And I will fall in love again

Wow. Today I had to do something that hit me really hard. I had to say goodbye to Frank. I know it was the right thing to do but it was still really hard. I said I wanted to clear out all the roommates but this is not what I meant. If you're not in a good place, you might want to stop reading now...

Frank was a rescue dog. He came from the Mastif Rescue center here. Big fat head, stubby legs, and a tongue that seemed like it was 4 feet long. We think he was about 3 when I got him. He had been abused in his life and really didn't like guys except for a couple of my friends. He didn't like cats or small dogs but larger dogs he was good with. We don't know his real name but the rescue place called him Frank. He didn't answer to Frank well but he knew what leashes were for and how to sit and stay, more or less :). He was all about going for a walk/drag around the neighborhood... He loved to ride in the car. Front seat or backseat, he was happy. The first time I stuffed him through the new dog door he looked at me like he "couldn't believe you would be so mean as to stuff me through... hey wait a minute, I'm outside! This is magic!" then he ran back and forth through the door like a million times.

He was all about guarding me from the "evil" roommates. If the fireman that lived with me got home before I did, Frank would hide in his corner under the stairs. Once I got home, he'd go bark at the fireman three times, then run outside to bark at him three more times under the window to his room, then run back in to do it several more times. At 11pm, midnight, and 1am before I'd put him in his crate and he'd relax. He did that with all the roommates over time!

He had a darling trot that says "I have something that I probably shouldn't but I'm taking it outside now, you can't see me!" He was all about eating things that crunched. Like empty soda bottles. Or train cars. Or noodles. He loved dried noodles. One day he bit into a box that looked like a noodle box. A big cloud of oatmeal formed around his head. He was not pleased. He walked away from the cloud and never ate another noodle box :)

I started taking him for drives over to my buddy's house on the east side of town. We had thought that maybe Frank was bored at my house and needed some friends so I brought him over weekly or so. We stayed there during the Waldo Canyon fire evacuation and when I went to California a couple weeks ago, Frank stayed with them. Monday we went to my buddy's house and Frank ran around with the dogs there in the big back yard. While we were there, he got into the food bin with one of the others and together they ate several days worth of food! I called my buddy the next day to say that Frank had surprisingly not eaten anything that night. We all laughed about "The Lummox" still being full.
The next day he still hadn't eaten or drank anything. And he was walking really strangly. He didn't run out the dogdoor to see me when I got home or jump up on the bed when we went to bed but rather sat on the floor near the bed. His walking deteriorated over the next couple days and I thought wow, I guess we need to visit the vet. I offered him some hot dogs this morning and he scarfed them down which confused me even more because I still thought he wasn't eating cause he was full--or something. I got him a cup of water which he drank from my hand. It was then that I realized he wasn't eating because he couldn't get down to the food bowls on the floor so I but them on a box so he could eat while sitting there. He drank most of the water I offered. (but the yucky dry food was no fun after having hot dogs, and we all know Frank was all about the weiners!)

I tried to carry him out to the car so we could go to the vet but he squirmed and jumped down (kinda). I got his leash out and he was all excited. He drug himself out to the car. I put him in the back seat. He drug himself into the vet's office. She did some tests and then told me that he was likely having a problem common to his breed, a slipped disk. They could send me somewhere for surgery but as fast as he had deteriorated, it was likely he would never walk properly again, or be able to potty by himself.
My little voice had warned me this morning that this was likely but I couldn't believe it. I broke down and cried. Frank had been with me less than a year and I was already being asked to put him down. I called my buddy and while I talked to him, I realized that it would be best for Frank if I let him go. I held him while they injected him with the drug to make him rest. I told him he was the guy I liked sleeping with the most. He was shaking, so was I. He licked me once more, then they injected him with the other drug. Before the plunger completed, he was gone.

When I got to class tonight, I saw this post from a friend who attributed it to Frank. It so looks like my bed does! Thankfully there haven't been many student questions tonight cause they're working on projects and I'm not really in the Now I suppose.

I guess Frank went out doing what he wanted to do, take a walk and go for a drive. We should all be so lucky.
So say we all!

Title reference: LeAnn Rimes "One Way Ticket" This song was the first song on the radio after I got back in my car at the vet's. I turned the radio off :)

Happy Yule everyone

This is something that a close & dear friend shared with me today that touched my heart. I wanted to share it with a couple of my fellow Pagans, Druids, & Christian friends alike, but also with a select few other friends that I knew would appreciate its message. :) I hope you like it, and that it brings meaning & joy to you. :)



Blessed Yule/Alban Arthan, Happy Winter Solstice, & Merry Christmas. :)



" A Midwinter Prayer"

-from The Celtic Wheel of the Year by Tess Ward



From the rising of the midwinter sun to its setting,

Scatter the darkness with the light of your love, O Shining One.

Make me short on mean thoughts, long on offering words of comfort.

Make me short on being driven, long on paying attention.

Make me short on focusing only on my own, long on looking beyond.

Make me short on obsessive lists, long on spontaneous acts of kindness,

Make me short on mindless activity, long on time to reflect.

Make me short on tradition as a habit, long on rediscovery and re-owning.

Make me short on rushing a tiring, long on walking and wondering.

Make me short on false, festive jollity, long on stilling and rooted joy.

Make me short on guilt, long on being merciful to myself.

Make me short on being overwhelmed, long on peaceableness as I set forth this day.

Happy Yule everyone

This is something that a close & dear friend shared with me today that touched my heart. I wanted to share it with a couple of my fellow Pagans, Druids, & Christian friends alike, but also with a select few other friends that I knew would appreciate its message. :) I hope you like it, and that it brings meaning & joy to you. :)



Blessed Yule/Alban Arthan, Happy Winter Solstice, & Merry Christmas. :)



" A Midwinter Prayer"

-from The Celtic Wheel of the Year by Tess Ward



From the rising of the midwinter sun to its setting,

Scatter the darkness with the light of your love, O Shining One.

Make me short on mean thoughts, long on offering words of comfort.

Make me short on being driven, long on paying attention.

Make me short on focusing only on my own, long on looking beyond.

Make me short on obsessive lists, long on spontaneous acts of kindness,

Make me short on mindless activity, long on time to reflect.

Make me short on tradition as a habit, long on rediscovery and re-owning.

Make me short on rushing a tiring, long on walking and wondering.

Make me short on false, festive jollity, long on stilling and rooted joy.

Make me short on guilt, long on being merciful to myself.

Make me short on being overwhelmed, long on peaceableness as I set forth this day.

If I Only Had a Brain...

I don't normally respond to things like the following. But I'll include this mostly intact. I don't care if the details are "true" but rather want to think about what this would mean if it were. I grew up in Los Angeles so having an "earthquake preparedness" bag was something we learned at an early time. Back in the day, we were taught to protect ourselves from potentially falling building material and household goods. We were told by our parents where to meet if "something happened." I don't know if we had good plans. I don't know how much these preparations would have helped since, thankfully, I've never had to survive a large scale disaster.

And nowadays, living in Colorado, I'm way out of practice. And I'm far away from my "family" who I would need to reunite with. If I had a family, what would we do if we had to evacuate the school? Where would we go to make sure everyone was OK?

We had an emergency evacuation drill at work recently. I'm on the safety committee. We got everyone outside in a reasonable amount of time but it was amazing to watch how it worked. The building recently changed our exit doors because they added a new office to ours. Many of the people in my area demanded that we go out the old door even though a "better" door was available. So they waited in queue to go down a set of stairs into the new office area and all the new doorways instead of leaving through the new unobstructed doors. Odd. Think people!

Once outside they wanted to go to their cars and start them, which is technically a violation of our rules because of potential terrorist issues (potential bombs in the parking lot) but do they care? No. Not until something happens and they get hurt. Then they'll complain that they were "victimized" and look for someone to sue. I don't get this mentality. It used to be that Westerners were responsible for their own actions. What happened?

Anyway, let me show you a message I received in my email this morning:

Juval Aviv was the Israeli Agent upon whom the movie ' Munich ' was based. He was Golda Meir's bodyguard, and she appointed him to track down and bring to justice the Palestinian terrorists who took the Israeli athletes hostage and killed them during the Munich Olympic Games.
[snip]

Forget hijacking airplanes, because he says terrorists will NEVER try and hijack a plane again as they know the people onboard will never go down quietly again. Aviv believes our airport security is a joke -- that we have been reactionary rather than proactive in developing strategies that are truly effective.

For example:
1) Our airport technology is outdated. We look for metal, and the new explosives are made of plastic.

2) He talked about how some idiot tried to light his shoe on fire. Because of that, now everyone has to take off their shoes. A group of idiots tried to bring aboard liquid explosives. Now we can't bring liquids on board. He says he's waiting for some suicidal maniac to pour liquid explosive on his underwear; at which point, security will have us all traveling naked!
Every strategy we have is reactionary.

3) We only focus on security when people are heading to the gates.

Aviv says that if a terrorist attack targets airports in the future, they will target busy times on the front end of the airport when/where people are checking in. It would be easy for someone to take two suitcases of explosives, walk up to a busy check-in line, ask a person next to them to watch their bags for a minute while they run to the restroom or get a drink, and then detonate the bags BEFORE security even gets involved. In Israel , security checks bags BEFORE people can even ENTER the airport.
Aviv says the next terrorist attack here in America is imminent and will involve suicide bombers and non-suicide bombers in places where large groups of people congregate.
[snip]
Aviv says the terrorists who want to destroy America will not use sophisticated weapons. They like to use suicide as a front-line approach. It's cheap, it's easy, it's effective; and they have an infinite abundance of young militants more than willing to 'meet their destiny'.
He also says the next level of terrorists, over which America should be most concerned, will not be coming from abroad. But will be, instead, 'homegrown', having attended and been educated in our own schools and universities right here in the U.S. He says to look for 'students' who frequently travel back and forth to the Middle East . These young terrorists will be most dangerous because they will know our language and will fully understand the habits of Americans; but that we Americans won't know/understand a thing about them.
Aviv says that, as a people, Americans are unaware and uneducated about the terrorist threats we will inevitably face. America still has only a handful of Arabic and Farsi speaking people in our intelligence networks, and Aviv says it is critical that we change that fact SOON.
[snip]


Aviv also was concerned about the high number of children here in America who were in preschool and kindergarten after 9/11, who were 'lost' without parents being able to pick them up, and about our schools that had no plan in place to best care for the students until parents could get there. (In New York City , this was days, in some cases!)
He stresses the importance of having a plan, that's agreed upon within your family, of how to respond in the event of a terrorist emergency. He urges parents to contact their children's schools and demand that the schools too, develop plans of actions, just as they do in Israel .
Does your family know what to do if you can't contact one another by phone? Where would you gather in an emergency? He says we should all have a plan that is easy enough for even our youngest children to remember and follow.
[snip]

How will you communicate with your loved ones in the event you cannot speak to each other? You need to have a plan.

OK, that was long but... My personal opinion is that we, as Americans, get very caught up in our "trivial pursuits" like American Idol and Survivor and forget to ever look at larger things. Part of this is a testament to how safe it is here in the States that we don't have to worry about the things listed above. But, listening to talk radio for the last couple years has hurt my brain.

It looks like all the Talkers are doing is spouting their "world agenda" without ever looking at what it means. We label things as either Good Ideas (ours) or Terrible Ideas (anyone else's) which means we can never seriously talk about either idea and look for a way to successfully accomplish whatever we want to do. We're now using the same logic we used when talking about the former Soviet Russia (always evil, always dangerous,...) to talk about our neighbors. There's no way to make a system work if you declare that anything that is "not us" is evil and therefore to be ignored/destroyed. Our country was *founded* on the concept of bringing different groups of people together.
Maybe we need a radio talk show that talks about how to combine ideas or refute "dumb" ideas without resorting to name calling. Seriously. The only thing the "haters" can say about the new iPad is that it has a "stupid name"? Really? I don't think that's much of a leap from saying everything our President is doing is "Socialist" or that the "Feminazis" are attempting to do *blah*. What happened to reason? What happened to considered opinion? What happened to actually trying to solve things instead of just making snide comments?
It times like this that I wonder if Terrorists are our biggest problem...
Title Reference: Wizard of Oz - Soundtrack (2009 Remastered Edition)">

The Boys Are Back in Town

OK, I admit it. This is going to be a strange post. But this is the song in my head this morning. And it's all because Supernatural is back from its holiday break finally.



I've been thinking about Sam and Dean quite a bit over the last few months. I even put my hand to writing a couple fanfics. (ack!) And i think the most interesting aspect of the show so far was a throw-away line in one of their own Filk episodes where Sam and Dean met LARPing portrayals of themselves. (As a side note, I never even thought of doing this… who knew!)

In the episode, the LARP Dean tells Dean that Dean has missed the whole point of the "show." That is, the relationship between him and Sam… a person you know you would die to protect, and that he would die to protect you. Dean is clearly thinking about that as the episode ends, reflecting on how far the two have come over the years. Big thoughts for Dean who usually is more of a "in the now", "black and white" kind of guy.

I've been thinking about this, too. One of my beta readers for my fanfic said I was too "smoosh-ie" in my characterization in one of my stories (she said the other was spot-on) yet, this is the kind of relationship I want, so far as I can tell. I'd love to have someone who I could depend on utterly and who could depend on me. Someone I know well enough that we can do smack talk in earnest but not viciously. And on and on.

In fact I even added a line to my wish list for a lover that they be a cross between Dean Winchester and Leo (from Charmed)

My real life Dean, ironically named Sam, is more of the traditional Dean portrayal as opposed to the slash portrayals. He's a lot like Dean and I cherish time we spend together even if there isn't any "slash." We've been on a fair number of adventures over the years. He's caused me to grow in ways I would never have guessed when we started--and I think I've helped him "mature" in some ways he would not have suspected. (so there if you're reading this..) And I wouldn't trade any of our time together.

I haven't seen him much the last few months because I've been slammed at school and work. And now that we're not working together, I miss our drives to Roswell every weekend.

The Jetta may not be the Impala, but we certainly spent a lot of time together on the road. I think it may be time for a road trip…

(as a side note, one of the math joke sites I read happened to have this Venn diagram on it today, a perfect representation of the Supernatural Sam mindset)



image from http://thisisindexed.com/

Title Reference: Thin Lizzy Boys Are Back in Town: Live in Australia

I Will Be Victorious...

Happy 2010 everyone!

Thanks primarily to Wil Wheaton's epic posts concerning the Year in Review, here is mine. WHHHEEAAAATTTOOONNN!!

In the Chinese way of thinking, this has been the Year of the Ox, a year to say, "I Persevere." The past year has certainly offered us chances to persevere… and to come out victorious.

Some things haven't changed much.

The house is being remodeled. Still. There is hope. The new tub (with "swirling bubbles") is in and now the floor needs to be done and the trim. . . There is hope, if I persevere. :)

Beyond-Earth hasn't progressed very much this year. We did find a new CAD artist to fix one of our broken images. Other things are in the works and we'll see how they work out. Sam and I are looking at some energy-related projects to bring us in some money. Then we can fly again!

The house in Roswell still hasn't been repaired so we can sell it but steady progress is being made. And I feel like we're getting somewhere for a change. It's painful talking to the insurance people but I wonder if they do it on purpose so people we settle for whatever they offer. I have time. 'In for a penny, in for a pound' after all. Maybe I should cut my losses but we'll see--I'm making progress. I will be victorious :)

Speaking of that, my Messages From the Gods album (MFG, to the right) has grown dramatically. The most recent song from Muse is the theme for the re-imaging of "V". Uprising's message of "They will not control us/We will be victorious" seems like it's directly in counter-point to Baba O'Reilly (Teenage Wasteland) which says I "don't have to fight/to prove you're right" and yet… I think the Who song is more about picking your battles. I've backed off on a couple of things and refocused on a couple others. If I'm right, I will win :) I'll let you know, right here…

And speaking of "victorious," my quest for a boy friend continues. I have an interesting prospect at the moment (but I don't want to jinx it by mentioning more details yet) and I finally did something this year I've always wanted to do. I slept with someone on my birthday.

Sadly, RJ and I only slept together since his appendix had burst and we spent the night together in the hospital. It was really nice and relaxing and fairly romantic until the nurse came in and asked if I was RJ's Dad! Ack! He's not that young! :)

RJ went off to prison after that night for busting his parole by failing a drug test (sigh) and that was not the nay prison story for me this year. Mike (my stalker from back in the day) called one day just to say "Hi" and that he was thinking about me. Eyes widening, I asked where he was and found out he was still in the prison out east somewhere. And finally found out that he was there because he "accidentally" killed someone.

At Samhain, I got a reading asking about what to do with these people from my past showing up again. The reading was interesting, the cards alternated between male and female and every card had something to do with fertility -- and every one of them was in opposition. No pressure or anything.

But perhaps it was a sign to spend more time on creative endeavors. I've started working on my book again. And the website that will support it. The site isn't published yet though there is a lot of work completed on it and on the Stone Reaches site. And Ashok and I have started developing an iPhone app which we're hoping to release soon.

I have lots of projects going :) Some of them should become "profitable" in the near future--stay tuned…

Title Reference: Muse, Uprising

Yep, I'm a Giver :)

Happy Happy Everyone!