Dreams in a Bowl

Three Dreams

2010-10-30T14:24:00.006-04:00

Yellow shirt and boxers

running, looking for shorts

outside, campus apartment area

trees & grass

found a group of friends. People from church

going to the gym

Went to an apartment for shorts.

Not mine, but a friend's

found my shorts

her roommates came in

girl on my back (piggy-back)

church service (felt like Gainesville church. Pastor Sohn was talking)

girl's mother was at the front

a missionary or something, talking on stage

girl wouldn't get off, and I didn't want her to get off

she was warm

everyone was told to take off their head-wear

I moved bandanna down and wrapped it around as a scarf (it was yellow)

girl was still on my back

There was another dream, but I can't remember it.

My Brain Hurts, But It's Worth It?

2010-06-08T11:42:00.004-04:00

So my brain has been crying out in pain these past few days. I was paranoid of after effects of last year's accident, but after talking with a friend who is experiencing similar symptoms, I realized why. It's hurting only because I'm trying to stuff more information into it than a reasonable person should be trying to put into it.

The bar review class is not that bad. It's basically taking all of what we should have learned in law school and cramming it into your head in 4 hour per day increments. (This is only in lectures. This isn't including the practice tests, the readings, the writing, etc.)

The bar exam will be in roughly 1.5 months. End of July. I know I'm not ready for it. Right now, I really wish I never got the Starcraft 2 Beta key. That certainly soaked up some of my time. It was fun, too. I'm looking forward to August 7, only because I'll be done with everything, and I'll be able to sit down and play my pre-ordered copy of Starcraft 2.

But for now, I'm glad that the beta period ended. I'm hoping that it was contributing to me sleeping past 2 AM. Because if it hasn't been, then that means that I need to figure out what's been making me sleep so late, and fix it.

So yea, my brain hurts. So much information. I wonder if I should have come to law school to begin with. Ah well. Just need to take the bar exam.

Opera Browser

2009-09-04T09:45:00.002-04:00

I started to use Opera, just because I've heard it was a good browser. While I don't think it's a bad browser, it will take time to get used to.

The main issue is that if you're comfortable with another browser (Firefox, Chrome, or IE) then it will be a hard progress to change, especially if you are used to your browser. I use FFox and Chrome, but there were a few keyboard-shortcuts that were significantly different in Opera.

The one I found most annoying was the shortcut to open a link in a new tab. In FF and Chrome, it's Ctrl + Left Click. This would open the link in a background tab. I know that middle-click works too, but I'm on a laptop touch-pad. The same control in Opera is Ctrl + Shift + Left Click. Ctrl + Left Click is the same as just a regular Left Click. Shift + Left Click opens the link in a new tab, but it's in the foreground.

My other frustration came shortly after this. Ctrl+Tab did not cycle through the tabs, but opened a menu of the tabs. Ctrl+Shift+Tab cycled through the menu backwards... similar, but different.

I really want to like Opera... It seems like it could be a good browser... has good features, but I also like my shortcuts. I think I would probably switch from Chrome to Opera if shortcuts were more compatible or customizable.

P.S. I also tried to change this in the preference menu, but nothing happened.

Cream of Tomato Soup +

2009-06-08T13:29:00.000-04:00

This started as a regular cream of tomato soup. Simple and classic. The recipe calls for onion cooked in butter until clear, then flour is mixed in to make roux. The roux is mixed with tomato juice and then milk. Season to taste.

The soup tasted as reliable as the recipe was, but it was also as boring as the recipe. But the great thing about cream of tomato soup is how adaptable it is to improvisation. So I looked around. I threw in some basil and a can of diced tomatoes. Cool, the soup is a bit chunkier. I threw in garlic as well. I like garlic. But I wanted the soup to have more substance.

Fortunately, I had some meat. It wasn't just any kind of meat. It was sausage. I like sausages: bratwurst, kielbasa, italian, salami, pepperoni, breakfast sausage, korean blood sausages, etc. This was a spicy kind. Publix labeled it "chorizo", and although it wasn't the chorizo I remember eating when I was young, it had flavor. This was what my soup needed. I chopped up the sausages, and threw them in.

Now I'm sure there's many other kinds of foods I could have thrown in, but that doesn't matter now, because at this moment, I'm quite satisfied. What more does one need from life than peace and a full stomach (also a form of peace)?

The recipe I started this madness from:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cream-of-Tomato-Soup/Detail.aspx

I miss my DS.

2009-06-06T12:30:00.006-04:00

I sometimes think my dreams show what my subconscious desires. My DS has been broken for a while, and I never replaced it. This dream might be a hint to me of the desire to play a certain kind of game.

I was on a quest, and a few friends came along. Thinking on it, I should have realized it was a dream pretty quickly, since there were obvious signs. Like how we chose the quest (like in a video game) and it immediately went into a cut-scene in which we enter into a mansion. We were supposed to do something inside and in the garden of the mansion.

We needed to track down a dark wizard, and this mansion was related to him. We wandered through it, but not much happened, until a monstrous man (I'm guessing it was a man, though it might have been a man who was experimented on by the wizard) ran at us. We defeated him, and as he lay there, we moved on into the garden in the back.

As we were leaving to the garden, the building sealed itself closed with solid steel doors. We had no choice but to go on to the garden. We wandered around, but didn't find anything. It was then when we realized that we needed to go back. We didn't know why, but there was something back in the mansion.

Strangely enough, it was open again, and the body was gone. The wizard appeared and we immediately charged. This is when everything froze, and the wizard began to explain why we had to come back. We had not truly defeated the big guy before. Then he projected in our mind an image of what happened as we were leaving into the garden. The monster got up as we were leaving and began to run at us just as the doors sealed, so we never saw that.

The wizard chided us and said we weren't ready to face the monster, let alone the wizard, but since we were here, we could not leave until we defeated the monster. The wizard then transformed the area into an underground cavern, complete with flowing lava (this is when you can notice that my video gaming when I was young still affects my mind). He started to toy with us, creating illusions of mages for us to defeat.

It was about this time that I noticed that we could only move on panels on the floor, much like turn-based strategy games. Interestingly enough, it was turn-based. We were on a magical, transparent, floating platform that the wizard created. The lava was flowing under us. He split the group, so that we would have to wait for our turn, and would give us different scenarios to defeat his illusions. I think this was to train us while we waited for his monster to come back so we could fight it.

Then I got a phone call and woke up.

What's Zopf?

2009-06-04T21:03:00.003-04:00

What you see in the picture is zopf. It's a loaf of swiss bread.

I've been planning to bake a loaf of bread for a while, and I finally got around to baking one today. This was my first time baking bread, so I picked an easy recipe. The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't smell the yeast. Still good bread, though.

Recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Zopf/Detail.aspx

Smells Delicious? Couldn't Care Less.

2009-06-04T13:00:00.003-04:00

My last post was a while ago. I'm doing much better, but in the meantime, I realized an annoying effect that the head trauma had. I lost my sense of smell. Apparently, it can take anywhere from 2 months to never to heal. This put a damper on my cooking.

Taste had a severe impact, since I was only able to taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (or whatever they call it these days). I can also feel the burn of peppers, but that's not so much of a taste as a feel. You can test that out by putting it on sensitive skin... you'll feel it if you rub a pepper on your eyelids. For several weeks, the foods I ate only had the tastes I mentioned, temperature, texture, and presentation. I lost over 15 pounds during that time, not because I was on a diet, but because neither cooking nor eating was fun.

Fortunately, some smells are coming back. This does not mean that I smell a weakened version of what everybody else smells, it just means that I can only smell certain compounds. I can smell white vinegar, but I cannot smell smoke. I can taste the difference between regular Pepsi and Pepsi Throwback (a limited time Pepsi made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup), but I can't really tell between Coke and Dr. Pepper. Vanilla tastes different than vanillin (artificial flavoring for vanilla), but sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies taste the same.

Anyways, so I was making london broil today, but the smoke detector kept going off. Actually, this smoke detector seems to go off everytime I've been cooking these days. I checked the broil, but no burning. I'm convinced that the smoke detector is defected. The meat was rare, which was how it was supposed to be. I'm thinking that I'll just cut costs for food and not spend too much on herbs and spices for the upcoming few weeks/months. What do you think?

I was in a hospital for 1.5 weeks

2009-03-23T22:53:00.000-04:00

On Thursday of UF's spring break, I went to FIU. I was visiting a friend who lived on campus at FIU. We had fun, and after saying bye to him around 11pm, I left his dorm to walk to my car. Somewhere between the dorm building and the parking lot, two things happened. I fell and hit my head. I lost consciousness. I have no idea of the order in which they happened. I'm told that a campus policeman saw me falling and came to help me. He asked me "Are you okay?" I answered "Where am I?" Since I was clearly not okay, he called the paramedics. I can remember from the paramedics. I remember that I was praying the whole time. I also remember calling my parents. What I don't remember, but what my mom told me, was that they left so quickly that they forgot to bring a Bible or anything, so my mom told me to recite Psalm 23. Apparently, I did it just fine. Then, I remember throwing up blood and blood coming out of my nose. Afterwards, I was told that if I didn't throw up, then the pressure in my head would have been too high and I could have died. The hospital was pretty boring. Being stuck in bed for 9 days is terrible. There weren't many good channels on the TV, and though I had my Nintendo DS with me, I found out, to my dismay, that I fell on it. The screens didn't work. But I spent a good portion of my time reading a book that I brought with me. And the Bible; the book of Job. On about March 19th, the nurses started talking about how my injury was similar to the one that Liam Neeson's wife had died from. They did not stop telling me how lucky I am. They did not stop talking about it even until I was discharged. I have a skull fracture on the back of my head as well as a blood clot. The fracture has healed a good deal, and the clot is dissolving. My right ear feels like there's water in it, and sounds are a little muffled through it. The doctor said it'll get better. My heart rate drops to something around 30 beats per minute sometimes. The average resting heart rate, I'm told, is around 70 bpm. So the hospital kept me in to make sure this wasn't the cause of me falling to begin with. So from 3/13 to 3/23, I was in a hospital in Miami (Kendall). But I'm free now. After all this, I can only say one thing: Praise God!

The Crockpot

2009-02-11T20:44:00.000-05:00

The Crockpot is a brilliant invention. It cooks slowly, so there is a very low chance of burning the food. As a result, there is little care needed for it. Just set it and leave it be for hours at a time. When you get back to it, 4-10 hours later, your food is ready!

This picture shows Harvest Pork Stew. The crockpot is getting close to empty, because it was delicious.

Finally! Pictures!

2009-02-11T20:30:00.001-05:00

So I finally decided to start with the bowl stuff of my blog.
I can't draw, so this blog won't be getting any pictures of my dreams. Unfortunately, a blog without pictures can be a bit boring. This is where the bowls come in.
I will have pictures of foods that I either make, or experiment with (even the failures).
Today's food was the Bacon and Mushroom Strata.
So, what's a strata? A strata's essentially a breakfast casserole. It has bread(cubed), eggs, milk/cream, and whatever else you want to throw in there. That "whatever else" happened to be bacon and mushrooms. I had extra of each.
It's a casserole, so it's primary function isn't to look good, but to taste good. It did it's job well.

Noah's... Taco Bell?

2009-02-03T00:29:00.003-05:00

So this time, in my dream, I was like Noah... The one from the Bible.

Only my "ark" was a Taco Bell. It was also a Wednesday in my dream. Random fact.

It's kinda complicated.

Anyways, the whole thing with Noah...

It had something to do with either extremely bad weather, an alien invasion, apocalyptic virus, or apocalypse itself. I don't know what it was, but I needed to keep these animals alive. So I got a pair of each animal... I think they came to me, in fact, and we took refuge somewhere.

Strangely enough, that somewhere happened to be a Taco Bell building.

Dad was there, and so was mom. There were other people there too. But the thing I think was important was that not everyone knew that things were not going to be easy. I remember saying things like:

"Thursday might be the last sale in a while"

"Noone will see animals for a while."

As an aside, the baby zebras in my dream were really cute. Oh, and the animals were really smart too.

Anyways, I guess I must have been hungry in my dream. So guess what I decided to eat?

Yup, Taco Bell. I got in line (strange... why would an abandoned Taco Bell in the end of the world have a black woman at the counter to give me sass?).

I ordered as many burritos as the loose change would get me. They had no tacos. Something about how the tacos always went bad. So the burritos were really cheap: 1 for 29 cent, 2 for 31 cent.

When I pulled out the change in my pocket, I had a bunch of big coins. I had 1 silver dollar among lots of half dollar coins (about 7). Well, I like big coins, so I didn't want to pay with any of the coins in my pocket. I found a few dimes, a couple nickels and a penny to play with.

The black woman at the counter gave me some more sass.

Teeth pulled

2009-01-08T11:45:00.003-05:00

Got my teeth pulled today. Anyways, notes from earlier this morning:

Watch football game

with family

drive to sports bar

Fabio in parking lot

prison type place

david's there

we're high up, and there's a ledge

been there long enough to lose track of time & day.

Might even be the same day as the previous sequence.

red & green (crystals? compounds?) react to explode

they (captors) want to know how the reaction works

Gators will be playing in the BCS championship later today. Should be good.

Go Gators.

Bus Trip

2009-01-02T11:13:00.003-05:00

I do not remember the circumstances, but we were on a bus, and I think we were going to the beach, or if not, on a trip at the least. The bus was picking people up at different places, and it was also doing crazy maneuvers on the road.

At the end of a tunnel, we passed a bunch of cops. I was sitting at the front of the bus and didn't think much of it, but people behind me started talking about it. They were black students, and the people that were with the cops were people they recognized from their church. I recall a woman was sitting on the curb at the end of the tunnel. I guess there was a car accident or something. She seemed to be crying.

New Years Party

2009-01-01T14:03:00.002-05:00

So I followed a rabbit and it led me to a New Years party. A few girls I knew from church were there, including the one I like, who was hosting. There were also dogs at her home, for some reason. Strangely enough, it was just me and the girls there. I don't remember the details, unfortunately, because it's been some time now since the dream.

Rescue to conference

2008-12-30T07:11:00.003-05:00

I'm waiting for the prayer group. We need to rescue someone.

I'm waiting for a phone call from a hotel room. The building has outside stairs.

I go down the stairs really fast while they don't notice and get the phone call half-way down

they comment on how quickly I got down.

It's kinda like deserted construction site and a mountain side wilderness.

The car is a white sedan.

We get to the place to rescue (david?)

and have a party in a hotel room with snacks and foods

a little girl who came with us is still up the next morning

we had stayed up all night and might have to go to convention tired,

so we talk about how we should get some rest

I find some markers and use the red marker write on table (what did I write?), but it doesn't erase well.

I go to a cabinet to find a small bottle of alcohol to clean before hotel finds out

it smells or feels a little bit like oil or gas or some pet based stuff.

downstairs to desk cuz I wanted to keep my wallet safe

think of leaving wallet and cash inside with them and require ID or secret number to get it back

walk into a convention in the main hall

matt saario?

preacher

speaker trying to keep attention and gets us to break into small group

an old friendly guy in front of us comments on how Matt and I were inseparable in the conference

after talking a while, the old guy calls out to guy to our left, "Hey, white guy!"

turns out "white guy" is part cuban and lives somewhere to do with county line and miami beach

talk to new guy who was talking about life and a job with blobs

I ask about blogging, responds with comment about The Game

I ask if he's talking about the one by Stylelife, and he doesn't want to say. Still a bit shy. a rafc

The Glare

2008-12-27T19:51:00.003-05:00

The light was glaring into my eyes.

I couldn't see the enemy that's hunting us. It was something like the Predator (but it might have been zombies). My group moved on, but I stayed behind so I could stop him. No matter what angle I try to change to, the light still glared into my eyes.

If I moved to a different window in the building, the sun would reflect of some other surface. I knew this couln't be real. It must be some computer game or something.

If I can just get the sun's reflection out of my eyes, I'd be able to shoot my pursuer, then my team would be able to move on so that we can finish the mission.

I waited for the glare to go away. Despite the pain to my eyes, I had to keep looking, otherwise, it would take advantage and sneak around. So I waited, and it eventually turned to night and I woke up.

An MP3 and a Paper

2008-12-11T08:06:00.007-05:00

I was in a study lounge with some friends. I recall Alex and Mesha. Quite possible that other France students were there as well. I remember talking about some paper that was due, and how we'd done it, so we were actually chilling.

Then there was some deal about some song. It was about some Earth, Wind, Fire song, I think. Then we talked about some Korean song I had as my ringtone. I recall that Mesha started teasing me about the song. Something about how the song meant that I liked someone.

I recall seeing Tim while passing what was not too different than the GC piano lounge.

Then Joe came around, talked about his paper. He wasn't quite satisfied with how it was coming, so he was still working on it. I remember that I told him how I'd finished mind and stuff. A while later, while looking for a song on the MP3, I remembered that I didn't finish the paper. I panicked.

I rand to where I had left my bag so I could go home and start working on it. There were three girls sitting at the floor there studying. I asked the one closest to it for the bag, and then took off. I got in my car and started driving really fast. Thinking on it, I think that in an earlier segment of the dream, there was a driving sequence and the bag was somehow important.

Oh, and at one point in the night, I was choking... Turns out, I really was choking on my night guard.

Pyromaniac

2008-12-10T19:43:00.002-05:00

This dream took place at a stadium. You see, I was helping out as crowd control. I was supposed to make sure nobody got in after the event started. Nobody. If anyone tried to, I was granted leave to fight them off with any resources available. I was mainly supposed to scare them away if a warning didn't work, so I decided to use fire.

There were superpowered-types in the dream, so using fire wasn't that harsh. I don't think I had any particular powers that I can recall, other than that I was not harmed by fire. I just had a can and a lighter. The can was full of gas, as far as I could tell, and the lighter was a zippo. The first time I used the can, I had let gas leak out, then lit it afterwards. The flare that resulted was pretty big. It made a roar as it lit up the corridor I was watching, and the people who were trying to push past me ran away. The flare was in the shape of a V.

I was able to start controlling how to use this, whether I would fill the room with gas before flicking the flint, or whether I would hose them down with the can. The can was not just some small hair spray can. This was made to light stuff up, since it had a wider nozzle that released much more gas at a higher pressure.

I met my match when a powered guy walked in. He could shoot fire and control fire. That's when my friend showed up. His power was that he could control fire. They started fighting, and I just watched. What was I supposed to do? It seemed the enemy was stronger than my friend, and he eventually subdued him.

Then he started on a rant about who we really were. Apparently, everyone who has these powers were missing at some point. The guy pointed to some scars that my friend had to point out that my friend was a victim as well. Were we all experimented on? He said that there were three types of powered people. There were the victims, there were those who volunteered, and I didn't catch the last one. It was about here that I woke up.

Curry Ramen

2008-12-09T10:36:00.004-05:00

I was playing The World Ends With You last night (instead of studying), and one of the characters kept talking about curry and ramen. Well today, I wanted something to eat (late breakfast/early lunch), so I looked at my inventory. I had ramen (the cheap Maruchan brand) and curry (3 kinds: Fresh Market, Tones, and McCormick [I also had all the spices to make it from scratch, but I wasn't going to waste my time doing that for a bowl of ramen]). So I put a pot of water on to boil, and threw in some curry.

Then I got to thinking... sure, it'll taste good, but it won't do the ramen justice to just leave it at that. So I threw in some frozen veggies (peas, carrots, corn, green beans). After that step, I just couldn't leave it alone, so I threw in some meat I had last night, chopped up some onions, and threw in some minced garlic as well.

There was still something missing, so I threw in the ramen seasoning packet as well. I didn't like the consistency of the soup... too thin. I really hate adding flour to something afterwards to thicken it, because then there is always that raw flour taste. Fortunately, I had some leftover Bechamel roux, which made things easier.

What I had sitting in front of me was too great for just one measly ramen, so I threw in two ramen.

That's how I ended up feeling too full to study. So as a result, I spent another hour watching stuff on Hulu.

A bike seat and some more.

2008-12-08T10:08:00.004-05:00

I was at school in my dream (happens a lot, actually). I remember walking around on campus and seeing familiar faces, but then there was one thing that bothered me. Even though it was finals week, for some reason, I had a class.

It was a make-up International Law class. And because it was a make-up class, it was scheduled at a different time than usual. As a result, I missed it. I would have missed it anyways if it was at the regular time, too.

So anyways, I was going down the stairs to get to my bike. On the way down, I started getting paranoid about something, so I decided to start limping. I wasn't hurt, and I knew that, but I started to limp to throw people off. I remember that I would use the hand rails on the stairs to "help" me down.

So once I got to the bikes, I recall my brother was there. Grant was also there, since he rides his bike to school as well. Well, my brother was talking to Grant about his bike seat. It was taken. For some reason, it was the mafia that took his bike seat. They took Grant's wheel too. So after talking about how much the rims could cost on bicycles, we loaded up into a limousine and started off on a "Harold & Kumar"esque adventure.

That's when I woke up.

I'm thinking that I have some anxiety issues about my International Law class, almost as if I didn't finish my class yet. This might be because my knowledge of the material is sparse.