Dreams (in which I do too much of it)

Despite evidence to the contrary, once I'd made my decision take Fergus (lumpy legs and all) to 20 Mule Team 100, I felt fairly relaxed about it. I was even sleepy and dropped off to sleep quickly at around 10:45 on Friday night. Love that new memory foam mattress.

Two hours later I was wide awake with a churning stomach and a fretting head.

• Had we done enough conditioning?
• Was Fergus going to crash and burn the next day because of the forecasted 72°F? [hah, we froze practically all day - they didn't mention the "brisk" wind in the forecast]
• Were his legs going to drop off?
• Was the fact that I'd not had a chance to do a short pre-ride on Friday going to bite me?
• Would his glue-ons stays on?
• Would I be able to eat properly or would I get lack-of-food-stupid?
• ...

Finally, I slept again and had an interesting and delightful dream about visiting a bat sanctuary and needing to draw pictures of the little bat tails to identify what kind of bat they were. No idea what that was about, but it was a bit of light relief from the fretting.

At 4:30 a.m. the alarm went off, and sadly, I was already awake. It seems that the worst part of doing 100 mile rides isn't the riding, it's the fretting ahead of time and resulting lack of sleep.

* * *

My commute is 600 miles a week and to stay sane I listen to audio books.

A LOT of audio books.

I can either get piles of audio CDs from the library or I can download digital audio files. The latter requires some caution to avoid bumping our internet usage over the monthly 10 GB limit and incurring a $10 overcharge, so CDs are a better option. Except that – of the three cars available to me to commute in – only one has a functioning CD player - and of course, it's the one that gets the highest gas mileage. :(

So the latest "good plan" is to buy a portable CD player that I can use in any of the cars. Yesterday I took a quick look at prices and availability. You can spend $30-$200, and judging by the reviews, it won't make a lick of difference. Most units had over a 100 reviews and half the people said "great unit! great sound! love it!", while the other half said "useless/broke after three minutes/fritzy".

My brain's way of dealing with this was to dream that I went shopping, bought 3-4 items, and when the lady rang me up, the bill was $10,456. And rather than say "uh, never mind", in the dream, I was trying to figure out if we had a bank account with that much money in it that I could use. Turns out the lady had mispositioned the decimal point and the bill was really $104.56 (lucky I'm on top of things and can do maths, right?).

Does this indicate a guilty conscience over spending $30 on a CD player?

Or was it that, in planning my purchase, I realised that I would probably go to the Republic of Walmart to get it - and in doing so might be able to pick up a new white/red-bulbed headlight to replace the one I already have that you have to bang and poke to get the light to stay on?

Big spender, me.