Oof. Nasty nightmare that somebody had been screwing with my fish tank and left live rock scattered all over the studio. (On the other hand, it was a very large and surprisingly clean studio, not the over-cluttered maze in which I currently dwell.*) I freaked out completely, as one might expect, and was running around trying to get the rock back in water, and save all the weird little invertebrates. Crab Bob’s shell was broken open and it was generally quite horrible, and I was really screamingly furious and ready to commit murder.

This was not restful sleep. On the other hand, it’s probably a good sign in a weird sort of way—I used to have nightmares about fish dying in tanks because I had forgotten they were there/didn’t get messages I was fish-sitting/whatever** so moving from internal to external failure is progress of a sort, I guess.

In happier news, much blooming in the garden. Practically everything’s going now–coreopsis and the giant rudbeckia (which promptly fell over. Next year, plant cages on EVERYTHING. I did the whole visual-staggering thing, like they tell you do, and didn’t think that the six foot tall plants in the middle would become two-foot tall residents of the border when we got a good rain.) the butterfly bush, white native veronica, red penstemon (which is pale peach and nothing like red) the pink pepperbush and the Carolina lupine. The only hold-outs are the black-eyed susans (which may just not go this year, I suppose) the echinacea (one of which is doing great, one of which is dying, don’t ask me why) and a couple others that are going to go later in summerl. The purple-headed sneezeweed and the blue asters have flowerheads, but haven’t popped yet.

We had the first two ripe tomatoes over the weekend, which Kevin popped on mozarella with fresh basil out of the garden, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and voila, instant caprese. It was awesome, and I don’t even like tomatoes that much. (I like them in sauce, and in salsa, but I’m not a big fan of the texture of an intact tomato.) We’ve also been using the basil to make an approximation of pesto, although it tastes less like basil and more…green. Which is delicious in its own way, so I’m not complaining.

*Any working studio I live in will become an over-cluttered maze given time, so that’s not really a complaint. Perhaps I was just moving in.

**Oddly enough, I’m not the only person who has these dreams, although the species varies. Sometimes I get reptiles, too, despite having never kept any reptiles in my life, and when they get hungry they start eating each other. I never get mammals. (I know people who get mammals.)

In my personal lexicography of dream, frogs, however, are a good sign–I’ve had what seemed like a starving-reptile dream and been insanely grateful when I looked into the cages and found tiny green frogs, all of them alive, and the sense of relief and joy was incredible. As is usual with dreams, trying to explain all this to somebody else makes you sound like a bit of an idiot, but if you’ve had the animals-in-cages dreams, you probably know what I mean.