Halloween Party 07

Well WHAT A BLAST this year's Halloween party was! Loads of people, fun games, good booze, and Beca and JAC's homemade cookies...how much better can it get? Aside from a ton of leftover food, which ok, that could be rectified next year with smaller size purchases and less in the way of snackies, I think it was just amazing. I was BODACIA, pirate of Delmar, and my husband, the wonderful Pirate JAC. Ori went as ori because he doesn't love his monkey costume, oh well, and Beca went as Princess Leia, until her headbanging coils fell out. again. HAHA! This is the only pic I have so far, from Tova and Daniel (awesome to meet him!).



It's the kids making a spider web (which Christopher tried to "land" in but that kid is HEAVY! He pulled a bunch of girls right over. I do admit that the circle was girl heavy, but they all had a blast doing it and Christopher got to be the center of attention - at least for a moment! All the kids loved the prizes and toys, such suckers! I think the best part was the trick or treating - 12 adults got brown paper bags with plastic bags inside. Half of them had tricks and half had treats. The tricks were pasta (cold and oily), olives, and jello. The treats were all manner of goodies (coin purses, mini-rubik's cubes, jack-o-lantern poppers, etc). The kids loved going from adult to adult trying out whether they had a trick or a treat, and I think the adults really enjoyed being able to do that, too! Deb and Chris were awesome magicians (top hats and all!) and Lynn and Dan came as Esmeralda and the hunchback! What a hoot!

I really enjoyed this party, once again, and am already looking forward to next year!

Tibetan Test for you!

Hopefully 22 people will look at this between now and tomorrow night...

choices

Oh my, what a life it would be if we ran right out of choices??? My friend's giving her dd the choice, this morning, between the beach and the aquarium. WOW! I wish I had those choices today. But today our choice will be to walk to the po using the stroller (but not taking the dog) or to drive to the po and then go to the park. It sure would be nice to meet up w/Tova there, but I don't remember her phone #. Maybe it's still in my bag?

We need to do a food shop today, tomorrow is help with pizza day at B's school. Should really go to the coop and ask K or J if there is anything I can do for them this month - running out of time and I need about 8 hrs! I'm sure they'll have some choices for me. Otherwise? I sign up for bag straightening! lol!

Choices for dinner, choices for breakfast. Today I chose the beautiful ham steak and I'll make a lovely little spinach quiche to go with it, and the frozen flax waffles. For me. O gets a bagel and we'll share some cantaloupe. After he finally TRIED it yesterday, he ate a LOT of it! Funny boy.

choices about how we FEEL are so much harder for me. When I'm feeling frustrated, it's VERY hard to open the door on well-being and invite more in. MORE isn't what I need, ANY is what I need! I'm really enjoying the Scott Noelle emails (find them here) and also the Abraham daily quotes. Getting both feels like overkill some mornings, so I don't open whichever one doesn't call to me. Today, Scott Noelle led me here, though, and it really resonated with me. I think the thing that has helped the MOST in that respect, that find your happy place when you are feeling like kicking in the door place, is the little waterfall in the LR. I love the couch that is in front of it, I love the tinkle of the water, I love the curtains and the watery light that comes through to that space. I can feel peaceful in just a very short time, if I can get there, sit quietly, not be a human jungle gym or smell anything burning or know that the children are killing each other. In 4 or 5 minutes I come away a new woman! It's awesome. Nothing else works that fast for me, although kava has it's advantages. ;-)

What kind of hippie AM I?

What type of hippie are you? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as One Intelectual Individual You're a thinker. You see things from a very different prospective than the rest of the world, and probably find release and self-expression in music, painting, scalpting, or any other form of art. People see you as a deep person, full of knowledge that they don't understand. People are attracted to that, but there's a good chance you don't care. Original Hippie 100% One Intelectual Individual 100% Pothead 75% Earth-Child 75% New Age Hippie 75% Not a Hippie 50%

Reading List

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). I've doubled **'d those I've read, with an * following if I've read that title more than once. I've italicized those I started but couldn’t finish.

**Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
**Anna Karenina
**Crime and Punishment
**Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
**Wuthering Heights
**The Silmarillion*
**Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
**Don Quixote*
Moby Dick
**Ulysses*
**The Odyssey*
**Pride and Prejudice
**Jane Eyre
**A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov*
**Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
**War and Peace
Vanity Fair
**The Time Traveler’s Wife
**The Iliad*
Emma
Mrs. Dalloway
**Great Expectations
American Gods
**Atlas Shrugged
**Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
**Memoirs of a Geisha
**Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
**The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
**Love in the Time of Cholera
**Brave New World
**The Fountainhead*
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
**Frankenstein*
**The Count of Monte Cristo
**Dracula*
**A Clockwork Orange*
**Anansi Boys
**The Once and Future King*
**The Grapes of Wrath
**The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
**1984*
Angels & Demons
**The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
**Sense and Sensibility
**The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
**One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
To the Lighthouse
**Tess of the D’Urbervilles*
**Oliver Twist*
**Gulliver’s Travels*
**Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
**The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
**The Prince (in French and English - does that count as multiple readings?)
The Sound and the Fury
**Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
**A Confederacy of Dunces
**A Short History of Nearly Everything
**Dubliners
**The Unbearable Lightness of Being
**Beloved*
**Slaughterhouse-Five
**The Scarlet Letter
**Eats, Shoots & Leaves
**The Mists of Avalon*
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
**Lolita
**Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
**The Catcher in the Rye
**On the Road*
**The Hunchback of Notre Dame
**Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
**Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values*
The Aeneid
**Watership Down*
**Gravity’s Rainbow
**The Hobbit*
White Teeth
**Treasure Island
**David Copperfield
**The Three Musketeers*

Other books I think are fabulous and should be on your to read list, if you haven't read them already:

The Glass Castle
Cry, The Beloved Country
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
The Namesake
The Stone Diaries
Stones from the River
A Sand Country Almanac
White Oleander
Night
Midwives
The Book of Abraham

I like a lot more than that, but those are ones I've read many times, now. And will read again! I confess that several of these I listened to on my ipod, which were unabridged editions, and many (even ones I've read multiple times) I may not have read for 10-20 years! Some more than that! And I do NOT consider myself old...isn't that interesting! lol

Thanks Aviva!

Priceless

Yesterday (Monday) Ori twice came to me and told me he had 'to go' and was wearing either a trainer or a diaper. WOW! SO impressed with the little smudge. Today? Peed in his pants. Granted we were out and about, and in the pet store, which is very distracting. But it is so wonderful that he is heading up and over the hump of diapers! I'm selling off what I have, and really am very happy about that. YAY!!!

The Bethlehem Families Coop has busted a big move this week. We are splitting off into 3 groups, one is transitory, the other two are evolved. Well, one is evolved, the other evolving. The new group will be made up of people from the old group and new families. The old group will be made up from only the old families who are ready to retire from the social commitments that necessitate bringing in new families. Hopefully all will go well, and new life will be breathed into the coop! YAY!

Sunday, while I was helping with and watching Birth, JAC took the kids over the the Fall Family Fun Day at the school. Ok, I'm all for fundraisers. I'm all for FUN fundraisers. And tbh, I'm not even against fish. Wondering where this is going? Well, Beca played some game so many times, she came home with NINE koi fish. So we are now the proud owners of a 10 gallon fish tank, 2 fake plants, a filter, a can of fish food, and a jar of dechlorinator. Total on Visa = $70. Watching them watch our very own fish? Priceless.

Rise! to the defense of CHOICE!

Yesterday, after spending about 4 hrs. setting up the silent auction, running errands, and generally being a happy little involved gofer, not to mention baking for the cast and crew, I watched Karen Brody's play BIRTH. Although I LOVED it, every wonderful feminine, rebellious minute of it, there were things I didn't like, or at least didn't love. I don't love that it is ok for a woman to be a chicken shit about her birth. It's not safer to have a c-section. It's not better for her, or her baby. And it's not ok to cost the system ten thousand extra dollars simply because people have scared you into it. NOT ok. Otoh, I do respect the many many women who carry and birth their babies under difficult medical circumstances, and who need the opportunity to do this in the safest possible way. These women are a seerious MINORITY, not 30% of all women birthing in the USA today! That's the c-section rate, currently. Nationally. Globally it's a different story. This is what you get when you search the WHO's database on international or global c-section rates. Bah.

Then today I read this article. I recognize it's on a save home birthing website. Possibly because it's completely about home birth? NO! Because it's another piece of a mother's choice that is being taken from her by a government less interested in the benefits to a mother than in the long term politics of medicine and pharmaceuticals. The amount of money they have been losing because Amish and Plain women nearly ALWAYS birth at home is really pretty small. But now studies are coming out showing that homebirth is often safer for low risk women and their babies. Now the UK mandates to permit homebirth as a viable option to all low risk pregnant women, making the US look like a great big boobie since much of Canada (though not all) has already passed this legislation. So Big Boobie that we are, we'll back up our hard nosed position to the Nth, and make it impossible for even religiously exempted women to birth their babies at home. What a bunch of tools! If the legislators were affected themselves (for example, legislation were passed to mandate vasectomies for all men over 40, or how about no beer sold on days when the NFL, AFL, NBL, ABL or NHL were playing? Oh I like that one!) perhaps they would wake the fuck up and quit pushing people around. Perhaps one of their daughters will catch Hep B from a hospital she was FORCED to birth in because even though she is young and healthy and unafraid of the pain of labor and birth, she is not ALLOWED by LAW to birth in the comfort of her own bed, where the sheets carry only her own germs, and she can eat scrambled eggs at 8cm.

On a more positive note, I think this is the best thing the WHO is working on right now - it should be HUUUUGE and it isn't, but it's a better effort than no effort at all!