200 Days and Counting

I was walking to Target this afternoon and I saw a deer. It was crazy; I was just walking up the street and out of nowhere a deer came leaping across the road directly in front of me! She crossed into the woods in the vacant lot beside me, and I had time to take a quick picture with my phone before she disappeared. It was a bizarre sighting for so many reasons. First of all, the deer had just crossed a four lane street that is the main artery through my neighborhood, causing several cars to slam on their breaks. Second of all, I don't understand where the deer came from. There is a series of narrow forested vacant lots that run along the train tracks, but I was a block past the train tracks at that point. So, presumably that's where the deer had come from, but in order to cross the street where she did she must have walked up the sidewalk for a block or through the parking lots of several tire and auto body shops. And it was odd because it was noon, and I was under the impression that deer are generally active at twilight and early in the morning. Obviously, something is wrong with this deer. At the very least she's completely lost because she's a mile from the big park (and even the big park doesn't necessarily seem big enough to be home to herds of wild, roaming deer). Poor thing. I hope she at least makes it back to the park somehow. I don't know what's up with all the wildlife sightings lately. I've seen a fox, that snake I wrote about, and a deer, all in the past month or so. And it's not like I live in the country, or even on the edge of the suburbs. I live right smackdab in the middle of a sprawling city.

Changing the subject completely, I had my first wedding-related dream the other night. I was "reading" a bridal magazine last week ["looking at the pictures and ads" is more like it since there's not exactly much in the way of written content in these magazines, but I got a free subscription when I got engaged so I page through the issue every month] and one of the articles was something ridiculous about Decoding Your Wedding Dreams and it was all about how you shouldn't panic if you dream that you're marrying someone other than your fiance or if you have a nightmare about terrible things happening at the wedding because it's not a bad omen, it's just your brain working everything out because even though weddings are happy the planning process is still stressful. Well, yeah, obviously. Thank you for stating the obvious, article. At the time I was like, "Hmmm, I've been engaged for seven months and haven't had a single wedding dream yet." But then--maybe because the article put the idea in my brain--I had a wedding/honeymoon dream a few days later. In the dream I was in a hotel room and Kiki was supposed to be doing my hair and makeup, but instead she was doing her own hair and makeup. The deal was that I was supposed to wait until she was ready and then she would help me get ready, but the clock was ticking and we were running out of time. I was standing at the mirror trying to curl my own hair and getting really stressed out because it wasn't working and finally I was like, "Kiki, I am supposed to be walking down the aisle in forty minutes and you haven't even started to help me!" and she was like, "Just relax, I'll get to you," but I was panicking because I knew I wouldn't be ready to get to the church in time. Then suddenly the dream shifted and Penn and I were on our flight to our honeymoon but we only made it as far as Los Angeles, and through the whole flight the giant Boeing 777 was flying really low and zooming between skyscrapers and it almost crashed about a dozen times. The low-flying/almost-crashing plane dream is nothing new since I have a version of that dream at least a few times a year, but the wedding was a new theme. I have, in fact, asked Kiki if she will do my hair and makeup for the wedding since she's great at that sort of thing (and is in fact doing it professionally now; she did a producer's hair and makeup for the Tony Awards the other night!) but I feel pretty confident that she's not going to make me wait until half an hour before the wedding to get my hair fixed.
Now I'm curious to see what other sort of crazy wedding-related dreams my mind comes up with between now and January, because I'm sure that won't be the last one.