I dreamt I was a sysadmin and had been sent to a training. I worked for a company that did online translations, or something. my boss was Maria.

part of the training was np-complete problems, but the other part was pattern recognition, and to show we had understood it we were given several problems in the end. the problems were complicated, and went basically like this. given a set of five letters, find the missing letters in the pattern, remove them all from the alphabet, and figure out a message embedded in the remaining letters. there were 5 or 6 sets of such letters. the problem was solvable, but the test was timed. I think figuring out the missing letters in the shortest amount of time was supposed to be the np-complete part.

I started working my way through it but kept getting presented with distractions. the third set of letters started introducing umlauts and such (ë ö) and that really threw me for a loop. I was still figuring that out (and was close to a solution) when the time was up.

i dreamt that i stole a bus, an 80's style big blue bus...

...and i parked it somewhere, where i had to run an errand. it was parked at a bus stop, of course, on the left side of the road, a lot like near fremont & market in san francisco. i left it for abotu 45 minutes... came back, and the DPT lady was there. she hadn't yet started writing the ticket, so i tried to schmooze. she smirked at me and said it was out of her hands, and even if not she couldn't back down from a $10000 ticket and all the press. all the press?! i looked around and there was another DPT dude in his cart thing so i couldn't pull out. he pointed out to me where only the first carlength of buss was legal and the rest was in a no parking. my heart sank as i looked...

my parents were gone, but I had a big family. near stanford, I guess. I was living in their house with karine and one other person. I had started to renovate my old room, and had all the walls prepped, when this distinctive squiggle pattern appeared. like someone drew with a sharpie. it was about 18" long and sloped upwards to the right. I wasn't happy but I fixed it.

the next day the entire part of the wall was covered with the squiggles. karine came with me and marvelled at them. she was amused, I was not. I looked at them closer. the entire pattern was made up of a's and b's, with short vertical and horizontal lines connecting them. on a second look, the horizontal lines were carved in like with an exacto knife.

in other words, the plaster wall was ruined, that would be hard to sand out and impossible to paint over right. it became obvious that karine had done it. when I asked her why, she said she had a cold and was fighting it by working out the molecular structure.