The fire trucks are gone. The windows are open. The cat is safe. The humans are safe. The burned mattress no longer smokes in the front yard.
I awoke at 6:00am trying to find that alarm clock that keeps going off on random days that my parents can’t hear because they’re deaf and are sleeping. I start downstairs and hear it’s actually the smoke alarm and my mother yelling FIRE! Call 911!!
I couldn’t get through this without sobbing. One of my all time favorite songs, Halleluah heals me every time I hear it. It is a song about love and healing and blessing. But to hear K.D. Lang sing it when, where, and, in the end an additonal, why, for Nodar, well see if you can make it through dry eyed. This? Was the voice and song of an angel in her bare feet.
I thought that the opening ceremony this year was the most amazing, most encompassing, most passionate, most inclusive I’ve seen. This pagan sat there in awe as she watched the shaman drum life into being. As the scenes unfurled before me in silence I could only be amazed and grateful to have witnessed the life span of Canada.
I don’t have television and was in a restaurant eating with some friends when I looked up to see the snow falling and the shaman walk out of the mist and start pounding the ground with his/her staff. None of us needed the sound and most of the table sat and just watched, struck peaceful.
But I missed this part. While I know that this was planned long in advance for me it added a special poignancy to the sadness of Nodar’s death that was underlying the ceremony.
I hope that I’ll be able to get my hands on a DVD of the entire ceremony as copyright is keeping it from being shown on YouTube. Have it I must.
“Jane Austen was the spinster daughter of a clergyman who led an uneventful life,” wrote Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Guardian. “She just happened to write half a dozen flawless masterpieces, which came perfectly formed, not from experience but from imagination.” Most of us don’t have anything close to the inconceivably potent imagination that Austen possessed. But I believe 2010 will be a year when you can access at least a portion of that wondrous capacity. You’ll be able to fantasize about vast possibilities in exquisite detail. You will have great skill at smashing your way free of limiting expectations through the power of your expansive vision. And the coming weeks will be a time when it should all kick into high gear.
I completely disagree with Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Jane Austin most assuredly experienced life in the world. She wasn’t worldly but she understood people and she very clearly understood how things worked in her time and place especially for women. Not to say she wasn’t ALSO imaginative. But to dismiss her like that so one can deny her tales as fabrications, well…
That said, this being unemployed with pay is a new experience. It might take awhile for it all to shake out but there is hope here that I didn’t have before. Yesterday I did the spring cleaning of my room, packed up some things that I have acquired this past year that were taking up space, mostly decor and gifts that I received that will have to wait until I have a place of my own. Created space.
I drew out the design on a round wood box for a coven mate who has a birthday in March. It is a water / sword theme and will be woodburned and then stained. Created art.
Spoke with my brother who I encouraged, and he accepted, to come here to see Dad while he’s still got most of his faculties. Created a gathering.
Dad doesn’t remember Monday or Tuesday or being in the hospital. We had no idea the recorder wasn’t on. Once he was out of what I think was a small stroke, he seemed quite lucid. Until he called my mom and told her come bring him home because the doctor’s were going to shoot him full of nuclear energy. Yesterday morning he told his good friend that he’d been downtown and the police were chasing him. He went on in great detail about that. Neither happened.
Yesterday at lunch my mom told him about the last two days with details about the hospital. He was flabbergasted and then went and laid down for a few hours in the dark.
My brother wants to remember my Dad well but I told him that Dad would really like to see him again, that Mom needs to see him. That we can go on a trip, all four of us together to see the mountains that Dad loves so much. He’s going to help us make some decisions about the rental house we’re selling this spring and perhaps help me clean out the garage. The stuff is mostly sorted but needs to be hauled off somewhere, either to a second hand store or the dump.
In the meantime, I’m puttering around and my tummy is back to normal. Still taking morning antacids but it does appear that the bulk of my distress was, well, distress.
The weather is gorgeous here. Cherry and plum trees in bloom, camellia’s, daffodils, and other pretty things. Birds chirping. All way too early for bees, hopefully most of the blooming trees are ornamental. The sky is blue and the sun is out. As concerned as I am about the warmest winter on record, as much as the low snowpack has me thinking about drought in August, we really needed spring to come. Beautiful spring. New beginnings, fresh starts. Life.
Don’t tell ME I’m not a problem solver.
I spent yesterday researching unemployment benefits and also talking to a wonderful woman on the phone. Yes, a person on the phone! I didn’t know they existed any more. But she did and she told me that I have the right to request that they use different quarters than 1-5. That I can request 6-8. I posted that on Facebook and someone I actually KNOW said “hey, they did that for me. They based my benefits on quarter 7. That’s how I was finally able to move.” I can’t find much online about it but a person at unemployment told me and a good friend who had that experience told me so it must be true.
They have to pay you a minimum of $133 no matter how little you made which means I qualify for that because all last year I was an hourly employee at the university even though I only worked about 5 hours per quarter. So I get the minimum.
Once that is enstated, I can appeal for the other quarter calculation and see what can be done.
I am going to the food bank today to check it out, see what’s shakin.
Keeping the good thing going, bringing the golden coins, let’s the keep the abundance increasing and increasing so I get the 7/8 quarters!
I’ve applied for unemployment. There is no doubt that I’ll qualify technically as you can collect if you are fired if it isn’t because you did something illegal or were insubordinant. As long as it was simply that it was a bad fit or you didn’t have the right skills, you qualify. I certainly don’t possess the skills to deal with people who suffer from Borderine Personality Disorder. (This makes is sound much more benign than it really is.) The question is what I was doing 5 quarters ago. 5 quarters ago I was not working but 6 quarters ago I was. And making webmaster salary too. They asked me to account for 2 years, all the way back to Jan 2008. It’s entirely possible that I might get to claim unemployment on webmaster wages. I might have to go before a panel to do it but I bet this can work out.
Goddess of Abundance, please bring me generous unemployment until the right job with the right people, the right skills, the right pay, the right benefits, the right vacation, the right location, the right hours, comes along.
Stitch Witch Cottage 