Surf Nation Map, Warehouse, Soul Store

       Dreams were as scattered as sleep last night. Thunderstorm rolled in making it difficult to sleep more than an hour or so at a time. Still, I managed to have at least three dreams that I remember at least part of them.
       The first dream found me looking at a map on parchment, it was in the proportion of a legal sheet of paper, or even a little bit narrower. There were huge mountain ranges on the side of a large nearly rectangular bay. (The cartographer/creator trying to get the most usable territory out of their paper, perhaps.) Inside the large bay was a number of islands arranged in several bands across the bay in such a way as to make traveling from the anchorages on the continent to the open ocean anything but a straight line. (strait line?) The islands were, I was told, the Surf Nations. Because they had long beaches and waves that travelled both inland and out towards the sea. Many of the inhabitants had taken to using long boards to move from island to island, even carrying cargo in some of them. Some of the best sailors were rumored to be able to make the trip from island to island without ever having to raise a sail. A good portion of the population is water logged from the knees down due to this mode of transportation. (That from a few notes on the lower right corner of the map.)

       In the second dream I found myself in the back storage units behind the warehouse at work. There were dozens of old lawn mowers, lots of damaged trash cans, we weren't allowed to throw out trash cans, apparently. and hanging on the side of one of the sheds were a bunch of paper cutters, they varied in size from the little 12 inch ones like I have in my office to a giant 32 inch flat bed cutter. I asked why they were sitting out here where their blades could get dull and rusty.
       "We aren't allowed to throw them away, either, they have dangerous parts in them. We would have to pay a services contract to sharpen them (which we don't have a budget for) or we would have to pay to have them disposed of (not something we were allowed to do.) Instead, we did have an equipment budget to replace them, so that is what we did."
       I looked at a couple of the larger cutters and realized that I could take the blade from one and put it on the other, and put the nicked parts on one item. At first they didn't want me to do that, but I said I would take the paper cutter back to my office. "Oh, you would have to take it home, it's off of our inventory."
       "OK." I fixed it up and then realized that it was so large I might not be able to get it into the back of Little Red. (It seems to have grown from a 32 inch cutter to a 48 inch cutter.) By the time I had driven my car back around to the storage units, the inventory gal had come and found my repaired unit, reactivated it in inventory and sent it out on the truck to a school. She said I could take any of the dull ones, though. So I grabbed all of the 24 inch cutters, which were actually the size I needed. I didn't do any repairs on them, instead deciding to take them home and fix them up there. The smaller cutters didn't have a property tag on them, so were really just considered office supplies. The warehouse guys seemed glad to have them out of their storage shed, and tried to talk me into taking all of the abused paper cutters. I thought about it, but then decided that I really didn't have a way to get rid of them once I did get them sharpened. The 24 inch ones I would keep one for me, R could use one and I figured I would bring the other two back to work and put them in both IT offices, no one would have to know they'd ever been anywhere else.
       "Hey, I found our paper cutters, and had them sharpened."
       That worked.

       In the third dream, much interrupted by thunder and lightning, I remember being at the counter of some sort of store. It appeared that the store carried a wide assortment of painted eggshells. Most were whole, but some had been made into intricate boxes with silver, gold and velvet details. Some had been carved into intricate scenes and then nested, smaller eggs tucked into larger, so the carved scenes had a sort of multiplaned dimensional effect. Underneath the glass case were the really expensive eggshells, all of which had glowing material tucked into them. The glow was obvious in the jewel box style eggs, and in the carved eggs. The painted ones just had a needle thin shaft of light coming from the two holes that had been poked in them to blow them out.
       The counter woman allowed me to look around without harassing me. I didn't really know what I was looking for. After looking at dozens of eggshells, I walked over to the counter and asked, "Do you have any sort of 'do it yourself' kits?"
       She smiled, the smile lit up her face, I noticed a dusting a freckles across her nose and that there were two lighter bluish streaks in her almost straight black hair. The streaks in her hair started just behind her bangs, which were cut sharply mid forehead. Even though the iris of her eyes was so dark a brown as to be almost black, there was a light inside, much like the glow that came from the eggshells in the cabinet in front of her, but slightly more disturbing.
       I realized that I had my own painted egg, and all I could do here was trade one for another, or trade for something else. I know I didn't want to trade my painted eggshell for anything else, and figured that anyone who'd traded one of these for something else, well, there must have been something wrong with the eggs, every one of them had been turned in by their owner in exchange for something, something that I am not sure I was even willing to ask after.
       I thought about asking the counter woman out, but didn't get the chance. (Thunder)

       Although I fell back to sleep, I couldn't find my way