compromise
UPDATED


Being a Virgo, an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, compromise hasn’t
come easy for me.  I learned how to meet others halfway in matters
of fairness and sharing, but I still have a hard time compromising
where principles are concerned.

In my current situation, I feel I’m being compelled to compromise both
by concessions in matters of principle and by being open to suspicion
and disrepute.  None of the alternatives I’ve found are
satisfactory to me.  I’m laying the matter open to my readers,
hoping to get both input and gifts of financial help.  Here’s the
situation:

I need a state business license to do readings online.  My
previous license did not cover that service.  I put up notice here
and on KaiOaty’s site that I had stopped doing readings there several
months ago, but people ignore that and keep asking for readings. 
By delaying licensing, I’m missing out on opportunities to be of
service and on the possbility of making money for it.

I have no intention of changing my policies to the extent of setting a
price or requiring payment in advance.  I won’t compromise that
far.  If and when I go back to doing readings, it will be on the
same terms as always:  I do the reading and then the client
decides what the service was worth and pays me accordingly.

Where the compromise comes in is at the definition of what I
do.   I have money at stake in this decision, and I also have
a principle at stake.  Each different occupational activity or
line of business requires a separate license.  Several of my
activities, including my writing, storytelling, jewelry work,
photography and sewing, fit into category #7115, independent
artist. 

I have always stated and believed that my readings are a valid
counseling service, not for entertainment only.  I take it
seriously.  I’m not a fortuneteller.  I don’t tell people
what they want to hear.  I tell them what they need to know, even
if it doesn ‘t please them to hear it.  It’s not a way to get
rich, but it has brought me some modest fame.  I’m not ready to
quit.

The problem is that this winter I have not even been able to save the
$200 for one license, much less the $800-$1,000 it would take to
license myself to do all the various kinds of work I can do.  That
wouldn’t be feasible anyway, since some of my occupations don’t bring
in enough money annually to pay for the license.  I have to
compromise somewhere because it’s not feasible to do otherwise.

I have decided to compromise my principles to the extent of calling my
readings a practice in the divinitory arts and shamanic arts to keep
the licensing expense to a minimum.  The state doesn’t care what I
call my work any more than they care how much or how little money I
make from it.  I just have to make everything I do fit into those
little boxes they created.  I’m not going to do any more freelance
editing or sell any of my sprouted seedlings or garden produce any
longer because that never made enough money to pay for a license. 
From here on out, officially I am an independent artist.  If
anyone thinks I’m compromising too much there, let me know.  I’m
soliciting input on that.

My other area of compromise with my principles is this:  I’m going
begging.  Someone commented here recently that she’d long been
unaware that the little purple hat in my header was a PayPal
link.  She thought the “little something” I was asking for was
comments.  I’m taking this opportunity to wave that little hat
around and state explicitly that your gifts and contributions are
welcome… needed, to get me back in business.

If I ever did a reading for you and you either forgot or couldn’t
afford to pay for it, maybe now you could contribute to my business
license fund.  If you like the stories I tell or the pretty
pictures of my Alaskan neighborhood I’ve posted, maybe you could give a
little gift to make it possible for me to turn it into a paying
occupation.  If I can do more of my share to support my household
here in this end of the Susitna Valley, then Greyfox can keep paying
the rent on his cabin at the other end of the valley and replace that
old car that’s gotten to the stage where repairing it isn’t
cost-effective.  Since the car is his place of business (covered
by his retail license) and the cabin rent covers the space where he
parks the car to do business, and he contributes as much as he can to
keep this household going, it is in my best interest to help keep him
going. 

Wanna help us?  Drop a little something in the hat.  Your gifts will be gratefully appreciated.

UPDATE:

pyramidtermite asks
how other people around here, such as the woodsellers, deal with
licensing issues. Most of the ones I know deal with them by ignoring
them.  I don’t have that option since someone on Xanga reported me.

He also said that he regards editing as a form of artistic
collaboration.  Regardless of how we might twist words to define
“editing”, it can’t be included under the “independent artist”
classification because there is already a category for “editor”. 
Things I can do as an independent artist are as diverse as taxidermy
and dancing, but editing isn’t one of them.

The “entertainer” classification is the only one that allows me to do
psychic readings as an independent artist.  Otherwise, I’m a
“counselor” and must have a separate license for that.  The
“entertainer” option is a loophole that exists because fortunetellers
are listed under entertainment in the U.S. Dept. of Labor’s Dictionary
of Occupational Titles, and to many people there is no distinction
between psychic counselors and fortunetellers.  I have some
semantic quibbles and a difference of opinion with that, but it’s not
in my best interest to make an issue of it.

What I’ve been doing –

It is a couple of weeks to my third Xangaversary.  A while back, I
started compiling two series of links to old blogs, similar to the
links in my left module to the memoir segments.  One of these two
threads that are woven in among the rest of my blogs involves my search
for and reunion with my children and grandchildren.  That one will
take some more work before I’m ready to post it.

As I’ve been working my way through from the earliest blogs forward,
I’ve come across some that don’t fit either of the two threads I was
working on, but which I wanted to link to because they either fit into
the little set of “get to know me” links I’d already put in the left
module, or they were just good blogs on topics of interest.  Some
of the former ones have already been added to the left module.  A
continuing thread on male/female relations will probably be posted in
an entry of its own after I’ve traced the entire thread.  Right
now, I’ve only got links to the first three entries on that topic and I
know there are at least two more.

The most important thread, the one for which I originally opened this
journal, hasn’t been completely traced yet, either.  I don’t know
how long that would take even if I don’t get distracted again and drop
the thread as I did a few months ago.  At that time, I hadn’t gone
far enough that I felt it would be useful to post the links.  This
week, I made a lot more progress on it, and added some pics of me that
illustrate my progress on My Healing Journey. 
I think it’s complete enough to be of use to those readers who have
asked about or shown interest in what I’ve been doing to transcend my
addictions and shed a lot of unwanted fat.  After I post this, I
am going back to add more to the thread.  I intend to continue
until I’ve brought it up to date.

Still running short on sleep, I got to bed about 1 AM and was awakened
at about 3:30 by an unidentifed loud crashing noise.  I sat up in
bed and said, “Doug!” 

He answered, “What?”

“Where are you?”

“Over here, getting Koji’s biscuit.”  This tells me that our dog
has just come in from outdoors.  He has us trained to give him
biscuits for dragging his chain up to the door and not making us go out
and bring him in.  This leaves the end of the chain at the door so
that all his lazy-crazy-monkey keepers have to do next time he wants
out is to take the end of the chain off its hook, clip it to his collar
and open the door for him.

“What was that horrible noise?” I ask.

Doug mutters with indifference, “I dunno.  I guess the chain got
caught on something.”  The chain, when the loose end is on its
hook by the door, rests along the metal skin of the trailer’s side, to
where it is fastened to the hitch at the front end.  The sound
that woke me was the impact of about sixteen feet of heavy chain
settling into position along an equal expanse of metal siding. 
The chain left here in that configuration by our benefactor Mark, when
he went south and left us to sit with his three cats and his dog Leroy,
is not an ordinary lightweight dog chain because Leroy wasn’t an
ordinary dog.  Leroy was a wolf hybrid with a talent for breaking
loose.  Now, since Mark came back and took Leroy south with him,
Koji has inherited the chain.

The rattle of chain rattled me.  I hadn’t gotten back to sleep
when I heard Doug exclaim, “Oh, shit!”  Those famous last words,
the two words most frequently heard on the tapes recovered from the
black-box cockpit recorders (usually painted fluorescent orange) of
crashed aircraft, had been my mother’s favorite expletive.  I, in
turn, taught them to Doug.  Oh, not in the way I taught him our
phone number or failed to teach him his own social security number,
through deliberate repetition, but through repetition all the same, the
same way I learned them from Mama.

“What happened?” I queried.

“The monitor puked,” he answered.

That equipment failure didn’t come as a surprise.  We’ve had this
computer for a few years, through four hard drives, at least three
video cards, a couple of keyboards and two mice.  The monitor
hadn’t quite been its old self since some rain blew into the open
window behind it a few years ago and moistened its insides.  It
was cranky and balky until it dried out, and then seemed to be working
okay until recently.  Then it started making sizzling, frying
sounds especially on warmup, and the display tended to jump around,
shrink and expand rapidly to the accompaniment of the frying
noises.  We theorized that a spider or moth might have laid some
eggs in there and we could have real live bugs in our system.

I never did get back to sleep as Doug did a hasty clickety-tappity post
to explain his sudden absence from his chat room (which he later
discovered hadn’t posted because he hadn’t been in posting position at
the time), disconnected the dead monitor and hooked up another
one.  I had begun to doze a little bit when I heard his relieved,
“All right!” indicating that the “new” monitor worked.  We hadn’t
known until that moment whether it was any good.

The recent windstorm that destroyed Greyfox’s former neighbor’s storage
shelter at Felony Flats, revealed among the other salvage two monitors
and I grabbed them, assuming from the sizzling sounds issuing from ours
that a spare or two might come in handy.  One turned out to be
missing some pins from its connector, but the other one is making it
possible for me to blog today. 

It’s a step downward from what we’re accustomed to, and I truly hope we
can get a new one before we have time to get used to this one. 
The screen is smaller, and even at maximum brightness the display is
murky and blurry.  Text zoom makes it possible to read webpages,
but some of the little icons in the toolbars are difficult to
distinguish.  I’m assuming that the quality of this display will
have an effect on the quality of the photos I modify while I’m using
it.  We shall see.  Tell me how these pics compare to some of
the others I’ve posted here.  I did the best I could with the
available tools.

After dropping my passengers and the van back at the rehab ranch last
night, Greyfox and I rendezvoused at the supermarket, then went back to
his place where he nuked us a nice supper of ham, potatoes and green
beans, with salad on the side.  While he was cooking, I took some
pics of Frankie and her kittens.

Frankie wasn’t easy to shoot.  I tried several times and ended up
with blurry shots of her nose and the inside of one ear as she was
examining the camera.

Greyfox is calling the lighter of the two kittens Ginger…

…and his darker brother is Peachy.

Oddly enough, for the last few days my mind has been coming back again
and again to the thought that things are often not what they
seem.  I wonder if things are ever what they seem. 
Perception is one thing, reality another.  The map is not the
territory, and you mustn’t try to eat the menu.  Having this very
different monitor makes it seem we’ve got a strange and less than
friendly computer now.

It’s hard on my eyes.  I squint to read what’s on the
screen.  We’d never given a name to our computer, even though the
original monitor wore the twin speakers like mouse ears on top. 
This monitor came with its name on a sticker, right on its
forehead:  I.V.A.N.  That was the generic tag many Cold War
hawks applied to our Soviet enemies.  So, do we have a Russkie
monitor, or what?  Doug found one good feature about it:  the
top is level, so that now the action figure of Scotty, Chief Engineer
of the U.S.S.Enterprise, will stand up on it without having to lean on
a speaker.  I found another good thing:  it is smaller,
shorter, lower down so that I don’t have to crane my neck and look down
my nose to see the screen through my bifocals.

---

On things not being what they seem:  windstorms bring windfalls;
junk and trash come in very handy sometimes, and what can at one moment
seem to be a generous godsend can turn out eventually to be a
regrettable and unfortunate entanglement.

People are not always what they seem, either.  Someone I initially
assumed to have been a rational, humorous and more or less truthful
person has turned out to live deep in impenetrable denial and to
communicate largely through sarcasm, distortion and deceit.  As
for myself, several of my readers and correspondents have referred to
me in recent days as “highly evolved” or some similarly fanciful and
flattering misperception.

At least, I’m hoping I’ve been misperceived there.   If this
stumbling, fumbling, bumbling, imperceptive and painfully inept fool is
an example of the higher levels of human evolution, where does that
leave us as a species?

Don’t answer that.  It’s rhetorical.  I don’t really wanna know.

---

Just one more thing before I forget it:

I’ve had this uneasy feeling, a sense that something was wrong. 
It intensified as I approached town yesterday, which I took as possible
confirmation that it was some widespread societal thing I was picking
up psychically.  I’ve had similar feelings following disasters and
other bad news.  I left Greyfox at his stand while I did some
shopping and went to the ranch to pick up my passengers, and then we
met at the meeting.

After we’d met up again at the grocery store, I asked him to sit down
with me in the snack bar area so we could talk.  I described the
feelings I’d been having, and told him that earlier in the evening I’d
had an overwhelming sensation wash over me, of anger and despair. 
He wasn’t puzzled at all.  He just asked me if that feeling had
come between about six and seven o’clock. 

When I acknowledged that he had hit the timing on the nose, he reminded
me that that was when the statewide news came on TV and everyone was
hit with the realization that a few already had gotten from the morning
papers, that our state Senate had voted to raid the Permanent Fund for
hundreds of millions of dollars, which is expected to decrease our
individual annual dividends by over three hundred dollars for each of
the next fifteen years.  Since many Alaskans (such as our family)
especially in rural areas, depend on those checks each fall to get them
through the winter until seasonal summer employment opens up again,
Greyfox felt that such news could account for my feelings.  I
think he’s right.

In three hours or so, I plan to be on my way down the valley to
Wasilla.  I’m not dressed yet, haven’t had breakfast, and I just
yawned hugely.  I’m getting off to a slow start today.

There’s no reason to hurry the trip, anyway.  I don’t need to be
at the ranch until 6:30 this evening.  When I sat down here this
morning, I found a note from Doug asking me to wake him around
noon.  He had also left his three most recent posts in the
tournament for me to read.  He is finally catching his stride
there, I guess. 

This tourney started just before the Mercury station, when it was still
retrograde.  There wasn’t any discernible sparkle in anyone’s
story lines early on, but it has taken off now.  I think Hilary’s
return has helped Doug focus on his writing.  The host set early
rounds in the Final Fantasy VII world, and in the Star Wars
universe.  The current round is set in Disney World.

The character that Doug has chosen to be this time is Eddie, a somewhat
dark disembodied force that enlivens a series of bodies.  He has
just moved from a very beat-up and dismembered character to a
brain-dead Mickey Mouse (rendered into that condition by old Walt
before he went, so that Mickey couldn’t reveal any secrets, and
subsequently kept alive by machines) and is proceeding to wreak cartoon
havoc that is perhaps more LoonyToonish than Disneyfied.

Gotta go now — things to do and places to go. 

The
cat came back.  About 4:30 this morning, I heard a scrabbling at
the door.  When I opened it, Hilary came in.  She hesitated
briefly, because Koji had followed me to the door and she wasn’t too
sure about entering with that big snoot in her face.

Once inside, her first stop was the food dish — not her dish in Doug’s
room, but the old ladies’ dish in the hallway.  She seems to
prefer their senior weight control kibble over her own kitten
menu.  After a few bites of food, she spent an hour and a half
rubbing up against me and purring until I gave up on sleep and got out
of bed.  Then I took her into Doug’s room and told him she was
home.  He reached for her happily and sleepily, and I left them
there.

---

Too energetic, or at least too incautious yesterday, I did more work
than I’m accustomed to doing, and hurt myself.  This is for me the
big dilemma of chronic fatigue syndrome:  am I better off pushing
the envelope, working myself to exhaustion and spending days
recovering, or pacing myself, taking it easy, conserving energy and
getting little done.  Since I never know until I hit the wall just
where that limit is, I often end up over the line as I did yesterday.

Tomorrow I go to town for the voluteer gig at the rehab ranch. 
I’ll need all the energy and stamina I can scrape up.  I don’t
plan to do any strenuous work today, but I know I’m vulnerable to
another of those energy spurts this afternoon, so I’ll have to be
vigilant.  Maybe I should chain my ankle to the computer chair –
but no, that won’t work.  When Doug gets up he’ll want to use this
machine.  I guess I can go back to bed.  I’d rather just plow
into this mess and get it all cleaned up, but I know that would be
foolish.

---

I’m keeping myself focused on lofty ideals, the moral high ground and
all that crap right now.  I’m doing my best not to do my worst,
but the temptation is strong.  I get no encouragement in my humane
and ethical efforts from the guys at home.  Last night while I was
venting my frustration with a certain nameless person to Greyfox on the
phone, Doug was hearing my end of the conversation.  With both of
them giving me their opinions, I was getting stereophonic reinforcement
for my base urges.

These guys had the perspective I’m trying to keep:

“…Last, but by no means least, courage–moral courage, the
courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The
world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old
struggle–the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your
conscience on the other.”
—Douglas MacArthur—

“Great
spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The
latter cannot understand it when one does not thoughtlessly submit to
hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses their
intelligence.”
—Albert Einstein—

Yeah, Mac, and it is a struggle, indeed… and, Al, they not only don’t understand, they can get downright pushy about it.

“Enlightenment
is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the
inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.
This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in the lack of
understanding, but in the lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Have courage to use your own understanding!”
—Immanuel Kant—

I’m workin’ at it, Manny.

Who is Yuliya?

Yulia Tymoshenko is the newly-appointed prime minister of Ukraine.  This image of her caught my eye during a news search.

In a search for information about her, I found more images. 
Reporters seem to be paying more attention to her look and her style
than to her substance.

I found comments on her firm physique.

A lot of attention has been paid to her changing look.

After being criticised for adopting a peasant-girl hairdo with a fake braid, she let her hair down to demonstrate that it was her hair.  Critics then pointed out that the braid had been longer and thicker on other occasions.

Ukrainska Pravda 
did a lengthy article on her style and beauty.  Apparently,
there’s a deeper story, too.  Her husband is reportedly in hiding,
wanted by Interpol, as she herself was until very recently when charges were dropped.  Her official biography
mentions that she is educated in economics and cybernetics, and that
she is known as a great crisis manager.  She’s a woman to watch, I
suppose.

Unexpectedly, I have the computer to myself this morning.  About
4AM, Doug lay down for a three hour nap on the couch, and when I woke
him at the appointed time, instead of returning to his fanfic writing
tournament, he stumbled off to bed.

I’ve lost one half-finished post here already today.  This Mercury
station is a rough one.  I realized yesterday that both the
firewood deal with Tim and my attempt to help and/or counsel the person
who wanted me to conspire to commit fraud were entirely within the
retrograde period.  The last time I heard from Tim was three or
four days ago, and he said he’d be here in a couple of hours with a
load of wood.  I have decided to wait until Merc gets moving again
before I try to call him.  An email that was sent to me several
days ago about the other deal got stuck in my ISP’s spam filter and I
just found it this morning.  It suggests that neither of us has
understood much of what the other was saying throughout the entire
exchange.  On that one, I’ve said all I have to say.

If
I end up cutting this post short and leaving things dangling, it will
probably be because Doug has awakened and wants this machine.  I’m
not going to offer him any frustrations.  He has had enough. 
Hilary, the new cat in the household, has gone missing.  For the
last week or so she has been going in and out at will, as the other
cats do.  On her first solo outing she went up a tree and Doug had
to go up a ladder to get her down, but until last night she’d been
going in and out okay.  She even learned how to lean on the door
and get back in without our opening it for her.  During the night,
she scampered out.  When she didn’t return, he went looking for
her.  Hilary and Doug bonded strongly, and he’s torn up about her
being gone.

When I turned my radio on this morning, I heard the click and the
display lit up and then it went dead.  All the outlets in the
living room are dead.  That would seem to be a tripped circuit
breaker, but none of the breakers in the box are tripped.

I was turning on the radio because I had this feeling
that something was up and I wanted to hear what the newscast had to
say.  I had already gone to Google news.  Nothing there
seemed to resonate with that funny feeling.  I still don’t know
what’s up, or whether my feeling is a neuronal misfire, a clairvoyant
alarm of something that hasn’t made the news yet, a premonition of
something that hasn’t happened yet, or what.

Before I forget again, I want to answer a question that lupa
asked, and I’ll answer it here because recently when I mentioned a past
life several people made comments that indicated interest.  The
specific question was whether one would be likely to get nightmares or
screaming panic attacks from what they might recall in a past-life
regression.  That’s a valid concern and a good question. 
This issue is the reason that I recommend the hypnotic regression tapes
and CD’s from Dick Sutphen’s prohypnosis.com. 
His altered state inductions always include a post-hypnotic suggestion
that you are viewing these events with detachment and will experience
no pain, fear, etc.

I know how important that is.  About 18 years ago, I attended a
Sutphen Psychic Seminar in Sedona where at one evening session Dick let
a protege of his do a group regression.  At each of the main
sessions with Dick, there were about 300 people, but only about fifty
of us came for the extra evening session.  The focus that the
young man chose was relationships.  We were instructed to think of
someone with whom we had a difficult or troubling relationship and
regress to the experience that caused it.  His technique was
okay.  The group achieved the altered state.

He neglected, however, to give the detached perspective
suggestion.  The relationship I focused on was with Doug.  I
had an enlightening and very interesting regression.  I
experienced more immediacy in it than in any one before that.  I
was right there.  It was mildly disturbing to me because in that
life I was a man, and I was beating a young woman to death.  I did
get the insight into my relationship with my son that I sought, but I
was brought out of the altered state before the young man gave any
return suggestions.

I am a “light-level” hypnotic subject.  Before I started using
Sutphen regression tapes, several people had tried unsuccessfully to
hypnotize me.  I could do self-hypnosis, but wouldn’t let go for
anyone else.  That difficulty with induction, I’ve learned, is
part of the pattern for someone who is a “light-level” subject.  I
go down hard and come out easy.  If a mosquito buzzes me while I’m
in trance, I come out.  At the other end of the spectrum are the
ones some hypnotists call somnambulists.  They go down easy and
come out of trance with difficulty.  Dick’s inductions are
designed to work for everyone.

It wasn’t a mosquito that brought me out that time.  It was my
friend Mary, in the chair next to me.  She was crying.  A few
rows in front of us, a man was on the floor, moaning and
writhing.  Several people were screaming or crying, and there were
a lot of them like me, sitting there wide-eyed looking around at the
confusion.  The kid seemed a little flustered as he gave the
return suggestions.  I suppose that was a learning experience for
him.  I’ve always wondered what Dick might have said to him next
time he saw him.  That night, Dick and Tara were doing private
sessions in another part of the hotel.

Let me emphasize that the experience at that session was very
atypical.  Nothing like that had occurred at any other group
sessions, nor had I ever had anything similar when I used the tapes and
CDs.  It was just the omission of the detachment suggestion that
caused it.  Doing a regression with a Sutphen CD is much like
watching a movie.  You understand that what you’re viewing
happened to you, but you don’t experience it as if it is happening to
you now.

I have mentioned that I no longer use regression aids.  I don’t
need them any more.  Memories from past lives come up
spontaneously, just as the memories from earlier times in this
life.  The are triggered sometimes by the occurrence of similar
experiences, and sometimes come up when I meet someone I knew in a past
life.  I have been told that the ability to spontaneously recall
past lives is an attribute of the old soul at level four.  I
dunno.  All I know is that as a child, I had dreams of places and
events I’d had no way of knowing about in this life.  Then later,
through life experience, discussions with others who had similar
experiences, and regression work, I came to understand that those
dreams had been past-life memories.  Later still, the memories
became integrated with my ordinary recall.  Sometimes I forget
what I ate for breakfast or whether I remembered to take my meds, but I
remember the night they set Xocoma on fire, how it sounded, and
smelled, and who was there with me.

SECOND UPDATE:  I may not
be seen around Xanga as much a usual for a while.  Doug (my
creative, willful, imaginative, game – and – chat – and – porn -
addicted adult son) is beginning another fanfic writing tournament at
randominsanity, and the only time I’ll have access to the computer is
when he’s asleep or for brief periods between rounds.  If we
continue as we are, sleeping on different schedules, it shouldn’t be
too onerous.  I hope, I hope….
UPDATE:

In this entry, I disparaged and denigrated pussywillows, and ydurp came to their defense thusly:

“Why go on glorifying such unspectacular little pollen spreaders?
Awww, come on.  They’re so soft and so full of the promise of warm
days and long nights.  It’ll come before you know it.”

Awww, come on, yourself!  I can’t get rapturous over little
limb-bumps that trigger allergic reactions without offering the
compensation of pretty pastel petals or delightful sweet scents.

Summer will come when it comes and I’ll know it.  “…warm days
and long nights.”  Not hardly… not here.  Hot days and no
nights in the land of the midnight sun.  And then, before we know
it, summer’s gone and it’s winter again. 

---

Mercury retrograde is almost over. (sung to the tune of The Twentieth Century is Almost Over)

What I miss most about the final years of the last century is the way
current events and cultural trends gave me so many opportunities to
sing the haunting, mocking, triumphant and melancholy refrain (offkey,
of course — I was born without the apparatus that allows some people
to carry a tune):

Just for fun, here’s the whole lyric:

If my personal experience and that of the people I’ve been observing is
representative of the general trend, this retrogradation of Mercury has
kicked a lot of butt.  It’s supposed to be a good time for
housecleaning, processing old emotional crap, and the basic old “work
on what has been spoiled.”  (Props to the first person who can
tell me, without looking it up, the source of that quote.)

In my case, I got some memoirs written early in the cycle, and did a
bunch of revision on what I’d written in 2002, but my physical
housecleaning hasn’t gotten done.  I look around in here and
despair of ever getting this mess organized.  I think the most
useful tool to help me with that job might be a bulldozer or some
dynamite.

Doug slacked off on dishwashing after having kept up with it for
months.  Last time I was in Greyfox’s cabin, it was apparent that
the recent influx of scrounge/salvage/junk combined with the entropy
that trails in the wake of his rambunctious cats had created a
situation where every step on that floor makes crunching sounds — and
there’s not a whole lot of floor there to step on, either.  Maybe
that’s a blessing.

Maybe it’s a blessing that Mercury is now slowed to an apparent (viewed
in terms of parallax) crawl before its direct station tomorrow. 
Blessing in disguise, maybe, or perhaps it’s a mixed blessing. 
Just listen to me whistling in the dark, looking for the bright
side.  Indeed I am the bastard child of Pollyanna and
Candide.  There are so many tiny little personal disasters going
on in the lives of me and just about everyone I see, that the bright
side seems obscure right now.

The lakes are melting around here.  Nothing odd about that. 
It happens every year during breakup, the season that is for us as
close as we can come to a spring.  What it means this year is that
there’s a very good chance that I won’t get all the firewood I’ve
bought because it is becoming inaccessible and Tim the woodseller
hasn’t gotten it all out.  Those paired annual events: 
freezeup and breakup alter the whole face of transportation around
here, making some places easier to get to while others can’t be gotten
to until the next phase of the cycle comes around.

I read on Xanga about some of you viewing daffodils, planting gardens,
enjoying the scents on the air of blossoming fruit trees.  Then I
go out and pick my way through the slush and around the mud and say to
myself, “Why bother?” when I think about photographing the pussywillows
in bloom.  I’ve “done” pussywillows every year.  Why go on
glorifying such unspectacular little pollen spreaders?

Still at least six weeks from any tillable soil, my big concern now is
that a series of warm days will leave my car standing in a deep puddle
that will freeze over during a frosty night, leaving me trapped. 
At least Tim managed to bring us enough wood to keep warm in here until
it gets warm out there, and we can wrestle some of the bigger rounds
into position for steps to let us cross the frontyard sea of slush and
mud when the big thaw really hits.   The snow off the roofs,
that is now piled window-high between the cabin and trailer, is another
matter.  Right now it is still icy-hard.  When it turns to
slush, all we can do is find another way around or stay out of the
backyard.   The outhouse is out of commission.

It has just occurred to me to look at what part of my chart the Mercury
station is aspecting.  Before I do that, though, I’m going to get
some breakfast.  A little bit of blood sugar is sure to improve my
mood.  Last night, I baked muffins.  This batch is perhaps
the best I’ve done yet.  They include almond meal, dried cherries,
mashed bananas, the juice of a lime, the zest of an orange, cinnamon,
vanilla and Chinese five spice, along with the gluten-free flours,
yogurt and other usual ingredients.  But, of course, I screwed up
the recipe by forgetting the oil.  It didn’t hurt the flavor or
texture, but makes them dangerously glycemic.  Until this batch is
gone, I have to try to remember to take some GLA or DHA, flax oil or
evening primrose oil each time I eat a muffin.  Phffft.

I taste like Peanut Butter. I am one of the most blendable flavours; I go with sweet, I go with sour, I go with bland, I go with anything. I am practical and good company, but have something of a tendency to hang around when I’m not wanted, unaware that my presence is not welcome. What Flavour Are You?

your inner icons by schizo_
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past life by mugseymalone
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occupation	Plumber
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Maybe, maybe not…

Some
paleoanthropologists are apparently giddy with enthusiasm over the
conclusions they’ve drawn from the recent discovery of an edentulous
hominin skull in the Republic of Georgia.  Some have made the
speculative claim that this discovery indicates that ancient
proto-people treated their elders with compassionate care.

I don’t think so.

Don’t get me wrong.  I have no opinion about whether this guy they
are calling the “Old Man” was cared for and kept alive for a few years
by others 1.8 million years ago after he lost all but one of his teeth
(his left canine tooth).  I’m just saying that such a conclusion
is not proven by that find.  That is one of the possibilities
there, but not the only one.

I think it is just as reasonable to conclude that he had been tough and
smart enough to figure out ways to soften his food or survive on
naturally soft foods.  My ex has been living for about a decade
without teeth, and he doesn’t get a lot of help or care with his
feeding.  He doesn’t have electricity at his place for blenders or
choppers, either.  What he can’t gum he mashes, slices, or shreds
with hand tools.  That prehistoric old man could have done
something similar.

The
Old Man might have had enough knowledge and skill to make him valuable
to his kin so that they helped him as he aged.  That makes
sense.  It also makes sense that he might have been skilled,
strong, mean and nasty enough to have either made it on his own or
compelled others to help him along.  Such patterns of social
interaction are currently found among humans, other primates, and even
other classes of animals.

This discsussion reminded me of one of my past lives.  It isn’t
the earliest life I recall.  In that earliest life, I died very
young, at about age three.   But there was one Stone Age
incarnation in which I lived fairly long for that culture, about as
long as the Old Man of Dmanisi.  I lived long enough to rear my
grandson after his mother died.

That wasn’t as long ago as the Georgian find.  We lived in caves
and migrated seasonally, but we looked more human and less simian than
the reconstructions of the skulls from Dmanisi.  Our culture
certainly did treat its more helpless and/or dependent members with
some compassion, but not unless that member had value to the
clan.  They weighed the costs and benefits because the clan’s
survival was marginal.

Children were cared for.  That’s more or less standard practice
among mammals.  Homo sapiens is not the only species where orphans
are adopted and reared by older siblings, grandparents, aunts, etc.

As an elder, I was cared for, too, but only because I had value to the
social group.  I had knowledge of herbal medicine and skills for
setting bones and treating wounds.  As my grandson grew to
adulthood and I grew older and more frail, he learned my skills. 
We had bonds of affection as well as interdependence.  When at
last a time came when the clan was ready for the trip to wintering
grounds and I would have had to be carried, others in the clan
persuaded my grandson that it was time to leave me behind.

Abandonment of burdensome members by nomadic peoples has been a common
practice even into historical times.  My grandson, who had learned
enough of my skills to replace me in the clan, had enough compassion
for me to prepare a deadly drink so that I would not be left alone in
the cold to starve.  I can’t help wondering how the Old Man above
met his end.

For more on the Dmanisi find:

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0504/feature2/index.html

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/old_man_of_georgia/#continue

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/04/07/MNGIAC48UJ1.DTL

http://www.pandasthumb.org/ April 6, 2005

MY WISHES

I want there to be no mistake and no debate about what sort of care I want at the end
of life and/or if I should become unable to express my own needs and
wishes. 

I recently heard about agingwithdignity.org
and a document they have prepared, called The Five Wishes.  I find
much in that document with which I disagree, but have borrowed freely
from it in expressing my end-of-life wishes. 

I am preparing a
hard copy of this that includes addresses and phone numbers of my
designated agents.  Otherwise, these are the instructions I’m
giving for my care should I become incapable of taking care of myself.

The person I designate as my health care agent, to act on my behalf, is my son Scott Douglass Studdert.

My second choice, if he is not available, is my husband Greyfox.

My third choice is Charles E. Studdert.

My agent is to:

• make choices for me regarding health care, including diagnostic tests, starting or stopping treatment, and life support.
• interpret any instructions I have given herein or in private discussions with him or directly to my health care providers.
• arrange for admission to or release from a hospital, hospice or other facility and hire or fire any private care personnel.
• make the decision to request, withhold or deny any treatments including artificially-provided food and water and life-support.
• see my medical records and personal files and approve or deny their release, and to sign any related forms for me.
• move me to another state to get the care I need or to carry out my wishes.
• authorize or refuse to authorize any medication or procedure to help with pain.
• take any legal action necessary to carry out my wishes.
• donate usable organs and tissues of mine as allowed by law.
• apply for Medicare, Medicaid or similar benefits, and may have
  access to my personal records such as bank records necessary for those
  applications.

I want to be offered food and fluids by mouth, and to be kept clean and
warm.  If I am able to handle my pain with the mind-over-matter
techniques with which I have done so for most of my adult life, I do
not want to receive medication for pain.  I want to be as alert
and coherent as possible, within reason, at the end of life. 
Should I become unable to deal with my discomfort, my agent will know
when to request medication for me.

If my prognosis is such that my health care providers believe I have a
reasonable expectation of recovery, I want any necessary temporary
life-support measures such as surgery, respirators, dialysis, IV
nutrients or drugs, tube feeding, CPR, blood transfusions or any other
treatment to keep me alive through the crisis.  If I am brain
dead, in a persistent vegetative state, or any other state without a
prognosis for recovering my capacity for communication and independent
survival, I want no life support at all.  Let me die swiftly with
peace and dignity.

If my doctor and another health-care professional both decide that I am
likely to die within a short period of time and life-support treatment
would only delay the moment of my death, I want no life support. 
If it has been started, I want it stopped.

If my doctor and another health-care professional both decide that I
have permanent and severe brain damage (for example if I can open my
eyes but not speak, understand or respond even by blinking, etc.), and I am not expected to
recover, and life-support treatment would only delay the moment of my
death, I
want no life support.  If it has been started, I want it stopped.

If my doctor and another health-care professional both decide that I am
in a coma from which I am not expected to wake up and recover, and I
have brain damage, and life-support treatment would only delay the
moment of my death, I
want no life support.  If it has been started, I want it stopped.

If I am in an end-stage condition from any of my currently existing
chronic illnesses (COPD, heart or kidney failure, for example) or other condition, or in an
acute crisis in which treatment will not aid recovery but only prolong
life, I do not want treatment.  Do not subject me to the indignity
and my family to the costs and burdens of treatment.  If I refuse
food, do not force or tube-feed me.  Give me water if I will
accept it.

If, and only if, I am incapable of using the painswitch technique to
relieve my discomfort, I wish to have sufficient medication to relieve
my pain.

If I show signs of severe depression, anxiety, nausea, shortness of
breath, etc., my agent is to decide when it is severe enough to
intervene with drugs.  If I’m hallucinating, I think I can handle
that.  I might even find it entertaining.

When I am near death, I wish to be read to from the American Book of
the Dead or an English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

If I cannot care for my own hair and nails, keep them cut short. 
Don’t fuss over my physical hygeine and comfort more than
necessary.  If I cannot control my own bowel and bladder
functions, please clean me up as necessary.  I ask no more than
what is needed to prevent decubitus ulcers, diaper rash, etc.

I wish to be cared for with kindness and cheerfulness and not with sadness.   I want to die at home if possible.

I wish for my family and caregivers to carry out my stated wishes even if they do not agree with them.

I have told my family and friends I love them.  If they don’t know
it, that would be because they don’t believe me or I didn’t repeat it often enough, and I regret that for
their sakes.

I hope for their sakes that they will forgive me for any wrongs or hurts I’ve done them.

I want everyone to know that I have forgiven everything there ever was to forgive.

I want those who care about me to know that I do not fear death.

Regarding my remains, if it is feasible for them to be given to a
medical school for instructional purposes, that is my wish. 
Otherwise, whatever part of my body is of no practical use as organ or
tissue donations, I want disposed of as simply and cheaply as
possible.  If I could legally be dumped out in the woods somewhere
for the carrion eaters, that would be my wish.   I want no
ceremony, no mourners, no memorial.