Vacation, Sleep, Cooking, Fall

I took a few days off from work this week, doing nothing important except taking walks, taking in the spectacular fall scenery at all the local trails and scenic spots I could find around here. My big film camera seems archaic. I didn't get any photos. My friend keeps taking photos and saying they will be sent to me, but they don't get sent.
I've also been doing a lot of cooking, taking advantage of the older ages of the children in the household, hoping they're now open-minded enough to try experimental things, after years of trying to get them to try experimental things at an approximate 60-40 pass-fail rate. The usual complaint is, "it's too spicy," which pretty much means "it has pepper in it."
I had a bad dream last night. I was in court. Someone was suing me and I came to court, not knowing exactly what it was about, except that it involved people I know, people who are closest to me, in a very realistic setting. In real life, someone accidentally hit me in the face while I was trying to speak to the judge and explain why I hadn't known what the case was about, and me getting hit jerked me awake, out of court and startled into the blackness of the early morning. I was kind of glad. I've been randomly falling asleep lately, maybe because my sleep has been so broken up these past three days.
I don't know about anyone else, but I am excited about my discovery, finding my posts from 1999 and a poem I wrote in 1998 about an old friend coming to visit, which I reproduced below. They were posted on a Web site that long ago, and I thought they had been deleted a long time ago because I hadn't been able to find them. It's nice to be reminded of what life used to be like, that so much time has passed and so much has gotten better in that time.