My Day

Ahh yes, it's a good life when it isn't raining, when the truck is only a few hundred yards away, and the slopes are only 60 percent. It's actually a good life when there are stones this big in the soil profile because when I finally get a stone out, I can be at least 10 inches deeper in the pit! Yes, it's a good life!!

This is a really great soil, by the way, grows big Douglas Fir and has volcanic ash in the upper part. I thought I had to leave all my Andisols behind in the northwest, and lo and behold they are appearing here in the Sierras. Leftovers from the volcanic activity near the top of Sonora Pass, I assume. the tape is in cm and meters by the way, and I go to a meter and a half or 2 meters if the bedrock doesn't stop me as it did in this pit.

Conversations with my online Womens Group

This conversation has been just so good for me personally, and I hope for everyone, to see that these choices and conflicts are really themes that cross over economic boundaries somehow. No matter how much we have or don't have, we are all still trying to figure out how to do it as we age. And the choices we make now have such a great bearing on how we will be as those little old ladies that we watch and wonder. At least I do. How did that person become so alone? How did that happen to this vibrant woman? I have really good mentors on this level and really good examples of how NOT to do it, so I am learning I hope.

Just recently my godmother Wilma let go of her condo, her car, and most of her possessions to move into an assisted living place. She practices yoga often, and has a wonderful outlook on life in general, and trust in a Higher Power. Her take on it all was that she was getting the opportunity to begin the "letting go" of the end of her life. She is 83 now, and her memory is going. She fell last year and broke her hip pulling the cork out of a bottle of good white wine. I went to visit her and she lost Costco, and we drove around her town for a very long time trying to find our way back to her house. I was so relieved when she moved out of her condo and went to the assisted living place. But she is my mentor when it comes to trusting in the ultimate order of the Universe and the power of the Higher Power.


I know that somehow, we will all have a roof over our head. There are a lot of homeless people out there, but I don't think any one of us will go there, even if we are renting a condo or an apartment somewhere. Trust and safety. Just what kind of space do I really need, or do any of us need to feel safe. I know I need to know that I can live somewhere where no one can tell me I can't keep my cats. Big issue with renting, and yet I know people with animals who rent. You figure it out, I guess. My sister rents, and her landlord won't let her paint or put anything on the walls, so she has these velcro thingys and hangs all her colorful quilts on the wall and the place looks like her home did back in the days when she was married and had a home of her own. So that goes back to the stuff part. I will keep just enough stuff to keep my space feeling like my space, and I too have learned here in this last move to California, that I don't need as much. I am clearing out and paring down and letting some things go, and some not. I have a porcelain chicken for pete's sake. I love that chicken. stupid, but somehow it pleases me to walk out into the kitchen in the morning and see the colors on that chicken. Reminds me of the days when I had real chickens, the sound of there gentle clucking and the smell of straw sweet and clean. I will take the chicken to Mo's.

I went through a woman's home after her death, Barb, my grandmother, and things were in such disarray that I vowed to never let my children have to do the same. Letting go of "stuff". Still working on the photos and files and mementos of our lives, and making those choices now. Need vs want. Still not at the point where I could let someone do that for me, though... Not sure about that one at all! I love the piano story. I let my first piano go to pay for my college tuition and I do play the piano. I now have a digital piano, easy to move, and yet I can still play. Did I ever tell anyone here that I played classical piano for the symphony in southern california as a teenager? Couldn't do that now, of course, but I can still play when I am moved to do so. Another retirement dream, but who will I play for?

And like you, Barb, even the move to Mo's place in Rocky Point probably won't be the last one. Mo thought she would build that house and keep it for 10 or 15 years and then sell the property and move into some kind of condo, more easy to care for. If we live long enough, we will probably leave that place eventually. It has lots of grass to mow and wood heat and is a big property. And as you said, I know Mo well enough and trust her to do something reasonable regarding how long I could stay there if she were to pass on first. I wouldn't want to live there anyway if she were gone. I have 4 kids, and if I were alone it would be important to be where some of them are at least. So even though I am trying to plan and prepare, there are still unknowns. Mo planned and prepared for her life so carefully, and then Carol died after they were together 25 years, screwed up the plan considerably, and yet Mo still followed her plan. Stuff happens.

So yeah, the final move may or may not appear, and the plan always has to make room for adjustments and changes, especially as you said earlier about the new realities in economics. Right now owning property or a home is a bit scary, and the investment isn't always going to go up. No guarantees on anything at all. So we can just keep on looking forward, making plans, and knowing those plans are only possibilities and somehow be ready to deal with upsets and shifts, and still have dreams and make more plans. Maybe it's about being attached to the plans and dreams that is the problem. Learning how to have them and yet how to let them go and not be attached when things shift. Barb, you are learning that in such a huge way right now. The shift in plans. So thoughtful when you said you did it too early. A good understanding there, it just wasn't time yet for you.

Charlie and Linda, I love watching you two build your life together, and seeing the love come through as you deal with the adjustments of kids and family and stuff and style. Bottom line is the love and the willingness to adjust.

And Virginia, you and Helen as well, shifting, changing, making adjustments over and over as you deal with place and stuff and choices. I am just trying here to think about the bigger picture, and seeing that economic realities are the surface of things, and there are underlying lessons for all of us that resonate and sound familiar. Things we are supposed to learn about being in this human body doing this human thing. Things I have seen people evolve and learn gracefully, and things other people I have watch kicking and screaming to the end and refusing to learn and grow at all. I guess some of us do and some of us don't. I hope I do. What an incredible blessing to have a place to talk and think about something other than the pragmatic everyday thoughts that seem to take over. Thanks to you beautiful batch of women that I have known for 7 years now!!!! WOW.

Hugs
Malone

Saturday morning

Saturday morning, June 9, 2007

Sun shining in the windows and I am still depressed. Not severely, not sad, just feeling a bit low and unfocused and the tears are close to the surface. Closer than I realized until I started writing. Alone. Although alone isn’t really the problem, because I noticed that I was feeling this way a bit last Saturday as well, even though Mo was here. Just life. Just doing life, the everyday stuff, but doing it alone. Sometimes that is good. Sometimes it isn’t.

I feel out of touch with kids and family. They are all so far away. I went through this last year around this time. I know that I have fun things to look forward to, that I just got to spend some good time with my son, which doesn’t happen very often at all. That soon I will have a short week with my entire family. Good times. Family times. But I want to be right there. I want to go over to Deb’s house and have coffee, or to Melody’s house and sit with her while she deals with the kids and all her stuff. I got a taste of it at Deanna’s. It was truly wonderful being there, having time again with family.

I remember so well how my grandmother complained about being lonely. I am not anything like her, I have work and am so busy, but still I catch that missing family thing that she went through. It’s almost as though the missing family is more of a concept, missing something that no longer exists. Family in the same town, Sunday dinners at Grandma’s house, coffee in the morning on the porch. What porch? I have a porch here that I rarely sit on because I am too busy working. Even if we all lived in the same town, Sunday dinners wouldn’t happen that often because we are all too busy.

So today I am not busy. I have yard things, house things, laundry things waiting, but nothing overbearing. My body is tired and achey from all the hiking and digging that I did this week. Beautiful week actually, cool weather, big puffy clouds in the blue skies. Working in the higher country far north from here, out of the oaks and into the firs and pines. Lovely. Lonely and quiet in the best way possible.

Pensive. Is it just my nature to be pensive? How tiresome is that for the people around me trying to understand. If it’s tiresome for me, I am sure it is tiresome for others to listen to. Mo says, sometimes you just have to go through the motions of everyday living, without anything going on, just do the chores, take care of business, be in life without any big input from anything else. Just everyday life. So today I am doing everyday life.

Loving my "inheritance"

Here is the URL for an article telling about a bit of the history of the Metlox California Poppy Trail "California Ivy".

http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660203519,00.html

I found a way to love my dishes, the ones I grew up with in California. Dorothy gave them to me, along with the silver before she died. These dishes and silver and crystal are part of the really good memories I have of Dorothy. She loved to entertain and set a beautiful table. We were on the very low side of middle class for that era, probably would be considered poor in this day and age, but we had sterling and crystal and knew how to have a truly fine dinner. Thanksgiving wasn't the only time. The dishes are special, but I couldn't figure out how to make them really look wonderful on the table, but today I did it. Bamboo chargers that match the painted vines on the plates, and a tropical tablecloth. So much fun. Now I have to have a dinner for someone!

random

Today I am doing what we call "lab sampling". It means lots of walking and digging and carrying lots of very heavy bags of soil, labeling them, dipping clods of soil in liquid saran, hanging them on clothes lines that have been strung between whatever tree or bush is available and usually a spade jammed into the ground. It means lots of other things as well, and it's actually pretty satisfying work. real.

This afternoon, the review team leader from Davis and I went to a sample location without the rest of the crew to sample a soil in a politically sensitive site. Beautiful day actually, breezy, not too hot, brilliant skies, grass still green, shade of an oak tree to work in. Many miles from any kind of civilization. Not bad at all.

The two Sue's we call ourselves, Valley Sue and I am Sierra Sue. So Valley Sue is writing something down on a label and I am digging away at the pit when, silently, the Easter bunny drops in. No, not a rabbit, not a real bunny. An Easter Bunny Balloon. It just glides in from nowhere and gently lands on the knoll about 10 feet from where we are working. And looks at us. The bunny is grinning and his ears are upside down because he seems to have lost some of his oomph. So he laughs at us. For about five minutes he laughs at us, resting on his little knoll. We look at each other and laugh and say, "Gee, maybe we should take him home". And just as quietly and gently the bunny leaves, lifted into the air by a gust of a breeze, and off he goes.

Now that's just plain random. and weird. and very very funny. We laughed the rest of the day. We never did find the bunny, either.

too busy to even write to myself!

So I am working on a major lab sampling event coming up here in the mother lode with all those bigshot smarties coming from UCDavis to check out my paralithics. I have a really difficult employee who is totally dedicated and makes me want to kill him because he is seriously and completely nuts, and isn't getting his work done at all. I have a totally smart and wonderful employee who is like a sponge and needs my continuous teaching, I have two great guys detailed in from out of my area who are smart and really good soil scientists but need to understand the Mother Lode in order to map a lot of it in a very short time and in the midst of this I am supposed to be finalizing all that stuff I wrote last year for my Basic Soil Survey teaching assignment, coming up way too quickly in May, only again, one more time, in some kind of new format devised by Marc Crouch the Grouch who is the head of training. The man is on a mission. We have to do teacher plans, and student plans, and convert them all to jpegs and then back to ppts, and then, of course, we aren't supposed to use too many ppt's because that isn't really teaching. and for pete's sake, I'm just trying to get a soil survey done for my area and get some lab data to document it! Nuts! I am going slowly or quickly maybe crazy!!! There's my rant for the day. Happy Easter everyone. I'm running off to Oroville to help Maryruth hide eggs for her 13, yes 13 grandchildren. geez. Then next week I am off to meet my own great granddaughter in Wenatchee for the first time finally. Then killer sampling week, and then off to Lincoln to teach the class, traveling there in the MOHO with MO gee, maybe I can call her MIMOtheHO. oops, of course I didn't say that, and taking Shera along in the gourd where she is currently resting. Will finally after more than a year spread her ashes in the canyons on the way home from Nebraska. Have I said all this before somewhere? This is how my life feels at the moment. All one big paragraph with no breaks and no real sentences.

Too funny!

You Were a Coyote

Brutally honest, you encourage people to show their true selves. You laugh at life - none of it can be taken too seriously.

What Animal Were You In a Past Life?

Motherlode Snowstorm

I guess snow happens so rarely here that the infrastructure isn't ready to handle it. This lovely 2 inch very wet snow brought down trees and lef 18,000 people or so, including me, without power for a day. It was beautiful, though, especially since the streets were wet instead of icy and it melted in a day. Not the winter snows I am used to, but enough to be delightful.

Snowstorm

Morning Thoughts

“It Can Happen Here” by Joe Conason

The most salient dissent to be heard in recent years, and especially since Bush's reelection in 2004, has been voiced not by the liberals and moderates who never trusted the Republican leadership, but by conservatives who once did.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for "a totalitarian type regime."

Raining in the Mother Lode

So it's raining in Jamestown, has been for a few days now. That's a good thing. When I moved here I didn't know that the little creek that passed my park would be perennial. It ran all summer and through the dry fall and winter, even without any rain for months. Woods Creek. It was not far from here that someone found a 10 pound gold nugget back in the early 90's.

Quiet Sunday evening. Moana has returned to Oregon, and we are back to talking on the phone, laughing about our days, sharing stuff long distance. I am walking again, in between rain storms. It rained so hard last night that the water came in backwards through the roof between the car port and the house. It rained so hard that the water puddled up 4 inches deep along my walkways and pounded the pavement and bounced 6 inches high. Rain. A good thing. Not sure how long it will rain this year, but if its anything like last year, it will rain for a couple of months now.

The air smelled really fresh when I went for my walk and there were flowers blooming here and there, especially the manzanita in full bloom. Lots of frogs and lots of birds as well. Great smells and sounds. Life is good.

I spent the day, two days actually, working on family photos, trying to sort and organize and scan, getting a photo book put together for Deborah. It's amazing just how much has transpired over the years. Funny to see year that have hundreds of phots, in the mid 80's when the boys were coming in, when we had a good camera. Then back to 1967 when my only photos are a very few tiny little torn strips from the old black and white photo machines.

The Grammy's are in the background. The Dixie Chicks, not ready to make nice. I love their new album. Yes! Guess I'll go watch them.

So I did Melody's Bible Test

And for some reason the HTML wouldn't publish here. But I got 98 percent. Yeah. Without looking any of it up either. So reading the bible does NOT a christian make. Although I hate it when people think that to be a "Christian" means you believe in God and are moral. Christian means a lot of things in a lot of people's minds. Folks not educated in bible thumping evangelical christian theology think it means something as simple as that. My childhood taught me that probably Catholics (where are definitely Christian) weren't "real" christians, and Mormons were definitely not Christian, and on and on ad nauseum.

So maybe the only thing that I agree with is that Buddhists are definitely not Christian, although when I tell Mo I am probably more Buddhist than anything, she says, of course you are not, you are a "christian". ah well. so semantics follow all of us around on this planet, christians, lesbians, whatever.

Abby

Ok, I can't believe I have really fallen for a dog. Her name is Abby and she is a dog from the shelter in Bend Oregon. Amazing actually that she knows so well how to mind, how to heel, to come, to sit, to stay. The best part is that she is playful and fun without being a pain. She loves to play with her toys, and somehow manages to completely destroy them in a matter of minutes. She especially loves anything soft like a stuffed toy. The most amazing thing, however, is that she only tears up HER toys. I have stuffed santas and snowmen lying around on the floor for Christmas, pillow everywhere, socks, shoes, slippers lying around sometimes and she doesn't touch them. Amazing. If we show her that it is hers, it will be shredded in minutes. She even managed to shred a 'Kong" for those of you who are dog people and know what that is.

Ahh well, count my blessings. Mo was determined to have another dog so I am at least lucky that I really like this one! She walks with me every morning on my little 3.5 mile jaunt in the dark around the mobile home park. Loves it. Nice thing here is that there isn't any dirt around so she doesn't track stuff into the house and is basically a house dog unless we take her out. Couldn't have been any luckier with this, I am sure.

Yeah, it's a hard life

Gee, too bad I have to take off work again tomorrow to drive to Reno for out of state delivery of Mo's car since she is not about to pay California sales tax when she lives in Oregon! Like riding on glass surrounded by cream colored butter leather. I am such a pushover for luxury, I am embarrassed to admit. My back hurts today. Too many hours in a GM car which somehow doesn't seem to fit my body. Any surprise that Lexus fits my body just fine??

Christmas

So, Christmas was fine. I didn't even get weird until the very last part of the day. I missed being with my family, but wasn't depressed and made the best of it. I knew all my kids were happy and in a good space. Even Deanna, who is having a time of it trying to deal with sharing her kids and grandkids and not being with family on the day. She and I kindof in the same space. No kids, no family, but she had Keith, I had Mo and we both had basically a good time.

It was 66 degrees in Jamestown yesterday, a little bit cloudy, some sun showing up now and then. We drove up to Calaveras Big Trees for a hike in the Sequoias. Took lots of photos and walked a few miles with the dog. There is often snow there in the winter, but not this time, so we drove higher on Highway 4, all the way up to Bear Valley Resort. Ebbets Pass is closed over the Sierra's not far from where we turned around, but just before you get to the valley is this great overlook. I felt like a stupic californian, tottering over the snow in my tennis shoes from the highway overlook to get a snow photo. "Going to the Snow". I used to do that when I was a kid growing up in Southern California. We would drive up to Big Bear for a day with coats and mittens and shoes that were basically worthless. Lots of sledding and yelling and getting very very cold and wet before we drove back down the hill. Maybe 2 hours from 60 degree days and sunshine on Christmas Day.

The Sierra Crest was beautiful, however, even in the overcast, and every once in awhile the sun would light up the distant mountains with gold. Speaking of lights, I have to go take a photo of the house in Jamestown. Melody and Kevin stopped at Halloween to see it with the kids and now at Christmas those people have outdone themselves again. I don't think I ever saw so many lights on one little house. All lit up it reminded me of a Thailand temple in the sun. Still working on the Thailand photos. I may never get them done. I keep wishing that somehow I could have captured that sparkling moving sunlight over all those mirrors, but photos just can't quite get it.

And speaking of photos, Deanna made a great collage of my great grandkids for me all done up and framed in black. Wonderful. Funny. we both did photos for each other this year.

Back to work today and trying to stay focused. But it's lunch time so I thought I would drop a note to myself.

midnight and can't sleep

It's midnight on a Friday night and I can't sleep. Went to bed at 830 and now I'm awake with a mind spinning full of thoughts. "Monkey mind". Choices. Do I take an Ambien? Do I lie awake just letting the thoughts come? Do I work on the Thailand photos? Instead I write.

It's amazing to me what kinds of thoughts come in the dark alone. Slippers. I am wearing some slippers that Lance bought for me back sometime in the mid 80's. More than 20 year old slippers. Bright warm wool mukluks with leather bottoms. Still perfect. Lance was so sweet that way. He loved to buy special things for me that he knew I would love. He always had the best of taste as well. Lance. Talking with Melody the other day, I reminded her that I had been divorced from Lance as long as I was married to him, that our marriage, that seemed such a huge part of my life, was becoming more of a blip on the screen. Just a chapter in a very complex story that doesn't seem to really have much of a pattern to it, just separate and yet very interesting but unrelated chapters.

Other thoughts. Do any of the chapters really matter? For so long I have thought that I needed to write the stories. Not only my own, but my mother's and my grandmother's stories. But in the dark alone, I wonder what is the point of the stories. My children will care, but what about those that come after. Do the stories matter at all to Hillary and Elric, Matthew and Steven, Jeremy, the great grandbabies? In the whole scheme of things, the stories are all just blips in the lives of people who are blips in the hugeness of the universe. All with our stories, so many of them.

Shera, a life now past, Dorothy, a huge story, and yet now almost irrelevant it seems. Goggie, who will remember her, who that is still alive will remember her? The people that I have loved and all those stories. I am not my story.

Memoirs are all the rage now, classes exist in teaching the proper way to write a memoir. Not a sequential story, but a part of your life that somehow affected you and has a theme and a conclusion. I don't have a clue how to do that. Autobiographies. There are classes in those as well, teaching how to find the theme and make it interesting, not just a litany of happenings. Learning how to find the parts that matter and letting the detail slip away. So things like slippers. Are they the detail or are they part of something that matters, part of the memories, and symbols of a good marriage that once was.

Families. In Thailand it was such an eye opener to see how close families remained. No one moved across the country, they didn't even move across the town. They lived in big family compounds. We visited one such family, and the rest of our group visited several others, in small groups of 6 or 7 people. The story was all the same. Mother was a public relations specialist for a big company, Father brokered coffee beans. Their home was spotless, lighted with flourescent bulbs that are bright and dim at the same time. Two children, 20 months and three. Little girls that were the apple of their eye. Mother's mother had a pumpkin farm nearby but stayed with the kids while mom worked and Fathers mother stayed when grandma one was away at the farm. Auntie and Nephew were there for dinner as well, and lived upstairs. Various grandparents lived in the houses next door, and other assorted relatives. All sharing common values and common lives, picking the papayas and bananas from their compound trees, eating fresh vegetables, taking food to the monks at 6am.

We sat on her floor and made pyramid cakes, special food that the monks loved. Father had been a monk for several years. It is expected in Thailand that men will serve as monks for at least some time in the lives, from months to years. As monks, they learn the proper way to live. They learn the 8 precepts of Buddhism, and how to live in peace and equanimity. We asked how the women learn these values since they can't be monks, and were told that all people are taught from childhood the peaceful, calm, gentle way of the middle path.

The pyramid cakes are made from a paste that is kind of grayish purple, a bit like poi, but made from sticky rice flour and palm sugar, about half as sweet as american sugar. You brush oil on a perfectly cut banana leaf, form a patty of the paste, put in a spoonful of shredded deep fried coconut that has some kind of other stuff in it, and then wrap it perfectly with specific folds that end up in a perfectly folded little package. Amazing. They are then steamed for 15 minutes and served up warm for dessert or saved for the next mornings offerings to the monks.

I thought about my family, and how scattered we are, and this very different way of living and how good it felt, how close they are, how strongly they support their families. If I were Thai, I would have taken my grandmother and dorothy into my home, I would have cared for them no matter what it took. I couldn't do that, and I don't expect my kids to do that. And yet I wondered at what we have given yp with all our independence. That kind of family and community.

The back side of the lack of conflict is the lack of self expression. It is considered uncouth and totally unacceptable to speak poorly of your family, or to raise your voice. Conflict is avoided at all costs. What is lost in this is really having any idea what anyone really thinks. Can these people be any different than all the rest of us, with anger and frustration, and grupmy thoughts about all the expectations? Probably not, but you would never know it. Sitting in a huge gridlock traffic jam that Bangkok is well known for, I saw that calm and peaceful demeanor of the Thai people. Bikes and trucks and even a cement truck pushing in for space, people not exactly getting cut off, but gently pushed as the gridlock got tighter and tighter. No horns honking, except that little toot to let someone know you may be a quarter inch from their bumper.

Lessons and experiences I won't forget, thoughts that flow past my monkey mind at midnight on a winter night of Christmas Eve Eve.

Dorothy Lucille Schultz October 2006

Dorothy at her home in 1975

Dorothy Lucille Schultz 1919 to 2006

Dorothy Schultz, "mom" to me since 1952, wnen my own mother died, has passed away. She went to a care home because her Parkinson's suddenly advanced and her husband David could no longer care for her. They brought her back home after 5 days with help from hospice nurses. She passed away Thursday morning, at home, in the same house I left in 1962, with David and her 50 year old child like adopted son David with her. She actually died Thursday and her husband didn't call me because he thought I said "I didn't want to be bothered". For pete's sake. All I said to him was that I wouldn't be able to cancel my trip so I hoped she didn't die while I was gone. I only found out because I was calling and checking in. If I had returned from Thailand and discovered she had been dead a month I would have been furious.

I won't be at the funeral. Maybe that's why he didn't call. He knew I wouldn't come. He is doing some of the guilting thing for sure, but to be expected since he is hurting. I will be sending flowers for "mom" and a written something that David will have read for me.

At the moment I feel completely out of touch with any feelings I may have about this, but they do come in here and there. I learned over the years that many women have relationships with their mothers similar to the relationship that I had with Dorothy, it often has nothing to do with the genetic thing as I used to think. I know what it is to love my children, I know how that feels for me. I know Dorothy thought she loved me and mine as much as she would have loved us had we all been her blood. I believe that, it was just her own way of loving that I never understood. So many people of that era were so damaged. I did forgive her a long time ago, and she said she forgave me. I know I hurt her horribly, and disappointed her over and over again. She never really had a clue why. I had the benefit of therapy, she only had the benefit of her church and her religeon. I was the lucky one there.

Well, enough of all that. At least I am beginning to see that I might actually have some feelings here and that is a good thing. I will be leaving for San Francisco in the morning, and then for Thailand Monday morning. Mo is here and I am glad. Life just does what it is going to do and people come and people go. I guess what I feel most is the deep awareness that stories happen and those stories have a beginning and an end. But maybe not really. I know Melody and her story with Donna certainly hasn't ended. Our family story with Goggie will live as long as any of us who knew her will live. The Dorothy story is such a huge part of the bigger saga, the whole Connie, Evelyn, Bob, and "the Bentz's". In any life there are so many layers of overlapping stories that I wonder at the relevance of any of them. We are not our story, and yet....who in the hell would we be, really, without out story.

Dorothy is a huge part of my story.

Even later on a Friday Night

warning. this post is completely irrelevant so just ignore it if you are anyone but me. I'm rambling and trying to find the writer that used to live in here somewhere. She's out to lunch for the moment.

So I keep wondering if I should move all this blog stuff over to Melody's Live Journal where I go all the time. Maybe she can tell me whatever reasons people use to do different blogs. I haven't written anything of substance in a very long time, in spite of the ever changing season. Winter has already come to Klamath. Here in Jamestown, winter is just a breath of cold air on the morning walk, some frost on the pavement, 32 degrees on the car thermometer. Still sun coming in the office windows in the afternoon.

Today I actually felt cold enough to wear a sweater. Poor Stacy, my new soil scientist is from Southern California. She works in the office in a huge sweater, a long scarf doubled around her neck and down her back, a hat that looks like something out of a Russian fairytale and gloves. Yes, gloves. Fingerless ones that let her still type. I am still in sandals most of the time, and usually forget socks. But today I remembered, socks AND a sweater.

I am supposed to be packing for my trip to Thailand. My grandson is home from Iraq at last, amazingly safe back on US soil after a scary sojourn. Relatively safe at least, as safe as anyone is living in a city and driving in traffic. We are so lucky sometimes to live this life with so few really bad things going on for our family. Little troubles, emotional emergencies that are really so small considering the state of the world. I am grateful.

I wonder if my life really started turning around back a few years ago when I was doing my gratitude journals all the time. I found one today, with day after day of lovely things, sometimes 2, sometimes a dozen, things I was grateful for in a time when I was broke and living in a house with no plumbing. Amazingly, that was also a very long time ago.

Bel is still living in that world of doing without. Now and then I send her money, try to help her a bit. She so deserves so much more. Another lost person going down the tubes, between the cracks of life. Her money is pretty much gone, she is now making a meager living selling "stuff" at her daily garage sale. Good thing she has spent so much of her life collecting stuff, I guess.

So, my house is going to be vacant, and I feel like I am broke, but it's all so relative. I'm not really broke at all. I have more than enough of every little thing, everything. I'm even going to Thailand.

Ahh well.

winter fun

So, Friday night, and I finally finished the project. Just a small piece of the project, actually, but enough that Deanna will get a nice surprise for Christmas. It will come early, and I will already be gone, but she will know I am thinking of her. And hopefully she is waaay toooo busy to read this blog in the next week or so! HA!