This morning, I do Santa at our church. I'm a little apprehensive about it, because they were very vague about where I'll be able to get changed. I don't care for the idea of driving up wearing the outfit -"Mom, does Santa drive a Prius?"- even though I've thought it funny the couple of times I've seen a Santa in a pickemuptruck or a motorcycle. I'm going to drive the van over -- all else fails, I'll move it to the far end of the parking lot, change inside, and drive back. And probably find the parking spot gone. This slot reserved for people in red fur suits. The weather is appropriate for it, certainly -- there's actually a possibility of snow, tomorrow morning. Just a trace, but it'll be fun, nonetheless.
As for the actual being Santa, I'm looking forward to it. These kids will be a little younger than I'm used to, so there is a better chance of getting crying, squirming kids, but I don't really mind about that. And its always a delight to hold someone's very young child (though I'd never have given our daughter to someone I didn't know; and even if I did trust the Santa enough to hold her, I'd have been right next to them. I'm protective, that way.) No, the big fear with younger kids is bladder control. I've never been wetted on, and it occurs to me that if I buy my own suit, I'm going to need to figure out how to handle that. The suit isn't all that expensive, but I don't want to have to have a spare 'just in case'.
I dreamed about problem solving again last night. It was sort-of related to something that was part of my life when I was a Minuteman missile launch officer. We had these gihugic paper manuals that we'd drag back and forth, describing everything we were supposed to know how to do. There was even a missile launch checklist in there, just in case the Emergency War Order manual wasn't available. Voice Reporting Signal Assembly: Enabled. Data Store and Processor: Verified. We'd get updates to pages in the manuals periodically, and we were supposed to sift them into the manuals within a couple of days of getting them. Most people did; some made a fetish of never doing it, betting that they wouldn't get picked for a spot check of their manual's status. Sometimes they lost that bet, and then there would be pain and anguish visited upon them. The manual page change wasn't hard, but it got tedious quickly. Is this the pile I'm taking from, and that the pile I'm adding to, or is it the reverse? And that was the nature of my problem solving dream -- somehow, I'd gotten a whole section of the manual in backwards, and I was trying to figure out how it happened, and how I could keep it from happening in the future. I kept thinking that some kind of color coding on the pages would work, or some kind of OCR deal. Never did resolve it, though. Guess I can't be a missile launch guy again. Just as well. Usually, when I dream of being one again, its along the lines of a 'what the hell am I doing here again?' bad dream. For the first two or three years after I got out of SAC, I had actual nightmares about finding myself abruptly back inside the Launch Control Center. Glad that doesn't happen now. Well, usually doesn't happen.
Light on... Light off... Missile away.
2 comments:
It used to happen to me every second night, but now, fifteen years along, it only seems to happen every second or third week.
funny thing...I get older, the people change, the equipment changes, the job changes, the security changes...just like what I would expect, but in my dreams, I am wandering around sort of aimlessly waiting for orders. Even the uniforms change and update. The scary thing is, I get a uniform update in my dream before I discover it in fact....and I am always wearing a uniform that is ten years out of date.
I also keep getting dressed down for wearing a beard and letting my hair grow long. But they always get called away, leaving me to muddle though new technology I don't understand, expecting to do a job I don't know how to do. So I sort of slide over to the next hangar, and hang out in THEIR coffee shop, or follow THEIR techs around.
Sort of like real life maybe?
Not sorta like -- exactly like. Eerie.
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