Tuna for Dinner

     Bit by bit I'm learning about life in the high desert of New Mexico.  One of the things I've learned this fall is how much dogs and coyotes like tunas.  No, not the kind that comes in a can, though they do like that, but the kind that grows on prickly pear cactus.  

The purplish growths are the seed pods of the cactus, called by some, tuna.  

One day last week the dogs and I were out walking on our usual path in the open space.  I started noticing purple poop on the trail.  On closer examination I saw that it was filled with seeds.  This answered a question:  Does anything eat the tuna?  Evidently, coyotes do.  Down the path we went, then the dogs started stopping and rooting around near prickly pear plants, something they have learned the hard way to avoid.  Root, root, root.  Chomp, chomp. Evidently, dogs like the well ripened tuna too.

Dream a Little Dream

I've wondered why some people remember dreams and others don't.  Articles on dreams suggest that you write down what you dreamed immediately when you wake up. It's hard to imagine a life where anyone would do that.  Most of us who launch out of bed do so in response to some urgent calling whether it's a crying baby, an insistent pet or a full bladder.  No time to say, "Hang on while I write in my dream journal."  For the rest getting up is such a struggle that adding a journal writing stop would probably mean they would  deem it another reason to fall back to sleep. 

Like most aging people, I've acquired many aches and pains I didn't have when younger.  Aches and pains which keep me awake or wake me during the night.  These nighttime twinges have taken the place of the nocturnal ruminations of my working and parenting lives when I worried about situations at work or what might happen to my children. There have always been things that bubble to the surface demanding attention when everything else shut down for the night. 

The result of these and other interruptions was that I didn't sleep very soundly.  I didn't spend much time in the land of REM sleep.  I know I had dreams, sometimes bits and pieces stayed with me, but not the way some other people seem to remember their dreams, vividly and in detail.

That changed a couple of months ago when my trochanter brusitis got so bad that I would spend most nights searching for a comfortable position which would allow me to fall asleep.

After a couple of weeks of this, I starting taking a couple of Aleve before I went to bed.

Then I began to sleep, and I began to dream.  My dreams were vivid, odd, and wonder of wonders, I could remember what seemed like big chunks of them.  

In the way of dreams there were strange happenings and juxtapositions with the wrong things and people in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But, I remembered them.  I could parse them.

Now I wonder if this change is due to better sleep, or the effects of yet another drug in my system.

One of Life's Unanswerable Questions

Why do people leave bumper stickers supporting candidates from past elections on their cars?  Win or lose, you'd think they would get them off at the first opportunity.  If your candidate won, I'd think that when they screwed up, and they will screw up, you wouldn't want everyone to know that you supported the jerk.  On the other hand, if your candidate lost, even though there is some satisfaction in being able to say, "I didn't vote for the jerk who got elected," everyone knows that candidate you did vote for would have eventually screwed up if elected.