Above is a photo I shot yesterday while walking around Bellevue. (The second one is a detail from the first picture.) I submitted the second one to The Mirror Project, a very cool online photography collection. (Their tagline is "Adventures in Reflective Surfaces". I love that.) I've been meaning to submit something to them for a couple of years, but I could never come up a shot that I thought was original until I saw this crosswalk button. As it turns out, at least five other people have already submitted the same idea. Blast! Once again, it turns out that I'm not as clever as I think I am. That should be my tagline. "Scott Dierdorf: Not as clever as he thinks he is."

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I've been having this weird recurring dream lately. In the dream, I'm back at college. I'm at the actual school that I attended in real life, but none of my college friends are there. I take that to mean that I'm returning for a graduate degree, but that's never really clear. The dream spans several months. I'm really excited about being at college again; the days are a blur, and I'm having a great time. Then one day I wander into one of my classes and realize that I'm signed up for five or six classes but have only been attending two. I nervously walk into one of the classes that I've been missing (a math class), and realize that the final is that day, right then. I try to tell the professor that I can't take the test because I haven't been to class once and don't even know what the subject is (linear algebra? In the dream I get a glimpse of the textbook, and it stirs a memory, but I don't actually recognize it.) He doesn't seem to understand what I'm saying. He shoos me back to a desk and hands me a test. I stumble out into the hall and find my next class (geography, I think), and it's the same story. I then have this realization that outside of the two classes I have been going to, I have no idea what I've been doing since I arrived at college. It's like I have amnesia all the time except for those two hours a day. I know that I've been having fun, but I don't know what I do.

I stumble out into the street. It's bright and the grass is green, despite the fact that it's late fall in Chicago, which is rarely sunny or verdant. The street is just like an actual street on campus (Sheridan, for any NU alums out there), but slightly different. The building across the street (Andersen Hall) is taller and kind of curved, like it's been photographed with a fisheye lens, and the building I've just come out of (Kresge) is from a different part of campus and is a different color. At this point, I wake up.

Normally something like this wouldn't even register on the Scott Dierdorf Freaky-Dream-o-meter. (Remind me to tell you about the chicken suit dream, or the dream in which I tunneled underneath the fields of England with Krzysztof Kieslowski and met a family of beavers. I swear I'm not making this up.) But I've had this dream two or three times in the last two weeks, and I rarely have recurring dreams. Am I fretting about something of which I am unaware? It's performance review time at work - am I worrying that my boss thinks I'm a slacker? I know she doesn't think that, but a subconscious that is apt to stick me in underground beaver houses with prominent Polish filmmakers is unlikely to listen to such arguments. I guess I'll just have to wait and see if the dream goes away after I get my review.

I wonder if anyone has a blog solely for their dreams. Chickensuit.com is still available...

 

A shot from this morning's wakeboarding session. This is my friend Charlie; I was in the boat shooting pictures and coughing up water from my near-drowning.

 

Computer porn.

 

OK, so here's the new thing I'm adding to this page: photoblogging. I just heard about this the other day, and I thought it would be fun to try. Photoblogging is just what it sounds like: blogging with pictures instead of words. I'm still tweaking the layout a little bit, but I think I've hit upon a solution that will let me blog images here pretty easily. Clicking the link above will take you to a larger version of the image. Unfortunately it doesn't open in a new window at the moment, so you'll have to hit the Back button to return here.

  Hello everyone! Welcome to my blog's new home! One of the reasons I haven't been posting much lately is because I've been hard at work building my new site. You'll notice that there's navigation, some new content, and a bunch of other new stuff. Most importantly, there's a fancy new URL that is much easier to remember and does not include a tilde. I'm sure that we're all happy about that.

The site itself is still not done, but I wanted to give you, my loyal reader(s), a sneak preview. The main part that remains to be completed is the photo section. Updating my online photos was one of the main reasons I wanted to rearchitect my site, so now that I have all of the framework done I should be able to get to work on it. I've also got some new developments in store for the blog in the near future, and I'm hoping to update my other content more frequently. I'll be sure to make an announcement here about new developments.

Please take a look at the site and let me know what you think. Also, notify me of any bugs or browser issues you find. Enjoy the new site, everyone!