Peeking into the rock

It starts with me watching a bit of a Trump speech or presser on a tv in a public space. It's unsettling but it's also foreshadowing. I go home--in this case it's an urban apartment, half below street level, in a brick building. It has big windows, and I can see into it before I go in. Ted's got a large group of people over to play a role playing game on a big table made of a sheet of masonite placed on trestles. This doesn't make me happy because we hadn't discussed it and I feel the need to decompress with him, to talk to him and listen to him.

When I go down into the apartment the kitchen is largely gutted. The line of cabinets is there, but empty, with doors and drawers gone, and the countertop is gone too. It's weird, because we hadn't discussed this either and I'm hungry and can't do anything about it and I can't talk to him because all these people I don't know are here. I go outside and the same thing is happening to the neighborhood--pieces of it are being gutted without any announcement. The place next door has had a bunch of valuable Precolombian artwork placed around the floor and on the sidewalk, which gives an inkling of what's going to happen there. A woman in overalls and a hardhagt is working and she hints that she doesn't know much about all this deconstruction but what she knows she can't tell me. Also, when I tell her about what's happening in my house she's really embarrassed, as she seems to have witnessed the work and to have some knowledge about that I should have but she doesn't feel she can tell me about that either.

The people in my house never seem to go home and I can't see any way to proceed so I just hang around getting more and more upset. Finally the game is over and some of them have left and I'm desperate and also I've been listening to him talk--or not talk-- and there's something about it that seems deeply wrong. So I just up and ask him what's going on with the kitchen. He doesn't say anything: he just looks embarrassed. I tell him it's just so weird that he didn't tell me anything about it, never mind asking me, he didn't even tell me, no warning. He says something but it's inadequate, it's not even the beginnings of an explanation or defense, and I see his eyes are so vague and kind of stupid and it hits me that he's not normal and he won't be getting normal again, that he's got dementia (like his grandmother) and life will never be the same. I'm off worrying about this and I say the word Alzheimer's to one of his guests and she's embarrassed  but what's much worse is when I wake up and realize that no, he doesn't have Alzheimer's, he's dead, he's gone, there's no Ted left to worry about at all.

Three days three rats. Two traps, and one by dog or cat.
( Does this cut work? Maybe you don't want to read about dead rats. )
On another front: I have much better dreams in my own bed.  And by better, I mean more detailed, with richer plots and characterization and setting.  And I remember them better.

On still another front: we're still getting rain.  I think we went two whole weeks without it.  This breaks the seasonal pattern.  The last two? years, the early-winter dry spell was long and scary. Are we moving to a dry winter-wet summer climate?  That would be disastrous for our local plants and animals, who are adapted to a wet winter-dry summer climate.