Thursday – Warmer & Wetter ?

Thursday, February 4th, 2016  § +8˚C / +46˚F — Sunny & Bright in Atlantic Canada @ 3:30 pm § Andrew Millar’s Birthday

Yard Zen Corner Feb 4th, 2016

This was today at about 4:15 pm. I had to move slightly to avoid getting the realy bright sun burning through the centre of this shot.

Yard Zen Corner Feb. 03, 2016 + snowing.

& This was yesterday at about 3:30 pm, while it was still snowing. I think we got about 10 centimeters ( 4 inches) of snow here before the precipitation turned to freezing rain and then rain. Today’s expected high temperature was supposed to be up around 10˚C/50˚F.

— What a difference a day makes? Yesterday started off pretty darned cold and ended up around midnight with freezing rain right around zero degrees Celcius / 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Today it’s flirting with ten degrees C / fifty degrees F.

Thunder Tree

I found this on a facebook page called “Ancient Celts” along with several other pretty darned nice photos of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and a lot of red-haired kids and ‘grown-ups’ and a couple cute young kids in kilts.

— & some of the photos I found on the facebook page “Ancient Celts” are pretty spooky – The image I carried around in my imagination for years that represented the first chapter in my “Great Un-Amerikan Novel” was a tree ( on a hill ) being hit by lightening. Another photo on that site looks like the north coast of ‘Shamrock Island’ in the game world I’ve been building for years (with a little bit of much appreciated help from my friends). — I tried to use the above photo as the ‘icon’ for this page/blog. It didn’t translate as well as I hoped.

— & Today, I was pretty close to exhausted when I forced myself out of bed to shovel some very wet heavy slush out of our driveway so Cathi could get out and go to work. { She actually thanked me for that? I might have wanted to ‘shoot the messenger’ / grumbled at anybody who did that for me. 😉  }

— And – I’ve got stuff I gotta do – so I better keep this short today — “Aboo Niesh Day!”

~~~~~ Jim

“Winter Today – Springlike Tomorrow”?

Copied & Pasted from “Latest News From Aerendel”

= = = = =

Wednesday, February 3rd  ∞  -9˚C / +16˚F & snowing in Atlantic Canada @ 11:11 am ∴ I think it might be Ian Anderson’s Birthday ψ

Walking Dogs in Snow Photo

The CBC – Canadian Broadcasting Company – encourages regular people to send in photos and videos. I hope this is not to cut down on the number of employees they might otherwise  need to pay to do that.

— It just took me two hours to wade through a lot of beautiful and sometimes disturbing tweets. Eek.

Jefferson versus Corporations.

– Thomas Jefferson – Author of many famous quotes, including “Banking Establishments are more Dangerous than Standing Armies.” Who’d’a thunk an Aries could be so prophetic?

— I was the recording engineer for an interview between Dr John Battista – a Psychiatrist and Green Party Activist in Connecticut – and David Cobb – a Texas Lawyer who was part of a group that had researched the history of corporations in the United States – and that group was fighting against Corporate Fascism – David Cobb, I do believe, ran for President of the USA as the Green Party Candidate in 2004 – After I had followed my heart to Canada and was trying to first become a permanent resident, and later, a dual citizen of the US & Canada. In 2004 I couldn’t leave Canada – unless I wanted to start the long and expensive process of applying for permanent residency all over again.

— & speaking of evil corporations – Canada has ruled that cable teevee providers must offer channels that they currently only offer as part of bundles – and so lower the cost that consumers need to pay to get what they want. Rogers Cable is blitzing the airwaves with propaganda commercials trying to lure customers into falling for their – “Get our packaged bundles now and lock yourself in to wonderful lower prices for three years!” b.s. — And Bell Aliant – who promised us three years of low prices and later informed us that we misinterpreted what they told us – had MTV in our channel line up on Monday, and no MTV was there on Tuesday, when the Shannara  Chronicles air. So I guess that proves that Bell is definitely on the side of the demons that the ‘Druid’ and the three young hero types in that series are trying to defeat. Yup, Bell is probably one of the bad guys.

Michael Moore advertizing his newest movie.

Michael Moore has another movie about to come out. He’s gotta be one of my favourite people.

— The Mouse that Roared? In Reverse?

Ground Hog Against the TPP

– Well, a groundhog with a social conscience? – Hmm – Don’t’cha wish the politicians and oligarchs who want to rule over you and run your life had as much intelligence and compassion as this guy? 😉

— Your government is lying to you. They want you to voluntarily give up every right and privilege you have. They want to say you voted away your rights. They want to be able to point their fingers at you and say, “They made me do it-” & When they get to Hell, they want to show the devils there that they really were on the side of darkness and deceit, so they can get a job as one of the demons torturing the decent folks they deceived into backing policies and programs that drove other good people into despair and economic slavery.

Fredericton Skies this morning.

But New Brunswick had a spectacular sunrise this morning, and this person from Fredericton caught it digitally on her camera.

— Today’s weather report, “Well, this afternoon we will experience Winter and by tomorrow it will feel like Spring.”

Opportunity or obstacle?

And here’s a bit of daily inspiration from Roy Bennett.

— I do like to have at least something positive to add any time I go through the trouble to write up what I see coming at us via the ‘Tweet-Us-Sphere’ and in real life beyond.

Very interesting waterfall.

And if thoughtfully reassuring words can’t inspire you right now, maybe a photo like this can –

— Looks like another place I’d like to visit and stay for a while.

— But I have other real world stuff to attend to, so I better end here – Have a wonderful, spiritually enlightening day –,

~~~~~ Jim

Brrrr – But – Better things are coming –

Friday, January 15th, 2016 -( -22˚C / -8˚F lighter and not windy at the moment in Atlantic Canada @ 8:30 am )- Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday & my niece Jenny A.’s birthday too. 🙂

— I received email from someone who has sent me a link to her page of mostly positive predictions for 2016 and into the future: The link is coming up :

— Link —> http://www.auracolors.com/blog/general/2016-predictions/ <—

— Graphic Image from the page linked above —> ⇓

Hand below a galaxy.

“Indigo-Cosmic” Image from the 2016 Predictions page linked above.

— The person who made these predictions seems to be plugged in to the same desire to refocus our consciousness from the current trends in media toward more positive and empowering subjects – the same desire I have been trying to embody here in this blog.

I will try to send her a link to this article and hope she is pleased with what I’ve said here.

— Thank you, have an inspiring, light filled day —

— Namesta –,

~~~~~ Jim

Wednesday Blizzard Philosophy

Wednesday, January 13th, 2016 -( -9˚C / +16˚F — Après shoveling and snow-blowing a foot of snow from out driveway – it’s dark and windy and cold in Atlantic Canada @ 11:11 pm )-

Change The World

If you try to change the world with intellectual arguments – the next person who challenges you will change it their way. If you try to change the world with love – you just might warm the world for a while. If you change the world by connecting to Divine Spirit – no normal human being can undo that —

— I froze my fingers clearing snow from our van this morning. Then the snow came down too heavily and the wind blew a little too insistently, so I figured it would be stupid to argue with Mother Nature and came inside. I puttered around and did a few things, right now I can’t remember what – and then decided that a nap would be the best thing I could do. I dreamed I was a newspaper reporter at some kind of function where somebody claiming to be an F.B.I. agent walked away from any group I approached. And then one guy in an expensive suit, wind blown blond hair and a Hollywood smile and sunglasses took me aside and told me he was giving me his notes and I should run with his story – it would establish my career – I typed up three pages – on wrinkled and half torn paper – and was proof-reading what I’d typed when I woke up. I woke up with a headache.

— So I took an allergy pill and a calcium-magnesium pill, drank some coffee and got dressed in snow-blowing clothes and went out and cleared a lot of our fairly long driveway, thinking it would be a lot easier if the love of my life hadn’t decided to get us a house that did not have a garage. But anyway – on the strange side, the plow that usually gives us a three feet high mountain of snow at the end of our driveway hadn’t plowed all that close to our driveway’s end, he cut the corner several feet out into the road, but he must have gone by fast – he shot some large *chunks of ice several feet into the driveway (*chunks? more like boulders? -some of them a foot long and maybe eight inches high & eight inches deep – irregularly shaped – at least they were not sharp edged – but they did threaten to wreck the snowblower’s blades.) I think it took me an hour to clear most of the driveway and clear a path to the hill beyond our porch where starving deer come every day and night looking for anything they can eat – and then, after I realized I’d done as much as I could, I put the snowblower away and came inside, filled a bucket with oats and carried that back out to the deer hill – tossed a lot of oats to where the deer should be able to get at it with very little trouble.

— And then, I sat down and watched our ‘trouble-is-my-middle-name’ orange cat strut his waddling walk by me – and I sat there, smiled and told him, “Thank you for enriching my life – All pets should be immortal, or live at least as long as we do-” And he glanced over at me with a disbelieving look in his eyes, and I thought he might be telling me, “Get over it – All cats are the chosen ones and if we grace your lives with our presence you should feel honored, and feed us unending supplies of cat treats and pet us whenever we want to be petted and leave us alone whenever we decide that something over there is more interesting than you are-” But then he smiled at me, might even have winked, and ambled on to go find a nice, interesting box to sit in.

— Yay! I actually said something that wasn’t entirely negative – even if it wasn’t an entirely wonderful day. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

 

“Think Light Vs Shadow – Not Light Vs Darkness”

Tuesday, January 12th, 2016 -( -6˚C / +21˚F — Dark, overcast & anticipating about a foot of snow in Atlantic Canada @ 10:15 pm )-

— The universe is responding to my desire for positive inspiration. “How to raise your vibration” is a Facebook community. A friend of mine liked the following message at the right time while I was checking things. The images below were copied and pasted, so what looks like links won’t work that way.

— I’m hoping I can pop at least one positive, reinforcing message in here every day.

Graphic with words

– Nice Message –

Poem illustrating Cherokee Wisdom.

This poem came with the image above it.

— Thank you –,

~~~~~ Jim

Monday, Dharma Quotes of the Week.

Monday, January 11th, 2016 -( +4˚C / +39˚F — Grey, damp & raining in Atlantic Canada @ 10:30 am )- Happy Birthday, Emily S. 🙂 & Dalila C.  🙂

Darma quotes

This is today’s Dharma Quote of the Week. I get these through my email since I subscribed at either their facebook page or on Twitter. Some quotes are better than others. And I’ve been warned that trying to ‘digest’ one school’s philosophy while embracing another can lead to ‘spiritual indigestion’. All true Religious/Spiritual sects/schools/systems come from the same Source. Their messages vary according to the culture and times in which their Truth was delivered to the disciples & citizens of which ever region the Inspiration was delivered to.

— The weekly email comes from: Shambhala Publications <shambhala@email.shambhala.com> which has a presence on both facebook and twitter.

— Thank you –,

~~~~~ Jim

Hello world! (v. 2.0)

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

This was the example post that came with this WordPress blog when I activated it. – I had recently had an annoying problem with another ‘premium’ Hosting service that I’d paid for and nearly lost the WordPress blog I had started there with the intention of trying to keep its content purely positive so I could send friends there who might want to know I was doing well, and didn’t need to know about any of my rants or darker moments.

I learned how to copy a whole blog and ‘port’ it over to another blog. And, after I tried that and it worked I felt pretty good and then went to other blogs and copied much of their content, and made sure the dates the original articles were posted remained, and/or any new date (the date of the copying) was edited back to the original date of the original article/post.

And recently – In January of 2016 – I had a positively inspiring day communicating with a new friend and decided to go back to this blog and fill it with positive stuff.

And that’s where I am here now – keeping that going forward 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

Committee Breakfast, Friday, May 15th, 2015

Friday Morning, May 15th, 2015 -( 9°C / 48°F @ 8:15 am, Sunny & Bright in our little corner of Atlantic Canada )-

Deer on the hill saying good morning and thanks for the oats.

7:30 am – Three deer looking a bit scruffy as they get ready to shed their winter coats. This photo was ‘auto-adjusted’ in PhotoShop. That made the greens looke a bit greener. There still is plastic inside the windows, which shows up more obviously when the photos are full size. At 549 x 412 pixels here, it’s about 1/5th the full size.

3 deer in the foreground while a fourth comes in from behind them.

There are at least two groups that seem to consist of a mother deer and between two and four yearlings, -depending on who comes with them?- Sometimes I only know there are more than one group is when I notice that one of the mothers has a straight line scar on her right flank. -Either a scar or a very weird bit of fur trimming.-

4 deer that almost look like three.

All 4 deer are in this photo. The middle two are pretending to be a Dr Doolittle type ‘PushMe-PullYou’, The one in the back is on guard, looking away from the camera while the one in the front is busy enjoying the oats I tossed out on the hill about an hour before they came around.

— These photos here are the size I usually upload 549 x 412 pixels or pretty close to that. I told the inner workings of WordPress that ‘medium’ sized photos should be 549 pixels wide because anything bigger than that does not fit right if I copy and paste them into a couple other blogs that I sometimes post in every day, sometimes once a month or once a week? But, anyway, it’s the middle of May. The grass is beginning to turn green. Spring is here. I think we survived another nasty winter. The last bits of snow on our property melted just before Mother’s Day again this year. The bad guys might be trying to bluff us into believing most of the world is going bankrupt while they’re “laughing all the way to the bank”. The sun felt warm even through the windows and across the room. & The guy who owns the field the deer are in either came here and cut the tree that fell down last summer in the Storm they named “Arthur” or paid somebody to do that.

— I can’t think of anything clever to finish this off with just now. Still kind of ‘shell shocked’ over the death of a pet. It feels like life goes on – and silly me, after a couple “Near Death Experiences” myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll see those pets again in the ‘next life’ — But that didn’t make it any easier. And every time life drops one of its ‘little surprises’ – all of our priorities seem to come up for review and have themselves reshuffled. You find out again who your real friends are and suddenly you’re locked in an echo chamber where ideas like: “Nobody ever comes back from a near death experience with the Divine message that they should have spent more time at work-” reverberate in your body, mind and spirit as if they’ve been double or triple underlined.

~~~~~ Jim

 

Ouch: Grief and Hope and Remembering

Thursday, May 7th, 2015 -( 14°C / 57°F  & Sunny and warm @10:15 here in Atlantic Canada )-

More perched on round cat furniture thing in Arnprior

Moe in February of 2006 – Hanging out atop the hideout we got for Sasha, who died of a heart attack after being with us for less than three months. Sasha was a bit timid and Domino was much bigger than she was and he played a little too rough for her.

— Yesterday was my cousin-in-law Joe’s birthday.

— Also yesterday, & totally unrelated to Joe’s birthday, my stomach was sore. fter a while I felt a bit like I might be sick if I tried to do too much, and defined ‘too much’ as ‘trying to do any more than I already had, folding up a big tarp and moving it under the section of unfinished plywood roof that had blown off the frame I was building around the steel yard shed. -The plan was to finish building a protective wood shed for our firewood, outside the steel tool shed. Because we couldn’t finish the woodshed before we were inundated with snow last winter, and because the second part of my pension is in orbit somewhere, we couldn’t afford another cord of firewood, so it cost us at least $300 more a month to heat our house which meant we couldn’t pay a couple other bills which meant- anxiety for mon amour fou.

— Last night I dreamed I was doing yoga stomach lifts. I dreamed that I remembered having done stomach lifts the day or night before and I wondered if that was why my stomach hurt. (Probably not- my stomach probably hurt from crying over our cat’s death, crying to the point where I burst into coughing fits, which probably strained my stomach muscles.) Today I wondered if part of the reason I took Domino’s death so hard was I saw him suffering through his last couple days. Maybe that hurt me more than it did him. He complained, meowing mournfully just a little bit louder than he did when he was upset because a door was closed and doors just shouldn’t be closed. That’s part of many cats’ philosophy. Some doors should never be closed. Some doors should always be closed, but some should never be closed. He also meowed fairly loudly and stared at things that maybe he could see and we couldn’t, halfway up the wall in the living room and other spots around the house.

— Last night before we went to bed, Cathi told me she’d found a photo of Moe from 2004, so maybe he was a couple years older than the “8 years old” she’d reported online somewhere a couple days ago. I went digging through old blogs and found evidence back as far as 2005 and she checked out her old bravenet blog and found the passage she’d written there and posted in April of 2004, the day after she brought Moe home from the shelter. -( my stepdaughter, Cathi’s daughter, Erin, had fallen in love with Max a scrappy little British grey cat, partially because he was an older cat and she was worried that nobody would want him. I’m really not sure of all the details, but I think we were in the Ottawa animal shelter to pick up Max when one of us blurted out the fact that Sasha had died of a heart attack shortly after we brought her home. The right person at the shelter heard that and told us she would give us a voucher good for a replacement for Sasha. We brightened, asked about possible replacements who might be there that day, and we were introduced to Moe, who’d been left off outside the shelter, who seemed to like and get along with all the other animals in the shelter, but who had a cough and needed to be ‘fixed’. Before they ‘fixed’ him they carried him around and brought him up to the doors of several other cages, he said hello and didn’t pick any fights with any of the cats there. Cathi remembered that they handed Moe to Erin and he leaned on her shoulder and gave her a hug. Cathi believes we have a photo of that somewhere on her backup drive. Anyway, I’m about to copy and paste the entry that Cathi found last night. )-

I don’t think this will print itself twice here, but I better check to make sure.

Link —> http://cathi_harris.bravejournal.com/archive/04/25/2004

===== Cathi’s blog entry is below this =====

Sunday, April 25th 2004

12:17 AM

Welcome Tigger!

  • Mood:
  • Music: The Chieftains
  • Weather:

The rain has stopped, but it’s a cool cool wind that blows.  Oh well, it was still a lovely day.  Yesterday was also a lovely day, and with it came the happy arrival of Tigger, the cat formerly known as Morris (for lack of a name), now healthy and happy and anxious to be away from cages.  The trip home was fun; he delighted in sticking one red-haired nose out the holes and talking to me the whole way.

At first he was happy to be segregated in the bedroom, lying in front of the windows watching the world go by.  But it wasn’t long before he made the great escape through my legs to rush out and then, with Domino meowing at him through the vent outside, Jim figured we might as well introduce them.  There was no hissing, no howling, just a sniff of noses and Domino going shrug and turning around and going downstairs.  This looked hopefull.  So a few more breakout attempts by Tigger resulted in one very fast cat finally making a break for it and exploring his surroundings.  He loves the windows, and he Domino had some minor “words” when he went down into Domino’s lair in the basement.  So, back to the bedroom.  This wasn’t Tigger’s idea of fun though, so after an hour or so of “scratch scratch scratch knock knock knock!” out he went again.  Domino was waiting for him, belly up in the hall and when he was let out, Domino led him downstairs.

Last night to give Domino a break, Jim stayed with Domino behind a closed door downstairs, Tigger stayed upstairs with me,  walking across my keyboard, knocking down photos off the piano (he learned that is a loud and clunky thing to do, hasn’t been up there since), played with little guy’s puzzle, played the piano, and spent several happy visits on my lap giving me hugs.  He does give good hugs.

And last night, against his will, back behind closed doors in the bedroom.  He was up on the bed, curled up between my legs (exactly the same way one of my other cats used to ), and then, on the pillow above my head, purring purring purring.  That’s how I fell asleep, to the wonderful sounds of cat purring.  Did you know that the frequency of cat purr is supposed to be very healing?

Anyway, that lasted until about 6:30 with Domino outside meowing, Tigger inside knocking on the door, so okay, out again.  I know, you’re supposed to keep them separate, but these fellows like each other, both are up to date on shots, Tigger is healthy again so I wasn’t too worried.  All day today we have had two cats following each other around the house, wrestling (they are so cute doing that, no teeth, no claws, just literally wrestling), sharing Domino’s futon, admiring the birds together, complete with Domino cleaning Tigger.  Yes, I think we have two buddies – Domino is still dominant (he did try his hissing routine and Tigger didn’t bat an eye at it, so Domino is happy), Tigger is so happy-go-lucky and friendly, he’s just happy hanging out and playing.  All is well with the world, and Domino is also a much happier fellow today  .  He really did miss having another cat around.

Other than that, well, we checked out some garage sales, drove over to Galletta (very neat little town), plan to go back and check out the flea market tomorrow.  Jim has been busy building cat perches with carpet reminants (some given free, some pieces 50 cents from a new store here); was a little too cool to work on the yard like I had planned, but maybe later in the week.

And that’s about it for now!

Cathi

=====

~~~~~ Jim

 

Tuesday, May 5th, 2015 –

Tuesday, May 5th, 2015 -( 20°C / 68°F & we still have that one small patch of snow here in Atlantic Canada at 3:48 pm )-

Orange cat sleeping with his arm on alert Bengal cat on a sleeping bag inside out on a window seat.

Orange Moe and stripey-spotty Domino enjoying their nice sunny window spot in Arnprior, 2007 -ish.

— My sister had a poster in the late 60’s / early 70’s that had several examples of how child development shapes the future of that child. – If a child lives with criticism he learns to be nasty to others. If a child lives with encouragement he learns self esteem.— & so on.

— If a child lives with pets he or she learns something valuable. I forget what that was.

— I can’t find that version, but this appears to be the original: Maybe there was a picture of a child playing with a happy puppy or something.

=====

     Children Learn What They Live (1969)

     BY DOROTHY LAW NOLTE

      If a child lives with criticism,
      He learns to condemn.
      If a child lives with hostility,
      He learns to fight.
      If a child lives with ridicule,
      He learns to be shy.
      If a child lives with shame,
      He learns to feel guilty.
      If a child lives with tolerance,
      He learns to be patient.
      If a child lives with encouragement,
      He learns confidence.
      If a child lives with praise,
      He learns to appreciate.
      If a child lives with fairness,
      He learns justice.
      If a child lives with security,
      He learns to have faith.
      If a child lives with approval,
      He learns to like himself.
      If a child lives with acceptance and friendship,
      He learns to find love in the world.

=====

— But pets certainly teach us something, including unconditional love. And right now, in deep mourning for Domino, because the life that used to be here, isn’t any more, it’s hard to understand or believe that this love and joy is worth the pain of separation. And I know through and through that we don’t just stop being when death occurs.

— Dang-

~~~~~ Jim