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

 

Monday, May 4th, 2015 – Kent State Day

Monday, May 4th, 2015 -(11°C / 52°F deceptively sunny and bright at 10:45 am in our little corner of Atlantic Canada )-

Cat enjoying cat food in a nice bright window.

Not the last photo we ever took of Domino. I didn’t post this one before because it showed how pudgy he became.

— Twice I got to choose a pet. In sixth grade I rode with my father when he drove a friend of his up to the vet in Trumbull to pick up a pet who’d needed extra care there. I asked my father if we could ask if the vet knew of any dogs up for adoption, he’d had a couple drinks earlier and he said, “Sure-” so I did and the vet just happened to have a fairly large young mongrel, white with brown spots, named ‘Reno’ who came ran me all around the parking lot on the end of a rope tied to his collar and then came home with us. We couldn’t let him run wild through our neighborhood so we tied him outside a couple times a day. He learned that a few short loud barking sessions would get him inside in a hurry. One next door neighbor complained. Dad took Reno back to the vet after we’d had him maybe a little more than a week. — I think I was just about 30, back living with my parents again on the advice of a spiritual Yogi. Working evenings in the post office. My sister Sharon and her first husband, Charlie, had puppies and offered me one. I knew that they wouldn’t live very long if I said, “No thanks-” and I wanted them both, but chose a female and named her “Lucky” My mother complained that she didn’t want to be the one who got stuck taking care of another puppy. I told her I was perfectly capable of taking care of her and didn’t mind at all. Another case of within a week, Mom and Dad jumped in the car to go visit my sister and took the puppy back with them. Brother in law Charlie shot both puppies shortly after that and shocked my mother, who didn’t believe me when I’d said that that could happen. Other than that, any time a pet came into my life it came because somebody else wanted it or somebody had to give it away. An undocked Doberman in New York state, Named ‘Rooster’ had scared a kid off a bicycle when he wanted to play with her and the kid’s parents threatened legal actions. I kept Rooster on property I was trying to buy up there and the neighbors made a big stink, I gave Rooster to a future Vet who believed there were ‘papers’ available. The Vet and another friend of mine contacted the woman I’d gotten Rooster from and learned that, yes, somebody had papers, but they weren’t quite legitimate and would have cost real money and a bit of moral quicksand that a future Vet didn’t want to deal with. The dog was a pure bred Doberman who hadn’t been registered at birth and the person with the papers registering phantom pups and charging people with questionable intent an unreasonable amount of money for those papers. And, my friends didn’t think they wanted to try to trust anybody like that. Other friends in New York had to get rid of a cat. I couldn’t have a cat where I was staying, another friend said he would take the cat and keep him for me until I had a place where I could take him back. Okay, well that cat caught feline leukemia very shortly thereafter and wasted away to almost nothing in a couple weeks. My life in New york fell apart shortly after that and my father asked me to move back home and help him out, so I did.

— One stray cat came and found me. She’d been in a fight and the first time I saw her one eye was a mess. I’d never been a cat person before this. But that cat found me every time I was in the depths of teen aged angst and depression. She got killed in the road while I was either in Vermont or away in the Navy. She was special. Every pet has been special. Trixie used to fall asleep in my lap as a wobbly puppy. It nearly killed me to see her in the dog pound after the same neighbor that complained about Reno complained that Trixie was digging up his back yard. A couple weeks after Trixie disappeared from the dog pound that neighbor came over and screamed at me that if we didn’t get rid of that dog he was going to call the cops on us, he’d seen it the day before digging up his back yard again. If I had the power to kill with my mind that guy would have exploded then and there. Thank God I don’t?

— And, other than that, any time a pet came into my life it was somebody else’s idea and somebody else’s choice.  But every one of them has been magical and special. When his doctor told my father he might be allergic to pet hair mom asked Sharon in Vermont when I was staying up there if she could take him. When we conferred with her husband and he reluctantlay agreed, we called back and said, “Yes!” And we were told it was too late. Flipper was gone. Too many pets were ripped out of my life by selfish adults. When Max the gray cat died last November, that was rough. We had seen him gradually wasting away and then in the last couple days he went quickly. Erin, my step daughter who had fallen in love with Max, especially because he was ‘older’ when they saw him in the cage in the animal shelter display at a pet store, thought that nobody would want him because he was an older cat.  So she gotr him and brought him to Mississauga, then Ottawa, then up to Pembroke when she was going to University up there. Then she transferred to WEstern Ontario University in London, Ontario, and Max stayed with us for a while. Then her future husband turned out to be extremely allergic to cats so Max stayed with us until the end. She came here to see him one last time and he went downhill really fast while she was here, he went that night. That was rough. 

— Maybe every time a pet leaves us is going to be rougher.

Young white deer and young normal deer in the foreground another normal deer in the background, blending in under the tree.

April 21st, 2015 – We’d heard that the white deer, the mother, who had been coming around with her mottled white and brown offspring had been hit by a bus and killed last winter. I think we’ve seen her and we’ve also seen this one, a younger deer, seen through the rain on the window here. Life renews itself. Earth abides. Silly people and their silly ideas fade away but love and joy and everything good about life is still here. Sometimes interrupted by brief periods of grief. There’s at least one more deer beneath the treem to the left of these guys.

— Argh! And thank you for the facebook messages of support and sympathy.

~~~~~ Jim

Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, 2015 –

 Wednesday, April 22, 2015 – Earth Day? -( 4°C / 39°F & Foggy @ 6:51 am in Atlantic Canada )-

Photo taken eleven days ago. We have since had regular morning visits from a young white deer and several other youngsters with an older deer watching over them, remaining on alert, always near them.

Photo taken eleven days ago. We have since had regular morning visits from a young white deer and several other youngsters with an older deer watching over them, remaining on alert, always near them.

— Woke up maybe half an hour ago from a dream about a guy who volunteered for the army during world war two as soon as he was old enough, graduated basic training and reported to a duty station where he was supposed to be assigned to a unit that would be disembarking for Europe and got there about ten minutes after Victory in Europe was announced. Amid pure chaos he was first told to report to a group of replacements who were all from Texas and then intercepted by a personnel division where somebody learned that he’d learned to type and changed his orders to fill vacancies in that department and was then absorbed into a unit that was filming the war effort and drafted into writing scripts, working with actors and actresses and spent an indeterminant ‘enlistment’ trying to keep track of what that unit was doing. When his head stopped spinning he had a novel that was something like Catch-22 Times M.A.S.H. from a propagandist’s point of view.

— I woke up feeling energized and confused, like I’d been shot out of a cannon, landed on my feet and was told to share a vision of this world running on the principal of maximum absurdity, kind of like an absurdity engine instead of an improbability engine.

~~~~~Jim

Brrrrrr- Friday, March 6th, 2015

Friday, March 6th, 2015 -( -26°C / -15°F  Sunny & Bright @ 7:45 am )-

Mom & 2 yearlings.

I shot this photo on March 1st. 2015 -with the telephoto function and the ‘sports’ function both active. Full sized, this looks more like a painting than a photograph, I shrunk it down here so it would fit in all our blogs. This is a mother and two of three yearling offspring. -Don’t know if all the children are hers- She is the gutsy-est member of the herd or herds that come around, acts like she almost trusts me. She will warily stand there while four or more younger deer turn tail and srpint off in different directions.  —jim w—

— This morning I woke up to ‘wump’ sounds, guessed that heavy sheets of snow might be sliding off the roof, I got up and stumbled around at about 6:19 am, and was surprised to  see how light it was outside. It felt like, at that time last week, it was still dark out there. When I saw the temperature outside was at -28.9°C / -21°F I thought the wump sounds were probably more like the house’s frame freezing in the cold.

Driveway, March 2, 2015

This was early Monday morning, March 2nd- It was still snowing lightly. But we didn’t get enough snow to merit a visit from the snow plows that frequently make it impossible to get out of our driveway here. One peculiar effect of this year’s snow, after what fell as light and fluffy stuff, the plows come by and give us a two and a half to three feet high ridge blocking the driveway, not with light fluffy stuff, but with hard frozen stuff, that isn’t really heavy, it’s like the weight and consistency of dry ice. -Weird- —jim w—

Snowy driveway

This is our driveway from inside the porch at about 8 am this morning, March 6th, 2015. Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of the driveway from our glassed-in porch and thought it was worth photographing and keeping somewhere- But I was busy fixing a broken bed frame (Yup, the dog did break the bed the night before. Our 125 pound Labrador thinks he’s the size of a chihuahua, and wants to sleep between us. The twenty five pound orange cat wants to sleep on my chest. Cathi needs her sleep to deal with her high pressure job and this makes for some interesting dilemmas, including bed frames that break apart at 2:34 am.)

Snow pile

Friday, March 6th, 2015- around 8 am. The pile that began beside the outside section of our porch now covers about half of that outside deck, and reaches the edge of the porch roof there. Before next year I want to cover the outside edge of the porch roof, back maybe a couple feet, with black metal to discourage the ice formation we got this year from thinking it can come back any time it wants to. I’m thinking we may need vertical bits of black metal high enough to catch the sun and warm up enough to melt any snow and ice that forms there.

— Yesterday I had felt a burst of optimism after feeling oppressed by a silly dry skin rash drove me to distraction for almost a week. And then Cathi sent me a link to something that led me to an article that might be ‘slightly out there-‘ but made a lot of sense to me. — I’m going to copy and paste that article here. Since this goes up on facebook- it will reappear there, but some things are worth repeating:

=====  https://sacredascensionmerkaba.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/urgent-message-to-ground-crew-total-solar-eclipse-march-20-galactics/

Urgent Message To Ground Crew – Total Solar Eclipse – March 20 – Galactics

23 Votes

SOLARECLIPSE032015URGENT NOTICE TO ALL OF GROUND CREW. A set of events that were set into motion resulted in a decision that will change the world as we know it. A few days ago I have received a transmission which is highly important for all of you to read. In it our Galactic Star Aliances talk about what has occurred and what is about to happen around March 20th, the “dark moon” as they call it, which is the solar eclipse.

Please be mindful of what you allow into your psyche. The times ahead are incredibly auspicious, everything that you want to happen will, therefore be careful what you wish for, and whatever you put into motion now will manifest very quickly into your reality. This is the time to create a beautiful new world, or rather restore it to the pristine state that it once were. Many in know understand the importance of these magnificent energies entering GAIA and so will try to pull your energy to them. Please focus on your now moment, disregarding whatever the media will try to feed you, in order to move your focus away from what you are truly here to do and are trying to achieve. The times between now and September are incredibly important. The more positive you stay the more light you can anchor, the better everything will be once we move closer and closer to September.

— I don’t know much about the background of the web site this was posted on. I’m not sure who the ‘Galactic Star Aliances’ might be. But when I wake up feeling a lot more optimistic than when I go to sleep I sometimes think I may have learned something while bopping around in dream land.

— Take nothing at face value, keep ‘reality testing’ any information you get, no matter how truthful  or weird it might sound at first- I’ve had the feeling that we have forces of light and darkness working over time to convince us that one side or the other has it right, as if they believe that whichever side can convince the most people – above a critical mass- of which good or evil future is coming our way- that side wins. I also had the idea that our reality might split in two with the ‘good’ people waking up miraculously in the ‘New Heaven – New Earth’ world and the ‘bad guys’ waking up to a nuclear winter where they can get a nice close up view of what their beliefs and attitudes can manifest for them.

— I guess we won’t know for sure until whatever happens – happens.

~~~~~ Jim

 

Early Morning, Thursday, March 5th, 2015:

Thursday, March 5th, 2015: -(-3°C / +27°F @ 6:17 am in Atlantic Canada )- It’s my friend, Lyn’s Birthday. 🙂

— At 2:34 am I woke up hearing what sounded like a fairly loud crack in the frame of the bed on my side. I thought the mattress might have settled down into a better fit or something. Then at 2:43 am I heard our First Nations / Native American drum go thunk like somebody hit it with a rubber coated drum stick. This was a more normal sounding ‘thunk’ than usual. I thought this ‘felt’ like a Yoga Master, said ‘Thank You-” and tried to listen/ strain my senses -inner and outer senses- to receive any kind of message that might be connected to that thunk. At 4:09 there was another thunk on the drum, this one was more like what we get a lot, like somebody striking a tightly stretched drum head with a stick near the edge, I said “Thank You-” again and fell asleep reaching for whatever message could have been connected to this thunk. I did have a string of dreams that felt like they were related to exploring a computer game world.

— I got more sleep than usual over night, more restful than usual? Didn’t wake up as often.

— When I woke up around 6 am I thought I should get up and write down the times and descriptions of the cracks and thunks I’d heard. I came into the office here and discovered that “Firefox’s plug in container has crashed again” and I “Need to restart firefox” This happens a lot. But while I was restarting firefox I lost a bunch of details from my dreams, so now they’re just sketchy memories. The cats were also loudly complaining that they hadn’t had any treats in a couple hours and they didn’t think that this was at all acceptable.

— Yesterday: The final episode from season 3 of Continuum was broadcast on show case up here. We now have to wait for the promised 6 episode last season that will tie up all the loose ends to this evolving story of time travel and the complications of trying to change history to avoid the nasty consequences of a surveillance state. The third season ended with one hell of a monkey wrench after the characters thought they had safely fixed their problem.

— And Cathi was happy that there were a lot of interesting programs last night, X company, about Canada’s World War II spy program, among them.

— & ugh, yesterday at 6:18 pm when I began to worry about Cathi not being home yet, I looked outside and learned that the driveway had a nasty high ridge (two and a half feet high?) of hard packed icy snow that some snow plow had plugged the end of the driveway with since the last time I’d checked. I groaned and went out and shoveled until she got home. No, she hadn’t ended up in a ditch- No, the van hadn’t died halfway home somewhere. Her work load is so crazy that she needed to stay a couple hours late to get through as much as she could.

— I did not drop dead from frantically shovelling through that yucky icy snow ridge. My back muscles were screaming at me though.

— It’s 6:45 am and the world outside is glowing a very strange blueish colour. Maybe I did wake up happily in a positive paralle dimension?

— yay?

~~~~~ Jim

Feeling a bit stiff, but not that bad –

Monday, January 26th, 2015  -( -17°C / +2°F & Still light outside @5:22 pm on Catherine E’s Birthday 🙂 )-

icicles

Icicles hanging from the roof over the porch Sunday morning.

— A couple days ago Cathi meditated on our future by visualizing going to her safe place in the upper astral world and opening doors. The last time she did that, every door she opened showed her chaos and ‘really weird’ futures. Between then and now during another meditation she asked her higher self what those weird futures were all about and why hadn’t she found one she could love and believe in. The response she received was, “You can open more doors-” So, this last time she opened several doors onto weird futures, closed and locked them and then found one that she really liked. ‘Weird stuff’ that has been happening to us in the past couple years wasn’t there. Both of us were really getting somewhere with our writing and we were both working on writing stuff that had publishers very interested. She could see that she really didn’t need to work outside – no more ‘day job’ was necessary. –> She visualized that she stepped through into that future and closed the door on this one behind her. — Almost immediately after she told me that I started feeling the need to ‘tidy up around here’. I actually got things done from my ‘to-do’ list. I finally cleaned up the top of her desk in this office here, contacted a long lost cousin in California, had a great online conversation with him, actually called Mom and Sharon in Alaska like I said I would. We skyped for almost an hour. Today, I’m looking at the entrance to this room and thinking I need to get the clutter off the bookcase and maybe start a file/scrapbook for that stuff I want to keep and trash the stuff I don’t. This is a real step forward.

— Today is somebody’s birthday. When I was feeling like my life was pretty much over, she came along at the wrong place in the wrong time and flirted, and convinced me that I still had something to offer and maybe all my dreams could actually come true instead of continually being squashed by evil authoritarian ice-holes all around me. I wished her happy birthday in email.

— I was stiff after slipping on the ice yesterday and landing on my backside. I think I landed on the best possible angle so I was jarred, but I didn’t send the top of my spine up through my brain or anything that catastrophic. I had a bit of a rough time last night lowering my head into sleeping position. There was a big black dog on my side of the bed and he’s too big for me to pick up and move through sheer muscle and grit, I could still pick up the 125 pounds of Labrador Retriever, but with him squirming and fighting back, I would probably throw something out in my back worse than landing on my rump in the driveway yesterday did. I tried to sleep in the recliner in the living room. I immediately had purring orange cat help and that complicated things a bit. But I did manage to sleep with a 25 pound orange cat trying to tangle his claws up in my beard without messing my back up any worse that it was when I sat down.

— Monday is garbage day, I pried myself up a little after 7:30 with Cathi getting ready for work and got myself together enough to get the garbage and recycling out, started the van to warm it up before she had to sit in a freezing cold environment and started getting a little bit of new ice off the windshield. After she got out I puttered around, looked through email and stuff and waited a bit, then gave the animals their morning routines and then went back to bed. Again, it was a bit difficult lowering my head past a certain point, my jarring yesterday had the muscles at the top of my back, and in my neck, complaining, but I got into a position that worked and did waft off into dreamland.

— I know I dreamed, and I think the dreams were consistant, like visiting alternate dimensions more than creating a whole weird universe inside my head – at least that’s what it feels like lately – but right now, I don’t remember any details. Which is sort of good, I was not terrorized by nightmares or anything. And here I am, less achy than I was before I went back to bed and thinking about further sprucing up my web pages.

— It’s a lot easier to add stuff to a wordpress page than it is to open up DreamWeaver or any of those earlier web editing ‘apps’ The only weird thing is, you have to ‘log in’ to you different pages one at a time, which is still a lot easier than firing up DreamWeaver and an ftp client and getting things done that way. And, if you have all the pages in different versions of wordpress on your website linked to the same account, same username and password, you don’t have to log in to each one individually. That helps, too.

— Interesting stuff about my long lost cousin in California. He was born on my 13th birthday. Back in those days it would have been scandalous, we heard that my aunt had ‘female problems’ and had to go into the hospital while she was in California, visiting a relative who lived out there. Eighteen years later we met her ‘female problem’ and I thought he was pretty cool. Last night he told me that I was pretty much the only person he met when he came out here to meet his biological parents that he could relate to. That felt great. He’s also a sound recording engineer with his own sound studio out there. He’s got a couple children and we will probably talk quite a bit in the very near future. — Yay!

— So now, in keeping with my weird sudden nesting instincts kicking in here -shudder- I should save this and go clean up the corner of the bookcase nearest to the desk I uncluttered the other day.

— ‘Have a nice evening,’ he said to the world. And the loving bits of this universe smiled and said, “He knows we’re here!” and chattered among themselves wondering how to show him that they appreciated being acknowledged. [ insert wide silly grin here ]

~~~~~ Jim

Zzzzzzz Zzzzzzz Zzzzz Clunk-

Saturday, January 24th, 2015  -( -4°C / +25°F & Clear after a bit of a dusting -light snow- last night )-  Susie P in Vermont’s Birthday.

I just fell asleep at the computer here, long enough to dream I was in a house visiting somebody when an earthquake hit, I went to the windows and looked out and saw long thin sink holes developing while the world shook. The sink holes were not spectacular, they were maybe a couple feet wide and twenty or thirty feet long and fell a couple feet into the ground. I was telling my friend I needed to get home to make sure everybody there was okay. Then I was in a car in moderate traffic on a  suburban street. Somebody else was driving. Then I woke up with a back ache.

ouch,

~~~~~Jim

 

Dream On?

Tuesday, January 20th, 2015 -( -5°c / +23°F & cloudy @11:30 am in Atlantic Canada )-

— My head’s on fire. Two hours ago I sat down in here to add last night’s dreams to the ‘dream jernil’ here and I noticed a problem with one of my pages. I think I fixed that problem, but discovered two or three more.

— But, if I don’t drop that and get on with this, it will never get done.

— And I should probably mention the fact that before I thought I should write down what I can remember of those dreams, I was going to sit down and see how far I could get with the next chapter of my ‘1963’ novel.

— You can see how far I got with that.

grumble grumble

— Dreams: Both of the dreams I remember a lot of details from were long dreams in a stable dream world. More like a visit to an alternate reality than something I made up that could fluctuate and change the physics of its universe at the snap of a finger.

— Dream One: This was sort of a Vampire world. Vampires were coming to my home there, starving, because humans had suddenly developed the ability to burn Vampires with Spiritual fire at will. Starving because the alternative was much worse. They were trying to become human again. I didn’t have the secret they needed on how to to become human again, but I did have immense unconscious power to protect myself and anybody else in my house. When one vampire decided to give in to his hunger and tried to attack me it was like the world’s most powerful bunsen burner ignited and a firestorm of white light exploded from behind me and flowed upward through and around me with power and force that I found astounding. It slammed the vampire up against the ceiling and burned him to ashes quicker than I could have stopped it if I wanted to. I woke up wondering why I was dreaming about Vampires.

— Dream Two: I was in New Zealand. I’m not sure how I knew I was in New Zealand, but I knew I was in New Zealand. I was an adult visitor to a school for young children. It looked like a small school where the grades were grouped together, like first and second grades in one fairly large room, third and fourth in another, fifth and sixth in a third, and seventh and eighth in the last class room. I think they were having some kind of team building play time. I think the lowest four grades -first to fourth- were in the same room with their teachers asking the kids for ideas while steering them toward ideas that were supposed to be important to this game. I thought it was a bit on the heavy handed side with the teachers pretending to be asking their questions, but leading the whole game, almost manipulating it. I heard that the kids had chosen “Star Wars” as their theme and had to build teams with as much diversity as possible. No team could be all athletic stars, or all the smartest kids, or the best artists or the most sensitive, or anything like that. The teams had to be set up so the kids would learn to appreciate that the weirdest kids in the school might have hidden talents that could save the day and help them win their game. The point wasn’t to win the most points, or finish the fastest, all kinds of tasks had their own problems and solutions. There were physical games where it wasn’t the guy who kicked the ball the farthest scored the most points, but where they had to kick a ball to each member of their group and then run to another spot to receive a kick and pass the ball on to the next person. The idea was to hit all four corners of the field, were goals were set up, collect a flag from each corner and then get back to where that game started. Then they all went inside and had to help each other solve puzzles. I didn’t quite get why they included all the different types of games they were playing, some of it seemed like a complete waste of time and energy to me. I did understand that the teachers were implimenting some kind of agenda that was supposed to make it obvious to all the kids that they were all basically equal, and somebody who isn’t the best athlete would be a whole lot better than the best athlete at some other important part of life.  — I did like running around and kicking balls and then sitting down and trying to guess what the point of the next puzzle might be.

— And here we are. I got up around seven a.m. and it is now after 2 pm, and I pretty much got almost nothing accomplished so far.

— Shrug–,

~~~~~ Jim

 

 

Later on in the day

The old man shuffles where the young man used to run

His eyes see the same world he saw as a child

But a lot has changed

Many details look the same

But a sandy area near a river where he used to play

lies now, half neglected and half fenced off and ‘improved’ with over priced houses

and distrusting owners glaring out through locked doors and windows armed with burglar alarms

The books he loved reading more than once now require a pair of glasses to reveal their coded secrets

Anywhere he looks, any memory he peers through is now weighted with years of random association with pleasure and pain

memories strained through love and loss, anger and forgiveness, harsh words and encouragement

Words like ‘forever’ and ‘betrayal’ fill with nectar and poison, sting and soothe

Wrinkled old women still look like the first time he saw them, softened by years of warm touch, celebration and consolation-

clarity, confusion, they’re all still there, you never forget.

Some things you never get over – some tears still burn.

The loss of a pet, the cruelty of a ‘friend’. The death of a child or a childhood companion.

Loves that turn sour can be survive – Loves that never were – cannot

And yet a rainy day can still bring back the sunshine

And dreams left unfulfilled can still inspire

While promises unkept can still burn deeply

as the pain in his joints can be ignored with a hint of a wagging tail

or the memory of a purring cat

whether ‘ghosts’ or ‘souls reborn’ are real, they are still with him and always will be

And now hints from the next life shock less and less

While messages from long gone parents, friends and lovers

feel more convincing every day.

Contact from beyond the grave, much harder to deny,

Leaves this tearful poem without an ending.

 

~~~~~ Jim Wellington – 19 January, 2015

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Saturday, January 17th, 2015  -( -15°C / +5°F @ 5:45 pm in Atlantic Canada )-

Boof & Hubbudah

Cathi and Jassper on the porch, January 5th, 2015.

Moe

Moe, looking strange as ever on the chair in Cathi’s ‘Zen Corner’

So yesterday the prognastifications of Half Past Human dot com had me worried and today there are way too many photos of dead children in Gaza on the twitter feeds. What else? I don’t know – I was almost feeling okay before, now I ache all over. It feels like a Sunday, like tomorrow will get here too soon and force me to get up and do something that I know will kill me slowly. But that’s just plain weird.

I spent part of Wednesday or Thursday feeling like something was attacking my emotional state of mind. I went back to bed and meditated there. I became swamped with ideas for the novel that I haven’t been able to get back to for a couple weeks. I wanted to get beyond that at connect with God in person. I fell asleep instead. Sounds like a standup comedian’s routine. But I woke up feeling refreshed, like a veil had been lifted. I don’t feel like the veil is back, but I feel like I’ve been pushed into a corner and locked in place there. Not as easy as, ‘I painted myself into a corner’- more like some kind of malicious force forced me into a corner and won’t let me move.

—ehh? So Dreams: Yes, I had dreams, I dreamed I was writing something. That’s all I can remember right now. So when I got up and began trying to write the next chapter to my 1963 novel it took me over an hour to open a new ‘document’ and give it a title. And then get two paragraphs done and then got called away to do a couple other things that absolutely had to be done. I remember Doreen Virtue telling us in 2007 or 8 that Michael the Archangel had told her that there was nothing wrong with the economy and as soon as people realized that, the phony recession would go away.Now we’re being manipulated into believing the economy is going to crash and we’ll all be in constant danger. But I’m thinking the real danger is the people behind every government on this planet. Or they believe they’re behind every government on this planet. Pulling strings, controlling us? They are full of it, but as long as too many of our contemporaries believe the b.s. propaganda we are bombarded with every day, the whole planet is being pushed into a mind numbing depression.

And now something is going radically nutsy with Firefox on my laptop. I can’t get any windows to move. they’re locked in place. That’s never happened before. This is the new version 35.0

— Anyway, whatever the evil vibrations are that are bombarding us, I have to go try to deal with them, or meditate my way around them.

— I did manage to write 2 plus maybe an eighth pages. Now I hurt and better go deal with that.

— Have a Nice Life– 

~~~~~Jim