Ten pictures in ten steps.

These are sitting in the hall closet - I pulled the bottom one (which has fish lips glued to it) for hat day last year - Orin's preschool. Fun hats we bought in Ohio, on an island. Yup - there's an island in Ohio!

My grandma made this - my dad's mom. She was good, huh?



The Joy of cooking. Sits, alone, on top of the wave. It's marked for pancakes/johnny cakes, plain or with fruit.

This is one panel of a 12 panel tapestry made by a women's cooperative in rural Zimbabwe. This panel is telling about how the woman carried a heavy load on her head for a long way, before getting home. Other panels tell about how her husband was drunk and beat her, then how sorry he was, and how she let him come back home in the end. Sigh.



Max. Short for Maxine. She's huge. We aren't REALLY sure she's a she, but she felt like a she, to me. In a box, with a fox.



Plants. I like them, but I also kill them indoors. These are Jerry's responsibility. Beckey get that spider plant 7 years ago from Verstanding's halloween celebration. Still going strong!


Yeah. So? We have a giant snowflake in the corner. So? What's it to ya?

These are on the wall right by my desk. I love being a mom!

Fresh picked apples from ILF. Galas. Best applesauce, pies, and eating around!


Candy in the candy bowl. This is crap the kids won at the Scottish Games in Altamont. Yeah, thanks guys. Still got this hanging around.

Is death the enemy?

I was checking out causes of death today, kind of random I know, because there's this article on CNN or somewhere talking about how prostate cancer is a huge threat to men today, and how cancer is a huge death factor for men over fifty, but - it says - heart disease is still (and always?) our number one enemy.

Now I'm sure this is true for a lot of people, people who think death is bad, scary, evil. I am not so sure. I think having a crappy quality of life, of being a burden on everyone around you, of not having the life you want to have because you are feeble of mind and/or body, is WAY worse than death.

I don't believe in heaven or hell. I don't think Hitler ever did get punished for what he did. I don't think his victims were rewarded for their selflessness or for the years they lost, the lives unborn, cut down in, or before, their prime. Or Attila the hun and his victims, or Lenin and his. It's not like that for me, there's a HUGE - bigger than the hugest huge - amount of energy in the multiverse, and when we die, we go into it, become part of it. This, what the Hindus call incarnation, this lifetime is our time to shine (which is why so many people, especially children, love love love to be the center of attention), alone in the universe. This is our time to love and be loved for who we are - separate from the rest of that amazing energy out there. And when we die and go back into that tremendous energy - the energy of a billion billion suns - we ARE that energy.

So what's so bad about that? Nothing! There's nothing wrong w/dying. Nothing at all. You don't get to see your sister-in-law very often, or eat marshmallows around the fire, but to me, it's a new amazing experience that is worthy of being looked FORWARD to, not escaped from (which doesn't give me a death wish, just a different perspective). You will never get to see the very end of the play, all except a small handful of the total number of people in the world who ever have or will live. But we will all become part of something amazing once again - for we do not create or destroy the energy that is god, we become it.

Baby steps

Gratuitous pickie of my boykie.

I spoke with a gal tonight, at back to school night at the kids' school, who has been looking for a job (part time) for 7 years. Yup - since her 7th grader went to school full time, since she moved to the area, since she knew what she was ready for. She got one, started yesterday - CONGRATS Susan! Meanwhile, it reminds me that needing a job NOW is so ME, but not very realistic. Baby steps. Ineed to start somewhere, anywhere, but I don't need to start with anyTHING. Adding "would you like fries with that" to the end of every other sentance is probably not the kind of job I need to be taking on right now. But doing something that makes me feel useful would be good! So I think the first thing to do is figure out WHAT I want to do, and then what I need to do to do it. And maybe figure out, in the meantime, what the hell it is I can do in the meantime!

I saw this blog today, and I think I will try to do this tomorrow - 10 steps. I think that's an excellent idea! Before my eyeglass appointment at 10:30, I will take my camera into town and do a walk, give myself 45 min or so to get 10 interesting things, 10 steps (or less) apart each. And finish laundry. Cause w/or w/out a job, the job of running this home is still mine. :D

Shhh - it's too quiet!

My kids are back in school. Actually, Beckey is at a leadership/team building experience at a Y-camp, but she's back this afternoon, and then, back to school. We managed to afford all the binders and calculators, new shoes, trip fees, and new bags, though the stew pot is thin this week. But now, well, it feels just a little TOO quiet! I know, I was complaining, it was too LOUD here just last week - my kids, their kids, neighbor kids, dogs, puppies (not ours!), parties, and the start of everything - it felt overwhelming. And now it's so darned quiet I have no excuses for not hearing the dang buzzer on the dryer in the basement. Well, some things may never change - like the piles of laundry all sorted out and ready for washing on the basement floor - but some things do. Beckey is in middle school, with lots of expectations and a whole new sense of belonging. Orin is on the bus and in kindergarten. He started writing a book yesterday, and drew two calender pictures - one of camels and the other he couldn't remember because then he drew a lot of other pictures, but they weren't calendar pictures, but he couldn't remember which were which. He's a rather happy boy! Soccer started last weekend, and he got stung twice by a wasp and fell once, on his tailbone, and it hurt. Not a great start to the season, but at practice on Monday he took some real tumbles w/out shedding a tear, ran his little heart out, and really enjoyed it! He was very charged up (making bedtime in time for book club impossible, but he was kind and sweet, and very cute in his matching purple footie pajamas - matching Beckey's of course!).

It's so quiet I can hear the lawn mower down the block. I can hear the wind in the oak tree outside, it's leaves still holding fast. I can hear the creaks of my own fingers on the keyboard, and in the house where it settles and sighs in the sun.

I will someday grow up and get a job and leave all this quiet behind, but for now, I am loving these moments, until the children return and in a flourish of kisses and lunch boxes, dirty socks and backpacks filled with the fruit of their day's labor, the quiet is gone, and my life is back. Sudden as it appeared, the quiet that became oppressive is once more elusive, and sacred.