I was in some sort of Slayer-like training due to a cog sci grad school program. I was walking along a wide brick-paved seaside area (Boston-like) with my teacher, a red-bearded dwarf, who was teaching me about how to hold the axe–a peculiar, insecure hold in which I was to bend my middle finger and brace it against an indentation in the thin, curved handle while gripping with the side two fingers and thumb. He said I would have to cut through the regeneration center in the spine and disconnect the two halves of the body. We were walking by a huge bronze statue of a Cthulhu-esque tentacled monster, and I saw him glance nervously at it, but we walked past in favor of a battle with a thin silver robot. It put up a fight. I cleaved through it a few times and its body re-sealed itself. “You have to hit the right spot,” said the robot, as I cut through its torso and levered up the top half away from the bottom half, “which is not there, but I’ll give it to you anyway.” It went silent.

Mom, TSS, and Serena came to visit me in Paris. We spent the day sightseeing, and then in the evening we were getting ready for dinner–they were going to cook me chicken wings. Mom said she wished she could go to a nice restaurant, and I said, “Oh, we can go to Tallent!” Then I realized they were leaving the next day, on a train to Rome, and asked what time. They were leaving around 6 in the morning and wouldn’t have time to both make chicken wings and eat at Tallent. I wanted them to stay longer, but they were leaving.