a weekend approaches….

 and is full of promise….

have i mentioned lately how nice it is to have ac? everyone in the house says we should have done this ages ago. i tend to agree, i guess i just thought it was too expensive before. it wasn’t that bad though, with the window units. we still need to do something about the top floor of the house, but i think if we put ventilation fans in the attic and do a larger evaporative cooler for the upstairs rooms, we should be able to cool the whole house. next summer for that one….don’t have the money for it right now and i think it’s going to take a bit more skill than we have between us as i think we have to cut holes in our house to get the ventilation fan’s done =) if the little energy star thing is correct, the average annual operating cost is only $45. i think i was most worried about increased energy bills, but running the small ac units couldn’t be much more expensive than running fans 24/7. i will let you know when i get my bill, which is generally always over $200/month anyway because of the sheer number of people in our house (7).

saw my girl last night and everything is good there. i know this is stupid, but i wanted to see if anything would change in her behavior towards me after we were intimate. i was cautious because i didn’t need her to suddenly become demanding or clingy. she’s done fabulous though, and it’s been really nice. we have sort of naturally wanted to be together a little more, but we seem to have come to a good place in our relationship and boundaries and life is good. she asked me to take her downtown for hot august nights, which is this huge classic car show. to be honest, i abhor being anywhere near town when this event is going on because there are just so many people, traffic is a nightmare, and there are so many street closures that going anywhere is hideous, but i will overcome to show her what it’s like. a couple of years ago, we went to the free concert in sparks, the town next to us and saw the village people. THAT was a good time! maybe there’s something that like which will be fun we can do.

i did something kind of mean, though. i had asked her if she was interested in having a kitty from our litter and she said she just wasn’t sure. then i asked her if she wanted one that was black and white or tiger striped and she said she couldn’t decide. well, i thought maybe if she saw them, she would be able to choose. i never dreamed that she would keep them both, i thought maybe her best friend would take one, but last night, i took them both to her house and she fell in love with them. she already has two cats who are siamese cross kitties and she spoils them rotten. i know they will have a great home with her and i will get to see them still, often. i think it’s kind of mean because i had a feeling if she saw how cute they were, she wouldn’t be able to resist and i was right =) but at least my kitties have a good home, now =) and they are with my girl.

i am feeling at a good place now. in some respects, i am going "wow, i am there. i have what i have always wanted"….but of course, i still cause myself anxiety worrying about how she’s processing things or whether or not her behavior is gong to change, seeing if d is okay…making sure i am being sensitive to him because i know how much it hurt me when i didn’t think he was being that way towards me. but i have decided that if someone i am involved with’s needs aren’t being met, it’s their responsibility to tell me, not my responsibility to spend my life walking on egg shells trying to anticipate everyone else’s needs and act accordingly to try to save anyone else from pain. that takes A LOT of work and a lot of energy. i didn’t even really realize i was doing that until i was typing all this out, but that’s been it. it’s almost sapped the joy out of it worrying where everyone else was with this. no more! i need to enjoy things more! shit, this is my life!

i have more to write, but think that i will do it a little later. my weekend is going to be heinously busy as i seem to have gotten myself wrapped up in yet another community project where i am needed, and it’s a blast, but it makes for busy times for the next few weeks.

take care all, have a great weekend, and remember to see the beauty. it’s there, you just have to look for it.

peace.

what a tangled web we weave….

so the confusion of the last entry is largely over, and much has happened since that time.

the basic crux of the situation is as follows:

i am sometimes a flaky, judgmental bitch. there’s no other conclusion that i can come to, and recent events have proven it. it’s time for brutal honesty, and the only place left that i can hide from people that know me in the real world, with very few exceptions is here =)

there i was, living my little existence on this message board for married women who love women. pretty cool, right? everyone who’s read me for any length of time knows how i frequently whine about the absence of the presence of a lady in my life. i long, i commiserate, i pontificate, what must seem like endlessly to some of you =)

so, in a truly bizarre twist of events, i ended up on yahoo personals, where i made an add probably two years ago. the thing is, i assumed if someone sent you a message, it went to your yahoo email. well, no, that would be too easy. and too clean and nice and neat. so there’s this whole other messaging thing that you do with yahoo, which is, like, a personal message or something. at any rate, it has a different inbox and is attached to your personals account, i guess. so waaaay back in march, i noticed that i had a message there, but i never knew how to get to it. i finally get to it, and it’s from this woman who’s a single lesbian. red flags immediately go up for me because i don’t want to meet or fall in love with anyone who’s going to try to convince me to leave my husband. we exchange a few emails, and that’s about it. between her busy life and my busy life, we never really hook up.

then, out of the blue, i hear from her again. seems she had some similar communication issue with yahoo, was in the process of moving and had her own life drama going on, but she was interested in us talking more. we chat on yahoo for a few days, and before we decide to meet, i need to tell her that i am married. i do, and she says something about still wanting to be friends and i sort of write her off as a romantic possibility because she basically gives me the impression that as soon as she finds a "real" girlfriend, even if she’s sleeping with me, she will break up with me for this chance at "permanent happiness". we do meet, and there are some things about her that are somewhat off-putting, but not absolute deal-breakers.

at the same time that this is happening, i had been toying with the idea of someone on the message board and had recently expressed an interest there too. that interest was returned, and another dialogue started up. she lives in the bay area of california, and she is educated, has small children and a husband too, which she doesn’t want to divorce either. my first thought is that i should be more serious about pursuing the person from the message board because she’s educated, she belongs to the same support system i do, she’s smart, and fun, and it would just be better. there are a million other reasons this was a REALLY BAD IDEA, but i just ignored those, because it wasn’t convenient to see them at the time =)

then, i go to california, near this person, for another reason, and she says she wants to meet up with me. we make a plan to have lunch and we are all flirty and everything, but then when we meet up, she is, like painfully shy. like, not just shy, but afraid to say anything, long spans of awkward silence shy. i think "okay, no big deal, no connection there." but then, when i get home, she’s all "i can’t believe what an idiot i was! i should have been more talkative, i should have told you more, we should have laughed more, blah de blah"

enter this opportunity to go to the midwest for a gathering of this message board. well, i have never been to the midwest and it’s something i should experience. i decide i am going to go for it, and ask this person if she wants to room with me. she says that she does, and i tell her that we can go as friends with no expectations. very cool, right?

the 13-18th of july was that trip, about which i posted previously regarding humidity, etc. except that the drama abounded. while we were in illinois, i knew the board person had an ex, but she was singing the "woe is me" about how she was so jilted and felt so used by this person and didn’t want to be part of her harem because she is like a poly slut and had intended to meet up with at least one other person at this retreat. funny thing, though, when we all got there, she totally was falling all over this chick. now, i am not the jealous type and we were just friends right? it was just kind of icky and a not-so-nice display considering she had been flirting and whispering sweet nothings to me prior to the trip. at one point, someone else who liked the ex came to the gathering, and essentially propositioned her, but the ex got freaked out, i guess and said she was icky or that didn’t happen or something. i confronted my friend and she completely came to the defense of her ex and i was like "oh man, i can see the writing on the wall with this one…this will not be good for me to continue at all" and i basically stopped any but the most courteous interactions with her. add to this that the lady i am rooming with finds out THE DAY that she is leaving that she is diabetic, and has to deal with that the first few days of the trip, too. gak!

in one of the most bizarre twists of this whole weekend and adventure, while i was in our room, laying on my bed enjoying the nice air-conditioning, i get a phone call. someone says "hi" i say, "hi" she says "you don’t know who this is, do you?" i say "not a fucking clue" she says "it’ s!" oh great…my ex who moved away to the extreme southern part of the state and your moving back and want to get together?!?! WONDERFUL……ugggh.

i come back home. since my roomie had been falling all over her ex, i basically stopped all but the most polite interacting with her, and when she leaves, a day before me, i hear not a word from her. no "how are you managing?" no "i made it home safe" or "i am in my connecting city"….none of that…dead silence, when before the trip, we had kept in almost constant contact with each other. i finally texted her just because it’s polite to ask someone you were travelling with if they got home okay and i get a response that’s curt and indicates she has.

fast forward about four or five days and i have heard nothing from her. not a single word. she finally sends this lame ass email saying she’s sorry if she frustrated me in any way, but it was a really emotional weekend for her. in the mean time, the drama with the local lady has severely lessened, we have continued to see each other casually, but hadn’t slept with each other yet, and she is not respecting my boundaries and my other relationship. life is good with her and i am beginning to think to myself "what an ass you are…..to think that someone who is educated would be someone better for you because they have that education. it doesn’t matter that they are also socially catatonic, have small children that you don’t really want to deal with and are seriously rebounding from a one-sided relationship, you ignored all that" and i did.

andnow i’m not.

saw the local lady last friday, but in the days before that, i let her know how much i appreciated her changes in behavior for me, her patience, and how sweet she has been to me.

gave her a present.

and now, we are together.

and life is feeling more good.

more balanced.

gentle, soft, and fabulous.

i am fond of her.

and that’s all for now.

*whew* what a ride this has been. can’t wait to see where we go next =P

peace. 

midwest humidity….

what an enigma. i never understood until being here that air could be oppressive. i have seen it be oppressive with heat before, but even that is not the soaking oppression of the moisture that is in the air here. i am in galena illinois for another night, then chicago for a day and then home. i came here to go to a retreat for the board that i am involved in. i came with someone i thought might be a relationship possibility, but that’s not going to happen. they say that when one door closes, another opens, and so, of course, still on this trip, me ex from last year called me. what a strange odyssey this whole, strange trip has been =) it’s also made me look differently at the local woman. feast or famine, my cup runneth over and what the hell do i want, anyway?

right now, i have no earthly idea.

peace.

playa-fied

 wow, what an amazing weekend i had! it was SO COOL to be around people that i haven’t seen for almost a year. the more i think about the entire "burning man" experience, the more i believe what a unique and amazing event it is and to be a part of it makes me proud, humble, and awed. it’s so odd not to see someone for a year, and then just come together around this commonality called rangering, and get to catch up on all of the last year, pick up a friendship as though no time has passed…because with burning man, time seems to pass based on what happens between events =)

i had an interview with the director for a sub-team of the rangers that i want to be a part of. it went well, i think. they have a lot of attorney’s who work as part of the team, and they are moving towards having fewer attorney’s and more laypeople. that would be me =) i guess they have some more interviews to do, then will all get together and let us know who the selectees are. i am hopeful, but won’t be crushed if it doesn’t happen. it doesn’t hurt to try =)

there were some communication issues with d and i, which always seems to be the case. i guess if we lived in isolation where we only interacted with each other it might not happen, but when you add other people into the mix, things always get messed up. i know this whole process i have been going through is part of the mercury retrograde thing, and in some ways that makes it easier, but in some ways, it does not. it’s mostly my own stuff that i am still working through. he is inifinitely patient with me and for that i am grateful. i guess we put up with each other’s shit well. i really do need to get over myself, somewhat.

saturday night, we went to the hot springs and it was really cool. i think there were about a baker’s dozen of us at the springs, laughing and playing and being drunk (some of us, i was not one, although i did have some yummy plum wine), swimming and generally being together. the hot springs are near railroad tracks and when a train goes by, it ramps up the geothermal activity that makes the water warm there, making it more bubbly and hot, closer to the tracks. then, if you don’t want super hot water, you just move farther from the tracks, and it gets cooler. neat place, anyway.

also true to mercury being retrograde, the ride home last night turned into a bizarre odyssey of mishaps that i hope are all done now and not the harbinger of things to come. not far after leaving the playa, we blew a tire on the motor home. when the tire blew, it knocked the cap off one of the water holding tanks so we had to stop and empty the tanks the rest of the way and then decide what to do. i guess the person who remodeled the motor home couldn’t have done much testing with it because the boards they had over the wheel wells rub the tires if you go over a large bump or something. this is what tore the tire apart. we probably spent an hour on the side of the road there, then we got on our way again, now going very slow because of the bad tire (there are two on that side) and a little farther down the road, the motor home started to run out of gas. i told d that i thought the generator took more energy than he though in terms of fuel, i suppose now he believes me =) so, what we had to do was take part of the gas tank on the truck apart so that we could access it directly in order to siphon gas from it to put in the motor home =) we eventually made it home, short one tire and rolling in on fumes from the gas tank, but we made it =) i think that d was pretty stressed, but i just kept my mouth shut and waited for him to tell me what he needed in order to make some decisions about how we were going to deal with our situation. i can help, but he is the mechanically inclined one, so i generally defer to him in these types of things.

i got to connect with the lady who helped me braid my hair last year, and she is going to talk to her so to see if they can come a day or two early and we can do hair. yay, hair!! i am still thinking of a color scheme i want. i need to order hair. i can’t believe it’s only six weeks to burning man!!!

peace.

another weekend, son, and “munich”

i feel kind of bad for my poor son. he’s not having a very good time in alaska at all. i spoke to him several times on the phone yesterday and he has come to the conclusion that it would have served him better to have stayed home and done survey work here with the job he normally has. when he talked to the guys who did it before, it sounds like they had really cool guys to hang out with, and chris doesn’t really get along with the guys he’s with. i mean, they don’t NOT get along, but they all know each other already and so he’s sort of like the perpetual outsider. this is an odd place for him to be because he’s used to being the center of attention and being surrounded by people who love him for who he is. he hasn’t been the outsider for a long time. but, he is finding good ways of dealing with things. he called his uncle, d’s brother and he works all weekend, and then there’s another friend in alaska, but when he tried to call them, they are out of town for the holiday. so, basically, he’s really lonely. i feel for him. but i have also been there for him, too. i am unsure what he would do if he didn’t have me to talk to. i can look stuff up on the internet for him….yesterday we sent him to the alaska zoo, which he said was kind of sad, but at least it was something to do. he will be home in another six weeks, though, so it’s all good.

i am at work right now, and it’s looking pretty deserted here about now. i actually work in a converted apartment in the back from the main building where everyone else works, and i am the only one here. it’s quiet and a little creepy, but not too bad. i could be getting lots done, but why would i do that when i can be here?!?!?! hahaha

this weekend was quiet in the extreme. i even cooked this weekend, which is a rarity these days. we have bbq’d the last few days and it’s been fun. it doesn’t heat the house up, and i get to have fun cooking. it’s funny, when you have to do it all the time, it’s drudgery, but when you don’t, it sort of becomes an adventure.

last night d and i watched the movie "munich" about the killing of the israeli athletes at the 1972 munich olympics and the subsequent response by the israeli government to eliminate those suspected of being involved in planning the attack. i studied this situation in a "political violence and terrorism" class i took, unique in it’s own right because it was taught by a jewish man who has been a visiting scholar at the university of jerusalem. it brought up many questions for me. do oppressed people know they are oppressed? what is the human obsession with having a "place"? what is a country really, except a geographical area governed by a collective of people who all live there at the time the country is formed. i can’t really understand the plight of either the palestinian people or the israeli people because i have never been either of those things. my country is a melting pot and i have chosen to take on it’s more liberal aspects in my own values in thinking people should be valued based on their character, but that becomes more and more muddied if you look at the characters from this film. was the israeli musad who did the killing a counter-terrorrist or a hero? it ruined his life, that is safe to say…killing those people. i think looking at these situations doesn’t really present any solid answers, it just brings up more questions for me. i don’t understand how people can do those things to other human beings. interesting times we live in…..

i think that’s all for right now.

peace.