I was in a conference room, like the eworld conference room we used to have daily status meetings in. beige, with the curtains always drawn. there was a meeting I was attending, and my boss maria, and 6 or 7 others.

I threatened to quit, and she got really mad at me for doing so in front of other people. however it had gone past the time of being discreet, and she grabbed my arm and chewed me out in front of those same people. they sort of just sat there looking on.

so I dreamt that karine started working at my work. she was responsible for testing some parts of the server tools that were in house, not the customer applications. we were all there working late, and I had a mild concern she was in over her head.

she ended up finding a bug where if one user was using the tools on one machine, he would freeze up when another user accessed the same tool set. she chased it down to a certain model of compter used, called a "volcano". she was having a lot of fun despite the hour.

I was downstairs talking to Matt and Sandy about other project issues when she reported the problem. they sort of rolled their eyes like they do until she explained how she had isolated it. then they realized they'd been having those problems in previous rev's too. they were very impressed.

we had been talking about other reported problems and trying to prioritize fixes. the project was that part of the tools could be dropped because the volcano boxes had that portion built-in. however things were pretty fucked on solaris as a result. I pointed out that if we merely forbid use of the solaris boxes on that net, problem solved.

a lot of the troubleshooting was done with a monochrome amber monitor looking at obscure logs.

I was with some largish group in the desert. for lack of a better way to descibe it I'd have to call it a paramilitary hippie community. we all lived in some semi-permament encampment around an outcropping that I presume had water.

I was part of the operations part, we helped administer things. Maria was part of this, a younger Maria than my boss is now. I'm not sure if she was my boss or not but her boss was this colonel dude who looked like Dr Phil. he lived in a big military tent.

it was Saturday night and everyone was partying or whatever. I was with Elena, I think, and we were doing acid. Maria was with us too. we were in the back of some Jeep-like military vehicle and someone else was driving; we were going arount eh edge of the encampment. what a beautiful night. Elena and I faced backwards and Maria sat in the back facing us (forwards). Maria was fucked up, and basically had her head in her lap.

we were looking around thoroughly enjoying the experience, the sights, the sounds, the feel of the breeze. I gently shook Maria's arm to see if she was alright, and to admonish her to appreciate the feel of the breeze. she lifted up her head and looked at me, and started "well on the planet I'm on..." I looked at her and her pupils were sooooo dilated. I laughed and reminded her to look around and appreciate the breeze.

while cleaning the garage, I found a homemade crossbow. neat. it had a trigger, so once it was wound up you aimed it as a rifle and then pulled the trigger. I put it on the mantle. I had some notion of giving it to a younger male relative.

days later, we were cleaning and found a pigeon feather. I asked Karine if I could glue it to the crossbow. she said sure. I put the feather on a paper towel, and put glue in three places. I went to the crossbow and started looking for where it would fit and be aesthetically pleasing. that led to my examining it more closely. I held it like to crank it, and then to fire; it seemed there was nowhere on it a feather would fit that would not look stupid, or get crushed.

the crossbow had a pistol grip. I hadn't thought much about it but when trying out holding it I realized, that there was no reason for the pistol grip. you never held it there to fire the crossbow... wait. I looked again. there were two triggers, too.