So last night I made an offer on a condo. I don’t particularly expect it to be accepted, but we’ll see. In retrospect, it probably makes sense to get the sale of the house moved further along before I make any more offers, but this place would be perfect, so I wanted to at least try.

Are any of you familiar with the breakfast cereal Puffins? I introduced cathijosephine to them, and she later found peanut-butter flavoured Puffins, which I’d never had. So the other day when I went over to her place, she told me we could have peanut-butter Puffins in the morning if we didn’t have pancakes.

The next morning, I woke up, hopped in the shower (where I noticed that she’d put a trimmed piece of shower curtain over the window, but it didn’t quite go all the way down the window), and as I came out of the shower, cathijosephine handed me a red bowl of peanut-butter Puffins. Happy that I was going to get to find out what they tasted like, I set them down on her laundry machine (a combination washer and dryer in the same unit, which is really nifty because she can just use it as a hamper and push the button when it’s full) while I got ready to leave. But unfortunately we were in a bit of a hurry, and I forgot it until we were on the road. A few times since then I’ve thought of that uneaten bowl of Puffins, feeling mildly guilty over leaving something for cathijosephine to clean up, and mildly disappointed about not getting to taste the new cereal yet.

Except it never happened. cathijosephine had told me we might have peanut-butter Puffins the next morning, but we were in too much of a hurry. I didn’t take a shower. The shower-curtain over the window is as I remember it, but the fixtures in the shower are different (as I discovered when I really took a shower there recently). Zeph doesn’t own a bowl like the one she handed me in my memory. Peanut-butter Puffins are more or less rectangular, like regular ones, rather than spherical the way I remember them.

So, this must have been a dream. I even have a pretty good notion of when I might have dreamt it. But the weird thing is that it blended so perfectly and smoothly into the rest of my memory. I thought about it several times over the week, sure that it was real. This makes me wonder what other completely solid memories I have that actually aren’t real — if I’d never thought to mention that forgotten bowl on her counter to Zeph, I’d never have found out this one wasn’t.

(I mentioned it to cathijosephine in the car the last time I went over to her place, and we had quite an entertaining conversation about whether it was real or not. I more or less accepted her assurance that it had never happened, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to smell the sour milk and see the bowl when we opened the door.)

Later, in bed, as we were laughing over this, she told me “You’re a special kind of crazy.” I’m so lucky that she enjoys that kind of crazy.