The Umbrella Dream
I had a dream last night that I was at work and behind my desk I found every umbrella I own. What grounded this in reality is the hot humid weather we’ve been having recently and my tendency to leave my stuff at the office. And the brollies were all there: the one from my old job, the big one from my dad’s old work, the rainbow one, even the kids’ one with the monster horns.
My default position of self-doubt made me assume that I had picked these up day after day on rainy days into London and not brought them home. Thing is, I know it’s going to rain and Wife and Son and Daughter find themselves sans parapluie and when it rains it will be my fault. It will also be my fault that I have all the umbrellas.
What does all this mean? Well, I think we’ll be seeing further mishaps throughout the day with the possibility of scattered thoughts and perhaps some clear thinking later if we’ve lucky, but you might want to not take an brolly with you. Dreamt. Does anyone else pronounce it “drempt”? Drempt. There’s a p in there. Drempt.
Why don’t people eat “steamt” clams?
I beamt from ear to ear (pronounced “bempt”) But it’s “dremPt”, isn’t it?
June 13th, 2006 at 10:33 am
You’ve really got to lay off those 20-inch veggie pizzas just before bedtime, Cliff.
June 13th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Ed,
I DID have two veggie pizzas last night. You’re not some kind of stalker, are you?
June 13th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Nah. They have the same effect on me.
June 13th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
There’s something very ugly going on in the HTML of the post body - something about font size=”2″ and span lang=”EN-US” and font face=”Arial”. It’s causing my RSS reader to go all peculiar.
June 13th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
Hi Pete - Is this on every post or just this one?
June 13th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
http://www.musicstack.com/tsearch/delta+rhythm+boys/i+dreamt+i+dwelt+in+harlem
- or should it be ‘dwealed’?
June 14th, 2006 at 12:43 am
To me, ‘dwealed’ sounds like something a dentist from Arkansas, with a lisp, would do.
June 14th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
Cliff: It’s not on Random Italics, Apostrophes Now, Getting There, Arghhh, Best In The World and everything before that, but it is on It’s Like Watching Brazil, The Umbrella Dream, This Is Developments, The Downside of Knowing…, And She Said, Back In Black And White and Site Redesign.
How are you writing these posts? Are you pasting some of them in from Word? Do you use WordPress’ so-called rich editor always/never/sometimes?
June 14th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Wow @ knowing all your umbrellas!
I couldn’t possibly remember umbrellas. I have a bit of an aversion to them.
They’re an odd invention - especially when shared.
If you share an umbrella - you get a) spiked and b) dripped upon and c) have to alter your method of walking to ensure your head doesn’t get wet or you don’t make your sharee wet.
Then you leave them places (aha see Cliff?) and then you leave them places when wet and they smell horrible (damp nappies spring to mind!)
Then they hurt your wrist as you hold them up.
Horrible things, umbrellas. And I quite like the feel of the rain on my hair.
My umbrella (yes I own one through some pressure to keep dry on the school run… ) is a duck-head one with spots on.
It has to be ‘nice’ enough for me to bother to use it.
It smells though. And I find myself comparing umbrellas and trying to match their designs with people.
June 14th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
Pete,
I write a lot in Word and then cut and paste. The last line normally comes out funny and I think that’s because I put a page break in right below the last line in word. Then I get to work, cut and paste into Wordpress and Shazam - there’s the magic. I have this - “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” checked, but for the last thing I wrote, the post called “Random Italics”, I used notepad, by[assing Word totally. If that fixed the problem, then that’s what I need to do in the future, unless I can just tick the box and that’ll fix it.
Any clues are welcome, but we may have already made some progress. If I post in Notepad for the next few days, can you let me know if the problem crops up?
Again, cheers.
June 14th, 2006 at 11:07 pm
Sooz - is the handle a duck head, or is the rainy fabric bit a duck head?
But the good thing about umbrellas is when people go out to eat and leave one at the door of a restaurant. Everyone’s inside dry and enjoying themselves and they leave their brollies all together, right by the door where it’s easiest to steal them, and they can be stolen easily. But no one does, because everyone appreciates the predicament because they are in the same boat.
There’s a trust and a camaraderie there you don’t get much these days, and that rocks somewhat.
June 15th, 2006 at 6:29 am
Umbrellas are mostly golf-course items here. But I won three- a duck’shead handled one given to me by my mother years ago, a golf umbrella given to me by my father years ago, and a small Totes pocket umbrella I bought to put in the car just in case.
And, like Sooz, I never use them. I LIKE rain.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:07 am
Cliff: yes, it’s almost certainly Word’s fault. I’m pretty confident that if you keep writing in Notepad, the problem won’t crop up. Alternatively, disabling the visual editor would also fix it. However:
1. If you disable the visual editor then when you cut-paste across, you’ll lose any formatting that you’ve applied whilst writing in Word. The non-visual editor is also a bit less user-friendly when it comes to applying formatting - you’d have to get your hands dirty with a bit of HTML.
2. If you continue to use Notepad, then (as you will have noticed) you can’t apply any formatting until after you’ve done the cut-paste. Unless you write the HTML as you are going along.
June 16th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Wow, from an umbrella dream to a cut-and-paste nightmare, in thirteen easy steps.
And no drugs involved!