Greyfox said that to me on his cell a few minutes ago.  When he said it, I cracked up so badly that he had to wait until I caught my breath before he could finish telling the story.  He is at the historical museum in downtown Wasilla today, selling his wares at the weekly farmer’s market.  He’s not a farmer and his wares are forged, not farmed, but this market isn’t discriminatory.  They have crafters and an espresso booth, too.

The source of today’s merriment was Penny, known to many as pain-in-the-ass Penny.  The woman has NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), and hers is a mixed form, including traits from the overt and aggressive NPD practiced generally by males, as well as traits of covert or hypersensitive NPD, which is generally the province of females.  She whines, pouts, kicks, screams, pounds things with her fists, ingratiates, insults, insists and wheedles:  whatever she thinks might get her what she wants.

Booth spaces at the market are first-come-first-served except for the vendors who arrived early at the first market of the season, picked their spaces, and paid in advance for the entire season to reserve those spaces.  Penny pays week by week, but expects to get “her” regular space every week.  Today, one of the Dinkels got there before her and took the space she prefers.

Dinkels are a big family in the Matanuska Valley, many of them farmers, descendants of Harold and Frances who came to Alaska in 1937 as part of a Federal program to replace some of the original agricultural colonists who had given up and gone south.  Any given Wednesday at the market you can probably find at least one Dinkel selling vegies.

When Penny arrived and found a Dinkel in the space she calls hers, she came predictably unglued.  Mr. Dinkel referred her to Leroi, who runs the Historical Society and the Farmer’s Market (as a volunteer).  As Greyfox related to me the exchange between Leroi and Penny, I was already laughing at the characteristic character voices of Penny’s high-pitched, “rrr… wrgh… rmph,” and Leroi’s deep, calm, authoritative declarations of reason and order.

Greyfox, with his own case of NPD and a history of clashes with Penny behind him, enjoys seeing her put in her place, but he habitually tries to maintain civil decorum in public.  It was no surprise that he would be trying to keep a straight face as he listened to Penny rant and Leroi lay down the law.  What got me was the, “ears folded double,” bit.

The dog slipped past me and out the door this morning.  We don’t let him out unleashed because it is dangerous out there and illegal as well, but once in a while he makes a run for it.  When I took off after him to bring him back, I took the camera.

Just down the block, he stopped to check his p-mail…

…and leave a message.

Then he ran ahead and around the corner into the cul de sac, where he found some more p-mail.

He caught the scent of something on the wind…

…and took off into the wind to investigate.

After I took the camera home and got his nobbly pink fluorescent ring toy from the fridge (only place in the house where he won’t smell it and try to get to it), he finally approached close enough for me to grab his collar.  With ring proudly in his mouth, he pulled me all the way home.

I’m exhausted.  I probably should have awakened Doug to chase down the dog.

The mnemonic verse is supposed to go:

It runs through my mind a lot when I’m outside.  I habitually, even compulsively, identify the things growing around me.  The stuff I generally call “swamp grass,” is sedge.  It spreads by stolons underground.  Out in the muskeg it provides perennial green, whether poking up through the water in times of flood or fading to pale near-yellow in dry times.  In my garden, it invades, competes with my strawberries, rhubarb, chives, onions, etc., and makes work for me.

Along my driveway, between the house and the road, now that there are seed heads waving atop the stems, identification is easy.  In addition to the water-loving sedge that thrives much better in the muskeg and my irrigated garden than it does in the driveway, I counted five different species of grass, and one rush with heads like little bottle brushes.

Sometimes whatever happens to be running thorough my mind becomes muddled with something altogether different.  If you are wondering how soft kittens found their way into the mnemonic verse for grass identification, so am I.  The seven new kittens under my bed probably had something to do with it.  This litter is the first for Colander Piebean, AKA, “Linda.”  She was huge and uncomfortable in the latter weeks of pregnancy, with a belly bulge that more than tripled her usual girth.  She stuck out so far on the sides it looked as if she’d swallowed a football sideways.

Her voice is rather rough and raucous at best.  Her frequent complaints about the heat and internal pressure, along with her bulbousness, earned her the temporary nickname, “Bagpipe.”  I suppose she’s happy with her kittens.  We seldom see her now, and the only time we hear from her is when we mess with the kittens.

Yesterday, Doug got his head stuck under my low-slung bed frame while dragging kittens out for routine handling and socialization.  I had to lift it off him, and that was complicated by the fact that he was taking up nearly all of the space where I needed to stand to do the lifting.  I stepped on him a couple of times while getting into position.  When I gripped the frame to lift, I gripped some of his hair, too.  When he started backing out, he had to stop and wait for me to get my foot off his shirt.

Needless to say, all came out well in the end.  The kittens were handled and photographed, then returned to their nest at their mother’s insistence.  Now, Doug has them out again, in a squirmy pile on the bed, with Koji sniffing interestedly and wagging his approval, and Linda strongly suggesting that Doug put the kittens away.

I’ll be back with progress reports, of course.  We have two more pregnant cats, too.  One of them is the one we were taking to the spay clinic about a year and a half ago, when the car broke down and I came down with pneumonia at the same time.  There has not been enough money nor a proper opportunity for any spaying since then.  Fortunately for the kittens, Greyfox is able to find homes for them in Wasilla.

 

I hypothesize about everything, including what might have split the tree in the photo above.  If a cause/effect relationship isn’t obvious, I speculate.  In human behavior, I seek meaning and motivation.  (Greyfox laughs at me for that.)  Almost always, I find more than one explanation for each occurrence.  That’s okay.  The questions matter more to me than any answers.  I’m curious.

I found a few things that piqued my curiosity on Friday’s water run.  As we often do, we bypassed the spring on the way down and went to Camp Caswell for ice cream.  As Doug and I got out of the car, we heard barking sounds coming from a pickup truck parked across the lot beside the propane pump.  I looked, expecting to see a dog.  No dog was there — just a round-headed, button-nosed kid about six years old, barking at us.

The shape of his head was evident through his sparse buzz-cut hair.  There was a definite air of hostility about his bark, his facial expression, tension in his shoulders, and the tight grip he had on the side of the truck bed.  I gave my head a shake and turned to go into the store.  When Doug saw the barking kid, he started laughing.

Since that truck was the only vehicle in the lot and a young couple were the only customers in the store, I supposed the barking kid came with them.  I said, to no one in particular, that it was a funny-looking dog in that truck out there.  Nobody seemed to pay me any attention.  We made our purchases and left.  By the time we were out there, the truck had gone.

As I drove from the lot, I asked Doug if the kid’s barking had struck him as funny.  He said, yes, it was pretty funny.  I said it hadn’t seemed funny to me, that I had sensed fear and hostility.  I paused a beat and said, “I saw no tail wagging.”  That got the laugh I was going for.

I thought off and on about the barking kid and discussed him with both of my guys.  The Kid’s opinion is that he was just goofing around.  I felt that he might have been venting some repressed anger or imitating a vicious dog of his acquaintance.  The Old Fart says he was obviously a feral child raised by wolves.  If he had been howling, I might credit that explanation, but he sounded more like a doberman than a wolf.  A child reared by feral dobermans?  Maybe.

At the spring, someone had moved the big rock from the middle of the little stream.  Now, it is on the ground at the edge of the stream, and a bigger rock is in its old place as stepping stone.  A lot of effort went into that project.  The smaller rock is fairly big, obviously heavy, and had been half-sunken in the bed of the stream.  The bigger one would be more than I could lift.  I’d probably even have a hard time rolling it.

Previously, it had been possible for a long-legged person like me to get from bank to bank of the stream without the stepping stone.  With the original rock there, even a small child could cross the stream without getting wet feet.  Now, crossing the stream is absurdly easy for anyone, and one could perch one’s butt on the flat top of the big rock in the middle, and still have room for one’s feet, or at least the heels.  Maybe a cool place to sit was the motivation.

My other unsolved mystery from yesterday involves something seen at a distance through trees.  In this telephoto shot, the tawny color and rounded “ears” suggested to my imagination a reclining Asiatic lion.  Reason suggests otherwise, but other than a big rock or a bear (but the color’s not quite right for a grizzly), reason suggests no alternative.

Pizarro, AKA “Berzerko” met us when we got home.  The photo below, of a hazy sky over the big muskeg along Sheep Creek, is available in a large enough version for wallpaper, here.  The photo of the split tree at the top of this entry was captured from approximately the same POV as the long shot below, in a slightly different direction.

  

Let me count the ways.

1. My shopping list:  for a couple of weeks I have been noting our needs on the magnetic dry erase list on the refrigerator.  Monday, the day before my projected trip to Wasilla, I transcribed those items onto a page of a spiral notebook and did some serious checking of supplies and discussion with Doug, to fill out the shopping list.  When I left for town noonish on Tuesday, I left the list in the notebook on my bed.

2. My lunch:  Tuesday around noon, all bathed and dressed and ready to go, I made a quesadilla.  Since it was too hot to eat immediately, I set it aside to cool while I enlisted Doug to help me get the potted rhubarb plant into the car.  That 5 gallon bucket of wet dirt is heavy.  When we got the rhubarb buckled into the passenger seat, I got in and drove away, leaving my lunch behind.  Doug had it for breakfast.
3. My rant:  Greyfox told me a couple of weeks ago that he’d bought a hanging basket of nasturtiums and lobelia (he didn’t say “lobelia”, but “little white flowers”) at the farmer’s market.  A few days ago, he started asking me for advice on plant care because the leaves were turning yellow.  I had already advised him to remove the flowers as soon as they faded (deadheading), and to pick off any leaf as soon as it showed any yellow.  I repeated that advice, and said his problem could be root rot since the container had no drain hole.

   I wasn’t even out of my car yet when I saw what was causing his yellowing leaves.  The plants were going to seed.  I took the basket off its hook, sat beside it on the porch, and started picking off dead flowers, seed pods, and yellow leaves.  As I worked, I lectured him.  I ranted about people who neglect plants and said just because he could afford to buy it didn’t mean he deserved to have it.

   I was bitching him out pretty thoroughly when I realized my blood sugar was low and asked him what he had to eat.  He nuked a frozen burrito for me, which was awfully bland, so I started popping the spicy faded nasturtiums and immature seeds into my mouth.  I went around the rest of the day with my breath smelling of some of the sweetest flowers on the planet.  The food sweetened my mood too, but I had to apologize to Greyfox to sweeten his disposition.

4. My hatch:  By the last supermarket stop, I was fatigued and my blood sugar was low again.  A kid helped me out of the store with my bags.  I had to unpack them, sort stuff, put the perishables into the insulated cooler, the fragile things on top of the pile, etc.  Then I got in and drove through the parking lot and across the street to a thrift shop — with the hatch open.  Greyfox asked me if I’d done that deliberately to give us more ventilation (It was a beastly hot day in Wasilla — a roadside time and temperature sign read 91 just after 6 PM.).  Sometimes that man gives me way too much credit for smarts.  Either that, or he was being sarcastic.

   On the positive side, I don’t think anything slid or bounced out while I was driving with the hatch open.  If it did, it must have been something non-essential, because I haven’t noticed anything missing.  Another positive:  I found a camera tripod at the thrift shop, a better one than I have ever used in my life, for $5.00.  I also bought seven VHS tapes of my kinds of movies, an antidote to the recent BAD FILM FESTIVAL of  “so bad they’re good” (not in my opinion) flicks Greyfox had given me.

5. Greyfox’s glasses:  Early in our shopping rounds, the Old Fart put on his prescription sunglasses and put his regular glasses in their case in his shirt pocket.  When we got back to his cabin, he couldn’t find the glasses.  After searching the car, he phoned La Fiesta, where we’d had dinner, but he hadn’t left them there.  Our only stop after the restaurant had been at his storage shed at the far end of the strip of cabins where he lives.  I asked him if it was possible that the glasses case had slid from his shirt pocket while he was pulling things out of the storage shed.  His eyes lit with hope, and I drove back there.

   As we approached, he spotted the case on the ground in the driveway and I hit the brakes.  First thing he noticed when he picked up the glasses case was tire tread marks on it.  He had to straighten a bent frame, but otherwise the glasses were unharmed.  That is a very good thing, because his uncorrected vision is 20/900 — legally blind.  His special thick lenses don’t come cheap and they have to be ordered from afar, so he might have spent weeks with only dark glasses in his current prescription and an old pair that doesn’t let him see as well.

Just as the left-open hatch turned out to be a harmless error and Greyfox’s glasses weren’t irreparably damaged by being run over, my left-behind list wasn’t a big loss in the end.  While Greyfox had been searching for his glasses, Doug called to say he had found the list.  I had him read it to me over the phone, and picked up the rest of my groceries after I dropped Greyfox off at home.  The Old Fart’s hurt feelings will heal.  It’s certainly not the first time I’ve bitched him out, and he has learned through the years to understand, if not appreciate, what happens when my blood sugar is low.

There is a story behind the potted rhubarb I took to town and gave to Greyfox.  Years ago, when Doug was small, his dad, Charley, helped move one of the original cabins from the Matanuska Valley agricultural colony to the museum in Wasilla.  He salvaged a few things from the old homesite, including some rhubarb roots from the abandoned garden.

They grew in my garden at Elvenhurst, my place across the highway from where we live now (have been “house-sitting” for ten years), and continued to survive unattended over there for seven or eight years.  A couple of years ago, I went over and dug up some of the surviving perennials, including several pieces of rhubarb root.   That season, I ran out of stamina (M.E., in case anyone is wondering why I’d run out of stamina) after planting only one of the roots.  The following summer, I got another one planted, and the rest of the root pieces stayed, with a little bit of soil, in the bottom of a blue plastic bucket through two winters, put out a few small leaves each summer, and SURVIVED.  This year, I got a third big piece of root planted, leaving one small piece in the bucket with just 2 little leaves on it.  I filled the bucket with soil, potted the root, and tended it for a few weeks.

After a somewhat brief and very limited immersion in consensus reality, I have decided to get back to subverting the dominant paradigm.  By, “limited,” I mean that I got a toe wet, didn’t even go knee-deep in pop culture.  I didn’t start watching TV, going to first-run movies, or renting videos, for example.  My only two magazine subscriptions are still Archaeology and Smithsonian.  I don’t tweet — don’t even own a wireless device. 

My radio stays tuned to NPR, so I get exposed to a bit of pop culture that way.  Facebook, when I signed on a few months ago, brought me closer to the mainstream.  My first FB friends were old friends from Xanga.  Some of their FB friends became my friends.  One indication of how far I’ve moved into that sidechannel of the mainstream is that I no longer put quotes around, “friends,” in that context.

I got swept along with these people into the culture of Facebook.  It’s similar in a way to my initial enculturation as a child:  I accepted and absorbed what came at me from my environment.  Even so, I maintained some discrimination.  I learned how to hide some people’s posts from my newsfeed, and how to hide or block apps.  But all that was reactive, and I didn’t really start to take back control of my mind until I got proactive in seeking out new facebook friends.

I can’t claim much personal credit for having initiated this.  To start with, I was guided by Spirit.  That unmistakable Voice in my head suggested that I reach out for a different kind of input.  I started searching for names of people with whom I have had enlightening or uplifting contact in the past:  people like Dick Sutphen, Antero Alli, EJ Gold, Claude Needham, and some New Age authors and practitioners that I respect.

I told Greyfox about my encouraging early results and with his concurrence I searched out for him some of the people from the Pagan community with whom he had been associated while he published The Shaman Papers and lived close enough to attend Pagan gatherings.  In this way, each of us acquired a set of Facebook friends more in keeping with our ideas and our intentions for ourselves.  There has been crossover and overlap between our circles of friends.  I spend probably more time with his friends than he does, since he’s still only getting an hour or two on library computers a few times a week, but the change has affected us both.

Every day since I made that move, my Facebook newsfeed has brought me more and more enlightening and uplifting contact with like minds.  I did not drop any of the other friends.  I think it is healthy to be exposed to a variety of views, to get some reality testing from comparing and contrasting them.  There is also the chance that I can serve to do some cross-pollenation of ideas among friends and friends of friends.

Fittingly, this change in my mind and life coincides with a retrograde station of Uranus, which is stationary retrograde in my birth chart.  The station of Uranus at the beginning of this month occurred opposite my natal conjunction of Sun and Chiron, so some spiritual healing and radical change is in order for me.  The current astrological intensity, with Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto all retrograde now, and a Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse coming up tomorrow, has me on an incredible high of connecting with other minds, working together in alternate realities, and pulling energy into the mundane world.

Can you tell I’m digging it?  Yes, I am.  I’m also looking forward to spending time with my beloved soulmate, lawful spouse, and partner in crime, the Old Fart (AKA “Greyfox”) in Wasilla tomorrow.  It’s time for the trip:  our fridge is empty and his space is filling up with things he has been picking up for us.  I didn’t plan for the trip to coincide with one of the biggest astrological events of recent days.  It just happened that way, the way so many of the most interesting parts of my life do happen.

I have been asked, again, to comment on Sarah Palin.  Ten months ago several people asked me what I thought of her running for Vice President of the United States.  After stating [here] some opinions based on observation, I followed up with some references to her record.  One thing that Greyfox had pointed out to me at the time was that not long before her nomination she had been asked by a reporter about rumors that she might be tapped for the ticket.  She had responded that if she was, she would decline because she was committed to Alaska.  Now we are seeing how little she values commitment and how lightly she takes the promises she makes.

Before I go further, let me say, I have no direct access to Sarah Barracuda.  My beloved Old Fart lives in a tiny primitive one-room cabin on the edge of Wasilla, where Sarah and her family have a multi-million-$$ lakeside home.  That’s as close as I get, and it would be hazardous to my health to get any closer.  I have it on good authority that the woman is deeply into cosmetics and perfume.  I am allergic to a lot of that stuff.  When women like Mrs. Todd Palin pass near me in the supermarket, my eyes burn, I sneeze, I wheeze, and reach for the rescue inhaler.

Not only am I not into cosmetics, I don’t read Vanity Fair.  Thus, I have to trust the NPR commentator who said this morning that in the recent article about Palin, some of her former campaign aides were quoted as questioning her “mental condition.”  In other words, she is mentally ill, according to those who are much closer to her than I am.  I would not doubt that assessment, based on statements I have heard her make in radio interviews and on local talk shows.

This I can state without fear of contradiction:  either she knowingly lied about things such as the Gravina Island Bridge to Nowhere, her husband Todd’s membership in the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party, and her intention to reject federal stimulus money for the state — or she is delusional.  If that woman believes everything she says, she is definitely out of touch with reality.

I heard her recorded resignation statement yesterday.  Just as with most of her campaign rhetoric, she said nothing of substance and said it in a tone that suggests she is leaving a lot unsaid.  She did sound sincere about the “lame duck” part, and it surprises me not one bit to see her giving Alaska the kiss-off when the polls are indicating she wouldn’t have any chance at a second term.  I don’t know what kind of governor Sean Parnell will make, but he would have to posess a high level of incompetence and no scruples at all, to be any worse than our last two Republican governors, Murkowski and Palin.

The kings are in!  It’s salmon season in our neighborhood.  The local general store is one of the weigh-in stations for a salmon derby.  We stopped in there today before going to get water, so that we wouldn’t be hauling a load of full jugs and buckets all the way down to the store and back.  The odor of less-than-fresh fish hung over the parking lot.  Inside, on the counter, were laid out half a dozen or so photos of proud anglers holding up their fish.

One was beautiful, silvery and not very big, good eating size.  The rest were huge spawned-out red things, hardly fit to eat but impressive trophy fish anyway.  I had the camera with me and thought a picture of the collection of photos would be suitable to illustrate this blog entry.  I was setting up the shot when Dennis, the owner of the store, stopped me.  He said some of those people wouldn’t want their pictures on the internet.  He pointed out one photo of just a fish, and said that fisherman wouldn’t even allow them to photograph him.  Since the guy’s name was in the margin of the photo, Dennis wouldn’t even let me take a picture of the fish picture.

Back at the spring, before I started filling jugs, I captured a few images of the surroundings.  The first three are the little stream that runs off from the spring, down into the muskeg, toward Sheep Creek.  (As usual, click to enlarge, especially the ripples in the third one down.)

Next is a patch of clover, and then a fireweed flower spike.  Click the fireweed for an explanatory caption about how we know when summer begins and ends around here.

After we filled our water containers and loaded them in the hatch, I turned the key to start the car and nothing happened.  I popped the hood and tried magic first:  Blur (successor to another old silver Subaru station wagon named Streak) likes having his fluids topped up.  There have been times he wouldn’t start and no amount of wire wiggling and other fiddling would do it, until I topped up his oil and coolant.  This time, that didn’t do it, nor did the wire wiggling, so I got serious.

Doug moved water jugs out of the way so he could get my tools out so I could remove the battery cables and clean the terminals.  It was after I’d loosened the bolt and asked him to dig my knife out of my purse, so I could scrape the terminal and inside the clamp clean, that we discovered I’d set my purse down during the abortive photography at the store, and left it there.

I improvised with the jaw of an open-end wrench, removed enough corrosion that the electrons were free to flow, and the car started.  Back at the store, Becky, Dennis’s wife, had seen my purse on the counter where I left it beside the fish photos, and stuck it behind the counter for me.  Geez– if I’d not left my keys in the car, I’d not have been able to drive off without the purse.  Must remember that.

Thanks to a double layer of insulated mylar bags inside a cooler, the ice cream we’d bought during our first trip to the store was still frozen when we got home.

I think about fixing things I’ve messed up.  Being the ultra-Virgoan perfectionist I was born to be, that’s natural, I guess.  I have transcended the anxiety and shame that used to go along with being an imperfect perfectionist.  I screw up sometimes.  So what?  That doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to live.

Still, I think about my mistakes and try to learn from them.  My little material screwups, such as an inedible kitchen experiment or a series of “inspired” photos that just don’t sing when I get a look at them, these are easy to do over or to get over.  Human relations is the area where I am more often left wondering whether do-overs are even possible and, if so, how to do one.

There is this guy, an artist whose work I admire.  I hadn’t known he existed until the day I was doing a Google image search for something to illustrate one of my mythological blog entries.  The piece of his art that I found wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.  It was non-traditional, and I was after traditional images.  It showed me how the old myths live on in modern culture, and my concept for the essay expanded to make room for that picture.

I found a contact link for him and wrote to ask permission to use the image.  I didn’t say much in that message, just that I was doing the essay on that myth and thought his painting would illustrate how culture keeps myths alive and evolving.  He gave me permission to use it, and also sent me links to sites with some biographical info, more examples of his art, and a page of his father’s art.

My essay on the myth went on the back burner for a day, while I looked at his work and his father’s, and followed up on his story.  It’s an interesting tale, of an educated high-status family that immigrates to the U.S. from South America and ends up, to some extent, being mistaken for Chicano wetbacks.

When I finished my essay and posted it, I sent him a link to it.  In the email, I mentioned how much I enjoyed seeing his work and his father’s, and reading about the family’s experiences.  The reply I received from him took me completely by surprise.

He wrote that he was thrilled to have encountered me this way, that he felt we were soulmates, and that he wanted to create a painting especially for me. It set me about half a step backwards before I told myself, “Well, maybe we did know each other in past lives.”  I hadn’t felt any particular personal connection, but… What do I know?  I have been meeting such “soulmates” all my life.  I suppose he could be another one.

Even so, he was coming on kinda strong.  I chalked up my feeling of hackles rising to the possibility of some complicated karma between us.  The reply I sent him was somewhere between neutral and positive.  I was honest.  I said that if we had known each other before, I had no conscious recall of it.  I think I expressed appreciation that he’d want to paint something for me.  I half believed, but didn’t mention, that I thought it might reveal something of our past association.

I never heard from the guy again.  A few months later, I was reminded of him when someone commented on that old post.  I sent him another email, just asking if he had gotten my previous message.  It was a few years later that the penny finally dropped and I realized that the guy probably took me for a leech, and his gushy “soulmate” stuff plus the offer of an original artwork were just bait… and I bit.

I think of him occasionally, and wonder how I might have handled things differently.  I don’t know.  I wouldn’t want to be as cynical as he apparently is, but a little bit of that might help to temper some of my naive literal-mindedness.  It would be fun to explain the situation to him and laugh with him at the misunderstanding, but I don’t suppose that is likely.  He might be one of those, “one strike and you’re out,” people.  I had my chance and I blew it.  I can live with that.

When I woke today, my body didn’t respond to the usual mental command to move.  That’s a little unusual, but not so unusual that it’s alarming any more.  I know that if I concentrate on individual muscles, and really work at it, I can move, then once I get started things begin to work more normally after a while.  After I started stirring around on the bed, working up the strength and coordination to sit up and find my glasses, I spoke to my son, Doug, and asked him to start a pot of coffee.

First thing he did was reach for a remote and start the CD that he had cued up ready to play.  As soon as I heard the opening of “Summer” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, played by David Garrett, I realized why Doug had been going to the mailbox every day this week.   He had been anticipating a shipment from Amazon.  We had heard David Garrett interviewed on NPR a while ago, and listened to some clips from his music.  Both of us liked it, and apparently Doug decided to buy it.  Of course, while he was at it, he ordered an expansion pack for one of his favorite games, too.

The morning paralysis was just the beginning of a day that has turned out to be one of the biggest M.E. flareups in recent months.  One body part or another has been either malfunctioning or hurting or numb or tingling all day.  The best thing I can say about all of that is that it has been affecting mostly my skeletal muscles this day, and not my eyes or my breathing.  I’m thankful for that.

Other than the annoying physical symptoms, it has been a wonderful day.  One small joy was finding another reasonably amusing and watchable movie in the box of 50 Drive-In Movie Classics that I recently borrowed from Greyfox.  I have watched a couple of stinkers, and have viewed the first ten to thirty minutes of a number of films I just didn’t want to sit through in their entirety.  This one today was originally titled The Polk County Pot Plane, changed to “In Hot Pursuit.”  With an unknown cast and production company that’s not been heard of since, full of chase scenes, corny country humor and both accidental and murderous death, I still found it watchable if not especially praiseworthy.  In that collection, just watchable is high praise.

I have listened to the David Garrett CD at least half a dozen times and won’t tire of it for a long time to come.  That’s one of the bigger joys of the day.  I also got a first look at some of the concept art from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.  This alone is worth the price of admission to this mixed up mess of a day for me.

 

Another pleasure throughout my day has been an occasional nibble broken off my super special homemade chocolate bar.  It’s truly ugly, but tastes so good!  I used the cheapest chocolate I could find, Baker’s Unsweetened, melted it in the microwave, stirred it up with a little bit of goat milk, an even littler bit of butter, maybe 20 or more packets of Splenda and some pure vanilla extract, and ended up with over half a pound of guilt-free chocolate.  Doug agrees that it is both ugly and tasty.  Unfortunately, the bite he tried contained some bitter chocolate that hadn’t gotten thoroughly mixed with the sweetener and stuff.  I need to perfect the recipe now that I know it works, and need to come up with a better prep method.  One moment, please, while I go break off another chunk….

Mmmmm… all in all, on balance, it has been a great day.  Life is good.