After another full day of house hunting, we settled for an apartment. All the houses were either way out of our price range, or dumpy. There was one three-bedroom that was really nice that we almost bought, but we eventually decided against it. The yard was too shady to grow any type of garden, it was too close to the highway to let the cat run wild, and it was too far from both work and school. With the apartment, we get a good amount of space for a lot less money.

I also get my old job back, with the same position and salary! I fully expected I would be back to a representative status, though I was going to fight for higher pay. But, my boss gave me the supervisor gig without a fight. Apparently, it was a surprise move because all the other supervisors were shocked. The boss had said last week that she couldn’t hire another supervisor. Whatever happened I am grateful.

My in-laws live in a very small Indiana town. To get anything at all you must run the fifteen miles to the closest “big town” which has a Wal-Mart. This is as good as shopping gets in their neck of the woods.

Amy and I headed to Wal-Mart to pick up a few toiletries and what-not that we had not bothered to pack up and take with us to Indiana. Rural Indiana is not the best place to find wonderful American culture. I was quickly reminded of what many foreigners think about us. Mainly that we are fat, lazy, loud and obnoxious. There was plenty of each category on display for us at Wally-world.

While returning a few items that Amy’s mother had purchased her, I overheard a conversation between two ladies. When asked how she was doing, one lady replied that she was on disability now. As if this somehow answered the question. Her tone of voice suggested that she had been waiting her whole life to be on disability and that managing to qualify for this program constituted some great achievement.

Items securely purchased, we headed out of the store and home. As we were exiting a lady and what I presume to be her son were confused as to which doors were the exits and which were the doors to enter. In fact, all doors were suited for both entry and exiting the building. They proceeded to walk out one set of doors, as another lady was entering through the same. In conversation with her son over which doors were which, the confused mother noted that this other lady was walking in the wrong door.

Overhearing the accusation, this lady decided to loudly proclaim that she was sorry, and that confused mom should “get over it.”

Confused Mom decided this was a suggestion filled with rudeness and decided to properly use etiquette by screaming, “You stupid B**tch!”

Home sweet home, as they say.

Now that my time is growing short, here in France, I have become increasingly busy. For example, yesterday afternoon through the evening I was amazingly active.

I left for my French class at about 4:30. Amy came along because we were returning most of the things that Ann had let us borrow for our home. We also stopped by and bought a little strawberry tart to celebrate my last class.

We didn’t leave Ann’s until about 20 minutes before 7 pm. We were supposed to meet some friends for drinks at 7, so we made our way straight to downtown instead of going home. This being France we arrived about five minutes after the hour and were the second people there. Ten minutes later Damian showed up, fifteen minutes after that somebody else dropped by and so on and so forth until about a quarter after 8 when the entire crew was there. By this time I had long nursed my Coca-Cola into oblivion and patiently waited for everyone else to finish their beverage. Considering the 2.50 Euro price for another class of soda, I set my limit to one.

The reason for the party was to say goodbye to Damian, who headed back to London today.

After everyone finished their drinks we all decided we were hungry and headed toward a restraint at the ripe hour of 9:30. Normal supper hours for the French are about 7 pm, which is about 2 hours past my American eating hour. On occasions like this when we don’t even get to the restaurant until 9:30 I am ready to start eating the tablecloth.

The food, when it arrived was lovely. I had some shrimp with fried zucchini and a plate of sautéed duck with mixed vegetables. We were eating on the terrace which sits right along the street. The downtown streets are a bit odd. They are not really normal streets in which traffic flows. Many of the pathways are blocked by metal poles, keeping automobiles from passing. Certain vehicles, such as the police, taxi cabs, and the local building owners have remote controls which lower the poles and allow driving passage.

Of course, pedestrians may walk up and down the streets at will. Being a relatively cool summer evening there was a good number of folks passing about us. A small group of homeless people decided the area right across the street from us was the perfect spot to sit for the evening.

For some reason, many of the homeless people in France are dog owners. Actually, a lot of people in France, homeless or not, are dog owners. Not that the homeless shouldn’t have a dog, it just always strikes me odd that someone so down on their luck still has the ability to take care of a dog.

Anyways, a small group of homeless folks with their bottles of wine and their dogs start gathering around while we are there trying to eat. They are all carrying on and getting rather rambunxious when I see one guy start kicking his dog and calling it a “pede” which is the shortened version of “pedophile” which is the French version of “faggot.” Now, I don’t know about my readers, but this was the first time I have ever eaten duck while watching a homeless man call his dog a homosexual while kicking the poor Mut.

After the kicking, the gay dog began fighting with another one of the homeless dogs. Then a couple of the homeless men began harassing the walker-bys for a cigarette, or some money. While they did this boombox guy stopped by.

Boombox guy is a young man we have seen before in the streets of Strasbourg. He sports a grungy set of dreads, all-black clothes, and a small 80’s style radio on which he continually cranks out heavy metal riffs.

The gang began to shout and dance and generally annoy us until about 5 minutes before we got up to leave. We said our goodbyes and headed home at around 11 pm.

We took our second shower of the day (and we can now gauge the weather on the number of showers we take in a given day – this day was mild and so we only needed two.) It was too hot to sleep so I stayed up playing on the internet until about 1:30 and then lay in bed sweating until about 3 where I finally managed some sleep.

… that I received a package of marijuana seeds from either my friend Mullins or my brother, Neal, which one I can’t remember. I took the seeds and planted them in small planters and grew them tall.

From the seeds the dream fast-forwarded to when they were large and ripe, do marijuana plants get ripe? Well, whatever you call it they were ready for the harvesting. I clipped them and dried them out.

Fast forward again to where everything is dry and the plants are ready for smoking. For whatever reason I decided to do the cutting/smoke preparation in my parent’s kitchen. I don’t really know all the ends and outs of how to prepare a marijuana plant for a joint, but in this dream version, I put the stalks onto a cutting board and hacked them into little bits.

Tiny, round seeds popped out of the stalks, and this was what I was looking for. I finished my harvesting and began to clean up. The dream is fuzzy on how many plants I actually cut up, but I had thousands of seeds. I filled one bucket up with seeds for my personal use and began thinking of ways to destroy the remaining ones, which I would not need.

While I was cleaning up, trashing the actual leaves (!) my dad walked through the kitchen. I tensed up sensing he would understand what I was doing and kill me on the spot. But, he was distracted by his own search for some unremembered object; all he did was make a comment on my mess looking like a nice salad. He then left the kitchen for the office and left me alone.

I disposed of the leaves, and the dream jumped to me being outside. It must have been right outside my parent’s house, but it was a landscape I have never seen before. Which, in reality, isn’t that far from the mark, since I’ve never actually been to the house my parents are currently living in. Anyway, I walked to the curb, where several old ladies were sitting on a porch swing. I walked a little ways away from them and began dumping my seeds very close to some flowers. There were literally tons of these seeds, at least three large piles filling the ground.

My plan was to burn the seeds and destroy all evidence of my illegal activity. Why I would do this in public, with many pedestrians walking about is beyond me, but never the less it was so. Making things stranger, I believed I must put a for sale sign on the seeds before I burned them. The price was really cheap, but I still hoped no one would want to purchase them before I could burn all the seeds. In fact, I began burning the first pile feeling anxious that someone might walk by and decide to buy the seeds before they were completely destroyed.

I didn’t think anyone wanting to purchase the seeds would actually know what they were, it was more like a garage sale, and someone might think they were sunflower seeds or something. Illogically I also couldn’t start burning the second pile until the first one was destroyed.

About halfway through the first pile’s burning, a middle age man approached the pile and began asking questions.

He seemed to know exactly what the seeds really were, but vocally, he was concerned with the destruction of the flowers that were buried between the seed piles. He complained that he would like to purchase the flowers before they were burned. I tried to stall him while the seeds burned, but he became more manic.

Somewhere in the conversation, he began telling me he knew exactly what the seeds were and that the flowers were the giveaway. He said that the flowers were, in fact, the product of the seeds. And as he said this, it became true. No longer were there marijuana plants, but flowers.

It was at this point that I woke up.