Hello, friends!

Well, I spent this whole morning working on my October/November/Recent Favorites list, and then I stopped and realized that we’re halfway into December, and I KNOW that there’ll be more to put on the list soon. For instance, The Witcher season 2 drops this Friday. Why post a “Favorites” list now when I know I’ll want to add The Witcher within a week? There are a couple of movies I know I’ll see in the theater in the next two weeks, as well, and my Cyber Monday skin care product haul from e.l.f. arrives today. I’ll be trying out those items over the next two weeks, and I imagine I’ll love at least one of them enough to share with you here.

I put the post on hold, figuring that the end of the month will be a better time to share it. I’ll be able to sweep up all of the little goodnesses left to share before the new year gets underway. It’ll be 2021, done and dusted.

Shelving the post I’d planned (and actually finished) meant that I had nothing for you, so I thought I’d share a few splendiferous things from today!

Today’s Favorite Little Things:

1). My cousin and I made a plan to catch a meteor shower together this (late) spring and make a four-day weekend of it!

2). My friend and I made a movie date plan to watch The Matrix Resurrections!

3). The cookies I made yesterday are even more magickal today than they were last night!

4). It feels like a spring day in here! It’s colder here in the house than it is outside, so instead of turning on the heater, I opened the windows.

It’s a stunningly beautiful, balmy 73F outside with clear blue sunny skies and an abundance of birds in my yard, none of this being the slightest bit unusual. Arizona in the winter is special. Arizona at any time of the year is special, but even we AZ natives and long-timers view it all starry-eyed when we think of how things are in other climates.

5). I’m getting my Yuletide deep cleaning and decorating underway!

I’ve got some pics to share from today, as well.

First, I have this one of the small desert cottontail rabbit who lives here. I’m surprised every time I see him because he’s so defenseless, and there are flying predators and stray cats around here, as we well know. Somehow, he keeps on living and living. I named him Bunnicula, because you never know, he might actually be undead.

Birds gathered on the lines:

In this one you can see the edge of Geronimo’s burrow to the left:

The patio in front of the sliding-glass door.

Magickal Mesquite! The deeply shaded little space beneath this tree is a spiritual haven, and I’m so grateful for it.

I hope you’ll all enjoying a lovely day, as well. Farewell for now, my friends.

p.s. I’m just going to ignore the loud clown horn that someone just started squeezing repeatedly somewhere on my street, haha

In today’s adventures in the little life of Yours Truly, a plumber just left. He’d been here all morning, since before 9am. But let me back up. (No pun intended.)

It started last night with a series of events.

First, an otherworldly, watery bloop bloop bloop sound echoed into the hallway. It sounded gentle and deep and dark. The mysterious sound seemed to be coming from the hallway bathroom. I went in to investigate and saw that the seductive bloop bloop bloop is the sound of large round bubbles rising from the sewer to the surface of the water in the toilet, one after the other. Most odd.

It stopped after a while, and nothing else happened, so I started getting ready for bed. When I turned on the water in my shower, though, I noticed that it wasn’t draining! I got in and washed my face, then turned off the water to see whether it would drain slowly, as it would if the drain was clogged. It didn’t.

It wasn’t behaving like a normal clogged drain, but I don’t know shit from Shinola when it comes to plumbing, so I went with the notion that the other shower would work.

And it was a good thing that I tried, because if I hadn’t, I may not have discovered that water wasn’t draining in that shower, either! I turned the water on for a few seconds and then off again to see what would happen, staring in puzzlement at the water pooled at the bottom of the tub, trying to think… and then, to my alarm, I watched as the drain started to spit black stuff out into the tub.

It was the Amityville Horror up in here, my friends.

I closed the shower door and backed slowly away, returning to my bathroom to use the toilet. It didn’t flush. When the tank stopped filling, I lifted the seat and found that the water had risen all the way up. The toilet paper was floating on top.

Give or take 20 minutes later – I spent the 20 minutes dancing to 90’s trip-hop, because I’ve been feeling that vibe lately, and what better thing to do upon realization that there’s a likely systemic underground sewer malfunction preventing you from showering and using the toilet – I lifted the toilet lid again to see whether the water level had gone down. It had. It’d gone all the way down. The toilet bowl was dry, and so was the one in the hallway bathroom. The water had drained from the showers, too. The black stuff in the hallway bathroom shower was stuck to the floor of the tub near the drain; it appeared to be dirt.

This confirmed my suspicion that the problem was systemic. I wasn’t amused. It wasn’t cool. The only way that an underground sewer malfunction situation could be amusing and cool is if alligators were involved, and they weren’t.

Fortunately, all of my sinks were working!

I was grateful for the sinks, and also for the handy little device I have that allows me to pee standing up, because I have to go a lot, and it would’ve been tedious having to pop a squat in the yard a hundred times before the toilets could get fixed. It wasn’t like I hadn’t already done squats in my workout that day, FFS.

It was midnight 41, but I called the plumber, anyway, because why wait? The person who answered the phone said that the plumber would receive the message immediately and would call me as soon as possible. I said okay and went to bed.

The plumber returned my call at 7:45am, and he arrived an hour later.

He listened to my suspenseful tale and was so experienced that he didn’t even look at the showers or the toilets. (So I didn’t have to clean them early this morning! But I’m glad that I thought that he would see them, because now they’re clean!) Instead, he went out to the backyard, scoped out the location of the bathrooms from the outside, and went straight up to the roof.

He spent some time up there with some sort of loud equipment, then came down and went to his truck to retrieve a different piece of equipment. Went up to the roof again. Made more noise. Came back down. When I became aware of a drilling sound coming from outside in the front, I looked out to see him drilling something on the sidewalk, metal on metal. Sparks were flying. I saw each individual spark as a dollar sign.

Eventually, he came to the door to ask me whether the patio outlet worked. (It did.) He explained that he had do (something or other) and then go back in with a more heavy-duty snake and camera to see what was going on. He got back up on the roof. More noise, and it still wasn’t sounding like getting-anywhere noise.

The next time he came down, he invited me to accompany him to the backyard to see where the snake with the camera had stopped. He had a gadget that could scan the ground and locate the camera, like a highly specialized metal detector. I tread lightly behind him as we made our way from the edge of the yard, out the back gate and along the fence on the other side, pretending that we were navigating a mine field.

The camera was elusive. I went back inside, and he went back up to the roof. More construction sounds reverberated through the house, and then I rejoined him in the backyard so we could return to our mine-clearing task. This time, the detector was able to find the camera! It was almost exactly beneath the back fence, on the border of my property and city property. Its pitch rose to a thin, high squeal when it found what it was looking for. (I realized in that moment exactly how easily entertained I am.)

The plumber said that I have newer pipes, which is good. They’re good. What he thought had happened was that there’d been a failure in the place where my new pipes met with the old city pipes, like the two parts had slipped and were no longer sealed together. Tree roots had grown into the pipe through the resulting gap. (Yeah, that story. The classic tree-roots-in-the-pipes story.) He said that the snake he’d used earlier in the morning kept pulling out roots, so he knew that roots were at the… (root of the problem, ahem). Now he could see exactly the where and the what and the how.

He’d dropped a video of the camera’s journey into my email while he was still up on the roof. It was pretty grody and cool. You wouldn’t know if you were looking at sewage system inspection footage or at colonoscopy footage. Plumbing is plumbing!

In the end, he was able to verify his assessment and blast out the roots with the hydrojet. Apparently it was difficult because of one large root that had grown in with the little ones; for a moment, he was nervous because it wasn’t going anywhere. He got it eventually, though. Now everything works!

But it’s a temporary fix. It’s a solution more than a fix, a solution for the moment, a way for me to use the plumbing for the next little while. I borrowed myself some time, because what has to happen (soon) is I’ll have to have him come back out to dig five and a half feet down at the back fence in order to remove a two-foot section of my clay sewer pipe (that goes toward the city sewer), replace it with a new section of pipe, and connect them properly this time. He was surprised that someone had taken the time to do an excellent job installing excellent, new pipes, but then messed up the part where the new pipes connect to the city sewer pipes. Like, details, man.

The official diagnosis on the invoice reads as: “Main Sewer Line Transition ABS To Clay Coupling Failed Underneath The Rear Alley Fence”

Kind of has a nice ring to it, I think. And I’m very happy with the service and with the plumber, himself. I would recommend this company to anyone. Local friends, if you need a plumber, hit me up!

I did some cooking and eating after he left, and then I sat down to regale you all with this thriller. Haha! I hope your morning/afternoon/night is going well, my friends.

And blessings upon you all. It’s Yule season now… multi-celebration season (including my own: my birthday is later this month)! We’re almost at the end of the year. Unbelievable!

Until we meet again, as they say.

Something special happened yesterday: Salem communicated with me. She’s done it before, but this time, she told me about something that I ought to do. Key words in her message were “closure” and “completion.” She included the phrase “service to humanity.” Since this was coming from her, I knew that she meant closure and completion regarding her passing, and by “service to humanity,” she meant service to cats in need. Everything is connected; helping animals is helping humans.

In any event, my intuition reflex was lightning fast. Without thinking about what I was going to do, I immediately got up from my desk and headed to the back door. (Trivia: my most pronounced fire energy trait is springing to action.)

I went out to the laundry room. Salem’s room.

Her bed on the ottoman was still exactly as she’d left it. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to touch her bed or her toys, though I’d recently decided to leave the ottoman bed for cats in need. On the threshold of cold desert nights, it’d been on my mind to prepare the room. I just hadn’t gotten up the gumption to do it. Salem gave me the push that I needed to get it done, and so I did.

I shook out her layers of towels, blankets, and pillow cases from last winter and piled them into the washer, crying the whole time. I gathered her toys and put them with the trash to be taken out, along with the two throw rugs that’d been soiled when she threw up on them. I never bothered to clean them. They were cheap, and I had new ones waiting for a purpose.

My aim was to do what Salem wanted. As I went about the task, I wept and admitted to her that I still couldn’t reach a place of closure in my heart… but I could fulfill the “completion” part of her request and close up the laundry room as it’d been when it was her room. It’s still her room, but now in the sense that she’s the proprietor and hostess. The sign that says “Old Salem Inn” still hangs above the dryer, and its meaning has become literal. That is what the room is serving as now. It’s an inn that’s open to cats in distress, with Salem’s guidance, encouragement, and blessing.

So I cleaned the room and re-decorated a lot of it, mostly just rearranging things that were already there. I made up a fresh bed on the ottoman, put in the clean rugs, and finished with a generous misting of Florida water for purification, facing the directions of the elements and thanking the archangels who guard them. The room is cleansed and consecrated, and Salem is pleased.

And of course, I’ve got pics to share!

Friends, it was hard. I cried while making up the bed because I felt, in my heart, that I was making a place for Salem to sleep. I couldn’t help it. Winters were special, as a part of my evening winter routine was shaking out Salem’s bed and plumping it up into a cozy warm nest for her. After four years, this will be my first winter without her. But I know that if any stray kitty needs a warm place to sleep this winter, they will find it.

Salem and I were together in the ancient past as well as the recent one, I believe. Our journey together hasn’t ended. I’m happy to be able to keep her inn open as a service to others.

Have a wonderful week ahead, all!

Nenette comes bearing this gratitude post tonight:

I’m thankful for you, my American friends and friends in other countries. I’m thankful for so much, but tonight I just wanted to tell you again how much I appreciate you and the connectivity I feel that we have.

May this find you doing well! [::HUGS::]

This morning I woke up at 7:30, because my alarm told me to. I’d slept for just over seven hours, but my mind-body needed more. I went through the house opening the window blinds to meet a world blue-grayish with breaking dawn, fed my cat, reset my alarm for another hour and ten minutes. Climbing back into bed and pulling the covers over my head, I encased and delivered myself back into the darkness of previous hours, and it was like the first alarm never happened. Immediately my brain’s dream center drew me into stories vivid with color and adventure.

The first dream was inspired by my chronic fear of oversleeping on work days, drawing on the only source of stress in my daily life, which is that of being late. In my dream-panic, I threw together a sandwich for lunch with the first accessible ingredients: either peanut butter with mint jelly, or mint butter (?!) with jelly; in any case, the open-face sandwich was a beautiful, creamy mint green color. Through my stress, I laughed and exclaimed how weird it was. It was white bread, which I never eat. It was mint, which is pleasing to me, but which I’d never enjoy in a sandwich.

The second dream was inspired by a video of a woman’s solo performance in a pole-dancing showcase, which I’ve been watching repeatedly in sheer awe of the athleticism that goes into the art form of pole. In my dream, I watched as an unfamiliar female athlete went through practice routines of an art-sport pole-dancing/extreme obstacle course, as in American Ninja Warrior, moving through a series of course settings of increasing structural difficulty. She was vertically navigating an enormous green structure in the shape of a star whose multidimensional steampunk aesthetic lent it challenges nested within challenges when my second alarm went off. I heard the alarm as she was attempting to leap from a moving gear, and I woke up laughing. “I wanted to finish that dream,” I told my cat. “Now I’ll never know whether she made it.”

But I felt awake and refreshed this time, happy to get up into the room now bright with morning sun. From the quiet kitchen window I watched four species of birds hopping lightly through the branches of bougainvillea thickly shrouding my patio in a tangle of vines, green leaves and clusters of bright fuchsia, flitting occasionally to the nearby watering hole and back again. More birds came to the watering hole from other directions. Watching the birds in the bougainvillea around the patio, the birds in the watering hole, the small desert cottontail rabbit – a permanent resident who ought to be named at this point – also at the edge of the patio, up on his hindlegs reaching for bougainvillea branches, I felt immensely grateful to live in this tranquil downtown neighborhood.

Now, sitting in my office writing while listening to the front patio’s bronze soleri windbells that I’d brought home from Arcosanti, I think of how the bells’ unique sound help to form my definition of life in the Sonoran desert: the sound of these bells, the scent of creosote giving away a rainfall, our treacherous yet somehow captivating dust storms (haboob), and our monsoon seasons’ spectacular electrical storms. I never tire of it. I left it once, but the desert called me back; it felt like a longing seeded in my blood.

A person who lives in California asked me recently, after remarking on our legendary heat, “How can anyone live there? How does anything even grow in Arizona? How do you get your fruits and vegetables?” Taken aback, I realized that this must be a common outsider idea of Arizona: too hot to be livable, too barren to be beautiful, too absent of “seasons” to be interesting. I reassured her that things do grow in Arizona. I did not ask her how anyone would want to live on the San Andreas Fault.

(Sonoran desert farming dates back to the time of the ancient Hohokam, who lived here and developed extensive irrigation canals along the Salt and Gila rivers.)

I feel fortunate. If you love where you live, you’re as lucky a person can be on this planet.

The Desert Botanical Garden is near my house.

And if you love where you live, you’re living a beautiful dream of a life.

Blessings to you all heading into a new week, my friends.

Greetings, my friends. This post was very long, and I decided to cut out 50% of it and turn it into more of a reflection, because ultimately, that was where it was leading. It was a whole lot of narrative, so this is me attempting to make a long story short.

Immediately after Salem died, another stray cat came to live in my yard, and he died recently. I knew that he was dying the first day he came to live here, so his death wasn’t a surprise. My feeling from day one was that he had some sort of degenerative neurological disease. I’d seen it before: the tremors, the spine slightly twisted, the uneven gait; how he moved along with his body low to the ground, his spine fishtailing slightly back and forth as he walked. The eyes not quite right, his vision seeming impaired.

My resolve to turn away strays after Salem’s death ended when this cat moved in and I saw that he was nearly skeletal. My conscience wasn’t having it, and Salem would’ve been dismayed, too, had I not fed him. I was just riddled with angst over his presence here because Salem’s body was still warm in her grave, so to speak, and the state I was in was one of total devastation. I saw this cat as an intruder and a usurper, but chasing him out wasn’t an option given his plight. Instead, I kept his food bowl filled and the watering hole refreshed, and I vowed to avoid developing any kind of emotional connection with him, especially since I knew that he was dying.

It was mysterious to me that the Universe thought that I was strong enough, in the wake of Salem’s death, to endure another loss, but evidently it did. It went right ahead and moved a terminally ill cat into my care.

I kept to my vow and avoided loving him, but I did become fond of him. I cared about him as well as for him. Like Salem, he wouldn’t let me near him, but he did return my eyeblink kisses a few times, telling me that he could see at least a little bit.

When he arrived, I wasn’t sure that he’d live through the week, but he filled out and grew stronger over time, and he lived for three more months – he died almost exactly three months after Salem did. He’d grown healthier in that he wasn’t starving, and happier in that he wasn’t living his waning life in desperate search of food. His life here was one of contentment. He had his favorite napping spots, sticking close to the patio, the watering hole, and the grass. Occasionally I would see him lounging on top of Geronimo’s burrow. Like Salem, he enjoyed the times that Geronimo and I interacted. He would follow us around the yard and settle down to participate energetically from a comfortable distance.

Over time, I noticed his spine turn slightly more out of alignment, and eventually, he started to limp and then drag one of his legs. Despite his gradual loss of functioning, I never felt that he was suffering or in pain.

One day, he stopped eating. He died ten days later. The last time I saw him was two days before his passing. He was sitting on the edge of the patio near his untouched food bowl, and he didn’t move as I approached and crouched down. I spoke softly to him and blinked slowly, but his eyes were vacant, and I could tell that he couldn’t see much at all anymore, if at all. He died on Thursday, October 28th. I found his body lying next to the watering hole when I came home from work. From the look and feel of him, he’d died just hours prior.

He chose to die out in the open, as if making sure that I’d find him. Cats typically hide when they know they’re about to die.

He looked as though he’d gone to sleep and never woke up, and a part of me was angry. Within days of Salem’s cruel death, another cat was placed in my yard, and three months later, I witnessed him die the sort of peaceful death that Salem had deserved. My inner juvenile wailed and raged at the unfairness of it. Why did my Salem have to die the way she did while other cats were allowed to die of natural causes? I hated feeling resentful and small like that, hated feeling my gut twist with torment over the contrast between his quiet, peaceful death in a sunny backyard oasis and Salem’s brutal killing over an alley in the dark of night.

I was mostly sorrowful, though. I always knew that he was dying, but to find his body just made me so sad.

The next day I went to work dressed up for Halloween and tried to be happy. The weekend took its course and ended with Halloween and flowed on into Monday, as weekends do. I went into work still feeling down, yet again trying to be happy. It didn’t go well. In fact, I felt worse as the day went on. The day felt cold.

I still miss him. I’d come to appreciate his energy and his beautiful spirit in the yard. His death was expected, but still, it was another loss. Nothing like losing Salem, but a loss nonetheless. My sadness was profound… nothing like my grief over Salem, but sadness nonetheless.

This brings me to the contemplative part. This little guy was the fourth cat to come into my life only to die young at the hands of the wild. Ronnie James died from a lung infection caused by ingesting a poisonous spore from a caterpillar in France. Cita died of a skin disease she contracted while trying to survive as a stray. Salem was killed by an owl. Now there was this cat, who came to me as if knowing I’d provide him with hospice. I’m grateful that he was able to pass comfortably on to a better form of existence.

What if it’s my karma to care for cats and then endure the loss of them?

I’m convinced that the Goddess Bast sent this cat to me, and that Salem, now an angel in the constellation of Leo, approved.

And so it’s cold at night now, and getting colder; I find myself hesitant to follow through on my plan to pack up Salem’s bedding on the ottoman in the laundry room. Because what if another cat comes to take shelter while dying?

It’s interesting that stray cats don’t congregate on my property, as stray cats often do. My yard is a one-cat yard. No other cat came through in the three months that this cat spent dying.

I have these pics of him:

Again on Geronimo’s burrow.

It seems that I didn’t succeed at making a long story short, did I. It feels good to have written this, though. Thank you for “listening” (reading), as always, my friends. November’s full moon in Taurus with partial lunar eclipse is coming up on the 19th, and I’m going to spend it doing the shadow work begged in light of this experience.

I wish you all a magickal week ahead.

My friends, it was already late when I sat down to write tonight’s post. I spent an hour on it, but now it’s really too late, and it still isn’t ready. I need to take more time with it in order to do the subject justice, and so I come to you now without it.

Today was Veteran’s Day here in the United States. Some very special people wanted to make my day special, and they did. My plans changed at the last minute, but I’m so grateful for it. It was an amazing day, and I am incredibly blessed.

My fellow American Veterans, I hope you had a wonderful day, too. Thank you for your service.

Until Saturday, then.

BECAUSE, my friends, I’ve managed to stick to my new nighttime routine. I think it’s been two weeks now? Or going on two weeks? That I routinely shut everything down at 10pm and start getting ready for bed. I have a whole routine, and it takes a little time. Here’s what I do:

–Any cleaning up in the kitchen that may still need to be done (usually not a lot, if any).

–Make my PB&J (peanut butter and jelly sandwich) for the next day’s lunch.

–Do the other things needed to get ready for work: fill my water bottle/put a clean mask in my bag/set my shoes and tool belt (if I brought it home, which I usually do, because I use my box cutter here, too) by the front door. I still love my day job, so it’s a pleasure getting ready for the next day, rather than a chore. I remember all my years of working in offices and dreading going in. Never again. I am blessed. The accident of getting my job was the happiest accident ever!

–Set house alarm system.

–Take a shower. I take cold showers now because they’re so incredibly refreshing with my tea tree soap.

–Nighttime skincare routine: either retinol cream or high-potency vitamin C serum, depending on the night (I alternate). When I use the serum, I let it dry down and then apply a hyaluronic acid and peptide complex cream to calm down the stinging. Eye cream goes on last. Lip balm.

–Gather up Nenette and put her on the bed, if she isn’t already there.

–Go in heavy with the super thick and moisturizing balm on my hands.

–Set my alarm.

–Triple-check doors to make sure that they’re locked. I finally have my new front door! What a relief to have a sturdy, tightly sealed one with a peephole and solid hardware that locks properly and securely.

Yes, this is a big deal. Would you like to know the saga of my front door situation? If yes, keep reading. If no, I don’t blame you. What’s to follow is a long, dry run-down of the events leading up to the installation of my new door, and let me tell you, it is riveting.

First, the backstory: One morning, in either April or May, I tried to lock my front door, and the mechanism fell off. It could not be fixed. The wood inside the lock aperture looked chewed-up and rotted away – that’s how old it was. I couldn’t lock my front door, but at least I had my good ‘ol steel security screen door on the outside. (The one that tried to cut off my foot.)
Secondly, I noticed a person who appeared to be staking out my house, being weird in his car and doing things like coming to my door, ringing the doorbell, and going immediately back to his car at the curb (not even waiting for me to answer the door) and sitting and staring at my office window before slowly driving away.
And then I noticed that the two padlocks on my two back gates had been turned upside down and left that way, keyholes pointing up to the sky. No wind could do that. The locks fit snugly, and they have to be wrangled with to even remove them and put them back in, much less turn them completely upside down.

SO:

–On May 8, the person who’d done my sliding-glass door came over to look at the front door (which was super old, anyway, and didn’t seal properly – it needed to be replaced for pretty much every reason) and give me an estimate for getting a new one installed.
–He said he’d send me the estimate in a few days, but he didn’t.
–We’d set a date set for him to come back and do a temporary fix on my lock, but he was a no-call/no-show.
–After several days of trying to reach him (his voicemail inbox was full and he wasn’t replying to texts), I finally got through. He said his truck had broken down, and that was why he didn’t show up.
–He said to find the door I wanted online and text it to him.
–I didn’t bother asking him to reschedule the temporary lock fix. I figured that my very sophisticated system of piling dumbbells up in front of my door at night was good enough.
–Found the door I wanted and texted it to him as requested. I bought new hardware (top-quality, tamper-proof lock set, because I am SERIOUS) for the new door.
–Never heard from him again. It was strange, because he’d been so friendly! I didn’t take it personally, though. I hope he’s okay.
–Contacted an actual door company to start all over with them. The manager came out immediately to take measurements. She was efficient and we had an effortless back-and-forth throughout the process from estimate to ordering to putting half down. We set a date for the install: August 16.
–Within a week of the install date, she called to say that the door wasn’t finished yet. We rescheduled for September 1st.
–I took September 1st off as a vacation day because she’d said that I had to be there all day. I had another (phone) appointment scheduled for the same day, so it was going to be a good use of a day.
–But at the very last minute, the door lady called to say that my door wasn’t going to be installed that day, after all, because IT HAD BEEN LOST. Those were her exact words: “Your door has been lost. We can’t find it.”
–She said that ten other peoples’ doors had been lost along with mine. The doors had been lost at the distribution company. (My day off worked out well, anyway, because in addition to my phone appointment, I also spent six annoying hours on and off the phone with the IRS, which had to happen but could not have happened had I not taken the day off from work – but that’s neither here nor there.)
–She stayed in contact with me every other day to update me on their progress in finding my door. At one point she called with good news: the door was going to arrive on the truck the next day! We rescheduled the installation for that Saturday. They were making an exception with the Saturday install because she knew that I wasn’t about to take another vacation day for it, and they felt it was the least they could do, anyway.
–But then she called to say that my door (along with five other doors) had not been on the truck. Later that day, she said she found out from the distribution company’s manager that my door hadn’t even been painted yet.
–She called again two days and a weekend after that to let me know that another truck was coming on Tuesday. Instead of telling me that my door would be on it, she said, “Let’s keep our fingers crossed that your door is on it, because they promised that it would be painted by then.”
–On Wednesday, she said that my door had arrived! It was actually in front of her eyes.
–Yesterday was Saturday, and they came early in the morning to install the door. It did take all day. It was a huge job. It’s perfect!

So finally, after five months, I have a new front door. The only thing left to do is paint the interior frame (or have the door company guys come back out to paint it; the door lady and I are going to discuss it tomorrow). But that’s cosmetic. I can now secure the house.

Here are a couple of pics of the long-awaited front door that had been on such an adventure, I’m surprised it didn’t arrive with exotic stamps and destination stickers all over it:

Between routinely getting ready for bed early (for me) and getting my new front door installed, that’s TWO snowballs frozen in hell! Also between the two of them, plus sleeping without a pillow, I’m sleeping better than ever.

Have an amazing week ahead, my friends.

You know what I love? Stormy summer nights.

It rained last night, again, blessings upon blessings for we in the Arizona desert whose summers haven’t seen significant monsoon activity since 2018. I was in pain again and decided to soak in the tub before getting into the shower. Despite the urgency of my intention when I received the bathtub liners last Sunday, I hadn’t actually taken a bath yet.

Turns out that the bathtub liners really work! It was strange at first. I thought of Dexter as I lined the tub. I thought of Psycho. Once I beheld the tub that was completely lined in plastic, I was a little creeped out by the idea of lying down in it. It was unappealing, and I wasn’t even sure that it would work, but I carried on with it because I knew it would be therapeutic if it did work.

I didn’t have Epsom salts, as I’d kept forgetting to stop off for them, so I used coarse grain sea salt, instead. The minute I found my comfortable position stretched out in the tub, my trepidation and doubt floated away on the surface of the water.

I’d unwittingly transformed my bath into a warm sea, forming both an enchantment and an elemental connection. It’d been nine years since I’d last taken a bath, so maybe I just wasn’t remembering it, but it seemed to me that the sea salt made the water extremely buoyant, bouncy and substantial like I’ve never felt bath water before. The water behaved like a solid thing propping up and supporting my upper back. Weightless and suspended in the warm sea salt water, I felt no pain. I closed my eyes in the dark, candlelit bathroom with the lingering scent of the frankincense and myrrh incense I’d used to cleanse the room beforehand, and I listened to Panda Bear’s album from 2011, and the whole experience was a mood, a trip, an escape from my body. It was 20 minutes without pain, and it was bliss. I remained motionless in a trance-like state, doing nothing but exist.

Then I got out and stepped into a cool shower to rinse off the salt and get clean. The tea tree oil soap I used is my new obsession. With its distinctive scent and the cool water, the shower fades away and becomes a rain forest. So I went from the sea into a rain forest, and then I sat down at my desk to listen to actual rain pouring down as I worked.

I’m grateful for my cozy haven of an office, especially at night, when I have candles lit.

On that note, I’m heading off to bed. Have a wonderful day or night, whichever’s the case where you are, my friends.

Today I didn’t leave the house, which is always my preferred weekend scenario.

But tomorrow I’m going out, because I have an impromptu horror movie date with a friend! It will be my first movie theater visit since 2019, and I’m braving it, for sure. I’m fully vaccinated and I’ll be super careful. I won’t even take off my mask to drink water. Delta COVID is out there, and I’m nervous about it, but I really want to catch this psychological horror (The Night House) in the theater. Not to mention I would like a distraction from the pain I’m still dealing with, if only for one hour and 47 minutes.

I’m thinking I might try to do some yoga in the morning to see whether that’ll help at all. To be honest, though, I’m thisclose to getting a massage somewhere. And unbelievably, I’m in enough pain that the thought of edibles has crossed my mind, but I’m not going to go there because it’s not a good idea to mix that with my psych meds. It’s weird enough that I’m even thinking about it.

It feels like it’s been forever now. The last time the pain was this bad was on Wednesday afternoon at work. Now, it’s even worse. I feel like I’m closing in on incapacitation-level pain.

At this point it’s concentrated itself in the upper left side of my back, between my shoulder blade and my spine up near my neck. It’s ghastly no matter what position I’m in, and it’s aggravated even by the act of swallowing water. It’s so bad, it’s making me nauseous. It’s stretching toward the limit of my relatively high pain tolerance and I’m not a whiner and don’t want to start whining now, yet it’s hard to think about anything else, so I’m going to peace out of here, with sincere apologies.

Before I go, though, a Gratitude list is in order!

1). Nenette.

This was in my office last night. She was too sleepy and content to protest getting her picture taken!

2). My loved ones are healthy and doing well.

3). My life is rich with simple blessings, which are the best kind.

4). I managed to accomplish quite a bit in the house today despite the pain!

5). There are no major stress factors in my life.

6). I recently crossed my one-year aloneversary! [::throws confetti::]

7). With this, I realized that I now consider myself to be my own best friend rather than my own worst enemy.

8). Arizona Monsoon 2021 has been spectacular. Three more days of storms are in the forecast for next week!

9). The moon and stars and planets and asteroids and black holes and all of the wonders and mysteries of the known universe and beyond are still out there, whether I’m outside to soak it in or not. Just the idea of that incomprehensible magnificence makes me ecstatic, and I can tap into that energy as easily from inside these walls.

10). My four-step plan toward optimal home security will be completed in just a few days, finally! The one remaining action item – getting a new front door – will be checked off the list by the time I come back here to post mid-week next week.

11). The Universe and my spiritual guides are talking to me. I’ve seen the angel number “444” FOUR times in the last four days. I am not making this up.

The angel number 444 “is associated with honesty and inner wisdom. If you’re seeing this, it could mean that your spiritual guides are encouraging you to look inward for answers to the challenges you’re facing. It also is an acknowledgement that you’ve been working hard, so give yourself a pat on the back.”

12). So I’m giving myself a pat on the back, even though it hurts.

13). I have some incredible humans in my life who inspire me to try to be a better human, myself.

14). My bathtub liners arrived tonight, so tomorrow I’ll pick up some Epsom salts (I thought I already had some, but I guess I didn’t), and tomorrow night I’ll be able to soak in hot water! The last time I soaked in a bathtub was in 2012, my friends. It was in France. It’s bizarre to think that it’s been nine years since I’ve taken a bath.

15). I’m grateful for all of you. Thank you for hanging out here with me. It means a lot.

I know I could add more to this gratitude list, but I’m going to close here and get into a hot shower to boost the effects of the ibuprofen I took half an hour ago. It’s starting to take the edge off!

Many blessings to you all, my friends.

Rumi wrote that beautiful quote. [::points up to the title::]

I wanted to write a full moon post last weekend, but I’m still not there yet since Salem’s death, and I’m sorry to those of you who anticipate those full-moon posts. I will start writing them again at some point.

I did marvel in the brilliant full moon on Saturday night, though, from my bedroom window. Jupiter was right there with her, bold and spectacular (the full moon was in Aquarius, which is governed by Jupiter), and the smaller pinpoint of Saturn a little way to the right of Jupiter. It was all quite breathtaking and amazing. I wanted to write about it, but I just couldn’t.

My mundane news of the week is that I’ve been in pain, which is nothing new in and of itself. It was acute, though, and severe. What happened was a knot formed on my back somewhere just below my left shoulder blade on Monday, and two days later (yesterday), I found myself in Level 10 pain. By yesterday afternoon the pain had moved up into my upper left trapezius muscle and deltoids, but I think it was garden-variety upper-body workout soreness from Tuesday that merged into the knot lower down until it was all the same excruciating mess.

My body seems to be sensitive these days, reacting to things (my recently mentioned contact dermatitis – my body suddenly rejecting products I’ve used for years) and holding onto grief. I sometimes cry at the end of my workouts as my mind flashes to Salem, as if the physical exercise loosened up and released knots of grief in my body.

Mind-body connection is real. My system is clotted with heavy emotion that’s gotten stuck since Salem’s death at the end of June, and now, nearly two months later, it’s manifesting in these ways. An itchy rash on the back of my neck. Severe pain knotted into my back. Pretty sure I have more than one knot back there.

Today was less painful than yesterday thanks to the self-acupressure contraption that I used last night and also the hot shower that I took, but it’s by no means gone. I would put today’s pain level at 4, meaning that I could still see straight at work.

I spent a good long moment this evening contemplating the situation. A deep-tissue massage would be truly amazing for working out the knots, and I’d certainly get one had I budgeted for one. What I need, I thought, is to soak in a hot bath with Epsom salts and certain essential oils. What I have, I remembered, is a bathtub that’s unsuitable for soaking, unless I want to add flakes of rust to the salts and oils, which I do not. (Yes, a bathroom renovation lingers somewhere out there in the future.) But what I can do, I realized, is line my tub. I did some research and discovered bathtub liners on Amazon that are $15.00 for 12, and they arrive tomorrow, and I can’t wait.

On that note, I’m going to get into a hot shower right now. It’s been bliss taking nightly cool showers with my fresh hemp tea tree oil soap, but I need the hot water on my back!

I’m grateful for the shower, for the running water, for the hot running water. I’m grateful that someone invented bathtub liners. I’m not thrilled by the idea of soaking in plastic, and I’m concerned that maybe I won’t be able to recycle the giant plastic liners, but for medical reasons I need to soak in something, and the liners are the most doable of all of the options I’d considered. (For various reasons I would rather not have a portable foldable bathtub that can fit into my shower stall.)

So that’s what’s going down this weekend, my friends. A HOT BATH with Epsom salts and some healing essences that can hopefully take away or at least further reduce my pain. Also, I need to get back outside at night to reconnect with the stars and other cosmic bodies I’ve been too afraid to face since Salem’s death. Perhaps that will happen this weekend, too. I feel like once I can get back out there, I can start writing about the moon again.

A merry weekend to you all!

Greeting, friends! I’m late again. I stayed up late last night more or less frantically making budget management changes, because once again, my bank is being merged with (taken over by) another bank, and this time, I’m not having it. I’ve gamely gone along with these shenanegans over the last few decades, but with this latest one, the time has come to jump ship. It’s times like this that make me especially grateful for having overcome my negligence in opening my mail. I’m on top of things now, and so I’m free to launch into anxiety-driven midnight quests to stop automatic payments from an account that will soon cease to exist.

In other news of the mundane change variety, it’s been two weeks today that I started using a prescription topical steroid on the back of my neck to treat contact dermatitis, a rash from an allergy I’d developed to the fragrant hairspray I’d used for over a year. I don’t smell like “sugar cookies” or “dessert” anymore, and that’s okay. The part I was less okay with is the consequence of not being able to wear my necklaces anymore, my triple quartz and my black obsidian. They were more about their (magickal) protective and healing properties and less about adornment, but rather than lamenting the situation, I’m viewing it in terms of the gemstone(s) I’m supposed to be wearing at this moment, because that’s what really happened, I believe. My body let me know that I’m meant to wear another stone.

At the same time that the contact dermatitis started, my body developed an allergy to other fragrant products I’d used on a daily basis, so I stopped using everything and switched to just one new thing, and that one thing is a thing (Dr. Bronner’s hemp tea tree pure castile soap) that I love more than all of the old products put together, so that was an amazing happenstance. Tea tree oil is good for healing and for helping to resolve energy blockages, as well as for aiding in banishing negativity.

My body is sensitive these days, reacting to things. It’s serving as a conduit. Nature in its entirety is miraculous!

A lovely new week to you, friends.

This year we’ve been blessed with a spectacular magical monsoon in our spectacular magical desert! This monsoon’s brought us the thunderstorms and rainfall we’ve missed in recent summers past, and it’s been fantastic. We had that intense heat wave in June, right around the time other states had theirs (I’m thinking of 119 in Portland, where many people don’t have A/C), but the temps dropped to classic monsoon lows almost as soon as July got underway. We’ve had cool temperatures ranging from the mid-90’s to mid-100s, we’ve enjoyed frequent storm activity (thunder! lightning! strong winds! RAIN!), and yesterday, my friends, I discovered mushrooms growing near the date palm in my front yard.

Unfortunately, the monsoon’s also brought out mosquitoes with its humidity. And the mosquitoes have kept me from being with my son, who’s been out quite a lot in the early mornings and late afternoons and onward into the night. Yes, my tortoise child has been sleeping under the stars near his beloved hibiscus plants.

23andMe reports that I’m genetically likely to get more mosquito bites than others, which explains my entire life. It has nothing to do with perfumes or other fragrances I might be wearing. It’s not about fragrances. It’s about molecules.

Female mosquitoes have a complex olfactory system that lets them sniff out their food. As it turns out, mosquitoes have preferences! Mosquitoes are attracted to certain molecules in body odor and breath and depending on the proportions of these molecules, some people may appear more delicious than others. But keep in mind that anyone can get bitten by mosquitoes, which can carry disease. So to deter those itchy intruders, the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization recommend using mosquito repellent, wearing protective clothing, and staying indoors during dawn and dusk when mosquitoes are most active.

“…staying indoors during dawn and dusk when mosquitoes are most active.” – Of course. That’s when Geronimo is also the most active.

I’ve learned the hard way to spend just a few minutes with him at a time, dressed in full mosquito battle gear. I was trying to stay away from chemical mosquito repellants, but after doing some research, I’ve accepted that essential oils aren’t going to be adequate if I want to spend quality time with my scale-kid. It’s one of those things I have to say to hell with and just get the scientifically created repellent. It’s okay. This evening I stood at the window and watched Geronimo playing and grazing and patrolling the back fence, and then I went to my computer and ordered some repellent for curbside pickup. I’ll retrieve it tomorrow after work, so when I get home, I’ll be ready!

I didn’t mean to shift the focus of this post to the mosquitoes, though. It sounds like I’m complaining when really I just wanted to rave about the wondrous, exhilarating monsoon this year.

May this find you all doing well and staying safe!

I would announce that this space is reserved for my upcoming mid-week post because my mind went on vacation this weekend, and I was actually going to say as much and leave it at that, but then I impulsively stuck my phone in Nenette’s face as she was sleeping and caught this pic of her the very second she opened her eyes in annoyed surprise:

Then I zoomed in on her eyes and found myself reflected there as a silhouette against the bright window behind me.

And there it is: Proof of my existence in Nenette’s eyes.

More to come in a few days, my friends. Spoiler alert: I binged a series that defies immediate coalescence of my thoughts on it at the moment, but I’m sure I’ll have some collected idle thoughts on it by the time Wednesday/Thursday rolls around, and I’ll want to share them with you, because holy crap.

A wonderful new week to you all!

A guy backed into me in the supermarket parking lot yesterday after work and it was a minor hassle with damage to only one vehicle (mine), but I couldn’t be mad because it turned out he was the forty-something guy who’d been in front of me in the check-out line, and I’d noticed that baby wipes and baby food were among the few items he was buying, and I’d thought to myself that his purchases made sense of his depleted energy. He was clearly exhausted, and when I went to his vehicle to talk to him about the accident, his energy was defeated on top of his exhaustion. He apologized and I said nothing to worry about these things happen and we’re not hurt and then we exchanged info while I had my insurance agency on the line. We took pics of the back of his (unscathed) Jeep Wrangler and then went to my (dented and scraped) Honda Accord to take pics of the damage to the driver side rear door and quarter panel and after the guy left, there was this bystander who’d followed us – a glamorous young woman who looked like a human version of a Kardashian – who wanted to be helpful and told me that her friend had a similar dent in her car and was able to pop it back into place with a suction cup and it was super easy, and when I asked, she said this is kind of awkward but she used the suction cup on her dildo, and I said like the kind you stick to your shower wall, and she said exactly, and I said I don’t have one of those but thanks for letting me know. I came home and finished filing my claim online and now I’m impatiently waiting to be contacted about making an appointment for the inspection/estimate because my instant-gratification-craving Gen-X ass wants the car in the shop STAT. I am not interested in suction cups. Also, my car, Dysis (Goddess of the Sunset), shouldn’t be sitting around looking like someone backed into her. If you know me in person you’ll see me driving a rental in the very near future (I hope). I’ll let you know if it’s snazzy or not.

Well. I’d planned to present Geronimo updates for my mid-week post this week, but I didn’t realize that since my last Geronimo post in early April, I’ve taken, like, 500,000 pics of him. Never fear (I tell myself) – after hours pass of sorting through and deciding upon, it’ll be Saturday, and I’ll have the smattering of pics that rose to the top.

You see, we’ve been enjoying a proper monsoon season for the first time in several years, and Mr. Dinosaur Man out there has been having a blast!

Me, I’m still wading through the new landscape of my daily life without Salem in it. I’m been having a time. I made a major mistake: It was absolutely NOT a good idea to put off going to the V.A. pharmacy and therefore letting my antidepressant lapse during this last month. My idea was that “Some doctor once told me that Wellbutrin stays in the system for a couple of weeks after you stop taking it, so I can coast for a little while.” WRONG answer, my friends. I don’t know what I was thinking. I mean, I’ve been grieving. Maybe the doctor’s words would’ve held true for a few days or even a week, but I procrastinated for almost three weeks. Every day, I got home from work and fell apart. It was only last weekend that it occurred to me that, yeah, maybe I should go get that prescription refilled. I went on Tuesday to pick up the medication, and I swear I felt a little better within an hour of taking it.

Yesterday was the first day since Salem’s death that I didn’t cry at all, but this evening I dissolved again as I spent time with Geronimo in the fragrant cool monsoon breeze at dusk, thinking about how Salem would’ve been so blissfully happy to be there with us.

Nenette still sits in front of the sliding-glass door, wide-eyed, looking for her sister. She’s clearly still confused about Salem’s absence.

I can’t get past the feeling that Salem was only out there exposed and vulnerable that night because I’d been with her until nearly 1am, and when I went back into the house, she simply stayed where she was in the middle of the yard and fell asleep. Salem rolling around happily in the middle of the yard was a part of our little ritual that we did under the stars every night. Have I said all of this before? I can’t remember, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I had. Apologies for any redundancies here.

At any rate, I may have cried this evening, but I’m still feeling a little better overall now that I’m back on my medication.

And I’m excited to post my pics of Geronimo this weekend as I write about his updates!

Merry Friday, all.

After nearly two weeks, the wildfire smoke has cleared over Phoenix, and two nights ago, I was able to view my brilliant summer triangle in the sky again: alpha stars Vega (of Lyra), Deneb (of Cygnus), and Altair of Aquila). Scorpius was also visible again, more prominent than ever, especially alpha star Antares.

-I wrote the above in my journal on June 14th, which feels like forever ago. It’s been a month since I’ve been outside at night! I’m getting there, in my own time. While Salem is no longer with me in this earthly realm, I know that she’s with me in the celestial realm. Our twin star certificates bring me back to this reality, but the absence of Salem in her physical feline form is still fresh. I’m not ready to go out there knowing that I can’t see her and interact with her at this earthly level.

All of this to say, I didn’t step out to admire July’s Full Buck Moon in Aquarius when it rose the other night, though I did celebrate her. As it was, we’ve had monsoon thunderheads covering ours skies, so I doubt that any celestial bodies could have been seen this entire past week.

May I just say that our monsoon season has been wondrous this year!

To those of you interested in my full moon posts, I apologize for my lack of one this month.

May this find you all doing well, my friends!

My friends, I don’t know how many posts I’ve written about my roach phobia and how I need to do something about it. You OG readers are probably tired of reading about it. But I was reminded of it again during our recent heatwave when I came home several hours after nightfall and it was a refreshing 108 degrees outside. I pulled onto the driveway, turned off the ignition, and was about to get out of the car when I saw something moving quickly and erratically on the front patio. I sat still in a vise-grip of fear-induced paralysis as my brain interpreted what my eyes were seeing. There’s only one thing that can scare me enough to freeze me like that, anyhow.

My eyes had fastened onto a huge roach that was covering my front patio helter-skelter at 500 miles per hour, running, flitting, zig-zagging its way from one end to the other, partway up the side of the house, then down, partway up the steel screen door, back down again, and around and around. There was no way I could get out of my car, much less walk onto that patio and open my door. I was stuck.

I called my friend who shares my roach phobia, and she graciously stayed on the phone with me for 34 minutes. The roach eventually slowed down and stumbled over the edge of the patio immediately to the right of the front door, and there I could see frantic yet static motion. I realized that the roach had crossed the invisible line of Creepy Crawley’s magic potion (laid down around the perimeter of the patio the day before), and so it was in the process of dying. The behavior I was watching was the roach’s physical response to the substance. When I say it’s nontoxic, I literally mean that there’s no poison involved. It’s an agent that instantly dehydrates the insect, sucking the moisture out of it. Death occurs fairly quickly. In the case of a large roach, it occurs after about 30 minutes.

Let me tell you, the turbo-charged panic and then death throes of a huge roach made for quite the spectacle to have to watch, and I had to watch it, because I had to keep track of where it was. I was going to have to get out of my car and go into the house eventually. I had to know the location of my enemy.

At any rate, I won’t bother recounting my eventual entry to my house. You can imagine that I was half-dead before I made it in.

Thus again I feel the need to overcome my phobia, though all the overcoming in the world could never convince me that it’s a good idea to attempt side-stepping a monster roach running amok on the front patio.

Meanwhile, in the backyard, Salem’s absence is allowing birds to eat dying roaches. I had the occasion to witness this ghastly extravaganza one morning as I was breakfasting. Birds that were clustered on the back patio drew my attention to a large roach that had also encountered Creepy Crawley’s solution. It was past the berserk stage and well into the disabled stage, and I couldn’t help but watch as two of the birds took turns pecking at it. The roach got smaller and smaller as bits of it disappeared down the birds’ gullets.

Salem is making sure that I won’t have to see a dead roach on the patio.

And if I ever actually embark on a roach-phobia-curing adventure, you’ll be the first to know about it.

Happy weekend eve, Everyone!

I recently (last week) decided that I want to start wearing dresses again after decades, like, just casually around town, so I picked one out at the Goodwill that I thought was cute and out of my gothy comfort zone because I thought it would be fun and brought it home to try on after washing it, and the try-on started out okay as I slipped the dress on over my head with my arms raised up so the sleeves could fall over them and the right sleeve went on first but then my arm on that side got stuck while the left sleeve was halfway on and also getting stuck at the top of my left forearm so then I had one arm completely stuck and the other arm halfway stuck as my upper body was contorted due to my upper back and shoulder also being wedged tightly at an awkward angle into the upper body part of the dress that was made of 100% polyester with no give in the fabric at all and thus ensued my frantic attempt to escape, and I live alone so there was no one there to help as I blindly wriggled and careened around the bedroom trapped in a dress with my arms in the air and my head covered and my upper body twisted and bent, thinking of how I was going to die and this was how my body was going to be found and I wasn’t even wearing nice underwear.

When I finally got out of the dress I tried to take a deep breath but it hurt so I couldn’t and I realized that I pulled a pectoral muscle on my right side, and all night it hurt to breathe and I couldn’t take a deep breath and the discomfort reminded me that I actually injured myself trying to get out of a dress I probably had no business putting on in the first place, and then I thought of the movie Slaxx about the jeans on a killing spree and I was thankful that the dress didn’t murder me, because it could have.

I’m taking it back to the Goodwill this weekend.

I’m devastated. My Salem is gone, as in, she’s never coming back. As in, she’s dead.

I’ll explain everything when I come back here on Saturday night. Meanwhile, I hope you’re having a good week.

Love to you all, my friends.

I saw a roach on the back patio the other day. It was early in the morning, and I spotted it through the sliding-glass door as I was about to step outside to feed Salem. It was at a glance and without my glasses, but there was no mistaking the narrow, orangish-brown oblong shape on its back with its legs tangled in the air and long antennae flat on the concrete. The sight of it threw me into a panic. I wouldn’t be able to avert my eyes. I wouldn’t be able to walk around it and pretend that it wasn’t there. It was right in front of Salem’s bowl. It was exactly where I’d have to crouch down to scoop out her food.

Here in Phoenix Metro, this is how we know it’s officially summer. It gets hot, and the large roaches come out at night. This one was dead because I have Creepy Crawley come out regularly to spray. Not that it matters. They freak me out when they’re dead as much as they do when they’re alive. As far as I’m concerned, roaches are nature’s abomination. Something has to be, right?

I stayed in the house and thought about what to do, and then I braced myself to carry out my plan, which would be to sweep the roach away from the area without looking at it. I knew that some amount of looking at it would be necessary, but I figured if I could glance down quickly, just once, just enough to position the broom where it needed to be, then I could follow through with the sweeping motion without looking.

It’s internal chaos with this paralyzing phobia. I could feel my heart pounding my stomach into knots as I stepped outside. My lungs were afraid to breathe, and the crawling sensation on my lower legs made it hard to move. But my baby was hungry, and I had to get ready for work. There was no time for messing around.

I gripped the broom with both hands and stretched my arms out to their fullest extent so I could stand as far away from the roach as possible, then glanced down quickly, lowered the broom to where I thought it needed to be, and swept. It didn’t work the first time, but the second time, I stepped back and bent forward to get a better reach with more accuracy (should I take up golf?) and executed a more forceful sweep. The roach went flying out of the patio area and onto the path leading to the back gate.

Sitting off to the side, Salem, who’d been watching me intently, followed the roach’s trajectory with her eyes and pounced on it. This actually gladdened my heart. Another sign of Salem’s transformation from feral to domesticated! She’d been playing with her toys in the laundry room for months. I’ve found them all over the place, even outside of the laundry room, but for her to actively engage with me while playing would be taking it to the next level. It would be another milestone in her development!

With this thought in mind, I was able to feed Salem with a little happiness to take the edge off the horror. But dismay lingered in my mind for the next few days as I contemplated the issue of roaches outside on the hot summer nights.

Because my habit is to go out to the backyard every night to be with the stars and the moon and the planets. Going outside at night to gaze at the celestial bodies while bonding with Salem is the highlight of my day. How was I going to manage it with the roaches out there, too?

At first, I thought I’d just have to stop doing it. I couldn’t see bonding with the stars and the moon and Salem AND THE ROACHES. The idea of standing out there with roaches skittering around was pure nightmare fuel.

But in the end, I was not going to let the roaches keep me inside and away from my beloved night sky and sweet daughter of the night. And that is why there’s now a pair of combat boots in the basket by the sliding-glass door. I have an official uniform for summer nighttime skygazing: jeans tucked into combat boots with whatever t-shirt. It makes me feel safer.

Salem seemed disappointed when she found a roach rather than an actual toy, but when I got home from work that day, the roach was gone. Either she’d deigned to play with it, or a bird had come to take it away. Either way, good riddance.

Nah… let’s not blame my eyes, which are innocent. It’s me with my terrible time-management skills. [::shakes fist at self::]

In lieu of a post tonight, I thought I’d drop in with an apology for not having a post tonight. I know I’ve been delinquent in getting my mid-week posts up, and this is not how I would like for things to be. Lest you think otherwise, I do plan to continue with the mid-week posts!

I had one planned for tonight – a much-requested and long overdue “garage gym” (read: living room) post – but it’s not going to happen until next week, unfortunately.

This Saturday, now! I’m beside myself with anticipation of next week’s lunar event, so I’ll be writing about that for Saturday night.

A sneak peek:

–Next week, on Wednesday, May 26, May’s full moon will rise in Sagittarius while we are in Gemini season.

–It will be the second supermoon – and the last – of 2021. This supermoon will be slightly more “super” than last month’s; it will be the largest, brightest moon of the year.

–It will be the Flower Moon.

–And it will be a Blood Moon. Why? Because we’re going to have a total lunar eclipse. The supermoon will be reddish in color.

It will be an ideal time for us all, if we are mindful of the opportunities for growth the cosmos is going to set before us. The total lunar eclipse Super Flower Blood Moon in Sagittarius during Gemini season promises to be one of the most spectacular celestial events of the year, if not the most, not to mention one of the most powerful times!

There’s so much going on, and I can’t wait to get into more detail when I post this weekend. For now, though, I’m going to crawl into bed. This is where I call it a night.

I hope this finds you all well!

Today started strangely, with my brain enmeshed in fog. When I left work an hour early with stomach cramps, nausea, and other intestinal discomfort, I thought it was possible that the brainfog was related. But I believe that it was something I’d eaten at lunch… maybe a bit of bread that’d gone past its time. It wasn’t anything as dramatic as food poisoning, but it was definitely a stomach-disagreement situation.

I can power through colds and even pneumonia, but I crumple when it comes to gastrointestinal maladies, no matter how mild.

So I came home early, and the afternoon turned to dusk. I wasn’t hungry until I was, and then, with my sour stomach, all I could think of eating was bland crackers. Luckily, I had some on hand (for just such occasions). Then I began to crave peanut butter and jelly and more peanuts and also dates, so I ate all of those. That was dinner. I recoiled at the idea of anything salty, oily, or acidic (e.g. my favorite things). No salt, olive oil, tart fruit, or apple cider vinegar? Yeah, something was off.

The obvious downsides of feeling unwell included having to skip my workout. On the up side, I got to see Geronimo and spend a good amount of time with him. I usually just miss Geronimo when I get home from work at my normal time!

Now it’s super late, but I’m feeling better. Hopefully, it was all just a reaction to the bread. I think that it was.

Speaking of bread:

…on the dining table, where she’s not supposed to be. This was a first! I put a firm end to it. Well, what I actually did was put something uncomfortable in that basket. That solved the problem nicely.

Happy Friday and weekend, my friends!

Happy Earth Day 2021, my friends!

In recognition of Gaia, the ancient Earth goddess….

She is the first Goddess, Gaia,
our mother, Mother Earth.
She is our Ancient Mother, and she needs us right now. This is her time of need! Sadly, it’s been her time of need for a very long time, and she’s worsening.

What, as an individual, can I do for her?

I already recycle. I’m already vegan. I already keep my driving to a minimum. I plan to go solar one day… that’s on the long-term list.

What I can do right now, I realize, is resolve to limit my use of synthetic resources. There’s more to this than bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, which I already do. I mean, I already do, but…
but then I’ll sometimes reluctantly ask for plastic bags, and I’ll put them inside my reusable bags. This is my Earth Day walk of shame for all of you to see, my friends: I ask for plastic bags at the grocery store every so often because I use them for the waste that I scoop out of Nenette’s litter box.

A couple of week ago, my feelings of wrongness regarding this finally got to me, and I purchased a hefty packet of brown paper lunch bags. I didn’t know what else to do. When I looked up “eco-friendly kitty litter bags,” I found bags designed for the purpose. The problem is that I’m not confident that they’re okay. They’re made of plastic, I believe, and technology aside, plastic is synthetic. Maybe I’m not understanding it; I’ll do more research. All I know for now is that I’m using up the plastic grocery bags I have left, and then I never want to see a plastic grocery bag in my house ever again. I’ll use the paper lunch bags until/unless I find a better way.

So there’s my Earth Day confession and intention.

To close, I’ll leave you with my movie recommendation in honor of Earth Day! Allow me to suggest Seaspiracy (Netflix Original Documentary).

The End… but not.

Thank you for reading, as always! Merry mid-week and HAPPY EARTH DAY!!