A second cyrus. THE HORROR!

A second African Grey snuck into our house like a deck toad. He started stomping around the floor while I was at the computer, and I got annoyed because I thought it was Cyrus. Then I realized that another parrot was stomping around in the living room. Since they were both African Greys, which all look exactly alike, I was confused about which was which. I spoke to the one in the kitchen, and he started spouting intelligible English. I spoke to the one in the living room and he went "Ooo! 4, 5, sssss" so I took that one and put him in his cage. The other one I had to find the owner for. I found its owner, but they were an evil cult that wanted to use the parrot in a ritual sacrifice. I had to save it, so I did. I didn't know what to do with him though. I'm pretty sure Erin O'Neal was involved in the solution.

Ick.

First dream, I was outside the L.L. Bean side of the Columbia mall, except instead of restaurants and Macys and a parking garage on the one side there was this river. And where the parking lot begins was the shore of a large body of water. And where the fountain is was instead a small wooden building that looked like an information stand but was in fact a pizza place. Reece and Meredith and Erin were in there.

I was walking along the outside of the building, looking at the water, when someone grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the mall. I shouted, nobody noticed. He went through a door I didn't know existed and up a staircase and into a small room that looked sort of like the reception area of an office. Except instead of chairs and a desk there were 2 rows of little cots. To each cot was handcuffed a child, their ages ranged between 8 and 13. Some of them had been visibly beaten. The man, who identified himself as "Chester" (of course), handcuffed me to a larger bed. I said to him "I think I'm a little old for you." He sneered and left.

I talked to one of the kids, who basically told me the obvious, that this guy was horrible to them. I gained super strength or something, because suddenly handcuffs weren't a problem. I escaped from the room and ran down the hallway. I must have passed Chester, because he started chasing me and yelling at and threatening me with a gun. I ignored the weapon and called 911. I was having trouble with my phone, it kept autodialing the numbers in my phone that began with 9 before I could press the other two digits. I ran out of the mall and around to the pizza place, with the guy right behind me. I finally reached the police and told them a kidnapper/sex offender was imprisoning kids in an office above the mall, oh and he's threatening me with a gun, could you please come out here. They said they'd be out there as soon as possible, and if I stopped being in danger could I please meet an officer at the front door of the mall at 4:00? I said yes and hung up.

During the call I'd been running around the pizza place in circles, and as I finished I ran inside and barricaded the door. It was ok, a friend owned the place. Chester couldn't get in. I went over to the table where my friends sat, and they understandably freaked out. I also told GITP chat, earning me worried emoticons from Trog.

As we sat there it started pouring out. Chester had left the premises, but I knew he'd gone back inside to his room. I looked outside to the door of the mall, and when 4:00 rolled around a female police officer wearing a raincoat appeared. Meredith and Erin prodded me into going out there, but the only clothes I had were not rain appropriate, and I had to change my shoes to something more waterproof before I could go out. Erin looked outside and told me that if I didn't hurry the police would leave and think I'd pranked them. So I braved the storm for 10 feet and met with the officer. She was older than I thought, her hair was grey. I took her to the secret door and she took some spontaneously-appearing minion cops up, arrested Chester, and freed all of the kids.

Next dream.

Erin and Meredith and I were trapped in our dorm rooms at the bottom of the ocean, so we had a conversation about music we used to like as children while drawing on t-shirts from the craft store with glitter pens. Erin was drawing these magnificent pictures of mermaids and submarines, I was drawing things I'd doodle during class. She drew a complicated underwater scene that turned out to be the key to our escape from this place, but I didn't stay asleep long enough to find out how.

School is on my mind, I think.

It was exam day, and I was doing a lot of running in the hallways to get to my classes. The classrooms looked like the rooms in Centennial, but the hallways looked more like the basement of Chandler.

I had a two part exam to turn in to Alan Rickman (who made it clear to us that he was NOT professor Snape, when I pointed out that the name on his office door was Snape he gave me detention), the first part of which was due at 8:00 AM. It was a multiple choice exam. When we were done we were to tack the scantrons to the corkboard on the left side of the room, then return at noon to turn in the essay portion of this exam.

The "essay" part was 2 questions. The first task was to write down everything I knew about Satyrs. I wrote that they were half-goat half-men, but that was all I could remember. I went down the hall to the library. The library was huge, like one you'd see in a cartoon, with bookshelves going up to the extremely high ceiling. I went to the mythology section. The librarian who was helping people was the alien scientist guy from Titan A.E. He was very eager to help, and got me a book about Satyrs. It was a children's encyclopedia. I revised my essay to note that they were depicted with wreaths of ivy around their heads, and that they were companions of Pan and Dionysus. Also that they were half-goats in Roman tradition, but in the Greek tradition they had horse tails.

The second question was an arithmetic exercise. I had to add together a pageful of numbers and divide them by 153. I don't remember the answer.

I had another exam with a different teacher between Rickman's first and second exams. This exam took place in the bio 101 lab in Jepson. I had to write a brief essay about a music video that was playing on a loop at the front of the classroom. It was a Die Aerzte song I'd never heard, and I found that exciting. Also for some reason Hugh Laurie was in the video. I noticed that the lyrics were clues to a mystery that I had to solve in order to save my family. But first I had to run over to Chandler to give Snape his essay. But Rickman was busy with other students, and wouldn't accept my paper. I was running out of time to help my family, so I tacked it on top of my multiple choice exam and left, hoping it counted.

Then I woke up before the mystery could be solved.

Me?? Unreasonable? Gluttonous? That's pretty far-fetched!

So, Erin and Meredith and I had finished moving into our rooms. I invited Sunshine over, and Matt, and we were going to order pizza. Meredith insisted on inviting Titus, who brought over 7 of his closest friends. This of course annoyed me to no end, and I told Meredith that I wasn't going to pay for the pizza they ordered. Meredith got mad at me and asked me why I wouldn't be social. I explained that not only did I not invite them, I'd invited Titus, but also that my money wouldn't go that far. In a cartoonish display of childish petulance, we each crossed our arms and sat at opposite ends of the room (for we were living in the same room) facing the wall, with >8( looks on our faces.

Then Reece shows up, and we have to go grocery shopping because we had nothing for breakfast! So we walked up to the Giant. I went to the bread section for bagels, but stopped at the cheap-baked-goods cart to see if they had any muffins. Reece said "Why are you looking for muffins? That is why you hate yourself." I said "I thought you might like some, silly!" But they only had chocolate chip muffins, so we dismissed them.

We went around the corner, where the shelves of bread are in the F-burg Giant, and found instead the kitchen in Bushnell. Reece disappeared to go somewhere. Erin said she was making pancakes. I asked her if she could leave the stuff out so I could make some when she was finished. She refused, because apparently I'm super-unreasonable and picky when it comes to pancakes. I shrugged and glanced at the recipe, thinking I would make them anyway, even if she washed all the dishes first. Erin got annoyed with me and ordered me out of the kitchen.

Around the corner I was back in the Giant. I ran into Meredith, and asked her if it was true that I was unreasonable about pancakes. She said it was, but wouldn't explain how so. I was confused. Erin appeared again and explained that I can't have pancakes because I haven't finished my muffin. I looked at my hand and realized it had a half-eaten muffin in it, but I hadn't bought one, and I didn't remember eating half of it, but Erin and Meredith objected to my apparent gluttony and wouldn't let me have pancakes.

I turned around and suddenly we were in the apartment and not the Giant. I was still hungry because I hadn't had a muffin, dangit, so I put on my robe (for I was still in my PJs) and went to Seaco for breakfast. They had pancakes there. Then I left and went to my first class, in Goolrick. I don't remember the class itself, but I had a class right after it in the sub-basement of Dupont. The opposite end of campus from the apartment. I had 10 minutes to get there, and I had to run, but I suddenly noticed that I was still wearing my pajamas! I couldn't go to class like that! So I ran back to the apartment. I passed Meredith while waiting for the William Street light to turn green, and she laughed at my situation.

Part Lucifer, part Lasciel. And a grave made of candy.

First dream, I woke up, went downstairs and got online, much as I have done this morning. I started getting messages from these people who said they were angels. One was trying to convince me to be evil, one was trying to convince me to be good, and one was just trying to help me do whatever. I couldn't tell which was which. I blocked them all and got off the computer. As I was watering the plants and doing other morning chores, I started to hear voices and laughter in my head. They were bickering. I rolled my eyes and ignored all of them. I went inside and started making a sandwich for breakfast, when the bad guy from last night's episode of Psych starts talking to me. I can't hear him, because the "angels" in my head were trying to instruct me on how to make a sandwich according to Good, Evil and True Neutral instructions. All of them involved bloodshed somehow.

Next dream. I had to research a person for a class. His name was... Anthony something, and he was Jewish, but that's all I knew about him before I started researching. I went to the UMW library, which had changed a little. The computers by the reference area had been moved so that instead of the wall protecting the staircase, there were more bookshelves. I walked past the first bookshelf and found myself in a graveyard. I began looking for Anthony's grave. I figured that it would have a star of David on it, so I was looking for that. I saw a classmate looking for her person's grave. She picked one up that was shaped like the Star of David and lugged it back to the computers, which I could see from the graveyard. I gave up and went back to the computers to try Googling the guy. A search on Anthony brought me absolutely nothing. I did some skillful searching on the library website and found one book featuring the guy's name. I got the book from the shelves and looked through it. I couldn't find his name in the book until the last few pages. There was a page of Garfield comics, and the last comic on the page had Garfield talking about Anthony and his pet fish. I went back to Google and searched for that, and found that Anthony was not at all noteworthy for being Jewish during the second world war, as I'd supposed, but for a highly publicized incident involving his pet goldfish that would have won him a Darwin-award. I went back to the graveyard to find his tombstone, and just a few rows up from the computers I found his name on a grave made of candy. I brought it back to present to the class. We were all very confused.

Then I went back to the apartment and woke Erin up, because she'd been asleep. I told her I'd used one of my meals at Seacobeck. She was happy because she could make a sandwich for breakfast.

My feet got pretty dusty at the fair yesterday.

I had to go to the Giant to get cake mix. I had to take off my shoes to go into the store or I'd wake up the puppies. See, the store was filled with sleeping puppies instead of groceries. So I traversed the Giant shoelessly and got some chocolate cake mix. My father had driven me there in his volvo, but he had to leave. He left the car right outside the door of the giant so I'd have it. I got in the car, but I'd never driven a stick before. The seat was too low and too close to the wheel, and the pedals were about the size of piano keys. There were cars behind me honking. I tried to adjust my seat and remove my shoes so I could hit the pedals with my toes. My feet were covered in dust from the store and kept sliding off the pedals anyway. An old woman came up to the window of my car and asked me if I needed help. I said I didn't, though at this point there were tears in my eyes.

Telekinetic.

The school decided that instead of apartments they were going to move us all into treehouses. To get to one house to the other we had to swing on ropes. We were distressed because we couldn't play DDR in these houses because the floor was too delicate. I swung over to Alice's room to discuss this. On the way back to our room I found a metal door. I thought this was odd, and went through. There was this huge, dark room filled with computers. And it was AIR CONDITIONED. I thought this was just spectacular. I went up to the only people in the room. They were all mad scientists, and they asked me if I wanted to help them create devices that would allow one to control objects with one's mind. In return I would be allowed to have AC in my treehouse room. But I couldn't tell anyone about it.

This of course caused everyone to hate my secretiveness and envy my air conditioning. I told Erin and Meredith about it, and they were both unimpressed.

As I type this, my desire for breakfast increases.

There was a girl haunting a park I was at. The playground equipment was incredibly high up, and she'd fallen to her death. The girl's voice taunted me until I saved a bunch of people from the same fate. I went to talk to her. I was the only one who could hear her, so my family thought I was crazy. I missed breakfast with my family because I was talking to her, but then I went out to lunch with friends.

It was Mel, David, Sheckells and I at the Spotsylvania mall. We wanted to get lunch. Sheckells insisted on ordering pizzas, 4 of them. I pointed out that there was a pizza hut right there in the mall, so there was no reason to call them, but Sheckells did anyway. We waited at the counter for our pizzas, but they were taking too long, so we jumped over the counter and went back into the kitchen. The kitchen looked kind of like the bio labs in Jepson, except there was an oven, and every table had at least 5 pre-made pizzas on it. These pizzas were all square and flat crusted, not what we wanted. The people in the kitchen were pretty mad at us for being back there, but since we'd called ahead they couldn't kick us out. I complained at them until they made us some proper round pizzas like the ones on the sign outside.