Ouch

Here’s the thing. You’re supposed to be one of my best friends. You already know there are issues that we’ve been trying to keep straight and from getting too intense. You know that I get really uptight when things are sticky and I don’t hear from you. I emailed you last Thursday (a good, bright, cheery and exciting email) and you haven’t bothered to reply. Is that your final answer?

I miss summer already

On sammiches & secrets

I re-bonded with Bassman over our mutual love of peanut butter and butter sammiches. I’ve also been known to eat peanut butter and pickle sammiches.
Don’t cry over that, it’s far better than the bologna, velveeta and ketchup that were a childhood staple. Mom also used to make “Hot ham sandwiches” which were a sort of grilled hamwich with Cambell's tomato soup poured over them.
Then there were toastburgers, which I haven’t been able to reproduce, I think you need one of those counter griddles to successfully make them. Somehow you grill them with the bread on.

Then my Dad and I would sometimes sneak and make fried bologna when Mom wasn’t around. At some point she had decided that was just no good and tried to forbid it.

I had a baby-sitter who turned me on to liverwurst on rye with onion and mustard.
And there was a family legend that my uncles would eat onion and peach jam sammiches and that my Father ate so many once, that he was turned off of onions for years.

A real loss was my Mom’s Sloppy Joe recipe. It died with her. The secret ingredient was mustard but I can’t seem to re-create it.

I remember watching her making it once in Washington, D.C. We were visiting some friends of my Father’s named the House’s. I remember thinking that House was the weirdest family name ever. That was before I moved to AA and started hearing names like Schickelgruber.
Anyway, she put in sugar and mustard and told me not to tell anyone because mustard was the secret ingredient. What can I say? I was like, four, and of course at dinner I spilled the beans on it. I’ve just never been good at the secrets game.

In the meantime don’t forget our show on 12/17 and to listen to the Bottom 99 through that link on the right.

Still life with pom, pens and apple

I’m taking time out to eat a pomegranate, and one really does have to take ones time about it doesn’t one?

I could easily become transdimensional

Ok this is it, the pressure is now officially on.
If I’m lacking in quantity and substantive quantity you’ll know why. In other words if I start showing up sporadically and sounding like zombies ate both my brain and my sense of humour, it’s cause it’s finals, recitals, big show and the evil xmas all at the same time.
I cannot wait for the 18th when it’s all over.
Or conversely you might be my escape and salvation. No one knows. How do I really respond to pressure? Well, I do know that when it’s interpersonal, I clam up.
We’ll just see now, won’t we?

Craptastical Amerikana

Sometimes on Saturdays, I just have to watch a little Lawrence Welk. There are several reasons.
• I adore real hoofers and Lawrence sometimes has them.
• If you don’t know your history you might repeat it.
• One needs to study his audiences to understand a large chunk of America or at least their parents.
• I have a thing for brass and clarinets.

Today, however, I tuned in for a few minutes, long enough to see the schmaltziest version ever of “Tie A Yellow Ribbon”, and that's gotta be some serious schmaltz. After which I proclaimed “That was craptastic” and switched to some heavy Gregory Peck/Telly Savalas B&W movie. Could it be the original Cape Fear? If it's not it seems very similar.

Edit: Amazing, I was right. My film noire credentials suck, I'm just not a film person. That was a damn good movie though.

I recently was told that spiders molt. This makes me sad as I had assumed all those carcasses were dead spiders. Dead of natural causes, we don’t kill ‘em. I appreciate the wonderfulness of spiders, I just have major arachnophobia.
Now I realize that all those carcasses just mean their former owners have gotten bigger.
We let the spindly ones I call ghost spiders live pretty much wherever they want, but the wolf spiders, which it turns out I’m allergic to, they have to go outside. One of Hosha’s (my cat) titles is Spiderbane. She used to go down to the basement at night and kill wolf spiders. Then she would carry them up and line them up next to the bed. One had to watch their step upon arising.

I made a complete fool of myself the other day, folding a tarp in the yard. A spider carcass got on my hand and I just started screaming. I tried so very hard to not. I really did. I just couldn’t help myself. The neighbor was staring at me and the worst part was having to confess it was dead.
I mention this because I just found such a conglomeration of arachnid carcasses all wound together in a register vent, such a jumble of jointed legs and web. The fear must just be primeval. Like the fear of the rattle and the blade.

There's got to be a morning after

I’ve concluded that the reason I feel sick to my stomach if I eat much of anything is probably the antibiotics. I’ve decided I have had enough of that this month, as well the inevitable other side effect. Ya’ll know how cranky that makes me.

I’m also done with cooking for awhile, 4 days of it is more than enough in one week. We’ll live off leftovers for awhile.

Do I shop today? NO. I am not your consumer queen in Amerika. What little shopping I do will likely be at the NitroVonBorax cafepress store. Support your local artists this and every consuming opportunity.

So you may notice that was my very first hyper link. Thanks to
Maketeanotwar
for attempting to school me on the hyper links situation. What I determined was that I’m not running one of the systems that makes it oh so very easy to do, with little pop up windows and all that, so I went in and researched and learned I have to do it by hand. I will prevail and I will hyper link dammit.

As I was sitting up too late having drunk 2 cups of coffee at Dali’s, hearing the freaky noises of the middle of the night, I also remembered a thanksgiving when my Mom was still alive. We had gone to dinner with my parents, my ex-husband and I, and returned home to find our house had been robbed.
I realized I still get extra uptight thinking someone is going to try to break in on that particular day.
I can just imagine the family where they are hanging out on thanksgiving after eating.
“So, what do you wanna do now?”
“The games on.”
“Oh I don’t feel like watching it. Hey! Let’s go rob the neighbors”

EDIT: Ok I see the hyperlinks did not work. I don't know why. I've checked it and checked it. There is no good frickin' reason for them not to work. I did everything I was instructed to do. I swear it

Studies in cranberry

Sure, it’s a setup, but we can handle it

I’m not sure if it was 1980 or 1981, my mother had been rushed to the hospital, again. The sibs were off in their own lives and worlds, I was trying to be nice and around the house because it was to have been “The Holidays”. But there my mother was in ICU and my Dad and I driving home from the hospital, both of us walled in with our own thoughts and our own silences.
Finally the question of food arose, with what would we replace all the usual planning, cooking and feasting?

I had been washing dishes at Thano’s Lamplighter for a few month’s, and they had opened a more upscale spot kitty corner across the parking lot from it. It seemed like a logical place to try for a meal.
We walked in to the windowless, gloomy, grotto and were told we could sit wherever we liked. Clearly because there was no one else at all. Not one other customer.
We took our seats, I ordered vodka (I've been getting served since I was 12) and the stuffed fish, Dad ordered wine and the “thanksgiving buffet”. We ate bad food, drank and talked.

As more glasses of wine were consumed I heard every story of every miserable thanksgiving. The other dying Mother through the evil stepmother. The lonely, can’t afford to go home from college and there’s not really a home to go to anyway. The Navy, the Army and stuck on ship or base stories.

What I took away from that dinner aside from my usual slight food poisoning, from eating at a restaurant, was a vivid sense of the betrayal, confusion and alienation that the lonely, displaced and dysfunctionalized are subject to as the culture sets everyone up with expectations that can rarely be met in any family or situation, no matter how functional.

I don’t think I ever went to another family thanksgiving, I think perhaps there never was another after that year.

Nowadays I go for an hour or two of dinner with my neighbor and his family. That way I can just run away home when the inevitable aggra begins.

Oops, forgot the title

I so wore myself out doing stuff.
Here’s crunions (you cream them), turkey, and, appetizers and dinner table at Lizardbreath’s. And it was just like that.
My to do list is like 25 or more, items long.
More pies tomorrow, but I’m betting you’ve seen enough pies.
Maybe if we’re lucky I’ll have up pictures of sunlight streaming through bowls of garnet like, fresh cranberry-orange sauce.
The luck being the sunlight, I’ve already made the sauce.

So how crazy is she?

Pretty crazy.
As I was cutting and prepping veggies I heard them bubbling and gurgling. So I told them all about how wonderful it would be to be grokked in fullness by the good folk who were going to eat them. And about how that was a goodness.

Later after they were cooking, they were still talking to me. I looked closer and realized it was air escaping from the coffee thermos.

Progress report

1. Shrooms'n'seasons
2. Tub'o'stuff
3. Roasty

Other exciting neighborhood activities

Today is blow by blow day

1. De boid
2. Is it onion stuffing? I think so.
3. I love my little mandoline, its called The Benriner
4. Stuff
5. The crucial stock. Heres the secret, EVERYTHING goes in the stock pot. LOT'S of celery tops and onion skin.
They call that drawer in the fridge the crisper, but it's really the rotter. Clean it out into the stock pot.

Tune in later for crunions.

no cute titles available at this time

So all I have to do is get through today and I’m free for a week. But being as It’s Monday, it’s a lot to get through. 3 classes and a lecture.
Tomorrow I grab my bird and cook it up to serve to Lizardbreath, Filmkid and friend. With stuffing and creamed onions and she’ll make a few sides, it should be good.
Oliver won’t go, he hates parties and he just did the whole thing with his family yesterday. I didn’t go, I had to rake and do homework. Didn’t feel like driving to Indiana. Plus he had the opportunity to hang with the big brother sans wives and such so I think that's a good thing. I’m not so sure about the in-laws, I don’t quite get them, but I’m really sure about the brother in-law. He is excellent people.

Off to bathe and do math and feed the cat and watch the news and make the tea and toast and pack the satchel and write the grocery list and what-not now.

Must be something in the air

This, and raking and raking and raking and raking is what I did this weekend, oh and math and math and math

Yam 'n' yampie

The Usual Yog

Half a loaf is better than none

This is what happens when you forget to grease

I've got Friday on my mind, and it's making me nervous

I get really, really, antsy on Fridays. I move from project to project always feeling like I’m waiting for something or expecting something or like I should be doing more, more, more. I bounce all over the net looking for email and inspiration.
I read, I smoke, I watchTV, I check the papers, I write, I shop.
I don’t know, it’s just part of the anxiety thing. Fridays are just anxiety day.
So what’s my solution? I think I’ll have a cup of tea, crank it just a little higher, then play some Rock-n-Roll and wear it out.

Lizardbreath just brought over some amazing asparagus pasta so I don’t have to cook and that’s awesome. So all I really have to do is practice and do what strikes me. OK here I go.

Mmm, mmm, good, head food

What I read this last week besides newspapers and the net:

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
A little too much Calvin and not enough Walden in her personality. The Bronte’s could have benefited from hanging out with the Alcotts. BUT a real good old tearjerker and I am such a huge sucker for a morality play. Liked it.

The Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
The above story (prequel) from the mad woman in the tower perspective. Rochester didn’t feel like Rochester at all. The language and feel is completely different and that is to be assumed, but I’m not sure I like it yet. I’m going to have to turn around and read it again because it just didn’t strike me.
I now have to write a paper on it. I’m not inspired. Maybe when I read the book I picked up to use with it for my paper, Women of the Asylum, Voices from Behind The Walls 1840-1940, I’ll find a way in to something juicy.

Stranger In A Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
Again. I found another copy in the trash and took it as a sign to reread it.
Now, I do think Heinlein is just the tiniest smitch of a hack. But far superior to the modern sci-fi/fantasy, crank out 25 books about your made up kingdom, Piers Anthony type, crapadoodle. It’s entertaining and fun social commentary. Despite of the rampant sexism of it’s age, one likes to love the characters.
It was nice to be able to give a copy to that very nice boy in class who expressed interest.

The Education Of Robert Nifkin - Daniel Pinkwater
Have you encountered Pinkwater? He is so very awesome. You know, he’s on NPR. How excited was I to find a Pinkwater I haven’t read yet and had heard rumours about? Very, very excited. I have to say that in this sociopolitical atmosphere it shouldn’t have been in the young readers section though, it’s his most blatant and out there children's novel that I’ve read. All the usual obsessive themes (chickens, cigars, beatniks, Commonism, bad food, bad teachers, good architecture, crazed psychologists, and fat men, etc.) show up. It’s just quintessential Pinkwater. Read it please.

Hit that link Clarissa

I see that the buggery to listen to The Bottom 99 has gone into the archives so I’ll just put this little refresher here.

It’s really real now

Umm, it’s snowing and it’s sticking. I have not had the opportunity to rant about winter as when it’s not actually happening I prefer to pretend it doesn’t really exist. The part that really annoys me about today is that it’s not actually winter yet. If it had the common decency to wait until solstice to become winter I could accept it more readily.
I know I could move somewhere else but there’s 2 things about that, (1) I really must live somewhere where the bugs die once a year. (2) I have an elderly parent 6 blocks away and that's the way it is. There will be no moving far away any time soon due to that. I have an odd quink about filial duty.

But here’s the thing, I had seriously contemplated moving to Seattle about 15 years ago. I adore Seattle. The stuff they say about Seattle being dark and rainy? I don’t buy it. I remember skateboarding barefoot in the bright sunshine of January there. You want gray skies for 4 months? Move to Michigan. It is so dark here in winter it’s like a different world. If you are one of those people who sleep till noon, here you get about 4 hours of murky daylight. It’s like living in Mordor.

Congratulations Redford!

At 2:09am you were my 1000th viewer. I’d give you a big wet kiss you wouldn’t likely forget in a hurry but, well, you know - working relationship, chance of electrocution, you probably won’t be back around for a week and I will have lost a little of my oomph by then, yada, yada, yada. But Oh - THANKS!

The healing power of Raisin Bran

I have discovered that when I’m sick like this, from the too strong antibiotics with the turn my system to soup super powers, I project a giant brown flake onto the night sky and soon I am saved by the amazing raisin.

I will not freak out and I will not cry

So I just really started to divine what the various transfer agreements between colleges and particularly U-M are REALLY saying and (A) I was not at all understanding them, and was not given adequate information when I’ve spoken to various really nice, but apparently misinformed counselors. (B) I never had to take any math at all probably. (C) If I actually do want to go straight to U-M I need 55 credits not 30 (D) I've been taking the "wrong" music classes but I'm really glad I can now play the piano.

Mr. Science suggests that I actually might want to consider doing the undergrad work at Eastern, it's cheaper, smaller and not as much bullshit.
I’m trying to take this philosophically and just say to myself “it’s all good”. I am learning and I’ll get there one way or the other but I see that I need to go back to The Center for the Continuing Education of Women and get a much firmer grasp on what the hell is actually going on here. Fuck. This is going to be WAY harder than I ever conceived. I did not realize I needed to find a class in learning how to understand rules, requirements and what reading 70 million forms correctly actually entails. God I hate beauracracies

Ok is it Bazooka Joe or the Moth’s?

There is a really strange thing going on here and I’m dying of curiosity about it. Why are all you people googling Je veux duper les mites?

How much can a heart be broken before it just don’t work no more?

So I’ve been watching this thing and developing theories for years.
It seems to me that when people die youngish of heart problems, they seem to me to be most often literally dying of broken hearts. Now, I’m not talking about someone who’s ninety, if you die of a broken heart at ninety why shouldn’t you? You’ve already watched everyone else leave, over your whole life. What could be more heartbreaking than that?

I think of certain of the dead people I know. I feel I can directly trace their heart troubles to actual troubles of the heart. The complete loss of their life dream, or the abuse of their childhood that was never to heal, and other sorts of really over the top things. I have to say that I don’t recall any indications of people dying of the traditional broken heart/love lost scenario though. Unless it’s directly linked to the loss of the life dream or illusion. That really seems to be the big one. I know several that that seems to have done in.

I wonder about this because I am meant to have heart problems. I have a Mother who died youngish of congestive heart failure, and her father before her died at 42 or 46 of a massive heart attack. The heart stuff has started showing up in other members of the family also.

But I have had this odd suspicion that I am not going to manifest this in the same way. My heart started being being broken so very, very young, the first time around six or so, that I have a feeling that it’s just so crusty and scarred over that it’s just not going to be killed by any traditional heartbreak.
As well as that I have learned to expect the unexpected. Sure I have dreams and illusions, but I also know on a seemingly really core level that when the worst happens it is also illusory as well as temporary. I’m lucky, I have an inner stuff that seems to remain unscathed.

I was just talking about this with Lizardbreath because in the course of writing this I just got word that another person in the outer rings of my circle died of a broken heart at 57, and in the course of the conversation was able to process and crystalize, that if you really acknowledge your broken heart it doesn’t kill you.

Of course the extremely superstitious part of me now is cringing a little wondering if the universe will take that as a challenge to try yet again to off me.
But as it seems to try about equally hard to assassinate and protect me I will probably be around awhile.

This whole thing came up because of Memo, it’s pretty clear she has cancer and it’s a sad thing she is a good, good dog.

See that picture farther down? That's her.

Phew, what a frickin’ weekend. One of the dogs I sit became horribly, dangerously, ill. I get back from 2 hours at the vet and the message on the machine is call and the word is “you’re old friend died” and my guts are infected, again.
Saturday an oppressive miasma was occluding me and I was in a literal fog. It wasn’t until hours and hours later when it occurred to me to run releases on it, that I cleared it. But by then my response was to just pass out. It had been around too long and drained too much. I could only try to sleep fitfully for 10 hours next to the sick dog.
Sunday the dog was better, somewhat miraculously, considering that they had psychologically prepped me to have to take her to ER and probably perform euthanasia on her that night.
I was better energetically too, so I just tended dogs and tried to write a story for here, do chores, laundry and cook.
That’s all. Now I have to focus on homework, I just wrote a 2 page paper, and I need to now really crank on math and bio to have the prep work for the tests in each ready for Wednesday. No bio lab for 2 weeks! I have to betake myself to the Natural History Museum though and do a lab there sometime over the break.
Then a little patient sitting on Saturday, school on Monday and then off for the week.
I’ll be dog sitting again for a few days over the holiday too but.... I can swing that.
I’m contemplating goin’ down to Howe, Indiana this Sunday too, to hang out with the Oliver Blades family in a little pre-holiday, holiday thang. It’s quite a slice of Americana and a nostalgia trip for me, it’s the Grandma and the cousins and the dogs and the big long table and the both comfortable and uncomfortable. I’m thinking about it.

Ahh, lovely, fragrant, jasmine, tea

Dogs-a-go-go

What’s going on? Well let’s see. Dog sitting is happening this week and I’m trying to convince Ro to let me give him a deep combing. So far half of him looks just lovely, but when he starts snapping at my hand I know it’s time to let him rest awhile. He gives me that deep soulful look like why are you torturing me? I thought we had an understanding? But Ro, you look so fabulous when all your plumes are all fluffy! Let me fluff them!
And Mem just doesn’t do the brush thing at all. She just gives me the devil eye when I come near her with the brush and I just wander away.

I am making soup, and dealing with the sick cat. We now have her on a strict diet of baby food lamb. Then we start adding back foods to try to see if there’s an allergy. Oliver and I both came up with the idea that it’s corn. I had been thinking it, then he said something about it independently so I got a ding on the inner bell that that is likely to be the issue.
I’m wondering if the animals are acting as the canary in the coal mine on GM corn, as I’ve heard about a ton of animals sick with vomiting in the past month.

I also have to say that after what I saw the average American feeding their babies in the baby food aisle I no longer wonder what starts so many problems so young. The stuff I saw was both just retarded and disgusting.
Why wouldn’t you just mash a fresh banana instead of feeding it to your kid processed out of a jar? Same for sweet potatoes, why wouldn’t one just bake up a couple sweet potatoes and throw them in the fridge until the kids hungry?
Considering that the damn stuff is 89 cents a jar why would you pay that when an average banana costs 23 cents?
I’m already adding up the idea that as long as the cat remains sick it’s costing me 60 bucks a month to feed her this stuff as opposed to about 20. Even though lamb is pricey I’m trying to figure out what to get to make this stuff myself.
I just don’t understand how the jarred stuff is any more convenient than just feeding the kid essentially what you are already eating. But I guess if you’re living on Hormel chili and Kraftmac and Lorna Doons (that’s a Repo Man reference Nigel) it wouldn’t be much different.

There remains so much cleaning to occur, that’s the main agenda for this weekend. I just keep looking forward to the week off for the holiday. And everyone keeps trying to get me to commit to stuff during it. Wishing I could afford one these allegedly groovy and tasty heirloom turkey’s but the very cheapest ones are frickin’ 7.50 a pound! So the rich will have to preserve the breeds of original American turkey without my help.

I’d really like to find some time to myself for some writing, my own writing that is. Not school, not band, not blog, not e-mail. Just some regular creative writing.

Don't look

I'm doing an experiment in web Magick and Urban Legends and you just really don't want to see this.
(I'll tell you if the phone rings)
Edit: Nope no phone ring

Hey! Listen to The Bottom 99

Am I going to annoy you excessively with this over the next while? Yes I am.
Am I kind of amped about the whole, finally, have the technology to put our stuff on the web? Yes I am.
Is that the link over there on the right? Why, yes it is.

Alls fair in academia or is it?

So, the internet. You know it’s really a pretty serious class issue. The people who have unobstructed access are the people who have disposable income or who are willing to sacrifice necessities for access. Then, you have to live in an upscale enough area to have web service access. Not so much an issue in this country were the microwave towers wave, but very critical in other countries.

So I’m thinking of this as I sit in the comfort of my living room, brewing a cup of tea and prepping my peanut butter toast, waiting for class registration to start. I have a class that is offered only in one spot per semester. I have built my entire schedule around getting in that class. I am doing everything in my power to be one of the people who gets one of those seats in that very limited class space.
I want to edge out the others, I have the system available to me, a white woman in America, who came from the disappearing middle class to potentially oust other people who don’t have the resources to be sitting at their computers at precisely 8:00 am already logged in to the school system.

Here’s my justification, I have worked my butt off in my current english class with this same teacher. I have 0 absences, I participate like crazy, I’m interested in the subject, I turn in everything on time. I sit there and watch these people who just really don’t care much one way or the other take the spaces away from other people who might care a lot.
BUT here’s the down side. Maybe a couple of those kids are being turned on for the first time and maybe my actions (which are not really shenanigans but feel creaky) are possibly going to prevent the illumination of some other human when the chances are exceedingly good that I would run across this literature somewhere down the line anyway. And I am using my class status as someone who, while poor, has family connections to the middle class to back me, to try to get an academic edge.
Right or wrong?
Well, regardless, I’m using my edge, just as I’m trying to use all my edges nowadays. I am not going to play the class guilt game when it comes to getting what I need. I already paid a really heavy price for my class guilt as a child and I’m feeling like, account paid.

EDIT: So it worked and I got all my classes just as I wanted them, despite having a glitch where for a few minutes I couldn't remember how to actually register, which blurb to click on and such.
Intro to Psych
Literature of the Non-western world
Foundations of Algebra
Classical Piano
13 credit hours, which is one more than I had this semester, but a more compact schedule, none of this sitting around on Tuesdays for an hour and a half waiting for lab to start, especially with the new no smoking policy, fehhh.
Just go to school, chew that Goddawful nicotine gum and grit my teeth alot.

I sense a pattern developing

As usual I'm going to prevaricate and say I don't do these often and don't care much for them -BUT-
As usual I'm gonna say I liked this particular one (spotted on Maketeanotwar's blog) and did it.
As usual I got a goofy result because nobody has hardly heard of Anna of Cleves and I gotta say, the opportunist in me is cheering her mightily.
She seems a little like a female mantis except the no sex part.






Which of Henry VIII's wives are you?
this quiz was made by Lori Fury

so tired, eyes closing

I just, among other things, cleaned my laptop. While I cleaned her, (notice the all new genderization), it occurred to me that she needs a name. I’m thinking Arabella.
I'm fond of the the Bella names. I used to have a car named Bellisima.

Later:

I think I’m seeing and examining one of the upper boundaries of my obsessions. I went to cut up the old towels for rags, and I’m finding it too difficult to cut up “perfectly good” towels. The problem being that they really aren’t and I’m just being annoying to myself.

Later:

You know what tastes really weird? Wrigley’s MintDoubleSpear.
I mixed up 2 sticks in my purse and it’s a whole new realm of gum flavour.

Way later:

A reminder to check out the bottom 99 link on the right, and listen to my band

"My don't you all smell like flowers"

Jeez, ya miss one Sunday’s worth of Coronation Street and you’re completely out of the loop.
I guess I’ll catch it up, or maybe I’ll get lucky and be too confused and give it up forever. It is both an innocuous and a really bad habit.
Holy Crap whatshername killed whatshisname. I’ve never been able to pick up any of the names except Tracy, Martin, Amy, and Charlie.

So we are the point in bio where we’re studying differentiation of species and such. One of the ways they’re differentiating is by whether they have one opening for mouth and anus or two.
We have really got it going on with this tube within a tube system we have going for us. I suspect we would be really sad pandas if we had to poop through our mouths.

I think I’m to the point in life where I really begin to understand the poop obsession of the elderly. It is really a joyous thing when it’s working right. I also think the whole scatomancy thing is not so far off the mark. I wouldn’t want to be the scatomancer. But there’s a lot to be gleaned from it.

I’m a little over-involved in the idea lately because I had some kind of gastro for over 2 weeks, but oddly enough I ate some of my own chicken soup on Friday and I’ve been OK ever since. The cat had some too and seems to have stopped vomiting. I’m tellin’ ya there is something about that chicken soup.
I wish I’d gotten what I needed to start another pot this weekend. I think with all this flu and cancer I need to always have the soup pot happening. It is that time of year after all, and even though it’s SO MUCH work it’s so worth it. It’s as if it’s the most nourishing food ever for the least amount of money ever.

So the cat has stopped vomiting and it’s weird, it’s as if just the act of calling the vet and giving her chicken soup has cured whatever has been ailing her for months.
As if it was behavioral not physical. So we’ve been giving her lot’s of attention and cuddling but the dogs are coming back on Tues. for a week so we’ll have to really take the extra time for her.

Talk about new rags for old, I went through the towels yesterday to sort out the ones to put in the give away, and every single red towel has hair dye on it. They’re all going in the rag bag now.
I did get some good deep cleaning done and the new/old smaller, lighter, dryer is installed. I suppose that makes today laundry and dyeing clothes day. As well as go buy a new dryer vent tube. Word to the wise, between those things getting full of lint, those stupid plug in air fresheners and toaster ovens, that accounts for a big chunk of your house fires.

New rags for old

Cleaning has got to be accomplished this weekend. I just can’t face the funk anymore. It’s just that there is so much that needs to be done. It’s hard to get started. But I’m just gonna hit the store first, then put on some super grungey clothes and just get really nasty and not care.

Theoretically we get our new-old dryer today. Oliver calls my poor old one the Mind Scrambler because of the evil noise of grinding bearings it emits whenever you turn it on. Its probably 25 years old so what can you expect. It’s been repaired 4 times in the last 12 years so at some point you just gotta consign it to the scrap yard.
I hate throwing stuff out though. Everyone who knows me knows this. I would rather pay to have the thing repaired, the cost of new several times over, than to throw it into the landfill.

I have a secret weapon against throwing things away. If I were to put a half eaten sub on the easement by my house I swear someone would take it away. I love garbage pickers. They relieve me of so much guilt of waste. I’m surprised though because we get our stuff almost exclusively second hand. And let me tell you when it leaves this house it’s pretty thoroughly used up. But nonetheless people take it.

More power to them. Frankly my goal is to have the house so emptied out of superflousity that when the student move out happens I’ll be ready for some new stuff myself!

For me to have accomplished this, is really cool

I converted some of our stuff to Mp3 and got it uploaded onto our new myspace site, over there on the right. It’s the link that says The Bottom 99.
Feedback is appreciated.
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The story of the Magdalen

We walked and walked and walked through Glastonbury, all the while the Tor got closer and closer like a beacon.
When we finally arrived, we started up the sort of, not so much stairs, as far spaced helping steps, set in the hillside.
The Kids and Brother just did the Patti Smith Horses thing and “didn't waste any time just climbed right up”. I started up and was just moseying along completely unsuspecting when about one third way up I was suddenly nailed by something, I still don’t know quite what, and dropped to my knees. I was dizzy, nauseous, head spinning and short of breath.
I kept looking up the hill at the receding figures of my people who didn’t even notice anything wrong. I kept thinking to myself, I have to get up that Tor, I will never have this chance again in life and if I don’t do this I will hate myself forever.
But simultaneously I was just about to heave my guts up.
I just somehow steeled myself and ignoring the tourists stares, started crawling on my hands and knees up the Tor.
After just a very little ways the whole sickness just started lifting off. It was as if I had moved through a barrier wall of miasma about 10 feet thick.
I felt better, I was able to become more and more upright, my head cleared and soon I just walked up to the top and acted like every other tourist, and took a bunch of photos of the fantastic view and the kids at the tower of St. Michael.

We walked down and I started in about the chalice well. I just had to find the chalice well. Well, we walked all over, up hills, down hills, looking for that thing and never found it. So I’m standing there at the White Spring gift shop where there's a grotto on a rock face. It’s all bedecked and bedewed with offerings and candles and such. And water everywhere. So I get the idea to go in and get some water, any water, I’m so thirsty and I want water from this place inside me.
When I walk in the water is running in a stream right across the floor! I say to the woman “I would like to drink this water” and she gives me a funny look and says “right, the glasses are right there” and nods her head towards a rack of glasses. So I drink and leave a little offering.
Then I go outside, across the lane is a pipe coming from the wall spouting water so I start splashing my face. I was so red and hot.

There are a lot of people sort of hanging about in various attitudes, costumage and presenting various aspects of Avalon worshipping druidy pagans. One of the most disreputable looking of these detaches himself and comes over where my 14 year old niece and I are standing, waiting for my brother who has gone to fetch the car.
He says something to the effect of “yer wanting the water then?” and I say “yuh, I‘m that thirsty”. My niece is looking at his filthy, horned bare feet with the grotty toenails, then at me, and is getting really freaked out.
He leans in and says,
“you’ve got to have both to get it”.
I’m starting to get the alert, that this is something far more than appearances warrant.
So I say,
“Which both? What’s that mean?”
He proceeds to explain that the spout from this wall is the red spring, the water on the other side of the lane is the white and that while both will “do” One has to mix them to “get it”.
I get it all right, The niece is sort of frantically plucking at my sleeve and looking at me like, what the hell are you two on about? I turn to her and I say,
“Do me a favour and go down to the car, take my big Orangina bottle, dump it out and bring me the bottle back please?”
While she’s gone on down, he tells me that those who know from the town come up and fill their kettles and jugs from both and use this as their drinking water. He asks about my experience of the Tor, I tell him, and he suggests that it’s because I am who I am that I experienced it that way.

So that’s how I filled my belly and my Orangina bottle with the water from the mixed springs of Avalon. When it came time to take the plane home, I just put it in a water bottle and brought it in my carry on.

But in the meanwhile, back in London over the next few days and weeks I started getting these odd thoughts and plans popping in my mind. I made a connection with a muse or some new part of myself and started writing a lot more and better, and my name just changed itself from Stella Tutski to Stella Magdalen. When I told Uncle Bunny he was not at all surprised, as he knew that there is a church dedicated to the Magdalene there at Glastonbury, which I was not aware of. I wish I’d known, I would have gone.

So I can tell you that DaVinci code or no, it’s pretty clear to me that the Magdalene WAS there, in some form, at Avalon. If it was physical then it was probably with Joseph of Arimathea. Maybe she went to Gaul from there or maybe it was way later, after she’d been in Gaul, or maybe it was because a cult of worshippers sprang up there and drew her essence to a shrine there after she’d left the physical plane. The how is interesting to speculate on, but not so critical to know.

Another day

The light was flickering through the bus windows onto the pages of my book and making it difficult to read. I looked up and realized we were entering the tunnel of trees that I love to ride through. I watched the woods thin to riverside and wanted to be in a canoe in the little backwater nook that runs by the road.

A beetle flew down the aisle and landed on the woman's backside fat roll as she leaned over to talk to her child. When she straightened up it launched the beetle back into flight. How many unnoticed instances have I undergone?

I walked behind you as you ran for the bus and remembered you from an age ago. When we kissed under the trees and you hated me for being unfeeling and for giving the ring away so I wouldn’t be tied to it. Actually, I was too full of too many feelings to give everything to you.
I wondered who was walking behind me.

I stopped for a Kosmoburger and it was everything I wanted it to be. It was exactly what it should have been. What more can one ask for?

I walked under Frannie’s japanese maple and had to stop and stare into it to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to fully understand every shade of red and orange in sunlight that ever was or will be.

I sat behind you while you worked and startled you when I appeared like an apparition. You said you stood under that maple too.

I keep sensing a layer of film lifted off. Like my disconnection had occluded my vision. Maybe I was so involved in my inner world that an external world was chimerical and muted.

I think there’s room for both.

Sweet (re)lief

Well, so midterms have actually been fairly successful so far.
Lit paper - 43 of 45 (with opportunity to correct mistakes to get my 2 points back)
Math test today - 96 = A (average so far high B+, I’m just pretty behind)
Bio test - 78 (averaged with other scores and current lab status averages to a B)
Piano - 230 out of 200 cumulative
Again, it’s not so much that I’m bragging, as I am just so fucking relieved. I was SO happy to get that info on bio and math.
I started working with my new tutor last night (my nephew) and we have a plan to get caught up and possibly be done with math by the end of November. That would be good, as I have a major final project for Lit., a drum recital on 12/4, a recital final piece for piano (I chose Herbie Hancocks Maiden Voyage) and a final lab test for bio.
Ok gotta go make sweet, nasty noise with the fella’s.

More paganism, more.

The prior cat was last year, this is this year. Unfortunately you can't see the full Tarot symbology on the the Dianic witch punkin.... oh well.

Today’s blood sugar dream

We had been being chased through some strange town ending up in the co-op where, thinking we were safe, we began to make dinner plans.
So we were sitting around a table at the Aut Bar, up on the grassy hill, and we see that a gunman is drawing a bead on us from down below. There's nothing to be done, he’s got a high powered rifle, so everyone freezes and waits to see who he’s gunning for. He shoots and everyone is looking at themselves to see if they’ve been hit. I’m looking at everyone and seeing no blood anywhere I start laughing and try to say “Haha he missed” Except it’s me, and I’ve been shot in the face and when I say haha blood comes spurting out of my mouth.
The next sequence is me laying calmly on the ground telling them don’t bother to call an ambulance I’m just not that attached to being here, and trying to dictate my will to my sister and make sure I say I love you to everyone while pieces of my mouth keep falling out.