The Kat Lee Reader

my love

2012-01-13T09:05:00.004-05:00

It's been a few year since I bragged about my almost unrealistically beautiful husband. That's just sad for you guys. So eye candy for my readers today. Then I hear Bonnie Raitt singing "Woman Be Wise" in my head, so that's all you get.

We're back from Barcelona, and on my Resolution List is hitting the blog more often than I've done.

So your gonna hear from me. Soon. But not at the moment cause I got to take a shower and get on the treadmill (attempting to accomodate the 'See 120 on the Scale' resolution. Got to fit everybody in, yo).

November

2011-12-16T17:46:00.006-05:00

my november

a few pics from my november...

Be Happy

2011-10-13T10:35:00.003-04:00

Be Happy. It's okay to be happy- since when did being happy become a crime? I used to have this job; okay, it was a maid job, but in fact, I really enjoyed it (aside from the fact that they made me wear pleated polyester uniform pants. That's criminal, and I stomached down the putting on of said pant for the love of my fun job) but I worked for a woman who was obviously Unhappy, bitter and slightly evil. (Classic woman boss?) uh oh.
So every day i came to work smiling, happy. It didn't bother me that I was going to be cleaning pubes off of urinals, or lifting chair after chair to get the vacuum under tables. I made it my mission to hunt the stray macaronis that got away from their plates and mouths of children. They weren't in the clear yet...they'd have had to grow legs or a roachy passenger for that.
But when I walked in, ready to face the day, my boss would sneer. Some days, she would question me.
"Why are you so happy?"
"What are you, on drugs?"

Sheesh. Nowadays, a pretty good response to that would be chimpanzee smile. I see all these arrests made for meth heads on the news, and they have this uncanny resemblance to old granny from Beverly Hillbillies. Then you read they're 23, and you think, damn. No teeth.
So when they jealously made snide drug remarks upon seeing your happiness, just give em
Chimpanzee Smile.

I discovered myself doing something today that made me a hypocrite- though small in action, after catching myself in this act I'll have to change my ways. Walking through the kitchen, I opened the gummy vites, and when an orange one came, after two attempts putting it back, I got a pink and purple. However, I do not let my children have the same luxury. I'd have made them take the orange one. But I just didn't want it. So my new rule is "Get the flavor you want, then we'll eat all the orange ones at the end." Because the orange ones are pretty good when its all that's left.
The sun's come out. Have a cool day :)

2011-10-03T09:09:00.010-04:00

Hehe.
Again, it's been forever!
I just haven't been the same since the lobotomy.
(That's a joke. But only barely...)

So I apologize for not checking in; sometimes I'll think of something really interesting and blog worthy, but by the time I'm here I don't remember what that thing is.
What have I been doing? Have I read any good books? What have I learned this year?
I'm not that person that's going to awaken your spirit with some sorta great revelation.
Oh! Okay.
I guess I learned that scrunching your hair when it's wet does not make it curly. I also learned that towel drying your hair (basically towel-scrunching, so I'm just being repetitive) & then the non-combing of said hair also, does not make it curly.
For some people, it takes a long time to learn something like this. You might be one, I don't know. I might too. But I have adopted a hair brush when wet thing that is working out pretty well for me.
I learned that the phrase "If you can't do something right, don't do it at all" is not necessarily correct. A half ass job is still half. And that's better than none. Staring at a pile of magazines on the floor, going thru half the pile and trashing a little is better than walking past the pile. Washing half the dishes is better than no dishes. So my new phrase is

A Half-Ass job is still half.*

I have a class reunion coming up this month. Yay.

But my husband's smokin hot so I guess I have one thing going for me. The man is beautiful, seriously.

And I can always blame my lack of finesse in the area of smalltalk, my stumbling into the consistant wrong thing to say on brain surgery if I screw up too badly. But hopefully it'll not come to that.

Because both before and after brain surgery, I'm the same. I'm simple. I like to just put it that way rather than the derogitory phrase 'simple-minded.' It sounds better. Lynyrd Skynyrd made it into a bragging right somewhat. But I haven't been able to listen to LS since the mid-nineties; Years ago we saw them at the Tabernacle and the smoke, mullets and speaker throttling lack of volume control left me deaf for a few days. Freebird has never been the same. If you've been reading this for a long time, I'll have to turn to the Taterbug reference. If you haven't, back track. :P

Went to a potluck yesterday. Oh! But before the potluck, I went to the grocery store. So the girl asks me what's new when she's bagging my gro, and I say 'I'm going to a potluck!' And she says 'What's that?' So I tell her it's a thing where people bring food, then I'm trying to think of the words to explain it and all that came out was,

"You know when somebody dies and everybody brings a covered dish? It's like that without the dead person."

"Oh," she says. (If you've come to the conclusion that this person made me feel smart by not knowing what a potluck was, this isn't the case. Sometimes intelligence is purely a matter of life experience. If you know what a potluck is, that's probably cause you've been invited to one. Which doesn't make you smart, just lucky). :)

So the potluck in question was a UU (Unitarian Universalist) Potluck. UUers are pretty random but liberal types, and this UU group is like an extension of my family. I really do love them all, and though the faces change from potluck to potluck, they are familiar and warm, and the food is always good.

The New Guy. So there were maybe thirty or forty folks there, mostly that I knew, and then this one new guy. The new guy had become disgruntled with his previous UU group due to 'too much New Age talk,' stating he'd made a fuss about it and couldn't go back. I'd seen my mother set her lovely pie down, and knew doing the math, 30 or 40 heads versus 8 slices of pie, that my best option wouls be to go straight for the pie, because hell, the cheese slices and macaroni salad would still be there, but there were kids present, and this was my own mothers pie we're talking about. So I selected my pie, and then framed the pie with little bits of things; a meatball here, two spoonfuls of salad there, til it was folding over a little and Linda handed me a tray. (God bless Linda...She's too good for words).

So I sat across from Steven at a little table, and set down my pie. Then the new guy sat down beside me. He told me about how he'd been disgruntled with his old group. How he didn't see how they could carry on so. Growing up fundamentally Christian, he told me, what was the difference between listening to that hubub (Hubub is my word, not his, but I'm just trying to tell the thing) than going back to what he'd heard before? He wanted scientific proof behind anything in order to make it truth. So he brings up Stephen Hawking (?) and his new theory that because the conscious mind dies when the brain dies, there's obviously no afterlife. He is seeking debate. "I grew up with reincarnation, so it's a little different for me," I tell him. Then he begins with his evolution speech, and asks about apes. Did Apes reincarnate? So I'm trying to be polite but then he keeps asking me questions, and I say that I just always felt that our spirits seek higher consciousness, and that we will continue to evolve until we no longer need to, spiritually, and then we go back to being one with God- but that it was just one persons idea, and that I felt people have to find their own spiritual conclusions. But what I said in my head was, "I just want to eat my pie."

Damn! Let me eat my pie. F*ck, if you came to try to disprove other people's belief systems, maybe UU is not right for you. Or maybe it is exactly right, just not with me, and definitely not with me and my pie. I'm simple! Let it be.

Agnostics. So I get along well with athiests/agnostics, perhaps because believing in a bit of everything can be similar to believing in nothing. It is what it is, or maybe not/we'll see. (It's those people who believe in the one concrete thing that you have to worry about- those are the troublemakers, lol). So my mother asks me if I invited this friend I have to the potluck.

"No," i say, "She's athiest. I don't think she wants any part of a religious organization."

"Why?" she asks me, so I try to explain that sometimes when you don't believe in anything, you don't feel the need to look for it. If you don't believe in aliens, a shooting star will never be a spaceship.

So I'd brought up religion with this friend in the car, and she said she didn't really believe in anything in particular. Then, I said, 'So would you say your agnostic, or more like athiest?'

'I don't really like to label myself or people in that way.'

She was right. Darn it if I didn't take a look at myself later on and feel slightly like one of those Baptist ladies that ask you if your saved in the check out line. I was the New Age crazy person. But it's not so much I want to label people, but that I'm 'grouping' in my head. It's just a weird thing I do- which doesn't mean one group is better or worse, it's just a strange thing. Whatever you are is accepted, I just kinda want to know how you got there.

Which just brings me back to the new guy. Maybe he had what might've seemed a pushier way, but wasn't that what he was asking all along? :) It's odd how the train of thought often loops back to where it started. Much love, Kat

*unless you're getting paid for it. Then half-assed is truly half-assed.

2011-08-22T15:10:00.002-04:00

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

-Georgia O'Keefe

Amy Winehouse

2011-07-24T14:11:00.002-04:00

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqSKVv6YO8g

Huge Amy fan, so this is just the pits.

If you haven't seen this AW Valerie video, it's one of my faves.

Sending good thoughts to you, Miss Winehouse.

You were a treasure.

2011-07-08T13:32:00.003-04:00

I have been crying for two hours.
Don't even look at me. Seriously. I have had it.
Ticketmaster Customer Service, you have done the equivalent of bashing my brains in with a rusty hammer. I can't take it!
Well' it's obvious I'm having a very very bad day. :(
So I waited one afternoon to buy tickets online for Adele (sweet sweet Adele!) at the Tabernacle. While it sold out in 30 minutes, I got through! And thrilled the girlies. We were going to Adele! Very cool. But Adele got sick, and it was postponed.
I recieved an email. Adele has been moved to the Fox Theater! Online Presale Only, use this number (which is my previous order number). Cool, I thought. Sounds easy enough. I'll sit a half hour early, have everything ready, and get Fox tickets. Not cool. :(
It would not let me enter my presale number. So I've called over and over. Finally what it amounts to is this...They see that I had the original tickets, and tell me it shows I have not purchased tickets to the Fox show. But it also shows that someone used my presale number and bought three tickets already, and only one purchase per presale number can be used.
"Who bought those tickets? What address are they going to?"
"We cannot tell you that."
"But you can see I did not buy those tickets! That's my presale number! How can someone that doesn't match my previous order name use my presale number???"
"We can't answer that."

Motherfuck.

So they say, "Wait by the phone and someone should contact you within the next 24 hours (while the tickets are selling out) to maybe resolve this and perhaps give you a new presale number, but Ticketmaster cannot." I'm screwed. And now I'm just a slobbery mess, my nose running down my shirt and no relief in site. Where are those little finder angels when you need them?

A long time ago I'd read that there were finder angels who helped you, say you lost your keys, you could silently call upon, 'finder angel, I can't find my keys again...' and then of course they'd turn up. Maybe finder angels were only a nice though all along. And if not, really, finder angels, i'd like you to search for whoever typed in random numbers until one worked (mine) and bashed they're brains in with that same rusty hammer. But a real one.

Oh, that's terrible. God help me.

I think I need some pie. Blueberry or blackberry. A la mode. I know food is not a remedy for mental stress, and that's such a crap solution. Honestly, I have a twenty year class reunion coming up. Pie shouldn't even be an option, that last ten pounds seems so damned content. The last thing it needs is pie. But this situation is special.

Sometimes I think of my cousin Jack when I think of angels. I think of car rides with my mom driving the old catalina, the felt hanging low on their heads in front; me laying across the backseat, with my legs dangling out...feet in the wind. I think about laughing back then, because everything was funny. I think about how now when I see feet dangling out a car window it reminds me less of those times, and more of the idea that someone will lose toes to a mailbox or something. I wonder if I googled it if any toe loss from dangling feet would come up. And I wonder if Jack is still funny, wherever he is. I wonder if he hears me when I think my silent conversations up or out to him. I think of Joust on Atari and ramen noodles and silver aviator glasses. I think of cards. Crushing cans in the stairwell.

But Jack is gone. And I'm having a bad day, or I wouldn't even be going back to that.

later.

observations

2011-07-07T14:18:00.002-04:00

Stuff I observed this week..
The girls, talking in back while I was driving,
"Nationwide has it's own store? Wow! I didn't know that! Did you know that?"
"Cool! Progressive does too. I saw it the other day."
Hmmm.
I don't know how people without kids do it, how they make it without those random funny kid moments. You think your too grown up for your britches, shopping the Coldwater Creek store, then the kids'll pop up behind you, "Did you see that sign? It said 'Irregular!!!'"
Irregular. I think they watch too many commercials. Funny.
Last week when we took my man to eat Indian, I watched a woman finger-comb a fat guy's long hair. While I was eating. And I was disturbed.
Probably just jealous nobody was finger-combing my hair while I ate my paneer.
And then at the bookstore, there was this lady. So whenever I find a book, I always back away from the shelf, so I'm not in the way. because I'm nice. And lately I've thought I'd like to learn to draw caricatures, you know, the kind you find in malls and amusement parks. So I stroll to the Art and Drawing section, and there SHE is. Stuck to the wall like a Chiquita banana sticker on a refrigerator. Like a bug on a windshield. Guarding the wall like one of those dumb birds that lays eggs in your yard. SPRAWLED out ON the wall. She was literally making love to the wall. And as I walked around her to try and view books, her beady bird eyes watched me, never straying from her coital positioning. And it was just really weird, I was obviously intruding. So I walked away. I went back later. Didn't find anything.
Anybody know Contrary Guy? That guy who has a contrary opinion to everything you say? I was thinking of the neighbor the other day and it reminded me of that. Cause he hates blueberries. But he may really hate them, i don't know.
I hate to go to the dentist now. Super Excited! Wish I could stay and hang out :).

To My Man on His Birthday

2011-07-01T08:26:00.005-04:00

My moon, my man, so changable and such a lovable lamb to me.
Today is your birthday. Your birthday, and I have in my mind all the things that I want for you, the things I can't afford but give you as mental gifts. I want to give you the world!
I think back on our honeymoon and how Juliette wanted us to watch her Moorea house for the summer, and how the bartender and his sister wanted to teach us to spearfish. I had just bought a sofa, I said. A Sofa. And so we didn't. But you had that nasty giardia thing, so I guess it was nice to come home back then, and we don't look back in regret. (But if someone out there is reading this and can watch a house in Moorea, leave the couch.)
And you work long hours as a carpenter now supporting our little family, and then you come home and bust out the red wine and we watch travel shows and live vicariously through Anthony Bourdain and sometimes Samantha Brown and whoever is going anywhere at that moment, really. We unshelf our dreams for an hour, talk rampantly about what we'd do if we could do, and then I look over and your head has crashed on the couch, but not that couch, that one didn't last. but we did. :)
So today I'm giving you what I'd give you if I was giving you something, other than a trip to eat Indian and the used bookstore. What I would do. If I could do. And I feel that eventually we can.
I give you a restored El Camino, maybe painted red, or orange, or even a 'mysteriously black' black, as I know that you eye them often. (Okay, the kids won't fit in it, so for now it would have to be a weekend car, but it's only a mental gift, so go with it). The CD player works like clockwork, as does your Pandora connection, so well you really don't need the cd player that much.
We'd go here and there like a crazy gypsy family, three months here, a year there, and we'd learn a new language and wear comfortable shoes. Bake bread, but wait, you gave up gluten, so we'd make rice pudding. with rosewater, like the Indians do, but with little strawberries on top, and we'd sell it in a rolling cart, like foreign street vendors, and people would think we were uneducated, but really it was because our language skills were in need of more time. We'd run cobblestone streets and paint buildings and eat like starving dogs in foreign countries where the food is good. The girls would love it too. And we'd trade the camino for a boat, and sail back to Moorea where we started this travel adventure together, but with the kids and lots of unopened booze, not because we enjoy drunk boating with children, but because the people on the islands told us the tiny cool places habitants like to trade black pearls for whiskey, so we'll trade and eat fresh fish cooked on a little portable grill while the girls string pearls on the beaches in the evenings. We'll learn to spearfish after all, you leaping off the boat in polynesian clarity, me with a lifejacket, or two, or three...but you won't drink the water. And maybe I can't give you these things right now, but maybe it'll come, and if it doesn't... you are still my greatest adventure.
(four months til Barcelona!) Happy Birthday to my lunar love :)

So much news

2011-06-13T17:06:00.003-04:00

So much news! So much news. But my head is riddled with sickness today and I don't exactly know how to write it all down to give it the excitement it's due. Not well today. But I won't go into that much except that the 'clearly I'm dying' thread running through my brain can't coexist with this other. Because this other needs it's space and teeny tiny fireworks just for It. I'll be going on a little trip...I can say that much. :D
Ha! Today I forgot how old I was when questioned by a nurse at my childs doctor appointment. I don't know what need they had for the information, but I started with an I don't know, and bounced back between 39 and 38 until i gave into 39, the less appealing of the two, but I knew I was close to 40 and my nature is choose humbler, and that may not even be a word, but then later Steven told me I was indeed 38. Then he added that he was only 37.
And it's already been over 100 degrees, and not summer yet. My mother has been buying french mustard at the TJ Maxx, this super delish mustard, for a buck fifty. What a great thing, french mustard. Not be confused with French's mustard. And I guess I was thinking about the mustard and just popped in with that last part. And I read this thing that said brown rice was only alkaline is you chew it 100 times. What is that?
be back soon.

2011-06-02T12:57:00.004-04:00

Well I'm sitting on my bed leaning over the laptop, with a string cheese propped on my leg. It's really difficult, trying to type with string cheese. Laugh, but it is. But people don't often think of getting a plate for a string cheese. They are quick 'on the go' foods, grab and carry. And the plates are downstairs. And everything else up here is fabricy or fluffy and that won't do.
I'm not really taking this post too seriously. (Not my usual serious self. ?)
I'm not because the other day I came to blog, and I was on a real roll. I'd written several paragraphs about that day and about the neighbors blaring Chicago or Peter Cetera or maybe ever Peter Cetera and Cher, and how it reminded me of high school chorus and how that high school chorus voice is the only way to make Peter Cetera any worse, then more about the neighbors and how maybe they had a Peter Cetera Pandora station, but then that they were elderly so probably not, then I rambled for awhile about how I unconsciously exhibited age descrimination, possibly based on my own mothers refusal to learn how to use her remote control. It was golden. The brilliance that poured and the revelations I'd come across while in the train of thought were remarkable!... but in a weird and freak accident, deleted. Never to be seen again. Only summarized stupidly and prefaced by my discomfort of trying to type while hovering over a frayed and ragged string cheese. And then how I don't like when the string comes off uneven from the main part when you tear at a corner. I suppose uneven bits of string cheese are a pet peeve. But a minor one. It's all the same once eaten. Certainly Peter Cetera is worse. And while I'm mildly complaining, aside from the band Chicago, Boston and Reo Speedwagon also are pretty terrible. (But Air Supply is good! Remember them on Solid Gold?)
My stomach hurts. I'm going now. I'll see ya 'round. :)

2011-05-27T17:35:00.002-04:00

What love does is to arm. It arms the worth of life in spite of the life.

-Archibald Macleich

the zombie squirrel

2011-05-11T08:32:00.003-04:00

I was driving yesterday and out of the corner of my eye I saw a squirrel. It was running parallel with the car, but on the other side of a fence, and I was on a fairly big road. For you city people, it would be a country road, for us it would be fairly big. A big road would be one that you'd not let your child fetch a beach ball out of, I guess. I'm off topic again.
So I spied this squirrel running. I suppose it was running after something. Probably another squirrel. I thought of how sometimes dogs chase cars. Then my kooky brain remembered that I'd just watched Ahh, Zombies! the other night and thought of that. And I'd thought of rabid squirrels before, and what people would do if there were some sort of rabid squirrel outbreak- like swine flu, only squirrel flu...but people wouldn't get it, they just couldn't go in their yards without squirrels pouncing down from trees. With teeth. But that was a thought from along time ago while watching them out the window. So my brain combined the old train of thought with the new one and then I thought, what if instead of human zombies, it was squirrel zombies, because then you couldn't kill them. And you could try, but their little deattached squirrelly hands would crawl and find you. You'd be getting ready to shower and your back would itch, and there'd be that squirrelly hand. Tiny little squirrelly hand.
And then I thought of this thing we do when we see a squirrel, how the kids will shout, "I call it!" and the person who calls the squirrel names it. How did that all start?
I think alot while driving. & I drive alot.

What am I supposed to be doing?

And I'm sorry about unloading on my last post. It's been attached to me like an anchor, those words, and there's that part of me that must just be completely insecure to allow them power. If you have concerns about your worth and someone tells you you are worthless it just reaffirms those negative feelings. And I don't want to feed that part of myself. My mother mentioned that perhaps we could go once a month. My stance on that would be that if I am 'worthless to the people I live with, what good would I be too someone 6 hours away, and only for a few hours at that?' Maybe next spring; By then I'll have forgotten. :)

I'm grateful you stopped in. I hope you have a Squirrelly Day...

bah.

2011-05-10T14:50:00.003-04:00

I decided on a whim that I'd do something kind for Mother's Day weekend, so I opted to go to Lexington to visit the Grinch, who now lives in a hospital there. It's a 6 hour drive, of which I only drove half- my mother drove the other 3 and we took her Camry (better gas mileage!).
Halfway there on 75, we experienced a flat tire. A big rig pulled up behind us and changed it. Sitting on the side of the road I was thankful we had a cellphone in case we needed it. It reminded me of another time riding back with my mother from Kentucky. Our old car broke down around the same stretch of nowhere, and I watched my mother walk down the interstate. I was twelve, and I laid in the car waiting for hours. Night came and I thought of walking to find her. A big rig driver brought my mother back that night and fixed our car. While I don't like riding beside those things, I know that there's always going to be that random truck driver that'll change your tire or a belt on your engine. I'm off the subject?
So I spent my weekend half driving, half in a hospital room. I made small talk while the old man berated me, telling me that my husband should leave me, that I was biding my time, and each phrase begat one worse. I just sat, forced to listen. I knew it was one day. One day to be nice. So I talked about my garden. And so he shouted and told me how I was making excuses. The deer had eaten our little garden to the ground. Even a couple tomato plants had been topped. "NO SUCH THING!" he shouted. "Deer KNOW TOMATO PLANTS ARE TOXIC! EXCUSES EXCUSES!" he raised his arms up like great wings and flapped his hands in unison, "EXCUSES EXCUSES! EXCUSES EXCUSES!"
And though I'd seen hoofprints in my raises garden beds, and watched the herd pass through my drive each morning, I sat. One day to be nice. but really I was sad.
And I listened as he shouted at my mother on our mothers day, and I watched my daughters faces and watched the clock and I counted the hours. And about midnight I pulled into my drive, thankful. ...emotionally drained. & I never know when i'll make that trip again.

I internally wonder about it all and want to lay in the moss til the me is safe from its cellular recession and my spirit eases out of my stomach and reaches my outer pores again. And then an inch or more beyond that even.

Cold Coffee, Warm Toiletseat

2011-05-02T16:46:00.002-04:00

A few months ago, back when it was cooler, I was thinking. (I did think back then, a little)
I was thinking about how often I get to thinking about stuff and forget I have a cup of hot coffee.
Then when I remember I have a cup of lukewarm or cold coffee. Which I don't like as much as I enjoy beautiful, beautiful hot coffee. Then later, When I went to the bathroom, the seat was cold. And I thought about the cold coffee, and that I like neither cold coffee nor cold Toilet Seat.

And then, I thought, I don't like warm toilet seat either.

Because that means someone sat on it. With their ass.

So I'm thinking about all this complex stuff, and then I realized that I'm admitting that I sit on toiletseats, & not just at home, but at the mall too. And that's just not something you tell folks. :P

But of course I never sit on toilet seats anywhere other than home, always squatting over them, and while using the toilet seat doily the entire time. Squatting over the doily. Of course.

And in airports and concert arenas, where you have to wait on a stall, I never sit on those either. But if I had, in a public place where everyone squats over the seat and uses the proper doily, I would mention that the seats at those places are warm, like they have been heated, perhaps. With someone's ass? Or maybe I did that once by accident.

So it goes Hot Coffee,

Cold toilet seat.

Unless I become one of those rich folk who get an electric toilet and the seat warms up for me. But then I may fear having water and electricity in the same sort of thing. Probably I'm too afraid of ass electrocution to own one of those.

And this reminds me of this time in middle school where some girls were sitting at lunch, and talking about stuff, and the conversation starting leaning towards the sinus canals. One girl stated, "I pick my nose." The others, me included, were aghast. The twelve years olds admission of nose picking was shocking, then leading to,

"Well, with a tissue. Not like with my finger."

That girl died a few years ago. But I never forgot that moment. Here's to you.

I pick my nose too.

The Curry Pot

2011-04-28T13:26:00.004-04:00

After thinking that my husband was taking me to lunch today (he's not) & this was our designated place of preference, I clicked on their website. To my surprise, there were some reviews that I didn't agree with. I decided to write my own. Yup. It's that good.

http://http//currypotcuisine.com/

The Curry Pot on Lee Highway is the stuff. We drive an hour one way to eat there, and they have some items that have scorched such a memory into my foodbrain that I just have a hard time eating other Indian food, always comparing. Within a 2-3 miles radius, there are 3 Indian Restaurants on this same highway, all with lunch buffets. I'd been to India Mahal, but it's not Curry Pot. Reading the fuss about Sitar, we decided to see. It wasn't the Curry Pot either.

This is where I discovered the subtle things that make the Curry Pot stand apart.

Mint Chutney.

I could drink this stuff. I could devour gallons. It's magically minty and thick, green and spicy at the same time. (Sitar's chutney had a watery texture and a sweet onion taste).

Rice Pudding. Yeah, you probably had rice pudding, and it seems nothing to write home about, right? WRONG. The Curry Pot's rice pudding has a very noticeable essence of rose water. (Yeah, that's right. I not only plant roses- I want to eat them too. For reals).

And I want dal, chickpeas, paneer, tandoori chicken, Curry Chicken, Chicken Makini(?) & all the other spicy veg that's on the buffet. Even if I don't eat them, I'm comforted by their familiar faces. (The two things I might add to this already perfect buffet would be the sweet carrot dish, and changing out one of the daily soups to Mulligatawny. Then, it would be more than perfect.)

The buffet is big, and cheap. I read complaints on the decor, and can say that I like it. It feels cosy & swell. I prefer booths to chairs. It's well lit. Strip mall? So what. You'd pay more for someone else's high rent, then get food that was less inviting. And the other places are dark. And dank.

Joe. Always smiling, the kindest guy ever, Joe. He knows my table & he knows how far I drive. This is my place, and my food.

I'm a big fan of the Idea of Energy and how it carries through, and I sincerely feel it's a tangible force here. It's a happy place full of comforting Curry.

It makes me joyful; and it makes me sad that I'm not going today. Instead, I'll be pouring a bowl of Koala Krispies dreaming of my Go To lunch spot. :P

2011-04-25T09:15:00.003-04:00

Four cow carcasses. Gutted, damn mess.
I'd been sitting across the farmer, the stoic farmers wife, and their son, a thirteen year old with a white boy fro who could play bass like he'd come out of the womb with it and a mad obsession with the Beatles catalog. For awhile, the kid and mine shared a guitar teacher, and when my daughter, eleven at the time, decided she wanted to learn Stairway to Heaven, the teacher figured it would be good to teach it to that kid too.
We switched teachers, and I heard all about it when my angel would lament, "I have to go in the band room in the morning and there he is! Playing my song!"
She hasn't gotten it yet, but seriously, she's twelve, and that kid practices daily for hours. My child maybe practices two of three times a week. Practice makes perfect?
But I'm off the subject. The subject was cow carcasses? So we were sitting across at a Cross Country gathering held at Ryan's with parents of Cross Country kids, which of course was awkward for me because 1. I am not a fan of Ryans, and 2. I'm not so much a fan of being crammed elbow to elbow with people you don't know while eating at an all-you-can-eat country buffet. I'm just not that good with people. Craziness.
So the farmer is talking about the thunderstorms that weekend, and how lightning struck an old oak, killed the oak, and spewed four cows that stood seeking shelter beneath it. And I marveled, as that was a revelation and perhaps the most enlightening thing I'd heard that day.
And this was months and months ago. But this morning while driving I passed thousands of cow filled acres, and as that question I often asked prior to the meal I shared with the farmer popped into my head-
Why don't they plants some trees in the fields and give the cows some shade?
I remembered the four cow carcasses. Gutted, damn mess.

have a really cool day :)

Brandi Carlile - The Story

2011-04-25T09:07:00.000-04:00

2011-04-18T17:23:00.002-04:00

So I've wanted to blog for some time, but the formatting is off, and when I write, then publish, it all runs together, and that aggravates me, and I save it for later. (Notice my tiny bird poem turned into a cruddy paragraph). Ack.
Last week a woman in my town, only a few months older than me, died from a brain anneurysm. She was home with her kids on spring break. One of our employees went to her church. I really had to glance back at the past three years and all the chaos there's been.
The symptoms that led to my brain surgery were unrelated to me having the brain anneurysm, but yet I found it and, well, cut it out. ("I cut it out my head, man!")
Yep, that's the dork in me reemerging...
My doctor was inexperienced, but friendly and empathetic, and nobody knew any better at the time; so it was one of those things. If you're coming to this thing this far into it, you may need to float back to may or june 2009.
And maybe there was just this divine tapping on my shoulder that made me ill so I would find something that could've killed me. Divine tapping.
Ah, yes. The divine tapping of my Bitch-Ass Thyroid later we find. And I still don't feel too good. Ill. But I'm on some thyroid stuff and I go back in a couple months for monitoring my levels and I'll try to keep chipper about it all. Happy and Carefree.
Not easy when you feel like your mind's been slurped out threw a straw. A monster with a big badass bendy straw. A Republican monster, perhaps. (HeeHee!)
Also, I now postponed my morning coffee by an hour because thyroid stuff makes it so, so I become a slightly crankier me. My stomach aches. And my soul is off somewhere doing something fun. It left me behind.
What is new, what is new...
We went to the Lauryn Hill concert. On a school night. With the kids. Probably not the best idea. But it was Lauryn Hill, and my mind said,"In thirty years, the kids will being able to say they saw this phenomenal legendary singer as their very first concert!" and I followed that thought. There was the moment when I said, "Guess what? I got us Lauryn Hill tickets!!!" where I maybe should've taken the response of "Who's that?" as a signal- but I didn't.
She had not one opening band, but two...and didn't hit the stage until after 11. At one point I looked around me and there was this surreal realization of it all. All around me, these incredible attractive, well dressed black men and women. The style and energy were palpable. The base was vibrating the room. She starting singing Peace of Mind (one of my all time favorites- though she didn't do the acoustic version) so I'm amazed that she's playing and I'm there, and I look over and the other three members of my family are sound asleep. Third row center, amidst the dancing, I'm sitting in the middle of three sleeping white folk.
'How did I get here?' I thought. And then the realization came over me. I'm not one of those cool stylish black women. I'm actually a geeky mom, so far from style that I have a little Arby sauce on my green jacket, and I was only a wee self conscious of that before, but moreso now. And the beautiful people looked liked they all dressed from the Anthropologie catalog. When you go to Walmart and you're surrounded by idiots and you think, Where are all the cool people? The answer would be that they are at some Lauryn Hill concert somewhere. But don't take your children on a school night. We slept in and had a sick day the following day. And we got some cool tee shirts.
My plants are about to burst. I'd better go, but I'll be back. :) much love!

2011-04-04T12:06:00.006-04:00

Who are you, odd bird, that you flit and, um, flap into my bloggie window? And can't you see That the ornery squirrel has done shook the seeds out the box? dumb bird, dumb bird... Thank you.

hello spring :)

2011-03-22T08:34:00.002-04:00

I'm sorry I've been away. It's no excuse but I forgot my password.
But I'm maybe approaching a breakthrough? Amidst my medical journey, I stumbled across something that may be my fix. This month, a new doctor, a new approach, and it may possibly be that the entire time I've been sick (yes, even the symptoms that led to my having brain surgery) it may have just been a thyroid problem.
Because I tested positive for anti-thyroid antibodies (meaning my body is attacking my thyroid) & I've had a weird neck thing going on for awhile, I went for a thyroid ultrasound this week. And it turns out that all the brain mess that has been plaguing me may not be due to having brain surgery, and will probably be corrected. Really.
I'm a wee bit thrilled. & I'm looking up plants again because I have this mad hope that I'll be able to dig and play and read and write again. And remember and be a social butterfly. Well, not so much a social butterfly, I've never been that. But maybe I'll make a friend or something.
I don't really have much news aside from that, which is my big news.
Oh- here's something.
My daughter was talking on the way home in the car,
"Today's Pie Day!"
"Pie Day?"
"Yeah, it's a math thing. They probably didn't have it when you were in school."

Pi Day. :P

Confessional

2011-02-08T12:40:00.003-05:00

It's been too long!
I've long known my blog has made a change; and as much as I want to keep up appearances,
some days I feel as though I need to sit with my peeps and have my Confessional moment. I am not always what I was. My mind is different. My brain is different. And some days it makes me sad because I feel the need to appear as though I am completely connected or completely as I was. There is a pressure to be exactly what I was for the comfort of those around me.
And I'm trying :). But I am not connecting with people the way I once could. There's a part of me that needs to say that perhaps the brain that left the building in 09 did not come back completely normal, and when you try to tell me some long story, I may only mentally follow for three minutes, and maybe only about 45 seconds, and then really when I'm lost and it seems your not speaking the same language anymore, I don't really want to even try to maintain eye contact to pretend I understand what you're talking about. I just want to look at a magazine with pictures of tiles or something odd but non verbal.
And when people tell me the same stories over and over it makes me tired, because while I cannot remember everything, I remember that you told me the ages of so and so's new girlfriends kids and I now just want to see some nice tile.
This is completely wrong, I know, but since this space holds my name, no place to vent like this one. My secret room. And I know you won't mind just for today.
My mother has commented of the mental change since the surgery, and how she was discussing it with my brother but was afraid to talk about it with me. This presented itself as a moment of relief. I know. Feel free to mention it,beause I'm trying so hard to make you think I'm the same, if you know, let me not work so hard. Let me be that person and not try to make you think I'm the other one.
And I remember breezing through books, reading several over a weekend, and I know that now a few pages are a challenge. Things that I should do or have done seem confusing to me and I just want to be able to be grateful for a simpler person that holds this space. I don't want to feel like the placeholder for someone who was smarter than me. I guess I just don't want to feel the pressure to be someone that I may not always be. I want to eat thai food and search through junk stores, and if I write a thing to tackle, I want to tackle that thing (2 loads of laundry washed/folded/put away & a shower for today) and then I want to revel in the fact that I accomplished my goals, rather that feeling like I'm not amounting to anything. I want to feel empathy again and I don't always. And there are days I just can't express myself.
How come no one ever tells anyone Its okay to be tired? It's okay to be tired. & If you are here by way of Googling brain surgery, it's okay to not be the same. I give you permission. If doesn't make you an infant...
and don't worry, the spirit of 'you' is still in there somewhere, and whoever needs it will see it in your eyes. Speaking is overrated anyhow. Kindness trumps any of the unnessecary knowledge that sloughed away when you were 'honed and perfected'. Write stuff on your hands if you need too and just grow into your new self.
My dad is dying again.
And I had another birthday this week.
And the cat has been moving folded clothes around the house several floors and I find things out of place and she's scootched them to make me think I'm crazy. A folded shirt and folded pair of socks are the latest items, placed in the center of the living room. Steven says its not possible for her to do that, with two items that were side by side, to be moved and again be placed side by side- by a cat. But it makes me feel better than imagining the old dead owners of the house are moving my clothes. I'm going with the cat. But a little sage couldn't hurt.
Much love to you all. Really :)

2011-01-21T10:23:00.005-05:00

For everyone out there with a spark of genius,

there are nine with ignition problems

-Julius Irving

If You Can Catch It

2011-01-14T11:46:00.003-05:00

Watched Grizzly Man last night. It's a documentary about Timothy Treadwell and his life with Grizzly bears. If you can catch it, it's on Sundance this month. Quirky & Educational at the same time. Not for kids (language).
Other movies I've seen lately -
The Box (starring Cameron Diaz. this movie pleasantly surprised me).
Mammoth - I don't know, I just liked it.

Tools

2011-01-12T10:37:00.002-05:00

Today I was thinking about how we train ourselves to do things unconsciously, and then the thought evolved into that old image of the discovery of monkeys using twigs as tools to get ants out of antmounds. It all surfaced because I'd grabbed a fork out of the dishwasher, then used the handle end to stir my coffee. I always do this.
But it started because a while ago, the spoons were all dirty, but the spoon my husband stirred his coffee with was sitting next to the coffee maker, with dried coffee residue. Rather than wash it, I used the handle end, then, the next time I couldn't find a spoon, I used a fork, but the handle end still, and now, the evolution of my usage of tools has me grabbing the fork regardless of whether a clean spoon exists, and still using the handle end. I think part of this came along with the discovery that we have twice the amount of forks as we have spoons. Since it makes no difference which I use, I conserve the spoons.
I wonder why Hubba Bubba quit making grape gum. The 80's were so simple and good :). Now the stores are all filled with 'Minty Melon' or Citrus Burst. Pie flavored novelty gum. (Which happens to be gross, by the way). But gone is the perfect, single flavored because it's all you need, Grape gum. Candy has seen better days. Jolly Rancher Sticks. Oh, and that gum with the zebra? The Striped gum?

Wishing you all your fingers & toes for the new year?

2011-01-11T15:07:00.004-05:00

So I've not been here, not because I don't think of stuff, but when I do I'm usually somewhere cosy and tell myself I'll stop in when its morning. Then I just don't.
A couple months ago, I started to write about this guy- one of Steven's customers, and how he sawed his thumb off. "He shoulda retired a couple decades ago," Steven tells me. But he didn't, and recently sawed the end of his thumb off. He put it on ice and had it sewn back on. So Steven's talking to another guy (another customer) and that guy had sawed his finger off too. So apparently, they can 'Dry-Wrap' or 'Wet-Wrap' the thing after they mend it, but with dry wrap, it doesn't heal as well as wet wrap, so this guy had his finger in a wet wrap for a long time. But the finger turned out mostly okay. And it made me think of that guy on Oprah, who got his finger cut off, but then his brother gave him this stuff to sprinkle on, and he grew it back. (I'll see if I can attach a clip of that). But I decided not to write about it, because it just wasn't that interesting.
But then during Christmas break, the neighbor came and brought us some Pumpkin bread (not near as good as my pumpkin bread) but she came, and while she was over, she casually mentioned Nolan. Nolan is the man that worked on our house (the Mennonite guy that I turn the tv off for in a previous post). One day when Nolan was working on our house, the moment Steven pulled out of the drive, he watched the neighbor pull him aside to talk about her house. I'd bragged about him too much, and she'd hijacked him for herself. Then she recommended him to one of her friends.
So she tells me that Nolan just sawed his finger and thumb off with a hand saw. And I thought about how I started to write about the finger thing, and I felt bad for Nolan, because he's like our friend; well, we don't hang out or anything, but he's got this angelic quality about him, and has 6 kids and probably no insurance. Also, I'm going to need him to work on the house in the spring, but I wasn't going to mention that part because it really doesn't seem fitting...but then, when I know that something is not fitting but I think it I have to say it even more? Like I feel guilty for thinking something without saying it aloud? It's like those kids who blurt out swear words; what is that called? My old brain would've remembered the word for that. It's like confession, because maybe the energy of the thought is carrying as much weight as the very words, so I just blurt it out and get it over with. "Motherfuck!" And then I can go about what I was saying to begin with.
If you are just arriving here, I'm totally sorry about that- please visit an earlier dated entry and it'll be more to your liking. maybe.
But Nolan had his fingers sewn back on too.
Steven got a running injury last week, and while over icing his foot with an ice pack tied on, he froze his little toe and ended up with mild frostbite. Burning pain & swelling, along with discoloration and difficulty putting his shoe on. I Googled it. As long as he could feel the toe, we felt like we'd be alright. (He's up and running again).
But then my mom called my dad this week, and he was in the Lexington VA hospital...awaiting the removal of his toes. He's a diabetic, and his toes, ridden with gangrene, have to go. She's telling me to call him, and I'm trying to figure a way to do that sometime soon. Trying to muster it up, I guess. I never lived with my father. I have older siblings that did, and he called my oldest brother this week. My oldest brother- not related to my father- had his toes removed a few years ago due to gengrene from a blocked artery. So they discussed toe removal and had something in common, which seemed odd but nice.
But it's very strange, all of it. It's like in that movie the Secret, where they're talking about when you want a type of car, and you start seeing that car everywhere. But not so much, because I don't want my fingers or toes sawn off. It's just a small world?
I saw a flea on the cat. So I've been itching all week, not from fleas, but the idea of the flea. I like the face that Idea and Flea both end in ea but they do not rhyme. They do, however, look nicely together.
We are snowed in for the second day. And it's not so bad. This week, I introduced the kids to Darth Vader. We spent hours watching all 3 star wars movies. I'd say that that is almost educational- how would they get through without 80's Pop Culture 101? We also watched Shallow Hal, which is far from educational, and completely inappropriate. But Jack Black is such a good dancer :D.
Happy New Years 2011. Happy January. Happy Thoughts hopeful for unexpected good things for you.
'Cause your my friend :)

Merry Christmas :D

2010-12-24T12:23:00.004-05:00

i took this picture last Christmas, aboard the back of the Calabaza sailboat, on a trip to a shipwreck off the Bridgetown Bay, Barbados. The boat was making me a wee bit sick, so our little family migrated to the front and laid down near the speakers. Hot and windy, the boat swayed up and down. Bob Marley & Jack Johnson. All the free Rum punch you could drink. (I went Water- something about the swaying of the boat and Rum punch- they must know nobodies gonna drink it. Also, they put pepper in the punch, which seemed odd to me.) We were aboard with another family, and a couple who referred to each other as My Darling with every sentence. They looked in their late forties/early fifties, and it was, My darling, can you get me my lighter, and Yes, my darling, let me get that for you, which seemed funny and odd but then got sorta nice and endearing. It was the sort of thing that Saturday Night Live skits are made of, but it just doesn't sound very funny when I write it down. Over the course of the next several hours, I heard My Darling & variables of it (My Sweet, My Love, My Dearest, etc.) probably over a thousand times. None of them directed at me (though afterward I'm sure we jokingly referred to each other that way).
The other family was on a cruise, and had only a half day in Barbados with their two sons. We found it odd that on the half day stop in Barbados, they got right on a sailboat, then got off just in time to get back to the ship. Barbados has Monkeys, for Christs sake! Real, cat sized tree monkeys with long tails and cute lil monkey faces. And much more. And in conversations, these folks will tell people they've been to Barbados, when they actually never set foot on the actual land space for more than twenty minutes. Our seven days weren't even enough. But apparently they were snorkel hounds, you know how those snorkel folk are. :P
This Christmas I woke up with a dried green mustache from a nasty sinus infection, remnants of what had bubbled out my nose while I slept. Not pleasant. Food has been a bit of an after thought, and everything tastes funny. On a positive note, I lost three pounds. I am only nine pounds from my goal weight. woo hoo. I was typing and let my coffee get cold again.
I think we may be going to an Asian buffet later, i heard something about sushi and all you can eat crab legs, and it really makes no difference to me where we end up. I wonder what those My darling people will be doing, and if they're still going on. If they are, bravo for them. Bravo for love. And bravo for the differences in all people and how what makes us laugh about some people can be smirked at in a good way. You can only laugh so hard at kindness. Then it just tends to rub off on those whose ears are in reach.
I was thinking about how I secretly like when people wear patchouli deodorant, and often I hear people make fun of it. I've been lighting incense this week, trying to regain a sense of smell, but it hasn't really worked.
It's supposed to snow this weekend. Everyone run and buy your milk and bread? When it snows where I live, no one leaves their house. This is because of the rural area and the lack of road equipment. The roads freeze, then people are stuck all along the sides if they attempt to drive. So the stores sell out of milk and bread with any word of snow. Everyone on their own little Christmas Island.
I hope it does snow. And next week is New Years- we usually go to an Imax for New Years. I think the Imax movie this month is on Tahiti. I've been to Tahiti, did i ever tell you about that? Spent a couple weeks riding on mopeds in the south pacific, ages ago. Steven got giardia, lol- we had to phone in antibiotics from the airport.. But it was awesome. I hope one day we'll get back there.
I'm thinking how stove top stuffing would make a great Christmas dinner. Just a giant bowl of Stove Top. And maybe a slice of pumpkin pie. With more Reddiwhip atop it than the actual slice of pie itself. Chemically laden or processed goodness. Mmmm. (I'm serious. It really sounds good).

Merry Christmas, My Darlings. Wherever you are. :)

Crabby

2010-12-17T12:16:00.002-05:00

I'm typing this with one hand on my phone, and with the other I'm stirring rice pudding.

No. Not really. Really I'm having a Crabby day. I'm very crabby, so crabby I fear I'd best not leave the house today. I have the flu. :(
On the bright side, Dr. Mary Margaret will have to wait while I recoup.
On the not so bright side, I can't think straight, nor eat, and have spent days watching movies under a quilt shivering- not comfortably, either...and my TiVo is not working. If we pause a movie, when we unpause, it scrambles. Which means yesterday the girls and I had to watch Serendipity twice, because we paused it an hour in, and then had to catch it again and just let it play til we saw the end with the second one.
And the idea of food has left my mind for the most part, but last night, I decided to try to make rice pudding, because the bland warm goodness might go down. Not even homemade rice pudding, but the stir in milk Jello brand rice pudding. And it didn't go well.
My pudding was filthy with brown slimey ghosts, and I attempted to pick them out one by one, but it was useless. My too hot stove eye tainted my pudding and I was just left with a dirty pan.
And the flu.
But while attempting to clean it up, I did have this moment where I imagined someone having to bring a dish to a holiday work dinner, not liking the coworkers very much, and perhaps sliding in with a straight face and a brown ghost laden rice pudding. I'm bad that way. But it would free you of any further holiday cooking obligation. They'll tell you, "Oh,you just bring the 7up."
I've been wearing the same fleece pants for three days but it may be five. I haven't begun my Christmas shopping. I did have to drag my sick self out to run errands, one of which was taking Naomi to her guitar class. The Music store has a new line of child sized drumsets for the holidays.
"I will be very disappointed if I don't get a drumset for Christmas," the tiny one says. She stares hard and I can't think. There's no money for a mini drumset, so I just shrug. Maybe one of those Sing-a-ma-Jigs.
I'm tired & crabby beyond measure. I'm easing into the idea of a hot shower and how it could steam the sinuses a bit. Clean underwear. Though my other fleece pants are in the dirty clothes, and that reminds me that laundry is piling up, and to take these off I'll have to put on jeans. Ack. It's funny, when I bought a new pair of fleece pants last, I was at Old Navy with my mother. "Those aren't good!" she tells me," You can't sleep in them, too much static!" But they're snuggly and the only time I notice the static is when I have to get up in the night and I see little flashes of light on my legs getting out of bed in the dark. Freaky but so cosy. Practical if you get them without snowmen or reindeer.
I'm off. I hope you're week is Merry and Bright. And definitely not Crabby. >:(

Retrospect- 12/8/2005

2010-12-13T09:39:00.005-05:00

So I haven't done Retrospect in a few months, or maybe a year, I don't remember.
I don't feel normal today. This inexplicable thing? I'm a tortoise in winter.
I wish I were more. For everyone.
So I plan to tackle some reading & maybe clean up the Tivo a bit. :P

& It's suppose to be ten degree's tonite so let's say a little prayer for Marechal Niel, who is not exactly cold hardy; I have her all the same...if I can grow this one, maybe lemons are in my future.

Today I give you Five years ago this week- 12/8/05.

(I have always said if I could meet anyone living or dead, It would be John Lennon, so it seems I ought to talk about him on the anniversary of his death, but the person who actually dragged me to you this morning was someone else...)
Sometimes I wish I could just drive, unencumbered by where I had to be
or what I had to do. This morning is cold, but not too cold, probably low forties. It isn't a bad cold, it's the kind of cold where you don't have to scrape your windshield, but when you breathe the air in, it fills your lungs well; it's the 'steak dinner' cold. I was digging through the console for cds, trying to get away from the Christmas music for a minute, and found a taped copy of my old Lyle Lovett cd. It had been a couple years since I'd played it so I stuck it in. Driving music.
I remember when my love affair with Lyle Lovett started, back when the Joshua Judges Ruth cd came out, the very one I was playing this morning. I remember getting ready to go see him and Bonnie Raitt in concert, putting my suede shoes on. I remember the shoes, because it poured the entire time, and the concert was at an outdoor arena. Walking through the parking lot on the way back, the water was over my ankles. I never wore those shoes again.
I remember Jessie coming by my house. Not my brother Jesse, but the wild boy who once stole a horse and rode it down the Highway 41 to the parking lot of our income based apartment, because I said I loved horses. "What are you doing here so late?" I said.
"I wanted to show you something." And there it was. I never went out with Jessie, he was too wild for me. I'd had a crush on him in ninth grade and back then he made fun of my gigantic glasses. He dropped out that year and had a few run ins with the law- you can imagine why. But he had beautiful dimples, and we stayed friends for years. Anyway..
He showed up at my mom's apartment when I was running late for the concert. Steven pulled up and I put my suede shoes on and ran out the door, leaving him sitting with my mother. He had just gotten married, he said. I hadn't seen Jessie for years before that and I haven't seen him since. I hope he's happy and not in jail somewhere. I can really get off course, huh?
I was sucked in by Lyle Lovett. I adored him. Baltimore made me cry. She's Already Made Up Her Mind made me want to be her. Who was she? As an aspiring writer, sure, I'd love to sell books one day, but moreso, make someone feel something. A something that carries over, not just candied words that you can put down and never think about again. More. This is what Lyle Lovett did for me. I remember Steven and I going on a camping trip (again- rain!) and the day we got back, seeing Don Henley in concert. In between songs, Henley made an announcement. "I'd like to congratulate Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts on their recent nuptials..."
While I'd been out in the middle of nowhere, in the rain, having to pee in the woods, pretending to enjoy exile from all forms of human civilisation, my 'other man' had married a Hollywood princess. I remember everyone saying Julia had to be crazy- Why would she marry Lyle Lovett? I knew why. And then, today, playing that cd, I remembered again. The funeral song came on at the same time I looked down and passed that flattened squirrel on our road. Yesterday it still looked something like a squirrel. Today, more of a spot.
Enough already. What else is new? I wrote eight query letters yesterday and one 'Thank you for your kind rejection' letter. I'm not so well versed in the art of the query letter, but I was really on a roll with the latter. You all would have loved it.
I lost my keys a couple weeks ago, and have come to the realization that they are gone for good. No more frantic searching, I'm letting go. It's weird, I bought this red leather monkey keychain a few months ago, and looked at my keys. What could I remove to make room for the monkey? There was the pewter Tahiti tiki that I got on my honeymoon ten years ago...and the graceland one from that great roadtrip we had. Various other ones, many keys, grocery store discount cards, and my sainted clicker. I came to the conclusion that nothing could go, and I would hang the monkey on my rearview mirror. That monkey came down and looked at me. "I want to be with you!" the monkey said.
"I want my clicker," I said.
"But I want to be with you more! And the power of monkey juju is stronger than the power of the clicker! OOO OOOO Ah Ahh! Screech!"
"Stronger than the power of Elvis?" I thought to myself. Apparently so. Damn that monkey juju. So I am unlocking my jeep doors the old fashioned way. There are some people who don't even have doors, who have never seen keys, I tell myself. But it doesn't help much.
And I haven't even covered the live raccoon I bought for ten dollars on Thanksgiving, or Hannukah at church, and the fact that I am the Latke Master. (That's the good thing about being Unitarian, we celebrate ALL the holidays). But I don't have time this morning. I hope everyone is happy, healthy & well. My love to you all :)

Jerry Lawson & Talk of the Town-I'm So Glad (I've Got Skin)

2010-12-12T12:14:00.003-05:00

I love this little Noggin video. It's simple & happy. "I'm so glad I got a nose, even though it looks like one of my toes!"

It's cool to be thankful for small things. Like peanut butter.
I am thankful for peanut butter. I eat peanut butter & jelly everyday for lunch, and it's pretty cool.
It might be cooler on those rare days when my husband comes home and whisks me away to the Thai or Indian place for lunch, but even on those days, often I'll eat peanut butter & jelly for dinner.

I'm also thankful for Jimmy Carter, because he grew peanuts...& any occasion that Georgia can turn out a Democrat, AND get him in the White House is a miracle. (Though I believe Ted Kennedy would've made a better President at that time in terms of the status of health reform-it is all about stategy/water under the bridge, etc.) Sometimes, the wrong strategy can make or break a situation; McCain's choosing of Sarah Palin rather than a more moderate candidate like Leiberman gave us the White House this time around, IMO. & I'm thankful for that dumb move. :)

Now, I also believe it was a dumb move for the Kennedys to not jump in and run for office in Mass. when Teddy died, as we could have kept that state blue had they chose that option. Argh.

My head's a wee dopey lately.

I'm seeing another new doctor Friday; for sure I'll be shaving my legs, regardless of it being an Ear Nose & Throat appointment. Any occasion they have to put me in a gown, they may. I guess I'm just too sexy for my own good. Regardless of the doctor's name being Mary Margaret; I'm just too sexy.

Last night we went to an indoor blacklight mini-golf place. We brought a carload of kids, so we didn't keep score, but I do like keeping score in mini-golf. I have an ambitious dream of taking work meetings at the mini-golf, keeping score, all that. Serious mini-golf business meetings.
I may even buy myself a stunning pair of plaid knickers. If someone ever hires me, it'll manifest.

Steven's rented a water cooler, and it's pretty awesome. Instant cold water? Cool! Instant Hot Water? :D! ...We can't drink our tap water-even boiled/filtered, there's some sort of white floaty haze. I don't know.

This week I discovered the difference between chrome & polished nickel. I bought a chrome towel bar but our bathroom lights are polished nickel, so it was a mismatch. I had always previously thought that there was only the one- what I'd called 'the Shiny Silver' I guess. Turns out chrome reflects blue & p.n. reflects amber. Interesting. Or not.

& a big welcome to whoever you are- the Kat Lee Reader has a follower!
That rocks that you'd bookmark my blog, and I did notice. thanks so much :)

2010-11-30T12:02:00.002-05:00

I made an egg sandwich for lunch today. A big egg sandwich, and then decided to peel the crust off the edges as though I was again a child. If it truly did make my hair curl, I'd have eaten it,
but it sure don't.
I couldn't finish the thing...I'd gotten too ambitious with the spicy mustard and had to talk myself into eating the first 3/4ers. It needed to be moreso a half mayo/mustard combo. I'll have to make some sort of concoction soon. It'll definitely be called Maytardo. I'll print out a sweet label to make it look 'real.'

The rain is smacking the roof. Dark damp day, today. Dank?
Is dank a word? my mind doesn't remember. I wish I had a cup of coffee.
Not a homebrewed cup but a frothy Starbucks thing. SF Cinnamon Dolce Latte maybe.

Sometimes I wonder if as a generation we are getting more or less crazy.
It's cyclical, the craziness. The things one generation decides to vilify.
So my daughter wanted to take 6 friends to the new Harry Potter movie for her birthday...
Only four of the kids (none related) are not allowed to watch Harry Potter (or anything involving witchery-including Kiki's Delivery Service, a cartoon dvd we have- Naomi wanted to watch with a friend, but she told her it was against her religion).
I can't help but wonder if these same religious parents were banned from watching Bewitched when they were small, and something tells me they weren't. They've climbed the wall crossing from harmless magical entertainment to the point of making everything bound to utter seriousness. Be serious. All the time. About anything that isn't Biblical.
She's thinking we'll see Narnia instead. She's kind and meek, and she wants to make her friends happy, but one day she'll emerge from her cocoon. They don't know the Naomi that said the only thing she wanted for her birthday was rainbow hair- not a strand, but her entire head. They don't know the Naomi that is odd and edgy, and pretty fabulous.
I think one day she'll be a teacher for them.

Happy Decembers Eve!

Carlos Nakai - World of Rain (Flute)

2010-11-27T11:16:00.000-05:00

wishing you quiet & breathing space after the Thanksgiving & Black Friday Chaos...
have a happy day :)

Fill the Well, Kat Lee

2010-11-18T08:09:00.003-05:00

Old woman a water balloon
in human shape
stepped on broken glass
Slow leak out her foot.
She rubs a shiny spot
on a pewter angel plaque.
Archangel Raphael, she says,
Fill the well.
Raphael, fill the well,
Fill the Well.

Maybe when the body die,
it ain't what it seem
Half woman spirit already
poured out
At 83 its reconnection

Forty near and I swallow hard
Lump in my throat
the water line
I think I lost my head.
I hang the pewter plaque
I found.
Archangel Raphael, I say,
Fill the Well.
Raphael, fill the well.
Fill the Well.

(fill the well, kat lee)

because I can...

2010-11-17T14:58:00.003-05:00

An excerpt from a short story I wrote a few years ago (Heart Shape Rock, Kat Lee)

There were times I would sit with it, stare at it, talk to it. Times I thought people driving by thought I was crazy. There’s that old woman, they probably say, talking to herself again. Perhaps it was better they thought that than know the truth…that I was talking to a rock, a nine inch across heavy gray heart shaped rock. The rock lined my roadside bed for quite some time. Something so precious to me, I’d stand frozen, not wanting to leave it, yet never with the thought to move it either.
Not that there’s anything wrong with talking to oneself. Sometimes you start at a place, ask yourself a question, til you go round and answer it so many different ways that you learn there may not be any one answer. A mental beating round the bush, I guess. Another reason conversing alone is a good idea could be that you may be the only one who can ask the right questions of yourself; or the only one who you trust with the response.
I’m not so stingy with my responses anymore. Not the ones where I’d bite my tongue days long gone. Not so stingy with the important ones, neither. But those I save for my special friends, them that twitter, crawl, fly. And who says them don’t have spirit that can’t talk as you and I do? Maybe the voice I give to them in my mind is just another way of talking to myself. I don’t dwell on it.
I did take the fly-strips down, it just got too complicated. With so many flies, how was I to determine which ones were the ones I’d befriended? It got to me walking through the kitchen, passing the buzzing strips, thinking I heard something light, quiet calling to me. I stepped up on a chair and pried one little fly off the paper, cause it might have been Flossie, but I really couldn’t tell. Two legs gone but safe and alive, I started to try another, fell off the chair and broke my ankle.
The doctor asked me what I was doing on that chair at my age. I lied. I’m not so stupid as to let him know the truth. The flies knew the answers. I’m not saying I like them all, the ones that ain’t in can stay out. But once they come in, it would really be rude to turn em out, now, wouldn’t it? And if I swatter em, then I just might make the smart ones turn, and I don’t want that. One of these days I’ll get one of those window air conditioners, then some of this crazy business will settle down. It’s not a priority today.
They’re working on a new subdivision across the road, some sort of fancy community gone up where the Johnson place was. I remember when the Johnsons’ barn went up, how proud they were of it. I remember Mrs. Johnson and how young she looked, even on into her late years. Older than me, but younger in many ways, too.
My spirit aged with trials I couldn’t shrug off, my hair gray before my forty year mark.
That birthday, I remember, the phlox was blooming near my rock, it hadn’t done so before. After that, the neighbors dog come chewed my connecting hose, and it took me a few years to get a new one. That wasn’t a priority either. The phlox dried up and never grew again. I remember staring at the purple petals leaning over the rock, covering part of the heart, turning it into something that looked more like a tear shape that day. I remember the Johnsons passing by, pulling into their gravel drive, not waving anymore.
God made it so, because I asked him. Let me be invisible. And it was so. And no one waved for quite some time til lately. Now the new residents, little children in tow, wave as they walk over to their tennis court, where the Johnson barn once stood. And it had plenty of life left in it, too, before they tore it down. I wonder if the Johnsons see what became of it. I don’t want to think to much, cause them I wonder what became of them; and lastly, that it is probably better than what’s become of me.
“I’ve found something!” she runs to me, stepping over and on the apples, some smelling fermented, those ones you step on carefully if at all; they flatten easy- worse, if you hit them at too quick a pace, they’ve been known to send you sliding. The little pixies aren’t so careful as me. “You have to see this one! The grand pappy of them all! You won’t believe!” I stop my picking, she pulls my apron then my hand, wanting to drag me somewhere. She smiles without a front tooth, and I laugh at how happy her funny smile makes me. She laughs too, we laugh together, and I let her drag me across the yard, away from the orchard, and not too sad to be leaving it neither. Where they’d been digging for the storm shelter, a pile of red clay chirt, nothing of value, there, but then a few scattered rocks unearthed. Winnie’s little hand pointed down to one very large very unmistakable one. I wasn’t surprised.
See, Winnie had a special knack for finding heart shaped rocks. Little ones lined her top drawer, a drawer she was barely tall enough to reach. Sometimes I had to pick out clumps of dirt from her little knee socks. “Heart shapes rocks is one thing, Winnie, but heart shaped dirt is a whole ‘nother. You can shape as many dirt hearts as you please, just don’t bring them inside.” We agreed, and it was down to rocks after that.
“I can’t lift it, mama, it’s too big. This one might just be two three four of my hands.”
“Where you wanting to take it?”
“You know wheres,” she said.
“I think this one might be too big to go in there. Why don’t we find a nice place outside for it?”
“Her. It’s a her.”
“Okay, let’s find a good spot for her somewhere out here, we got to be quick, Antonia‘s due to wake up.” I lifted the mound, and her little hands went up. She could take it from there, she said. Barely, she could, but she did. We walked in the yard near the old red rose bush, and Winnie kissed the clean side, then set it down dirty side up. She glowed triumphant, my sweet.
Her honey hair was short from her daddy sheep shearing the child cause of a bout of head lice that summer. He weren’t a sentimental man, no man was back then. No use to argue, soon the day would be over and we’d move on. Piles of hair in the floor, falling, my shoe kicking a little under the sink to keep for later. She’d cried to lose it, and Antonia, she was too small to know better. I wasn’t, and I had to hold back my own tears watching first curls hit the floor. I think I was sadder when it was her turn than when it was mine.
I think now that God or maybe angels chiseled those rocks in the night just for her, my Valentine’s baby, my oldest. I can’t say that my eyes are too good, but sometimes I’ll spy one along the gravel road. I think now she’s chiseling them for me.
　
　
“Mrs. Johnson, I thought you might like some company,” Mrs. Johnson sat in an inclined bed, staring at some sort of television talk show. She didn’t turn her head.
“Mrs. Johnson, I brought you some pickled okra. I remember you used to like it. Do you still?” I sat in a chair near her bed, her eyes now fixed at my face.
“Edna?”
“No, Mrs. Johnson. I’m not your daughter. I’m your neighbor. Do you remember me?”
“Jane?”
“June.”
“You’re crazy.” My take on crazy had changed much over the years.
“Yes, Mrs. Johnson. You are too now.”
“I am?”
“Yes. Do you want some okra?”
“Alright.” I’d become lonely young, but Mrs Johnson wasn’t lonely til she got pretty old. Lonliness is a place where beggars can‘t be choosers. Lonely is a place, and before she’d got there, she’d probably spit at the sight of me. On this day she just chewed her little green okra, stem and all, staring at the television. I never went back after that. Frankly, I couldn’t tell if she noticed much I was there.
I was sitting at the table with all the memories and voices from the flies and Mrs Johnson in my head that I’d forgotten I made coffee and poured it in a cup. The coffee in my cup had took cold so I stuck it in the microwave, set the time to one zero zero then slipped my ragged feet into the house shoes. Time to make the rounds.
My usual walk consisted of around the house, to the mailbox, check the flower beds, and back to the porch. By the mailbox I spied my garden beds, by the garden bed, I spied her, the hard but soft friend that was my consistent, my connection with before.
A new sidewalk a bit further replaced the ditch, paving replaced the gravel road.
“Ma’am!” she yelled out, and little feet ran across the road to me, the sound of shoes smacking clack clack on the new road, followed by a car’s hurried brakes. My neck grew hot and the hairs rose up.
“God damned hell, child! You were near being road kill!”
“I saw the wind blow this out of your yard, I’m bringing it back to you.” The child hand passes over an old Guidepost magazine. 1988. I’d read it and left it on the porch for the past few years in a stack of junk. My old hands wrung the thing but it wasn’t any use. I’m not responsible for this. Even if it’s my magazine, it ain’t on me. Damn that old magazine. I make note to throw out all the magazine’s when I get back to the porch.
“Oh my Gosh! Look at that rock!” She points, but I know already. It’s time to tell her to go home, so I try to think of a way to do this nicely. I don’t feel too nicely about the situation, though…ants are crawling on my skin, or maybe my pores have turned into ants, I’m not quite sure. A little light headed. A woman yells from the other side, then runs up to us standing there.
“Morgan! I told you to never cross this road!”
“I’m not responsible for your child, miss.”
“I know your not, I’m so sorry. Come on Morgan, we’ve got tumbling class,” she takes the little hand, and the other one waves at me. Bye, lady, she says. Bye, child. I look down at my rock. Bye.
Nothing in the mailbox except some sort of envelope that said it was important document for me only. I shook it a little, then opened it as I walked up the porch steps. A little key and some sort of paper that says if I take my key to the car lot, I’ve probably won a car. I wonder how much they paid to make all them keys. I wonder if any of them fit in one of them cars. It’s doubtful. I didn’t get this old by clickin my heels. A little out of breath, I lean on the porch post. My eyes close and for a moment, I could be anyone doin anything. I could be one of them Buddhist meditators, so still without thinking. Since I’m standing, I can’t be sleeping, so I figure I’m close to what them folk do. A sapsucker come tap tapping on the house and the vibrations wake my mind. I close my eyes again but no use. I can only hear running across the porch in my mind. I tear at the little magazine the girl handed me and remember about cleaning the porch.
That is my priority.
I’ve gotten all the paper off the porch, it don’t look too bad. If only I could get rid off the stray cats. He’d moved the dresser out on the porch, the dresser and the bed too. The bed sold and the old dresser was a cats nest now. I don’t like cats; I’ve never liked them. I guess I might have had one once as a child, crazy sounding thing all full of claws. I got lazy and I left my dinner plate on the picnic table, Daddy come home an seen the cat on the table licking my plate, both paws on the white. The plate was made clean, but the cat met it’s end in a burn barrel. My daddy stood there hitting it in the head with a hammer, trying to get it to stay in the can. I wasn’t overly attached to the cat, but enough so I was hoping at the time that maybe the little monster could get herself free. Use those claws and claws daddy’s face into little lines of red running down. Claw him up, then jump right over and get free. It didn’t happen that way. I wish sometimes the memories we make in our mind could grow real and replace the ones that aren’t pretty, like the smell of burning cat hair. I wish that love could make them real. If I say something out loud to a stranger, a lie, it could just fill in for an ugly. Like rather than tell the cat in the barrel story maybe I had a cat that sat in my lap and loved me. It outlived daddy and lived to be 33 in human years, who knows what in cat years. All the while, I let that cat eat tuna off daddy’s plates. How nice it would be if that’s the way it worked.
While I’m at it, I’d probably make daddy be senile like Mrs. Johnson was, and take the cat in a purse for visits. I can see in my imagination his eyes afire at the sound of the can opener turning. I believe if it ever did happen that way, that would be the end of it.
Anyhow, I don’t like cats. I don’t like the smell of them. Probably I never did.
-Kat Lee

2010-11-12T08:02:00.004-05:00

I was driving this morning & I saw a big black goat trying to squeeze his head through a fence, surrounded by various white goats. It reminded me of the devil.
This is especially funny since I don't believe in a devil. Goats must have a pretty good sense of humour to put up with such an eschewed reputation. Maybe they reincarnate as dolphins. I ate goat ribs once at a block party, but they were tough. It was a very old goat.
I am sorry that I've not been 'round; I still think of random dorky things, I just fail to remember to stop in & mention them.
My Steven & I were having a conversation about my driving and stop signs. He doesn't seem to think my 'stops' are good enough. My take on it was, if it is a four way Stop in a rural straight way area, and there's no one at the other three stop signs, that stop is more so a Yield.
Then yesterday, going through the Stop in the dark, I imagined how funny it would be if there was a cop standing in the darkness watching the Stop, and if you treated it as the Yield, they would turn a specially made helmet they wore into a flashing blue light helmet, and then I suppose chase you on foot. Maybe radio it in, I don't know. It really didn't get much further than the blue light helmet. Ha.
Now that I look at it, it's strange how aestetically pleasing the word Stop looks in this font.
But I'm going through that stop sign in the daylight now that we have Daylight Savings. Blinding Daylight, just enough to be too far down for my visor while I'm driving. Sucks. I would prefer to drive in the dark in the mornings & let my kids & husband have the extra hour of light to play in the evenings. To make myself feel less ungrateful I imagine places that are dark but happy yet, like Sweden. I imagine Bjorn Wiinblad faces & Moomins & it makes the dark seem like a perfect place to inspire the opposite- color & whimsy. Then I go to Gap to find some sweaters and everything is brown and navy. Blah. I don't know who determines the new fall colors.

I'm suggesting Yellow.

I love Yellow in the winter. There should be some nice Yellow winter boots out there somewhere. A yellow sweater dress with a capped sleeve to go. Then this just reminds me that I should've done something grand with my life, like being the one to put out the yellow boots and sweater dresses, so I get it out my mind.
I don't like the idea of beatings oneself up over unimportant things. Not that I don't do it; I do it on a regular basis, but then you gotta just jump up and shake it off, which I'm also okay at.
A couple months ago, I was talking to one of my daughters on a Sunday afternoon, and I noticed her teeth. They were stuffed white in between like little cannelloni. When was the last time you brushed? I asked her. I don't know, she said. Was it Friday? It was.
I discovered that while I enforced teeth brushing on school mornings, I wasn't reminding the girls to brush on the weekends, and this entire time they were taking full advantage of the fact. I felt horrible for not remembering to remind them. & It's okay & unimportant now, but then I felt insecure.
I had a doctor appointment with a specialist that I'd been waiting awhile to see. I was nervous & frazzled and didn't really expect much more than a quick consult. I've seen a few doctors here and there (understatement), and was just not to aware of the details of my appointment, I guess. I got in the room, and the nurse brings a gown in.
What's this for? I ask her. Change into the gown & the doctor will be right in.
I started sweating. I hadn't had to change into a gown in I don't know how long. & I hadn't shaved my legs. Do I have to, I asked. Yes. My legs were stubbly and I had to put the gown on. Shit. So I'm nervous and the doctor is holding my legs up bending my embarrassed ankles. My phone goes off with the most annoying ringtone ever. I apologized for not turning it off. He laughed.
So then he moved in close with the light thingy and tells me to open my mouth. I'm sitting on the chair-table in my gown, and realize I have gum in my mouth. The trashcan is across the room. I confess my Gum-Sin. It's okay, he tells me. Just push it back in your cheek & raise your tongue.
I'm the worst patient ever, I tell him. He smiles and says, "Believe me, your not."
But I don't believe, and was convinced that I should've know better & I was for sure, the very worst patient.

See how easy it is to beat yourself up over nothing?

We do it all the time. The trick is to remember that the next day is a new one, I guess.
I'm glad we had this chance to chat. Have a great day :)

2010-10-04T13:22:00.002-04:00

The cold winds are blowing in. Also the sick season.
Stuffy sinuses and no more shorts.
I wanted to post a REALLY easy hot beverage recipe.

Pour boiling water (12 -14oz) in giant mug or bowl.
Add
1 chicken boullion cube
1 Knorr Cilantro boullion cube
1 nice round slice o' lime.

Voila!

Stuff

2010-09-15T13:41:00.004-04:00

Morning :)

What's it like where you are? I'm in an upstairs room, listening to the happy sounds of a little munchkin popping bubble wrap somewhere below. The desk is covered in random jiblets of paper, scrawlie ragged paper. A camera. An Albert Einstein mug one third full of this morning's old coffee. A Star Wars episode I mousepad.
Sometimes when I think of Albert Einstein
I think about this book I read as a child about him walking into another body,
alive again and jet-skiing. It was supposed to be true.
We took the Buick back for roach evacuation. & random little broken vents, light covers, knobs, etc. But mainly roach evacuation. It came back with roaches. Hmmm.
God, if this is the first time you ever read my blog...Not a good place to start. (I'd go back to maybe 2008 if I were you. Good times!)
But I think I may have to start painting again. I'm seeing a painting of a roach driving a beige Buick. Waving & Smiling. Maybe a roach baby strapped in a carseat in the back. Sucks.
But it will make for good memories years down the road when the Buick is a memory. & the roaches.
Incidentally, I still really like my new car, I'm just afraid of it. Sorta like inheriting a giant old antebellum home, "Woo Hoo!" then the chandelier starts shaking, you see bloody faces in a mirror, and they all say, "GET OUT!"
Ah. What else is new.
New Products?
Oh! If you own a cell phone (maybe some of you own a cell phone) you must have Pandora, which is this awesome free radio thing where you enter the name of an artist & it plays music that's similar and awesome and you end up discovered all this other music, then adding more stations, etc etc..
Anyway, So if you have a cell phone, and you have Pandora, there's this other thing you need to get. My husband just bought me a gadget that plugs into my phone, you set your car radio on the same station as the thing, and your Pandora plays through your car speakers. Twelve bucks at Walmart.
There is probably a name for this thing & some sort of technical stuff but who knows what it is. Let's run with the Einstein theme & have a 'redeeming quote' break-

Imagination is more important than knowledge. :)

But you should get the thing. Just don't try to skip songs while driving, that would be dangerous.

Ha, another thing I saw recently? Today I was watching T.V. and this commercial comes on for Vagisil Individually wrapped 'Freshday' Wipes. (Daytime television is notorious for feminine ads, but this one was interesting). Like the little wipes they give you at the wing place but with the word VAGISIL in large print across the top. Will they be successful? Probably not. But if the company had any sort of vision or sense of humor, they could have been. My suggestion to you, folks at Vagisil? (I am telling you, I'd be great in Marketing!) Take your big tacky name off the packets. I know, you are proud of it, but you can still put the name on the box. On the wipe packet? 'ASS-Wipes.' I believe 'ASS-Wipes' would sell. & it could be marketed to men as well.
It's a name that would bring joy, and they'd even be sharable at that point.
"Gosh Judy, I've been sitting on these bleachers for five hours in this heat, I feel like I've wet my pants from all this ass sweat!"
"Well, here, Gloria, have an ASS-Wipe!" (You gonna give Gloria a Vagisil packet? No. But ASS-wipes would come in handy in a variety of situations. Grandmothers would put them in Christmas stockings).
I guess I should be done with that subject.

I'm sorry if I'm occasionally gross. I wish I were more graceful. :)

much love, yt

2010-09-09T13:57:00.001-04:00

i don't feel too well today. :(

thought for the day...

2010-09-04T09:36:00.002-04:00

You never plough a field by turning it over in your mind.

--Irish Proverb

'Mean to' don't pick no cotton.

--Anonymous

Where've Ya Been? ;)

2010-08-27T13:04:00.002-04:00

So, um, I haven't heard from you in awhile.
Isn't that like someone to place blame on someone else for their own misconduct;
I've been out & left you with nothing to come back to.
In my defense, I was physically ill & just not able to maintain a coherent thought..
But I had a moment of clarity,
& something funny happened this morning,
So I thought I'd drop in.

& if you've just dropped in,
Thanks for showing up. :)

So yesterday I had a good feeling about the day.
I felt somewhat light and glad, and that's the normal me,
light & glad, but sometimes it's hard to find her under the odds & ends.
So I'm sitting, and my husband calls me.
Do you want to go test drive a car? he says.
We hadn't really discussed cars in a while, probably because our budget is too tight,
and I just don't randomly think of things like that too much.
But the new school year started, and I'd found myself driving Steven's big truck
because the jeep had no air conditioning, and everything,
groceries and children included, would melt in the Georgia heat.
I'm not complaining about the truck,
I just couldn't park the thing;
Though everybody has said that parking further away from where you're aiming to be
is a healthy habit, so that's okay. But then there was the thing about not having a spot to stick the borrowed European double French horn, & the daily toting of it.
I'd be swapping for my jeep and the truck would go back to Steven,
as soon as Fall brought the weather down.

So I put my cleanest shirt on & some eyeshadow, and Steven came & emptied
the truck. We rode out to a used car lot and decided to test drive a Buick.
The air was cold, and it looked new & clean. All of the sudden, my husband had a spontaneous thought, and we traded the truck in. We just did it. Because why not? We gave our old truck and two thousand dollars, and rode home happy.

Though it did have a couple minor transgressions.
1. The cd player doesn't work. but the car lot guy said he'd fix it on Monday, and we figured that was okay.
2. We're sitting in the back back seat (or what you call the third row) and a roach crawls out from the seat belt hole. Now, my husband has never lived with roaches. Ever. But growing up, I'd lived in many an apartment where the roaches would scatter and scamper across the counters and walls, where they'd leave their crunchy egg sacs and dead kin in the silverware drawer, and where never ever would I invite a schoolmate to my home.
So while he's laughing, I'm recalling days of old, and it's a scary thing. Ah, it's just one bug, he says. But then another crawls out...and when we're looking in the little compartments in the side, yet another. I'm feeling apprehensive, but he tells me it's just a bug & they'll be all dead soon enough if there are any others.
Hmmm. So I picked up my children, first not knowing who I was, then flooding their little faces with joy at our new car. Our New Car (How cool is that? Okay, so it's a 2003 Buick with about 99,500 miles, but to us, we feel cool & lucky).
This morning, the girls were waving at friends in the car rider line. Roll your window down! My oldest says. So they are hanging out, waving, excited and so proud to be in a new car; a drastic difference from the jeep days, where it would die while in the car line, and they'd slink down in their seat.
We're giddy and the car (the New car!) is full of laughter, and then it happened. A giant roach crawled out of the cd player, and we went from saying our hellos to squealing little girl cries,

"GET IT! AHHH! GET IT OUT!"

And my daughter realizes we're screaming 'Roach' & suggests we roll up the windows again.

Which is probably smart.

So with no prior thought, no planning, I ended up with a new car & some Mexican lunch,

which makes for a pretty cool day. Aside from the roaches. & I'm staying away from any labeling of our beauty being referred to as 'Roach-mobile'...Perhaps there's some sort of hidden benefit in it that we're not aware of. Theft deterent? Hmmm.

thanks again for hanging round my blog. i'm grateful.

2010-06-13T13:54:00.001-04:00

Experience Your Good Now! Louise Hay & Puerto Rico

2010-06-09T12:36:00.011-04:00

"I want beef jerky," I leaned in to tell my husband, one row in front of me.
"They didn't say anything about beef jerky," he tells me. Here we are, mid-air on the way home, and I'm staring at Sky Magazine, pg. 154. "It shows a picture here..."

"Don't get your hopes up," he tells me. But that's been my problem all along.

Reading Louise Hay's new book, Experience Your Good Now, Learning to Use Affirmations,
has probably been the hardest to read yet. I'd been ill- physically ill. How I felt was not in line with uttering things like, "I am grateful for my perfect health. " Nor could I imagine feeling any other way, or being any other way. My recent mantra's ran more along the lines of, "Well, Hey, at least I'm alive!"

And it's not that I don't understand the concept of affirmations, or even that I doubt their effectiveness. It's that without the Belief to back them up, I could only cynically utter one. My mentality was one of deprivation disguised as practicality. 'I couldn't do this because I couldn't afford it.' or 'There are too many more qualified writers with actual educations.' I'd allowed not going to college to become my fall-back excuse for anything that I wanted to do but didn't. That excuse turned easily in my mind to 'I'm not smart enough.' Like Anthony Bourdain taking his maiden trip to the Greek Isles, I held the small shiny book in my hands with one thought- I'll try.

On page 30, Louise Hay writes,

As I've said many times, I belive that should is one of the most damaging words in our language. Every time we use it, we are, in effect, saying that we are wrong, or we were wrong, or we're going to be wrong. I would like to take the word should out of our vocabulary forever, and replace it with the word could. This word gives us a choice, and then we're never wrong.

Think of five things that you "should" do. Then replace should with could.

Louise's book also coincided with something odd that happened.
I got an email that quoted an outrageous price on Roundtrip airfare to Puerto Rico ($191!). I joked to Steven, and he quipped back, "Book it!" Ha ha, very funny. We had just gone to Barbados four months prior, our first vacation in 14 years. Though we'd always talked about seeing the world, it was always tacked on before or after 'One Day.' I'd been maids at hotels, and comfortable with that.
I was the one that cleaned to rooms, never the one who stayed in them.
What made me think any differently?

& then,

but Why not me?

& then,

we randomly reached into the magicians hat, and pulled out exactly what we wanted.

A little more of the World.

Puerto Rico? We jumped into a spontanaeous moment of being the little engine that could.

Oddly, there had never been any Puerto Rico discussion. Not in passing, not ever. We didn't even really know where it was.
In our little three day trip, kids in tow, We found that wherever you go, you can find a little piece of brilliance. We slept at The Gallery Inn, surrounded by Vintage charm, and heads...Concrete heads. Lots of them. We hiked a rainforest, got plopped down into a Bioluminescent Bay, Flew kites in front of El Morro, got stuck in an out of gas bus on a San Juan highway. We drank cold coconut water out of beheaded green nuts, and we filled our happy bladders full. Pigeons alit on our shoulders gracing us with their happy birdie vibrations- (birdie everything- as well as a need to shower).

We discovered that Puerto Rican coffee is without a doubt, the very best coffee on the planet- the closest adjective to even try to describe this stuff? It's alien coffee. It's just not from this Earth.

During the course of our little trip,

my little book tagged along,

the yellow letters glaring at me. Experience Your Good Now!

I was- and oddly, the 'Shift' (Yep, a W. Dyer reference) may well have occured without me even noticing.

My thoughts on others and my station (ha!) in life were sinking me. Only those other folks flew around on random vacations...I was the maid. I never minded that position- but it was where I stood. I took jobs that were somehow beneath others in my mind. But I liked those jobs. Perhaps the people I imagined that were better than me hated their jobs. (& why was it even necessary to imagine that they did?) Sometimes I'd swing in fast, my cart wheels spinning gravel, to bring a cooler of ice somewhere, and I liked it. I liked wind in my hair, the sight of golfers playing and waving as they went past, sitting in the restaurant kitchen with other housekeepers, after mopping the bathrooms, eating $10 slices of pie for free (because if they cut it they could not serve it the next day...) Maybe I applied at those jobs because I felt like I was less, but I can see now it was all pretty rediculous. You can mentally allow yourself to be less, but you can also just accept yourself as you are.

You can believe what you like & the world will morph around you accordingly.

Louise Hay- pg 103- Cursing is an affirmation, worrying is an affirmation, and hatred is an affirmation. All of these are attracting to you that which you're affirming. Love, appreciation, gratitude, and compliments are also affirmations and will similarly attract that which you are affirming.

Nelson Mandela said, "In order to build our Nation, we must first exceed our own expectations." (This one popped in front of my eyes during the in flight movie, Invictus. Oddly appropriate).

Not allowing yourself to be good enough is an affirmation.

Not getting your hopes up is an affirmation.

I unknowingly had already been using affirmations, but because I wasn't saying aloud something that was in a written statement form, I just wasn't aware. And I can see that repeating a positive statement could affect your energy and alter your belief in time. Am I ready for that? I don't know. At this time, let me just use this one .. "Why Not?"

I laughed with my oldest daughter, seated by the window.

"We need to make this a group effort," I tell her. "We need to collectively see the jerky." "Yes, I see it." We sat laughing at the idea of manifesting elusive jerky on a plane, let alone being on the plane.

I can tell you that we did indeed have jerky. & We will always have Puerto Rico.

Wee Brain Bits

2010-06-02T15:31:00.002-04:00

I had to shop for a swimsuit today,
and crammed into a tiny fitting room with two kids but only one chair.
Talk about chaos.
& Crying (Not me, but surely, it could've been).
Eight swimsuits, white 'Go to the Light' bright lighting, and me,
Squeezing into random swimsuits
Which is pretty dreadful.
I mean, well, first of all
I can't even try on a swimsuit without thinking
that someone at sometime
probably farted in it.
They were trying it on as well, squeezing their fleshy parts in

& let one go.

I guess it's my inner Woody Allen.

But it's probably true,
& it was probably not a loud one but one of those
Airy ones that only the ears of the blower can hear.
Which may make it worse.
Though now, reading this back,
it makes it sound as though I myself
farted in a swimsuit that I did not buy.
I did not. (Really!)
Ah, but someone probably did.

I have my book review coming up & some other exciting happenings.

Today I wonder why people didn't evolve with insect eyes
where there are many eyes all over the place.
Deep intriguing abalone disco ball eyes
laden with shifting prisms,
None of which any one person would know which to look into
Unless you told em.
Even just an extra one behind each ear.
It would definitely help with changing lanes while driving.

Also, today I'm thankful for celery with peanut butter
& sometimes with cream cheese,
but not real cream cheese- that lesser fat stuff- Neufchatel?

Have a sweet sweet day :)

May

2010-05-25T12:08:00.003-04:00

I haven't blogged too much lately; honestly I don't feel too well.

I only want the oblivious youthful sense that nothing can ever go wrong.
I want to be fearless
Fearless with the ability to skip and laugh and play
without this feverishness.
My head is a ragged willow &
I have too much of an awareness of my own mortality.
I'm taking a break to get all this crying out of the way.
Then, when I'm ready to laugh again,

I'll come back to you.

Thought Train

2010-05-20T07:54:00.003-04:00

I was driving this morning & thinking about stuff. Stupid stuff and some non-stupid.
Like, before I was driving I was pulling hair out of my mouth, and it's because I fix the girls hair with my cup of coffee between my knees, and I guess when I brush, the hairs come off and then I halfway eat them later.
And while I was driving I could see the border collie that lives at that corner from half a mile ahead just waiting to chase a car, and I was the next car, but when I slowed and looked at that border collie, I noticed it was not the usual one, but one with freckles, and it reminded me of a dog I had a million years ago, and clearly I'm unafraid of a run on sentence. The dog grew irritable with age and I gave that dog to my father after my other dog had stitches. My brother took a stray to my fathers house and the dog with freckles took his eye out. He just didn't care too much for dogs.
But it made me think of a million years ago, and how long ago that really feels and how part of me had changed. I used to say that the girl inside you never changes, you only get older and wiser. I guess sometimes you just feel tired, not just physically, but mentally too. My inner girl is tired. There's good and bad in that. The good is that I'm tired of wanting things. I've gotten over ideals or too lofty dreams, and now I'm left only wanting things I know I can attain. Wording it that way may make it seem dismal, but it's actually a relief. Let me reword it.

I know that I can have everything I want and I have simplified the list to make it so.

The bad in tired is that I too often pass up things like Uno marathons or eating inside the Capt'n D's (which the girlies love & believe to be a 'real' restaurant) because delegating what I have to do or remember can become a chore that takes up too much of my mental space. (Do you get that?)
Moving on. We drove to Kentucky, and passed through hundreds of interstate miles, laden with McD's and Arby's with other random crap thrown in. Hotels and crap on every exit. I stared at the Ramada signs and I felt confused. Would it be too much to ask for Ramada to add a franchise Indian restaurant to the side of all their hotels? If they want it to seem more American, they could call it Ramada Grill or something. I marveled at what a great idea I had, wishing that I could just phone it in. Mulligatawny Soup every third exit.
Then I thought about how my mother calls the interstate the freeway, and I like it that she does that. And then, that Toni Price song, Freeway, and how much I loved it.
Maybe I should dig that out & listen to it again. And I thought about how much effort it is to capitalise every single I, but once you capitalise two, you're pretty commited to following through with all of them. And I don't know if capitalise has a S or a Z, but I think you know what I mean.
I thought about how my latest Hayhouse book review is due here but I haven't started the book yet. Today probably.
My phone just made the Facebook buzz, and now i'm thinking about how I wish I could remember to turn off things like Facebook and Poynt on my phone because it sucks the life out of it.
I'm thinking about Google Analytics and how in the past two weeks one third of my blog readers dropped off the radar. Homeschoolers, probably :). (Just kidding!) Most of the people who arrive here through a search are still looking for Toilet Seat Alarms. I love it. I thought about how strange Google analytics is, and how it tells me cities and even countries of readers who stop in. The sheer boredom of blog readers but also the kind gestures of people who will read about hair in your coffee and still come back. Somebody in New York stops in- who are you?
I imagine the person eating a sandwich. Maybe it's a bald guy selling stuff in a cubicle. Maybe it's a mom who also eats hair in her coffee.
I bet you think todays blog is about you, don't you. Don't you? (I'm terrible). Ah, don't fret.
But I have to throw in that a wise guru once said, "Those of you who do not sing, must be playing with your own ding-a-ling." Yikes.
And then I thought about how the songs on the side may be leaving, but it's hard for me to part with them. At the same time, I have to hear the beginning of the first song over and over, and just like you, I have to hit the pause button to reread the blog when I edit it, and maybe that's not a good thing. Poor Chuck Berry.
I thought about how our latest family thing is watching AdventureTime With Finn & Jake (Cartoon Network, Mon 8pm) My husband & kids have adopted this as their new favorite show, and we sit, piled on one couch watching. On an old paisley couch. Even if you don't have kids, the show is pretty brilliant. For a cartoon. I mean, just so simple and dumb, that it's brilliant.

& now I'm just thinking about how that hairy coffee is starting to make me jittery and I need to hit the granola before I start sweating.
Later :)

2010-05-18T14:08:00.002-04:00

Light tomorrow with today!

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Don't Fret, You.

Theme Park Field Trip :)

2010-05-14T08:09:00.012-04:00

After trying over and over to photo my group of kids on this thing, I gave up trying and just started snapping random photos in the chance I'd get it right. Ha- I didn't.

Yesterday was field trip day, and my daughter begged me to come. We need chaperones! You must come. She reminded me of the previous year when I did not. So I spent 11 hours with a gaggle of wee ones at a theme park. Fun :D...really!

There was a bit of a rough start, as buses always make me have to pee, and not going before I left, my coffee tortured me much of the ride there. Worse, the girl behind me was crying from the same ailment. Can you tell the teacher I have to go? she asks me, I can't hold it!

I felt her pain. Literally, I did. Eventually the bus had to stop at a gas station midway and the girl was escorted by the teacher. Another student popped up and said she need to go, but the teacher declined. I decided I would just hang in there too. Getting off would have just been the 'I'm a parent, so I can pee at the gas station even if you can't' thing. (Later, waiting in a long line, I discovered standing on only my left foot lessoned the pee pain, and did my own grown up version of the potty dance. Bend right leg like a flamingo, straighten leg. Bend, repeat).

But I wasn't completely sure I was going to make it. Even in the midst of my pain, I was not oblivious to this time warp of the bus ride. Fifty 11 year olds, one big yellow bus. Singing classic bus songs. Take me out to the ballgame. If you're happy and you know it. I was just waiting for 99 bottles of beer, but you can't win em all. Kids making the signal at passing trucks to honk their horns, laughing when they did. Rich kids & poor ones. Beige kids & brown kids.

The shy ones and the ones that could barely contain their excitement. I'd been here before.

Kids were showing off Silly Bands, or Zany bands, little rubber band bracelets in various colors and shapes. Which ones do you got? they'd say. I traded for this one...

My own daughter was feeling pretty good, two of her silly bands glowed in the dark.

Ha. Off the bus, We had a gaggle of girls, four in our group, then five. Two quiet, two loud, one somewhere in the middle who announced at every ride that 'she was not going to ride that' & at every ride was coerced by the others, then discovered it was no big deal. The kid rode rides they couldn't pay me to- she was a great sport. My own girl, painfully shy and quiet, yet incredibly happy. She feeds off the craziness. I stood outside photo booths packed in like clowns in a mini car. We'd pass other groups in matching tees & they'd start buzzing.

Giant cola icees in souvenir cups, cruddy pizzas and in one instance, a Bucket O' Fries. (It was disgusting, but the kids wolfed it down, bragging about it's salty goodness). Kids emptied their pockets of ketchup packets, and couldn't wait to ride again. & you pair nasty park food and spinny rides, and you get a little puke here and there, but everyone survived. Back on the bus, my daughter crashed, her head on my shoulder the whole way home. This is the life.

I know that public schools are criticized heavily for their inadequacies and testing standards, and too many things to mention. You thow your kid in a random underfunded place full of germy kids, occasionally licey kids for 6 hours a day, 180 days each year. Some parents expect too much. On the other hand, some parents expect too little, opting for homeschool.

Yikes. The homeschooling parents have already heard what I'm about to say, their witty replies on bumper stickers of their minivans, Proud Parent of an Unsocialized Homeschool Kid. But I'm going to go there. (Just for a second)

I'm neither for or against Homeschooling. & in the same instance that one might wish to homeschool their kid, there is a parent doing it in the exact opposite direction. One home may be very Bible or religion based, not wanting their kids taught in a non-Christian environment. Others may just feel they can teach their child better themselves or that public school puts too much pressure on kids. (I don't actually have any friends with kids, any, & I'm just not a social person, so homeschooling would be like cell time for my own wee ones in our case).

But there is a beauty in the fact that your kids are thrust in the midst of other kids that are the opposite of what you are.

As a UU, i'm led to concoct in many ways my own path to God, and my personal path believes that God created all the people dramatically different in outward ways and thoughts in order for us to find the core.

Because maybe it's the same.

God threw us all in a giant public school and said, Learn to Love ALL OF IT.

Kids are still trading bananas for twinkies. & if your kid gets a ball to the head during kickball in the gym? It's still going to be attached, and the maple gym floors still echo the sounds of those kids, oddly thrown together. Gym kickball. God, I love it. & speaking of echoes, I can still hear the random songs of yesterdays bus.

I think that we all have paths we're supposed to travel & certain people we're predestined to connect with. You'll find who you're supposed to. This is where the Social defense of public schools for me loses it's strength. Each life lived holds purpose. There is no wrong way.

Blowing my 'God is Pro Public' school out of the water :).

Who knows if you're actually even choosing your childs path,

or if the path you choose is the one that they already decided on.

I'm going off the deep end, huh? :D

One more moving target pic for the road :) almost!

2010-05-08T17:35:00.003-04:00

Last night Steven walks up to the loft and looks at me.
You must get another chair, he says. You look like one of those little old ladies driving a big truck, the ones that can't see over the steering wheel. Ha. I had a metal folding chair, but it migrated, and now there's the blue meshie lawn chair. A chair is a chair, I'm okay. It serves it's purpose.

Unlike the book ledge on the treadmill.

Today I went to a garden & saw the biggest Allister Stella Gray I've ever seen in my life. Lucky, because I have that one sitting in a pot on the drive, and now I know it needs 10-12 feet. Giddy to see it. Also, I decided against waiting another year for David A.'s Claire Austin. Seriously, three years and still no luck? I have the hole dug already & I give up. I bought Ducher instead. I bet she'll be better. I should be out in the excruciating heat digging holes as we speak. I'm working myself up to it. Wedge of watermelon, then out the door...Soon.
In high school, they gave everyone this test to see what you should go to college for, it was a scan-tron thing and you filled out pages of random questions. When mine came back, it said
Farmer. I had a good laugh, reading about the agricultural college it suggested I apply for.
Now I think maybe the test may have been in the ballpark.
But maybe not. Either way, I just have an affinity with the plants, each as individuals; they have an energy and I think oddly sometimes they are happy to see me; they are like silent friends.
Like you.
but better. ;).

Rose of the Day

2010-05-06T22:02:00.007-04:00

Our rose of the day is Acropolis. Meilland (France, 2002)
Not a vintage, but a great find all the same.
Popular in Europe, I ended up with a grafted import from Canada.
If you can find own root, don't settle for anything other.
If not, you can find this one at Hortico Inc.

2010-05-06T07:59:00.006-04:00

Argh.
I'm not so sure it's a good day to blog.
because there's this part of me that just wants to let out all
my frustrations, my mental static, and I don't want to be that person.
I want to be the effervescent spirit that rises above
my issues. & I try.
but sometimes there are days when it's just hard to put on my trooper face
(we all have them)
I want to not say aloud what ails me.
There's a perception that if something isn't verbalized,
it may not actually exist.

I guess I'll vent today.

Normally I walk the rose line at the front fence, but the construction workers start early and end late, and I subconsciously feel that they think I stand and pretend to search the rose leaves, while I'm actually watching them. But really I'm looking for worms eating on my new growth, and annoyed at their hammering as it invades my most prized moments of meditative thought.
I'm starting small but I think I'm on a roll now.

So our health insurance sent us a letter saying they are leaving our state and ending our health insurance, and the idea of shopping for health insurance eight months after brain surgery is daunting. Of course, some of you may say that there's always the new Health Reform with that high risk pool, but my state has opted out of that. Personally, I feel fine and don't view myself as high risk, but it's sitting heavily with me.
(My state is actually trying to change it's state constitution in order to opt out of all health reform. "We're the state that wanted slavery," my husband says, "It's the intelligence of that same gene pool- Slavery is Good, Health Reform is Bad. I'm just a few hairs away from moving us to Europe myself," he says. but our doorshop isn't a mobile one.)

This week was my 14th wedding anniversary.
But my Steven had to work a 16 hour day,
that day and every day
so we said we'd just postpone it for awhile.
I know it just is what it is for now.

14 years ago :)

& I just heard the grinch was sent home from the hospital
with hospice.
& i don't exactly know how to process the information.
though I never lived with him a day of my life
I do feel sad for him & confused for me;
and it's one of those moments where you have to forget things
like the time I mailed out Christmas cards the first year I lived on my own,
and he called asking where his was,
but I knew he was a Jehovah's Witness,
& he said, "No, I never was, I just told you that
so I wouldn't have to send you birthday cards or gifts"
& all the other conversations where I ended up crying.
You have to forget that stuff and try to look at what else there is.
I don't know what else there is.

I don't know how to fill in that blank line.
I don't think he did either. That's why he wouldn't sign it.
he left it blank and all these years perhaps I've been trying to
fill in that line.
& no one is perfect.
I have a head full of static from the whole thing.
but I guess we'll be making a drive.

I think I'm done now.
I don't know if it's all better out than in.
I used to think that from whatever place someone is in life
things could only get better.
Today is one of those days I'm hopeful but unsure.

thanks for bearing with my wee blog. :)

Rose of the Day

2010-05-05T08:16:00.003-04:00

Cramoisi Superieur :)

A nice china dating back to the early 1800's.
I think she's pretty stunning. dainty little branches dripping with flowers.
She's a great repeater, too. (Note, mine, in photo, is less than 2 year old, starting in a 3" band).

Symbols

2010-04-30T08:38:00.004-04:00

Let It Be came on the radio this morning on the way home. I was steering with one hand and picking a scab with the other. Ha. My first reaction was, "I love that song!" then, "I wonder if it's talking to me?" I continued to pick for a few more seconds.
but then I Let It Be. :)
but while I was thinking about it, I remembered this weird thing I observed while on a walk with the baby yesterday. We'd passed this giant ant mound, an irresistable sandy treasure for any child, and my wee tot quickly found a stick with which to pounce and poke the thing.
And mentally, while I watched the rapid red furies, I said to myself, 'At least now they have something to do.'
because if some child doesn't destroy their mounded homes or reveal their eggy nest, they're probably bored...right?
Then, the train of thought took me to people I know that consistantly find some sort of drama in their lives. You probably know somebody like that. At least one? dig deep.
At least one standing squirm of ants never content to Let It Be, always destroying their own ant mounds in order to keep the cycle of constant movement going. They require it.
Why? Because they don't want to be left alone with their own thoughts, I guess.
Tarot.com sends me my horoscope via email, but only the first line; I'd have to click on the link to get the rest, and I'm too lazy to do that. It may mean trying to remember a password or something, and I don't write most of them down, so that would be a guessing game for me.
but the horoscope header today said,

"Messages are coming to you today in symbolic form and..."

funny.

& ultimately, I leave you with them. Scabs. Ant mounds. Let It Be.

yours truly

Birthday Girl

2010-04-29T08:15:00.005-04:00

the baby is counting down to her birthday; she's been counting down since March. How many days are in April? She's made a piece of paper writing all the numbers from about 45 back, then scratching on off per day, until she's gotten here, 3 days left.

What do you want? I ask.

Oh, I don't know, she says. 'Make it random.' (this is her new word, and it finds its way into everything. You want to grab a snack? Yeah. What? Oh, random, she says.)

Hmmm. Maybe a skateboard or a bike. Maybe I'll give her $100 and let her run wild in a toy store.

Ha, unfortunately, She won't be getting one of these:

(although I think it's pretty hilarious in general, they freak me out a wee bit. The new color softens it up. Nice touch, huh? )

Happy Day to you too. hope it's full of sunshine and fluffy clouds and puppies and cupcakes.

with glitter.

Old GypsyLand Stuff

2010-04-28T20:44:00.002-04:00

I wrote a hundred or so pages of this thing years ago, and pulled it up wanting to look over it.
This is roughly pg 24-30. ha ha. enjoy.

Dirt Eater

The park in Seattle was pretty; wettish, but pretty. On again, off again rain gave way to doubts about whether camp would set up. Our girl played solitaire repeatedly, marking in a notepad her wins with a line, losses with a zero. Pages and pages of lines and zeros filled the space, seeming to mean something. Perhaps it did to her. A shadow crossed over the cards, moving leaves; where there was the lack of shadow brightening the cards from the overcast darkness to white in the middle, dirty fingerprints and gray around the edges. Everything gets put out and seen in the light. Sun?

Lisette hopped up, looking out the window. Shea was piling wood on a fire, a good sign. Jack had wandered a bit into the woods. He sat away, and was often distanced slightly from the group, sometimes talking to himself, or maybe God, but she wasn’t sure which or who. How could someone be so preoccupied with a God that doesn’t do anything? There was never an answer to any question she asked that sounded Godly…It was always her, she found upon reasoning. Yet, her friend spent hours talking to this invisible being and had an answer for everything. Was he hearing something she wasn’t? She found her shoes and then found her friend, lying stomach down on the ground, scratching, digging a bare spot of earth.

“Hello,”

“Oh! Hello,” Jack smiled, a ring of dirt around his mouth.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m grazing,” he said, nonchalantly. She looked over, seeing piles of weeds and grass, their roots tangled in grand clumps of dirt. Jack raked one gigantic section into his mouth, still scratching, his fingernails a black accessory to the makeup on his face.

“Grazing?”

“Yes. You know, herbivores do it all the time.”

“Yes, I know. Would you like me to wash that grass for you? Or maybe I could just shake it off,” Lisette reached for a clump, shaking it slightly.

“No. No, I eat the dirt too,”

“You do?”

“Sure. You know, people are so afraid of germs nowadays, that they are over-washing. People were actually healthier before all this hand washing business, you know?”

“I don’t wash my hands all that much…”

“Good, that’s good. You know, more and more people are getting bowel diseases from lack of dirt, a large percentage of folks are having to drink microscopic parasites…literally maggots, just to fix the situation.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s absolutely true.”

“I hope I never have to do that,” the world was a confusing place. “I spend a lot of time around dirt, though,”

“Yeah, I think you’ll be just fine,” Jack sat up with his hands full of green, a clown-faced ring around his smile. She couldn’t help but smile back at his dirty face and teeth.

“I think you will be too, Jack.”

Walking back, she thought about what they would be having for lunch themselves. Her father was tying a hammock. He swung around at her footsteps. “Here, child!” Lifting her on the hammock, he sent it swinging.

“Papa, I’m a little worried about Jack.” The Gypsy King lit his cigar and stopped the hammock.

“How so, girl?”

“He’s grazing.”

“Oh. Well, that’s strange but it won’t kill him. Nothing to worry about.”

“Maybe he’s hungry?”

“Oh. Are you hungry?”

“A bit so…Do we still have peanut butter?”

“We are having better than peanut butter today, child. And I think I know exactly what might help your friend, too. He just needs a mission!”

“A mission?” The Gypsy King laughed, and was already walking off, going to remedy all her morning woes.

Dirt Eater on a Mission

Eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich, she watched the morning routine of her fellow campers. Tammy talked to Sam and Martha, frying bacon on a little cook stove. The Gypsy King was setting up a rig to cook on. Shea bagged his laundry, and as she watched him, she made a mental note to ask if she could through a few things in.

Grandmere sat with her knitting, and Zeph with her smokes. She didn’t see Hugo, but he was probably somewhere with that nasty rabbit. Bassam approached, rubbing lotion in his hands. He was always so meticulously clean, this man. Clean and beautiful.

“May I?” He held the bottle of lotion in her direction, and she nodded. His fingers ran over her hands, in between her own fingers, squeezing and rubbing. She could imagine his lips on hers, but he’d never dared or even implied.

“Feet?” Entranced, Lisette thought he could do her hands, her feet, the whole shebang, but she said nothing, only raising her foot within his reach. The lotion, warmed in his hands, was slick across her arches, and he tugged and squeezed the foot with both hands. Those same hands ran up her ankle and leg, stopping at the knee. On to the next, and as a wave of warmth rose up her neck, she wondered if Papa Michel was watching. He was…but we’ll get to that later.

“Ca va bien?“ and just like that it was over. He walked away and picking up a guitar, started to tune it. Zepherine lit another smoke and stuck it into Bassam’s mouth, sitting beside him. Clearly, it was time for a walk.

“Where’s Jack?”

“Ah, he’s on his mission!”

“What kind of mission?”

“The secret kind. No, he’s in the woods, I think. Tell him to hurry if you must go after him.” The Gypsy King liked everyone and everything on time. Bassam watched as she took to the woods.

Sitting in a clearing, Jack squatted silently. For a moment, she assumes he was taking care of business, and turned away, “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, it’s okay, come over, just be real quiet.” Tiptoeing, then squatting beside him, the two of them sat in silence. How long does someone have to be patient in order to actually have the quality ‘Patience?’ Who determines that? Sitting, sitting.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m on a mission,”

“A secret mission, probably?”

“Oh, no, your dad wants me to find a chicken or something for the grill.”

“Out here?”

“Yes, and I found it,”

“A chicken?”

“Better, a turkey.”

“Oh! Wow, where?”

“There look,” he pointed out towards a mostly bare field. All she saw was a tree stump.

“Where again?”

“Look, right there,” pointing again.

“I think that’s a tree stump,”

“No, I saw it move earlier,”

“Oh,” looking again, she was sure…it was a tree stump. “How long have you been watching this turkey?”

“About a half hour,”

“Well, maybe it died,”

“No, I believe it’s sleeping now. I’m just trying to figure a way to sneak up on it without it running away.”

“I’m pretty quiet, you know. Why don’t you let me sneak up and grab it, then when I have it, you run over and carry it back?”

“I think that sounds like a good plan.” So Jack let Lisette get up from her watchful squat, and she took a few careful steps. After those, she didn’t really feel the need to be that careful, or quiet, for that matter. There would be no chase, and she suspected the tree stump wouldn’t put up much of a fight. She turned to look over at Jack as she approached the thing, and saw he was mouthing the word ‘slowly.’

“Slowly, alright,” a few feet away, she jumped over to the tree stump, grabbing it with both arms. It this what they meant when people called the hippies ‘Tree Huggers?’ Jack quickly ran over, perplexed by what he saw.

“What happened?” Laughing, Lisette didn’t hesitate with her ‘I told you so’s.’

“It’s a tree stump! I told you it was a tree stump!”

“But it wasn’t a tree stump. I saw it move.”

“I’m afraid I’ve never seen a turkey turn into a tree stump before, Jack.”

“God must’ve done it. God is the only one who could turn a turkey into a tree stump.” Of course. “What are we going to do now? I spent all afternoon trying to catch that turkey, your dad is going to kill me.”

“He’s not going to kill you! Maybe we can head over into town and get one of those giant fish!”

“That’s insane.”

“Not so insane, I like fish.”

“Well, yeah, but he’s setting up to roast it. Bassam always gets a goat or chicken or something.”

“Bassam doesn’t always get a goat,” then, there was silence.

“I’ll find something. You go on back and tell them I’m coming. Hey, let’s keep the turkey between you and me, huh?”

“Sure thing,” her feet walked back with the light effortless ways of a child, perhaps for the last time.

It's sorta funny rereading something you've written, and finding all the little nuances of your life over and over. Names and faces of friends that you'd stick in places they'd never go.

I once thought I saw a turkey outside the window while running on the treadmill, but it turned out to be a tree stump. The childlike but highly metaphysical qualities of my cousin Jack, who used to live with us. We'd play rummy hours on end, keeping pages and pages of score cards. He died in his twenties of a gunshot wound, perhaps self inflicted, and I went on to keep score of my solo card playing, only with lines and O's. Lines were good; pages with mostly lines were days that would surely be filled with luck. My writing continues to evolve & I don't know what of this old me stuff. but the memories are cool.

much love, kat

a love letter

2010-04-24T07:50:00.010-04:00

we lost our bubba (aka Reuben) yesterday.

a sloppy faced day.

today just

Remembering my friend.

dog slobbered microfiber, he'd grown too big for a lap dog

He's smiling because I was holding a tennis ball.

our love to you, boy.

turtles

2010-04-20T17:20:00.002-04:00

i brake for turtles.

i also brake for pinecones

cause at a glance they

can look like turtles.

- Kat Lee

2010-04-19T13:34:00.003-04:00

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. --Psalms

I found myself spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon at a kids party for the baby's soccer. Kid parties are usually Food hell, and the putrid smell of hot dogs and cheetos makes me a tad bit ill. Drinks in wee plastic barrels is flavors like Orange, Red, and Blue.
A few of the mom's were discussing how awesome the cupcakes were; it was,
"Oh! These cupcakes are so good!"
"The white cake with that fluffy icing, Yum!" My oldest and I looked at eachother. Should we dare? I mean, we usually don't like cupcakes. (Don't get me wrong, I like the 'idea' of cupcakes; the cute little emblems in pink, sometimes on clothing with glitter or confetti-like sprinkles. Cupcakes are cute. I just am not sure if they're meant to be eaten. Maybe in carrot cake form, but I don't know.)
But we'd eaten this mildly gross burrito we'd purchased from a white van on the side of the soccer field, and were feeling unsatisfied and left with a bad taste that needed a comb over. We decided, yes, we should try these much praised cupcakes.
Dyed neon green and black. And halfway into them, we were sticky, and one woman said, watch your fingers, they stain. And they did. Our fingers, lips and teeth...black.
And last night, in lieu of supper, I decided to just have a nice glass of wine. I felt sick from the random contents of my stomach. I don't recommend buying burritos from a van or black cupcakes, this is my knowledge that I pass on to you today. (Though I do think it's in your best interest to have your mouth all covered in black dye in public, people too often go years without a humbling or 'Dork' moment).
But today Food Karma kept Steven's work delivery from showing up, and he had to drive an hour to pick up supplies...
right near The Curry Pot. :D
Today I'm thankful for fresh mint chutney and a wedge of nan. Dal. Makini.
Getting to steal my sweet man from his too busy job.

I'm thankful for all sorts of things.

2010-04-17T11:00:00.003-04:00

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seeded

refusal of that which others have made of us.

--Jean-Paul Sartre

Not really going to blog today, just saw this wee quote & wanted to share it.
Beacause Monsieur Sartre is right, you know; You aren't what people think of you, or only capable of someone's very low expectations. Do your best to be shockingly good today :).

2010-04-14T10:32:00.005-04:00

Crazy morning indeed.
I wanted to weigh myself this morning before I ate breakfast, so I stripped down. Two weeks of not running and eating complete junk, and I weighed less than ever. Nice, because I'd been beating myself up over throwing the Chicken in a Biscuit crackers in the buggy. Seriously, I know better. But I loved them as a kid and forgot what they tasted like, so there I was. I'm going to practice restraint even though they make me lick my fingers from the chickeny buttery salty taste. Not everyone likes the same things. :P
Anyway, I had weighed in, but hadn't eaten breakfast. I eat the same breakfast everyday- Nature's Path pumpkin seed granola with almond milk. If I feel adventurous, I go hemp seed granola. I tell Steven the almond milk is better because is doesn't have all that mucus and it's healthier, but he then reminds me that I eat yogurt, which is dairy, so it cancels it out. Either way, I eat it everyday same time-ish. But I hadn't showered yesterday & I reeked, so I didn't want to get dressed before I showered. I threw my t-shirt on and decided to go pour my cereal. Today I discovered that I cannot eat breakfast without pants on. I am all for airing out, but apparently that's just a little too odd for me. I had to set the bowl down and find some underpants before I could enjoy my breakfast.
Women and their weight, huh?
This is the first year I've been watching the Biggest Loser. I love it, they've really changed some of these folks. Look at Sam- he's downright hot. He may be 20-30 pounds away from having his own calendar. & While we're talking hot- I secretly imagine that Bob & Jillian are getting it on when I watch the show. While I would never buy a celebrity porn dvd, any porn dvd, that one I would buy. Bob, with that lispy kindness but tattooed scruff (please don't comment that Bob is gay. If he is, I don't care. That possibly makes it even better), and Jillian with her crazy aggression- seriously, if you watch the show with a little imagination, you can make it much better ;). I'm so bad. Terrible.
But you never know.
I showered, got dressed, put my shoes on, then went to shake the towel off my head. Looking in the mirror at my wet hair, I didn't remember if I washed my hair or not. Did I? So I deattached the shower cord and washed my hair with my head hanging over the tub. At worst, I washed it twice. I find it's the things I may have just done or heard that I forget the easiest. Ha ha ha!~ My brain is a work of art, but also a work in progress. (Did that come from me? I guess I'm gaining faith in myself these days...)
We went to see How to Train Your Dragon 3-d last night. The movie was way better than the previews let on- too darn cute. And I guess it's fitting as I was mentioning mythical creatures yesterday and my discovery of the first ever unicorn fossil.
I'm starting to feel sad for you if this is your first visit to The Kat Lee Reader. Sad but grateful you're here. Probably an innocent bystander, googling Granola & weight loss.
& you get me instead :). I wish you a bright & shiny day! yours truly

One with Nature

2010-04-13T13:13:00.009-04:00

I walked to the mailbox, Soleil D'Or in hand (the latest of my collection-I collect roses if you're new here). I set Soleil atop her future home, glanced in the mailbox and at the emptied trashcan, and decided 'later.' The mailbox contained some medical bills (which insurance companies have claimed they need 'more information' before payment- this is just for the day I went for tonsilitis...argh) and the trashcan? It needed to air out a bit.

I ran for my life, frightened and out of breath, but not sure if I could risk stopping. Maybe he was bluffing? I slowed and turned my head. Thud-Donk! That's supposed to be the sound a possum long dead makes when someone running after you throws it and it hits the ground.
thud-donk.

"You have to get that thing out of the pond," I told him.
"I don't want to. I don't even want to see it. I wish you girls would've got it out while I was at work." (I bet!) I walked him down the trail and pointed. He'd brought a big plastic bag and some gloves. The beast had been there a few days, bulging eyes, fly ridden, patches of hair off in clumps. He started to raise it by the tail.
"I'm going to need you to hold the bag open while I put this in there."
"No, no, I can't do that. I don't want to be that close."
"You have to," he tells me. I say that we should just think about it, and that I have to go in for something. Maybe somebody else wants to hold the bag? Knowing my Steven, there's a chance he'd see humour in grazing my arm with it's sticky possum body whilest I am holding the bag. I opt out.

"No you don't!" and as I start to walk away, he tells me he's going to throw it on me, so I run. I run, and I can hear him running behind me. Surely he wouldn't? I run, then out of breath, I look back to see it fly close.

Thud-donk. You're lucky I didn't try to get you with it, he tells me. It was so tight it would've splattered across your back. The can could stay at the end of the road, as well as the bills. For today.

I was loading rocks to move under the fig tree & found a fossil (I guess).

I forfeited throwing in the wagon, staring at the thing. Porous and round, I imagined it a femur of some sort of long ago animal, and stuck it in my pocket. Maybe a cow bone, but maybe something exotic and undiscovered. Because there's no hurt in having an imagination, maybe a unicorn. I think if you discover a new species you get to name it. So above is the first photo of the remains of a unicorn, the Katleecorn. Or um, Katleecornysaurus. Of course, I can't prove it, but you can't prove it's not. I welcome you to try, but til then, Katleecornysaurus.

On Facebook recently I saw friends join a group called Unicorns are real, they're just fat and slow and we call them rhinocerous. Funny. I imagine that mythical creatures were once real. Dinosaurs were real, so maybe dragons were once real. Who knows.

I also passed this grass stuff -
I don't know what it's called; it grows everywhere. My mother told me when she was a girl, my grandmother Georgette told her to eat the little leaves when she was thirsty on long walks. So it grows in France as well. We all eat it as we walk past, and it tastes like the sour peel of a green apple. Yum.

How did you get here?

Hmm. So next month the roses will be blooming & you can expect I'll be posting garden photos. I can't wait, though it's may seem like an occasion where I should have a separate blog. I collect roses, and at times, I feel I'm contributing in some weird way to the continuation of their dwindling species. I grow no Hybrid Teas (okay, one- Senegal) because I find them ugly, and no knockouts, because they are 'mall roses' and belong only in public areas or in stepford wives effortless yards. Okay, I find them ugly too. Don't get angry if you happen to grow one of these. Some folks don't know any better. But the mass sales and marketing of Knock Out roses puts some great vintage roses at risk of becoming scarce. Roses that have been around for hundreds of years, that honestly can out perform any knock out and do it with throwback style are harder to find. Nurseries are going out of business, and the ones that are doing well are selling you more and more bad stereotypical roses- in some cases how can you not hate roses?
But there are treasures, and I am humbled to serve them in any way I can.
If you'd like more information on roses, try HelpMeFind.com, click the roses tab.
Also, stay tuned for some photos of favorites, coming soon.
I hope your day is blissfully cool & peaceful. :)

Retrospect - 4/8/2006

2010-04-09T09:56:00.002-04:00

I haven't done a retrospect in awhile, and since there's tons of crap festering in a drawer, I thought I'd dig through and see if I could find something from this time of year. Here's 4/8/06.

Hi again!
I'm back! Feeling great, too! It's not quite time for chips and salsa yet, but getting there. The wisdom teeth thing wasn't too bad, the drive there was probably the worst part.
So anyway, I went through my hope chest yesterday. It had been a few years, and some of the things I have held on to for far too long made it out for good...others didn't.
There are obvious things you'd find; my high school diploma along with the little beanie hat that you wear on your graduation, stories and drawings from the girls, special awards they've gotten at school. A few things I made when I was ten years old. Some antique French picture frames, bought at a flea market in France. A pottery porcupine I bought near Alsace, France. My husband says it's an ashtray, I say candy dish.
"It might hold two or three pieces of candy," he tells me. There's the chipped snow white plaque that my namesake, Gracie, painted for me. It doesn't really go with my decor, but one day I'll find a spot for it. At the bottom, a new car brochure for a 1988 Honda Prelude...along with a pristine licence plate reading 'I Love my Prelude.' Funny that I hold it so fondly- I never owned that prelude. Even so, it's not something I could break free of yet. I set it back inside.
I have a little ceramic teapot, where instead of a spout, it has these giant red lips, and a Marilyn Monroe type mole. I also have the matching cups. I think my mother bought this for me when I was eight or nine years old because I thought it was funny. I sat in the floor and emptied the pot. Inside, some eighth grade junk. A few notes from friends I lost touch with, a poem I wrote for a boy named Roger, who never loved me back.
(It's funny, over a decade later, Roger ended up working with me for about a week, and we laughed about what luck he'd had. At fifteen or so, he just quit going to school, was in and out of school, married to a woman old enough to be his mother, and living in a park full of singlewides from the seventies.
"It's your fault," I was brave enough to say, "It's because you didn't love me. I put a hex on you!"
"Take it off! Please!" he said.
"Well, to take it off, you're going to have to bring me a live rooster," I said. We jokingly agreed he would. Unfortunately, his car broke down before he could get it to me, and with no ride, he lost his job. There I sat with my back to the old trunk yesterday morning, folding back the notebook paper with Roger's poem scralled in my sloppy cursive. I hope he's doing alright.)
Inside was also a note from a Secret Admirer. It said something like, 'I want you, I need you, I can't live without you! Love, Your Secret Admirer.' Chances are, it was some sort of joke, but since I can't be sure, I fold it and stick it back with the others. I find a tiny clear box beneath all the other stuff and give it a little shake.
Fingernail clippings. I don't open the box. Some are kind of long, and on some, remnants of polish. Was I going to glue them back on? Am I that strange? Certainly not. But am I strange for putting them back inside and keeping them? Does revealing this to you make me strange? Hmmm. I'm going to say it's not so strange, for now.
There's a huge vintage quilt, silk with a giant peacock embroidered in different colors in the center. I bought it years ago on Ebay; it's an old Asian thing, and I typically like old Asian things. Steven wasn't so crazy about it, so it makes about 1/3 of the trunk.
Some newspaper clippings. A couple old books. I read somewhere that people used to go to libraries to get high off the old books; there is actually some type of paper mold that makes that smell and gives people a high. I like the smell of old books, and they go straight to my face. I hold it back, because after reading that, it gives me a curious pause. I bring it close again and inhale deeply. It that gorgeous smell of musty books is such because it gets people off,

What better than a book high?

My own writings, you know, the gypsies...who knows when I'll be done with it and who'd buy it then?- are going good, but I don't type at the computer anymore. I do better freehand, then typing it in later. I don't really have anything interesting to tell you this week; having my wisdom teeth out is the biggest event lately. Oh, I'm going to Office Depot later to buy some boxes. That may be uneventful, you never know.
I hope every one of you are doing swell! My love, my love my love to you all~

2010-04-05T21:16:00.003-04:00

Every house was burning off nature's rubbish yesterday, including ours, a giant bonfire aglow, crackling long into the night. It's been warm and I glance over at each homes orange yard beacon. Hum. A trip to town would mean 45 minutes there and back. My internal Peanuts Gang sighed at the idea of it. Worse, the waste.
No Marshmallows.
An evening fire is a complete waste sans marshmallowy goodness caught on fire, blackened til in peril of sliding off its stick. I walked the can to the road and back in. Even without the cheap and ordinary treasure I wanted, I was pretty well off.
The sprinkler ran that day and the girls jumped over it while I swatted giant carpenter bees with the badminton racket. You hit em then hit em again once they fall to the ground, to ensure you've finished the job. I watch for the wasps and honeybees intermingled.
'You just want the juicy ones,' the girls tell me. They look like bumblebees; I don't know the difference. There may not be any, I don't know. I'm unafraid of them, the 'juicy ones'...we've read that the females can sting, but won't go after you. The males can't sting but they like to fly at your face like they can. I guess that just makes them easier targets.
The cat was fixed last week, and for the past 6 days, she's worn a cone on her head, or what they call an Elizabethan Collar. She looks sad but takes it well. She occasionally will hop on the bed and proceed to lick the inside of her cone. Lick lick lick. Lick lick. 30 minutes of licking the cone, waking the crab. He becomes even more crabby. Where is he, anyhow? I suppose he's been at work almost 15 hours.
Made some exciting discoveries lately! If you have 5 hours in Chattanooga, go to the end of Lee Hwy and stop at McKay's used books. I LOVE this place, imagine a couple Barnes & Noble's, but used and full of discontinued treasures. While you're out & about, follow it up with a trip to The Curry Pot. $6.99 Indian lunch buffet. Yum. The folks there are nice, the food is great. A recipe for a great afternoon. (Okay, if you've never been to Chattanooga, you'd better get the aquarium out of the way first, the bridge walk, the carousel & Clumpies ice cream. But the next day, hit Lee Hwy).
The crab is home! Much love to you guys, but I'd better go! Please visit again~ I'm happy you stopped in. One day you may find treasure of your own (on the kat lee reader :D).

2010-04-01T13:56:00.005-04:00

I'm a huge fan of Rachmaninoff. Moody & ghostly Rachmaninoff. & I take my Rachmaninoff straight; plain old piano. Often our generation gets then wants things fast. fast food, movies before reading the books, instant information online...the idea of classical music being a complete entity can put people off. We've grown accustomed to having someone throw the lyrics in, and we don't really have to think too much. Rachmaninoff changes things. And yeah, I do wonder what he was thinking when he wrote some of these songs, but that's what imagination's for.

Watch Valentina Lisitsa's hands go at around 1:12. Love her interpretation- She's got mad skills!!!

Show Me What You're Made Of? The Shift...

2010-03-30T09:31:00.021-04:00

Oh,God?
After reading Wayne Dyer's The Shift, I wondered if I had fully absorbed what Doc Wayne was trying to get into my mind. Much of it, I already believed, but I didn't know if I had taken it in. How was this book going to prove helpful or inspirational to me? And how in the world do I write a review on it?
I reread it with sure knowledge that I was the worst book reviewer in history. Already my first book review was almost a book itself; not so much review like, but a laymans guide on how I could use the bounty of information given. How would I begin this one?

And surely, God throws me a line. A Facebook friend (let's call him Church Guy- and he's swell, don't get me wrong) Church Guy posts a new status...

Would God prefer to wrestle with rebellious children
or reign over rocks and trees? Any ideas?

Hmmm. Of course I was full of ideas! And where a better place than a Facebook status to have a lovely, yet public religious debate? (I'm kidding). My response...

God wouldn't wrestle with rebellious children or feel
the need to reign over rocks and trees.
God has no Ego, and everything, rocks, trees, and Man, are Of God.

And here I'd done it. Not thinking I was even remotely being controversial, and fully unprepared for any dialogue, I was sent a private message. A long one. My mind was churning over the message I recieved. Was there a wrong or a right? And one sentence in Wayne Dyer's The Shift that I found most profound is this one;

Noninterference becomes a higher priority than being right or dominating others.

This means alot to me, and I didn't know if I should even respond...yet I did, and in that response, I drew much of my inspiration from The Shift. Perhaps in many ways, this book was dropped in my midst at the right time. Why don't I just post the message and response so you can see where this is going to take us...

Hey, I am so sorry but I deleted my status which deleted your post/comment. I didn't delete your post or my status because of what you said. I welcome any thoughts even if they may be diverse than mine.I have been in a long discussion with another more new age person for the past week and the thoughts that I posted were out of a conversation from that.

The point of my post was not about God wrestling with anything, but that he would rather us have free wills and be able to choose than to just be a God over rocks and trees.On a side note, the comment that you made about God not haveing an ego but man does, and then you said that we were of God, implies that God does have an ego...simple math...(man has ego+man is of God=God has an ego)

I don't believe that man is "of" God nor is anything else, but we are his creation. We were created with a free will because He wanted us to choose to love Him, that also opened the door for us not to choose Him, hense the facebook post of God so loves us that He would rather be a God of rebellious free will children than to have created no humans at all.

Again, please note that i did not delete your post because of you are what you wrote but more because I was trying to get thoughts from the group I was with last night, so I moved the status to a private conversation with them.

Sorry,
Church Guy

My response? Yikes...

Hey Church Guy!

Hope your doing well! Didn't realize it was only a post for people of your church friends; No problem. (Oh- can you email me the status you posted? I think it'll be a great jumping point for my Wayne Dyer book review!).

The God we believe in does not have an Ego, though. I can understand your 'simple math'- but while we are Of God, we create an Ego out of what you call our 'free will'. Our 'God having an Ego' for us would be akin to, for example, 'Jesus getting high or running over babies.' Blunt example, but to the point. I don't think Jesus would rob a gas station- unimaginable! But man would.

Quantum Physics tells us that everything is made up of particles, even objects you percieve as one object, like a pen, are actually tiny particles of energy moving at varying frequencies. Everything carries an energy, rocks & trees included. Man, most definitely. God is the source of this energy. God is in everything, every leaf & every raindrop. There are lots of analogies to this in the Bible, but they aren't taken literally in your religion. Men with a need for power were quick to edit the Bible, but that's another entire thing.

So our version of God with no ego wouldn't need man to 'choose him,' but to see that we are Of God, and should learn to love ourselves & others. It's a matter of seeing the 'God' in others for most New Age religions. The God I believe in is humble and intertwined in a different way than the way you believe. It seems that God tries over and over to get the point across. Your very spirit is made of God. The fingerprint on your finger. Maybe God just wants you to be able to see Him in yourself. That's what I believe God would want.

Your view of God and religion is completely the opposite of ours, so I totally understand you deleting the post. Hope all is well with you and yours :)

Here I was with my response, frantic at the idea of this 'simple math', and laden with Wayne Dyer fresh in my memory. Yet also remembering the fact that I should not need ot be right. I should let it go and not respond at all, or respond with a simple "We should just agree to disagree." Unfortunately, I was not yet in a space where I could control myself when it comes to this sort of thing, so I went a wee bit crazy. My husband, on hearing the keys race, looked up the stairs. "Get 'em!" he tells me. I get that 'dog peed on the rug' remorseful moment, but no longer could stop the tap tap tapping of my fingers. To his credit, Church Guy once again responded, but in a softer and more cordial way. He's a genuinely good guy.

And I found my inspiration.

So let's get to it! Wayne Dyer 's The Shift (Taking Your Life From Ambition to Meaning)

The Shift is a companion book to the film of the same name, which I've not seen, so this review is based purely on the book. To me, the statements contained in the first chapter, FROM, while sounding scientific, were some of the most important. In many ways the thought of merging Science with Religion (or Spirituality) has been deadended. But if we try to read through the process, starting with the beginning, you can arrive at the end with maybe a larger sense of reverence for not just God or mankind, but for every little thing.

There is no way to get around it, I just have to jump in with the excerpts. Wayne put it best-

"Remember that quantum physics tells us emphatically that particles do not come from particles. If we reduce that original particle to its subatomic status, it is smaller than chromosomes, atoms, electrons, within the atom- and even the sub-sub-subatomic particles called quarks. Scientists have placed quarks the size of my origination point into a particle accelerator revved up to 250,000 mph and collided it with another quark. The result? Nothing was there. It appears that nothing exists at the moment of the transition into something. Or, as I enjoy saying, 'From nowhere to now here.' All that exists in the world is pure formless energy- no particles.

Modern physics confirms the metaphysics of Genesis, which tells us that everything came from God and it was all good. Similarly, the Tao Te Ching tells us that all being originates in nonbeing. Thus, the question of where we came from is answered similarly by physics and metaphysics. They both conclude that we originated from something that has no form, no boundaries, no beginning and no substance. We are all esentially spiritual beings having a temporary human experience. This is our essence. This is where we come from."

I can feel you tiring of me and the science aspect of this book. We just want to hear about your crazy weekend, you're thinking. But bear with me, because I'm not finished. Again, here's Wayne-

"I conclude that everything is energy; it's all vibration at a variety of frequencies. The faster the vibration, the closer one is to Spirit and understanding where we came from. The pen I hold in my hand as I write these words appears to be solid, yet a glance at it through a powerful microscope shows that it's actually a field of moving particles, with mostly space between those particles. The vibrational makeup of my pen is energy that is slow enough to appear solid to my eyes, which can only perceive objects that fit within a certain frequency."

I'm close to writing the whole book, so let me breathe for a moment. I really wish I could write that entire page, which goes on to talk about thoughts being an energy system, and how they can be measured, but I'll just say that you can find that information on page 14, along with that last paragraph. So do you got that?

Everything is energy (Spirit. Of God. There is nothing that isn't). God did not create us in his image, he created us of his very being. What is God's name? I Am. It may seem mystical, or you may just not connect with the science of it. But let's start with that. I'm not in general a deep person, maybe that's the wrong word; I'm pretty Simple. At times quirky, but mostly simple. So I have to throw in that my mental train of thought does find itself choo-chooing down winding valleys, and the energy/spirit/we begin as energy and end as such made me start thinking of my dog (he's doing well, thanks) and reincarnation.

That never ending question of whether people reincarnate as plants or pets reincarnate as humans kept surfacing. Yes, I understand the goal is to alligned our thoughts-energy with the Source, so does this change our evolution as well? Can my dog reincarnate as a human in a future form? Does our energy shift what we resurface as? Not that I need to know today, but I can't stop the train. The Dalai Lama could have very well been a dolphin in his last life...or who's to say he won't be in his next? Does anyone actually know which species is the more spiritually advanced? My money may be on dolphin. I'll get back to you on that.

So do you have this so far? The slower the vibration of somethings energy, as in the pen/object. The higher the speed of energy, sound, light, thought, all very fast. Faster=more alligned with Spirit. Negative emotions literally make the body weak, as more positive thought keep us alligned with God and give us strength.

The idea is to remember our origin, the need for allignment, and in finding that place & recognizing the Source within us, we can live a life fulfilled. (Can you imagine? A Fulfilled life, not a 'good' life or a 'happy' life- while you'll find that too, and you may already feel you have those qualities, I think people in general are missing the fulfillment part).

We are taught Ambition at an early age, gaining praise for accomplishments. Before long we are running in the rat race, and those of us not 'fast' enough can easily feel out of place, or unnecessary, regardless of what we do. Do you know what your place is... or only what you feel you have to achieve to even have a place?

"Ego insists that we traverse from nothing to something, from being no one to being someone, from oneness to twoness, from unity to separation. It is this journey that requires us to Edge God Out and learn to believe in a false self. Ego's number one job at this stage is eliminating our nobody status by encouraging Ambition and creating a new (albeit false) identity."

Wayne goes on to list six components of the Ego, which I'm going to kinda sorta throw together for the review-Who I Am Is What I Have, What I Do, What Others Think of Me, I Am Separate from Everyone Else, From What is Missing in My Life, From God I fully realize that on the surface, my sweet reader, you don't feel you are what you have or do. You don't care what people think of you. You aren't separate, um, just different. But do we even need to feel 'different' and is that not a sly way of Ego saying that we are separate? Hmmm. Ride what I call the 'night-boat' with this current. Here are a few of my favorite passages from this section (WD)-

"Believing that who we are is defined by what other people think of us cripples the joyful spontaneity of our authentic selves. If others disapprove, and their opinion defines us, then we modify ourselves or shrink from view. Our image of ourselves is located in them, and when they reject us, we no longer 'are' at all. The ego's way of dealing with this dilemma is to adapt to everyone else's opinions. If they think we're stupid, we attampt to convince them to think otherwise by trying to be the person they want us to be. We cease to exist except as a reflection of what others think."

When we give more credence to the opinions of others than to our own self-assessments, we deny the very wisdom that created us. The more we integrate these egoistic beliefs, the more we tend to believe in our own self-importance. Our drive to accumulate and achieve ultimately causes us to forget that our intrinsic value is our connection to our spiritual self. In other words, our connection to our Source of being becomes obscured in favor of pleasing ego's ideas that we are what other people's egos think of us!"

You know already the concept of Oneness, heard in many different analogies, One tree many branches, one wave on the ocean, & Wayne references the fingers and toes, body parts on one human body. This doesn't mean that we all are supposed to do the same things or enjoy the same things...If your right index finger goes digging for gold, the lefthand pinkie may have a harder time with that task, more suited to scratch your left ear, but know this- the gold digging finger will resurface. It never leaves its Source.

Dr. Dyer's The Shift is a book about recognising our Oneness, letting go of our Ego's and therefore finding a greater connection to everything around us. He's been a constant source of inspiration for so many, and while I could write pages and pages from the book, At only 111 pages, you could easily check it out. As I read about Wayne Dyer's own personal Shifts in life, I looked back at my old paperback copy of Your Erroneous Zones, the wild twinkle in his eye, and then to my copy of The Shift, a different man, still ultimately compelling, but more wise. (I am not fooled by it. If you watch Wayne's PBS specials, you see the magic. Dr. Dyer is a stunning blend of integrity and humour. I hope he never loses this playful side). On that note, The Shift is a concise book, getting straight to the point, at some times too straight; Wayne ain't playin. His own mantra-

Let Go and Let God.

You know, long ago I was reading a copy of Light & Consciousness, and there was a passage about throwing pebbles in the river. The water has to go around the pebble, and makes waves. Soon you have rapids, you've thrown so many pebbles in. Many times you see this, people addicted to drama and chaos, even seeming bored when their lives are peaceful. If this is you (I know its not, my sweet little darlings are not pebbles throwers. Never!) take a breath and try to restrain yourself. You don't always have to try to prove yourself. Let it go.

Negativity makes you weak & kindness matters. When you makes things rough for others, you make it even worse for yourself.

I'm making small measures in different directions, like a puddle of water that expands outward, and get a little closer to being the me I like everyday. I should have given myself a wee kick when I found myself hastily responding to my friends religious comments. The U-turn from the Ego can be a slow and challenging process!

If it makes you feel better today, You are right. (I am right. haha! I smile in my heart...) But you (or I) don't have to say so.

"All of us can get into the habit of living a life based on service without expectation of reward by simply adopting a practice of radical humility. This is one of the key components of highly evolved people. Just observe how nature operates: The ocean stays low yet gains tremendous strength. That's because all the rivers and streams ultimately flow down and come to it. As the Tao Te Ching reminds us:

Why is the sea king of a hundred streams?

Because it lies below them.

Therefore, those desiring a position

Above others must speak humbly. "

Just smile, walk away & have a cool day.

Show me what you're made of? You don't have to do that. Just find out what you are made of, then make the most of it. Much love to ya.

( I did receive this book free of charge, but I am not a paid endorser of Hayhouse books or products.)

My attempt at being a poet :P

2010-03-23T09:11:00.000-04:00

Wind blew trees
& branches fall
Old man in old coverall
gathers up the fallen wood
twigs is bad
but tree is good

Skin like paper
creased and thin
Works with gloves
Wide hat brim
Old woman in the noonday sun
Fought the weather
Weather won.

what I don't know
Old woman do
Happen to one
happen to two
Face held high
in noonday sun
One day I'll be
the weather'd one.

kat lee :)

Animal House

2010-03-16T10:27:00.000-04:00

I'm having a bit of stress this week. My old dog, Reuben, is dying. Honestly, I don't really know what of. About $1000 later, several x-rays & trips to the vet, and no answers. He'd had a heart attack last week. For two days, he lay limp and lifeless, the vet saying there was nothing that could be done. At over 110 lbs., we had to put him on a moving blanket and move him around. Lo and behold, he held his head up, then ate seven pieces of cat food. (Dogs like it, I don't know why. But dogs like it and humans keep them out of it. But after days of no eating, we were excited.)
The next day, he stood, and he walked, and he picked up his ball. He smiled. (Dogs do smile.)
But he also fell down the stairs, tripped in the yard, and moaned and whimpered around the edges. Coming home from after school stuff, I opened the door to find two three ft wide piles of vomit on the tile. (I had to make spaghetti that night, and obviously after shoveling & mopping piles of orange, I had mine sans sauce.)
The next morning, more piles. We took him back, as the vet assured us that some x-ray with contrast would definitely determine the cause of Bub's misery. We only got fuzzy scans showing an enlarged heart, some sort of something, and a blockage somewhere in the colon or stomach.
We were triple charge what they quoted, and said the next option would be exploritory surgery. We brought the old man home, along with several RXs.
So he's taking 10 pills each day, whining, but basically happy. Or happy-ish. & I'm frustrated.

bub home from the vet.

We named the cat, and her perky nature and fearless attacks make me less tired.

Living with the contrasts makes me appreciate youthful energy and wisdom that comes with age. If only we could hold the two in our hands, our lives, at once.

Throw two standard poodles, a turtle, and a couple kids in the mix while we're at it.

Ouida perched atop the turtle tank.

There's other stuff that went on, I just don't know how important or entertaining it is,

and in order to keep my blog light, I'll just end with

I'm glad spring is near. (I am!)

Happy St. Patricks Day :)

2010-02-24T17:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I'll hear a snippet of something in my voice that will remind me of my grandmother, Marie, and sometimes Steven's grandmother, Margaret. My mother, she's got this too...
It's the hard edged sound of life going too fast, I believe, and then with women they finally look back and realized they were just aiding others in the living of other lives, but not really living fully in their own. Sharp and bitter, they failed to pay attention.

Stop for a few minutes & remember that you are the main character.

Every woman wants to be an old woman one day. Okay, it's either that or die young, given the options, every woman wants to be an old woman one day. Take it easy.

Let your life warm by the sun; be a rock basking iguana stretching a moment into YOUR moment. (I can hear you saying you don't have a moment, this is the problem...they are ALL your moments. Don't you remember?)

Or be a microwave burrito, nuked too long, hard and crispy on the ends, til you've spent your life spinning in circles cooking so bitter that no one wants to eat you anymore.

Which one are you?

Random passing thoughts...

2010-02-19T13:52:00.002-05:00

I drove past a guy driving a truck yesterday morning who looked like a young Fidel Castro. No, make that a middle age-ish Castro. He was wearing a hat. It was a Castro-ish hat. :P
I was listening to Sean Paul while running today, and wondered if everybody thought Sean Paul was cool of if this was one of those weird guilty pleasures.
I saw on Dr. Oz that you have to eat 8 meals in order to poop one. He had a demonstration of a clear pipe that was supposed to be a colon, and they were stuffing it with spaghetti and hot dogs. Well, then I talked to my husband about it and he brought up a good point.

If that's true, Dr. Oz, then why is it you can eat corn and see it again the next day?

The new cat has gone through another several names. I don't remember what she was the last time I was here? Minou/Shin Setsu, I think. Since then we've tried Noodles (didn't take) Iris (i liked, but me alone) People were agreeable enough on Heidi, but I had last minute doubts.

I think today I'll call her Poi.

Poi for today

I just realized I only have twelve minutes to shower before I have to leave...

maybe i'll see you tomorrow :).

Chants of a Lifetime by Krishna Das - Taking me out of my box, or um, making me see i was in the box?

2010-02-17T12:29:00.002-05:00

I’ve tried for many things, sent out many manuscripts, applied for writing jobs, and to be honest, I may very well have lost more essay contests than I care to admit. I try, I fail, then I move on. So I didn’t really expect much when I applied to review Hay House new releases. Though there was no money involved, merely the chance to read books from a publisher I adore, I wrote it off that I’m generally unlucky.
Surprise…I checked the mail and there was package from Hay House. Did I buy anything? I didn’t remember. I pulled out a letter, and realized they picked me. Based on my blog, they chose the first book to be-

Chants of a Lifetime by Krishna Das.

Hmmm. Strange. An awesome opportunity, but a book that seemed completely out of my box. Could I even read an entire book? As strange as it seems, I’d not read an entire book since my brain surgery, chocking it up to eye issues, or perhaps not remembering what I’d read the previous day. Maybe I couldn’t even read it.
But then, maybe I could. Was there any way that the universe would drop this thing into my lap by accident? I decided to try, and here’s my honest review for ya. With love.

Chants of a Lifetime is a book about a man, Krishna Das, and the spiritual path that led him to Chanting. I always thought that my religious views were extremely open. I’m Unitarian Universalist, leaning towards the New Age side of things. I quickly realized how narrow my sight was, when the main character of the book was brought into play…Maharaj-ji. Maharaj-ji is a spiritual leader many Westerners devotedly followed, someone who had incarnated to the point where they were entirely of love.

This was difficult for me, as I grew up with God Energy and no in between. I had no spiritual teacher that I could stick in that spot in order to relate. How could it be that someone could see another in the flesh and feel that kind of love? I had to think about it for a minute, and found a solution that could work in Steve Bell, an old Jewish guy my family dearly loves. A white bearded Psychology professor, Steve once loaned me the book Ishmael, and after reading it, I couldn’t return it. His scribbled notes and underlinings meant that this was something he cared for, and I clung to it as it were sacred, because what he thought good must definitely be.

After a long Halloween full of excitement, including a birthday party, haunted trail, eating junk food at a restaurant, and a Hayride, when asked what my childrens favorite part of the evening was, their reply?
“When Steve called us his Grandchildren…” my husband and I echoed the girls, knowing there was no better place to be than sitting having tea in those tiny cups with Old Steve. So for me, I filled in Steve for Maharaj-ji for as far as it would take me. (Let's not forget Mrs. Bell- pretty spectacular as well as an awesome cook. If you do a search of this blog, you'll find her chicken soup recipe near the beginning).

Krishna’s relationship with Maharaj-ji at times seemed as though he was one of the apostles of modern times writing about Jesus, and I did gain insight, oddly, into the Christian religion through reading this book. Living in the Bible belt, Jesus is quite the celebrity, which I pushed against, thinking about the Hypocrisy of believers than happen to banish all other spiritual paths other than their own. Reading Chants of a Lifetime opened me up to the idea that maybe I needed to expand my own thought patterns; I may have been wrong to relate Christianity to a closed off point of view. The idea that I thought Christians were closed minded showed that not only was I equally closed minded, but reminded me that as a Unitarian, I was supposed to be supportive of everyone’s right to their path. Because I had no guru, I discovered that I didn’t want others to have that either. Because I did not feel there was a difference between how one arrived at their spiritual niche, a part of me felt that someone was only worthy if they accepted all forms as well as their own. That was me being the Hypocrite.

Krishna Das writes,

“We see ourselves as separate and different from other people. On the level of thoughts, physicality, and emotions, we certainly seem to be. This is the “optical delusion,” and yet it is what we experience. My stuff revolves around a different planet than yours. You have your planet, I have mine. But on the deepest level, our planets are actually each a reflection of the same thing- the Self, the One - like the moon reflected in different pools: one moon, same light, many reflections. When the pool of water is calm and there is no debris floating on the surface, all of the reflections are identical. To the extent that we experience that, the way we live our lives changes. The true guru gradually frees us from this “optical delusion,” whether he’s guiding us from “within” as a manifestation of our own true Self, or from another human body that appears to be “outside” of us. Whether or not we meet the guru outside of us at some point in time, all of us have the guru inside as that place within us knows.”

And with this paragraph, I was able to let go of my need to stick a spiritual human guru of my own in place of Maharaj-ji. The true destination is in your heart; finding a place of self love inside you. Seems easy, right? But was I really a fan of me? And if I had to answer that question, it would end up an easy No. But why? And how do I go about becoming a fan of me? Again, I’m going to quote Krishna Das…

“It’s as if we’re living on the front lawn of our own home. We’ve been locked out of ourselves for so long that we forget there is a house to live in. We buy all kinds of stuff and put it on the lawn. Yes, all that furniture and that expensive flat-screen HDTV are on the lawn. Then when they get rained on and ruined, causing us unhappiness, we thinks that’s the way it has to be. We’ve forgotten what a house was for. We’ve forgotten that there even is a house. We’ve forgotten that there is shelter inside of our own hearts.”

Spiritual practice is done in order for us to get back into our ‘house.’ To rediscover that we are all part of a whole, and the whole is Love. This wasn’t too hard for me to comprehend, as it’s something I already believed, but if I’m part of the One- this God Energy, and God = Love, how am I contributing if I am not a fan of me? I’d tried to meditate before, but it just didn’t click. How do you clear yourself of that debris? Even this week, the fact that someone stole my garden gnome from the bike trail was causing me angst. Albeit dorky, I was fretting and wishing that I could implement a surveillance system in the trees. And this wasn’t the first time he’d been stolen. Also, I envisioned bad juju on any location that poor gnome was now placed, in turn placing bad juju in my mind where I placed the thought. How do you meditate with random trivial things stuck in your head? And this is where the Chanting comes in.
Meditating is not the easiest thing to do; and some people cannot begin to quiet their unstill minds. Chanting is a way to get around this. In the repetition of the Name, or these spiritual songs, you have a focus, and that focus does not let your mind drift as easily as say, a quiet room. Things will come and go, but the fact that you have a steady focus makes it easier to leave behind the clutter.
But what do the Chants mean? Good question, and this was something I looked for while reading the book. Who was this? What was that? My analytical mind wanted stories and explanations, and I found none, but the book is written this way for my benefit. Basically, the Energy of the Names = Love. The best way to explain? Again, let’s go with Krishna Das…

“Shirdi Sai Baba has said that Namasmarana, or the constant inward repetition on the Name, is actually God remembering Himself within us. The power of the presence of God is carried in the name:

Beginning with simple repetition, gradually but inevitably,

the Divine power which is hidden in it, is disclosed and takes on the

character of a ceaseless uplifting of the heart, which persists through

The distractions of the surface life.

I love that phrase, “gradually but inevitably.” It means that even if we’re running through a train from the front to the back, in the opposite direction that the train is going, when the train reaches the station, so will we. So much of my life has been spent running in the wrong direction, only to find that I’ve wound up in the right place anyway.

So despite the fact that we don’t know the true meaning of these Names,
Repeating them is still different from just saying the name Frank over and over. By repeating Frank, we remember every Frank we ever know. Many images arise in the mind. But when we say Ram, what image do we get? Most likely, no concrete form appears. And that’s the whole point. The real Ram is not a person we’ve met in our daily life. The real Ram lives in our own hearts and, by repetition of the Name, we are tuning into that essence within us. If it is something we can imagine or make up in our own heads, than it cannot take us beyond our own heads. In this way, the repetition of the Name can free us from our thoughts and allow us to be here in a deeper way.”

In one of his PBS specials (The Power of Intention), Wayne Dyer talks about how even tangible things have an assigned energy. A banana. A rap CD. Everything, living or otherwise, carries an energy. We gather strengths as well as weaknesses from various energies in our day to day lives. This wasn’t hard for me to grasp, and Dr. Dyer’s discussion on Energy was a great prequel to reading Chants of a Lifetime. It made me more open to the idea that chanting could help me be a 'fan of me,' and the repetition of Names that equate Love could cancel out my gnome angst, etc... perhaps make me see how trivial some of my aggravations are.

There are many things in the book I’d love to point out, but my review is quickly turning into a book of it’s own. Are there places where the book falls short?
There were times when I felt a sadness for Krishna Das, especially when he wrote of his own family ties. At times, I felt a Lonely vibe, but maybe I was reading too much into it. There seemed to be some resentment toward his parents, and I would have loved to have seen his marriage be written about in some other way other than it was. I guess in a way, I expected too much, mentally envisioning him as someone so spiritually evolved that he'd be able to let go, or at least form some sort of connection to another imperfect human outside of his Spiritual family. I seeked a sacred bond for him in the form of someone in his family to love, other than Maharaj-ji. But why?
In the end, Krishna Das is just one of us, still working through his stuff through spiritual practice- that's what the books about. :) He is no better, no worse; Das is us. That is pretty much what he means to convey, and perhaps that's why he left things in the book for me to question in those ways. I wish him healing in these areas, because sometimes things that are obstacles are also blessings.

And near the end of the book, I read a passage by Rumi that hit home, and could have definitely been placed closer to the beginning. From the book…

“…I was afraid of everything. And so nothing was happening in my life. This baba saw all of this, and when he showed me- and I saw it- everything began to change.

These spiritual window-shoppers,

Who idly ask, “How much is that?” Oh, I’m just looking.

They handle a hundred items and put them down,

Shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.

But these walk into a shop,

And their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,

In that shop.

Where did you go? “Nowhere.”

What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

Even if you don’t know what you want,

Buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,

Like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference

What people think of you.

Rumi

(on pgs 195-6)

And here I was. Looking around the room at unfinished business, many a half-painted canvas, novels I’d write a hundred pages into, then write then off as unworthy of finishing. Stacks of things I couldn't throw out, but didn’t have time to sort through either. As much as I try to be a positive person, this book has aimed my eyes at places I wasn’t really looking. It is always going to be easier to aim our love outward. The book that was taking me out of my box could have shown me I was in the box, wanting something great to happen but only making a half-assed effort.

Time to go inward & be a gung ho participant. Let’s see where it goes!

I’m looking forward to chanting, and can see that my self defeating prophecies may not always come true, regardless of my manifestations. Thanks to Krishna Das for writing this book, and to Hay House for sending it my way.

http://www.hayhouse.com/details.php?id=4593&utm_id=3313

Here’s to a year of spiritual evolution with Hay House. Go for the ride with me.

Much Love, yours truly :D

Don't get too excited...

2010-02-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

Hi! Hello again :)
I am not too sure where I'll be going with my blog today, but I've found that over the past couple weeks, I've had these 'Aha!' moments, and mentally assured myself I was going to blog about them, only to not remember what they were. So I figure I just need to start writing and see where it takes me.
I watched this movie Towelhead yesterday while I was folding laundry, and at first it was disturbing, then well, Aaron Eckhart is in it and he's kinda sexy, and then he's...well, it get's even more disturbing. Yikes.  (So am I recommending the movie or not? I don't know. I'm confused with that one.)
Airfare to Sweden is on sale! $200 round trip! Which would make it a affordable blast...had I not just watched Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations- Sweden.  I'll have to get the icy cold and the hotdogs wrapped in shrimp salad out of my mind first. He did no favors for the Swede's.
There's a house in my town, a house so brightly lit; a house that doesn't close it's blinds, so that not only can you see the thousands of lights outside the home, you see every lamp inside as well, even while driving rather fast. Oprah says cell phones are dangerous while driving, I say maybe the glowing lighthouse is a distraction as well. This house would no doubt in my mind show up from outer space. (If you know me and my town, you may be able to guess the house.) So why do they do it?  I can imagine that they're alien walk-in's that have a subliminal memory of their home planet, and hope to one day be discovered.
If they are not wanting to be discovered by aliens, then what???
Then I remember I live in the Bible belt. That just makes it obvious they want Jesus to know it's never to late to drop in.  Would they be disappointed if Jesus was a Buddhist?
Or a woman? Or Mexican? Because I'm fruity that way, I then think, well, if they offered Jesus a BLT, would he pick out the bacon? Ah, get over it, I'm just rambling.
My dishwasher had a catastrophe and broke my three favorite mugs. One was a yellow Klingspor mug. Some sort of free mug from one of Steven's sanding machine places. I broke one I'd used for years, and he called the company and they dug one out, but now there are no more. Another was a Paris Cafe mug, of which my sister has a twin. I'd go to her house and see her mug on top of her cabinets, and think, 'Why doesn't she use her mug?'  Now you may think I regret using mine, had I stored it away I would still have it...but then it would've been stored away and I'm radically practical, mostly (the Aquarian in me fights the urge to be quirky).  You have to have sentimental reasons for that-
- ex. Paul Newman gave me this mug. Display it somewhere safe and do not touch it.
- ex. That crazy photo of your great grandmother licking the mug handle? That's the mug! Display that one too.
- ex. Cool mug from Tuesday Morning? Use it.
Because there are other cool mugs. I recently replaced my mugs with all random mugs I bought off of Ebay. The unifying factor is that all the new mugs have varying Gnomes on them. White gnome mugs, yellow gnome mugs. Gnomes on swings, gnomes with pipes, gnomes standing, smiling in their gnomey red hats. Happy.
I had a birthday a couple weeks ago. Happy Birthday to me! :D.
We got a new cat. We've had her a few weeks and still have not come up with a name that sticks. She's been several random things...Two weeks ago she was Minou, but the feminine version of Minette was voted out, and it was too difficult saying the masculine Minou...honestly, I think Steven just hated the name. Last week, Shin Setsu. He loved this one, but if it's harder to spit out than Kitty, it may not stick.
I'm tempted to just call her Enid and get it over with, but when you have a family vote, you can't really do that. Argh.
I'm reading this really cool book, and hopefully I'll be reviewing it over the weekend.
I guess as I hop off I'll just leave you with good energy & hope you have a great day!

Focus on a lightness of being, because that which you focus on grows.

You are what you are. Find it and value it. If you don't, no one else will.

I don't want to paint today.

2010-01-19T08:57:00.000-05:00

I don't want to paint today. Not motivated. Probably I'll just get on my stationary bike and pedal while watching Dr. Oz.
I'm still waiting on my copywrite to come back on Hosseldorf so I start submitting to Literary agencies again. I may have to get off my ass and look into it. (I'm not the most motivated there either. For those of you who are new here, I've been sending off copies of Hosseldorf for almost 8 years, minus the last two. But sometimes I'm still a believer :)...).
And I don't know why I'm back here again today. I don't have anything that interesting to say. Some days you just hit a blank, whether you're writing or painting, or of course when someone asks you a question and you weren't really listening to begin with.
I must try to be a better listener- I do work at it for sure. The other day I listened to my mom talk about her cats for what must've been 45 minutes. Her cat was angry over some sort of displacement or new sleeping arrangement, and she described to me in detail including the sounds the cat made. She did it with kitty attitude, as well. It looked at me sideways, and then it said, "Yeoww!!" Ah, but of course, she did it with a French accent.
The fact that I can remember my mothers story about her displaced cat may actually prove that I'm a pretty good listener. (I hope my mother never finds my poor blog, lol.)
But don't quiz me on it.
so I haven't anything interesting for you today, just a block of my inner workings. You too?
We should probably do something about it.
I'm a firm believer that hot coffee can release some inner workings, but that's another subject... it's just hard for me to ignore such an obvious lead to potty humour.
I'm fruity that way. :D.
The other day at the table, we were eating rotisserie chicken.
My little one started yelling, "Show me your bone!" How can you not giggle at times like this? You could say it shows my immaturity. I can say that any opportunity that comes across where you can find that inner goofball and have a laugh should maybe not be missed.
You lose this part, the laughing you, as you get older. Me too. So maybe random phrases like Show Me Your Bone! come out of childrens mouths elbowed by little guides from the other side, to give you the chance to find a moment. Because it only is a moment.
So, Woody Harrelson has this documentary on the Terror's of Milk. He has incredible points, and the mention of blood and pus in milk that has to be pasteurized and the cows are so ill does make me queasy. He and his family are this dope smoking, ultra-vegan health folk (I'm not saying this in a negative way, it just factual. Ask him yourself!)
So he's riding his bike and he's explaining health things you can eat and drink, and he's got all these kids, but that bad bad voice in my mind says,
"Wouldn't you like to babysit those kids for a day? And would you take them to sonic and feed them chili cheese dogs and Cream Pie Shakes?"
It's Tom & Jerry and the lil angel tom & lil devil tom and not me at all. There is obviously a cartoon cat on my shoulder.
Today I'm praying for the Democrats in Massachusetts. Please let them remain victorious, and I'm sure they have at least one angel watching out for them. His name is Kennedy.

~have a sweet day~

Aol thinks i need a flat iron but...

2010-01-18T21:50:00.002-05:00

Get Sleek hair with a new flat iron!

Why?
So you can have smooth sleek hair!
but what if I want hair that's tangly and wild and I just don't care about being so sleek? What if I want to not brush my hair for three days? And incidentally, on those three days, perhaps I want to wear the same jeans everyday? The ones that have been cut but not mended on the bottoms but are cosy and if I don't get paint on them or salsa they look relatively clean?
But you always get salsa on them.

Oh snap. well let's say I don't eat mexican food for a week?
let's not. Change your jeans. brush your hair. You have daughters, do you want them to have hair like cotton candy?

kat

so sometimes there's a constant battle between me and a self defeating prophecy;
It's like a song with meaning that is so uncomplicated everyone already knows it.
It's the burned in our head,'If you can't say anything good, say nothing at all.'
Fear can drive you and put that phrase into being with actions replacing the words part.
It's Alfred E. Newman saying 'Why Bother?' but then you know
it's good that he bothered, because you remember his smiley face.
Albeit kooky or dorky he was smiling
& you remember it.
Let's make a deal today, you don't say 'Why bother?'
& I'll try not too either. :)

Didn't think I'd resurface, did ya?

2010-01-17T18:55:00.000-05:00

Hello all!
Hope everything's been going well! I know I'm a bad bad bad blogger. Bad. I've been away for far too long. What have I been up to all this time?
Well, I went to Barbados (I plan to write a detailed report as soon as I get it all mapped out in my head. ?)
I'm painting a 4 ft tall banana! :D
Sometimes you get this little voice in your head that says to do something, and I went with it. It's surprising how painting so much yellow can really perk you up. Due to the size, I may look to cheap galleries that may take my oddities on.
It's been quite the tundra here. Cold. I don't like the cold, so I find myself frequently drifting off to the land of cheap and free flowing rum punch. (Mentally, not literally. Literally I'm more of a coconut water kind of girl, but 'when in Bridgetown, you do as the Bajans do' and they have mastered the rum punch, baby!)
I've grown some bangs, which makes me very happy.
I've had a sore throat since I've been back to the US, and done the unthinkable- I Google it. Apparently I have a wicked case of either tetanus (cross your fingers I live through it) the teen whoreish mono (I'm an angel! Could my sweet man have visited an Asian spa? Yikes.) or tonsillitis. I have to repeat this once again, as I've said it before & I still agree with it-

NEVER GOOGLE AN ILLNESS.

However, if you came across this blog by googling Brain Aneurysm, keep reading. Whatever insight I've got from that has been hard to come by, and the number one thing is that fear of an unknown something is the worst part. Once that something has come and gone, you are uphill from there...as long as you think 'uphill.' Be happy.

I'll be back soon with a few pages on What Where to do things with kids in Barbados (including a lovely opinion on whether or not to travel with laxatives & what kind. Ha. No, seriously.)

much love, Kat

PaPaYa Art

2009-10-22T11:49:00.000-04:00

http://http://www.papayaart.com/category.jhtm?cid=2

my find of the day...papayaart.com. Love them :)

2009-10-22T08:10:00.000-04:00

Long time no see!

I'm really sorry bout that, I've had a lot of catching up to do at home, and it's still not caught up. But I am still around somewhere, though not here too much. How's it going?

Me, I'm good. I've come out of the rough patch that was the summer of 09, and two months later, am in the 'looking forward to the winter of 09' stage.

We got our passports renewed! We're going on vacation. A real vacation, which includes a plane. The kids are beyond excited- they've never been on a plane, which is cool that we can do this. We talked about it for the past six or seven years, but never could go. This year, my husband booked our trip. We'll be spending Christmas on an island, and I may even hold back on the SPF a day or so, just to come back to the tundra with a wee bit of sun. :)

We needed to counter the stress with something happy, and I'm thrilled.

My transmission is going out on the jeep. It stalls out at red lights and stop signs so I have to crank it back up when the light turns green. I went on Autotrader looking up minivans, with the common white honda odyssey being the ideal, then going downhill from there. I found a Nissan Quest with not too many miles, and called about it. The trade in value on my jeep is $500!

My husband said he'd sooner but a brick on the gas and roll it off an cliff somewhere. (We won't). But then, while looking up used vans, I just glanced a wee bit at the Volvo XC90- what I would drive if I could just click my heels. "Why don't we just get that?" he says. He's sweet, and perhaps overly optimistic.

Dr. Oz was on this week, with his audience member assistant. Where is the triangle of death? he says. Turns out, it's your nose. Picking it is bad- he went on pretty convincingly, but I am too tired to elaborate. Already, I am aware I spend too much time in there, so I am going to do my best to cut back.

Dr. Oz. ha.

I've noticed little things since I've had surgery, and for those of you who read this that are about to have a craniotomy, I'll throw it in.

A few times a week I'd bump my teeth really hard with my coffee cup. Sometimes I just turn the cup before I get to my teeth and pour my drink on my shirt. I think this is common and no big deal, so if this happens to you just bring the cup to your face more slowly, or buy a mouthguard. I'm kidding about the mouthguard.

I'm a little dopier, but I'm trying. I haven't taken any kind of medication (including over the counter stuff like advil) since about two weeks after surgery, and I'm doing great!

I painted my toenails for the first time since I had surgery this week. Essie Rock the Croc Red.

Great color. (Essie makes awesome nail polish. It does not chip. Ever.)

Well, i just wanted to drop in. ;)

my love

2009-09-17T19:36:00.000-04:00

my love

Random thoughts...

2009-09-06T19:33:00.000-04:00

I'm having difficulty getting my 10 year old to go along with our Halloween plans. She thinks she's absolutely too grown.
"Can't I be a witch or a fairy?" she tells me. No. No, No, No. This year, we're going as a group project, we're building a special memory. Her trick or treating years are limited, isn't it a great idea to start building a special memory? And perhaps it's the toil of '09 that's made a family changed, we've been given a new sense of urgency & appreciation; Appreciation for things we would never do, and also things we said we may one day do but never took seriously.
We're in a way now forced to take life less seriously, because the fact is one of the greatest parts of taking life more seriously is taking it less so. (Yes, there you have my thought for the day. In order to take life more seriously, you must take it less seriously. It makes sense after awhile.)
Because sometimes folks stifle their joy in order to be serious.
So I believe we're going to have to pay her. She says she'll do it for $100, but we think it's steep. I have a month to talk her down to $25. Honestly though, if Steven can agree be Tinky Winky, then what's she got to worry about? (That's right, baby, there's four of us & four of them.)
With insurance and hospital bills, brain surgery and its after effects, is it so wrong to want to have one trivial afternoon? One day to be silly? Hmmm.
I had this strange dream last night. I was out with friends, shopping or hanging out (which is strange, because I do not have friends with which I shop or hang out. Not one, let alone 3-4. I'm honestly not that friendly. And perhaps living in the South, when someone fails to convert me to their religion, I get frequently sacked. It's no big deal.)
Oh! So anyhow, these friends and I go to an Indian Restaurant. I'm a huge fan of Indian food, so this is pretty normal. But then I'm glancing over the menu, and notice a strange item.

Raccoon Curry

"Is that actual raccoon?" I ask the waitress. "Yes," she informs me, "it is real raccoon in a curry sauce." Oooh, I am thinking and discussing with my friends, about to order the exotic feast! "I've never had raccoon before!"

Then I woke up.

Completely the end of my raccoon tasting experience. They say dreams are suppose to teach you something, or maybe they're symbols. I wonder what Raccoon Curry means, and for some strange reason the idea of it doesn't completely offend me.

My mother mentioned today she wants to read my blog. "How do I get to it?" she asks. Hmmm.

My sister brought us supper today (thanks, you rock!) and sat next to me at the table while mom repeated her eloquent reading of David Sedaris, this time a chapter from Holidays On Ice. That's where her money be, I tell her. Sedaris books on tape in her priceless accent. It's a money idea. Though this chapter ended with a baby named Satan Speaks washed and dried in a machine. Not very holiday friendly, Mr. Sedaris. Just plain wrong! Hope the next chapter, entitled Dinah, the Christmas Whore, is easier for my mother to read. :)

Thanks for stopping in ~ Have a really great day...

Rest in Peace Halle

2009-09-04T12:57:00.000-04:00

Hello!

Just wanted to stop in for a moment. I'm still recovering, but better each day. My left eye, still gimpy. I've informed my husband he's now in charge of shaving my left armpit, I just can't see it. I go back to my NS next week, and he may possibly clear me for driving. It scares me a little since my vision is so bad, and they tell me it may take three months for this eye to heal. But I may be back in traffic next week (?) . Part of me needs to, I'm out of canvas, and no one will buy it.

When I look in the mirror, the hair sorta reminds me of when Naomi cut the ponytail off the front of her head. Like a childs first do it yourself haircut, lol! It's okay.

We're having a funeral for our cat today. She was sitting in the lawn watching the birds at the birdfeeder, and a pit bull and another dog came and killed her. She'd been our cat for almost seven years. I've had a sick feeling in my stomach all day. I'll miss her big orange moony eyes, and I suppose now it could be you'll think I'm one of those weird cat people, but here's a video of my sweet cat from last year on YouTube-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro2L_7lj1j0

I just don't feel well. Rest in Peace, Miss Halle Berry.

You were a good cat, and black cats are highly underrated.

Home Again

2009-08-23T13:18:00.000-04:00

I'm home!

Can't say I'll be extremely productive, as I have a gimpy eye for a while, and typing with one eye is currently challenging. Seems they cut certain muscles in your face when you have brain surgery, and these include muscles that connect to your jaw and make chewing and yawning painful, and muscles to the eye on that side that make your eyelid funny and the eye is in a painful mode right now, but in another month I've been told it'll all be normal again.

The hair surprisingly doesn't bother me in the least. My mother tells me the scar is a 9" question mark across the top of my head. Funny. If anyone were to have a question mark carved into their scull, it figures it would be me. It's okay.

Today I get to shower.
For the first time.
Since I left. I have been able to sit in a shower chair a couple times and clean myself, but the idea of running water on my head wasn't possible until today. Friday they pulled the staples out of my head. I brought a sandwich bag as I felt it was necessary to keep them.

I'm eager to be myself again. I'm eager to shop, and drive, and paint. I'm eager to put my makeup on though my husband tells me I don't need it. Considering I cannot leave the house for another month, I guess I won't stress about the makeup too much. I'm not able to read at the moment, but my mother has been humouring me, reading David Sedaris books to me outloud in her perfect for books on tape French accent. Everyone should be so lucky. It's especially funny when she reads words like 'fucking', it makes me happy to hear my mother read this out loud, and my husband even snuck in and sat listening, commenting how funny it was that she read those words out loud. She tells him she can't leave any words out.

This is how precious mon mere is.

I hope that I'll be talking about something else soon, trust that I'm as eager to get over this consuming mess as anyone. I can walk myself to the bathroom. I had to get to this point, as there was a time people were holding bendy straws to my face and feeding my with spoons. I've made lots of progress. I can open both my eyes, but one gives me vertigo.

Sleeping is strange as I cannot turn over on that side. The nurse told me it was fine to wear a scarf in the event that I would be out in public and may shock people. I never considered the other people as far as this matter; I don't care much if I shock someone. My husband tells me that's a benefit of having a giant scar on your head. He's funny. I think soon I may have to paint a self portrait with my question mark head. I was painting a geisha before I went to the hospital.

I don't talk about the painting too much, as I am not the most confident in that area...but I enjoy it and will come back with crazy vigor when I can see.

I'm okay. & I'm getting better everyday. Thanks for stopping in :)

so I'm off

2009-08-06T08:04:00.000-04:00

One thing I noticed about hospital parking decks,
the rear view mirrors full of raggedy stuffed animals.
Car after car of them.
& sick people.
& today before I leave I resent both the sick people
and the rearview mirrors with their tigers
and kittens and doggy plushies.

I feel a wave of hostility and I cannot explain why.
& I cannot imagine 5 days in a hospital.
How am I gonna crap when I'm not in the comfort of my own
sweet john?
I'll be so stopped up. Stopped up, stapled. bald.

Steven says going in the hospital is just like having the girls.
"sure, I say, but without the baby."
I have to leave now.

The baby brings me her pink elephant plushie
& I'm taking it with me, loved & holey, ketchup stained.
But that doesn't make me the rear window lady.

I have to go now.

Stay Salty, Stay Funky. (that's the Kettle Chip logo, but I likes!)

Full Moon

2009-08-03T21:30:00.000-04:00

Hello, people!
I'm having a wee bit of brain surgery Thursday, August 6th. Full Moon.
I came to write my passwords down in case I don't remember them.
I think the other night I heard deer hooves on the driveway.
Nasty flower eating creatures.
I couldn't sleep, I just sat up waiting to hear them again, or maybe just trying to see if that's the thing I was actually hearing.
I'm feeling really sad.
I'll be home next week but not home online, just home.

Wish my awful week away. Wish me to blink and be here again, recovered.
And if you've stopped in by accidentally Googling Brain Aneurysms or brain surgery,
feel free to comment with any questions you may have.
By then I may have some answers.
It'll pass.

We ate out food Steven brought home. I got a Dr. Pepper, a fountain Dr. Pepper. It's been years since I'd had one. "How come you get a drink?" The wee one asks.
"I have Princess powers this week. All week." The looming cranial cracking grants me wishes, red shimmery Dorothy slippers that come with a heavy price.

but There's no place like home.

I discover that I don't really like Dr Pepper anymore.

& I bought some banana republic jeans for $9.99.

much love, yt

Retrospect, Monday, November 21, 2005

2009-07-17T12:45:00.000-04:00

My blog readership has hit its all time low, and we all know my mind is on other things than blogging at the moment. With what's looming ahead I just can't focus.

So I give you a time when I could. Here's Monday, November 21, 2005

Hurrah! Hurray! Harumph! ?... I don't know exactly why I decided to start that way, but it felt right at the moment. Shouldn't we all begin things with a hurrah & hurray sometimes?
(Actually I had a great first sentence, but it was lost in the typing of Hurrah...)

Steven hooked up my dishwasher yesterday! As I still don't have the rest of my kitchen, the dishwasher is probably what was the most necessary thing at the moment. Dishes were on every surface in my home, piling up in my tub, my sink; the cups stacking and teethering, pots and pans and their friends gaining strength in the army that I foresaw overthrowing my home. We were digging through papers on the tables. Where did all the spoons go?
Ah, but I've loaded them, filled my dishwasher with ammunition, and faught and won the was at last. There is not a dish (in sight) in here no more...unless you count the one in my fridge. You know the one, that one bowl that completes my set, but has been in there covered in aluminum foil since, I'm guessing May? July? I stood in contemplation, staring at the bowl, then closing the door. I'm too scared. I have no idea what it ever was, but likely it will see the can one day.
What else is new?
We went to a Baptist funeral this weekend, which I thought was going to be excruciating. You know how the Baptists are always trying to convert you at the funerals. Naomi cried real tears, but didn't know who they were for. Shanna smacked her gum and wanted to go home.
Afterwards, theres a dinner, and we followed along. Turns out I met this interesting man. An incredible, interesting man. (Yes, I remember I'm married.)
An incredible, interesting, 84 year old man. Happy Lee was the son of sharecroppers, went on to college, then to become one of the most outstanding democrats I've met. He worked under a few presidents (JFK & Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter) worked with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, and in 2004, was the first recipient of the Gandhi Foundation Lifetime Acheivement Award. At the same ceremony, Coretta Scott King won the Gandhi Peace Award.
Now in the early stages of Alzheimers, he looked at my husband in shock when he told him his name. "Steven Lee? Steven Lee?" Walking him to his wife, "Look, this is Steven Lee!" We found he'd had a son that passed away named- Stephen Lee.
"He died at 40 from a brain tumor, but before that he was a veterinarian, and you know, he invented this contraption..." With pride, he told us about this thing that tied (?) to a horses vagina (yes, he used that word...about 6 times, hee hee) and when the horse went into labor, the cord broke, and it automatically called three people and told them which horse was having her baby. They use this all around the world, we learned. If you can find a copy of Happy's book, I recommend it.
Man, I haven't even covered yesterday at church yet. I know I don't have room or time, but it was bread communion. (Everybody brings bread or soup). Steve Bell brought Matza ball soup. The Matza are all different sizes, he said. He went on to tell a story. (Here goes)
There were these two old women who only got one meal a day, and today there was this pot with broth and two matza, a big one and a small one. They stared at the soup and faught over who would go first. Finally, one goes first, and ladles out the big one. The other woman looks on in disbelief. "I can't believe you took the big one! How selfish!" Ranting and raving about the others large ball, the woman with her bowl full said, "Well, which one would you have taken?"
"The small one!"
"And that's what you got!"
And the moral of the story is before you go complaining about getting the short end of the stick, maybe thats what you asked for. (I think. I'm not quite as eloquent as Dr. Bell).

Oh! And the whole thing about him calling Irene! I have to tell you this, then I'm done, promise. Okay, he turns to Irene.
"Good. You got my call you bring soup or bread."
"No, you didn't call me."
"I did. I left a message on your machine."
"I don't have a machine."
"Isn't your number XXX-XXXX?"
"No, that's not my number."
"Oh."
about 20 minutes later...
Woman walks in with a covered dish.
"Where is Steve Bell?"
"I'm Steve."
"Did you call me?"
"Did I call you?" laughing, "Is your number XXX-XXXX?"
"Yes!"
"Yeah, I did call you. Who are you?"
"Gracia. I don't know who you were, but I thought maybe I just didn't remember. So I brought the soup." Okay, it doesn't translate to be as incredible as it was, but it was awesome. There are no coincedences. Irene looked over, "But I know her!"
Gary looked over, "Me too! She used to be in my Tai Chi class!"
Gracia was a wonderful addition to our day. So full of life, and did I mention she speaks 6 languages? Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, English, & Turkish! Wow. She is going to come back to our Hannukah, and she's Catholic (On her way to UU?) :)
And little did I know we'd be discussing the items we brought in front of the congregation.

There I was, the first from the left, starting with...the Left. I brought Wheat Thins. (I have no kitchen! Who knew. I'll do better next time)

Happy turkey Day! Much Love as always, Kat Lee

this is Steve Bell :)

How to Survive Your Cerebral Angiogram!

2009-07-16T13:18:00.000-04:00

My doc made the cover!!! Woo hoo!

Also, I lived through the cerebral angiogram, and after my experiences with the damned thing, I'm going to suggest ways it can be better for you if you are needing to have this same procedure done.

Dr. Frank Tong at Emory was the Doctor that performed my C.A., and after we got home, my husband's words-

"I've never met a nicer doctor in my life."

I believe that Tong makes an uncomfortable procedure better because of a kind nature that put me at ease. Palpable integrity, easily put.

Jeff Steinig, Karen Patterson, & Norma Jeans confirmation name is Kathleen... :) hello!

Here are a few steps to make your Cerebral Angiogram a tad easier :).

1. Forget your new panties at home. You will not get to wear them. (I know, I wanted to wear my new panties too. forget it.) They don't call it 'groin' for nothin. However, during your procedure, you are on a heated table, and are covered, um, mostly. When you read other more medically stout sites and they say thing like, "they will shave, scrub, and sanitize the groin area" this does not mean your entire groin area. Actually, you can stick those knees closed tight if indeed it makes you feel less exposed. The ' my ass is in the air' fear is the very least of your worries. (although, I have to tell you that the guy before me that was having the same procedure was pulling the side of his gown trying to cover his exposed ass- but unfortunately, was pulling it the wrong way. I sat horrified watching his naked ass all the way down the hall. Horrified because their were tons of people there, and yikes, that could be me.)

2. Schedule your procedule as early as possible. Things happen. My C.A. got delayed by almost 4 hours, due to a hospital emergency. Scheduled for 2 pm, this means I did not eat since the night before, and the procedure didn't end until nearly 7. Then, you have to lay flat for 4-6 hours, so you have an opportunity to be extremely weak at that point. I could not wait to go home, yet when the nurse had me walk down the hall and back before I could leave, I passed out cold. I had to stay an extra 45 minutes while they got a new bag of IV fluids in me. Personally, I think they should have given the IV bag when I got in the room while I waited the 4 hours. If you are scheduled at an earlier time you may not need this, though. Just in case, bring a big bottle of gatoraid and a bendy straw. In retrospect, I'd get an earlier time, but I'm hoping this won't be something I'll have to go through again. So this is just a suggestion for your sake :).

3. They can put a mild sedative in your IV bag. But not unless you ask for it! I was extremely nervous, but did not actually get the sedative. They forgot. But it was okay, I survived, it really was not so bad. But I say go ahead and ask for it for comforts sake. Also, I closed my eyes almost the entire time- the spaceship technology, hospital atmosphere, and bright lights can be daunting- but you can zone out if you close your eyes. Pretend you are lying in a tanning bed, ha! Chit chat with your Doctor. You'll be fine & it'll be over before you know it.

4. Don't move, don't breathe, don't swallow...This is what they tell you when they shoot the dye in your head. You hold your breath, then they repeat this as they film your arteries. I don't know if explaining the exact feeling of this would be a good or bad thing, because my description will make it sound worse than it is. You'll see some little white lights in your eyes. You'll feel a 'fizzy' feeling in your neck. And you head will feel like it is being filled with hot fluids? It's just strange. I personally feel that all med students should have this done for personal experience sake before they are allowed to perform this procedure on someone else, but that's just me.

5. The worst part of my experience was-A. The fear of the thing. and B. The IV needle. The fear. I'm chicken little, so the idea of it was scary. But the idea of lots of things are scary. My IV needle was poked in my wrist at an angle and I felt it scratching me the entire time, especially with movement. But I have crappy veins for IVs, and you'll do better for sure.

Good luck to ya :)

My Etsy Find of the Month

2009-07-11T14:17:00.000-04:00

My Etsy find of the Month is by artist Treasure Frey...I think she's amazing.

I just ended up running across this and felt it really relates. http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=24006939

2009-07-09T16:06:00.000-04:00

I'm not really in a letter writing mood so much.
I initially thought I'd quit blogging until fall, then resume my blog when I felt better. But then, probably from googling brain aneurysms and surgery so much, I figured I'd document some of the little events that led up to my lovely summer of brain funk & maybe it will help somebody, or even guide someone through what they may themselves experience when diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.
It started when I got a severe allergic reaction. Which led to all sorts of other things, including severe headaches. My doc decided we should get an MRI. The MRI is not so scarey, just expensive as hell. And the MRI man tells me I have terrible nonexistant veins, so he stuck me twice in the first arm, then when he started sticking the second arm, I was slightly nervous. But it's okay.
Initially, they said they thought I had a congenital AVM, which is a abnormal vein you are born with. Another MRI & MRA later, they called my husband and told him i had an unruptured brain aneurysm. My uncle died at 44 in his sleep from a brain aneurysm. My aunt died from a brain aneurysm as well. Two of my mothers siblings. It makes me worry for my mother a bit.
Our neurosurgeon happens to be Dr. Barrow at Emory, and I feel like he's a good choice. I hope he's a Jew, you know your good and safe with a Jew. But who knows. (I'm just being silly...that's the Kat Lee in me coming out. "Look for a good Jew name!" I tell my husband. "Like what?" "You know, something that ends in Man or Berg or has Stein in it..." Barrow doesn't sound Jewish, but his first name is Daniel. So it's a toss up.)

The neurosurgeon tells me my syptoms are completely unrelated.
It's just an extra little thing to work out.
They don't actually cut your brain, they go in between the left and right brain somehow.
That is comforting, I think.
Atlanta traffic is a nightmare.
Steven's trying to work his way in, and he's partly in and a suburban rushes past, doesn't let him thru. He yells Cocksucker, rolls the window down, and he spat on the car. I'm looking at him like he's crazy. Who is this man? It's his birthday. :)
He comes to sit down on the sofa when we're home. I'd put my lawn chair under the giant oak, the one with all the moss, and I sat there the other day, half napping. I left my chair under the oak, and his was still on the patio.
"I moved my chair," he tells me. "It looked lonely and I don't like your chair being so far from mine." He'd gone out and dragged his chair across the field. Every day should be his birthday.
He needs my keys to turn the airbag on. I can't find them.
"Look at my purse!"
"What?" he says. The giant orange bottles are taking up too much space.
"It looks terrible! I don't want to be one of those ladies with pill bottles filling their purses..." and I gripe and complain until I'm not anymore.
I try to blog, then give up. I then reread my little letter and wonder where the symmetry went. My flounce. My swagger. (That makes me laugh! I keep hearing that term, & was just waiting for a chance to use it...though I'm not exactly full of literary swagger.) Where was I? I just ran downstairs to hit the timer on dinner, talked to my friend, took a valium, and now I'm back.
No fussing with me about the valium, people. I firmly believe that valium helps me with the whole little 'aneurysm thing'. Though I don't take them everyday, only on days where I have to talk about it. If your doctor calls you and say that you have a brain aneurysm, go on and request your valium then. Preferably the 10's. I have 5's currently, and only take them when I'm forced to talk about it or get too curious and google brain surgery.
(Could be how you got here...Don't Google. It'll only make you feel bad. Look up something completely separate from your issue...Like new tile flooring or Etsy.com. Googling will only make you cry.)

Talking about it is much harder than having the damn thing. It's like having a giant freaking mole on your forehead, it doesn't get away from you, but you surely don't want to have to talk about it. And it can start with your mother or sister knowing, or one friend. Then, you're getting calls from your sisters ex-husband and old neighbors, and they want to know how your doing. Which is nice. But mostly, you don't want to talk about it. You want to talk about Michael Jackson and if it'll rain and the stupid but out of the blue status reports on Facebook. You want to talk about stuff other than it.
But today, I guess I thought I'd talk about it. Get it out in the open.
I'm so happy I found it.
I'm so lucky too. I know. Happy & lucky. :). But a wee stressed.

My friend told me on the phone she'd shave her head when they shaved mine.
"What? They don't do that, do they?"
(That was the trigger that led to me taking the above valium...) I am not yet sure about the head shaving thing, but I will keep you informed.
Next Tuesday, I go for the next test, where they run dye into the artery near my groin, into my brain, and it gives them a 3-D scan. One doctor called this a Angiogram, another a Cerebral Arteriogram. While not interesting, I'll probably blog next week about that, because Googling it made me feel slightly ill, and I had hoped I could read someone's simplified version of what it's actually like. I'm hoping it's no big deal. Also, I'm hoping they drug me heavily.
They said my aneurysm surgery could be done as early as the following week after that.
I would kind of like to take the kids to see the new Harry Potter first. I've read about people not remembering things, not being able to spell afterwards...I figure I'll blog and we can see how it turns out.
I'd like to focus on Fun soon. Some sort of vacation maybe. Steven says I can pick where we go, which is cool. He wants water; I'm not so much into water, & prefer Historic things, like the Parthenon, but cheaper. A nice Euro garden, which my kids would not be thrilled with.
Maybe Barbados. I hear there are monkeys there. Who doesn't love monkeys? We save our change in a big water bottle. It won't get us the parthenon, but I'll be happy with a monkey or two!
My Ravi Shankar ringtone is playing but I don't recognise the number. I don't answer.
More later. Kat :)

2009-06-30T14:18:00.000-04:00

DON'T LET TROUBLE FESTER

It is a good rule to face difficulties at the time they arise and not allow them to increase unacknowledged.

Edward W. Ziegler

One's objective should be to get it right, get it quick, get it out, and get it over.

You see, your problem won't improve with age.

Warren Buffett

i was thinking perhaps my aneurysm was insignificant enough that perhaps it could

remain in its spot, unperturbed...These were today's quote's of the day in my email box. ?.

I'm hanging in there! :)

Debbie Downer Day

2009-06-25T18:39:00.000-04:00

I was sitting here thinking about how salty my tears were, slobbery faced,

and, yikes, it has been a while, hasn't it..

So I go to open this email that has little recipe things but I only open them to read

the little quotes which are usually really cute.

Today's Quotes Were

When you get into a fight with a bear, you don't get tired until the bear gets tired.

Coleman Young

Only fitting, I s'pose.

Today I was told I have a brain anuerysm.

I've discovered MRI's and MRA's, and needle happy people that scare me. I can tell you I have had a crippling headache for days on end. I can also tell you that I'm gonna eat the hell out of some gluten when I get over this mess. (Turns out my sickness was never a gluten allergy.)

I think I'm supposed to see a neurosurgeon tomorrow. I'm not even sure; my husband is in change of all the doctor stuff. I did yell out while he was on the phone with her that I should get a mandatory supply of valium with any news like that and, Wee, my wish be granted.

Is that how to spell Wee.. Like the Wee when you get pushed on a swing,

not the wee my kids do in the pool. I just blew my nose on my shirt. There are no tissues in here and I'd have to drag my ass downstairs, so the shirt is making do. And it doesn't actually bother me to say the fact out loud. I'm too old to care about snot on a shirt, I guess. Or maybe it's just that I feel like shit.

Mind you, snot on jeans would be a completely different story.

Sorry I haven't been blogging. Frankly, I've just not been well. Please hang in there and wait for me to be back to my old self soon. :).

(It'll happen. And I'll be funny again.) much love, yours truly

oh, hey, today's my 100th post! um.. yeah. lovely.

Race Car Bed

2009-06-10T21:56:00.001-04:00

I was looking on Craigslist for used furniture and I saw

that someone was selling a Little Tykes Racecar Bed in Full Size.

I have no sons nor a guest room, but if I ever were to have a guest room,

perhaps when I'm old as hell, I shall buy the little tykes full racecar bed

and subject grown friends and relatives to sleeping on it whenever they stop in to visit...

I'll act like I don't notice that it may be odd or unfashionable,

but in fact, I'll go to sleep in my own bed smiling.

Sick Day

2009-06-09T17:51:00.000-04:00

I could actually feel that you were missing me?
It be a palpable thing, and though I'm not having an all that interesting week,
I thought I'd check in. How are ya?
I've been covered in hives this week due to some sort of food allergy. My throat is choked as though an invisible hand has me by the gullet, could be some red twizzlers are to blame. I'm itching and scratching and debating the last momentous words I'll utter, because, when I have a food allergy, I become kitten in the ocean, thrown; anxious and surely dying. With the driven in knowledge my grandmere gave to mon mere, and she to me, I go about getting dressed. I choose carefully my underpants, heaven forbid I arrive in an emergency room in my neon yellow with fuschia ribboned thong, or worse those God awful time-of-the-month panties. My smart but ill mind thinks it best to wear a black or pale flesh toned boy short underpant, just in case.
I stand before you (make that sit before you. Slumped, for that matter, in a backless chair...) and try to make sense of the world. I imagine my dead self visiting loved ones with the invisible power everyone wished they had but not to the extent of the dead ghost kind. The thought quickly creeps me out, so I start to envision a less 'dead' power, like say, hovering three feet over the ground in a yoga guru pose.
So I'm in guru mode, and all I can think of is what a great idea it would be to have full length mirrors on the inside of the doors of bathroom stalls. I wonder about my guest bathroom, and why I couldn't have thought of that sooner, a full length mirror directly opposite the john, that your guests may watch themselves lay eggs in the moment.
I enjoy the idea, then decide it's too vulgar for my imaginary guru self. Were my true self able to hover, I'd teach a class- because hovering would make me worthy, right?- and all bathroom stalls would be equipped with mirrors.
"Why mirrors?" Pupil says to teacher. I'd vary my answers on a day to day basis, with quotes like,
"To know self, pupil must see humble moment," or ,"Man can not know what chicken go through without first seeing his own eyes lay egg," and it would all fly because I could hover. Without being dead. Ah, yes, I should write the Mah Jong fortunes :D.
Toilet eggs turn in my mind, and I'm then thinking of corn and how Food Lion had corn on the cob ten for a dollar. Corn on the cob and watermelon are two of our favorite summery things, and I jump off topic from one end of the...um, spectrum, to the other.
We watched a great zombie movie this week, called Fido. I highly recommend this one. If you can find it, it'll be a treat! Take the kids to see it. (It's harmless, really). I think it's on the independent film channel or sundance. I readily admit I watch too much of these channels. Can't get enough. Who doesn't want to sit down with a few slices of supreme and watch Rickie Lake give birth? The Business of Being Born- seriously, watch before you give birth. I especially love when they have very foreign numbers; not your standard French or Japanese film, but those rare Greenlander moments, when characters are trudging through waist high snow.
My gluten free withdrawals are making me cranky, as I'm on week three now. I wrote this short story about this cranky old woman, only to discovered cranky comes way too easy. (But I feel any emotion at all beats ambivalence).
I took the girls on a playdate to a friends, which is rare for me. My good friend lives in a palace with labyrinth corridors, and every time I visit, the home seems to have grown a room or two. Several types of doughnuts sit atop the kitchen bar, and my kids pass the bag of powdered.
"Guess you won't be going to Daylight Donuts everyday after swim this summer?" No. No daylight donuts. I smell refined carbs and see myself licking the powdered sugar off the wee baby's fingers, were my friend not two feet away; and of course, were the baby not known for scratching her booty with her nails when she wipes. So the thought escapes, and i don't miss the donuts too much.
I watched as my friend thawed chicken in the microwave, then stuck it directly on the grill. No fancy marinade, not even a shake of pepper. The little ends are nuked white. I cringe. There are hundreds of ways to cook chicken. This is one I'm fearsome of. I feel the French superiority gene rise the hairs on my nape.
"I'm having a girls night out party Saturday, you want to come?" Mojito's, she tells me. I watch the chicken and feel concern for my friend, suddenly volunteering to cook for these unknown ladies. Later, safely in my right mind, I think of excuses. The idea of complete strangers is a crippling one, and Hermit Kat has a social circle of approximately four. Two of these are my children. Party? Me? My eyes took turns swelling shut last week and it could likely happen at any moment. So we'll see.
I'm feeling proud as I've not yet succumbed to Twitter. I jones for Facebook in the mornings and hearing Oprah toot the Twitter horn made me curious...but I didn't go. Like my friends halls and secret dwellings, I fear I'd get lost there, and I only have so many hours in the day.
Here are twenty minutes, just for you, my friends, my wee internet social circle.
I'm sorry I haven't written more, but I'll try and do better...

ReRoute

2009-06-05T14:07:00.000-04:00

Steven left a giant salamander in a casserole dish in front of the coffee maker this morning. Like the hunter men of old, I can only hope it's not 'What's For dinner'...and if so, please email all of your scrumptious but gluten free salamander recipes over to me, hell, just write them in the comments, that would be excellent...

I'm rerouting you to this blog I read today because it's just that good, and since I really am not in an entertaining mood, here's a blog entry from Petunia Face, one I only wish I'd written myself...

http://petuniafacedgirl.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-time-and-impermanence.html

enjoy :)

Retrospect (Thursday, May 18, 2006)

2009-06-03T09:12:00.000-04:00

Still covered in hives. Still itching. The cat came back home.
So another Retrospect day for ya. (Don't be bummed; I am actually having to type the thing in.)
Stacks of old stuff. So here's Thursday, May 18, 2006

Sitting here with a bowl of sour cream and a side of microwaved burrito, I decided to say hello. I wasn't going to write today. Actually, I haven't felt like writing in a while, but I got a sign.
There was a man standing on the side of the road with an empty milk jug, turned sideways, on his head. I didn't know if I was seeing correctly, because sometimes, I don't. But most definitely, a milk jug, bent into a little milk jug hat.
"This must mean it's time to write my friends," because when I see a man on the side of the road with a milk jug on his head, I'm compelled to tell someone. So I go into Food Lion, and the old man that usually bags my groceries is in the meat department.
"Good Morning," he says.
"There's a guy with a milk jug on his head out by the road," I tell him.
"Does he have a long white beard?"
"Yes!"
"Yeah, that guy comes in the store sometimes. He seems pretty normal when he speaks, you know. One day he came in and was telling me how to plant my turnip greens."
"Wow."
"He may just need some medicine," he says.
"I bet that's it," and I push my cart to the dyed red cherries.

A thought popped into my mind that perhaps I'm as screwed up as the milk jug guy if I have to talk about him. I'm feeling guilty for gossiping; guilty for thinking I may be in some way superior. Perhaps God is testing me. I think when we talk of others downfalls, we do it out of insecurity...'I'm not so great, maybe I can talk about how screwed up this person is and take the spotlight off of myself.'
You know, you can never take the spotlight off of yourself. You know that, right? The brightest spotlight you will ever see will always be your own. So here I am, writing to you about Milk Jug Hat guy, but revealing that we are all just milk jug hat guy, we just ain't all wearing the same hat. I didn't know when I began this that I would come to this conclusion. You see what rambling does to me?
The young grocery store manager smiles at me and says Hi when I'm leaving. I've had a cold and feel raggedy and tired. I wish I had dressed for the store. Why is it, when a handsome guy smiles at us, we wish we looked better? Even if you're married or have a buggy full of screaming rugrats, or you're 150,000 years old, the young store manager smiles, and you want to look better. What for? I want to get over that. I guess it's the spotlight thing again. I want to be able to smile back, knowing I have spinach in my teeth, and laugh about it.
That's what I want.
So I haven't been writing in the book either. After asking my mother and Steven if they would read the first 80 pages, they said they would when they had time. Months later, they still haven't found a time slot, and discouraged, I wonder if maybe I should take it back before they find the time. I don't know if I ever fully make sense.
The other day, I was driving over a little bridge, over a little creek, and saw something out of the corner of my eye. My first instinctive thought was that it was a tiny beached killer whale (like Orca, just wee tiny). My second thought was to tell myself that I'm completely out of my gourd. More likely it was a white plastic bag. Why on Earth was my first instinct to think there was a killer whale in that tiny creek? Strangely, I saw a man walking down to that creek with a fishing pole the other day, and I laughed to myself.
"He's going to try to catch that killer whale." God help me. Now you are probably wondering if the guy really had a milk jug on his head. I'm telling you, he did. But I am less and less sure of the fact that I make any sense; I can only ramble and write what I know, and hope that you can pick out something that you can relate to.
I gotta run, Shan is having an ice cream picnic & I'm in charge of Reddiwhip and cherries!

Much love to you always~ your truly

2009-05-31T10:35:00.000-04:00

Not much today. Covered in hives.
My eyes took turns being swollen this week, Thursday left,
Friday Right, Saturday, under eye right...
Giving up bananas this week to see if that's the culprit.
(Off gluten 2 weeks!)
I guess I'll eradicate everything until I'm living off of
Starbucks and apples. (Kidding!)

Hm. So nothing of interest here. Oh! Saw two guys playing tennis outside the court yesterday, I thought because the court was too full. (Which it was.)
"They are not playing tennis," Steven tells me, "They're playing birdie."
So we drove past the two grown guys playing 'birdie' on the lawn, next to the tennis court.
"I think it's sweet," I said.
"Yes," my husband says. "Two men involved in sweet activity." We're laughing now, and he tells me sweet isn't the word. Sometimes you can use a word that isn't exactly the right word and it can work. (For instance, my husband's odd use of the word 'birdie' in lieu of badminton. Personally, I prefer it.)
Something else happened yesterday, and I remember saying, "I'm gonna blog about that!"
Unfortunately, I no longer remember what it was, only that it seemed blogworthy.

And the cat ran away.

I'm itching and so I'm gonna leave you with that. I'm really glad you stopped in~

Have a sweet day!

Retrospect- Monday, April 24, 2006

2009-05-27T11:20:00.000-04:00

Another Retrospect, you say? Well, I could tell you that I've been nursing a cold cup of coffee for the past hour listening to the umpteenth day of rain, but it's not so interesting.

so yep. I give you Monday, April 24, 2006

I woke up this morning and opened the deck door. Something about the day called me to garden, something I love to do. Maybe I can get some weeding done! Pulling tangles of wild strawberry vines up from under the roses, I was bit by a spider.
"Let me explain," he said.
"Go on,"
"I've been watching you uproot plants. You can sit there and uproot a small plant, and yet you lovingly work around the larger one that you've decided to befriend. What makes you the judge of what is good?"
"I was just pulling weeds," I said.
"Ah. How do you determine which plant is the weed?"
"Well, usually the one I didn't plant. Are you through now?"
"I'm just getting started," said the spider. "This morning I had two friends. We had a nice breakfast in the undergrowth, and your large filthy hand appeared." I looked at my hand, and indeed, it was filthy.
"I watched you encounter my friend earthworm. You carefully cradled him up in your hand and moved him to safety."
Ah yes! This morning while weeding, I found a little earthworm, trying to escape the newly sunlit ground I uncovered. He slid across my palm, and I wondered, 'Do worms feel love?' As a child, I would pick them off the city sidewalks after the rain, trying to save their drowning little bodies from the afterlife. Even now, when the rains come, I pick them off my driveway, setting them in pots. My husband fishes with them, insuring me that they stay on the hook better if slid on lengthwise, hook through their little worm mouths, the sideways and again. If worms feel pain, do they also feel love? Is it better to feel neither than both? I watched him slip under the landscape timber that borders the garden.
"I remember Earthworm."
"Then I watched you encounter my friend grub worm."
Grub Worm? I didn't remember. I told him so.
"You don't remember GrubWorm because you smashed him with the flat end of your shovel."
"Oh." I did remember that.
"What makes you think you can be the judge of what is good or what is beautiful? I have never met a larger hypocrite than you! Do you take on this God Complex in every aspect of your life? GrubWorm had a sweet, juicy inner core...but based on your opinion of what was good, you disposed of his little grubby life! Hypocrite, I say! Long live your gushy spirit, Grub friend!"
And with that, I smashed him with the flat end of my shovel. (Hey, that way, they can be together, right?)

My spider bite is still sore. (Yes, there's a real spider bite. It all happened, just like that. Although walking back to the house to get some mango tea, I thought I heard a little spider voice, telling me that the spiders wre going to band together. They would hide where I least expect it! I think this voice was Steven's, ha ha...)
One of the things I've learned from Steven over the years is to shake my shoes upside down before I put them on. Spiders, he tells me. Once when he was little, he had cowboy boots. After summer one year, he went to get them out of the closet, and there was a dead rodent inside one. So not only does he shake his shoes, but he also sticks the pair he's going to wear the following day up high on a table. I don't go that far yet, but I do shake, and YES, I have shaken out a spider in the past couple months. (Steven also won't get into bed without checking the sheets & under pillows for spiders. Would you say he has a phobia?)
I was really going to talk about my weekend. My mother, trying to make a lemon meringue pie, saw her crust cracked. Irritable, she went home. Steven, thinking we were having pie, brought his sweet tooth home from office depot, and stood staring at the cracked crust. He decided he'd make scratch brownies. After working on them for twenty minutes, the last ingredient was flour. There were two recipes, side by side, and instead of using 1 cup of flour, he used 2.25. His dream of watching Kill Bill One (again) and eating late night brownines was ruined. No more sugar meant there were no more second chances.
"There's half a pear in the kitchen. If you want, I'll put some chocolate syrup on it." He didn't see any humour in what I'd said. I got a kalhua White Russian out of the fridge and sat with him, watching the hansou sword scalp Lucy Liu. Again. Hmmm.
If I ended this with "I went to the kitchen and got that pear half that the kids had left; sometimes you just have to appreciate the little things" that might sound good. But in truth, I threw it in the trash the next day, so that would be a lie. (Like the spider story is not a lie? you say? Hey, I'm even writing your dialogue in here! No, the story is not a lie, merely the dialogue. Perhaps not even that, but spiders talk much too low for me to be able to understand them.

I love you all so! Have a great morning!

Oh, and Congrats, Shannon~ Your baby is too precious.

Saturday, Actual Exchange

2009-05-27T11:12:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday, it was raining, and my husband, children and I sat in the parking lot of Starbucks, the girls drinking green tea frappaccinos, Steven & I with Latte's. I was sitting on the side with the street lamp, looking up at the rain.
I hadn't remembered the rain ever looking like that. Soft, like hair. Strings. Bouncing off my hand like rubber ball snowflakes. Moonlit and majical.
This is the actual exchange between my husband and I as I held my hand out the window marveling at this newfound discovery of rain.
ME- "Look! The rain- it's like moonlit hair; floaty shiny strings of somesort. Amazing..."
HIM- "I wonder what kind of mushrooms they put on your steak."

HA. :D

2009-05-22T13:51:00.000-04:00

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.

- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Random stuff...

2009-05-21T08:05:00.000-04:00

Is there no better finale to a huge deal of a show than a
cringe worthy inspirational song about reaching your dreams?
That's right, I'm talking about American Idol.
And that yearly CRINGE WORTHY ballad at the end.
This year Kara wrote the song. I think she were a wee uncomfortable, but the judges were trying to be nice. "Let's not judge you by that song, let's say you had a great year."

Riding the train of thought for a moment.
Train of thought says
I hate ignorant people.
then, doesn't everyone hate ignorant people?
then, what if ingorant is just a point of view...
To somebody,
I'm probably ignorant.
Hmmm.

I'd prefer not to be.

But maybe,

I don't hate ignorant people.

Maybe I just feel sorry for their lack of intelligence.

then,

well, I never went to college,

and my manuscripts are returned so heartily

perhaps I am not the one to judge

who's ignorant and who's not.

Perhaps no one is.

"Where are those nasty crackers?" he says. What nasty crackers? The nasty seedy ones, and he's digging through the cupboards. Oh, I say, those were my moms and she took them back.

"They were gluten free!!!" he says.

"Yes, and she took them back to spread fancy french cheese on them." They are probably better with cheese, he says. They were so nasty. Taste like burnt up roaches, he tells me, still glancing in the cupboards. :).

"You know," he says, "my stomach and head haven't felt good for a couple days. You think I quit gluten too rapidly?" Um, no. Why, you wantin to eat bread?

"No, I was sorta wanting the beer in the fridge."

(No gluten=no beer, although they make a few gluten free varieties not sold in our tiny town...)

2009-05-18T12:36:00.000-04:00

La bave du crapaud

n'atteint pas

la blanche colombe.

Yesterday

2009-05-18T08:34:00.000-04:00

You know when you're a child, everything looks better, seems bigger. You eyes magnify things and your memory wanes, til you think things are grander than they actually are. One example is the time my husband was very excited that we were going to Gatorland, a place he visited as a kid.
"They have a 50' swinging bridge over this swamp filled with alligators..."
Well, they don't. They have a little boardwalk, maybe 10-20 feet, over a park area that has no gators. 10-20 feet is probably big for a kid, and children can imagine an empty marsh full of alligators easily. People haven't squashed all the creativity out yet. His mind had to grow the sight he'd seen in order to make it still awe inspiring for the grown mind.
Because the things that we think are great when we're small may not seem so as we get older.
I experienced this yesterday.
Yesterday, I made an old familiar dish my mother made every week growing up. We ate it often, so I didn't remember it to be out of the ordinary.
Boiled chicken hearts & gizzards. You boil em, then dunk them in ketchup with hot sauce. (I told you, my mother said as a kid, I'd eat whatever she cooked. She was right!)
So I boil up hearts and gizzards, and my 10 year old is walking past.
"Taste this," I tell her, and I hold the fork out. She eats it. "Pretty good," she says.
So she walks in circles, talking, eating bites of hearts and gizzards. Fifth or sixth bite in, I hold a little heart up on the end of the fork. "Look! BaBump, Babump, Babump..." (Okay, babump babump is my heart beating sound).
She gives me an odd look. "What? Is that what it is?" Then she spits the bite in the trash, runs out side and starts to spit in the yard.
"You said the first five bites were pretty good," I commented. There'd been a running joke that one day I'd cook em, and my mom was coming over, so I did yesterday.
"I made your favorite," I tell my mother. She responded that we were poor and ate that stuff to make do- when we weren't eating the free Denny's food on the days she worked. Funny, in my mind, Denny's is still this fabulous place, too. I still have an old collection of paper Denny's masks, not even cut from the original sheets. Maybe I could frame then and hang them in the playroom. :D.

That was Yesterday.

What i Give to You

2009-05-15T21:17:00.000-04:00

What I give to you is 30 to 45 minutes of my day,
not everyday but sometimes, when I'm

a. bored or

b. not so boring.

Sometimes I go days collecting the non-boring bits for you,
trying to gather little pieces or ordinary that you may not notice
but are not that ordinary after all.

What I give to you is akin to Fallon's giving choice bits to his cats,
A bite here and there yet not the bulk of my day.
The bubbles on the bath, shiny and lovely
but I never go near the water.
There aren't moments where I slip and go deep;
Writing this is like writing to myself.

It's a one-sided sandwich; I am the speaking and the listening.
I am the bread folded over hiding my peanut butter, honey and bananas inside.
There is no second slice of bread in blogging.
:P.
I do not let you view bruised banana chunks
But the big nutty bits are too much of me as a whole!
So you have to eat them
Hope you like them
If you're here you're probably full of nuts yourself

thanks for dropping in :)

Because because because because because!

2009-05-13T19:16:00.000-04:00

Because of the wonderful things he does!

I must first apologize for the little coconut story in case its too vulgar for my sweet readers of prudent ears. I actually toned it down to get it here, but I don't know.

Maybe apologizing is the wrong thing to do.

Maybe I cannot ever be the same person twice in a row, twice in my blog even.

Or maybe, I'm the same person in every single blog if you read far enough to get to know it.

And you just stick with me anyhow. (If so, Thanks for that!) Eventually, maybe you'll find me back at the place where you liked me best, and I'll be once again a welcome sight. It'll happen.

We ate some gluten free chocolate chip cookies last night. The dough taste funny, familiar but indescribable. Made from some sort of bean flour. Yum!

My husband and I were watching the movie Baby Mama with Tina Fey the other day. It is so strange and funny what different creatures a man and woman can be. I just kept watching the movie, wondering, "What color is that living room in the apartment? And what about that color? I wonder if it would work in the bathroom or hallway?" So everytime they show the apartment, my brain is in paint chip mode.

So then, my husband shouts, "Hey! Did you see that?" Huh? I say. He grabs the remote and rewinds. Very important indeed for my husband to rewind!

"The park bushes. You see that?" and he has it paused. "The park has been planted to look like a womans genitalia! See that?" Of course, he reasons, they have purposely planted the hedges in the film to look like a giant green, um...bush. Purposely?

I don't know, I have my doubts. But I felt that one person would definitely know-

Jimmy Fallon, of course! Fallon is the one who could bring back that Late Night Letterman feel. I couldn't click with Conan, but Letterman was sarcastic love for me. As a preteen, he was the one that made me laugh, the smart snarky guy who'd hang with the likes of Fran Leibowitz and Bud Melman, and he made television classy and raunchy and lovable. I bought his top ten book and dreamed of him, in a weird way he made me imagine myself not the geek i was, but cool. And trust me, I was a geek.

Fallon now has that chance to make late night right again.

Who doesn't just adore Jimmy Fallon, he just looks like the cute little neighborhood kid...

but he's not- So I email Jimmy Fallon my questions about the paint chips and the vagina park, but no response. Not from his people, nothing. Not a 'Thank you for your email' from the lady in housekeeping, nothing.

Certain of course that Fallon has the answers, I wait. But I feel that probably Jimmy Fallon sits among all his 42 cats, cats over and under his bed, they are scratching on papers like the ones you see on animal detective, then jumping on the bed for bits of cold cheese sandwich. On white bread. Even though white bread is not hip and trendy Manhatten grub.

No doubt Mr. Fallon is reading my blog (right, he's one of the five of ya) sitting on some old star wars bed sheets with cats cats cats. I do however give him the benefit of the doubt, as I imagine he would give them the center bits of choice, and eat only the crust for himself.

As I do you. ?.

"No! No! Don't take my cats!" he'd say tp the pet detectives, crying and covered with hair, but as a young celeb, his cats are safe. I've heard that when he's feeling kinky, his wife goes up to broadway and rents an old Cats costume including full makeup. But with a skirt, no undies, just a Cats top half then the skirt and some orange leg warmers. Cause that how Jimmy Fallon gets happy.

But don't tell anybody you heard it from me!!!

Ha.

So I've got tons of gardening to do...

If you purchase roses from mail order own root sites, often they tell you to snap off the buds to stimulate root production. (I know, I really need a separate blog for this. Otherwise, one minute you care, the next you don't)...I really have a hard time snapping off the pending flowers on a potted plant about to bloom. I want to see them. I wait too long, so I can see them, but then their scrawny asses stay scrawny too long. So my gardening tip for the day is pinch off the buds on new mail order own root roses.

(this rose is called L'Ingenue)

Thanks for stopping in-