August 12, 2002

• Here’s a questionnaire I couldn’t resist when I read the answers Jude gave.

  Name:  Kathy Lynn Douglass, Coyote Medicine, Secretary of Space, Susitna Sue and SuSu

  Age: 57

  Rank: female

  SS # : 23 skiddoo, kiddo

  DOB: 9-18-1944

  Sex: any offers?

  No Your Real Sex!!!!! M/F : Asked and answered, M/F.

  Work: on Self, art, craft, writing memoirs, writing fiction (New Age
  close encounter serial killer thriller), supervising family business,
  subsistence, hunting, gathering, sowing and reaping.

  Or no work: Play, you mean?  Yes indeed, every day. 

  Pet Peeves: Defensiveness pushes all my buttons.  Anyone who
  won’t entertain or can’t accept conflict, dissent or criticism without
  resorting to diversionary defense mechanisms or angry ad hominem
  invective, is pathetic.

  Why Xanga: Sarah, sister of my soul was at Xanga.  She had said
  she thought I should blog.  When a grandmother came to me in a
  dream and said I needed to keep a journal, the penny dropped.

  Favorite hiding place: My workroom, once the master bedroom at the
  back of this 15′X 55′ trailer my family started out housesitting in
  1998, right after Sarah went back to Big Sur.  She lived here
  first, and some of her stuff is still back in the room where her bed
  was once.  The bed is in by the wood stove in the front room now,
  so I can keep the fire going at night.  In the “bedroom” at the
  back of the trailer Greyfox’s stock for his stand shares shelf space
  with my books, sewing machine, tools, and my houseplants.  That’s
  the room where I start seeds in early spring to plant outside after the
  snow goes.  I hope this question refers to where I most like to
  hide myself.  I don’t tell anyone where I hide the stash, or
  what’s in it.

  Childhood Accidents: Numerous falls, cut and scrapes.  My
  parents took me out to party with a cousin and his friend who were in
  the Navy, on VJ night, the party after VJ day (Victory over Japan, end
  of WWII, for those for whom it’s history).  I was a babe
  in arms.  They got in a wreck and I ended up under
  the driver’s seat while my mother ended up on the pavement on her
  butt.  No severe injuries.  I was an uncoordinated, curious
  risk-taker.  Skate the edge, and over the edge.  First ER
  visit:  Tobe, male half of the old couple who rented half our
  house after my father died, was swinging me around (age 7) and
  dislocated my shoulder.  A few years later my mother and I flipped
  and rolled in a 1948 Chevy on a sandy country road in Kansas–crested a
  rise in the road, with a switchback just below the crest on the other
  side, going too fast.  One of my first boyfriends hugged me too
  tight when I was about twelve and separated the cartilage on some of my
  ribs.

  Quirks: I looked it up:  “a peculiar trait: 
  IDIOSYNCRACY”  Hmmm.  I say what I mean and I mean what I
  say, most of the time.  If I’m not sure, I look it up.

  Where you live: Upper Susitna Valley, Alaska, about equidistant between Talkeetna, Willow and Trapper Creek.

  Where were you born? San Jose, California

  Is it a bathroom or toilet? : The room is a bathroom, or a washroom
  if I’m in Canada; or else it is a john, ladies’ room, powder room or
  potty.  The toilet is the porcelain throne, of which there is none
  in our outhouse here in the valley.

  Is the cup half full or half empty?: The cup is just there to give shape to its contents.  I fill and empty it at Will.

  Do you believe in Love at first sight?: Beyond merely believing in it, I practice it.  It’s fun.

  Favorite Phrase: I knew you were going to say that.  (Coyote Medicine, the smart-ass psychic)

  Favorite comeback: Yeah… right.

  Favorite Era? Present, by far… and I speak from LOOONG experience.

  Quick wit or slow?: Often my laugh rings out about a half a beat
  before the rest of the crowd gets the joke or sees the unintended humor
  in something.  But I’m so literal-minded that there are some
  things I don’t get at all.  I haven’t mastered metaphor.

  Scars: Many cuts and burns on my hands from a lifetime in kitchens
  and tinkering with tools and machines.  Healed-over cracks in
  skull and arm and thumb.  Burn near the bottom of my bottom from a
  motorcycle with a broken fender strut, stab wound from a screwdriver I
  drove into my own foot getting into the back seat of an old Ford or
  Chevy coupe in a hurry.  Do stretch marks count?  Oh, and
  mustn’t forget the stitching and scarring of labial tears from
  childbirth.  As PFC Sephiroth, my favorite of my son’s best
  friends, says, “That’s nothing, compared to my scarred psyche.”

  Are you recognizable in a crowd? Yes, unless I choose not to be noticed.

  Fact or fiction / Your xanga Site? Fact, unless clearly labeled as fiction or stated as opinion.

  Favorite Memory: no single one, but a series of sunsets and sunrises in Sedona

  Worst fear: That I might still have some unacknowledged fear
  remaining somewhere under a layer of denial.  Naaaah, not
  really.  Even that thought doesn’t scare me.

  DO you gossip: What I like best to do with the gossip I hear is to
  discuss it with the absent third party who was the topic of the
  gossip.  I like to get to the facts, from the source.

  song of the moment: Baillamos!

  Describe a day  in life of : When I wake, either Doug hasn’t
  gone to bed yet, or everyone is asleep, unless it is one of the cats or
  Koji dog who wakes me, wanting to go out (or in the case of Pidney cat,
  demanding that I get up and shut the door she pushed open to get
  in).  I click on the TV, run to the outhouse then come in and
  check the fire and stoke it except in June, July and August, take my
  pills (yecch), and get coffee while local news or Today tells me what’s
  up out there.  Second cup of coffee and something solid to eat and
  if Doug isn’t using it, I warm up the computer and read my comments on
  Xanga while I eat breakfast.  By then I’m awake enough to go care
  for the living things for which I am responsible, starting with the
  plants, the ones least able to assert their needs.  On typical
  days, after chores I’m exhausted and retire to my bed where I sit in a
  half lotus under a laptop and write.  Atypical days can take me
  miles away on various missions or replace the day of writing with video
  fests when Greyfox is home craving entertainment, or with days of play
  at the PS2 when I am blocked or we have a new game.  I read books,
  too, sometimes all day for days and days when I’m researching
  something, and always for at least half an hour at bedtime. 
  Computer time gets slipped in wherever it fits around the schedule of
  the two males who share my home.  What I do here includes
  research, maintaining 3 little websites and building a fourth, poppit,
  animal ark, news, genealogy and stalking old friends and lost family,
  and xanga.

  Favorite people:  I love everyone I know, and more deeply the
  better I know them.  The one closest to my heart, though, is my
  youngest child, Doug, the best traveling companion I’ve ever had, the
  only one who has ever liked to travel the back roads with me and stop
  at every whim.  His close childhood friends Lindy and Randy (AKA
  Sephiroth) are also among my favorite living humans.  I have a big
  soul family and they know who they are and I’m not even sure I know who
  all of them are, but they are all my favorites. If we’re including
  favorite dead people, they’re too numerous to name.

  Quote of the moment: “A risk a day helps keep your fears away.”
  (Sarah passed this along to me, and I forgot who she said said it.)

  Finish the sentences

  I was once: smaller

  now I’m: extraordinary

  I lost my: fears and most of my inhibitions.

  I am attracted to: sweet gooey things and high places.

  Time is:  Real, but not what you think it is.

  Xanga is: getting more interesting.

  • 7:06 pm
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