Tough decision….

Aww, I guess it wasn’t that tough.  It’s about half past three
ayem, and I just finished putting my groceries away.  I’m not
sleepy, and enjoying the smooth jazz on the radio, so I had to decide
whether to climb in bed and read myself to sleep, or blog.  Guess
what I decided.

Last week my alternate driver said she
wouldn’t be available to drive the van from the rehab center to this
week’s NA meeting, so I said I’d do it.  Tonight when I got there,
a staff member popped out the door and told me no one was there. 
The residents and the van had gone on an outing to Thunderbird Falls
and wouldn’t be back until way after our meeting, so Greyfox and I went
on over to the Alano Club and made coffee before the meeting.

But first we had to get in.  It’s a funny situation there. 
For a while the club had a resident manager onsite and we could always
get in, found the place warm all winter, and often he’d made coffee for
us.  He’s gone now and someone in power decided not to replace
him.  More often than not when we arrive for meetings we find the
door locked.  There’s a sign inside that door asking the last
person to leave to lock it when they go.  That’s what I did
tonight when I finished washing cups and cleaning up after our meeting,
so someone tomorrow may need to go in a window to open the door from
inside (as one of our rehab residents did one night), or they may opt
to slip the lock as I did tonight.  I’ve seen other people use
their credit cards for that, but I’ve got a better tool:  my old
Spyderco Clip-Flip, the twenty-some-year-old prototype of the knife
they’re now calling the “Police” model. 

Greyfox and I
briefly discussed what crime if any we committed.  He declared it
wasn’t burglary since we took nothing, wasn’t breaking and entering
since we broke nothing, and at worst it had to be illegal entry. 
I pointed out that the sign outside says it’s open from 11 AM to 10 PM
to members and for a half hour before and after meetings to everyone
else, and we were within half an hour of our meeting time.  The
club was open, just not unlocked.   He said he’s said it
before and it bears repeating, I shoulda been a lawyer.  I think
I’d have been happier as a forensic pathologist, if I’d gone the
academic route.  As it is, I think my resumé’s probably more
interesting reading than it would have been had I gotten that PhD I was
on track for before my father died.

It was a better than
average meeting, a small group. lots of time for sharing and toward the
end it turned into an open discussion instead of the standard series of
monologues.  One newcomer was there for his first meeting, one man
still in early recovery who is compulsively making two or three
meetings a day to maintain his abstinence, two women back in after
having been out for a while and realizing keenly the difference between
simple abstinence and true recovery, plus Greyfox and me and one other
regular.  The topic was how God talks to us.  For Greyfox
it’s in things he hears and sees, such as on TV or trash he picks up
off the ground.  For me, it’s the voices in my head, such as my
mother’s voice saying, “Look on the bright side,” or my father’s voice
saying, “pay attention.”

The old fart and I had made a movie
date a couple of days ago, so after shopping we went back to his cabin
and watched a video.  When he’d found the video, he’d called me on
his cell from Blockbuster to ask me if I’d ever heard of Mel Gibson
playing Hamlet.  I hadn’t, nor had he, and I suppose that’s
understandable, given that the movie was released in 1990, the year we
were married.  I had been ‘way out of mainstream culture and media
for a decade or so by then, and he fell out for a while when he fell in
with me.  With Franco Zeffirelli (who made Brother Sun, Sister Moon,
one of my best-loved movies of all time) as director and screenwriter,
and a cast of actors we both know and respect, and its being his
favorite Shakespeare play, we decided it was worth a try.  After
seeing it, I’d say that was putting it mildly.

This was the
best performance of Hamlet I’ve seen in this lifetime, and I’ve seen it
played by Richard Burton and at least a dozen other theater
companies both amateur and professional.  Mel Gibson spoke those
immortal lines with more of the feeling and depth of understanding that
brings comprehension to an audience than any other actor or reader I’ve
ever heard.  Helena Bonham-Carter as Ophelia stole the show. 
Hamlet’s feigned madness and Ophelia’s true insanity could never have
been portrayed better, and perhaps never as well.  As star-crossed
lovers, those two have always put Romeo and Juliet to shame.  The
setting, a castle in starkly beautiful natural surroundings, made for a
far better production than one could get on any stage.  We two old
Shakespeare lovers, old souls who knew the Immortal Bard back when he
was a mortal of ill repute and lousy credit, were wowed.

It
was around one or after when I started home.  By then the sky was
beginning to brighten in the northeast.  The season of the
midnight sun is nearly over; it’s almost getting dark at night
now.  On this side of Willow, I came up behind a big rig heading
up the highway, and I slipstreamed in his wake until I got to my
turnoff, then flashed my lights at him, “bye and thanks,” and shifted
down to first gear for the rough dirt road.  Doug was already
asleep, so I unloaded the car, put perishables away, then checked my
comments.  I noticed I had some new subscribers and checked out
their sites before putting away the rest of my groceries.  Now,
I’m beginning to feel sleepy.  I hope my writing’s not having the
same effect on my readers.

More stuff I forgot to mention:

Before I started writing my “bastard child of Pollyanna and Candide”
blog this morning, I’d had a couple of other things I wanted to add,
but they slipped my mind.

One was in response to the person who suggested I get a new profile pic
to show my “slender self”.  The one that is up there now was taken
in the middle of the weight loss, after about six months, when I was
down somewhere around size sixteen.  The problem with implementing
that suggestion is that it’s devilishly hard to do a full-body
self-portrait, which I suppose was what he or she had in mind. 
(I’m too rushed today to go back and check my comments, gotta get ready
for a town trip.  Please accept my apology.)  Both Doug and
Greyfox have a tendency to stand and hold the camera waiting for a
pose, and I never look well in posed pics.  I have not yet trained
either of them to just snap away, ignoring what the subject looks like,
because the shutter delay on the digital camera assures that you never
get the pic you snap anyway.  I think both of them are still
accustomed to trying to conserve film, dammit, and so I seldom get a
shot I like when I hand the camera over to either of them.

Another hand-held
head shot would probably reveal a more slender head, but the most
striking evidence I see of my weight loss (aside from losing my pants)
is when I look down at my legs.  What I used to have down there
wasn’t just fat.  When I was eating all that sugar, wheat, and
other foods to which I’m sensitive, it made me ill, stressed my liver
and kidneys and gave me edema.  My ankles were swollen and my
knees were bulbous.

Doug
took this shot of Granny Mousebreath yesterday while he was here at the
computer behind the couch and I was over there in Couch Potato Heaven
playing the PS2.  They are not quite the dancer’s legs I had
thirty-five years ago, but they’re a lot better than what I was
standing on when I went to Doug’s high school graduation three years
ago, which he mercifully cut off when he took this shot of Greyfox and
me.

The other thing I had planned since last night to blog about today was
a conversation between Greyfox and me, over his cell phone.  I
laughed so hard I gave myself an asthma attack and drew Doug’s
attention far enough out of the game he was playing that he asked what
all the hoohaw was about.  It turns out I didn’t need to blog it. 
Greyfox did that himself at the Wasilla Public Library this morning.

Looking on the Bright Side

Mama always told me to look on the bright side.  She didn’t always
follow her own advice, but whenever as a child I was gloomily depressed
about some loss or injustice, or obsessed with the imperfections I
perceived everywhere, she’d tell me to look on the bright side. 
She insisted that there is always a bright side in every situation.

I thought she was simpleminded.  True, she probably wouldn’t have
scored as high on an IQ test as my father or I could, but she had the
capacity to know wise truth when she heard it, and in her time she had
been taught, just as she taught me, to look on the bright side. 
Viewed from a psychological perspective, optimism makes sense. 
Pessimists set themselves up for disappointment and failure by
expecting it.  Why not set oneself up for pleasant surprises by
going out of the way to look for them?  Particularly for
perfectionistic, obsessive-compulsive people such as myself, prone to
notice any little thing that’s out of whack and obsess over it, 
the mere effort of finding a “bright side” can be a healthy mental
exercise.

Mama’s “bright side” philosophy was, I later learned, fairly advanced metaphysics.  Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God, wrote a parable for children, The Little Soul and the Sun. 
In it he tells the story of a soul fixated on darkness until God points
out that it’s standing in the light, obsessing on its shadow.  I
oversimplify, but it really is a simple concept.  Light penetrates
even into deep caves and tunnels.  Darkness is relative, and our
perception of it hinges upon relativistic principles.  Shadows are
an artifact of light.  Darkness is only the relative absence of
light, just as in physics there is no such thing as “cold”:  it’s
just a relative absence of heat.  Our senses allow us to choose to
move toward light and warmth, or away from them.

Yesterday when I told Doug I’d found the bright side to the looting and
vandalism at our old home, I got an incredulous look from him. 
When I explained, his expression turned to comprehension and amused
pleasure.  I found, strewn around in the intruders’ wake, some
things I’d forgotten I had and some other things I knew I had somewhere, but had forgotten where I stored them. 

Now, I can turn my head and see on the windowsill my Franciscan Ware
Coronado Coral Swirl coffee server (looked it up on eBay and identified
the pattern). Nearby is a cheery yellow ceramic hippopotamus planter
I’d always loved because seeing it makes me smile, which I packed away
when I baby-proofed our house when the kid was little.  For a
while back then I missed some of my fragile tschotchkies, and then I
forgot they existed.  Now they are back in my life and in my view,
thanks to the vandals.

Thanks to Doug taking a longer than usual route on his dog walk and
finding the mess, I was also able to retrieve my baby book and the
guestbook from my father’s funeral before they were ruined by the
weather.  In the same box with them, I found my slide rule,
t-square, curve templates, and other drafting tools.  An
assortment of big flat objects in a big flat box–I had no idea where
any of that stuff was.  Blessings in disguise are blessings
nonetheless.

Today when I sat down here to start work on reconstructing the ME/CFIDS
blog I lost earlier this week when my browser crashed, I found another
blessing in disguise.  I started a fresh web search for data and
links to include, and found resources I hadn’t found before.  I
saved text and URLs in a notepad file and will go back and digest the
new data before I start writing that CFS-101 blog again.  It’s
going to be better this time around.  Being the bastard child of
Pollyanna and Candide ain’t bad at all.

The Pack Rat’s Inventory

A comment from leafylady,
on my blog about the looters and vandals who’ve been scattering,
breaking and stealing things at my old home place across the highway
from where I’m now living, expressed curiosity about what sorts of
things I have crated away.  Since I still haven’t worked up the
strength, resolution and gumption to recreate the CFS blog lost in the
crash, I might as well satisfy her curiosity.

The things I have stored, for which there is no space in my living
quarters, fall into three categories:  things of sentimental
value, things of practical use, and things with little practical use
and no sentimental value which are either aesthetically pleasing or
somehow amusing.  Sometimes those categories overlap, and I
suppose there are a few things I’d find hard to categorize, but for
most things in my junkpile one of those categories fits.

I’ve just thought of three other categories into which I might divide
my stuff:  things I had to get out of the house to make room for
new stuff to come in (such as when Greyfox moved in) but couldn’t stand
to part with, things received in exchange for work I’ve done (I accept
any sort of barter for my readings) or found in a dumpster or alongside
the highway, etc., for which I could not find immediate use or space in
the house, and things I never unpacked after we moved here from
Anchorage in 1983.  That last category includes things that I
packed up when I baby-proofed the house when Doug was born in 1981, and
things which were packed for the move two years later.

Charley and I (he’s Doug’s dad, and we were together from 1974 to 1985)
supported ourselves during the economic bust following the Trans-Alaska
Pipeline construction boom by dumpster diving and fixing up and selling
at flea markets the junk we found.  I have a green thumb and love
growing things, so for years I collected anything and everything that
could serve as a planter.  I saved string, twine, cord and rope,
and made macrame hangers for plants.  Our flea market booths were green. 
When I moved to the Valley, flea marketing was no longer feasible, and
by then chronic fatigue was taking over my life, but I still have a
collection of old coffee pots, rigid plastic ski boots (AKA
leg-breakers) and similar odd and amusing flower pots.

For many years I had an ambition to own a restaurant.  I suppose I
still have the desire, but it’s more of an unrealized dream at this
point in my life.  Who knows?  Maybe it could still happen if
I go into an extended remission or have a miraculous cure and a big
financial windfall (NO–scratch that word “windfall” and make it
bonanza or something–there was that time I prayed for a windfall and a
gust of wind blew me off my feet in an icy parking lot.  The
insurance settlement came in very handy, but made me wary of
windfalls).  Anyhow, I have been collecting dishes and heavy duty
kitchen gear for thirty years.  Give me about three hours (to soak
some dry beans) and two scullery slaves and I’ll be able to serve a
nutritious meal to a hundred people, easily. 

Supply some fresh groceries, and I can do it in less time.  One of
the things the looters took this week was my twenty-gallon stew pot, so
I’d need to cook in smaller batches, but that’s doable.  I have,
in addition to my electric range here, a total of eighteen propane
burners:  three four-burner ranges and three Coleman two-burner
camp stoves.  Two of those four-burner cooktops are in an old
school bus Charley and I turned into a mobile kitchen for our natural
foods booth at the Alaska State Fair.  We did that gig for six
years, in the late ‘seventies and early ‘eighties.  The bus is now
one of the storage “buildings” the looters have hit.

Besides the Christmas decorations they scattered, they did some hasty
unpacking of boxes and crates I’ve not seen the contents of since I
moved to this valley two decades ago.  Some of that was of
sentimental value.  I picked up and brought over here last night
the baby book in which my mother recorded my infant milestones, and the
guest book my father’s friends signed at his funeral.  A lot of
what they unpacked was the heavy restaurant china that I collect both
as useful and aesthetically pleasing.  I do like the elegant
simplicity of old-style diner dinnerware.  I also picked up and
brought over here a few choice pieces of art pottery such as a pink
1950′s era Franciscan Ware coffee server (but its lid has gone
missing), a carnival glass plate (now with a chipped edge), and an
undamaged antique heavy green glass vase that was probably carnival
prizeware, “slum”, a long time ago.

I collect pitchers, glasses and mugs in addition to plates and
bowls.  My mother collected teapots and I inherited some of her
collection.  Some of that is now gone, and also some rocks. 
We had boxes of rough agate that Greyfox and I collected on our
honeymoon stored in the old bus, and when Doug looked for it last night
he couldn’t find any left.  But, the good news is, they left my
pavilion.  They unpacked the big OD green canvas quartermaster bag
that held the top and sides of the booth I sewed together–from 6
bedsheets with 1500 yards of thread, for doing readings in at
fairs–and the hardware, etc., but they didn’t take it with them. 
The pavilion and poles came over here last night, and are still in the
car.  We were too tired to unpack everything.

The other major items still in the car are Greyfox’s cameras.  He
came with a collection of antique cameras, and there never was room for
them in the house.  We barely managed to get his clothing and
essential gear into that little 8 X 35′ trailer and the 10 X 16′
attached wannigan, and there’s no room for them in here, either. 
They will go into our “spare” station wagon, the AMC Eagle that used to
be his roadside stand and might end up being Doug’s car IF he gets his
license and learns to drive and IF we get the Eagle running.  If
so, we’ll have to find another place for the cameras.

Formerly crated up and now jumbled about in the storage spaces, in the
“useful” category, are many pieces of electronic gear that we salvaged
from dumpsters over the past twenty-some years.  Much of it had
only cosmetic damage to the cases, and was discarded by the stores when
they found it had been damaged in shipping.  Charley had worked in
a radio and TV repair shop and would bring home any bit of electronic
gear he found.  He still goes over to the old place to “mine the
junkpile” for things he’s found a need for, as do others of our
neighbors and friends.  In addition to those crates of stereos and
such, I had a stack of fitted styrofoam boxes, in which each box fit
into the top of the next one as its lid, with a lid on top of the
stack, filled with parts:  resistors, transformers, wires, light
bulbs, patch cables, etc., and the looters not only scattered the gear,
they destroyed the boxes–in too great a hurry, I suppose, to just
unstack and open them (unless they were too stupid to figure out how to
do it), they tore out the sides.

Hail Eris!  All hail Discordia!  Chaos rules.

Summer looters are back.

The first year we were housesitting here, Doug slept at our old place
across the highway, keeping an eye on things.  After our residence
here became evidently permanent, we moved some of our more valued
possessions over here and he quit camping out there.

Every summer we’ve seen evidence of thieves:  a few things turning
up missing.  This summer, it’s not only thieves but vandals and
looters.  Someone has been in there and left an awful mess, even
worse than the disheartening mess it already was.

Yesterday evening, as I was thinking about going to bed because it had
been a busy and tiring day (for me, the queen of chronic fatigue), Doug
came in from walking the dog and said we should ride over and fill the
car with anything else we value, before it all gets ruined or taken
away.

I found Christmas ornaments scattered on the ground, broken glassware,
and many things I’d left carefully packed in crates apparently
hurriedly gone through and left in disarray.  We loaded the
car.  I had an asthma attack.  Doug hurt his back.  We
both alternated among disgust / anger / dismay.  I used to worry
how I’d ever clean up the mess that was there.  Now it seems truly hopeless.

I still want to rewrite that lost blog from yesterday, about chronic
fatigue.  I don’t know if I will do it today.  We only
partially unpacked the car yesterday and I have to go back to town
tomorrow to drive the rehab van.  My alternate driver has another
commitment and I volunteered to take her turn.  That commitment,
Doug’s injury, and my fatigued state cause the tasks ahead to loom
threateningly, and that impairs my ability to sleep.  Thus the
downward spiral continues.

Most of this is copied from the Pan-American Indian Association newsletter, Whirling Rainbow.

When riding a dead horse,
best strategy is to dismount. 

In our various government programs however, a whole range

possibilities.  Here are some of those Dead Horse strategies.

Change riders.

Buy a stronger whip.

Do nothing: “This is the way we

have always ridden dead horses”.

Visit other countries to see how

they ride dead horses.

Perform a productivity study to see

if lighter riders improve the dead horse’s performance.

Hire a contractor to ride the dead

horse.

Harness several dead horses

training to increase the dead horse’s performance.

Re-classify the dead horse as

“living-impaired”.

Declare that, as the dead horse

therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line.

Rewrite the performance requirements for all horses.

Promote the dead horse to a

supervisory position.

CFS-203

I have just spent the last three to four hours writing a blog entitled
“CFS-101″.  It was a rich mix of my personal experience with
chronic fatigue, authoritative references and links to more info. 

Ironically, my browser crashed and I’m too damned tired to try and
reconstruct it now.  Besides, I have other work I need to do
today.  I must put together a new batch of orthomolecular
supplements for Greyfox.

Later, all.

refreshing candor, from a politician

Ben Stevens is the son of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (Republican,
Alaska).  He represents an Anchorage district in our state
legislature.  Recently, D.L. Mooney, a woman who lives in this
same huge valley I live in (the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, which we
shorten to Mat-Su) called Stevens a “whore” for his financial
entanglements with business, consultant fees listed in his financial
disclosures.  She said it in an email that she didn’t sign, but I
often don’t sign email since my full name appears in the sender line
anyway.

Stevens replied to her email, “Afraid to sign your name? Your just more
valley trash.”  We can add bad grammar to Stevens’s faults, as
well as naiveté and political hubris.  He says it was a “private
conversation,” that email exchange.  He didn’t like it when Ms.
Mooney forwarded his reply to a reporter.  What I like best is
that he is refusing to apologize to the rest of us valley trash. 
I, personally, think that if any apologies are due, Ms. Mooney should
apologize to whores.

Now, a man who lives even farther up the Susitna Valley than I do has
started raking in the bucks with a t-shirt that says, “Proud to be
Valley trash.”  I think it’s unfortunate that these two river
valleys have been lumped together the way they have, as a political
entity.  True, at their lower ends they do run together, but the
Upper Susitna leads away to the north toward Mount McKinley, while the
Upper Matanuska winds past glaciers and off toward the Canadian
border. 

Down in the flats where the valleys run together is most of the farming
country in this state.  Anyone would be nuts to try farming the
upper end of either valley, but a few nutty ones have tried.  The
towns in the lower Valley are bedroom communities for Anchorage
commuters.  Out here we cultivate mostly tourists, and our
homegrown citizens are a more individualistic lot than those down near
town.  Many of us call ourselves Valley Rats, but I don’t recall
ever having heard us referred to as valley trash before. 
Something in the tone of Stevens’s email, though, especially that
“more”, suggests that perhaps in Juneau where he hangs out, or in
Anchorage where he has to maintain a home in order to “represent” it,
it is a common term.

News-Miner – Past News

Silly me–who knew?

When I described my symptoms to Greyfox, he said that “poisoning” I
experienced the other day sounded like Chinese restaurant
syndrome.  Sure enough, when I googled it, I found a list of
symptoms that included all of mine and a few others, such as
anaphylactic shock, that I was then glad I hadn’t experienced.

The irony here is that I’ve ranted against MSG for years, and have even
told people about the myriad of names under which it is legal for it to
be listed under truth in labeling laws.   I’d grown lax in reading
labels.  I skimmed the immense ingredient list for soy isolates,
hydrolyzed soy protein, MSG, etc., and missed the autolyzed corn
protein.  I read the large print on that label, the “nutrition
facts”, but since I’d eaten other meals of the same brand I didn’t
closely read all the ingredients.

Evidently, I need to go back to cooking everything I eat from
scratch.  I’d gotten complacent, and started viewing those frozen
meals as a luxury, something to use when I’m too fatigued to
cook.  I might even be able to make such a plan work, if I take a
magnifying glass with me on shopping trips and never shop when I’m too
fatigued to read all the labels in their entirety.  Since that’s
probably not feasible, I suppose frozen meals are a luxury I can’t
afford to indulge.

http://www.fact-index.com/m/mo/monosodium_glutamate.html

Blah

I got poisoned yesterday.  I ate a frozen meal, one of the
new-style low-carb things.  I’ve eaten them before and they were
pleasant and non-toxic, but that time I got a toxic reaction to
something and spent a couple of scary hours with a numb, tingly feeling
around my face and neck, pain in my throat, sinuses, and eyeballs, and
shortness of breath.  I drank lots of water and at last it went
away, but it left me shaky and achy.  The food factory’s customer
comment line only operates Monday thru Friday, so I’m waiting for
tomorrow to tell them about it.

When Doug read my blog about “stretching the spacetime continuum” with
my packing skill, he told me that he and Greyfox had been talking about
my bag sale bonanza outside the cabin while I was trying on my new
things inside.  Doug said he told Greyfox that there was something
non-Euclidean about my skill, like Dr. Caligari’s shopping bag.

I’ve been wrestling with memories, trying to sort the jumble of years
that my mother and I lived in Kansas and made annual trips to
California each summer.  One year we rode the train… one way, I
think, then bought a car in California and drove back… I think. 
One year instead of the southern route on US 66, we went through
Prescott, Sedona and Flagstaff, Arizona and visited some of my Douglass
cousins in Colorado.  On that series of trips we drove two
different dark blue 1948 Chevys, I think… no, of that I’m fairly certain. 
Maybe wrestling isn’t the best way to tame those memories. 
Perhaps I should relax and try to seduce them to unravel.

You’re Bettie Page!
What Classic Pin-Up Are You?
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On the “Which Bettie?” quiz, there was no single way I could truthfully
answer it, so I did it once one way and again the other way.  I
don’t think either Bettie below describes me as accurately as the kinky
Bettie above left.

You’re Color Bettie, you’re bright and modern and
you seem to always know what’s going on. You’re
into art and expessing deep feelings…that
makes you a little deep yourself.

Which Bettie Page Are You?
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You’re Nude Bettie. People see you as outgoing and
maybe a bit wild. Your often hyper and always
up for some crazy fun!
Which Bettie Page Are You?
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Have I ever mentioned that I’m bipolar?  I know I’ve blogged about being obsessive-compulsive….

You’re not Coffee, you’re Tea!
What Kind of Coffee are You?
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