wow, i have friends, who knew???

my whatever has gone camping with his cousins up in the mountains, and i had a party in his house while he was gone. >;}~

ok, i'm not really that evil, but still.

at the moment, we've got the only internet on the property, so visiting family all congregated here in mike's living room last night. they kinda trickled in one at a time while i was making radiatore alfredo, not because i'm that hoity toity a cook, but honestly, all i had in the fridge was frozen chicken breast, a single broccoli crown, a jar of alfredo sauce, some garlic and yellow onion, and half a box of radiatore.

all sizzle and no roast? not me. i got june cleaver HANDLED!

so while my beautiful offspring was outside playing with her cousins, i was cooking slap-together dinner and listening to my workout mix on mike's really great speakers.

family started trickling in and the party just grew from there.

i passed around the three corona's we had in the fridge, and my kinda-adopted-sister-laura's fiance dave dug into his music library and shared a bunch of his tunes with me. we got video of him channeling stevie wonder. i'll try to post it later, promise, cuz there's nothin' like embarrassing the crap outa potential new fodder... um... i mean FAMILY.

long story short, we sat around mike's living room getting silly and having a really good time.

i normally do not enjoy parties, not in the least, or even company all that much. i'm very much a loner, and the effort involved in getting ready for a party, getting TO the party, and then wandering around trying to be nice to people you don't know very well... THAT'S way too much work. i always find myself edging towards the door, and once i'm out, i heave a big sigh of relief and perform the mental equivalent of loosening my tie as i climb in my car to go home and be alone and quiet again.

but this was really fun, totally spontaneous, and i made a new friend. REALLY happy laura found herself such an all-around nice guy.

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i was gonna spend a lot more time coming up with cool stuff for this entry, and then i realized that the day is getting away from me and i'm WAY too much of a perfectionist. gonna go get out in the real world now, and maybe i'll post more later.

toodles!

campfires, bats, and the 4th of july

short and sweet? 1:35am on 7/5.

last night we "fake-camped" in the corral garden, in the firepit we "liberated" last year from the foreclosed house behind ours. damn. i shoulda got a picture. we made hotdogs, joked about the girly tablecloth, fired up the coleman lantern, got smoke in our clothes and our hair, burned a few hotdogs over the fire, and laughed. my whatever's youngest son came over and joined us outside, spent some time talking with his dad after i went to bed, then took off back to walnut creek where he lives.

insert random picture of campfire here...

last time we had a fire, there were bats swooping down to get the bugs that were drawn to the light. that was last summer, as i recall. i huddled inside my hoody and finally bolted screaming for the safety of the house.

i can face angry dogs without mussing a hair (have. frequently). i can handle and feed big ol' snakes. love snakes. i can wrangle cats and horses and kids. i never use a flashlight in the dark, and i joke that this is because i'm the meanest thing out there anyway. the dark does not scare me at all. i feel most comfy, as it happens, walking around in the silence outside at 2am. love how peaceful the world gets when everybody else is asleep.

can't handle bats. phobic. FO-BICK. the little brown bat is a mouse with wings. tiniest critter EVER. they make me run screaming. stupidest thing you ever saw. i'm ashamed. deeply.

ok, seen like this, it does look pretty creepy. they just seem really unnatural to me. photo courtesy of luke ormand. check his blog here: wild long island photography. brilliant stuff, maynard!

(turns out, upon a bit of reading, that the probable reason why there aren't any bats around this year is because they're dying in droves from a disease called "white nose syndrome". horrible fungal infection, 95% mortality rate, no known cure. much as bats scare the bejesus out of me, i have to admit they're worth their weight in gold as mosquito catchers, and i love all animals, even the creepy ones...)
 
worked today till 5:30pm, came home to find my whatever was entertaining his brother and his brother's girlfriend. i can't remember the last time his brother came up to see him, so this was a very cool thing. i came in, put on my grubbies, and then we chatted and shit, talked geraniums, played with snowshoes, cat of terror, laughed, etc etc, before they took off to go watch fireworks.

my whatever and i went back inside, and we both fell asleep. work kicked the crap out of me, and i actually felt kinda sick.

and that about wraps up the 4th of july for me.

morgan hill's annual 4th of july parade. i was a volunteer safety marshal last year, but i had to work this year. i AM sorry i missed this. it was really fun. we've got a really great parade. check out the photos from the morgan hill times... but i think you have to have an account on the website to view them. your call. cool pictures. i have to admit, i love living in morgan hill. first time in a really long time i've felt like i belonged to a community.

 random thought: almost cried at work because 11 years ago, on the 4th of july 2001, my mom died of cancer. i purposefully did not write a big, prominent paragraph about this fact. i did not mention it first thing. i'm just telling you this so you don't think i'm weird. i don't know what today was about, but it wasn't mostly about my mom's death. i didn't have a quiet moment to myself to think about my mom's death. i may have to take some time tomorrow, call my mom's sister and have a bit of a grieving space with her.

other than that, no epiphanies, no great spiritual change, nothing remarkable happened, except that my whatever didn't appear to have a problem with his son knowing i pretty much live here. i asked if we should cancel our sleepover and he said no, no reason to cancel. he didn't seem to care that his brother knows for that matter. don't know what to think about that. guess there's no point in analyzing it, and frankly, i feel pretty comfy not analyzing anything. the world is what it is.

left my whatever a $20 for utilities - i figure i should start paying him something since i'm here using the lights and whatnot when he's gone at work.

ok, tired. achy. still feel kinda sick. gonna take my sorry ass off to bed, in my trailer tonight. that's all i gotta say about that.

toodles all...

tiny houses, marriage is bad, and crickets

you know what's weird about writing a blog post over the course of several days? you start out with one idea and it gets orphaned when you find a few others you like better. having said that...

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doot doot doot looking out my backdoor...

i live on about an acre of land, owned by adopted "in-laws", up in the hills above the town of morgan hill, california, about a mile away from chesbro reservoir. to call it home is a bit of a stretch: i sleep in my 20-ft travel trailer that's parked out back near the barn, and spend most of my time in the house of my friend/boyfriend/whatever, who rents a mother-in-law unit from my in-laws. some nights i sleep with him. most not. we both like it that way, to be honest. i'm finding that what i thought made me happy when i was younger and in my "producing a family" period is entirely different from what i know will make me happy now.

which, quite honestly, means i have to give up my pretensions of normalcy (and yes, i did once have them) and admit that i'm a pagan/gypsy/hippy/alternative lifestyle kinda gal. even my own daughter doesn't understand why i don't want to get married again, ever.

i kind of like the idea that my whatever and i could be together purely because we want, second by second, to be in the company of no one else. i like the thought that there's nothing at all in the world, no oath or legal bond or any other constraint, on our having to stay together. we just ARE together, in such a fundamental way that any attempt to legalize our togetherness would automatically result in it dissipating like a soap bubble.

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weird tangent. kinda wanted to rebuild my trailer for a while, you know? maybe design it as my own little space, make it all artsy and cute and self-sufficient. i imagined something like a real gypsy vardo...

note the stove. comments to follow.

here's another concept - the hippy vw bus repurposed into the hippy vw vardo. yes, sorry, i do really love how this little thing looks!

love the... well.. the EVERYTHING, actually. not quite sure how one drives down the freeway at 65+mph without destroying the rooftop garden, but artists, i suppose, cannot be bothered with minutiae.

ok, just found another site with more pictures of this great little house: "kushti bok"...

i've been going through a lot of homesteading blogs, and tiny house blogs, etc etc. at some future point i'll add a listing of the ones i like best. right now, i'd just like to share with you the following manufacturer of marine stoves, navigator stove works.

the "cod"...

the "halibut". this one is kinda like my wet dream - the fishy door has an actual OVEN behind it! it's $1000 more expensive than the cod, but hell, this is a dream anyway, right??

i'd seen many pictures of vardos with these little tiny stoves set into their sides, but never known where to find one before. wow. i think i'm in love. more on this later.

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i'd been coming here to morgan hill on the weekends to work on my writing for about three years before my ex and i separated, and in fact, that trip up here each weekend was one of the reasons i knew it was time for us to put an end to things.

looking around my whatever's house, in which i'm currently sitting and typing, i'm reminded that this isn't home either. not sure how i feel about that. we have about the same level of love for each other - what we recently decided was "let's take some time to find out where this is going" kinda love. we have a really deep friendship and we make each other happy. we each do things for the other that we wouldn't do for anyone else on the planet. it's actually been a healthy experience, to learn how to just BE with him and not expect all kinds of weird shit. i don't know where we're going and most days i don't care.

odd, that this is really an analogy for the state of my entire life.

i made a decision about a year and some back, to get rid of 90% of what i own, and i've moved in that direction, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, ever since. i can look back at the time since my actual divorce, and see the patterns of loss... no, that's harsh and rather self-pitying. i should say, the patterns of "stripping away".

having a hard time forgiving my ex for the things he took from me. a lot of those things involve some physical object, and the concepts represented by that physical thing. we lost our home because of him. i blame him for dragging his feet and not wanting to have sex EVER, so we couldn't have a second child. i lost fifteen years of my life to his passive aggressive BS.

basically, my marriage was a perfect example of trying to swim upstream. i hit every rock on the way and the current was hell.

went camping this weekend with my whatever. we went to pinnacles national monument outside hollister, friday night to sunday morning. i called it our "shakedown cruise".

for the first time, we saw california condors. gotta tell you, that was something amazing. i'm still kinda jazzed about it.

his tent works great but the double-high queen-size mattress sucked. hugely. he couldn't get his power inverter to work and i wound up borrowing somebody's battery-powered air compressor (note: NOT an air pump for blowing up huge-ass air beds but a BICYCLE style air compressor.) took almost an hour to inflate the airbed, and i had to use my lungs to augment the flow of air. yes, i blow. stop snickering.

i started out thinking his monstrous camp chef two-burner stove was way more firepower than we needed, since i'm a coleman camp stove kinda gal and have been for a long time, but it turned out to be a godsend when we discovered we couldn't make a campfire owing to the fire danger.

we turned the thing broadside to the table and turned the burners up.

after dinner, we walked around the campground and found someone who had the camp chef propane fire ring.

this stuff is all modular, btw. you just need extra hoses and splitters off your propane tank. now my whatever is salivating to add this lovely little device to his camping arsenal. me too, for that matter.

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on a slightly related note, i'm getting tired of slaving for minimum wage at all hours of the day and night. it's hard to get a night to spend with my whatever, and we can't do much on the weekends because i always have to work. decided to try kelly temps to see if i could find some bankers hours kinda work. i've had good luck with them in the past. i'll have to check out some other temp agencies too, i think.
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my in-laws have a barn, an actual barn that was built to hold horses, which got converted into living space up above, and storage space down below. i lived in the apartment up above until i couldn't pay the rent anymore, which is when i moved down into the trailer.

best picture i have of the barn, as seen looking through the garden that used to be a horse corral. the top section of the barn with the little windows is where the apartment is. it runs the length of the building.

the apartment was filled with my stuff. just moving in, i had boxes lined up in the living room that stayed there for months and months. the clutter was unimaginable. i could barely walk.

eventually i got those boxes cleaned up, but the bedroom was still full of crap. recently, i had to move all my stuff out of the apartment and down into the storage room. i got rid of another load of crap. see the pattern?

now the storage room is loaded with boxes. most are no longer just jammed with crap - they hold books, or personal stuff, or my daughter's toys she's not ready to get rid of yet, all labeled and neatly stacked. i have five big duffel bags full of clothes.

so now it's time to start sorting through these boxes to get rid of stuff. i think of this as the first winnowing.

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i was going to say something pithy about "the harder you work, the luckier you are", but i couldn't find a picture that worked at all. then i started to think about what hard work got me, and the honest answer is, i'm not sure anymore. getting rid of 90% of what i own, and every day i empty one more box. right now, first, it's books. i'm scared that i'll get done, look around an empty storage room, and all i'll have is... nothing.

rationally, i know that's stupid, but i guess i have a lot of old ghosts running around up in my head that need some serious exorcizing...


 get it? EXORCIZING?!? mwaa haa...



fine...

toodles, all.

mitakuye oyasin

more on the good red road. i'm reminded of the phrase mitakuye oyasin (mee-DAH-koo-yeh oh-YAH-sheen). this is a lakhota phrase that translates to "all my relations", and it refers to the unity and connectedness of all life.

started thinking about the good red road this morning, about what i needed to do to change, and about the interconnectedness of all creation. found a prayer, of which mitakuye oyasin is a part:

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the website i got this image from didn't credit the artist. if you're the artist, let me know and i'll give you credit for this image - it's beautiful...

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin....All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer....

To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.

To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.

To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.

To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.
To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.

To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.

You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.

Thank you for this Life.

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 "there is no place in the transcendent consciousness for any of the baggage you may still be carrying. all the shoulds and shouldn'ts that may have dominated your consciousness are to be released and left at this crossroads."

today seems to be all about paths. everywhere i turn, i see the word "path", or i run across concepts of path. as i mentioned last night, i do see my path forward, but i realize i didn't get it all right last night. my path has two parts: the first isn't actually writing. the first is getting rid of 90% of what i own. i think i won't be a writer and i won't know any peace until i accomplish that goal.

at this moment i have so much physical, spiritual and emotional clutter i can barely stand up straight in my own body. i think it's time for me to get off the computer and go work on getting rid of some of the physical stuff, which will in turn get rid of some of the emotional clutter, and THAT in turn will help me get rid of the spiritual clutter.

and THEN i can come back and write.  ;}~

toodles for now...

late night shit...

not much to say tonight. got home from work at 11:15, it's now 12:41am, and i don't feel like i can sleep yet. i'm tired, i'm even sleepy, but i don't want to sleep yet.

irrational shit, or maybe not so irrational: my best friend ellen, hereafter referred to as LN, can see the future. in bits. not even the necessarily useful bits.

me, i see paths. i see the possibilities. i don't see what will happen. i see the road i need to take. to where? wow. i'm not sure i can even answer that. here's an example.

for years i asked the universe (god, creator, mama goddess, whatever you call your higher power) to make me a writer. well ok. i'm a writer. then i asked to be an author, as in a published writer. ok, been there, done that too.

 i also wanted to be the red baron when i grew up. i too desired a doghouse that could turn into a sopwith camel.

then i expressed to the universe the desire to finally make my living as a writer. "this," i said, "is the life i want!"

so now the universe, i think, has done me the courtesy of taking me at my word, and has set my feet on this path.

problem is, i'm fighting it. don't even know why. things have been really rough for me the last few years, and i have a very taoist belief that that only happens when one is going in the wrong direction. i know i've used this analogy before, but bear with me because it's a good one, one of my favorites, and it always applies: think of tao, or the way, the path, that is, as swimming in a river. when you're going the wrong way, you're swimming against the current. you hit every rock on the way. BAMBAMBAMlol. everything is harder, everything goes wrong, and no matter how many times you ask why, there's never an answer. because it's just wrong, i guess, is the answer.

so when you turn around and go the right way, suddenly everything is easy. you're swimming with the current now, and it carries you around all the rocks. everything goes right.

 add mojitos and gently swirl to mix...

so, now to my point about paths, and about seeing mine. i asked to make a living as a writer. as long as i'm fighting it, and doing everything BUT, my life is going to be impossibly hard, and it's going to get harder and harder with each day.

my only possible path forward is as a writer. there are no other paths open to me anymore, and that's my own damn fault.

wow, well, or i'm psychotic, you know, either way.

ok, all of which ruminating leads me to wonder if i'm just a bit closer to answering the big question: who am i?

maybe i'm just a writer? maybe the angst, existential or otherwise, is pointless. i know how to write, i've gotten compliments and positive encouragement from every professor i've ever written for, i know how to create query letters, i know how to solicit editors. maybe i'm there already and i just don't realize it?

and on that note, off to bed. for some reason, i'm thinking of the good red road, and of walking it as a dream path...

 the good red road is another way to say tao. clearly, paths are important to me right now.

toodles and g'night, all