If your bionic leg is in the shop for repair (new socket and a few minor tweaks) and your bike is in the shop for repair (new chains, tune up and brake adjustment) and so you are rather lazily lounging on your comfy purple couch planning your trip to Boston this Fall (woohooo!), well if this is you, you might just want to spend a few minutes browsing the pics on this site. Especially the ones of Ewan McGregor. Because kilts rock. Yah. :)
July 2007
Playing along with this meme from BiV and JourneyGal:
1) I have difficulty with auditory discrimination. Meaning that if I have several incoming sounds my brain can’t prioritize the sounds very well and I don’t end up hearing much of anything. So chatting in crowded restaurants is tough and I usually sit at the front of classrooms. It also means that I have a really hard time “hearing” the words of songs or movie dialog. If I like a song I search out the words and I watch movies with the subtitles on.
2) I rarely wear nail polish although I like the idea of wearing it. My favorite color of polish is pale pink. I have strong fingernails that I can easily grow out very long.
3) Like most other people in my family, my second toe is longer than my big toe.
4) Until about 5 years ago I hated cats. I thought they were whiny, annoying, and they made me sick (quite literally, because of severe allergies). I resented my friends (and my sister) who liked cats. Now I am a zealous cat lover and the allergies are gone. Nearly every day I cuddle my kitties, sing them songs, and feed them their favorite treats. I find them an endless source of joy and delight.
5) Until about 5 years ago I hated chocolate. I liked chocolate-flavored things like cake, but hated the taste and texture of chocolate itself (PayDay was my fav candy bar because of its lack of chocolate). Yet at some point I got some very fine dark chocolate and fell head over heels. Now I don’t do milk chocolate and I only eat fine (as in 73% or above) organic dark chocolate. I almost always have a bar in my cupboard and nibble away at a few squares of chocolate per week.
6) I can touch my tongue to the tip of my nose. And I can do “the wave” with my eyebrows. I can also wiggle my ears–even one at a time.
7) Vanilla is one of my favorite smells. I am particularly fond of The Body Shop’s vanilla body spray and of Yankee Candle’s French Vanilla scent.
8) In the spirit of BiV’s “famous-people” list, I’ll add a few of my own. I’ve already written about my relationships with the Broncos. During my cancer treatments I had a few other brushes with famous folks, including Kenny Loggins. At a summer camp for cancer patients I took a drama class from an actress on the then-popular show “Hill Street Blues.” When I was a college student I dated a Japanese Chippendales dancer a few times (my roommate was dating his best buddy so we frequently went out together or hung out at our apartment). That was an ‘interesting’ experience–the hubris of someone who carried 8×10 glossies of his (mostly naked) self at all times. Yah.
Photo: Closeup of a bright pink zinnia flower
Last night I was up most of the night with semi-awful phantom pains. Not so bad that I was screaming (which happens occasionally), but bad enough that my hip and leg were spasming at regular intervals and keeping me from sleeping soundly. So I am a bit tired and a bit testier than usual today (that, coupled with the realization at 4 am that I’d left the water running when I was soaking a friend’s garden yesterday evening, grrrr–but fortunately when I got out there early this morning I found that another gardener had turned off the water for me! whew).
So, I went out to the garden much earlier than usual this morning. And it’s an overcast day and just perfect for toodling around out there. So I picked a passle of tomatoes, cut some flowers, pulled weeds, and just enjoyed watching the dew drip from the leaves of the plants. It was just what I needed after a very long and uncomfortable night.
Photo: Two small pale pink roses, wet with drops of water.
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
~Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
Last night I had the strangest dream (queue 80s music now)…
I was in the garden and it was early dusk. We were all enjoying the warmth and joy of the evening as we do on a regular basis. But then it got very dark very fast and we looked up and realized that night was coming on like a huge storm (can night do that?). The moon was full and dark, with clouds covering it. It wasn’t the large moon that I am used to enjoying on evenings in the garden. I felt afraid.
I woke up early, perhaps prematurely, and had a big glass of water and decided to go back to sleep. I returned to my garden in my dreams. I was sitting around the table with my family enjoying the evening again. Only this time a huge group of people from our former church life–the ‘leaders’ rather than our friends–came by and were peering over our fence. I felt threatened and defensive.
I woke again and snuggled into John’s shoulder and felt safe. Then I got up (for the final time) and enjoyed a cup of Wedding Imperial tea and a generous slice of apricot cake.
All is right in the world again.
From George McGovern via the Progressive Historians (McGovern is speaking on the Senate floor):
Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land — young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.
There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes.
And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.
So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: “A contentious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”
While I don’t agree that someone who is mutilated (by war or otherwise) is necessarily without hope, I often feel hopeless when I realize how little consideration our nation’s leaders have for the human cost paid by their wargames.
Last night I made a yummy steamed-bean salad with a mix of these funky purple-podded beans (from Seeds of Change–love them!) and a handful of green beans. What tasty fun!
This is my first year with bean success. In years past I’ve tried growing bush beans and the bugs ate them all. Also tried pole beans last year but they were mowed down by a rogue bunny. So this year I sowed both purple and garden-variety-green pole beans. I’ve discovered that the purple-podded beans grow earlier, faster, and are more hardy in my garden microclimate (in other words, I am so growing them again!). The kids made a darling teepee with castoff wood poles for growing the beans on. It is pretty cute and they are so proud of *their* beans.
Three random things about me:
1) I am direction dyslexic. Meaning that I can’t tell left from right. You would think that I could remember that my right leg is amputated and that that would help me somewhat? Nope. My brain just doesn’t process the difference between the two directions. It makes driving challenging. Fortunately John and the kids have learned to find humor in it. (Note: I do tend to have a pretty good sense of direction, as in cardinal directions. I can also read equally well from either direction)
2) I don’t care much for ice cream (esp in milkshakes) or ham because of awful throw-up experiences with them. An awful vomit experience with pickles resulted in a fairly temporary aversion. [Note: during my chemo era (when I was throwing up dozens of times each day), I learned that OREO cookies taste just the same going down as coming back up. OREOs became my major food group for about a year.]
3) I like to write my ‘to do’ list on the side of my left hand, just below the base of my thumb. Right now there are faded words there from this morning reminding me that I needed to put a textbook on reserve in the library.
A blue flower for you (especially Sara, whose blue morning glory flower just blew me away this morning….)
We were up late last night with friends. I was tempted to say we were up too late, but is there ever a too late when you are having just too much fun to come home? (Yes, my friends, Apples to Apples is addictive!)
So we had school and work today even though yesterday was a holiday. The kiddoes are a bit testy. And I am a bit less patient with their testiness.
But it was well worth it. :)