{"id":4923,"date":"2010-11-13T11:36:53","date_gmt":"2010-11-13T10:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/?p=4923"},"modified":"2010-11-13T11:36:53","modified_gmt":"2010-11-13T10:36:53","slug":"lifes-a-glitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/?p=4923","title":{"rendered":"Life’s a Glitch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is definitely a Glitch-In-The-Matrix sort of day. It began most oddly when I woke calmly, in the aftermath of a dream which was unlike any of the dreams I usually have. Regular readers may recall that I am afflicted with the curse of recurrent Frustration Dreams<\/a>, where an endless series of generally unpleasant things prevent me from getting somewhere or doing something that I have to do. But this morning’s dream was different.<\/p>\n

It started like a common or garden frustration dream, with me needing to get back to a job I had failed to turn up at for months, and was about to be fired from. And when I got there, I had to do a load of work and then get all the reports of that work written up before I could go home. And normally this is where I would have got stuck in a loop of frustrating events that would get in the way of me getting stuff done, and getting where I wanted to be. But No! Amazingly, this time, the dream allowed me to do what I needed to do, and then to get home, where I was greeted by an enormous sense of satisfaction, and my children and grand daughter all sitting around a table smiling and having a good time.<\/p>\n

I have to tell you this dream has FREAKED ME OUT. I have never had an Achievement<\/em> Dream before. Well, not that I have remembered anyway. And while it felt really nice to wake up having done a good night’s work, as it were, I can’t help wondering if maybe this is an intimation that maybe my Life’s Work is done, and that I can now “go home” in a sort of spiritual (ie snuffing-it) sense. Ha! Trust me to put a downer on what could have been a lovely start to the day.<\/p>\n

Anyways, the glitchiness has continued. During the early morning animal round I found one of the latest litter of kittens dead in the barn. In the half-light of earliness, I saw this little bundle of black fur crouched just inside the door, and when it didn’t immediately run away as per usual, I felt all pleased that at last the kittens were getting used to me, and this one would let me stroke it. “Over my dead body” it said to itself. And when I reached down to give it an affectionate tickle behind the ears, it keeled over on to its side, floppy as a floppy thing. It had obviously shuffled off its mortal coil fairly recently, because it was still warm and not yet stiff, (I’m getting to be a bit of an expert on such things these days). So I carried it out into the slightly brighter outside light, and gave it a thorough examine. No sign of injury. No obvious sign of illness. Indeed, only yesterday it had been climbing in the mullein outside our door with its siblings – frisky, feisty and full of life.<\/p>\n

So, returning an Open Verdict on the Cause of Death, I popped the little body into a bag, and left it on the outside table, while I went to assist Simon in his preparations for his early morning departure to head for a ferry for the Homeland. And when he was duly kitted out with his provisions for the journey, his bag full of technological essentials, his toothbrush, and (possibly) a few clothes, he took his tooting-all-the-way-up-the-lane leave.<\/p>\n

And I found myself alone with a grave to dig, a chicken-house full of phobia-inducing feathers to clean (I do wish Lonely could keep her clothes on for more than a couple of months at a time), a pen full of sticky pig poo to bucket up, and a barn full of spitty llamas to feed. For a short moment, I couldn’t help wondering why, oh why, people insist on calling this kind of existence The Good Life.<\/p>\n

And then the sun came out, and a nuthatch landed on the bird-feeder, and I remembered I had a book to write. And I thought that maybe my Achievement Dream was a Good Thing, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is definitely a Glitch-In-The-Matrix sort of day. It began most oddly when I woke calmly, in the aftermath of a dream which was unlike any of the dreams I usually have. Regular readers may recall that I am afflicted … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cats","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pnnDj-1hp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llamadharma.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}