Every year the Cat Writer's Association holds a 3-day conference. It consists of writer workshops, lots of giveaway book samples from writers to the other writers, a fantastic awards banquet for notable writing achievements, and generous donated gifts from cat care industries (cat litter, toys, food, treats, care items, pet beds), and it's usually in association with a major cat show (Cat Fancier's Association, typically). Now, this is exclusive membership, you have to be published and of a quality and activity level that really shows you are a promoter of good lives for cats and their people.

Kathryn went to the cat writer's conference in 2005, and a friend of mine new to the CWA went this year. This was my letter to her, and I thought I'd share it here because it talks a lot about Kathryn and both sides of her... how beloved, committed, smart, friendly and beautiful she was, but also how tortured, sad, and limited things were for her as well. For reference, please check out Fritz the Brave, a site on feline asthma, for which Kathryn wrote and recieved coveted awards - the CWA Muse Medallion and Cornell University School of Veterinary Medicine. These were Kathryn at her best/shiniest, an award acknowledging how hard she had worked and the countless hours of advocacy and education she had accomplished.

( Letter below )

Wanted to share what I posted in response to an npr.org article, Visqueen: A Ferocious Song Of Devotion:

I have caught Visqueen's last two Portland shows and have collected the whole set of CDs, and am scanning the media for articles like this. The music is powerful, brave, intelligent, creative, bright and catchy, with influences from power pop and punk. The lyrics typically tackle deeper, darker topics of missed expectations and pain but in a cheerful and translucent way. Ms. Flotard slays me with her humor, offbeat characterizations and metaphors when she has the opportunity to talk, extemporizing between songs. The band name comes from that waggish humor, a nod both to the ridiculousness of plastic sheeting and duct tape, plus the word Queen which describes Rachel's role in the band. Don't miss the chance to see Visqueen, they are one of the bands which has helped me turn lemons into shiny, sparkling, sweet lemonade!

This was a comment I made on a friend's post on LJ, but it says enough about my life and about acceptance of difficult realities that I felt it needed to be shared more widely.

I was not aware you suffered seizures, [friend's name withheld]. Your situation is one where you had made memories, but then lost the hooks to them. Sometimes someone can help you reconnect it. Perhaps some memories never come back, they are either purged or there are no longer any hooks to them, lost in the corners of your mind.

I've seen other people have grand mal and absence seizures, all in unexpected circumstances. More recently, I lived with someone who some days wasn't able make new memories. She depended on me to remember some things she couldn't. She begged me to never manipulate her with untrue manufactured history, to take advantage of her acknowledged memory loss. I stayed meticulously true in dealings with her over objective happenings, and never did game her.

Sometimes she would tell me I was lying when I brought up past that was true, but that was inconvenient for her to be true. This was painful for both of us. These discussions often ended unresolved, me turning away to find a quiet place and end the exchange, the pointless argument over what happened. My last words on these occasions were something like, "our subjective realities are not aligned... I can't convince you of what doesn't feel real to you, but it is real and clear in my memory. There is no basis to this argument." She could always out-badger me, I don't have the will to keep fighting after a point, just to retreat with what I know to be true.

I read some books on memory and recall, with the most recent understanding of cognitive psychology in these areas spelled out for the interested technical layperson. These helped me accept the reality of memory fault as just the objective fact of the situation. It also underlined that our emotional realities are purely subjective and completely real, and no amount of trying to anchor a real memory for me with scattered remaining nearby memories for another, can make it seem real for the other.

May you be blessed in continued acceptance that your instantiated body, incredible and intricate a machine as it may be, is finite and incomplete, and your memories stored in that mechanism that are likewise incomplete are no less valid or vital. We are wholly immanent beings within our physical structures. I am glad you shared your human limitations and perhaps helped others to accept their own.

Namaste

It's been eight months now since Kathryn's suicide and death, and I thought I'd share an update on the last few months.

Month six was really rough, I was coming down off antidepressants and facing ALL my feelings head-on. I didn't do so well. I think I got tangled up in the shock/denial part of things and a lot of my life kind of slowed down, and I couldn't focus very well. Work piled up and didn't get done. I also was holding back on doing personal stuff because I needed to make time in my life for work. Sitting and staring at the screen and not making progress on my to-dos did *not* make my bosses or me happy. This ended with a blast of anger and bargaining, but that was so major that it completely halted all progress on anything. I was afraid to do anything at work for fear of it coming out unconstructively. My bosses put me on vacation to see if I could sort myself out.

Month seven - August - was sabbatical. That helped a lot. The work pressure cooker was off. I had originally planned a giant road trip to Canada for my sabbatical, but I realized I was not up for it so I stayed home. I took the time to catch up with getting my personal life back under control - everything from vaccuuming and doing laundry, to picking up messy piles of books and papers. Again I TRIED to take Kathryn stuff not immediately relevant to my life and throw it into her office and shut the door, but still I am not really making significant progress on that. That's OK, I feel comfortable in my space and I will eventually get to the place of dealing with that. I feel now I have the ability to keep up with running my home.

Also in August my sisters and I relieved a huge burden by getting Mom out of the foster care and into her house, something she had really wanted but that we were all a bit scared about - whether she can keep up. She has done better than expected since returning home, and has found ways to do all her activities without driving, too - the roads are too busy for her limited attention.

I also spent money on some hobbies, things I have long delayed buying because they would have competed with Kathryn's needs or projects. These purchases were affirmations of long-delayed personal wishes, and gave me more things to look forward to in the future. They help connect my present life to my future, and celebrate my dreams, help me envision my dreams, and pull me out of the past and into the present and future. It's an acceptance that things are different now, and Kathryn has no further needs I have to compromise with. So what were the toys? an electric guitar, a home weather station hooked up into reporting on the Internet, and all the remaining equipment I needed for backpacking. Most days that I am home I spend a chunk of time in the evenings playing with the guitars. I also went backpacking up to Rock Lakes and Shining Lake for two nights, and took a short trip in to San Francisco to visit my nephew and friends. Yay me! I feel so pleasantly spoiled to have these many luxuries.

The cars are all retitled to me now. Somehow this seems like a big thing.

Months eight (September)through ten (November) are going to be very focused around work success and stabilization. I've been staying mostly off Facebook and livejournal except for weekends and occasional shares like this... mostly in writing mode rather than reading/responding. I will continue to prioritize work, my home space, and family over friends, activities, and travel.

Since mid-August I have still have many emotional moments about Kathryn, but they pass quickly and are over with in 5 minutes to (at the very worst) a couple hours. I'm a weepy mess at concerts and plays as I relate to songs and characters suffering - but it's generally a positive experience for me. I have moments where I so terribly miss the best parts of Kathryn, and I wear the wedding ring some times. On the other hand, I know I do *not* miss the problematic parts of Kathryn, the side that was dominant much of the last couple years of her life, it is such a relief to not still be fighting with her. I'm where I need to be. I have come a long way in the last couple of months.

So I've figured out some things with Gmail, my archived mail folders (accessed on my private server ala IMAP), and the Thunderbird mail program.

A long time back I started taking all my incoming mail to my regular IMAP server and intercepting and sending it through my personal gmail account to be checked for spam. Any non-spam messages are forwarded back to my regular IMAP server's Inbox and it observes they have come from gmail so it deposits them in my IMAP Inbox. This worked great for spam control, once I got it trained. Since my blackberry can easily access my gmail inbox and stored mail, and Thunderbird can access my IMAP folder archive and Inbox, it was a mostly-working solution.

However, two copies of my inbox, and a mountain of unmaintained old messages on gmail have presented me with a nightmare dual maintenance problem. I briefly considered abandoning all mail storage at my domain's personal IMAP folder archive, but I really love having control over my main file storage, so I knew I couldn't just put it all in gmail.

Gmail *does* work great for processing the incoming, *new* mail, so I ended up deciding to try to manage all my incoming mail stream on gmail (the 'Inbox', 'Sent', 'Drafts' and 'Templates') messages, and leave all my long-term archive folder storage on my IMAP server. I used tips for setting up IMAP access to my gmail account from here. I set it up to use [Gmail]/ folders for "Sent items", "Drafts", and "Spam", but I retained my own Trash and Templates folders.

IMAP access to my archive folders on my personal server remained the same as they had been. I made sure to turn off the autoforward from my gmail account's Inbox to my personal server's Inbox. In order to list my Gmail account at the top of my accounts above my (already existing) archive mail server, I used the Folderpane Tools addon.

Tastes great, less filling, a single Inbox to process, and good support for 'new' mail on the blackberry (rarely would I use my Blackberry to access my archives).

Last night after my Sunday night radio Nets (on-air amateur radio meeting/practice, for those who haven't participated before), I assembled a very simple antenna for testing, and made a contact with my friend Marty W7MSO a couple miles away.

The antenna was about six feet off the ground and was comprised of about 42 feet of 18 gauge speaker wire zipcord. I unzipped 32 feet of it to form the arm of the dipole 64 feet from end to end; the remaining 10 feet formed a transmission line (see the Mar 2009 issue of QST for some of the theory and measurements of this sort of antenna system). I used dacron cord to hold it up against the house in the center and lines on each end thrown over low tree branches, affixed to the wire with square knots.

I empirically adjusted the point where the lines were pulled apart using an MFJ-259B Antenna Analyzer at the radio end of the feedline... it gave an SWR of about 1.4, with about 50 ohms of resistive and 15 ohms of reactive impedance, resonant at 7270 Mhz. Note that inches matter, adjust a few inches at a time... if used masking tape to prevent it from pulling apart further. Lacking a PL-259 plug end, I used a steel paperclip as the male end of the plug, and taped the feedline to that and wrapped the other end and secured it with tape at the other end.

Now, this is about the cheapest Near-Vertical Incidence Skywave (NVIS) antenna I could imagine. NVIS is useful for close-by HF contacts (within a few hundred miles), and is used to avoid a silent 'skip' zone by keeping the antenna close to the ground, instead of high in the air.

The antenna didn't need much in the way of tuning, no doubt because of the low SWR and the resonance demonstrated with the Analyzer. I was able to hear some of the stronger signals on the HF bands as far as GA and TX, and of course CA (I live in OR) but reduced 1-5 S-levels. Actually I'm surprised I heard them as well as that!

I was able to make a contact with Marty W7MSO on lower sideband voice using ~5W. He lives about 2 miles away and over a ridge, where he read me as S3. I seemed to get heavy static noise (it was evening) at S7 (my high-in-the-air dipole was reading the noise floor at S6). Marty was semi-readable depending on the noise floor. The attenuator on my rig helped cut the noise down to S0, and the DSP unit helped clean it up a little more.

Note that at 40m and 80m the transmission line loss is down to 1-2 dB/100 feet, so while I wouldn't recommend the zipline for transmission line at 10m (the attenuation is MUCH higher), down at the low end of the band it is fine.

I shall upgrade the end connector to a real PL-259B and solder it on, and then have to try more contacts with this antenna... I'm curious how it makes out. There's an Oregon ARES District HF net Tue night that I'll need to try out...

A friend asks about 'neurofeedback' and I had to ask 'biofeedback'? It would seem the answer is yes. This led to some fun associations for an old-timer like me.

Glennis (my first girlfriend, to eventually become my first wife of 10 years) had a vibrating black panther plush toy. It was big (over two feet long) and when you hugged it tight, it would vibrate (woo-hoo!). I was rather fond of it. However, there was no biofeedback element to it.

Biofeedback became really big in the '70s along with microcomputers (before they were renamed Personal Computers by IBM), software for calculating your biorhythms and plotting them out on newfangled daisy wheel printers (the precursor to dot matrix technology! in any case it was a replay of the fight with the ink ribbon we were all used to from typing our reports on a typewriter), homebrewing, Marlboro man mustache rides, free love before AIDS, tie dye, and sewing your family's clothes out of old drapes.

Biofeedback - old idea, but still relevant.

A big part of this trip was testing out mostly new gear I bought for backpacking.
( Lots of detailed notes below the cut )
Next Time Stuff I missed and would have liked, but got along OK without. Coffee or something hot and caffeinated for breakfast. A light trowel for digging a toilet. 4 liter and 2 liter nylon/poly stuff bags - the tough plastic bags I used were still too fragile. Smaller MSR gas canister. Hair brush. Tooth brush. Gloves. Wristwatch. More matches. Trekking poles.

A strange thing happened this week. I got part of my mind back.

Sunday and Monday were about helping Mom get moved out of the foster care and back into her home (yay Mom!), and spending another day adding assist bars to her bathtub and making her door locks safer. I knew I would not feel right about it and would fret if I just didn't stay and do it to help Mom, and help myself feel she is that much safer. I also went to dinner with friends and saw Storm's last performance of Crazy Enough, which oddly enough did not touch me as wrenchingly as my prior viewings, although I still got new things out of it and a stronger understanding of perspective - new insights into myself from hearing Storm relate her story and insights.

Tuesday, I'd been planning to pack and go backpacking, but I knew I wouldn't be really present for it. I needed to work through my newly minted checkboxes and todo lists in my new binder. A lot of these actions were about getting my house in order - picking up the clutter which had been steadily accumulating since I moved back into my dead wife's space in February. I got cracking and have made huge progress, although there is still much to do to complete putting things into a new, sustainable structure. I've also put every single one of the retail therapy items to test doing something useful, so none of them are being wasted. I've managed to complete some projects which I had been unable to figure my way through for over a couple years... they are completed and now no longer weighing down my consciousness (for example, all the PCs are now being automatically backed up!).

So, now to the interesting part... my mind (Buddhists, please refrain from the lesson 'you are not your mind', I know, I know... :-). What happened this week? I stayed up very late and got up late-ish. Each night I had a lot of energy. I had good focus. I got things done. I felt some anger... but it was transformed from the burn-it-all-down anger I was feeling at the very start of the month. This new anger gave me energy, drive, focus, and a feeling of power and capability. In some ways it's more testiness than anger... it's playful, quick, somewhat witty, and it feels luciously, richly good... but in a constructive way, not a fukitol way.

I think that I'm rebounding from two things... one is the dopey mellow I-don't-care which antidepressant medication was doing for me for a year (I never had a problem going to bed on time, and after about 3pm each day I was pretty much not all that focused). Summary: I've re-established more normal neurotransmitter levels. The second item is that I'm no longer impaired by an unpredictable, demanding, and at times abusive home/relationship situation. That situation had made me shut down a lot of the visualization of my hopes and dreams, and required of me that I just find a way to cope for the short term that wasn't actively destructive. I really do believe I'm starting to feel and reach for my future again, and the hopeless uncertainty and meekness that requires is lifting. I'm feeling the power of the ability to actualize.

My theory is our consciousness is distributed to different centers around our brains, and there is typically a loudest voice or two at any one time. I think one of my old consciousness/processing centers I had been unable to access and known was needed and missing, has come back online. I welcome the integration of this missing part of me, and think it will help a lot in being strong and able to move on important things in my life. Yay for sabbaticals giving me the space from unrelenting execution requirements, so I could tease this part of my brain back to join and aide my life.

In my last week in review post Saturday morning, I wrote about feelings concerning Mom and family visiting. While I was happy for Mom and family, I, myself, did not thrive with the family visits at Mom's house. Ultimately, I called a halt to my participation in them.

Sunday morning was breakfast (which I was late for and fixed myself at Mom's) and trip to church with Mom, Cathy, and Sue, followed by lunch preparation. I had told family ahead of time that I may not stay for lunch, because of midday plans, but Mom insisted on making a sandwich (I requested a half, she started making a whole), and then I realized I was running out of time, so I summarily picked up the half made sandwich, chopped it in half, wolfed it down standing, made my apologies and left.

Next up was my fourth(?) visit to Storm Large's musical confessional play, Crazy Enough. I introduced four my friends Gayle and Lev, and their friends Marcel and Lily, and all had a great time. I cried a lot and in different spots of the play this time. The heroin scene is always difficult because Storm acts out the dreamy painful dissociative expansive trance of opiate addiction, which triggers lots of memories of Kathryn's addictions. This time the 'broken' Mom Storm loved so much, and the ultimate hardening and reaction to that, really triggered the tears (recalling my own relationship to Kathryn). More tears regarding the confusion of loss when her Mom died, and at the sheer beauty of the refinement of Storm's performance in the final song (and throughout), like being handed a perfect rose. It was not easy to be reminded of so much, but I left feeling redeemed and thankful I will be seeing this performance a fifth time next weekend.

I returned to Mom's, not knowing what to expect. I felt exhausted and ready to bolt, so I took a nap. When Cathy, Sue and Mom returned I was happy for them, and happy to see them. The deeper and stronger feeling resembled claustrophobia - feeling trapped in a noisy place and unable to do anything useful in it. I told my sisters the feelings that were coming up for me and explained I needed to just head home to take care of myself.

I was hungry, so I stopped and had comforting fatty food - a beer and fondue - at Gustav's, and then finished driving home. I used the evening to do a home fun project - setting up a weather station (details here) and trying to get it to talk to my Linux computer - which kept me preoccupied until 4am. I slept in until 10:30 and then continued throughout the day Monday, also hanging up wasp traps and finally making progress on kitchen stuff. I listened to NPR.

I figured out what was going on for me on Sunday. Being at my Mom's house triggered feelings of when I lived there through much of 2008 with very few other options available to me. After all, it's Mom's house, Mom's rules, Mom's visitors, Mom's menu, Mom's way of cooking, Mom's habits... so much so that I feel annoyed by all of these. In particular, the noisy (but welcome) visitors and it being yet another meal being served of which Mom was the Queen and arbiter, all this is right and in its place, but I didn't feel happy being there.

The second issue was that I was not where I could do *anything* useful... the kitchen was too crowded with others, and I could visualize all the stuff needing attention at home that I could actually do something about... *my* home stuff is so important to me, and I know this. I can relate to how important Mom's home is to her, as I have one of my own so important to me!

So, by being home by myself, I got several useful things done on Monday, and that is exactly what I needed. For this next month, I have a LOT to change planned... I need to clear a home that had become primarily all around Kathryn's needs fulfillment (and so far is pretty much unchanged from that): clear the clutter, and learn new ways of maintaining it for myself. Really, because of Kathryn's illnesses and her packrat but artful nature, it ended up ceasing being so much my home and very much being Kathryn's home -- overwhelmed by this when I had grieving to do and a full-time job, I just left it the way it was since she died, unable to really figure out where to start turning it back into my own space. I was able to express what was coming up for me and (eventually) why to family, so that I didn't apparently cause any damage with people's expectations.

It's just going to be one of those times in my life where I mostly need to take good care of myself, and try to explain it, and hope others can either understand or if they can't, go away for a while.

I bought a notebook and pencils this weekend. I'm starting to make to-do lists again, after many months of mostly abandoning them as far as personal stuff, and barely able to process them on a work front. This feels really empowering.

Now it's time to run off and get the truck smog-checked and registration renewed, then dinner with some friends and head back to home... yay, home.

Fortunately this week has steadily improved.

Grief and Work Axis: It started on the weekend with the really angry FTW thoughts coming up, breaking loose the weeks of denial and blocked progress - but at what cost? This lead to sick days and renegotiating work plans, and in the end it was declared the first week of a five-week sabbatical, moving it up from September to August - my bosses are very helpful and generous. I am so incredibly fortunate.

Bend: I spent a lot of time journaling and dropped all my more casual big-group plans, of which there were way too many, anyways - apologies to all my friends who didn't get to see me at their gatherings. I also took up Theresa on her offer to drive out to Bend and visit with her, Marty, her daughter Ashley and her husband Caleb. I went on some gravel backroads to get there. We enjoyed the ranch, the high desert range, Bend Brewing Company, classic car cruise-in in Drake Park, a major thunderstorm, putting a tree out that was struck by lightning, and power outages. Sunday I headed home, stopping by the Metolius River.

Gear: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping... Retail stimulus efforts focused on notebooks, pencils, and other organizational materials at Office Depot, something I have been lacking for quite some weeks, potentially a cause for me feeling overwhelmed and stuck and wanting to FTW. I also stimulated the economy at REI shopping for backpacking gear - tent, ground cover, sleeping bag, mattress, stove, cookware, a GPS and some sundries. I stuffed all these in my (30#) pack (along with water and some dry food) and made a 2.5 mile test walk over to Damon's house for homebrew and BBQ. I've also figured out how to load maps, tracks, and waypoints into the GPS.

Mom: Part of my week's efforts were helping Mom temporarily set up at her house (instead of her room at the foster care), and enjoying company of my brother (Bill) and two visiting sisters (Cathy and Sue). We had a long talk with Mom and it looks hopeful that we are going to be able to work on a plan for her to return to home while still making sure all her needs for medical attention, safety, transportation, and relief from some of the home management tasks are anticipated and covered. My Mom is really amazing in her health and ability. I realize how very fragile this position is... with several critical chemistry balances in her body only working through active management by doctors and medications, and her being one fall and broken bone away from losing all independence again. Still, we all want to help her be as independent as possible.

Friends: I visited Val's amazing dahlia garden (photos). I was able to shoehorn in Pho lunch with Diane, Robert, and Kitten too. Finally, on Friday I stopped on the way home and saw Jeff's band, Sinnergy, play at the Tonic, met his friends and ran into Kevin Hahn of Kleveland and many other projects.

Saturday: If all that sounded intense, looking back on it, it was! Today I slept in really late and am chilling out at home, doing some house and yard projects. The gorgeous dahlias are going nuts and need fertilizing and watering. I need to sweep the porch and do a lot of de-cluttering of kitchen, dining, living room, and office.


 

I've now got the new LiveJournal Messenger. My Windows Live ID is opalmirror@livejournal.com. Sign up now and we can chat!

Thursday night saw Star Trek a second time on my own, it's good. Friday was a really mellow day and I was just NOT up to going out in the evening.

Saturday I had lots of plans of things to do, but ended up mostly getting resting and caught up on facebook. Something made me decide to make dutch babies and that was breakfast. I broke out new live DVD/CD combo, All the Way In from Terri Nunn and Berlin and had a lot of fun remembering the concert with them. Terri signed my copy before shipping and she is a lovely, gracious entertainer which I was so happy to see (and massive kudos for her covering and recording Duran Duran's song, Ordinary World). I also gave a listen Western Aerial EP from their recent CD release party at Dante's.

I managed to get away to enjoy Star Trek in the Park - a live performance of the classic ST episode Amok Time where Spock battles Kirk to the death for love on Vulcan. I arrived just barely on time to greet my friend andrine and her daughter, promptly tripped over the blanket laid out next to her and nearly fell on several of the nearby seated people before I got my balance... becoming instantly one of those people you hate to have muscle in to your picnic -- good job James! I tried to remain very small. It was a very pleasant surprise that Rebekah and her friend Isaiah were there just over my left shoulder! The show was excellent, T'Pau had an impressive strong gravity, T'Pring a ruthless cunning, I liked the cheesy live music and the bullhorn communications from HQ.

After Star Trek I visited Deepak and we went for beers at the Alameda brewhouse, quite tasty. I passed within a block of Lisa yet again, a Facebook friend of a friend, who I still have yet to meet. I then transported a duffle bag of belongings to Margarete and started chatting with her and the topic seemed to flow to Kathryn and my relationship and her suicide... touched several nerves and squeezed out more than a few tears. I grocery shopped on the way home and ended the hot day with some ice cream.

Sunday I awoke and fixed some dangling shades in the house, and again had a quiet morning. I had discovered that The Angels of Australia (known internationally as Angel City) has reformed. I have been listening to them since the 80s and they are one of the most original hard rock/metal/punk/Australian pub rock bands I know, helping crack open the door for Midnight Oil, INXS and other Aussie bands to invade the US. I had thought that after Doc Neeson had his car crash in 2000 that they were done for, but now I may have an opportunity to see them live... if I'm willing to fly to Oz. Half considering this!

I spent some time setting up and exploring the Pandora free music service - great fun! I am happy that like other good social networking services it can import your address list from Gmail and automatically friend people... I wish last.fm would add that ability, because I'd prefer to use an open project than a commercial one.

 

The dahlias in the Kathryn Hopper Memorial Garden are starting to bloom! Kathryn would be very excited, as am I! I have been fighting aphids on one plant but SPRAYING them off is working, and avoiding chemicals is keeping their predators, ladybugs, alive as well. I may have to spray the one with spider mites though.

I'm almost done with the antidepressants, and am feeling more myself... physically my skin and body's sensory abilities are clearing up and being stronger... I can feel my muscles enjoying a luxurious stretch in the morning... it is really amazing how dulling those medications are. I am feeling more of my motivation returning too. When I needed them, they sure helped, but I'm glad I'm returning to full health.

I traded in most of my Portland Center Stage flex passes for specific showtimes for Storm Large's show Crazy Enough. I'll be going with some friends on the Sunday matinee August 9, and a large contingent of Storm fans on the last show, the evening of August 16.



Finally! I managed to fire up and run Happy, the Morris Minor 1000, which has been mostly sitting in my shop since Kathryn passed away and I moved back in. I gave it a few spins around the circular driveway, and it really wants to be driven. I'm going to get it back on the road, once I can find where she squirreled away the title and review the insurance requirements.

Sleep: another big imaginative dream, not terrifying but not easy, thoughtful. It started by accumulating a girlfriend/companion who left her place at the fast food restaurant to join me on my travel adventures. She was cuddly, petite and sunny, and I was very grateful for her company. Next, in a dark restaurant, a small bead curtain window curtain that could dance and talk joined (I carried her in a paper grocery shack and talked to her at times). Last, as we were walking along the boardwalk in a huge, busy, and populous city (I thought of NY, DC, or Beijing - more the latter because of predominant asian mixture), we picked up a less-well defined young male figure.

Eventually we stepped into a rocking bar that was gearing up for the night's big party, more and more crowded, mostly first time customers. Etta, the curtain, was planning tequila. For a bit I was seperated from my friends in the crush. Free booze was poured out to the ladies first then my real-life friend Steve turned and grinned at me in approval from the crowd, free bottles filled drink glasses to the men, the music boomed, and a wild party ensued.

I never saw my friends again. I stayed at the bar to the next night, and the evening after. They were... gone. Crushed at first, then just sad. I saw the second morning how they cleared the debris and the spent bodies of the partiers that did not survive, by unhinging the walls and bringing in the dump trucks and front loaders.... The bar's dirty secret? No, it just seemed pragmatic. The bar processed souls, partied them and removed the residue.

The lesson of all this, as I explained to some hopeful revelers, is that we cannot plan on our connections working out the way we planned. We will also never get out of this life alive, so for now, we must take what comes and we must live it fully. We must not become overly attached to a plan. We must take people at their word for the now. The connections I had were real, but were fleeting, and in the end its always me that I have to depend on. The dream ended as I walked away from the bar, down the quiet evening street, and my alarm dinged.

Distressing cramping all through right back, neck, arm, and at times butt and legs... Kept turning throughout the night, adding and removing bolsters and pillows, until I found the right position for a bit. I am probably not in the best health for cuddling in the same position for hours :-(.

Cats piled on all night and snuggled me in the morning.

Breakfast was a two-egg omelette with pesto, spiced olives, and havarti, accompanied by a split english muffin and coffee. Mmm!

Mom has a blood draw so have to go to town today. That means it's time for a shower.

Thank you to all who contacted your Senator about HB2377 as I requested in my prior post, especially naadhira. The Senate added an exclusion for licensed amateur radio operators and passed it Tue. It passed the House this week (bill tracking details available courtesy of The Oregonian). All that remains is for the Governor to sign it into law!

This exclusion for ham radio is important, and in fact my ARES/RACES team did a drill about a month ago, driving around the South part of Clackamas County and assessing locations, using only direct mobile-to-mobile communications. The ability to travel and use radio at the same time strongly facilitates both practicing and employing these skills in the case of an actual emergency.

If your legislator supported this bill, it is appropriate to thank them at this time. If they didn't support it, it's also good to let them know you are watching. :-)

I had a lot of feelings come up last night, about what it is like to give and give and not be acknowledged, even suspected that you have nefarious purposes as your motivation. The feelings coming up for me were frustration and apology - apology that I just couldn't hang in there in the relationship any longer, apologies that I was falling apart, that I couldn't just stick it out, that I had to prioritize myself and take care of myself, that I needed a calmer personal space.

What was really hard is that I can apologize all I want but there is no one to tell me that it's OK, except myself. There's no closure.

And this is how it works.... sometimes people sitting in front of us are unwilling or just plain unable to see it from a place of love and compassion. It's not their fault. It's hard when those people are dead, or dead to us.

I can tell myself all I want that I was being as loving and compassionate as I could be, within the limits of my human ability, and that I'm no good to others if I am not being good to myself. Still the feelings keep coming back and the tears keep fountaining. I tell myself, it's OK to feel... it's OK, I'm OK, let the feelings flow through, I'm a good man and loving and compassionate, sometimes understanding and acknowledgement just doesn't happen and that is OK, it's part of being human.

dianylaShared the following with me and it was very helpful. Thank you, Diane:

The past is still there in the present. Both the happiness and the suffering you have experienced in the past are still there, alive, in the present moment. In the past, you may have made mistakes, you may have been unskillful and caused suffering to yourself and your beloved. People say it is impossible to go back to the past to fix our mistakes. But with mindfulness it is possible to go back and repair the damage, because the past is available in the present moment. Suppose you said something unkind to your grandmother and made her suffer, and now you regret it because she has passed away and you can't apologize to her. If you look deeply, your grandmother is always alive in you, in every cell of your body. As you breathe in, you can say, "Grandmother, I know you are there in every cell of my body," and breathing out, "I'm sorry." You decide to be kinder and more aware of your beloved ones now. Then you will see your grandmother smiling to you, and your wound will heal. This practice is wonderful because the past is still available to you. If you look deeply into it, you can learn a lot from the past and heal wounds from the past. Mindfulness of the past is very different from getting carried away in sorrow and regret. --Thich Nhat Hanh

I let the sun go down and come up, I slept and dreamed, and today is a fresh good day, with mostly other things on my mind.