update….

(Preserving the Open Diary history.)

okay. od opened an auto-dave draft of my last entry, so i had to make sure i didn’t write over that before i started this entry.

i am all sorts of messed up in the head right now.

first, my son is doing fine. he was a squad leader for the first couple of weeks, and then he wasn’t the squad leader anymore, but we’ve gotten some letters from him, and he seems to be doing well. the first letter he sent, made me cry. i am so proud of him…he says that many of the other guys write every night and he just doesn’t feel the need because i raised him to be strong, and that is certainly true. so, we shouldn’t take his lack of constant communication for lack of care, but for self-sufficiency. that made me very, very proud because that’s exactly how i take it. he is more verbal with his girlfriend because she needs to hear his words more than we do. his staying with us before he left was good for everyone. he says he feels closer to us than he has in years and i also feel that way. it’s alternately easy and hard to have grown-up children. i am happy that he is doing well and is self-sufficient. i know i have done my job…he credits me with perhaps more than i deserve, but i did raise him and i feel accomplished that he is a good person, for the most part.

another thing that happened about a week after my son left is that i started a new diet/eating program. i had been saying to myself for a long time that i wanted to do something structured…and i was getting flyers all the time for the center on metabolic studies here on campus, but they always talked about using our state ppo insurance health benefit for this, and i have the hmo health insurance, not the ppo one. so i said to myself, "the day i see my insurance offered on that program, i am going for it"…and it happened later the same week my son left. i called, they had an "orientation" session, and then i contacted my doctor to see what he thought. he asked me if this was something i really wanted to do, and i told him it was. he is also a friend, so he helped make sure i had all the papers signed, approvals done and such in time to be able to start the program the next week. my insurance is paying for everything except for the actual food…they give you everything you are supposed to eat.

so, this week will be my fourth week on this program. i’ve done well as far as the numbers on the scale go. not like, jaw-dropping good, but well enough…manageable even.

the thing that’s messing me up is all the mind-fucking that goes along with body image, weight loss, health. there’s so much negative connotation for me with this. on one hand, i don’t want to end up like my mom, and that’s the major reason i am doing this. another part of me likes who i am and says "fuck your preconceived notions of beauty". this all came about because my fire group got a "community member-at-large" and asked that person to talk to people in the larger community and see what those people thought; their perceptions of the fire group. what came back was a whole lot of ugliness. she said some people said we were only a group of fat, old, ugly members anymore, and some of them even said they had brought people to our event last year who ended up making fun of the people on the stage. part of me thinks these people are small-minded, but it still annoys me. and i’ve thought if some of us should step back because we are hurting the group. the issue is that the pretty people don’t participate anymore, for a variety of reasons. if it wasn’t for us old, ugly folks, some of the time, we wouldn’t have enough people to keep the show rolling, keep the gigs going, etc.

but this whole thing also plays into this whole complicated thing concerning my relationship with food. it’s all very twisted and dysfunctional, and it’s definitely making me think a lot about my motivations, the things that make me eat, and how i react to things. now, i am out of time…i will have to finish this later.

peace. 

piece and quiet...

wow.

there is so much to say, i am not even sure where to start. 

i suppose the place to start is with the thing that is uppermost in my mind right now. my son was supposed to leave for the army and bootcamp today. yesterday at about 10:30am, he got a call from the army saying "you have two hours to organize your life, we want you to leave today instead, be at the armory by 12:30pm". it was pretty stressful. his poor girlfriend did not even get a chance to say good bye to him because she's a college student so she was in classes and working yesterday. his mantra yesterday was "what a difference a day makes..." because there were many loose ends that needed to be tied up that will now be done by me and his dad. my baby now belongs to uncle sam and it's depressing as hell. truly. the good news is that i waited until after he was gone before i cried. it was actually when i saw his girlfriend and what a mess she was that i lost it. the rest of the day was colored with this sadness. i was supposed to go to a bellydance practice last night, but with all that was happening, by 5pm i was completely emotionally exhausted and just wanted to curl up into a ball somewhere and sleep. that tells me i was stressed!

in other news, little more than a week ago, i got my hair braided. i think i've mentioned in here that in june, i am going to paris. it will be my first time out of the united states and i am exceedingly excited. there is more to the story than i think i've written here, but that will be for another time. in the ensuing time, i have been paying for this trip, but i paid it off earlier this month! now, barring something catastrophic, i am going for sure! anyway, i don't really want to deal with international plugs and blowing up appliances and such, so i thought it might be easier just to braid my hair. so far so good, with a few exceptions. i, apparently, have a lot of hair, which means i have a lot of braids. i think i will ask her to make the braids a little larger next time because all this hair is HEAVY!! in general, though, i love it.

so, while i was getting my hair braided, the lady who does this for me is a foster parent. she currently has three, i think, under the age of five. one of them is SO adorable! he is the sweetest little boy and his chances for adoption are slim. he has a cleft pallette, and will require some more surgeries for that to be fixed and some other issues from his mother making poor choices before, during, and after her pregnancy with him. his name is noah. he is three. interacting with him made me realize how sad our system is. noah has some siblings, but none of the bio families want to take him because of his disabilities. the foster mom is afraid to take him because she knows he will have some medical challenges and her health care status is tenuous at best...adopting him could break her with medical bills. i thought to myself how sad that this little boy is going to be shuttled around a system that's so inadequate. what are his chances? i began to think perhaps i could help this kid. my kids are grown. he deserves better. i thought and thought about it. when i mentioned it to my husband, he accused me of looking for a replacement child because mine are grown and one was getting ready to leave at the time of the conversation. part of me wondered if i wanted a "do over". it would be very hard to "start over" and have a small child again. is this what i really want? then again, it seems almost selfish not to do this for this awesome little boy. i know i could handle his challenges. i just don't know. it would be amazing, and at the same time, do i want to go back to that place? he's 3, so there would be no diapers, but there would be day care, special ed services, iep's, and dealing with his other issues. too much? i just don't know. i am agonizing over this stuff....what do you think?

i am very excited because the ladies i bellydance with are finally getting to the point where we might be ready to form our own group. we've been coming together for the last couple of years to dance beyond what was done just for class. i think our name will be "hipswitch". i am very excited about this too.

things in the fire world are also exciting. the fire arts festival will be in july, and things are rolling along with that. 

those are the things which are currently on my mind....now i need to post this in a lot of different places =)

peace. 

piece and quiet…

  wow.

there is so much to say, i am not even sure where to start. 

i suppose the place to start is with the thing that is uppermost in my mind right now. my son was supposed to leave for the army and bootcamp today. yesterday at about 10:30am, he got a call from the army saying "you have two hours to organize your life, we want you to leave today instead, be at the armory by 12:30pm". it was pretty stressful. his poor girlfriend did not even get a chance to say good bye to him because she’s a college student so she was in classes and working yesterday. his mantra yesterday was "what a difference a day makes…" because there were many loose ends that needed to be tied up that will now be done by me and his dad. my baby now belongs to uncle sam and it’s depressing as hell. truly. the good news is that i waited until after he was gone before i cried. it was actually when i saw his girlfriend and what a mess she was that i lost it. the rest of the day was colored with this sadness. i was supposed to go to a bellydance practice last night, but with all that was happening, by 5pm i was completely emotionally exhausted and just wanted to curl up into a ball somewhere and sleep. that tells me i was stressed!

in other news, little more than a week ago, i got my hair braided. i think i’ve mentioned in here that in june, i am going to paris. it will be my first time out of the united states and i am exceedingly excited. there is more to the story than i think i’ve written here, but that will be for another time. in the ensuing time, i have been paying for this trip, but i paid it off earlier this month! now, barring something catastrophic, i am going for sure! anyway, i don’t really want to deal with international plugs and blowing up appliances and such, so i thought it might be easier just to braid my hair. so far so good, with a few exceptions. i, apparently, have a lot of hair, which means i have a lot of braids. i think i will ask her to make the braids a little larger next time because all this hair is HEAVY!! in general, though, i love it.

so, while i was getting my hair braided, the lady who does this for me is a foster parent. she currently has three, i think, under the age of five. one of them is SO adorable! he is the sweetest little boy and his chances for adoption are slim. he has a cleft pallette, and will require some more surgeries for that to be fixed and some other issues from his mother making poor choices before, during, and after her pregnancy with him. his name is noah. he is three. interacting with him made me realize how sad our system is. noah has some siblings, but none of the bio families want to take him because of his disabilities. the foster mom is afraid to take him because she knows he will have some medical challenges and her health care status is tenuous at best…adopting him could break her with medical bills. i thought to myself how sad that this little boy is going to be shuttled around a system that’s so inadequate. what are his chances? i began to think perhaps i could help this kid. my kids are grown. he deserves better. i thought and thought about it. when i mentioned it to my husband, he accused me of looking for a replacement child because mine are grown and one was getting ready to leave at the time of the conversation. part of me wondered if i wanted a "do over". it would be very hard to "start over" and have a small child again. is this what i really want? then again, it seems almost selfish not to do this for this awesome little boy. i know i could handle his challenges. i just don’t know. it would be amazing, and at the same time, do i want to go back to that place? he’s 3, so there would be no diapers, but there would be day care, special ed services, iep’s, and dealing with his other issues. too much? i just don’t know. i am agonizing over this stuff….what do you think?

i am very excited because the ladies i bellydance with are finally getting to the point where we might be ready to form our own group. we’ve been coming together for the last couple of years to dance beyond what was done just for class. i think our name will be "hipswitch". i am very excited about this too.

things in the fire world are also exciting. the fire arts festival will be in july, and things are rolling along with that.

those are the things which are currently on my mind….now i need to post this in a lot of different places =)

peace. 

update…

 things are feeling pretty mellow today.

my brother got out of the hospital last thursday. apparently, they got his blood sugar under control. for now, they are going to try to have him control it with just diet and pills, we will see about that. i suspect that how successful that is depends on how successful he is at not drinking anymore.

my son leaves for the army and boot camp in about two weeks and i am very sad about that. he’s been staying with us, and he’s really grown in to a nice man. it’s nice to spend time with him and have him now be a considerate housemate, help with dinner and groceries, and try to look out for my interests. i will always cherish this time i’ve had with him. his girlfriend got a new puppy and he is SO cute. i might post a picture of him later, his name is grizzly and he is part boxer and part saint bernard (!!!) he’s going to be a moose, but right now, he sure is cute. he has the saddest little face and eyes….and his eyes are like a hazel gray/blue. very beautiful. it’s good to have my family around me…

some things have changed in the last little while. there was a guy staying with us that i think i wrote about before. he’s a friend of my daughters and he is the one who brought over "the big ass tv" that is now in my living room. because he was so generous with letting this be at my house, i never really worried about him paying rent because i knew he was going through a rough time. he used to be a metal fabricator, and he had an industrial accident and cut his hand badly on an industrial saw. during the normal course of an on-the-job injury, they drug tested him and he tested positive for pot. no more good job. he worked sales during the holidays and seemed to make pretty decent money, but it was the holidays, so i told myself that he probably needed to buy gifts for family and such, so i wasn’t too worried about it. well, my sis has said that he is the worst about cleaning up after himself. sheesh, you are already living for free, he couldn’t clean up after himself? apparently, not. then, the kids told me he got a pretty handsome tax return, and he did not offer me a single nickel. i think, all told, that he lived with us for about five months, at least. and he did not offer to pay anything, buy any groceries, nothing. the tax return thing was sort of the last straw for me. it made me feel disappointed in him for not even offering and taken advantage of. i had told him before that when my son came home to stay, he would have to stay in my daughters room on the floor if he still wanted to hang out, and he said sure. well, when my son first came home, he made no attempt at all to either clear out or even clean the room that was going to go to my son. i had to clean the room and i am here to tell you, it was nasty. i had gotten it together last summer to use as an office, then my nephew stayed in there for awhile, and i had it looking really sweet. but he had not one time cleaned the floors, there was stuff spilled all over my freshly refinished hardwood floors, it made me feel very sad and disrespected. it’s been over two weeks now since he’s been gone, and i have maintained when they come over, telling them they need to leave at an early time because we all work early. it had gotten to the point where every night was party night and if it was this boy and the other housemate that used to be my daughters girlfriend, if it was the two of them and/or their friends, they’d be up all night and sleeping all day. and existing to drink, drinking in my house, and leaving empty beer cans and trash all over my house.

the ex-girlfriend is gone too, for the most part. she still comes around occasionally, but doesn’t generally stay very long. i felt sorry for her when her and my daughter first moved back in to the house. my daughter has continued to pay rent the entire time she has been in my house, but it’s been more than a year since this girl worked, and she was to the point where she wasn’t even trying anymore. i mean, she said she refused to take a restaurant job because she would not work any where that she had to put her hair up. again….WTF? 

this has been very hard for me. i am a compassionate person and regardless of whether or not these people pay their share, i have to pay all the bills in the house anyway. it didn’t hurt anything to have them there, and the economy has been so bad, i’ve been trying to be a good person. but it had gotten to the point where all they did was party and drink and there was no attempt to respect me, my husband, my household, nothing. it had to stop. but there’s still a compassionate, sad part of me that feels very badly. but not bad enough to let anyone else come into the house that isn’t willing to pay rent!!

i can’t tell you how much more quiet and peaceful the energy in the house has been since they left. it’s felt very family oriented and good. i probably should have done this a long time ago, but i can’t really apologize for being a nice person, either. and i do still feel bad for the ex-gf not having any place to go, but i have a hard enough time taking care of me and my own without taking care of other lost souls too.

i must have needed to vent about this because i did not think i would write about this today when i started this entry. i think that’s all for now.

peace.

family history…

today is marked with a tinge of sadness for me. my mom’s been gone for over two years, last year around this time my brother passed away, and last night, i got a call that my other brother is in the hospital and in the icu. i guess that a year ago he was diagnosed as being borderline diabetic, and i heard he had stopped drinking. however, my sis spoke to him a couple of weeks ago on the phone and he seemed then like he had been drinking.

that’s all i really have time for right now. i will keep folks posted. i think i renewed my subscription, but the last box that returned me to this site gave a database error, so here’s hoping for the best =)

peace.

thoughts on culture and humanity…

 i’ve been thinking a lot lately. thinking about what makes us who we are and how people who experience the same things can interpret or process them so differently. this is a constant wonder to me. i try very hard to understand people.

i have seen this a lot in studying my nephew and my son. they are very different and yet, in a lot of ways, they are a lot alike. my nephew, when he joined the army, he was drifting. he was existing for the next time he could get wasted, and that’s no way to live. he’s a really smart kid, but i think he was sort of trapped in the "why should i help myself? everyone else will help me.." he went through several friends, he was sort of a mooch, he was just directionless. i think it was also sort of toxic for him to be around his mom so much. the army was good for him. he doesn’t always like it, but when i talk to him, he talks about being afraid of reporting his aches and pains because he doesn’t want them to kick him out. it’s like he rails against the structure, but it also seems to be good for him, and i think he realizes that. he has a lot of aches and pains because he never really participated in sports or much of anything dealing with physical agility or sports the first 20 years of his life. i got to the point where i didn’t know how much more i could do for him. that made me sad, but at some point, a person has to take responsibility for themselves.

my son is different, but then, not so different. he is so much like me, he scares me, but with a decidedly more violent and young perspective =) i know i wasn’t always agreeable, but he sometimes channels his negative energy in destructive and violent ways that stun me. in the times he has drilled with the national guard here, he has talked about how much he likes it. he craves the discipline, he says it reminds him of being back in football in high school. he enjoys the physicality of things, the comaraderie that develops among the troops who have only their bodies to shield them from the abuse of those in charge. i am scared to death for him, and for his being in the army. i only hope that by the time he gets to the point where he can encounter a dangerous situation, the world status and outright aggression of the united states will have been tempered enough to largely keep him out of harms way. my son is a hero-type. he’s a leader and that makes me afraid for him. but then, at times, i still see that sensitivity in him that is the thing that made me rent "schindlers list" for him to watch at home…i knew he would cry, and i wanted him to be prepared for it and be able to show his emotions at home. as he prepares to leave for the army, he is sort of couch surfing at our house and so i’ve gotten some more time with him lately. we were eating lunch the other day and we all started crying, remembering my mom. i will always cherish this time i’ve had with him, before he leaves. it’s amazing to me that i raised this man that i see before me.

so all this got me to thinking about how as we become adults, it’s almost an expectation for us to become separate from most of the people in our lives. we get caught up in our own stuff and it’s like we forget to maintain the relationships that will, at some point, sustain us. that doesn’t seem fair. he is still friends with all his football buddies, but they have scattered to the winds. i remember thinking it amazing that this one’s parent died, someone had a brain anuerism, that was killed in a drunk driving accident. he’s actually been much better than i ever was at maintaining those relationships, but then, mine back then weren’t near as strong as his. i had a miserable time in high school and he did not.

i suppose i am feeling pensive today.

just sharing thoughts…

peace.

busy bee....

that's me. i love this stage in the creative process. the fire arts festival is almost taking on a life of it's own. feel free to click it's link to read about that. wrote a grant last week and pondered it over the weekend before i promptly forgot about it in all the girly goodness that took place over the weekend, came home after some personal drama i will mention in a minute friday afternoon, then panicked because it was grant deadline day, but i got it in, in time. *whew*

so, last weekend, i drove to the bay area for some girly time. one of my burning man/ranger friends is getting married in march, and this was to be her bachelorette slumber party. it was a lot of fun. we have made a commitment to see each other more often and this would be a great goodness in my life.

on driving down, i procrastinated the morning, as the weather was looking dark and i didn't want to encounter bad weather. when all looked as good as it was going to get and still be light outside, i made my way, enjoying the trees, the change of scenery from the starkness of the dryer side of the sierra's, in nevada and eastern california heading into the mountains, then the damp looking but too dry and bare mountains near the tops of passes and finally the lush greenery descending into the sacramento valley. that drive will also be special and beautiful and represent to me all that's great in the west and in my world...

eating. my god. did we eat at this girls retreat/weekend. there was one of those mile high chocolate things that looked home made. it was so divine that more than a few bites rendered one sugar coma-rific. and some of the yummiest soups i've ever eaten. veggie, thai, potato/bacony goodness. drinking, check. laughter, massage, hottub, and just friendliness! got to know some new people i'd never met and got to get better aquainted with some i hadn't known quite so well. gained more respect for many. wow. i am so blessed to know some amazing people!

collapse. inevitable around 4:30am. sleeping on pad in one room. bodies of beautiful women everywhere. up around 8:30am, sunday came way too soon. visitation by the divine juice fairy, bagels, tea, water, leftovers, more chocolate.

drove in to the city briefly for a costume fitting that seemed not meant to be. address frailty, miscommunication and slight disappointment, smart enough to see the signs, this not so much meant to be. must get on the road, ominous clouds looming.

back home. make it most of the way in what seems like pretty mild weather. stop to eat and gas and enter a storm of epic proportions. get turned around without snow chains and head back to colfax. thankfully have diana gabaldon audio books to keep me company, sleeping in my car in colfax under the brutal glare of a strip mall parking lot light. because of the awesome weekend had my favorite pillow and a very warm blankie to keep me warm. what an adventure! i made it through and got home midday on monday. it was still fun and i wouldn't have traded a single moment of the entire weekend.

these are the things memories are made of =)

peace.