Category: We need more positive news –

Life And Death When Nobody Notices –

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Life And Death When Nobody’s Looking –

There were feral cats on my two hundred
And fifty mile route through rural upper New York State

– One Night a week, on Fridays
The Weekend Papers came out at midnight
and we, the victims of economic warfare,
had until 8 am to deliver them.

One night, in the middle
of nowhere
I saw a cat
run out from a roadside hiding spot
right under the back wheels of a car
whose driver never saw what happened

– I pulled over and stopped
got out and knelt down beside the cat
Her back was broken
her insides were crushed
from the stomach back

I tried to comfort her, what?
Talk to her – Tell her she was on her way
To the Kitten Happy Hunting Grounds?

– all she wanted to do was crawl away and die in peace
And me, with my human sentiments and sensibilities
hoped I wasn’t scaring her to death while I knelt there and cried

– She tried her damnedest to crawl – drag herself to cover
But she couldn’t move at all

I stayed with her until the light went out in her eyes
And twenty years later I can’t forget that moment

– Can’t stop hoping I didn’t make her final moments in this life unbearable-

I hope she understands.

—– Jim Wellington

The Cat Says, “Make The Snow Go Away-“

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Saturday, March 17, 2018  —> -10˚C / +13˚F in the dark and clear atmosphere @ 11:11 pm in Atlantic Canada, on Cousin Ricky { Patrick } Conroy’s birthday 🙂 —

Moe

– Moe’s got his nose in the planter where he just finished off most of the cat grass and catnip –

— That’s three and four feet deep waves/dunes of snow outside Moe’s insulated window – Once a day he goes to the door and stares at one or both of us until we open the door, then he stares out at the snow and finally turns, looking heart-broken, with a desperate, “Make it go away-” look and something close to disillusionment behind his sadness, looks like he’s wondering what he needs humans for if we can’t magically make the snow go away and his wonderful green world appear  where it should be – Ya Know?

Moe looking at us.

– One of Moe’s “Make it go away-” looks –

— Moe was called “a cat and a half” by a friend near Ottawa – But that is a lot of fur around a lot of cat there –

Plants on our porch.

– Happy Plants – Basking in sunshine –

— The plants on our porch – patiently wait for warm weather when they can go outside and happily bask in the same sunshine Moe wants around him – but they don’t whine and complain the way he does.

Eslyn in the cat tails at the waterfall.

– Meanwhile – over the border in our game world –

— We had several of us corroborate on how to make a waterfall without a five or six thousand dollar graphics package. ‘Eslyn’ here loves the results.

Eslyn asa Ranger with the falls behind her.

– Eslyn posing with the ‘Exploded Rock Falls’ she helped clean up this evening. –

— About once a day even I wonder if getting this game world up in working order may be too lofty a goal. But then – A fresh face like ‘Eslyn’s ( Who was with us in like, um, 2012 but recently returned – ) shows up and goes, “Oh wow – This is great, I think I can fix your little problem there —” ) and gets it done.

~~~~~ Jim

Ice Chunks –

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Friday, March 16th, 2018  —> -2˚C / +29˚F with very light snow falling @ 6:39 pm in Atlantic Canada —

Ice Chunk.

– Let’s see- This monster is like two and a half to three feet long and a foot high – Solid Ice – and weighs about 80 to 100 pounds. –

— Ugh! Good thing Cathi was already scheduled to work from home today. If she tried to drive over the above chunk of ice, which was blocking our driveway where she usually turns to stay in her proper lane on her way out of here. It would either have stopped her dead in her tracks or sliced through any vital cables and/or gas lines, brake lines — thinks like that.

— While I was digging this thing out or the end of the driveway I was thinking it might be poetic justice to launch that sonofagun at the windshield of anybody driving a snowplow on this street. —> Luckily, I’m a writer and I can imagine that as a plot angle in a story and not believe I owed the ‘birty dastard’ who pushed that thing into our driveway the scare of his life.

— & by the way, in this photo the ice chunk is posing atop a three and a half foot high mound of packed cleared snow at the edge of our driveway.

Snow chunks.

– I thought yesterday’s snow chunks were bad. –

— If somebody hit you in the head with one of the above ‘boulders’ of tightly packed snow, it might make you angry. If you head was ‘thick’ enough the chunk of snow would break.

— Today’s monster Ice Chunk could probably kill a healthy adult male human being.

Paw prints in the driveway beside my size 13 boot print.

– On the lighter side, Cathi thinks these paw prints belong to a very small cat. –

— It felt like a waste of space to center that above this.

— Now, it might just be a bit of ugly formatting on my part.

— But, yeah, Cathi thinks those are a very small cat’s paw prints. She worries about a cat that size being outside in weather like we’ve been having lately. – Worries more that it might be homeless and shivering in the dark somewhere.

= = = = =

— But, on then other PAW –

TaleRocker in a cave.

– TaleRocker’s latest look, since Doug gave him a pair of glasses. –

— We gave TaleRocker a new ‘Gravatar’

 

~~~~~ Jim

Working Through Catastrophic Deletions & Learning to Really Appreciate Colour

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Saturday, February 24th, 2018 —> +2˚C / +35˚F with less than an inch of new snow on the ground, and the vehicles … @ 8:13 am A couple hours North of the Bay of Fundy —

Xhyrean's new look -

– First the Good News? – This is me in Aerendel –

— Yup We had a Catastrophic “oops” – One click wiped out like ten days of work.

— Working inside a 3D Compute Game – World Building – has it’s ups and downs. Now the bad news? —> While trying to resize an ‘asset’ ( big old rock ) the pyramid moved, I clicked and we lost – jeeze – I don’t know – The bottom 4th of one area —? Ten days’ work messed up in half a split second?

— But – Before I admitted anything I tried to undo that click, nope  – didn’t work, so I started fixing the area the hard way – & three hours later I had the perimeter back where we started – But we had some intense landscape that was missing – including the connections with other areas – We’d spent hours fussing with ‘water’ to fake a waterfall – and tip up one ‘oceanic’ bit of water – at a weird gravity defying angle – and messing with orientation adjustment tools to try to match up the edges of three bits of water, two parts of a river and the waterfall – so it didn’t look as horrible as we feared it might. And we were proud of that. But that ‘One-Click’ disaster had buried all that hard work beneath a now suddenly flat featureless landscape. — Luckily – the water, the rocks we used to cover the seem at the top of the waterfall – all that stuff was still there, hiding.

Ocean inlet about to be deleted.

– The “Ocean Inlet” Above ( We weren’t entirely sure whether it was going to be and ocean or a big lake /inland sea – ) – Was actually beyond the limits of the area it was connected to – And it was slowing us down –

— The above was just before the disaster – We deleted two cosmetic additions to one major area because they were really slowing us down, making it frustrating to try to navigate around – No matter how pretty or aesthetically satisfying they looked, they had to go.

TaleRocker looking at thesky.

– Jim’s Builder character – Checking out the ‘altered’ blue fog –

— “Before”? – Please notice how flat the land is to ‘TaleRocker’s right –

Have ou seen the stars tonight?

– In the process of driving ourselves nuts to fix the landscape – Jim went off and checked out an old area that never lost the stars, came back and tried something –

— Now look – Pulling down the ‘Landscape’ again – left us with a dilemma – and the opportunity to make some changes that might be more visually interesting – We’re not finished with that ugly weird hill on the other side of the river, but the river itself looks better than it did ( Um – in my opinion anyway – )

— & Another unexpected bonus to working our tails off in marathon sessions – I got up exhausted and headed for the kitchen to get myself some ‘nourishment’ and everything I looked looked absolutely amazing – Suddenly everything around me was vibrant with colours I probably saw, but didn’t  pay much attention to – paint on the walls – even the sand on the dog’s stairway in and out from the elements – even the sand in the driveway – Everything was beautiful – I remember a Yogi giving me advice way back in my misspent youth – He said that anything artistic we do helps us in our quest for spiritual ‘enlightenment’. Like the quote from “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” – “Before enlightenment – chopping wood and carrying water — After enlightenment – Chopping Wood! and Carrying Water!”

— Did I tell you that when Jim came back from North Shamrock Island he went in and deleted our ‘Skybox’ and bingo – the stars came out – They’re not all that visible in the screenshot above, but they’re there –

Ellyn the half-elf

– “Ellyn the half-elf” –

— “Ellyn” ) I don’t know how well putting her to the left of this text will work, but there she is, cropped – with the exposure adjusted so she actually shows up in this ‘photo’ –

Ellyn.

– I think this is Ellyn posing in a full width screenshot that had to be adjusted for size to keep it under 2 MB so this blog will accept it here.

— This was Ellyn before we messed up the landscape behind her.

Fidaria

– Fidaria – The female cat person. –

— Fidaria. Jim met a young woman of ‘Yugoslavian’ pedigree whose name was Fidaria. He thought that name was both beautiful and exotic. So when one of us wanted a Female cat Person as her main builder Character – Before she knew I had a cat person avatar for me here –  And she wondered what to name her – Jim went down the alphabet and got as far as ‘F’ and or friend lit up – “Yeah – that’s a whole lot better than “Kitty” –

Xhyrean at sundown.

– “Me” in the dark at Sundown – just before the stars came out and dazzled us all –

— I should probably end this here – I was the last one standing a couple hours ago and things got slowed down to an agonizing scrawl as the loads of landscaping changes we made were stacking up in a buffer somewhere – And I’m pretty sure I can safely log out and re-enter and run around to see how the changes we made look in the ‘daylight’ here 🙂

— Hasta luego –

—– Xyrean ( the bloodshot and starry eyed ) –

“Canadian Still Life With Snow Flurries”

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Tuesday, January 30th, 2018 —>  -10˚C / +13˚F with ‘light snow’ @ 9:30 am Atlantic Time in New Brunswick, Canada —> I think today is Mrs. Noreen Rooney’s birthday —> 🙂

Wood pile under tarp in drveway with very slight accumulation of snow flurries.

– “Canadian Still Life – With Flurries” (?) –

— When I was in Alaska at this time of year ( 1994 ) the stillness up there really was still. @ -40˚C / -40˚F it felt like even the air was frozen. Ravens and Moose were alive, Ravens complaining vociferously and Moose blundering around in a trance.  { You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Bull Moose, at least two tons of one, standing on his hind legs, reaching about ten feet up into a tree to eat twigs and dead leaves —> His hooves moving up and down with his effort – All this about two feet away from you with only a double glazed picture window between you and the Moose. If the darned thing lost his balance, he would have come crashing into my sister’s living room, probably panicked and could have run around in sheer panic, smashing things and maybe killing people, if he landed on top of me, I’d be history – But yeah, that was an experience – } {{ And I lived to tell about it, I think. Am I still alive? Is this the ‘here-after’? Jeeze, I hope not… }}

😉

~~~~~ Jim

Welcome To Stone Lake

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— Stone Lake is a property that includes a steep hill where logging trails were the only way vehicles could hope to reach the summit.

Kaeren

– Kaeren of Stone Lake – Parallel Earth designation =   { E/NorAm/US+Can+Mex # (-07) } –

— Kaeren O’Neill’s protective uncle George owned the property. When she was a bright-eyed five year old he’d promised Kaeren it would be hers some day.

— But George disappeared and everybody said he ran off with his secretary. Since uncle George worked for the US Government a lot of scary men came around and asked a lot of scary questions.

— But that was ten years ago.

— And a farmer named MacPhearson { Uncle George’s best friend since childhood } received a letter from Uncle George’s attorney explaining that if George disappeared for more than five years, Farmer MacPhearson should sell the property and make sure the money from that sale went to Kaeren so her alcoholic mother couldn’t drink it all up – The plan was that money would pay for Kaeren’s University Education.

— But nobody seemed to want to buy that property, heck, most of it was nearly vertical.

— And when an out of towner was interested, Farmer MacPhearson drove the potential buyer up the steep and partially washed out logging trail in a four-wheel drive vehicle that had been ‘customized’ for use as a farm utility vehicle. MacPhearson’s son had hacked off the back half of the once Station Wagon-like Power Wagon, put down a sheet of marine plywood and built a low wooden wall and working wooden tailgate and presented his father with one of the world’s ugliest hybrid pickup trucks. But Farmer MacPhearson thought it looked just dandy. All it had to do was drive forward and back, turn corners when he turned the steering wheel and stop when he put on the brakes. And that it did, in spades. And it was real good at carrying all kinds of stuff around his farm.

— Farmer MacPhearson had spent many hours in his youth, hunting with Uncle George – all over that hill. When George got his US Government job, the loggers thought they could squeeze him for big bucks, told him he needed to pay them quite a bit to cover their insurance and operating costs. But George wasn’t stupid. He knew how much the loggers were overcharging for the wood they ‘harvested’ from his land. And he basically told the loggers they should try one or two impossible sex acts with themselves and told his friends on the local police force to make sure the idiot loggers stayed the heck away while he was off working on classified government projects.

— But when the logging trail ended at a mound of debris, Farmer MacPhearson scratched his head, shrugged and told the young potential buyer, “I guess this is where we get out and look around a bit -”

— And when the two of them walked around the pile of twisted tree trunks and mud and who knows what else – Farmer MacPhearson gasped at what he remembered should be a hilly landscape full of old growth trees and trails left by deer and moose and smaller animals, and a gurgling brook that ran through those hills and over a couple small waterfalls – and saw only a nearly level area of exposed – not quite weathered smooth – stone. All the farmer could say was, “Well, that’s different -”

— As the summer afternoon sun blazed overhead, and heated that stone – several areas of almost spooky – mirage like – waving areas of heated air rose above the uneven ground.

— The prospective buyer – a young man only a couple of years older than Kaeren – smiled, “Looks like a stone lake -” and that name stuck.

— Like almost everyone she knew, Kaeren believed she lived in the only Reality there was – The planet she knew as “Earth” – And it never occurred to her that there could be anything like a parallel world —

But then One Morning – She Woke Up To Find:

Eslyn in Mer city

– A completely unexpected landscape –

— She thought she was still asleep and dreaming.

Midnight in the desert.

– But the people in this ‘dream world’ knew she was there and responded to her presence. –

— She could taste the air. She could feel the wind. The sand in this strange place smelled like wood smoke.

Re: Search For Images Of Ganesh

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Sunday, January 28, 2018 —> +3˚C / +37˚F with light rain falling in this part of Atlantic Canada —

— Time for me to weigh in here with a copy & paste of what I’m using as a sticky on my blog —

— This was posted almost two and a half years ago after one of my clients wanted images of Ganesh for his web site.

— I kind of like the way this looks. —> Hope you do too.

—H.J. d’A—

= = = = =

Thursday, September 22, 2016 — 19˚C / 66˚F with bright sunshine @ 12:42 pm in Atlantic Canada —

Ganesh - with a black background

A friend wanted an image of Ganesh – Apparently September 5th was a special day dedicated to Ganesh in India, There were many images that could have fit the bill. I liked quite a few, including this one.

I am hesitant to call Ganesh a ‘god’. Cultural differences are too easy to misunderstand. My take on a ‘Western view’ of Ganesh would be that He is regarded the way Roman Catholics regard Saints. They ask Ganesh for help overcoming obstacles, removing obstacles from their lives, blessing them with ‘good luck’.

"Happy Ganesh Chaturthi'

I should have looked this up, but it looks like ‘Ganesh Chaturthi’ is a Holiday / Celebration Day dedicated to Ganesh.

My friend, Jim W., told me a story related to Ganesh. While he was working part time as a cleaner when he first became a permanent resident in Canada and could legally find work- one of the places he worked was an old textile mill that was in the process of being converted into a ‘Corporate Centre’ / Office Building. The building had some creepy areas, other people who were there at night reported seeing ghosts, experienced being touched and/or pinched when nobody else was in the building.

Jim began chanting “Shri Ram” – a chant he picked up from a recording of music popular with Sufis – which was attributed to Mahatma Gandhi- He said he could feel his own voice vibrating in his chest and then all around him (after several minutes) in an unusually relaxing manner and then received a ‘spontaeneous visualization’ in which Ganesh was dancing, walking along beside him as he dusted, mopped and wet-mopped the floors. A few minutes later his visualization had expanded to include a whole traveling group of Hindu Indian musicians, playing drums and other instruments as they walked along with Ganesh and Jim, clearing the creepy vibrations away with happy smiling feelings and light.

He said he’d never thought of Ganesh as a Dancer- but apparently most Hindu Indians know Ganesh as quite the accomplished dancer.

🙂

— H.J. d’A —

An Environmental / Climate Tweet From Australia

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Saturday, January 27, 2018 —> -8˚C /+17˚F & kinda grey and ‘blah’ @11:44 am in Atlantic Canada —

Aussie Tweet

This came as a tweet from an Australian – But when I tried to get the full message I landed on the guy who tweeted it’s web site.

— Anne Frank’s young face smiled from a number of tweets this morning calling this Holocaust Memorial Day – There were several Pro Union Tweets and only one or two really nice photos from my favourite European tweeting photographers. –

 

Morning Mist on Lake.

– And I snitched this amazing photo from one of our Arnprior friend’s facebook page –

— Shelley Cameron, ex-Arnprior-ite, took the above photo of a fog hanging low over a lake somewhere.

— People who capture photographs or somehow creatively spot things most of us overlook and miss – and paint or somehow share their vision with the rest of us, should be acknowledged, praised and let know they’re appreciated. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

This Earthly Life

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This Earthly Life

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Friday, September 15th, 2017

 

It all seemed so simple
While we basked in Heavenly Love
– Guided by the wisdom of Heavenly Beings

So of course we volunteered
to come back down to earth
To save those silly earthlings
that we cared so much about
From suffering all the pain and confusion
they so readily embraced
in their blindness
and ambition –

But the process of birth
wiped our memories completely
and left us defenseless
before those Shakespearean slings and arrows

We were target practice for everything
that only valued power
and saw love as weakness
wisdom as a hindrance to their fulfillment
which, of course, they could never achieve
anyway –
And then they blamed us for their
inability to become the sole
ruler of everything they see.

And when the ones we care about
turn and blame us for every little failure
in their lives
of course it hurts

If we were mindless
unfeeling
disconnected
automatons
It might not hurt at all

But we are, after all,
Angels in Training
And we feel every pain
we ever wanted to save
anyone else from ever feeling –

And down here
where the electro-magnetic currents
have intense and negative effects
on our ability to remember who we are
and why we’re here –
and, in effect, block out the sun of reason –
we’ve either got to trust
The Heart of the Universe
and the wisdom of whatever
we believe God might be
– to get us through this –

-intact?

— Jim Wellington 2017

Good Morning / Good Afternoon —> A Little Background —

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Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018 —> -4˚C / +24˚F & very grey and drab with almost invisibly falling snow @3:15 pm in Atlantic Canada — Imported from “Mirror Blog” two days  later —

Deserted Manor Houses

– Faer Kingdoms – Deserted Manor Houses at Dawn –

— One of our first glimpses of a parallel world within a parallel world – In this case it’s an anomaly-created ‘pocket dimension’ called, “The Faer Kingdoms”. This is an area where mythical creatures and “The People Of The Glenn” live side by side with humans and elves and upright bi-pedal Cat-People – among others.

Cavern Details

– Cavern Details – A guide named Daerenn led us part of the way to safety through a cavern that had been formed by rushing water from melting glaciers eons ago. –

— This cavern is mostly stable with wild portals opening in random spots from time to time. In a lot of areas it’s dark and scary, in others, engineers have been able to chip away excess stone near deposits of fairly clear white or perfectly clear colourless crystals in the ceiling and set up mirrors and lenses to amplify and focus daylight into the interior of the cavern so sights such as this one are spectacular –

Wild Portals

– Examples of Wild Portals springing up – Not inside the cavern –

— Guards rush to stand near wild portals on a dark and stormy night in a section of the Faer Kingdoms. This was just before a really intense lightning storm and the kind of downpour that produced flash flooding everywhere.

Cavern Guard - "Don't Look Down"

– Doug hinted that there were several areas where various guides warned us, “Don’t Look Down!” This was one of those areas. –

— Luckily, most of the guides and guards in this cavern are hyper-vigilant and not afraid to body slam somebody who looks slightly woozy against a wall when they might just pass our and teeter over the edge. There was a deep pool of water at the bottom of this drop. We were warned that some pools can be extremely toxic.

Moonlight through channeled crystals

– Moonlight channeled through crystals –

— On a night with a brilliant full moon outside the cavern, the engineers were able to filter that moonlight through crystals and flood areas of the cavern with bright, nearly magical light.

Woman guard guarding Crysal deposits

– Crystal deposits – Colourful glowing crystals light up some dark spots. –

— Her name is Eslyn, she’s a guard – and she told us, “When we dress like this, a lot of guys can’t think straight – Sometimes we need all the unfair advantage we can get.” She smiled. Other guards glared at us like, “You’re not supposed to look!”

Crystal Cavern Guide.

– Vollffe was another guide/guard. He told us that many guides and guards adopt flashy dress to suggest to potential looters and vandals that they’re already rich enough so bribery would be out of the question. –

— Rods and shards of mined crystals litter the floor while scars from miners’ picks and other implements of destruction are plainly visible in the walls of this section of the cavern.

Cave Entrance as seen from the Faer Kingdoms

– When we glanced back at the cavern’s entrance/exit once we could see again in daylight. This is what we saw –

— The Faer Kingdoms landscapes, and many other features there – exhibited much richer colours than we were used to in our ‘normal world’.

Dhoreena beyond the cavern.

– Dhoreena is an artist and a gentle soul from our world who became fascinated with this dimension and stayed on to capture as much of it as she could in paintings and occasional contraband camera photographs. –

— When our eyes became adjusted to daylight again, an artist named Dhoreena greeted us and led us to a safe hostel where the food wasn’t bad and the beds were a lot more comfortable than sleeping on the cold hard stone in the cavern had been. She admitted that she came from our world, said something about a designation “Earth – North America-Canada-Mexico Number Minus Five” – And mentioned that the only difference between minus three and minus five was the borders of Maine and New Brunswick. Presque Isle is part of New Brunswick in her world. She also told us that she’d heard rumours of a dimension in which Robert Kennedy avoided assassination, where the Psychiatrist who hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan confessed to trying to set up the hapless immigrant as a diversion for the man dressed as a security guard – who suffered a broken neck when a football player near Bobby Kennedy saw the gun in his hand – and Bobby went on to become a three term President of the USA and jailed the manipulators of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Economy, in her words, “Went Gang-Busters!” She also told us that she didn’t mind that the locals had her change the spelling of her name to reflect their customs.

— I probably need to come back and say a lot more, but I can do that later –

~~~~~ Jim

 

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