Category Archives: Miscellaney

Tag, I’m It!

I was tagged by Kat.

Four Jobs YouÂ’ve Had
1. Library book cataloger and purchaser
2. Psychotherapist in a mental health clinic and private practice
3. Dental assistant
4. Clerk at Borders, Lerner clothing, St. Claire Paint & Wallpaper, movie theater, CVS drugstore, Burger King

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over
1. The Secret of Roan Inish
2. Any Pink Panther movie
3. Gone With the Wind
4. Big Fish

Four Places YouÂ’ve Lived
1. Syracuse, NY
2. Oswego, NY
3. Austin, TX
4. Santa Clara, CA

Four TV Shows You Love To Watch
1. CSI Las Vegas (not Miami or New York, yuk!)
2. The West Wing
3. The Daily Show
4. Nova/Frontline

Four of Your Favorite Books
Oh, come on — just four??!!
1. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
2. The Gift of Therapy by Irvin Yalom
3. The Velveteen Rabbit
4. Anything by May Sarton

Four Places YouÂ’ve Been On Vacation
I am listing places from adulthood; I’m mostly a homebody who likes day trips
1. Package tour of Europe: London, Paris, Innsbruck, Switzerland, Venice, Tuscany, Rome
2. Miami, FL
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Corpus Christi, TX

Four Websites You Visit Daily
1. Bloglines (my subscriptions)
2. San Jose Mercury News
3. New York Times
4. Flickr

Four of Your Favorite Foods
1. Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream
2. dark chocolate
3. anything Italian
4. apple pie

Four Places You Would Rather Be Right Now
1. I
2. like
3. where
4. I am.

Four Bloggers You Are Tagging
1. Chad
2. Winston
3. Diana
4. Nacho
And anyone else who wants to play! Leave your link in the comments so we can take a peek.

The Day After Tomorrow & Memeishness

Time feels compressed to me. Saturday felt like Sunday all day. Thankfully it wasn’t; I still have time to prepare. I’m leaving to fly east — to Syracuse, New York — the day after tomorrow. It’s not that I have immense work to do… just packing and watering the gardens really well. But I’m volunteering on Monday, and then suddenly it will be Tuesday, and I’ll have to catch a noon flight. Get this: I’ll land at midnight. Of course, there’s a three-hour time shift in there, but still, it will be a long journey. I’ll be there one week, so posting will be spotty, if at all.

However, I plan to take lots of pictures, so I’ll have some new material to share.

I spent this evening culling about three dozen books, mostly fiction, from my bookshelves. They’ve been very tight and getting more so. Since I rarely re-read fiction, I targeted those. I’ve emailed close friends and family to offer free reads. I’ll post whatever titles they don’t want so that other readers have a chance. Kat did this awhile back, and I benefited!

That cup of coffee I had at Barnes & Noble this evening after dinner probably wasn’t a wise decision. I’m wide awake now. But I didn’t buy any books (yay self- discipline!). I’ve enough in queue to last me awhile.

Below are a couple of memes I did for fun. One is the Friday Random Ten (a couple of days late, ah well) where you set your music player to “shuffle” then list the last ten songs you heard. The other is a cooking quiz that I found in my blog meanders — can’t remember where.
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Seven by Seven

I’m taking Chad up on his request.
Seven things I plan to do before I die:

  1. write more
  2. read all the books on my shelves
  3. get another tattoo
  4. learn to knit
  5. become a mother
  6. make more art
  7. learn how to speak Spanish

Seven things I can do:

  1. drive a stick-shift
  2. wiggle my ears
  3. bake excellent pies (crusts from scratch)
  4. be punny (intended)
  5. create a comfortable, peaceful home
  6. take risks
  7. be a loving friend

Seven things I cannot do:

  1. write computer code (except bad HTML and butchered CSS)
  2. run a marathon
  3. stand on my head
  4. talk and cook at the same time
  5. sneeze quietly and daintily
  6. leap tall buildings in a single bound
  7. tolerate huge crowds

Seven things that I find really attractive about the opposite sex:

  1. gentleness
  2. skill with electronic gadgetry
  3. sense of personal style
  4. sense of responsibility as a provider
  5. egalitarian attitudes
  6. linear thinking
  7. their pieces/parts are different than mine

Seven things I say the most:

  1. I’m just sayin’
  2. Treats! (high-pitched and shrill to call the cats to get yummies)
  3. I love you
  4. I’m hungry
  5. Did you hear/read about/know….? (followed by trivia)
  6. Various forms of meowing and chirruping at the cats
  7. My chin is not out! (A certain person teases me that when I’m annoyed or mad my chin gets pointy and juts out.)

Seven books I love:

  1. anything by Bill Bryson
  2. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
  3. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
  4. Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott
  5. The Gift of Therapy : An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, Irvin Yalom
  6. anything by May Sarton
  7. When We Were Very Young/Now We Are Six, A.A. Milne (and The Tao of Pooh/The Te of Piglet, Benjamin Hoff)

Seven people I would like to see take this quiz:

  1. Fran — Sacred Ordinary
  2. Kirsten — Cicada
  3. Euan — The Obvious?
  4. Natalie — Blaugustine
  5. Nacho — Woodmoor Village Zendo
  6. Nathania — Purls Beyond Price
  7. Ronni — Time Goes By

Blog Discoveries & Trivia

I found out about Blogpulse from Euan’s blog. I’ve been trying to wean my ego from paying attention to the number of visitors here or finding who links to me. This program, of course, taps into that vein, but it promises to be an interesting way to track topical trends in blogs. I found myself listed and looked at the blogs considered to be my “neighbors.” A few were appealing, and I shall make a point of visiting more:

  • Pages Turned. A reading journal and commonplace book–a book in which ‘commonplacesÂ’ or passages important for reference are collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. Offers an impressive booklist and other snippets.
  • Coffee and Varnish: With Enough Coffee I Could Rule the World. DEFINITION – “Jane Smith”, circa 1969: coffee whore, internet junkie, canine lover, devourer of books, movie fiend, creative, flirt, lazy-ass, smart-mouthed, potato-chip-eater. An interesting collection of reflections.
  • Nothing To Do With Arbroath: No real issues. Just stuff and nonsense. Fun links to interesting tidbits. I especially enjoyed the European Geography quiz, although I admit with chagrin I scored only 56%.

I also, lately, have hopped on the silly quiz bandwagon. This blog has not featured many, but every now and then I give in and take some. Results are below:
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Bad Cat

I rounded the corner from the hallway and found Sophie lounging on my laptop. Very bad idea. The fan was whirring madly. However, both cats adore sunspots and will sprawl wherever they find one.

can't resist a sun spot

My laptop has the ability to take a screenshot — a picture of the computer screen. She managed to take two as she lay there. Below is the better shot. Is she a genius, or what? A bad, smart cat.
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Perhaps You’ve Noticed

I have been playing with the format on this blog! You see, currently I maintain two blogs, and I’ve been desiring more unity in my writing. I spent this evening changing the layout to allow the left column to contain more information of a personal nature, and the right column to highlight my interests of a more professional or philanthropic vein. The center column, of course, is for the daily posting.

I realize the format makes this a visually dense experience, which is why I changed the column link style from bold to normal. I need to check it with other browsers to see how it looks, and somehow I need to get my hands on a PC to cross-check that. Please bear with me while I continue to tweak!

Spring Break

The weather has turned glorious in the Bay Area. I have company coming to town tomorrow for six days. These conspire to pull me away from the glowing computer screen for a little while. I shall return!

The Divine Erotic

The following excerpt is from Heart & Soul: Living The Joy, Truth & Beauty Of Your Intimate Relationship, by Daphne Rose Kingma.

Integrate The Divine Erotic

Your erotic life, the expression of your sensuality in every dimension, is the mysteriously lovely vehicle for the integration of all that you are as a personality and a spirit. It is the sacred playground of physical passion, the point in our experience more than any other at which the material and spiritual intersect. Here the physical body becomes a temple of joy, of deeply rooted connections, of solace, of coming home.

Through sensuality, emotions are expressed in physical form. The body knows, feels, and teaches, eloquently and directly. When we are touched in exactly the right way, when making love is graceful and ecstatic, we are moved without words to a level of integration of body, mind, and spirit that can be instantly healing.

Because of the power of sexuality to heal the rift between our bodies and our souls, we all have a yearning toward it that is far stronger than what we can attribute to the physical sex drive alone. That is because deep inside we know that the erotic life can lead us to integration. And it is only people who are healed physically, emotionally, and sexually from the great raft of wounds we have all endured (if in no other form than our culture’s repression and perverted exaggeration of the erotic) who can be true vessels of compassion and approach the whole world with generosity.

Unfortunately, many of us have been unable to welcome our bodies, our innate sensuality, and the power of the erotic itself into the ken of the spiritual. We’re not even sure that we should, and yet like our sense of the spirit inside us, we do somehow vaguely understand that our erotic life, too, is divine.

If sexual energy and the joy it creates weren’t so awesome a power, no one would bother with it. Instead of being so focused on it, in so many forms, good and awful, we would have gone off to live quite comfortably without it. The truth is that sexuality is a light of such incredible brilliance that it draws the moths of darkness to it; and for this reason, if for no other, it is a spiritual responsibility that we integrate the divine and erotic in our lives.

In your grand quest for love, therefore, for the finest and most beautifully integrated becoming that your heart can entertain, do not overlook — indeed consciously seek — the sexual healing that will bring your personality and spirit into alignment with your body. For when we integrate our sexuality, claim it as the amazing gift it is, we not only heal ourselves and our partners, we help to restore the divine erotic to the entire world.

Cotton Club

When I am sick, my head feels as though it is jammed full of cotton — tight but soft inside. My thoughts ooze and slosh around. Every now and then I shake the earth with a sneeze — I never learned to explode daintily — and attempt to return my head to normalcy… at least , as normal as it can be in this condition.

I’m not complaining, though. My job is going well. I’m gaining skill and finesse as I deal with students and staff. The sun shines more often, and my brand-new Mac Powerbook accompanies me faithfully throughout the day. What more could a junior geek want?

I’m stunned that tomorrow is February 1. Already! I wanted to do something to observe Imbolc on the 2nd, but I also have a full schedule that day (work until 8 p.m.), and so I’m uncertain as to what I might do. Until my head feels less like a pressure cooker, I’ll let this question be.

Ready for month two? I am.

It’s A Year!

trixie bliss

“A Long Winter’s Nap” / Kathryn Petro ©2004

Greetings to the New Year! I hope you had a gentle and joyful holiday season. Mine was, though poignance and grief were blended in. I spent 18 days in Washington with my future in-laws, helping my father-in-law-to-be get to his radiation treatments for two weeks. I also assisted with holiday and guest preparations. Despite the stress inherent in the situation, it was a wonderful opportunity to get to know them better, to become their daughter in a way we had not yet experienced. They will continue to seek treatment for as long as there is something to pursue, knowing that in time, we must learn the difficult lesson of letting go. But not just yet.

The photo above is of Trixie, a cantankerous Devon Rex who is happiest when she is sitting on someone as long as they don’t move. The composition of curves and lines revealed in the soft light caught my eye. It makes a fetching picture. She was my buddy during my visit, and fortunately for me my own two cats aren’t jealous types. We were happily reunited on the 28th. I’ve spent the subsequent days settling in — cleaning, grocery shopping, unpacking.

So it is another year. Another January in which to attempt new behaviors with great intention before abandoning them. Another journey — marched or sauntered — through 365 days. Surprises await, some delightful, others disappointing. Ecstasy awaits, as does intense pain. As I watched the ball drop in Times Square, I thought of the millions of people who are in living hell in South Asia. My happiness was tempered by this awareness. The new year varies in meaning depending on one’s life at that time: for some, it symbolizes hope for new beginnings. For others, it is desperation (another year passed and I still didn’t do X?). For many it is a time of grief for recent losses, or for the memories of older loss stirred up. For just as many, it is simply a time when we struggle to write the correct year on various documents.

The world is immense, big enough to hold it all. One lesson I have learned over the years, that I keep affirming on any anniversary, is that opposites can co-exist. I can experience happiness, and this does not deny the reality of suffering. Likewise, I do not need to forsake happiness and only suffer. We have permission to be trivial and profound; we can wonder what to make for dinner while our hearts feel the weight of disaster. We are capable of doing this, if we will but allow ourselves to be with paradox.

As for myself, this is a good year to appreciate complexity, to relax my desire to control events, and to accept contradictions. It’s also an ideal time to make more art, savor more food, nurture more plants, read more books, and talk more often with “my peoples” — one moment, one day, one season at a time. To those of you who have written me in the past month with your heartfelt wishes, please know that I have held them close. I’m so grateful you are out there, faithfully checking in. It’s good to be back.

Beaming and Scrolling

I am so proud of and pleased for my Other Half. Last year he released a beta version of software designed to enable Apple laptop users to use the trackpad as a “scrollpad.” After extensive testing, he released it this morning as shareware. Apparently he has many happy customers, because orders keep rolling in.

He was also just featured in the Mac Gems Weblog at Macworld. The review was complimentary and awarded a score of 4.5 mice out of 5. An excerpt from the review:

Earlier today, Raging Menace officially released SideTrack 1.0. The first non-beta version of this excellent utility is reasonably priced ($15) and supports the following trackpad features:

  • Using the left or right edge of the trackpad for scrolling up/down.
  • Using the top or bottom edge of the trackpad for scrolling left/right.
  • Using the trackpad button as a standard mouse click or a control/right-click.
  • Mapping a “tap” on the trackpad as a standard mouse click, a click-drag, or a control/right-click.
  • Mapping the corners of the trackpad to either particular mouse buttons or keyboard shortcuts—tap the corner to execute the action.
  • The standard trackpad preferences: tracking speed, double-click speed, etc.
  • Impressive trackpad calibration and input “filtering” options that help prevent accidental actions.

    –Dan Frakes, Mac Gems Weblog

I use it and find it immensely helpful. The one time my beta version expired, I felt lost and hindered; I reflexively tried to scroll and didn’t have the capability anymore (until I downloaded the new version). If you’re a Mac laptop user and are interested in this nifty little product, visit Raging Menace and click on the link for Side Track 1.0. Happy scrolling!

The Abatement

Postings have waned since I started working last month. The job drastically reduces my time to read and cull material to quote here, as well as limits the time and energy for reflection, writing, and polishing original posts.

In addition, I am in the process of laying the foundation for my life coach practice. I’ve been reviewing the website and tweaking the content. I also need to create a structure for telecoaching. This is all time-intensive. I’m looking forward to this, though. I believe I’m where I need to be at this moment, and the clients who need me will find me.

I’ve also begun providing grief counseling to a client at The Centre for Living with Dying. This is intense work that stirs my insides into awareness and compassion, makes me a bit more reflective about life. I love this work. I think that this, counterbalanced by the coaching, will make a good blend of projects for me. Throw in continued hours at the bookstore, and it’s a happy situation.

In the meantime, there are holidays coming, which I like to celebrate, and I am preparing get married shortly after the new year. It’s a small wedding — an elopement to a romantic place and then a trip down the coast — but even so, there are some logistics involved.

So time is a factor. Bear with me, please. Hopefully I’ll develop a rhythm that includes regular posting.