pics of Cuddles The Zombie Velociraptor on the table, so we shouldn't be too hard to find.
This isn't any sort of themed event; I'd just like to catch up with friends and iFriends, and maybe meet some of you in person (if we haven't already). So if you're in the area and it sounds like fun, please come by.

Time & Date: Saturday, October 13, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Trinity Hall at Mockingbird Station off Central Expressway (Highway 75).
Who's Invited: Anyone who's in the area (or happens to be passing through) and thinks this sounds like fun. Children are welcome (mine will almost certainly be there).

 See you there!

[1] ...at least by me...
[2] ...ditto...
[3] ...real and imaginary...

Local Gathering Update

I haven't gotten much feedback on the North Dallas Gathering that I proposed a while back. So, I'm going to exercise my divine mandate as Future Ruler Of The World, and make some arbitrary decisions. Here's the updated information:

Time & Date: Saturday, October 13, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Trinity Hall at Mockingbird Station off Central Expressway (Highway 75).
Who's Invited: Anyone who's in the area (or happens to be passing through) and thinks this sounds like fun. Children are welcome (mine will almost certainly be there) though the location was not set up with kids in mind.

Note that this is a gathering (where we get together for food, drink, and socialization) and not a Gathering (where the few who remain battle to the last in order to take each other's heads and claim The Prize), so dress appropriately and leave your swords at home.

If anybody has any objections to this plan, now's the time to say so!

North Dallas Gathering?

I've been wondering, off and on, if any of my friends, iFriends and/or regular readers would be interested in getting together for an afternoon of helping me pretend to have a social life. This was inspired, in part, by some of the get-togethers that have happened when Accidental Historian was in town, except that I'm trying for a venue where people can actually talk to each other. (I've had a lot of fun at those things, and they've kind of reminded me that I really don't Just Go Hang Out With People enough.)

Here's what I'm thinking:

Time & Date: Saturday, October 13, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Either The Londoner in Addison, or else Trinity Hall at Mockingbird Station off Central Expressway (Highway 75).
Who's Invited: Anyone who's in the area (or happens to be passing through) and thinks this sounds like fun. Children are welcome (mine will almost certainly be there) though neither of the suggested locations are really set up with kids in mind.

This is all pretty tentative, so let me know what you think. Is there a better place? A better date? I like the mid-afternoon time, because A) it shouldn't interfere with anybody's dinner plans, and B) those of us who have kids can get them back home with plenty of time to get ready for bed.

If you're interested in attending, leave a note in the comments. Even if you don't have any particular suggestions, it'll help me to figure out how much (if any) interest there is for a gathering like this.

iFriends and Weird Dreams

I mentioned, in comments on another blog, that I am privileged to have quite a number of friends who brighten my life in various ways. A substantial portion of these are "Imaginary Friends" or "iFriends": people I know online, but have never met in person.

Online relationships really are relationships. (I doubt that's news to most of my readers, and these days it seems to be a fairly common understanding among the general public as well.) And after interacting with them for years, there are quite a number of my iFriends whom I know fairly well. Oh, I wouldn't recognize voice or mannerisms; but I know their moods and attitudes, what sort of music they like, what issues they care about, and what sorts of things infuriate them. I have, in other words, a strong sense of their personalities.

Strong enough, in some cases, to dream about them.

This has happened before. Generally there's nothing odd or skeevy about it; I dream of iFriends in the same way that I dream about other people I know.

This one, however, was an extremely weird dream. Not only was I in college, but I was rooming with one of my fellow bloggers and her husband - which, I know, sounds a bit dodgy, but in the dream it was a perfectly ordinary living arrangement. Now, I have only a vague idea of what this particular iFriend actually looks like, and I don't know her husband at all. (Actually, waking-me is a little surprised that they didn't have their dog with them; I've seen enough pictures of that dog that I might actually recognize him if I encountered him in real life.) My own wife and children had no presence in this dream whatsoever.

So far, that's not too weird. If it had stopped there, it would just have been an interesting little reminder of the courtesies required for coed living arrangements in a none-too-large dorm room. But, no: this is one of my dreams, and my dreams don't let well enough alone.

The first (and least important) bit of strangeness was that it was a very snooty college. The other students were all dressed in suits and ties, and seemed very aware of their position and importance. This was odd mainly because none of us are particularly snooty people, nor was our fourth roommate. (He wasn't anyone in particular; just one of the NPCs that sometimes show up in dreams to fill in the bit parts. I hope they get paid decently for doing that; it must be a difficult job. But I digress...)

Fourth Roommate was also convinced that the Chupacabra was roaming the campus. This seemed very tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory-ish (even in the dream), but as soon as I agreed to hear him out, the beasty came looking for me. Apparently it kept getting spotted because it was roaming the campus trying to make sure that nobody knew it was there. It was a pretty scary thing, too: spindly limbs and long claws, a wide mouth with a lot of very sharp teeth, and something like wings under its arms. Oh, and it could talk, which is how I know what it was doing.

So: I dreamed I was rooming at a University with an iFriend and her husband, and the University was haunted by a talkative but not-too-bright urban legend in the flesh. I know people who dabble in dream interpretation, but the meaning of this one should be clear to anybody:

I need a vacation.