My backyard is a metaphor.

Been busy the last week - sorry for the lack of posts. I was out of town on business the latter half of last week, then had a busy weekend. Some of it was social (saw the movie "No Reservations" - it was good, but not stellar - and went to a house-warming), but mostly I tried to get caught up on some sleep and had a bunch of stuff to do around the house. How is it that I got a lot done, but I still seem to have a list a mile long?

I still haven't attempted to attack the backyard, which is truly out of hand now. I'm going to have to go back there with a weedeater just to get the grass down enough to mow it. It's just been so blasted hard to get enough of a break from the rain to do anything. I'm hoping tonight I can get started on the weedeater portion of things. We'll see. I haven't been terribly motivated lately.

I need to do it, though. I'm going to lose my cat back there if I'm not careful. I'm surprised I haven't already had nightmares about it. Not that I haven't had any nightmares. With some of what's going on in my life right now, that's a given. There are a couple of things causing me a lot of stress/anxiety/grief right now, and there's almost no way that my stress/anxiety/grief doesn't come through in a nightmare sooner or later. The other night, I dreamed that I'd been kidnapped. In the dream, the guy who kidnapped me had mistaken me for a young boy (it's a dream people - I don't think I look like a boy), and he kidnapped me because he was going to hold me captive, sexually abuse me and then probably kill me.

I managed to get to the bathroom before his first assault, and I got the attention of some neighbors out the window and tried to make them understand what was happening, and they kind of seemed to get it, but they wouldn't do anything, so I wasn't sure if they understood or not. Then the guy came in, and when he realized that I was trying to signal the neighbors and escape, he started to attack me. He managed to get his hand in my shirt and was pressing his fingernails into my sternum - it almost burned, and I was just trying desperately to keep him from touching any other part of me and to pull his hand away so the nails would stop digging into me. It was during this struggle that I woke up. In terror. I was afraid to go back to sleep for a while - I was afraid if I went back to sleep too quickly the dream would pick back up. So, I lay there, trying to normalize my breathing and get it through my head that I was safe in my house and all was well. It's such a pleasure being me.

Anyway, I'll see if I can't make some headway on my yard. And on my psyche.