My hand got a bit bigger and itchier since our bike ride on Sarurday. Last night it started itching bad enough that I had to sleep with an ice pack on my hand, dripping condensation all over the floor. I dozed off for a bit in that position, and had a dream that:

• My room was an outdoor area, the walls were replaced by a pointy iron fence, and surrounding it was a pine forest.
• It was winter, so said forest was covered with snow.
• The water dripping off my ice pack had re-frozen all over the floor, making it cold and icy.
• There was some Irish girl (with red hair) running through the forest re-enacting 'Little Red Riding Hood'.

I woke up from that at 4AM to find that my room, in fact, was still inside the house and relatively warm (except the part of the carpet with cold water dripping on it). I wasn't getting much sleep and shifted onto my couch and replaced the warming ice pack with a bowl of ice cubes.

I dreampt that a friend and I (I don't know which friend) were visiting the future. We got out of our time machine into a small city park with a fountain in the middle. The fountain was surrounded by a smooth circular gutter, and I thought it'd be neat to slide around in it. But I hadn't brought my swimming suit. But over by the fountain I found someone who gave me a suit to use. As I put it on, though, I realized that it wasn't a regular swimming suit but a full wetsuit. A bit much for sliding around in the fountain, I thought, but oh well. I guess in the future people need to be super prepared for anything.

Then I was being given a tour of a future space ship. Apparently it was powered by disembodied tiger heads 'suffering the ultimate pain' scattered throughout the ship with tubes sticking in them. I wondered if because this was only a dream that made it not matter. Not that people in real life don't do horrendously horrid things to critters (not to mention eachother), but at least we don't have tiger heads in 'ultimate pain' powering our spaceships.

After the spaceship tour I was down near the bottom of a deep, dark, rocky crevice. Someone told me that if I went up a couple of floors, there was a guy who'd give me a really fun ride on the railroad tracks at that level. I climbed up and found the guy and sure enough, he got me into a car and sent it cruising down along the tracks to the other end of the crevice, where the car entered a tunnel and you could get off. I somehow looked at a 3D map of the tunnels here (it looked like the automap in descent), and found that there was a thrill ride called "Hide Your Fear" that was further along the tunnel. I couldn't tell exactly what it was from the map, but I could see that 4 tunnels came together and then turned straight down as if through a funnel, so I had some idea of what to expect. When I arrived at HYF it turned out that each incoming tunnel had 2 sets of tracks, and the people on each side of the tunnel would fall on opposite sides of large, spinning saws before being routed down and around some smaller spinning saws, and then arriving at the exit where everyone congratulated their friends on surviving and vowed never to go on that ride again.

Later I was driving to and from UW-Milwaukee, which was up in some mountains and not all that close to Lake Michigan. Actually it was in Switzerland, but still within driving distance from Madison. And there was a railroad going alongside the highway (similar to the setup where the railroad goes along highway 14) with blue trains running on it.

In this area there was a group of Germans who were somehow forcing the government into repealing some law. I agreed with their goals, but wondered how successful their tactics would be in my country.

I got a bit frustrated with the speed of the D6.0 scene rendering speed last night, but today biking downtown from Wal-Mart with YC (so she could get home and I could get to my Ned-led kayak lake lesson at 17:30) I realized that I could probably do some optimizations to make it run at a reasonable speed without having to rewrite the whole thing in Flash or Java. Like pre-rendering entire rooms and re-using room <div>s rather than re-creating them every scene change.

We got halfway through the lake lesson, just to the point where we were about to actually go in the water, and then they put up the red 'storm's coming so nobody use the lake now' flag. So Ned says he'll be there Thursday and Friday at 18:00 and we can come by then. That'll give me time to get my own nose clip.