Terry's Double

It's 3:10PM on New Year's Eve. The New Year is 8 hours and 50 minutes away. I don't feel like writing a new blog post, so, as I've done once before, I'm going to steal a post from one of my other blogs. This post was originally published on The Applebee Chronicles. And oh yeah, Happy New Year everybody!

The Nissan

We picked up Nuria's rental car yesterday. It's a 2021 Nissan Sentra SV. Cars have come a long way since my Jeep was built. The Nissan owner's manual is 510 pages. There are also several other manuals about the vehicle.

It doesn't use an ordinary ignition key. No, it uses an electronic pendant. First, you use the pendant to unlock the car. Then, you use the pendant to start the car. Starting the car is complicated enough that there is an online video showing you how to do it. (See the video below.)

Doing anything, like turning on the A/C, or the headlights, or even the radio, is different enough that you have to learn how to do it. I suppose that eventually you would get the hang of it. I'm hoping we won't have the Nissan long enough for me to remember how everything works.

Late December

This morning, I got out of bed and I walked around the bed to the bedroom window (one of them) to adjust the Venetian blinds, and I discovered that the window was cracked open a half inch. It's probably been open since autumn, but I keep the blinds closed and no one could see that it was open. That may explain why my heating system has been running so much. When it's 8 degrees outside and your bedroom window is open, even a half inch, the room is going to be chilly and the heat is going to run. The opening was a half inch wide and 36 inches tall. That's equal to one inch by18 inches tall. And that's 18 square inches, which is equivalent to a round hole that has a 5.75 inch diameter. That's an almost six inch diameter hole in the wall. When the oil company fills up my heating oil tank, I'm going to pay for that oversight.

Nuria is going to get a haircut today, her first since she arrived here on September 20th, a little over three months ago. She's going to walk to the hairdresser's shop for a 3PM appointment, then walk home. Then we'll drive to Enterprise Rent-a-Car so she can pick up a rental car to use until the insurance matters are settled and she can buy another car. I hope that will happen in January.

We visited one of my very good friends yesterday. He is in poor condition. He is unable to stand up or walk due to several health problems. I hope he will survive this year, but with the condition that he is in, he's probably ready to go. There often comes a time when life is more of a burden than a joy, and the future holds no promise of change. 

I'm going to start a diet on New Year's Day. I'd like to lose about 30 pounds. I've tried before, and I've given up. I went on the Atkin's Diet three times. Each time, the same thing happened. I began losing weight for two weeks, then my weight stabilized for two weeks, then I gained weight for two weeks, at which point my weight was equal to my starting weight. At that point I quit the diet. So this time I'll have to do something different. Maybe combine Atkin's with a fast every other day?  I know I'd feel better if I weighed less, but I definitely don't want to be hungry every day.

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting column in the LA Times today. He compares Trump's annus horribilis (as he describes it) with Nixon's scandalous presidency. You can read it here.

Christmas 2022

Merry Christmas!

The song of the day is 2022's Kid On Christmas from the 2022 album Holidays Around the World by a cappella group Pentatonix (Kirstin Maldonado, Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi, Kevin Olusola and Matt Sallee). The song also features Meghan Trainor. The album includes three originals: "Kid on Christmas," a collaboration with Meghan Trainor, "Star on Top" and "Prayers for this World."

Kid on Christmas (below)

Star On Top (below)

Prayers For This World (below)

Christmas Eve

Today is Christmas Eve. At 7AM the temperature outside my house was 8° and with wind chill it feels like -7°. (-13° and -22° Celcius). That will wake you up! We visited with my friend Butch at about 1PM. He lives a few houses down the street and usually we would walk there, but the air was bitterly cold, so I drove us to his house. His daughter was visiting, and we exchanged gifts with them.

We came home and I watched the Minnesota Vikings defeat the New York Giants (27-24). It was a very close game. Either team could have won, down to the last minute. That made it interesting.

There was more football on the TV, but I decided to switch over to YouTube and listen to Christmas music. Nuria made dinner and I put some relaxing piano jazz on the sound system. By sound system I, of course, mean my TV set. Sure, I could play sound through my computer speakers, but they sound like crap. The TV, at least, sounds halfway decent.

The outside temperature is 20°F, or as we say hereabouts: freeze-your-ass-off cold. It will be 14° by morning.

At seven we ate dinner, and afterward I went back to typing a blog post about nothing. We've already given each other Christmas gifts, so there is nothing exciting to do on Christmas morning. But that's fine with me. 

At 7:45PM I received an unexpected phone call from an old friend that I met in university and later worked for at his company for 14 years. We talked about old times for an hour. I really enjoyed hearing his voice again and reminiscing with him. How many friends do you have that you've known for fifty-six years and you still talk with them like you saw them yesterday?

I posted a video here that played some pretty piano jazz, but it only lasted a day before YouTube (or somebody) removed it. So if you're here after Christmas Day, then sorry, you missed the music video. But you can still go to YouTube and search for "Smooth Piano Jazz Music".

Friday Evening

Friday turned out to be a sunny, cold day. At 5PM the temperature had fallen to 23°F (-5°C). The low temperature forecast for Friday night is 8°F. I'm gonna be burning dinosaurs and kilowatt-hours, and a fire-log or two.

Nuria warned me that the fruit on the rum cake was soaked in rum. She doesn't want me to get hooked on rum cake alcohol. I used to drink a liter (about a quart) of vodka every day. I did that for years. I chose to quit drinking alcohol. I don't think eating a tiny piece of fruit soaked in rum is going to turn me into an alcoholic. There is probably no alcohol in rum cake anyway—just the flavor of the rum. What concerns me more than the alcohol content is the calorie content. There's a diet in my future, and it's getting closer every day.

I just lit a fire log. There's Christmas jazz music playing in the room. Nuria is sitting on the sofa behind me, phone in hand. She's sending a message to her sister in Costa Rica. 

Time passed. The fire burned. The temperature outside continued to fall. It's 16°F now. 

Nuria and I watched It Happened One Christmas starring Marlo Thomas, a 1977 remake of the 1946 film It's A Wonderful Life starring James Stewart. We ate more of Nuria's pumpkin pie, which is delicious. In two more hours, Christmas Eve will arrive with the midnight hour. I have nothing exciting to relay to my readers. We're homebodies now, Nuria and I, until Christmas is behind us. There's too much traffic and too many last minute shoppers for us to be driving around. We've already lost one car this Christmas season. Auto-wise, we're now down to my '95 Jeep. But it's a reliable workhorse. Nuria has begun looking at used car ads. Before, long, we'll be a two-car household again, I think, and hope.

"¡Feliz Navidad!" as José Feliciano would say. 

Friday

The expected cold front hit this morning, or at least the leading edge hit. A strong rain shower began falling. After a short while it stopped. Nuria had papers to mail to her lawyers in Chicago, and she wanted them to get there as soon as possible, so she just left the house on a trek to the Post Office. She likes to walk there and the rain isn't falling now. I hope she gets back before the weather gets bad. It's only about 8 minutes to the Post Office and, of course, 8 minutes back. She may spend 5 minutes inside the Post Office, doing business there. So, unless she decides to extend her walk, she should be back about 20 minutes after she left. 

Last night we had a fire log burning in the wood stove and relaxing music playing and it created a very nice mood. I captured a glimpse of it with my phone camera.

Nuria just returned from the Post Office. Her package of paperwork is in the mail to Chicago, 2 day delivery and signature requested. 

Tomorrow we'll walk up the street and visit my buddy Butch. I'd do it today but I fear we might be caught in a downpour.

Nuria is in the kitchen making rum cakes. She said she will make three cakes. She wants to give a couple of them to friends and, of course, there will be one for us. Her last home-baked cake was a red velvet cake with cream cheese icing, and needless to say, it was very good. When the new year gets here, I have to lay off these tasty treats. I've already gained five pounds just in the last few weeks. If I keep gaining weight, I won't be able to get out of bed. Then, I'll have to give up snacks, unless Nuria keeps bringing them to me. There is a YT video about a man who fasted for more than a year and lost 382 pounds. He fasted under medical supervision, but fasting that long is dangerous and doctors don't advise it. When he ended his fast, he resumed eating but he did not put the weight back on. There's a video about his experience here.

I've fasted, and I can tell you that after the first three days, your hunger goes away, because your body switches to burning ketones (which are derived from body fat) and so you're not hungry. Our bodies can burn two kinds of fuel: glucose (sugar) and ketones. As long as we have glucose in our blood, our bodies don't make ketones, and excess glucose is stored in fat cells. When our bodies run low on glucose, we switch to breaking down fat into ketones, which our bodies then burn for energy. That's the basis of the Atkins diet and the reason it works. I'll be joining the millions of other Americans who will swear, on New Year's Eve, that they're going to lose weight in the New Year. Good luck to all of them, and good luck to me.

Christmas Countdown

One of my readers concluded a comment with this sentence:  "Can't wait for your Christmas blog and New Years full of wisdom and hope through the sparkling words of the author !!"

Oh shoot, really? Now I'm blushing! I've always thought that my readers, through their comments, were the ones who were full of wisdom, and I still feel that way. But thank you for the kind review.

The high temperature today is supposed to be about 50F° and the low tonight is forecast to be 38°F. The storm gets here tomorrow, and tomorrow night is forecast to be 9°F (-12.8°C). I'm gonna be burning those dinosaurs (or whatever heating oil is made of). I've seen colder weather here and I've written about it. But I shouldn't complain. The temperature in Great Falls, Montana, is currently -25°F, and today's high temperature there is forecast to be -12°F.

For Christmas, I gave Nuria a Garmin GPS for her car. Now she is car-less, so I tested the GPS on my Jeep. It worked fine. I figure she'll need it until she knows the area. Even then, it's a handy device when you're driving around a part of the city that is unfamiliar to you. I used to have a TomTom GPS and it worked great. It worked on a trip to Inverness, Florida, and back home—a 24 hour round trip. After that, the TomTom prompted me to update the map. I tried to, and it began installing the new map. But then it said that it was out of memory and couldn't install the new map, and the old map was gone, so the TomTom was useless. I threw it into the trash after using it one time.

I got up at 6:30AM today, after being awake since 3:30AM. I always wake up during the night and usually can't get back to sleep. Now it's 8AM and a light rain is falling. I will drive Nuria to a doctor today to pick up paperwork for her permanent residency application. She has to sign it in front of the doctor, and the doctor has to sign it in front of Nuria. Then it goes into a special envelope, is sealed, and is sent to her lawyers in Chicago, then they check everything and send it to USCIS (Customs and Immigration Service). Nuria and the USCIS have been swapping paperwork since 2020. But the money flows only one way, from her to them. The lawyers charge $4500, and the government charges a few thousand dollars. When all is done, the paperwork will have taken about three years and the cost will total about $7000. Even after that, she can be denied residency. The government promises nothing.

I hope my next blog post will be more Christmas-y and less complaining. I recently bought some fire logs, and today would be a good time to use one or two. Stay cheerful, people!

Winter Solstice

It's Wednesday, December 21st, the middle of the work week and the first day of winter for this year in North America. Winter begins on the day of the winter solstice, which is today. In earth's southern hemisphere, winter began on June 21 this year. 

Coincidentally, on this first day of winter, a raging blizzard is crossing the country and headed my way. It is due to arrive in my city on Friday. The low Friday night is expected to be 12°F, and the high on Saturday is expected to be 27°F. Christmas will be a little warmer: a high that day of 32°F and a low of 15°F. And it's "just" December. January is the really cold month where I live.

I broke the handle off the sliding patio door that leads to my backyard. I just yanked it too hard. So I ordered a new door handle from Home Depot. It came today. I removed the old handle and tried to install the new handle, but it didn't quite fit. The mounting holes were very close to the same distance apart as on the old handle, but not close enough. Then I dropped one of the parts of the outside handle (a part I need to use with the new handle). I saw the part fall—a black, metal piece about 1/2 inch square. I watched it fall to the outside step and bounce off, then fall into the clover beside the step. I looked for it carefully, pulling clover up so I could see the ground. I couldn't find it and finally I called for Nuria's help. She looked for it and pulled more clover out of the way. Neither of us could find it, even though I saw exactly where it fell into the clover. It was freezing cold and after an hour I gave up trying to fix the door. I decided to replace the patio door. But not just the door: the whole installation including the track the door rolls on. It's old and needs replacing, anyway. 

It's also time for a new garage door. So that's on my list for the beginning of the year. I may wait until spring so that it won't be so cold when the installers are working. And oh yes, I just remembered, the garage has two old wind turbines on its roof. One has failed and won't turn. The other is equally old and will likely fail soon. So add two roof turbines to the "to do" list. I wonder if I can get all this done for under five thousand dollars. That's what it cost me to remodel my kitchen when I moved into this house. Oh well, what is money for, if not to spend?

Two milestones for Nuria today: One, she passed her medical exam (another $455) and is expected to see the doctor tomorrow to pick up the paperwork. (This is in regard to her application for permanent resident status). Second, the Toyota incident (in which her vehicle was totaled by another driver) is moving forward. The other driver's insurance has taken full financial responsibility for Nuria's auto accident, after they looked at photos of the Camry and determined the car is a total loss. I don't know what they'll do next, but the insurance claim is in their ballpark now. 

I hope everyone is well, and stay safe, y'all. It's a busy time of year for the roads. Drivers are distracted by thoughts of Christmas shopping, and the expected bad weather will only make the roads more dangerous. Take care.

Mary, Did You Know

A cappella group Pentatonix is known for their Christmas albums. This song of the day is 2014's Mary, Did You Know by Pentatonix. There are many recordings of this song, sung by various artists. The oldest version I know of was recorded by American Christian singer and record producer Michael English in 1991. Since then, hundreds of singers have covered the song.

Christmas 1915

I've posted this before, but inasmuch as we're approaching Christmas, I think it's appropriate to post it again.

The song of the day is Christmas 1915 by Irish singing group Celtic Thunder. The song is about a Christmas truce that occurred on the front lines during World War 1.

Auld Lang Syne

One of my readers left a comment to remind me of another Christmas song, traditionally sung at midnight as the year ends. I'm talking about Auld Lang Syne, and it is one of my favorite Christmas and New Year's songs. Thanks to LL for the reminder of this great song.

According to Wikipedia,

The text is a Scots-language poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 but based on an older Scottish folk song. In 1799, it was set to a traditional tune, which has since become standard.  ... The poem's Scots title may be translated into standard English as "old long since" or, less literally, "long long ago", "days gone by", "times long past" or "old times". Consequently, "For auld lang syne", as it appears in the first line of the chorus, might be loosely translated as "for the sake of old times".

And so, 

The song of the day is Auld Lang Syne sung by singer, songwriter, and actress Lea Michele (Lea Michele Sarfati).

Last Christmas

Christmas is a week away.

The song of the day is 2022's Last Christmas by a cappella group Pentatonix featuring Japanese YouTubers Heikin and Seikin.

Consequences

If you're of my generation, then you remember vacuum tube radios. You remember vacuum tube televisions. You remember turning on a radio or TV and having to let it "warm up" before it would work. The vacuum tubes literally had to heat up before they would work. 

Then along came transistor radios. They were amazing; they produced sound the instant they were turned on, no warm-up required. I bought my first transistor radio from a mail order company named Olsen. I paid for it with money I had earned by delivering the morning newspaper. The radio had six transistors, as it proudly proclaimed on the front of the case. I bought a rechargeable battery for it, too. It was shaped like a regular 9 volt battery, but when the battery ran down, you could plug it into a little charger that came with the battery, then plug the charger and battery into a wall outlet. It was cheap but it worked.

One day when I was 15 or 16, I left my radio in my dad's car while I helped him work on an old house he had purchased to be rental property. The house wasn't in a good part of town, and so when we came back to his car to go home, the radio was gone. It had been stolen.

I bought another radio. This one was slightly better (and larger) and it contained 8 transistors, a fact that it, too, proudly proclaimed on the front of the radio. Still, there was a place in my heart for that 6 transistor radio. You only buy your first transistor radio once. 

But frankly, I would never have stolen a cheap transistor radio, because at age 15 I had too much self-respect to make myself into a common thief. What's a common thief? When you steal billions of dollars from investors with a bitcoin scam, you're a financial genius. When you steal a cheap transistor radio, you're a common thief. Plus, I didn't know for sure if there was a heaven, but I knew that I didn't want to throw away my shot at getting there on an act of petty thievery. I should note that this was neither the first nor the last act of petty theft I would experience.

The world is full of thieves, and it's full of good people, too. There are people who will give their lives to save yours, even though they don't know you. Maybe the petty thieves I've encountered later woke up and learned to have a little self-respect, so that "petty thief" won't be the only item on their life's resume. I hope so, because, as the preachers and the philosophers have pointed out, our actions are balanced by consequences. Ignore that fact at your own peril. In the end, you only get what you give. It's called karma.

House Ghost

The time was about 1:30 AM. I was in bed. The house was dark except for a dim light in the living room. That light cast its incandescent glow down the hallway to my bedroom door. In the dim light, I saw Nuria get up and walk around the end of the bed and through the bedroom doorway. I watched as she opened the bathroom door and entered the bathroom. I could see her clearly.

I thought, "No one is going to believe this." The reason I thought that was simple: it was because Nuria was lying beside me in bed, and my hand was touching her arm. I could feel the warmth of her skin. I almost awakened her to tell her, "Look, Nuria. It's you!" I didn't because I knew it wasn't Nuria. It was just a kind of apparition of Nuria. 

I kept thinking that anyone I talk to about this is going to accuse me of just dreaming, yet I was awake and I  knew I was awake. A few minutes later, I got out of bed and went to the bathroom to use the facilities. I was wide awake, not sleepy at all, so I didn't return to bed. I sat at my PC and began perusing the news.

These kind of things have happened to me a number of times since I moved into this house. I've written about them previously on this blog. Here's one example: Go Figure. Here's another example: Odd Stuff. It's the kind of thing I've learned to shrug off. Maybe these kinds of things happen to everyone and other people simply don't talk about them. Maybe I shouldn't either, lest people think I'm daft in the head. I don't know—the world is a strange place sometimes.

Entering the Labyrinth

This morning I drove Nuria to the Battlefield Park Auto Salvage company to visit with her Camry. She told me she wanted to get some things out of the car before something happened to them. She named the items she wanted to retrieve, and when she said "my parents' rosary beads" it almost went by me, but then a part of my brain said, "uh, what? Rosary beads? In your Camry?"

I had thought her walking away unhurt from that collision was exceptionally good fortune, but maybe there was something else, too. Maybe there was something in the car that protected Nuria. Maybe. I can believe that.

Also in the car was a well-worn coin purse filled with quarters. I thought that was a good idea—for toll booths and parking meters, a coin purse filled with quarters in a handy place where she could easily reach it. Though more and more toll booths take credit cards.

She took the floor mats and the windshield sun shade that she had bought for the car. She took it all and bid farewell to the Camry. 

The gal behind the front desk of the salvage yard said that if they could station a tow truck at Walmart, it would be busy all day towing cars from accidents. A woman sitting near the shop's front door told me her car was hit by a truck entering the Walmart parking lot as she was trying to exit. She could see the collision coming and began backing up to avoid the truck, but a vehicle behind her prevented her from backing up enough, and the truck scraped her car. The truck driver should have stopped but didn't seem to care. He told the investigating officer that the accident was the woman's fault—that she had hit him. The cop knew the truck driver, and so the cop wrote the accident report as being the woman's fault. Fortunately for the lady, a witness stepped forward and ultimately the report was changed to put the fault on the truck driver where it belonged.

We ended up back at Walmart and bought groceries. We left Walmart and pushed the shopping cart back to my Jeep and put the groceries into the cargo space in the back of the Jeep. A bitterly cold wind swept across the parking lot. We came home and carried many bags of groceries into the house. For dinner we had baked fish, mashed potatoes, and red, white, and orange baby carrots. Then we took a break before eating homemade pumpkin pie with whipped cream.

The wheels are just beginning to turn on the auto insurance. There are many threads that must yet be woven together. I've had an auto accident myself, but it was long ago. It was my fault. But that's another story of another time and a very different VirtualWayne than the one who lives today. I hope none of my readers have to go through the auto insurance labyrinth due to an accident. It's not fun.

Nuria - Part 2

Yesterday's post was about my domestic partner, Nuria. Today's post is about Nuria, too. But mostly it's about her Toyota Camry.

Nuria bought her 2009 Camry in July. It was the first vehicle she had owned in years. She was so proud of that car, even though it was used—or, as they say on the TV adverts, "pre-owned." She would go out in the mornings and wipe the dew off the Camry's windows. She would clean the dust off the roof of the car.

This morning, Nuria told me she was going to the library to make some copies. Ironically, I recently bought her a copier/printer because she had been going to the library so often, in order to print and make copies of immigration documents. But she had to print 21 pages and she didn't want to use up all the ink in the printer, so she drove to the library. And that's where this story should have ended. But—

The library was closed. On Saturdays it opens at 10AM and she had arrived at about 9:30. So she decided to drive to Walmart and pick up a couple items. She made it to Walmart and had stopped on the road, waiting for traffic to clear so that she could make a left turn into Walmart's parking lot. She was in the left turn lane with her left turn flasher blinking. In the rear-view mirror, she saw a car approaching fast from behind her, but she assumed it was in the adjacent lane and would pass her Camry on the right. 

Suddenly, Nuria felt a terrible jolt and her car spun around in the middle of the road. The approaching car had rammed the back of her Camry. Her beloved Camry appears to be "totaled." Meaning: un-fixable, too badly damaged to repair. The rear of the vehicle was caved in, and the chassis was warped enough that Nuria couldn't get the driver's door to open.

People immediately stopped to help her. Nuria wasn't hurt, but an elderly man who had been driving the other car that hit her car had blood on his shirt and pants. Bystanders called 911. Within five minutes, police and an ambulance were on-scene. Nuria called me and told me she had been in an accident. I told her to be sure to get the other driver's insurance information.

After I got there, which took about ten minutes, an officer gave Nuria a card with the case number for the accident. The police will collect the necessary information about the drivers and what had happened. One man volunteered that he was a witness to the accident and he talked to the police. 

An officer gave Nuria his ID card with the case number written on it. When we left the scene, men were still sweeping glass off the street and the two cars had yet to be towed away. 

I took one photo of the Camry. The scene was busy with police, ambulance, maybe a fire truck. I was more concerned with making sure Nuria was alright and that we had all the information we would need.

Nuria is worried about her personal items that had to be left behind in her car. I think they'll be okay. The car should be locked, wherever it's taken. We've reported the accident to Nuria's insurance company and gave them the case number, and they'll handle the rest (I hope). I don't know if Nuria will have to go to court, but the courthouse is at the end of my street—easy to get to.

Now Nuria will have to start searching again for a good used car. That may take weeks. But there is no rush to get it done. 

So that was my and Nuria's Saturday morning. How was yours?

Nuria

My last blog post was six days ago. It seems longer to me. I guess I'm not doing much these days.

Sometimes Nuria (my domestic partner) gets quiet. She did that this morning. She was quiet a long time. I asked her if anything was wrong. She said, "No." Yet I knew something was wrong. Sometimes people don't know how to put something into words. Then I have to dig. I ask questions until I start to feel I'm getting somewhere, and then I drill down into that topic, whatever it may be.

I finally got Nuria to talk about what was bothering her. She misses her family in Costa Rica: her three daughters and her three grandchildren. There is Joanna, her oldest child, who has two children, a boy and a girl, "R" and Stephanie. ("R" is, of course, a nickname.) There is Maria, her middle child. And there is Mary, her youngest child, who has a son called Nick.

I can't replace her family, and as of now, she can't leave the country. She is applying for permanent resident status and she can't leave the country until August of 2023. It doesn't take much to entertain me. I can spend hours looking at YouTube. But Nuria is more of a "people person" than I am. She likes being around people. I'm not a people person. She had a family. I didn't; not a "real" family. She had a life with many friends. I had a life with a few cherished friends. She likes people. I tolerate people. 

(I just went to the door to accept a package—a large brown box from Walmart—addressed to Nuria. She's in buying mode. I never know what to get people. Humans of my milieu already have everything they need and really want. Trying to select a gift for them is like trying to decide what kind of icing you want to put on your red velvet cake, only infinitely more complex. My father couldn't do it, either—make my mother happy. As a child, I felt sad for my mother, who bought birthday and Christmas gifts for everyone in the family but received from my father whatever dregs remained on the drugstore shelves on Christmas Eve.)

I can't make people happy. They have to do it. I'm here if they need me. I can ask questions, but I can't always fix what is broken. Especially when someone is a long way from home and family. When people around me are sad, it makes me sad when I can't help them. But what will be, will be.

Soccer

Last night, Nuria and I were asleep in bed. I was dreaming. In my dream, I pinched someone, and I pinched hard. Then, both in reality and in my dream, I heard Nuria squeal, "Owwwww!!!"

I suddenly understood that I had pinched Nuria and I hoped she was okay. I wanted to wake up and ask her if she was okay, but I just couldn't wake up. I teetered on the brink of wakefulness, half awake and half asleep. Nuria didn't make any further sounds, so I assumed she was okay. I resumed my dream. The pinch and Nuria's squeal of pain are the only parts of the dream that I remember.

In fact, I had forgotten all about it until this morning, when Nuria said, "You pinched me really hard last night."

She said that my night was wild. I was rolling around in bed, and I was talking. That is not very unusual for me. I often roll from side to side in bed, lying on my left side, then my right side, then my left side, and so on. Talking while I'm asleep isn't too unusual, either. Nuria takes it all in stride. But I know I wouldn't want to sleep in the same bed with me.

Nuria is watching TV now. She's watching the USA play the Netherlands in the World Cup. That would be "soccer," which is called "football" in countries not named USA. Netherlands is ahead with 35 minutes remaining.  

I don't know much about soccer. I can watch it for a few minutes, but it seems like the most boring game humans have ever invented. Maybe that's because so many games end with the score 0 - 0 or 1 - 0. 

"Hey, VirtualWayne, let's go to the stadium and watch two teams not score any points for 90 minutes."

"Thanks, but I'd rather do something more exciting than watch soccer—like, take a nap."

But to each his own.