Sometimes I appreciate happiness...

Today it’s simple…simply a crispy cold round red radish dipped in a bit of freshly ground French grey sea salt…heaven, pure heaven.  I’m happy! Emerging out of the depths of dark misery into the expanse of sunshine flooding my soul reminds me once again that a reasonably good quality of life should never, ever be taken for granted.

I’m always out there…you know…living life and being peppered more oft than not with those moments when it would have been more advantageous to have zagged instead of zigged.  With each mishap there is eventually, and I do mean eveeeeeeentually, a moment in time when the realization that I have crossed over that threshold of miserable to hopeful sets my mind dancing in quiet celebration.  I’m at that place now; that place where optimism steps in.

While I may be pragmatic at times,

and

out to lunch at other times,

one thing is always certain -

coffee and dessert will cure anything,

even if only for an hour;

but oh...

what a lovely hour that will be.

Enjoy!

The Lemon Grinder

The problem with squeezing lots of lemons is the thousand spoonfuls of sugar needed to make that tooth enamel melting product a drinkable concoction.  All those left over lemon carcasses create the lumpiest bed I have ever been unfortunate enough to lie in.  Woe is that grey, white and orange looney tunes spitfire of a sweetheart kitty who tries to nap with me at midnight, only to desert me 5 minutes later for her cozier than perfection heated cat bed wrapped in pure padded luxury and totally lemon carcass free.   She’s able to do that, as she has a great support system in me.  I seem not to be able to do that as I have a pathetic support system of only me.  Trying to be at that strength it takes to be strong for myself wears me a little bit thin most times lately.

Life seems to take on the appearance of wanting to run right over the top of me and leave me trampled in its wake.  I’m fighting back, but it's a solitary fight that’s a mountain of work.  I should have could be dredged up from the past, but I’m sticking to the present time with a vengeance…it’s all I can hold on to these days.  My body seems to be a mass of problems that all reached the same point at the same time, cascading over the edge into the massive abyss of pure pain only relieved by morphine in its infancy and now I travel in and out of good, better, worse; over and over…two steps forward…one step back…one step forward, two steps back…physical therapy…my good friend…my bad friend…my only friend.  Pathetic, but I’ll survive.  I always do.

Dumped by one of my best friends...okay, so they actually weren’t one of my best friends after all...I guess it was just the case of a casual acquaintance wolf dressed up in a best friend sheep's clothing :(  It happened at my lowest point of misery when I was on morphine…the barrage of attacks one after another, after another of everything that was wrong with me in this person’s eyes.  I could only listen and try to take it all in as they exited out of my life forever, leaving me a hope you get well soon greeting card I found the next morning.  I burned it.  I tried to burn all the years of that relationship out of my brain, but of course, the material stuff goes up in smoke while the memory stuff goes on for what seems like forever. 

Life…isn’t it grand!  It’s all we have, so I embrace it with both arms and hang on tenaciously for the journey.

         

Tell me again how much you love me.

Half full, half empty, or just half a glass?  I straddle that fence, stuck somewhere in-between naughty and nice.  Dear Santa...I’ve been a bit more nice than naughty!  Doesn't that count?

Vic's still in Iraq destroying things with a laser cutter, a very tall crane, a box cutter and a pair of scissors.  He's an extremely resourceful individual.  The man everyone can always count on.

We're one cat less, and skitzo kitty calico has been doing a happy dance since her tormentor, the little black terror, poofed out of her life.  I’m a bit sad, she’s a lot glad.  She’s a team player if food isn’t involved, and my lap loving moocher. 

I've had a setback with my back, and have developed a very close relationship with my physical therapist and pain.  I'm looking forward to retiring and starting a new chapter in my life.  Vic told me to say that :)

The yard is looking great if you’re near sighted and never owned glasses.  We did have an arborist work on all the trees to define their outline from each other, and cut down on the chaotic intermingling they created.  The bit of extra sunlight is lovely. 

Front porch has new cedar railings to keep visitors from plummeting into the garden, which is a good thing.  Repair crew trampled the garden to smithereens, which is a bad thing :(  Now it's my thing to fix it all.

A bit vague, but that’s my style today.  No photos, as my smart phone is still a little bit smarter than me.  I’m thinking of Christmas, 'cause if I don’t it will fade into oblivion before it even starts, as it did last year.     

Perched on my stack of pillows staring into the emptiness of this computer screen, I’m having a difficult time trying to squeeze out a few words of awesome :( Overstuffed on homemade deep-dish pumpkin pie piled high with mounds of real whipped cream, I've just cut another smaller piece to savor with a hot steaming cup of coffee laced with lovely cream.  Holidays…when one can be a little pig with blessings...love it!

Lacey’s tucked under the skirted hassock dreaming of roasted mice lined up in a row.  Dustin’s snoozing in his fleecy cave bed pretending he’s perched on the highest cat tree on the highest mountain.  Zoe’s traded in her dark world of under-beds for queen of bed-top snoozing.  Charlotte and Austin still occupy my studio, but a Let's All Just Get Along Together reintroduction with Lacey is being planned to occur by the 25th of December.  Might require a small miracle, but isn’t that what Christmas is all about?  Keeping fingers crossed.

May your dreams be sweet ones, may your friends be true, may your homes be winter-warm and summer-cool, may your spirits soar with the eagles on high and nestle with the doves down low, and may you tell those closest to you again and again just how much you really do love them.  

The Jamie Files - Tale 8 Conversations with a Cat

* Jamie has to have the last word on this blog.  Such a sweet pain-in-the-butt. *


What's up, pesty cakes?

I'd rather tell you what's down, meany cakes.

Let's not get too feisty, smarty cakes.

@#$%!  Okay, BABY cakes.

Watch it!  Only one person calls me that...lovingly.

All you say to me is NO, no, NO, no, NO, no, NO, NO, NO!

No one else is complaining about that short sweet word they all must learn to obey.

Well, I am.  I want you to say Yes! Yes! Yes!

Yes???  Where did you hear of that word?

When you tell that man who visits here long times apart what you desire, and he says "yes, dear" and you do whatever you want.

No other cat has ever protested before.

I'm not like any other cat.

Yes, you're right.  That is so very true.  There!  Now I've told you "yes".

:(  That's not what I meant.

I though you told me cats don't do smiley's and frowny's.

:(   :(   :( 

Okay - "no" is the law and "yes" is the answer to a question, maybe.  So ask me a question that requires the law laid down or affirmation granted...kitty dearest.

???  Would you please say that in cat English. 

Ask me something.

Do you love me, mommy dearest?

I would do anything for you.

Do you love me?

I stuff good eats in one end and trash collect what comes out the other end.  I care about you greatly, my little headache.

Do you love me?

I love you, sort of sometimes...anyway, ask or say something to me that I can answer yes to more easily.

May I perch on the counter in the kitchen just once a day, pretty please; so I can jump on sweet Lacey when she walks by and kick the shit out of her?

NO!  and where did you learn that s word?

It's the best word I've learned from you, mommy precious...short, sweet and to the point.

:(  My, how you've grown.

May I perch on the counter in the kitchen just once a day, pretty please; so I can see where sweet Lacey goes, jump on her later and kick all that calico fur off her?

:(  You're just not getting it.  There's no way I'm going to say "yes" to something so negative, you little woolly bully.

:(  ?!?!?!?  May I perch on the counter in the kitchen just once a day, pretty please; so I can meditate while I wait for you to feed me extra spinach with my canned food, and totally be all that you want me to be?

Of course, you can...sweet Jamie.  See that wasn't so bad, was it?

Thank you, best-est mommy in all the world.  I hope that old Popeye movie was right.  Looking forward to getting stronger and kicking that loony calico all the way to the moon :) 

:'( 

Crash and Burn

I seem to be too bored with this endeavor to continue.  Blogging, never quite what I had envisioned it would be, has been a lonely disappointment for me in the fight to be popular, semi-popular, hardly popular, and downright sucks non-popular.    I will always be grateful for the early years that eventually snowballed into a nice little show of followers for all too short a time, and mourn the latter years when hardly any of my favorites escaped the black-hole of oblivion.  I leave this experience as I had entered it...alone and talking to myself.

Life in the Passing Lane

Life passing me by...
me passing life by -
two entities racing in the same direction
trying to overtake each other,
one is first then the other,
then the other is left in the dust
and reaches for the stars to pass first again.
First...last?



Does it even matter
in the battle to see who loses first
and who looses last?
Will I leave life nipping at my heels, 
or will life leave me running off a cliff
one horizon back?
Yesterday evaporates into tomorrow,
and today...well today is just another day.



What propels me, 
a person of modest accomplishments
to feel so unaccomplished - 
so off the radar of being cared about.
If I were the last person on earth
none of this would matter, I suppose...
but I'm the 1,000,000,000 plus person on the earth
and it still doesn't matter :(

I have a difficult time coming to terms with this issue,
this need to feel I matter...
One grain of sand in an ocean of sandy grains...
pinched up by a pair of tweezers
and released into a flushing commode.
Will it be missed?  Will it?
Is each day to be maxed out,
as the end is just that...THE END?



Heaven...hell...neither?
A treasure trove of beliefs -
all lay claim as the right one,
all proclaim others the wrong one.
We seem to need something more than death -
something more than death at the end of our life
to justify living it at all.
We want more than just a beginning and an ending.

Why? 

Isn't the gift of breathing enough?

Thoughts...like dust in a sunbeam

It’s amazingly cold outside.  Its winter in middle Tennessee, but the spirit of Christmas present and its false promise of an ultra-super hallelujah beginning of spring last week is still laughing off in the distance.  I was thinking of gardening then, and now I’m back to hibernating in my warm woolly sweater and sipping from a cup of steamy hot coffee laced with a bit of cream, while through the glass I watch a downy woodpecker secure his place among the cardinals at the feeder despite a little harassment from the English sparrows.

My day hasn’t been as poetically descriptive as it perhaps could be, as the super practical defect in me has exploded into action as I cruse the internet on a never-ending quest to set my life up to handle any calamity weather or humans can bestow upon my existence.  Being of sound mind, I'm aware my home, the Earth, is on a constant quest to thin out the population if I relax when I should have reacted.

This planet…always in flux with hurricanes, tornadoes, straight-line winds, flash floods, slow floods, earthquakes, mud slides, rock slides, sleet, snow, and freezing rains…can shut off electricity in an instant.  A home that drops down to 30 degrees inside while it is an ice storm outside is indeed a home that needs to be reckoned with smartly.

It’s been a difficult battle within myself to even understand what actually is real and what is true.  A few years ago after several months with a new bible study group, a rude awakening threw me into a tailspin that I haven’t been able to recover from since.  Women are subservient to men.  If I am a Christian, then I believe women are subservient to men.  I can’t agree to that or be that.  It’s never going to happen.

And what about souls?  That animals are soulless and death is the end, opens up an endless succession of questions about myself.  It is not logical that only humans have souls, although it is indeed logical to believe that only humans are capable of corrupting their souls to the max.

And what about the real reality of creation.  Life in its simplest explanation is a mammoth food chain from the mightiest to the tiniest.  All procreate to populate the earth and all destroy or are destroyed to keep the cycle from careening out of control.

At a Neil deGrasse Tyson program last November, he talked about the camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft being turned back towards Earth and capturing a photo of Saturn’s rings and Earth…the pale blue dot.  A pale blue dot from Saturn…non-existent from twice the distance.  Humbling, isn’t it…we who think we are so important in the realm of all that exists.

“Look again at that dot.  That's here.  That's home.  That's us.

On it everyone you love,

everyone you know,

everyone you ever heard of,

every human being who ever was,

lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering,

thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines,

every hunter and forager,

every hero and coward,

every creator and destroyer of civilization,

every king and peasant,

every young couple in love,

every mother and father,

hopeful child, inventor and explorer,

every teacher of morals,

every corrupt politician,

every "superstar,"

every "supreme leader," 

every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there --

 on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel

on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner,

how frequent their misunderstandings,

how eager they are to kill one another,

how fervent their hatreds.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors

so that, in glory and triumph,

they could become the momentary masters

of a fraction of a dot.

From Carl Sagan's 

"Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space."


.

Tired, I'm taking a break to think of simpler things while I live on that mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.  Take care.