Poor Man, Rich Man

       Tent Collapse, Three layers, folded and re-set the broken poles to a much lower height. Worked out well as it was freezing and the smaller internal volume was much easier to keep warm. Morning arrived and I climbed out to find myself in a tent city. Many of the tents had collapsed under the weight of the snow during the night. I started calling at collapsed tents, helping those who were in need of digging out. I had a large red tabby with me, he had to come up to my thigh, and must have weighed forty pounds. He sniffed and I dug. When we were done we'd managed to dig out a couple of dozen people. The digging went much faster, as those we rescued, after getting some warm breakfast came back and helped with the others.
       The Cat and I hadn't had breakfast, and when we made our way over to the breakfast area, everything was gone. I told them it was OK, I had some cat food for Mandrake, I was sure he would share. We went back to my broken tent. I had most of a 20 pound bag of Science Diet Hairball control, and a couple of boxes of raisins. The tent and our cook kit, my wool felt blankets and a couple of shoulder satchels and an extra few pairs of socks and underwear were all I had for the two of us. I had a few coins, but didn't know what I could possibly buy with them that would make our lives much better. I was pretty sure I didn't even have enough to by a single bit of lunch meat.
       Mandrake ate a little of the cat food with me, then shot off through the snow looking for 'rabbits' which I knew that all he would find would be big rats, but he thought of them as rabbits. I didn't want to break his heart, so I never told him they weren't rabbits. He wouldn't eat them, but brought them back so I could cook them up. He did, when there wasn't snow on the ground, love to eat bugs of all sorts.

       I then dreamed I was incredibly rich. (Talk about opposites. I was buying a 256 year old house that had been struck by a meteor in the late 1700's. You could still see the hole in the floors of the second and third stories, and the crater down on the first floor, where there was a hand shaped ceramic flow on the bottom of the crater. The Hole Tour allowed us to visit most of the house. I decided to buy it, and wrote a check for it on the spot.
       I got myself and several friends moved in and then we went out the back yard where I had some bleachers and an oval racetrack. The racetrack was raised and people could walk around the inside of the track to operate small cars, mostly by pushing them by hand, but also by jumping into them and driving (some sort of virtual interface that was wired to our helmets.) We started racing and I wasn't doing too well, until I remembered that a lot of racing has to do with braking. I pulled into the pit and had my "crew" tighten the brakes and put on stickier tires. I shot back out at full acceleration, then slammed on the brakes to make it around the curve. I passed the last couple of cars. The crowd, who'd arrived to sit in the shade and eat lunch from the offices nearby, cheered as I began moving through the pack.
       I realized, after playing through another dozen laps, where I lapped the field twice, but was still being lapped by the leader, that this was going to be a whole bunch of rinse, lather, repeat. Not a bad little game/simulation, but I longed for the simplicity of the Cthulu 500 card game, as this was proving to be tiring. As my car would come around on the straitaway I would give it a boost by hand run over to the other straitaway, and then virtually hop into the car to make the proper braking and throttle maneuver to take each curve.
       It was fun watching the crowd respond. There was a yellow flag due to a player collision. I took advantage of it to go in and change my tires again. The softer tires didn't seem to last as long. The leader also pulled into the pits. That was when I realized the leader was being controlled by my left hand!
       What? Oh, that rebellious hand! I had a talk with myself and realized I was controlling all of the cars, because this was a dream. I somehow shot to the end of the race, only a few of the lunch crowd had remained to see the end. The score was Left hand 666 and right hand 555, whatever that indicated. I was several laps down from the winner when it was all finished.
       I was then on a road trip that started at the dream town mall, where I picked up several boxes of camping supplies. A group of us headed to the house to pack up the camper, but when we looked at the map that would take us up to the park we wanted to camp at, we realized it would take us several days to get there, and we really didn't want to take that much time. I got on the phone and called the airport.
       We drove down, and as a surprise to my guests, I drove the camper right back into the back of a large cargo jet. Crewmembers jumped out of no-where and strapped us in. The doors closed, leaving us in a darkness only punctuated by beams of light coming in through high porthole windows high in the cargo bay. I turned on the Bigscreen Monitor and dialed up the dreamnet. I pulled up our GPS and overlaid our position on a map of the area, then zoomed out to show our progress towards our campground. Once we were airborn I calculated that we would only be in the air three hours, then have another hour or so of driving to get where we were going.
       We decided to take advantage of the large monitor and play a pickup RPG. I fired up the 3d version of inkscape and loaded the data files for some caverns under some mountain range far from here, and then fired up a little spreadsheet table to create a dice roller.