When I got home from work at 6:45 p.m.-ish Wednesday, after another impressive session at Apex Training with my strength and fitness coach Andrew, the Teenager handed me a cold beer. This was much better than the start of my day.

(New personal record: 40 lb dumbbell row. Now, if we could just get the left leg to participate in the bench press.)

Even though I get up at the pre-dawn hour of 4:15 a.m. to work on my novel (buy my books here or email me for Paypal orders) before my ten-hour shift at Stitch Fix’s Bizzy Hizzy** starts at 6:30 a.m., between the animals and my superpower of innate time sense, I don’t usually need an alarm.

But Wednesday morning I woke from a terrifying nightmare by alarm. I will spare you the elaborate details but let’s just summarize by saying it felt like it lasted for hours and was one of my “James Bond dreams,” as the Teenager’s father used to say during our marriage. Stress-induced action-adventure dreams where I must navigate great danger to try and save family and/or the world.

The alarm work me before the end of the dream, so in that particular scene, her dog (F. Bean Barker) and I were trying to find and rescue her from the villain. But the dog had been mortally wounded and was dying in my arms and I still hadn’t located the Teen.

I woke shaking violently, I reset my alarm for 30 minutes later and curled into the fetal position with the covers under my chin, treasuring the faint smell of bleach. I almost called out. But I forced myself from bed and went to work.

I hadn’t had enough sleep, in part because our tiny foster kitten Jean-Paul Sartre resides in my bedroom now, and throughout the night (before the dream) he kept leaping on my face and biting me. He’s at the stage now where he’s learning appropriate social interaction, so that’s his way of getting my attention to tell me he’s bored. He’s learning to sleep nicely in my bed, but he still has poor impulse control so we have some lessons to teach him.

I maintained a 90% average on my work metrics, attended my roster and safety team meetings, and voiced my idea about different colored lanyards for safety team members to make us easier to spot in the warehouse. Currently, the safety team has orange name tags but only half the team has them, they make the name tags harder to read, and badges turn so you can’t always see the orange. In my opinion, the fact that you wouldn’t have to personalize lanyards means distributing them is instantaneous and easier to maintain.

In other events:

• My blind friend Nancy has Covid for the first time.
• The dining room ceiling project happened.
• After a brief panic yesterday that one of my references had gotten lost in the mail, my service dog application is complete and will be reviewed in the next 3-6 weeks. More blog posts on that here.
• My college roommate (Curly) visited.

Mercury Retrograde started September 9 and ends October 2, and the autumnal equinox is September 22 at 9 p.m. Hopefully the equinox will straighten out some energy in the universe. During the last Mercury retrograde, the flood that launched the ceiling project occurred. Read more about that here.

PHOTOS OF THE CEILING:

And because some of you might wonder where the food posts are:

** On an unrelated note, I worked Freestyle on Sunday, hit my normal 103%, and had an order where someone order six of the same sweater in the same color and size. In my fantasy, Mom and her two daughters and three granddaughters are wearing them in a family portrait.