In between all of that I dreamed. In the first dream, I accidentally rode my scooter onto the highway. Then it started raining and I was freaking out because I was on the highway, it was raining, and I couldn’t find an exit. I woke up and had to pee (weird). The second dream was just awful. I had left some clothes in the dryer for maybe half a day. In that time Mrs. Swan had taken my clothes out and just threw them outside. When I asked her where my clothes were she just shrugged and said that she threw them away. This is the part in my dream where I flipped and started yelling at her and telling her that’s she’s disgusting and inconsiderate. This is when I woke up and realized I had overslept and would not be doing my yoga practice this morning.

Things are just piling up. I know that’s where the last dream came from any way. The first one…who knows. I’m sad because I think today is the last scooter day for a while. I desperately need to clean the clutter out from around me, not to mention the rest of the filth. This morning I discovered an area in the kitchen where mice have been hanging out. I lump mice into a “you are dirty” category and right now I’m feeling like I’m living in a trash dump.

Maybe it’s time to take that salt bath. At least the bathroom would get cleaned.

We bought so much crap this weekend. Most of the things I purchased needs to be (carefully) packed away and put into storage. I bought these way cute tumblers but had to talk Mom and Katrina into also buying a set so we could swap them out. Now I have a set of six way cute elephant glasses (I can’t find them online). They’re for the new home.

The only problem with IKEA weekends is that I get nothing done at home. The house is grossing me out. It needs to be cleaned. Homework! I still have done nothing on the yoga homework front. Tonight I will tackle one homework project and maybe dust the living room. I think the dusting part is being a little ambitious, but hey. Who knows right? Maybe I’ll get home and Mrs. Swan will have done it. Ha! Hahahahaha!

Mom and Mrs.Swan together I can handle. Katrina is no problem. Love her. I need her there for support and back-up. She’s my inner bitch who actually says the things I’m thinking out loud. Brian and Amiee, I’m not so sure about. I haven’t even seen them since I found my ornament trash. I haven’t said anything to Mom about it either (she is going to be soooo pissed!). I don’t want this to be the time for confrontation. Well… actually I never want confrontation, that’s why I make a pretty darn good door mat.

So here’s my game plan. First, they are going in a separate car (whoosh). Once at IKEA, I loose them amongst the kitchen displays. If I am required to interact with them I will say things like “I am so proud of this country for electing Obama” and “Isn’t it just great that Obama won the election?!?”. Amiee reads Ann Coulter (I know, vomit right?!). I’m hoping that by the time we leave IKEA, she will be so fed up with me that they won’t tag along with us to REI and Pappadeux’s. I think this is a solid plan. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll shove them into a Hopen/Komplement with Katrina. It will be like the Thunder Dome with Katrina being the soul survivor.

Afterward we stopped by Starbucks for our free cup of coffee. When I got to work, I opened a box of stuff that I had ordered and there was a small bag of candy inside. Score! I had two Starbursts, a caramel, and wedge of chocolate. I have been running around like I’m on crack all day. Usually Chris drives, but I drove us home today. I made ravioli lasagna and I was so jittery, I added an extra layer. I can’t sit still! I am on freak-out mode. Meanwhile, Chris is sleeping. We obviously handle stress differently.

You would think I would be the one sleeping since I got up at 5:00 to do my yoga practice, but no. I feel like I’m going to leap out of my skin. I know I’m going to crash and when I do, I’m going to crash hard. Oh please let me wake up to happy!!!

One of my assignments is to teach someone how to visualize auras. See, the focus of this weekend was energy bodies, auras and chakras. All the things about yoga that I think are hooky. Apparently we are surrounded by our own personal electronic fields that consist of several layers. There’s the physical layer which is our bodies. We can see, smell, and touch this layer. After this is the vital layer, the emotional layer (this is the one that’s colored), and the universal layer. When some one says they can see your aura, it’s the emotional layer they are “seeing”. This layer varies and changes in color and size. I cannot see auras, or if I can, every one’s auras look alike to me. So I’m really not sure how I’m going to teach someone else how to see auras when I can’t see them myself (or even believe they exist).

I will admit that I learned something about the chakras this weekend that is pretty cool and will make a great party trick. We have seven chakras (crown, forehead, throat, heart, solar plexus and root) and they spin clockwise. They spin counter clockwise every now and then as a self cleaning mechanism. If you hold a pendulum over any of these chakras, the pendulum will spin. I’m not kidding. We all got to hold the pendulum and we all got to have the pendulum passed over us and it was freaky. You don’t need any thing fancy. You can even use a washer tied to the end of a string. You’ll need to add a handle (maybe another washer) so you can’t manipulate the string. I’m thinking of stopping by the wicca store and buying an actual pendulum, but I also want to make one just to see.

So… crazy weird weekend. Lots of homework which includes a 20 minute salt bath. Most people would be thrilled with the idea of soaking in a tub for 20 minutes. I am not normal. I think baths are disgusting and the idea of “soaking” makes me cringe. I’ll have to bleach the tub, shower, bleach the tub again and then do my soak. And even then, 20 minutes is a lifetime! It’s too much work to clean my aura. Can’t I just leave it dirty?

When we moved in with Mrs. Swan, we left a few things in the storage shed at the old place. Things like Halloween costumes and Christmas decorations. This was supposed to be OK with Chris’s brother and his sister-in-law’s brother who moved in with his girlfriend/wife and baby. After all, we did give them our washer and dryer. We went over there this evening to get Chris’s Ghostbuster costume for work and discovered this. The box containing all of our Christmas ornaments looked like it was full of trash.

I burst into tears. Then I took the box out to the car. I cried all the way back to our house. I cried as we sorted through debris trying to salvage anything and then I just sat staring at the wreckage while even more tears rolled down my face. Apparently the new tenants had a dog that had gotten into the shed, knocked over a bunch of stuff and went crazy with what ever it could get it’s teeth on. Who knows when this happened. They don’t have the dog any more. It probably choked on a shard of glass from my Babar ornament.

You know, it probably wasn’t a big deal to them. They probably thought “Oh… they’re just ornaments. They can go get some more from the Wals-Mart.” That’s where all Christmas ornaments come from right? Yup. I don’t even know how to finish this entry. There’s so much I want to say about Chris’s family (poor Chris…he was adopted). But I think mostly, I’m just done. I’m done with doing things for their kids. I’m done with going to their home for family events. Most of all, I’m done with pretending to be nice to people I don’t even like.

I’m sad.

He figured it was shingles because the info he’d found online. A lot of time I feel that seeking medical information online can lead to a heap of hypochondria. But I got online that evening and within seconds of glancing at the first picture, agreed that Chris had shingles. The doctor confirmed it this morning and put Chris on a bunch of steroids and told him to stay away from small children, pregnant women, and the elderly.

He feels fine other then the fact that he has a painful itchy rash on his side (think chickenpox for adults). But neither of us can stop saying “shingles” in this totally exasperated and amazed way. Chris never gets sick. Never. He gets a cold and it might last a day or two, but that’s it. I’ve never known him to go to the doctor to get antibiotics for a sinus infection or strep. He’s usually driving me to the doctor for those kinds of things. That’s our normal routine. Chris started getting a really bad cold just as we were leaving for Portland that turned to an extremely bad cold (I think sinus infection) while we were there. We’re both pretty sure that this compromised his immune system and then add in the stress of being back here and working out our new budget. Bam! He’s got shingles. I’m tempted to duck tape oven mitts to his hands just for the fun of it.

Shingles?!?!?!?

Some say that inversions reduce the aging process. I think this is because they are just fun. I love doing headstands, particularly now that I’m older (old and decrepit). It’s something I could do as a kid, but you never think you could pull off as an adult. So, once you get into it, its like “Wow! Look at me!”. I do not like handstands. I have a very large carrying angle in my arms; they don’t lay straight, but bend at the elbows and even hyper-extend. This means I don’t have joint on joint alignment in a handstand. The carrying angle starts developing in girls between the ages of 7-14. If a girl falls during this developmental stage, she is most likely to break her arm because of the way she would put her hands out to catch herself. I have broken both of my arms. Not at the same time; more like two years apart. I think was 7 when I broke the first one and 10 for the second one. My carrying angle was not caused by the broken arms. They’re purely genetic. Handstands make my elbows hurt… I mean HUUURRRTTT! So I don’t do them. And the great thing about this weekend, is that I learned that I don’t have to do them.

There are only two weeks before our next teacher training (ACK!) and our session one training will be over with in January. Then I start session two where we learn to teach beginning yoga. Some parts of this seems to be winding up really fast, but then I think that I still have another six months left and I’m “Gah! Can I just be finished all ready?!”. I have lots of homework stuff due in December and that has me slightly panicky. When I was in school, I was on top of things. Assignments were turned in at least a week before they were due. Now, I’m all about procrastination. Chris must be wearing off on me.

I also got to finally meet the newest member of the family, Lucas, who is three months old already. Cati (Steph’s little girl) was totally enamored and told my sister-in-law that she was going to have a baby brother soon too. Katrina’s so great with little ones. She propped Cati up on the couch and plopped little Lucas down on Cati’s lap so she could get the hang of holding a baby. Lucas was great. He just smiled and chewed on his hands and farted as he got passed all around.

There’s a scene in Nightmare Before Christmas where Sally has to sew herself back together after jumping from the window. This is how I feel after a weekend with my family. I feel like there’s never enough of me or enough time to talk and get caught up with each and every one. Part of this is my own fault because I don’t go home as often as I used to, so they don’t see me very often. Since the last time I saw them, my great-nephew’s voice has changed (sounds just like J), a baby was born, and my niece started talking again (she’d been doing the uncommunicative teenager bit). It’s just so much easier to deal with them on an individual basis. I really feel guilty about not spending enough time with Dad this weekend, who for some reason kept asking me if I was hungry every time he saw me (what’s up with that?!). But Dad can’t miss a day of peanut sales from the flea market.

At the end of it all, I packed up the car with twice as much stuff as I came with including a large bag of guilt. And when I had made it home, I started stitching myself back together.