2011? Already??

Holy crap! It's a new year and it'll be a pretty damn exciting one, too!
I'll be having a baby in the first part of June, my daughter will be turning 7 in July, we'll be moving into a bigger place in February or March, my Grandy (grandpa) turns 90 in April and I'm going to try my damnedest to get to Texas for the festivities, and all sorts of other things will occur as well, I'm sure.

Ok, so really, what's changed? Same apartment, same job, same crazy-ass dreams. At least this one wasn't bad. Kinda exciting, actually.
I dreamt that I was back in Alaska and this man was teaching my to pan for gold on this black sand shoreline. His buddy said it we shouldn't pan there because the property was owned by the local Inuit people, but the first guy said it was ok, he had checked with them.
Anyway, I discovered this huge stone box about six inches under the surface of the sand and started to dig it out as the tide receded. The box was about 20 feet long and four or five feet wide. I pulled off the first lid, which had a shipping label etched into it, and then pulled off a smaller lid.
Underneath was a huge taxidermied giraffe. It had been in the box for a little while, but had sustained surprisingly little water damage. The most amazing thing, though, was that the giraffe had no spots. It was a tawny color all over. At the bottom, near the animals hooves, was a placard that read "Plains Giraffe".
I got the two men to help me dig the box out and hall it closer to the shore. They then began to pull the animal out in a painfully haphazard fashion, letting the hide tear and not caring if the smaller bones were scattered. I screamed at the to stop and not touch the damn thing again.
The giraffe was laid out on a large wooden slab and I managed to take the slab out of the box and lay it on the beach. (Don't ask me how I did this by myself, it was a dream, ok?)
Under the first slab were more compartments in the box filled with the skeletal and taxidermied remains of dozens of now extinct animals and some I thought might have been completely unknown to science.
There was a small skeleton of a saber-toothed cat, but it was no bigger than a house cat. There where skeletons of what looked like large rodents and a taxidermied gopher-type animal with huge canines.
I became more and more excited as I looked through the box and decided I had to call the fish and game department. Seemed like a logical first step.
The two men wanted to sell the specimens for profit and I was disgusted by this idea. I told them that the specimens had to be sent to a museum like the Smithsonian where they could be verified, studied, and displayed for the pubic.
The two men drew rifles on me, I quickly drew a pair of pistols and shot one man and told the other to lower his weapon. He did.
I called Fish and Game and an officer came out to arrest the pair and then sent out an expert to look at the box. I found out that the container had been on a ship coming to Alaska from Sweden in the 1800's and belonged to a naturalist who was actually a very distant relative of mine. (Now in reality, I think I might be the tiniest bit Swedish somewhere down the line, but not enough to really claim ancestors from the 1800's. Think back further... like viking days.)
Anyway, I was all excited and seemed to wake up, but the dream just shifted. I called my older brother and told him all about the 'dream' and he told me we should go to the place I dreamed about.
We went to that shoreline and not only found the box, but found some amazing fossils of horseshoe crabs that were nearly 15 feet across.

Bizarre, eh?

Hope my new year is as exciting as my dreams... but with less gunplay.