Alecto's Ophelia

On cues, visual or otherwise

My dogs amuse the hell out of me at the moment. Every night it's been the same routine. In and out in and out the big dog has one long tube from in to out with regard to fluids. The little guy, he holds it until he really needs to face the ice. 

So here we all are, the girls and dogs and I and little girl goes to bed and the music might be on or the television or lord help us, both at the same time plus big girl with her headset plugged into the computer simultaneously watching episodes of House online and whatever else on TV and we're just as ADD as it gets I think. Something like that.

Anyway, there's a point in time when certain cues occur. For instance, I turn off the computer. That's instant cue that we're going to bed. Another is what little dog feels is the last time outside. And then big dog might start going down the hall wondering why we're not coming with him.

Last night I shut down early and they both went suddenly bonkers. It was quite all right with little dog but big dog didn't know what to do with himself. Drink more water? Maybe more food? Do I need to pee to poop to go out and eat ice? Oh no oh no oh no I think I'll chew a shoe instead. NOT.

Finally they settled down and I turned the computer back on. Big dog ignored this. Little dog implored me to reconsider. He sat at my feet in a state of misery until sometime between 9:30 and 10, as every night, we went to bed.

They were exhausted over the anticipation back and forth and slept like well fed babies, for the most part.

How many of us respond to verbal or visual or other types of cues and don't even know? What happens when we're not conscious of what occurs around us and how we behave?

I think a lot about this lately.

My dogs, they're awesome.

On muscle memory, mind, body or soul

I am almost positive that I have had the same yahoo account for at least 8 years. Same user ID, same password.

 

Seriously.

 

I set the account up initially for the calendar so that my direct reports could see my schedule and request meetings or appointments. So they had the password.

 

Everybody had the password and as time moved on there were sensitive documents and I never made a change.  Nothing bad ever happened either.

 

The other day I changed the passwords on all of my email and other accounts. I did this for several reasons but mostly because my doctor TOLD me to and I actually listened to him even though it hit more land mines than I care to think about it.

 

So anyway, I changed my password, right? How long before I stop typing the old one automatically? I’d say it’s got a half life of…

 

Anyway, muscle memory, for one thing or another takes some getting used to and discipline to change. Focus and clarity and it doesn’t matter what you’re changing, change will occur.

 

 

Bikram notes from the master's trenches

I went online looking for Bikram philosophy and found a blog detailing the nine incredible weeks of instructor training  Bikram Blog.

This is out of context and it comes at the end but I wanted to share it because for me, it landed hard.

Let me end with a few more choice Bikram quotes from this week:

"The darkest place in the world is underneath the lamp."

"The only thing most Americans hear is ‘Take it easy, honey’, ‘Don’t hurt yourself’. Come to my class you hear something completely different."
 

"In America, you don’t say ‘cheat’, you say ‘compensate’."

"My yoga is the most incredible invention in all of civilization. Ask me why. Because people survived without electricity, without antibiotics, without air travel, etc. But yoga helps people survive. It gives you a better life. I can live without music, I can live without all that. I can live happily in a cave in the Himalayas. But we need heath to survive. That’s why this invention is more important than anything else anyone invented. Why am I talking that? Who got me off track??"

"My mother and father fight every 7 minutes. But they know when to stop. In American, no one knows when to stop. They are extremists, in America, they over do it. Yoga teaches balance, moderation."

"Did I clear myself?"

"Yesterday I explained to you why women get fat ass pretty quickly."

"PMS is American bullshit."

"Nobody on this earth knows the women character better than I do! (grunt) You women are bulletproof."

"Men don’t change. They are like used car: buy as it. No change."

"Don’t tell people what they want to hear. Tell them what they need to hear. Tell the truth."

"Which pain is good pain? How do you tell which pain is good from the pain that is bad? When you die."

"People act so weird, especially when they are upside down."

"Make your life and other people’s life better."

Walking on glass, toe heel, toe, heel all the way across the plains

 

This Christmas my dad showed up with two plastic storage bins from my Aunt Ann with whom I had a conversation some years ago about some family china that I didn't feel I had any right to as the only girl once removed and that surely one of her boys would have gotten married and taken it with him.

Apparently not. Anyway, I think this because my paternal grandmother once compelled me to return an heirloom Christmas ornament to my father because 'our things pass down through the family name' and it didn't much impress her that I'd kept the family name. And that doesn't make a bucket of sense because my Aunt sure didn't keep the family name but I never could keep this stuff straight.

Now the truth of the matter is that I don't think my aunt got her hands on this stuff until her mother was past ninety but I could be wrong about that too (I find myself wrong about many things these days). It is also possible that Grandma Bess finally relented given the circumstances. In any event, here it is.

My mother once had possession of he soup tureen which is a grand affair with a slot for a very ornate ladle which I returned to my father some twenty odd years ago at somebody's request. He's said I can have that as well.

The thing about the china is it's absolutely not my style in the least. It's fussy, ornate, very old and quite breakable. It cannot go anywhere near a dishwasher, microwave or child under the age of 41. And yet here it is in my household, used immediately to serve Christmas dinner and I am smitten and awed. I wanted it the way I want all things old and family because I'm wired that way. I like to hold the ghosts of my ancestors in my hands and feel what's left they might have to say to me. I just wasn't prepared to instantly love them in a whole other way the moment they came out of their wrappings and into my hands.

They belonged to my Great, Great Grandmother Beyer who came with her husband from Germany penniless sometime before the turn of the century, I believe. My Great Great Grandfather Beyer was a barber with a space at the Waldorf Astoria and my Great Great Grandmother Beyer was a dressmaker. They had one child who was my Grandmother Bess's mother and her name was Lilly and that's about all I've got to say at this writing other than I'm stunned the china made it past Lilly and into Bess's hands in the first place.

So Great Great Grandfather Beyer the Barber had some wealthy clients with some tasty little insider tips and the Beyers lives changed just a bit. And if you think about the probable timing, that would have been a miracle in and of itself. This china would have been purchased after the fact and given the markings on the bottom - Theodore Haviland Limoges France in red with no underscore - these pieces are circa 1903 - 1925. Just before the market crashed.

And here it sits today on my dining room table. A thing to be cherished not for it's inherent value (although apparently I can still buy and sell it and I lean toward the buy, not the sell for heaven's sake) but for the fact of it's continuity. A piece of beauty and grace that is meaningful only in talisman of it's being.

Like I said, I am in awe of it's very presence in my home.

Now all I have to do is manage not to break it which brings us to the segue.

Covered vegetable dish sits on a massive glass table reflecting the dish itself and the contents of the room. Something broke this weekend or broke a year or two years ago or who the hell knows but it broke and I found out for sure last night and I don't know quite how bad but there's a reflection of it in the table. Cletus slept with me last night and I had the good fortune to have a friend, a real honest to god friend to call at six in the morning and say I need you, please come now. OK, I was better than that. I sent the text at 6 and the Facebook message at a more reasonable hour of 9ish and she came right over, adjusted my meds a bit, gave me half a pack of cigs (don't worry, this is absolutely medicinal and no more addictive than the Klonopin I seem to require at the moment and its working which is the good news).

I'm debating sleeping with the dogs tonight. I don't know if that will help or make it worse. I guess I'm just going to deal with it one small moment at a time.

On the Art of being Inappropriate

Posting has become very difficult. Commenting has become very difficult but nobody should take that personally; I’m certainly still reading and I have a lot to say but if your comments require authentication I can no longer post a comment during the day and at night, well at night I just haven’t been able to. I’d offer up excuses that anybody would buy in a heartbeat but what the hell would be the point in that? This is a life blog where we strive for honest, forthright communication. Well, I do anyway. It’s my purpose for being here. Here is where I write the things I might not say otherwise. Here is where I document the things that matter in my life in a way that I cannot easily communicate elsewhere.

And it was all good until my family members started reading my blog and I had to start filtering. And then I started having real feelings for the sensibilities of my readers and I had to start filtering there. And then life got hard again and I stopped writing all together because I didn’t feel I could write most of my truths without pissing off or offending somebody and no matter what anybody tells me about people pleasing paranoia and all that, this is real for me. Conflict, real or perceived, makes me curl up under the proverbial bed with my thumb in my mouth and my eyes squeezed shut. That right there might be too much information for some of you.

Anyway, I don’t want my family members to stop reading my blog. It’s pretty much the only way you know I’m still breathing. I do want you to take what I write with a grain of salt and recognize that it’s about me, not you. I don’t want my blog friends to stop reading and if I offend any of you with too much information or a conflicting opinion, belief or behavior I’m sorry for that but I value your presence and your input. Actually, I love that you’re out there. Somehow it all makes me feel a bit more human and connected. So I’m going to try this again, one more time, because most of the time it keeps me grounded.

So that’s it. That’s all I really wanted to say right now except I’ve been looking down a pretty deep black hole lately and I’m doing my best not to tip in and the beloved kitty who has been with me through three marriages and two divorces went over the rainbow bridge on Saturday but the three remaining chickens are good and Simon is cool as hell even though I’m pretty sure he just passed the 50 pound mark (he’s fifteen weeks old today) and I quit my night and weekend job (the one at home that makes me happiest but won’t pay the mortgage) at least until my family pulls their collective heads out of their collective asses and starts pitching in unconditionally and I’ll write about all of it in the very near future. I’m pretty sure it’s a good story.

 

 

When we all still lived in the castle

OK, I’ve been a total slacker and the Typepad editor is still unusable by me. We’ll see if I can stand the formatting issues that come with a copy paste from Word.

Anyway, Total Slacker has been hanging out over on Facebook like a total addict. It’s OK, I have plenty of company. I’ve been hanging with Cielo and her husband too! There are a few more of you out there but for the sake of anyone wishing to remain anonymous I’ll leave that alone.

I’ve had a Facebook account for about fifteen months. I set it up at the request of friend from middle school who is currently expatriated just outside of London and it seemed like a good way to keep in touch. I didn’t have a lot of hope for it though and even mentioned in my profile that I was more likely than not to forget my user id and password and then that would be the end of me. Or at least the end of my Facebook presence.

Little by little I accumulated ‘friends’. Not too many and I didn’t do a blasted thing with them either. I kind of got it about this ‘wall’ thing and I had myself a vampire and a werewolf and knew how to send a virtual gift. Most of my friends were self selecting, they found me. If I knew them I said ‘yes’. If I didn’t know them I deleted the friend request (I did get some weird ones in the beginning).

Last April when we were in the Au Pair selection process I had this year’s Au Pair set up an account so that she could get to my account and look at pictures because I had been unsuccessful sending her anything. That was as useful as it ever got with the exception of being able to post family photo albums that nobody got to see any other way.

This October, just six months later, the nanny is jettisoned from the house (she was given 48 hours to retrieve her belongings properly chaperoned) and I needed to remove her from my Facebook profile. I needed to remove her, my daughter needed to remove her and last years needed the boot as well. In this process of discovery I clicked something called Friend Finder and boy did I go to town. So, less one nanny and plus forty old friends. Yeah, you read that right. 40. And I don’t like people, remember?

Not all of them are intimate friendships. Some have become passing acquaintances. All of it is worth networking value and the entertainment factor has been very high of late. I have reconnected with people I barely remember from high school, people I can’t believe I forgot from high school and people I can’t believe I ever walked away from at the high tech company.

I found my old best friend. The one I had when we all still lived in the castle and Jeffrey wasn’t anywhere near dead and four of us ran in a pack (we’re still missing one and Jeffrey, well, he’s kind of dead) and the world was young and good and we were all gods of the burgeoning virtual world. And nothing really awful had happened to any of us yet. As adults that is.

And then all hell broke lose and the four of us split right down the middle and I didn’t see her again, well, until yesterday.

And all I want to do is find a way to tell Jeffrey it’s all right now. I found a way to stop being alone. I found a way to get back home.

Passing by the open windows

It is really very easy to get yourself lost in the world and wind up serving your soul sunny side up to some cosmic parking lot attendant at the train station. I was sitting in my car at the station this morning, not feeling all that balanced, staring at the platform and thinking, what the fuck? My ears and throat hurt and I've yet to recover from the lost sleep incurred during the trip into the city Tuesday night with the big kids to see one of the final productions of Rent (I'm still crying over that one).

And then I got out of the car and approached the platform. I'm reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road from the original scroll which means it's like reading the inside of my own brains at nine thousand miles per hour minus any sort of punctuation or spell check. I rather like it a lot. The rest of you might get to feeling a bit sea sick as most people eventually out grow the desire to be hung upside down by ones feet and spun around until the world forgets the lie of linearity. After awhile I forgot about the soul sucker in the parking lot and got lost in Kerouac's version of reality (I quite like it).

None of this resolved the soul sucking and its really just a bit of a bandaid. Sometimes I need to come home and just get hit upside the head with the desires and textures of my own life. You know, the real part where I operate under the illusion that I'm making up at least a good portion of my own rules. So you know how this goes; I take off my monkey suit, pour myself a glass of wine and head out into the great and mighty jungle which calls itself my back yard.

Some of you might remember this little guy in a prior iteration when he was quite a bit smaller and I questioned Audrey's ability to keep him hanging off the deer mesh. Well, here he is and I suspect he'll hang here, slug free, for quite some time. This is food people. Through the garden walls and into the mini jungle, this is food. It's awfully hard sometimes to find a way back to something real and true in all the muck of soul suckage out there. And to reiterate an earlier point, I do actually love this thing they pay me money to do. I LOVE it. However, it is still corporate america, not my life and a bit of a soul sucker all the same. I need grounding, people, and here it is.

This is a little hard to see but it's one giant mutha of a sugar pumpkin (they are supposed to be TEENSY) resting in a bed of corn. I'm just going to wait and see what it does despite the fact that the slugs (that I thought I didn't have) have finally moved in and consumed the first of my ripening sugar babies (bastids).

When Little Girl shakes this pumpkin it sloshes.

Here is a butterfly stuck in the meshing. We freed him without contact and he flew away...

  To the tiny cupola on the roof top. You can see him, he's the little beige spec, on the peaked roof of the cupola.

  You can see the bottom of the new chicken coop behind Little Girl who is doing her own version of geeking the camera (does anybody out there besides me recall the origin of the word geek and it's relation to chickens specifically?).

  And then there's this seven nearly eight year old version of peace. Yeah, I do actually buy it.

In the light...

And finally, I know it's kind of hard to see, but this tobacco type plant I bought two of that got no more than 18 inches high at any point in time suddenly makes this gianormous offshoot that's nearly four feet tall (not that you can tell because those cone flowers are nearly eight feet tall now) and he stands up like some porn star out of the seventies and says, come 'er, babe. let me show you what I've got...

Have a great weekend. I'll be rolling about in the dirt and other such scandalous things.

Speaking the unspeakable

I have been asked if I'm going to blog this and I'm not sure I can. There are two things and the second is much easier to write so I'll write it first. Last night one of my six chickens was murdered savagely by what can only be raccoons. I'm not exaggerating the brutality of the death. She was dragged from the coop (I think they lifted it right off the ground), over the fence, across the lawn and into the swamp shrieking the entire way and leaving a swath of blood and feathers that will have to be cleaned up before Little Girl comes home this evening. I was afraid NoMans was going to sit out there in his bathrobe for the remainder of the night throwing rocks but we put the dog in the pen instead and despite his diminutive size (he weighs all of 22 pounds) he sure does have a deep and ferocious sounding bark. And before anyone gets up in my face about it, yes I do know what those raccoons might have done to my dog but they didn't and he won't have to stay out there again.  Tonight the remaining five girls will stay in Homer's old puppy crate in the shed (which is fort knox) and the new fort knox will be delivered by fork lift on Tuesday of next week. There. That's that and I just wish I wasn't so damn upset about it but I am because I should have known better.

Here's the other part. The first part. My son came home last night. I called him on Tuesday because it was Cletus's birthday and he actually answered the phone. I asked him to come to her party but he was working and I asked him to come to dinner last night and he said he would and he did and I kept my judgmental mother mouth firmly shut and it was lovely. 

Doesn't sound like such a hard thing to write does it? Well, unless you're me and you were beginning to believe you were never going to see or hear from him again (it's been 17 months) it wouldn't sound so hard at all.

I can barely breathe and if I start crying now I will probably never stop. So listen, any of you out there not speaking or being spoken to by someone you love maybe now would be a good time to get over it. Seriously. We are all any of us ever has. Good, bad or indifferent.

p.s. there are a boatload of little baby eggs. we are eating all of them as fast as we can.

100 Things

I am overdue with a couple of posts. I need to discuss the current chicken affairs (they crossed the street, hahahahah), I've been given an award by Spartacus and the nanny swap is complete. However, before I can do any of those I owe CG a list of things growing in my backyard that I can name off the top of my head. As usual, I kind of made up my own rules as I went along and I did this at my desk which means I really have to think about it (I can't see it).

To start with, I definitely divided flora and fauna and I have no idea if bugs and insects belong in fauna (I suspect not) but that's where I put them just like I listed my fungus with the flora even though it should have it's own category. 

I also included some things I planted but omitted many (as in most of what's inside my garden walls). I'm not sure exactly how I drew the line but a lot of it had to do with self sustainability. In other words, I dropped seeds for nasturtium, cosmos, zinnia and johnny jump ups but they will and have come back on their own. I established perennials which will also be back but I do want you to know that the Foxglove (digitalis) was found in the woods before I even added to the collection.

I also noticed that while I know the formal names for some things I know only the common names for most. In some cases I cheated and looked them up. In the case of the mushrooms I kind of had to look them up because common lawn mushroom numbers 1 and 2 would have been meaningless to anyone not from the Northeast. Probably. Also, nifty red things, only meaningful to me.

And lastly I noticed how much I don't know. For example, most of the forest behind our house is made up of new growth trees (in the last 70 - 100 years) and are of a variety that I simply don't know. It's not like I've never seen them I just haven't the foggiest idea what they are. All I know is they grow straight up, have green leaves and no branches good for building tree houses. Bah. Also, they fall over a lot in the swamp.

One last thing - I have no idea what kind of grass is planted in my front and back yard. Probably because I don't much care about it. It's there, it's green, we no longer reseed or fertilize it.

Flora

Blueberries
Wild raspberries
Wild strawberries
Alpine strawberries
Queen Ann's Lace
Poison Hemlock (there's a reason these two are close together)
Golden rod
Rag weed
dandelion
Purple sage
Clover
Oregano
Monkshood
Thyme
Honey suckle
Peppermint
Violets (just purple I think)
Johnny jump ups
Yarrow
Butter cups
Day lillies
Snap dragons
Peonies
Cosmos
Eccanacea
St. John's Wort
Orange poppies
Lupine
Cone flower
Zinnia
Yellow and Red climbing roses
Wisteria
Morning glory
Fox glove
Nasturtium
Portulaca (yes, this comes back again and again in the most bizarre places)
Bracken Ferns
Maiden Ferns
Blue Flag (swamp) Iris
Skunk cabbage
Purslane
Meadow foxtail
Northern bentgrass
Thicket sedge
Red fescue
Bulrush
Burdock
Wild lettuce (reseeding butter crunch)
Wild(ish) butternut squash (crawled from the compost bin)
Broom moss
Powder puff moss
Lichen (I know there are multiple varieties)
Crab grass
Whipfork moss
Reed grass
Cat tails
Witch hazel
Sweet flag
Woodbine (creeper)
Holly
Rhododendron
Burning bush
Azalea
Common dogwood
Mountain Laurel
Juniper
Maple
Pine
Blue Spruce
Common lawn mushroom # 1 - Macrolepiota Procera
Common lawn mushroom # 2 - Psathyrella Candolleana
Nifty red shrooms - Mutinus Elegans

Fauna

Lightening bugs
Japanese Beetles
Night crawlers
Cicadas
Grasshoppers
Crickets
Centipedes
Carpenter ants
Itty bitty black garden ants
Dragon flies
Common house flies
Horse flies
Mosquitoes
Potato bugs
Aphids
Boxelder bugs
Tree frogs
Swamp frogs
Garden toads
Canadian geese
Mallards
Tree sparrows
Goldfinch
Robin
Blue jays
Humming birds
Field mice
Owls
Wood peckers
Raccoons
Coyote
Wild turkeys
Rhode Island Reds (those be my ladies)
Chipmunks
Ground hogs
Deer
Rabbits
Gophers
Hawks (at least a pair, possibly more now)
Bats (at least half a dozen now)
Crows
Grey Squirrels

And..... (you thought I was done) I would also love to see lists from Kory, Kitt, Lisa, El, and Wendy.

Finger tips

I got up nervous on Saturday morning, showered Little Girl, woke up Cletus and started packing food and making breakfast all at the same time. By the time I finished packing up the picnic there was a good 10 pounds of lunch and dinner for just the two of them all combined not counting the water and juice bottles and Cletus has got to carry this plus two duffel bags full of boots and clothing (they're wearing their flip flops and crocs) and her back pack which happens to have six books, four DVDs and a computer before I even thought of stuffing it with the juice bottles. Little Girl will carry her own back pack which is really a diaper pack with her name on it which is not the best idea in the world and it's full of ninety bazillion books and forty thousand crayons and a coloring book. My heart palpitations were going into over drive and we left the house precisely on time and I'm pretty sure I only snapped at Cletus twice and not at all at Nomans (he may correct me on that count) or Little Girl.

We arrived, as planned, good and early to the station I walk through twice a day. Today it was a different station full of non commuters and I've only been upstairs in the waiting room once in the last fifteen years and that was just last week to collect the Amtrak tickets. We sat in seats overlooking the tracks and I put Little Girl on my lap because she was starting to get antsy and worried. We went to the bathroom and she did OK right until we came back to the seats and her eyes welled up and she asked Nomans for some water so that she could 'calm myself down'. And she did. We talked about the trains and the number of cars and the engineers and the engines and which way is which and where is track 1 anyway? (it appears to be missing) And then she finally dropped the other shoe and said, 'Mommy, I'd be a lot happier if you came with me. At which point I asked if she'd done the math and considered I'd have to be on the train a total of sixteen hours each time just to do that. She knew. And still.

We sat upstairs until the train was announced on Track 4 and started for the stairs. I held her hand and on about step four she started to hyperventilate. She did this, making these heart breaking little gasping sounds, all the way the stairs and onto the platform and onto the train and oh crap! There don't appear to be any double seats left together and I'm going to be forced to make somebody move possibly by tormenting them with a wailing seven year old which is not fair to the girl, now is it? I spy a four seater with no leg room at all and one Au Pairish looking girl asleep with her feet on the seat across and I drop my girls and their bundles and apologize but she knows and picks up her feet.

Little girl is on the inside seat where there just happens to be no window and I am sorry about this. The Au Pairish looking thing has the window. Little Girl has tears rolling down her cheeks and I mustn't, mustn't mustn't cry under any circumstances because she deserves more of me than that just now. I stroke her hand and remind her that she's got Cletus (who I made pick her up and comfort her on the train platform just to give them both the right idea while I was still there) and that this is all perfectly all right. It is time to get the hell off this train before we're all stuck until New Haven and the last thing I feel as I turn to go are the tips of her little girl fingers. They tremble and let go.

We leave the train and I stand at the window, through which I can barely see, and wave with my brave face to my girls until the train pulls away from the platform and I bury my face in my husband's chest and howl until the howling has taken the breath right out of me.

(it was a really great weekend and lots of amazing things occurred, of which I have taken good pictures, but this deserves a post of it's own)