What I did Yesterday

I had a nightmare last night, which is something of a rare occurrence for me. My worst dreams are typically perplexing rather than frightening. This particular dream had me waking with a start with my heart pounding for several minutes.

Essentially, in the dream I’d gone to bed for the night, and am awoken in the middle by the sound of the front door being unlatched and Elizabeth’s voice saying something. I rise, and run downstairs telling Elizabeth to close the door, and she explains that it’s all right; she’s just “letting Cinderella in before midnight.” Through the leaded glass of the door, I can see a person in a pointed hat on the porch, but they run away as I come down the stairs, and the dream ends with me tearing open the door to chase the stranger. At that point I woke up, and very nearly jumped out of bed to check the front door.

The sheer terror generated by the dream stuck with me for several minutes, though it seems a bit silly. It frightened me much more than dreams of being murdered, or falling, or drowning, or burning, and it was a fear experienced on someone else’s behalf.

Bad dream aside, yesterday was an excellent and relaxing day. I worked from home, and took my lunch hour to wander downtown and browse thrift stores. I also took the opportunity to visit the Arts Hamilton storefront, where some of lonita’s art was on display. As I examined her (very nicely done!) pieces, the teenage attendant, who had a green Mohawk and pierced everything, struck up a conversation about table-top RPGs, more or less out of the blue. He was impressed to hear I’d written some, and I told him where to buy the Usagi Yojimbo RPG I co-wrote with normanrafferty.

After work, I spent an hour playing with the girls. Claire has decided that I make an excellent slide, and Elizabeth and I did some “roleplaying” with her stuffed animals. Apparently, one of the teddy bears is evil, and the others are conspiring to topple her. After supper, we took the girls to local landmark Stoney Creek Dairy, Claire’s first trip with us. We sang songs in the car – Claire treated us to a very tuneful rendition of the theme song from “Fifi and the Flower Tots.” velvetpage was more chipper than I’ve seen her in days, and it rubbed off on everyone.

Following ice cream, we decided to go for a drive in the country, and ended up at the Devil’s Punch Bowl Conservation Area. The waterfall was surging nicely, and the noise of it as we approached the rim of the “bowl” intrigued Elizabeth. Was it rain, she wondered? Thunder? The view from the lookout, over lower Hamilton and the lake, was gorgeous, though a little ominous as enormous thunderhead clouds towered over the city, flashing lightning.

The storm started soon after we got home. It’s been a good summer for thunder and lightning, and I have to admit I’m enjoying it. Since June 1st, we’ve received 233 mm of rain. In the same period in 2007, we got only 55 mm.

Mars Memoirs 6 - Canal Considerations

"Without the Grand Canal, there would be no people on Mars, leastways not anyone worth shipping a battalion across eighty-million miles of void to visit. Mars would be all Kraags and nomads clustered about salty sloughs and great howling stretches of nothing that make Antarctica look like Picadilly.

The canal, to suit its name, is a grand edifice. A mile wide, thirty-yards deep, and thirteen-thousand miles long, in a great blue garter belt around the equator, coming round again to meet itself like the serpent, Addyheesa, of Hindoo tales.

It goes all this way without benefits of locks or lakes or pumps or falls, cutting through hills and valleys and across canyons and spilling over plains, in a way that none of our engineers or inventors have been able to figure. It makes the Suez look like a wretched ditch, and no one can guess how it was made, nor even when. Nor can the scholars amongst the Marsfolk. The simpler people just consider it part of the landscape, or an Act of God, and I confess I can easily imagine a great, brawny, forearm reaching down from the orange sky and dragging a furrow across the dust with a Divine Forefinger.

Like Addyheesha, the serpent I mentioned earlier, the Grand Canal flows into itself and makes itself. In the opinion of some Marsfolk, it made itself by bein’ itself, if you follow. I don’t know that I can explain the idea. It’s what my old vicar (a wordy, bookish, puckerer) would call “ineffable.” Looking upon it, stretching and steaming in the cold air, mile after long mile, even a hard-headed fellow can’t help but think on how his life depends on it, and get to thinking on deeper thoughts than “When’s tiffin?” and “Where are the bloody cartridge tins?”

In any case, the Grand Canal is indubitably there, and without it, all the water on Mars would be locked up in the ice caps or the frost under the soil, and everyone would die gasping. Who built it, and when, and how it gets the water into itself, and how it pumps that water into a thousand tributaries, and stays clear of ice, and a hundred other mysteries, will have to wait for the attention of brainier chaps than I.

I stood on pier of black stone, and inspected the little fleet of steamers that awaited, and the native punts and barges that moved amongst them. Save for the presence of Johnny Martian, it could have been the Holy Ganges in the Mutiny, and me twelve years younger and carrying a Brown Bess and waiting to ride northwest to Banaras with a company of Gurkhas.

I recall I was feelin’ rather small and homesick then, and no wonder, being a Yorkshireman born in the shadow of The Mill, plucked up and dropped 5000 miles away with a gang of Hindoos, en route to a city as old as Egypt. How much more, then, should I feel small and homesick a thousand times further from home, sailing a canal older than Adam?"

- from the memoirs of Brigadier Franklin Begg, HM Own Martian Rifles (Ret.)