dream

P. gave birth to a cat. I helped deliver it in the backseat of a car.
Also, I dived deep into the bottom of a pool to bring up 5 copper coins.
Also, I won $10,000, but it was contingent on my returning all but 2 books I just got through interlibrary loan. Of course I had a hard time picking just two, but I had made my first choice at least when the alarm went off.

Even my dreams are scatter-brained.




edited to add this Usage Note, brought to you by our friends at Dictionary.com & my own "dived? is that correct?" moment. Very interesting stuff, I think:

Either dove or dived is acceptable as the past tense of dive. Usage preferences show regional distribution, although both forms are heard throughout the United States. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, in the North, dove is more prevalent; in the South Midland, dived. Dived is actually the earlier form, and the emergence of dove may appear anomalous in light of the general tendencies of change in English verb forms. Old English had two classes of verbs: strong verbs, whose past tense was indicated by a change in their vowel (a process that survives in such present-day English verbs as drive/drove or fling/flung); and weak verbs, whose past was formed with a suffix related to -ed in Modern English (as in present-day English live/lived and move/moved). Since the Old English period, many verbs have changed from the strong pattern to the weak one; for example, the past tense of step, formerly stop, became stepped. Over the years, in fact, the weak pattern has become so prevalent that we use the term regular to refer to verbs that form their past tense by suffixation of -ed. However, there have occasionally been changes in the other direction: the past tense of wear, now wore, was once werede, and that of spit, now spat, was once spitede. The development of dove is an additional example of the small group of verbs that have swum against the historical tide.

edited again to add this. At dinner with C.'s parents long ago, somehow a question of the origin of the word "hooker" came up at the dinner table. C's is the kind of family that doesn't hesitate to get up from the table to bring back an encyclopedia, a dictionary, or any other book relevant to conversation at hand. I loved this. I want to be this. At any rate, the entry for "hooker" was quite lengthy, and I remember laughing hysterically as C's father read some version of the following:

hook·er²
n.

1. One that hooks.
2. Slang. A prostitute.

Word History: In his Personal Memoirs Ulysses S. Grant described Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker as “a dangerous man... not subordinate to his superiors.” Hooker had his faults. He may indeed have been insubordinate; he was undoubtedly an erratic leader. But “Fighting Joe” Hooker is often accused of one thing he certainly did not do: he did not give his name to prostitutes. According to a popular story, the men under Hooker's command during the Civil War were a particularly wild bunch, and would spend much of their time in brothels when on leave. For this reason, as the story goes, prostitutes came to be known as hookers. However attractive this theory may be, it cannot be true. The word hooker with the sense “prostitute” is already recorded before the Civil War. As early as 1845 it is found in North Carolina, as reported in Norman Ellsworth Eliason's Tarheel Talk; an Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860, published in 1956. It also appears in the second edition of John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1859, where it is defined as “a strumpet, a sailor's trull.” Etymologically, it is most likely that hooker is simply “one who hooks.” The term portrays a prostitute as a person who hooks, or snares, clients.

Who writes this stuff? Really, I'd like to know.