Lucid Dreaming With No Escape Hatch

In case you were wondering, if you take an OTC sleep aid called doxylamine succinate at 3am, and then you listen to an audio book as you fall asleep, and the book in question is on the topic of consciousness beyond brain death, you will indeed proceed to experience several hours of freaky, hallucinatory and wildly disturbing dreams that may or may not involve possums, demons and Kate Middleton.

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Also, I can’t really recommend this.

This Week of LBA (Low Blogging Activity) Brought To You By Our Friendly Neighborhood Germs

If I’ve seemed to have fallen off the grid over the last week or so, there’s a reason, and as I sit up at 3 am typing this – miserably sick – I’m pretty sure that reason is strep throat.

The household illness began last Wednesday night – Thanksgiving Eve – when G seemed puny, out of sorts, and unlike herself. By early Thursday morning she was running a fever, miserably unhappy, vomiting and barely eating.

Thanksgiving 2012 was officially “off” for Jon and me, and the two of us spent the next 4 days in the house tag-teaming 24-7 care for our sickly toddler while also entertaining a very bored 5 year old who was NOT sick, and who had no one to play with for those 4 days because her little sister was sick, her older sister and brother were away for the holiday, and her cousins were out of town.

This situation around Casa Hickju translated into almost zero time for me to sit at a keyboard over the long holiday weekend to do any blogging.

Here’s poor G during the holiday break, feeling just awful. I think this may have been on Saturday.

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The Fab Four (Plus My Uncle John)

In the late summer of 1965, when The Beatles came to L.A. to play several shows at The Hollywood Bowl, there was a press conference to introduce The Fab Four to the Hollywood press corps. At the time, my grandmother was an editor with Photoplay Magazine, which was the People Magazine of its day (from the early 40s into the 70s, really), so she attended the presser and brought along her youngest, my Uncle John, who was a teenager at the time.

My Uncle has mentioned to me a few times that at that event, he was sitting almost in Paul McCartney’s lap, but I didn’t realize how true that was until somebody in the family ran across this photo online over the weekend.

This is that 1965 press conference, and the young guy in the tie sitting right next to Paul – almost in his lap – is my Uncle John, notebook in hand.

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Here’s a closer view.

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Pretty neat. Now I want to find a photo of the time Mick Jagger helped my mother get into the auditorium when The Stones played Santa Monica around this same time period (true story).

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ADDENDUM: Actually, all 3 of my grandmother’s kids came with her to this 1965 press conference. That’s my Uncle Roger, top right, hand on hip. My mother isn’t in this photo, but she recalls collecting the straws that Paul, John, George & Ringo had used during the event to take home afterward.