Neena & Veena, Office Job & Roman Army

1. I'm at the UofWA, and as usual I'm not sure where I'm suppposed to be going. I'm in a gym, and it's a dance class. Neena & Veena Bidasha are teaching a class! They start some choreography that involves a lot of "phaeraonic" arm and hand gestures. I follow along and soon am performing it with them, albeit poorly. They start doing a lot of "mime" gestures (like the Moroccan "putting on makeup" or "making coffee"), most of which seems to involve food: "I'm buttering the bread now...". Soon it's not mime, we really ARE moving down a long buffet of food.

2. I'm at my grandmother's house, only it's my mom I'm helping out these days. I'm going in to train a new girl to work at Cerri Feed Co. (a place I left MONTHS ago). I'm showing her the ropes when the boss comes in and starts asking me to order more #10 envelopes. He folds some letterhead up and says "Like this, with the return address" but he's mad it a very skinny envelope. "Do you really want them that small?" I ask. He then starts laying in to me about how when I worked there I ordered the wrong thickness of envelopes(!). Then he starts a diatribe on how, when asked whether we had envelopes on hand, I had told him we had a box, but when he looked it was a box of postcards. I think I can tell the difference between envelopes and post cards, but he was too busy telling me how untrustworthy I was to discuss the possibility of his having looked in the wrong place. (Can you tell how I feel about office jobs?)

3. Now I'm back in the front room of Grandma's house, sorting out some garage sale finds I'd recently acquired. Mostly curtains and bedspreads, including a complete bedroom set of that 30s dusty pink satin stuff. The door opens and my uncles come in with my mom in a wheelchair. They're just getting back from the hospital, where they had to take mom while I was out. I feel bad that I wasn't there to take care of her. "She was low on vitamin E." they say. Apparently this is a life-threatening situation in my subconscious.

Soon we were all seated at a long table in an upstairs room in an old Army barracks. It's a big feast like at an SCA event. Mom is doing fine, now. People are drifting off to the next "thing", and nobody seems to notice me, so I pick up my gear and shuffle off. My "gear" consists of my armor, which is Imperial Roman. The helmet is kind of big on me and the shield is heavy. It's cool and drizzly outside, but I'm wearing a wool chiton. As I descend the stairs I see Nick Worthington, in English Renaissance clothes, cutting across the road. I go across to the gym and into the locker room to kit up. The other women are startled when I come in, but then they see I'm a girl, too. I feel tired, and the other women seem cautious around me. I start to suit up.