A Case of the Mondays

Okay, my sweet honeys, because there are SOME people still left in the world working, and because other people may just need a pick-me-up, AND because some of you lovely people have traditions that I LOVE (Thinkin' Thursdays, Windy's old ritual, uh... there are others)

Here is my contribution. I have savored some of these in fantastical mind-wanderings and now you get to share. One each Monday. A new paradise. A beautiful place to dwindle away a few minutes. Because I'm damn tired (already?) of forty degree weather, and because we can dream!!!

So enjoy, and do like I do, picture yourself running around in the blue, lazing away in the shade, and WHATEVER ELSE until that sun sets and the beach party begins... listen to me on those drums! You'd think I was born here!!
What about you??

Where I'd LIKE to Be Right Now

It's likely I'll not be visiting THERE soon, I forget exactly where this is - Tana Lot - so, I put on some hiking shoes and wandered the hundred acres here again. Here is what it looks like.

The raspberry vines are all cut back and newly tied up for winter. Glum, but the sky was nice.


The strawberry fields, as well, are colorful yet yucky: The berries are taken over by slugs and insects even before they can turn red. Bummer. I'm not one for pesticides, but sheesh...


What can I say? The sky turned back to grey!! Sigh... Cool thing is, if you click on it, you may be able to see what I saw with my naked little eyes, that the tall pines on the coastal mountains were silhouettes against the muted sun. The scene was pretty unreal, and not nearly as depressing as it appears here.




Moss Farm. Only on the western edge of the strawberries, the softest, most exquisite stretch of at least three different types of moss and/or related green things spread out like a fairy carpet.



Meathead. This 100-lb Rottie beast belongs to a neighbor and visits when he wishes. For size comparison, I tried to get him to stand next to a barn, but he sat on it. It is barely visible, sticking out there beneath the lower half of his body.



Some big ol' paw prints. Just for shits n giggles, I had Meathead step beside the gigantic tracks you see here. His normally enormous foot print is visible next to the bottom most print, you can barely make out his smudgy toe prints and claw marks in this mud - making the size and weight of this mystery animal OBSCENE. We got scared and quickly ran back to the house.

Panties

Someone sent me this in an email recently. Still on the fence about it. Maybe I like the message. Maybe there are things just too complicated to be solved by undergarments. Or maybe I just soiled my last pair of big girl panties.

some poetry while my heart sleeps.

You stretch your wings across the face of the Earth… everything is motionless before you. You glide, silent; you are the difference between day and night…
You are Shadow.


You watch the People grow gaunt and weary; you make whole villages so thin and dry that even the ground beneath them cracks, and still the rain refuses to visit; now only their caricatures are left in the rock formations of the canyons…
You are Want.



You easily and constantly cover the land; there is always something new. You permeate the oceans, but the liquid must be so heavy, so slow. You’ve been everywhere at least once; they say there are places you’ve forgotten, but these are just places which you simply did not wish to see often…
You are Time.



Your reach is immense; your domain is the outermost to the innermost places… in some you are cold, but in others your fire is unsurpassed. You are the massless expanse of the invisible plasma that binds all things, and if you stretch your arms as wide as you can, your fingertips will touch…
You are Space.

Will Work For Hay

My "Living in the Sky" is not meant to say that life is fluffy. It often isn't. Nor to say that I'm way UP HERE and everything else is below somewhere... I have gotten calluses from having my face in the dirt, A LOT.

It is only to say that I have given in to the River, the river of life and things that are, were, and things that are yet to pass. After reading the wonderful Eat, Pray, Love (thank you Clare and Dawn for your simultaneous coincidental suggestions) I realize there are others out there who have had the All is One experience and realize humans have so little, and yet so much, to do with the workings all around us. Baffling, it is. Sometimes.

Which leads me to now be able to tell you how scary life in the sky can be. The lowest limits of the bottom of the barrel sank over a week ago for me. OOPS I couldn't find a job before my unenjoyment ran out. Sorry, you had your chance...

Humor, love, hope... all seem so far away right now. I live, it seems, for pictures from Florida, all your stories, poems, watching Ames move halfway across the country... and I have been doing all THAT for a long time, but now I'm avoiding thinking about the bank repo-ing the truck, having to buy food at the Dollar Store, and heaven forbid... look for someone who can take care of The Boys. I dunno what life would be like without my horses. I don't wanna know.

Thank goodness I live in a place rent-free and I get a hundred bucks a month for VA Disability (egads) but my injury continues to worsen, and (I didn't want to tell everyone) looks like I may need surgery (good ol' VA) for either my spinal injury or the carpel tunnel that it is causing so bad that the docs want to schedule me now. Every day of stall mucking and sweeping is murder on my hands and arms, but if all I have to pay for my livelihood, and my life, is pain, I've got that in spades.

There are some nice people at the unemployment and VA places who I've been talking to and who may be able to help me somehow, starting with food stamps. I'm sure I'll feel better next week. When I (gulp) turn 40. If anyone has any smile-makers, now is the time people (I saw the baby and dog on Rocket's blog, and have already cheered for the Big Blue Crab)...

Captcha - Part Deux

I've been saving these up, but am lacking a certain sense of humor to make a good post of them lately... So I'm just choosing some of my faves, ones that happened to make me laugh today. Which is to say the list would be different each day... but oh well, here goes.


This is cute. Like the plural of CACTUS, to silly people like me.




It just sounded funny cuz it rhymes with Feces. Hey, I never said I didn't enjoy the poop humor. I do.




OK, this one just made me laugh out loud.






There are PLENTY of utilizations for this one...






...and again, with the crude humor. I could begin a new word trend with my friends in L.A.





This is something that may pop out of Mr. Bush's mouth at any given time, given his predilection for such accurate speech and his recently picked-up Texan accent... don't get me started. He didn't have this accent growing up. Oh wait, I got me started. Sorry.




This one is just too damn cute. Still can't think of any use for it. Feel free to help me out with any of these... would love your input. You are all funny and make me laugh, have at it!

Dedicated to the Refocksa Family

Ah, The Days of SUMMER!!!

What happens when you mix three girls, costumes, whiskey, and one very compliant gentleman horse?



No, just the picture we put on our housewarming party invite. We took something like 50 photos, all of which I wish I could put up here, there are good ones, bad ones, VERY bad ones... well. I'll see if I can get them from my roommie's camera.

I love looking at them because I can remember getting sweaty in my cowboy shirt and chaps, back when the grass was green in the pastures and there wasn't so much MUD and MUCK to trample through everywhere... the skies were full of big white puffies, we played music a lot in the kitchen -

And now my old bones are bitten from the cold, the grey skies go on forever... I don't even want to get up to feed myself let alone the horses, the cat... I actually sit and think, how long can the litter box go between changes? And is there a way I can unnaturally prolong it? Cat refuses to use the oh-I-wish-I-had-this bed I made for her, an overstuffed-undersized cloud of a bed lined with a heating pad, whose controls I just push, and five minutes later she could be snoozing in her own steamy comfort... but no! she continues to crawl under MY new comforter, the down-alternative 300-thread-count, no-I-don't-wanna-wash-this-each-week comforter. Thusly, I have cat fur EVERYWHERE. Shiaat.

Well, sometimes I get smart (see! it can happen to anyone!) and recently here are some of my smarter ideas: I bought a desk lamp, brushed nickel finish with a 120-watt bulb, for $5 from the Goodwill, and the bright light helps banish my gray days (see, Windy? I don't know what the diff is either so I used one of each for good measure). The heat from the incandescent bulb too keeps my little bedroom from growing icicles. And if I put it next to me, sometimes even resting it on my legs... well, it gives off some heat to these cramping, cold muscles. Also literally shines heat onto my frozen toe-cubes.

I also went shopping at a discount store for some bubble bath, some GREAT smelling soap (I now have enough to last a small army 'til next summer) and the softest, cuddliest two-dollar socks I've ever held in my little hands! Putting one pair on last night, I turned them inside out, and my feet were so happy they spread the joy right up to the corners of my mouth!

After twenty minutes of lolling around in tropical olive-oil and basil-scented heaven that is my steam bath (for which I intentionally do NOT turn on the exhaust fan), closing my eyes to the bright heat lamps shining like an island sun down on me, and opening them again to see streams of their light through the steamy mist... putting my fuzzy socks on, and blow-drying my hair (a treat I hardly ever give myself), I feel the cockles warming up enough - even the sub-cockles - to motivate me to make some stew, or hashed browns, or some other lovely comfort food, and put my blankets and (down-alternative!) comforter in the dryer for a while to de-fur them for the next night's sleep.

I am watching the hurricane, and hope soon our Floridian sisters and brothers will be able to enjoy some peace soon!

Autumn Sky Morning

Clare took this photo. I'm thinking of replacing my butt-on-a-rock pic but I'm just not committed to it yet.

A Smattering of Stuff...

The trees around here are all but barren and I still haven't posted the pics I took a month ago. I plan to remedy that today.








And, I'm getting worn ragged, honeys! We've implemented a de-alpha-tization plan for Louie, my 7 yo used-to-be-good equine. Since he thinks he's such the top dog, with all the other horses under his command, we give him some time alone and some time with the old folks (our resident 25 and 37 -year-olds who don't give a honk about alphas) and I used to keep Happy with the young-uns... that lasted about a week til I found some righteous teethmarks in about 5 places on Happy's shoulders. Huge scar-lookin, will-the-hair-really-grow-back marks... and I pulled him outta there. problem is, with four horses together, H + L + the old folks, Lou has a chance to be alpha again, so I usually have to separate him by himself - the rest of the horses are great, but then HE gets in an uproar... and you know that stressed horses can lead to sick horses...















Not to mention that it's harder to bring the old gents in at night like we're supposed to when there are four horses gnashing at the gate... I'm about to pull my hair out. The pasture I COULD keep H & L in would be great, since it's separated from everyone and makes things peaceful... but we've been getting those nasty wind and rainstorms and that pasture has ZERO shelter. I end up rushing out in the middle of the night and putting them in stalls. Yes, twice, at midnight... geez no wonder l'm getting burned out on this...















Sorry to unload like this. last night and this morning were oh so challenging and I'm oh so tired... would be easier to have them in runs with shelters all the time. They'd be happy, I'd be happy... sigh. At present the plan is to wait til the gents have been put in the barn for dinner, then my two go into that pasture cuz it has a shed. Then before the gents come out for breakfast, I put my two in the barn to eat. I have to separate them or stand and wait til they eat cuz Lou is getting fat again and Hap's getting skinny from having his food stolen - he's a slow eater. Then I put them into the no-shelter pasture for the day til dinner. so that is where we're at.














And I had a really weird dream the other night - many nights in fact recently - and I find it interesting that this happened on Hallowe'en, when as they say the veil is the thinnest between worlds... not that I haven't had dreams of my ancestors on many other occasions, they show up in the oddest places, doing their pow-wows, dances, or just telling me things. This was a dream that these old ancestors were dressed in 'western clothing' and laughing about not wearing skins and such this time around... and we were all waiting for Leonard Peltier to give a radio address.
As far as I know he is still imprisoned...















My senile cat is waking me up it seems all hours of the morning, and even when I try something new like leaving my bedroom door open for her to wander about (she spends 99% of her time in my room) she wanders about wailing like a pinched child. I end up taking off one sock at a time and throwing them at her so that if the first one didn't make my point of SHUT THE HELL UP the second one usually does. She ends up running for cover and I get a few more minutes. I don't know how to deal with this w/o giving her tranqs every night... there goes her liver!!

Any thoughts or suggestions on any of the above??