Happy Groundhogs Day, Happy Feast of St Brigid, Happy Imbolec...

AND...

  Happy Birthday to my dad...he would have been 87 years old today. (For some reason all of the photos of him that I have in my files seem to be missing or not showing up right...this is fuzzy...)

  The Irishman has a birthday too, on the 8th. Both Aquarius'.  I will plan a birthday/Valentine's Day celebration for him.

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  Feeling better in some ways, not so much in others. It was a beautiful 60 degrees here today, so I opened up the house and blew out the cooties again. (Supposed to have a mild front coming in, bringing us some rain) I also did laundry and hung my bed linens all outside on the line. They smell so good...my comforter too, although I had to finish it off in the dryer, because by dark, it was still a tiny bit damp.  I did a little housekeeping and cooked some supper and that was about it. But tonight I'm coughing more than I was yesterday...I actually went to bed last night with no cough medicine and was fine, after a bit of initial mild coughing. Tonight, I have been coughing since supper. yuck.

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  Nothing much new around here...my son is coming in the morning to do some outside work for me..he needs the money and I need the work done. I'm going to have him do some pruning (lilac, rose of sharons, and roses) and he's going to start moving that giant pile of mulch for me too. I'm going to have him mulch all across the top of the rock wall, and down at the base of it too, where the irises all grow.  Also along the west side of the house where I planted irises. I  want to use that mulch in the aisles of the garden beds...it will make a nice walking path.   It'll be good for him to do some hard physical labor and work off some steam, and good for me to NOT do it. lol  Win/Win.

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  Just wanted to stop in and say hello. I can't stand to read any more of the political crap--it's driving me crazy. I need to go to bed and get some sleep and it's already after 1 AM...but on the bright side, all the laundry is done (I just folded the last load) and the floors are vacuumed and the bed I'm getting ready to climb into has clean clean sheets.  Supper dishes are done too...

  Going to try to get out and go to a movie tomorrow night...hopefully One For The Money...hope you all have a great Friday....

 Namaste.

Weekending

  It is Saturday night, or Sunday morning..the wee hours where you lose sight of which day you are in, straddling them both as we do.  It was a pleasant enough day today, and I attended another anniversary celebration in a meeting I used to attend regularly. My friend was celebrating 35 years, and another young women 4. It was lovely all around, and she and I went to lunch afterwards.

  I stopped at a couple of flea markets and didn't find much that caught my eye, aside from an adorable switchplate of ceramic hummingbirds for a dollar. Of course I snatched it up and came home and installed it on the light switches on the living room wall.  And, all right,  I have a confession to make: I also bought some vcr tapes for 75 cents each...The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, with Brendan Frasier, and a copy of Children of the Corn, based on the book by Stephen King. 

  I don't know if it was watching the mummy (must have been), but  I was on the computer (the Irishman is asleep for hours already), and felt compelled to google the name of an old friend of mine who hails from Egypt.  We met in California, years ago, at a masquerade party one Halloween when I was young and beautiful and dressed up as a belly dancer.  The party was in a bar, naturally, and the young man in question fell madly in love with me.  lol  We had a torrid romance and I loved to listen to him talk...his voice so rich and heavily accented, he was so intelligent and cultured.  The last time I heard from him was in 1997, he sent me a Christmas card and said that he had married and divorced and where was I and why was the timing never right for us?   I always felt that we were soul mates, and our relationship was one that makes good reading on a plane, or in the middle of a cold winter night.  He tried and tried to talk me out of living with the Irishman, saying that he was not the right man for me. 18 years later, it seems he may have been wrong. I told him once that God loved him too much to saddle him with someone like me...

  Well, I found him. And he's on Facebook (of course he is).  I wondered if anything had happened to him after the 9/11 events and if he was still in this country. He has moved to central California, but he is still there. I saw the picture of him and my heart lurched a little...he looks really great and I can barely tell that all these years have passed. I, on the other hand, am nothing like I was, in so many ways.  Why oh WHY do men age so much better than we do?? It just isn't fair...

  My gardens are coming along and hope to spend most of tomorrow getting the last few bits in. The weather has taken a turn from cool spring to hot summer, and it was dry today, but Monday is bringing the rains again.  If I don't get myself to bed soon, I won't wake up until late afternoon.  lol

  I have some pictures, but am too tired to post them just now. Maybe tomorrow....

  Off to bed, dreaming, no doubt, of Cairo and camels and a midnight oasis of the heart.

Namaste.

Last Saturday of April

Oh my. What a wonderful day I have had!

Long, surely, and full to the brim with community and creativity and spirituality. It started off with an early morning and a leisurely breakfast/brunch. Cared for all the critters and the house and the birds outside. Went to the springs to refill the drinking water jugs. I pulled a couple of loaves of zucchini bread out of the freezer from last years uber bounty (lol) so they could thaw and be sliced and plattered to take along to the Earth Day celebration we were attending. We were out of the house by noon and headed out. I'll save the descriptions of THAT for tomorrow morning, as I am really tired tomight.

I am constantly amazed by the world I live in today. More all the time, I am in love with the beings who cohabitat here. It seems like the longer I live, the broader my horizons become and the more I appreciate every last drop of my existence. Maybe it's because time is going by so quickly or I am savoring each moment so much more. I don't know...

By the grace in my life today, I look at the world-- my world-- through new eyes almost every morning. I have a set of small rituals and rites that I perform consistently that send me on my way in a grounded and serene manner. I have a list of people that I say the smallest of prayers and blessings for (usually) before the sun comes up. I look to the Four Directions like my grandmother taught me and I bless the world. There is a tribe of Natives that do a ritual called the Jump Dance, because it is their job to help keep the earth in balance. They are taught from infancy that they have a sacred responsibility to do this, so that man might continue to live and prosper in the world. I feel like I have a responsibility too, to keep my world in balance and to maintain the ritual of blessing every person, every animal that crosses my path. A responsibillity to care for my planet in every way I know how. That includes everything from my rituals and prayers to recycling and greening up the place.

I am blessed to have a connection to my world that I thought I had lost in my years as a practicing alcoholic and drug addict. Those lost years, when I was disconnected form people and from life. Today I am in my life up to my armpits. Fully involved and immersed in a life that is so full and rich and blessed.

I am blessed to have new friends all the time.

I am blessed to be a tool of my Creator...as useful today as is humanly possible for someone like me. An open channel, a cracked pot. *grin

I am especially blessed to have lived long enough to get to experience all this.

And for these things, I am truly grateful.


Namaste.