Walking Cactus?

On 20 legs no less....

Of course, it's not really a cactus... not a plant at all... and it's not alive anymore...

but it is intriguing enough to catch my attention... seems they found an ancient worm creature fossilized and all here's the link to the NPR story...

Whatever have I been doing?

The answer to that question is "Not much of any interest to anyone but me..."

Sorry about that...

The truth is that I'm working and working and working... and as much as I want a new job, I haven't had time to even think about applying for one. The only time I have is on Sunday afternoon... and I usually spend that asleep.

I work, I go to church on Sunday and to the classes when I can drag myself there... These are from one of the classes on a Wednesday...

They're an Anglican Rosary... We strung them ourselves at the class... my little summary of the class is this... Almost all major religions of the world use some sort of prayer beads, to repeat a prayer or mantra. In the mid-eighties an Episcopal pastor, during one of their study groups, created these, and they've been slowly catching on ever since. To find the complete history of them, and other stuff like suggested prayers and how to make them... go here


Anyway... my church is non-denominational... and the former Catholics were missing their rosaries... for no good reason really, none of the rest of us are stopping them from saying them, but they missed the communal rosaries that are often said in Catholic churches and most of us just don't know what it's all about, and the former Baptists, Methodist, etc... who do know what it's about aren't objecting, they just are most CERTAINLY not praying to the virgin Mary.

The Anglican Rosary or Protestant Prayer beads are a very nice compromise. As you can tell by looking, there aren't as many beads, and they aren't as large as most rosaries that you see. You go through the entire strand 3 times. And while the church has distributed prayers that we will all recite together every Monday during Lent if we choose to participate, there are no hard and fast rules for saying them. You can make up your own prayers. You're kind of expected to actually. So while I have memorised the prayers the church sent out, I made up my own for myself... for several reasons.

1) the prayers the church will be saying during the mass are heavily focused on mercy. The phrase, "Have mercy on me..." is chanted a hundred times during the rosary... and while I'm not perfect, I don't think I need THAT much mercy. I just don't feel that pitiful.

2) The prayers are all directed towards Jesus... which I don't object to by any means... It's just that I had the sudden realization that even though I was definitely raised Christian, our church prayed more to God than Christ. Primarily because, in the New Testament, Christ never said pray to him, but to pray to his Father... and I guess my particular sect took that pretty seriously. Oh, we prayed in Jesus's name a lot, but not too Jesus... kind of a petty distinction, but... still...

3) There are certain prayers and phrases that I remember from my childhood which give me comfort for some unknowable reason. They fit just fine into the beads, and I will use them...

Now... the purpose of the beads is more meditative than anything else... repeating a prayer, mantra, phrase or any word really, can, bring about a very calming state almost like a trance.

Provided it's done right... like one of our assistant pastors pointed out... if you're gonna be like her brothers when they were growing up, and have contests to see who could get through the beads first... well, then don't bother.

Anyway... We made our prayer beads in class, and I got home and started trying to memorise them... and the beads promptly broke. Scattered all over the floor. And my first thought was... "great... now I'm damned to hell."

The cats however were thrilled to no end... and were chasing beads all over the place... and they made a nice maddening high pitched rolling sound on the floor as the cats batted them across the room...

The above pic is a restrung set that I made myself. The cross is from the church beads, the others are hematite and silver beads that I had in my flea market stuff... they look pretty good actually.

So... now that I've gone on and on about some things that most of you probably don't care that much about... I guess I should probably let you go...

Haven't been posting much lately. Hardly surprising... this is largely a garden and plant blog. And this is hardly the time of year for gardening or plants... I look outside and all I see is brown grass and the occasional mudhole. Not much to talk about it that arena.

That, and I've been working extra to make up for the paychecks I missed when the engine needed replace, shortly followed by the power steering pump burning out. There are some bills that have gone unpaid, and the only way to get the money is to work extra, so there we are.

Considering the current state of affairs... it's certainly easy to see why this title jumped out at me from the bookshelf... "The Freedom Manifesto" How to free yourself from Anxiety, fear, mortgages, money, guilt, debt, government, boredom, supermarkets, bills, melencholy, pain, depression, work and waste.

This little mini-tome, written by Tom Hodgkinson, has been providing me with some valuable insights into things... and while I can't say I agree with everything he has to say, there's certainly enough valid points for me to seriously have some thinking going on.

But a lot of it boils down to this... We, as a society, tend to overspend. The basic workers life goes pretty much like this. We go to work so that we can earn money to pay our rent or mortgage. We work over time usually at a job we don't particularly like, with people we don't particularly like, and for bosses we don't particularly like. When we get home, we are so physically exhausted that we sit in front of a TV and watch something that's moderately entertaining, while being periodically blasted with advertisements that are informing us all about things that we need to buy to make our life easier or better and which we will have to go further into debt to buy. And it doesn't end. We keep going to the job to pay for the stuff we keep buying in the hopes that we will be happy and we never seem to get there, and the only people that seem to benefit from all this are the 2 percent of the human beings that control all the wealth... and quite frankly, they don't seem to happy if you look close enough.

There are two ways out of this. One is to deprive yourself of everything while you work and amass a huge amount of money, then one day, you will have enough money to be able to not worry about it.

Or two... stop buying things that you don't need, simply because somebody out there says that you do need them.

His contention is that your time is better spent doing things a simpler way.

I'll probably go with the latter... but quite frankly, I probably was leaning that way anyway... For instance, I don't posses an I-pod. Can't really see the reason for one. When I'm driving I'm concentrating on the road, listening to the dispatch radio and my GPS. I'm certainly don't have the extra attention for anything else. When I'm shopping, I've managed to get in and out of the market for years without listening to my favorite song, and when I'm at home, I have a CD player or even a radio. Who needs it?

I do not have twitter. I can't imagine that anybody out there cares that I'm pulling into Ennis TX to deliver a load of whatever, and I have enough experience with twitter to know that 99 percent of what comes over it, I don't care about. Honestly, I was once at dinner with a friend when we were subjected to the announcement that someone elses baby had just had it's first "Poopy diaper!" While this may, or may not, be a milestone for the child and something Mommy wants to celebrate, I, quite frankly, don't give a damn.

I'd do without the cell phone if I could, but I do use it for work. And I text more than I call my friends, because it cost less than the minutes... but even that has it's limits for me. This morning, I turned the phone off. I figured I'd turn it on if I needed to make a call. This happened about 1 pm. So, I turned the phone on, called the customer to arrange his delivery... and within 15 minutes I was besieged by about a half dozen texts asking if I was all right.

It seems that if you can't be located at the blink of an eye, everyone assumes you're comatose or something. I'm pretty sure that as recently as 5 years ago, I had friends that I saw once a week, and didn't talk to between those times. And I never assumed they'd lost consciousness.

I'm pretty sure that human beings have, historically, gone for very long extended periods of time without speaking or texting every few minutes. My own mother was an Army wife, based in Germany, and when Dad went on manuevers for periods of one to three months, I'm sure she worried. But she didn't panic. Instead, she packed up the kid and jumped on a train and visitied Bavaria, or Munich or basically she did something on her own, and when he came back they no doubt had long talks about their seperate times... face to face talks. Over dinner. Without some thing bleeping at them and interupting.

So... for the next few weeks... I'm going to be re-prioritizing.

I'm certainly not going to take Mr. Hodgkinson's suggestions and quit my job, move to a shack in the country and grow all my own food. And, if I'm honest, I don't think he expects anybody to go quite that far... But what I will be doing is this.

I will no longer spend $1.50 on a cup of convienence store coffee when I can certainly make a cup of coffee at home to take with me in the truck.

I will not spend $6 ot $8 a day for fast food lunch, when I can pack a weeks worth of lunches at home for the amount one of those bad-for-me barely food meals costs.

I will not spend $1.29 for a bottle of water when I can buy a case of the things for less than $5, and actual tap water is free... (I don't care what what the health freaks say, I've never heard of anybody who died of tap-water induced cancer.)

With the money that I save on lunches... I will be more than able to pay for my after church lunches with my friends, and still have plenty of money left over.

And I'm looking for other ways to avoid spending money. It's not exactly Puritanical thrift... it's just that I don't see why I should spend money on things that aren't good for me or I don't need or enjoy, when I can save the money and do things that are good for me, that I do need, and that I do enjoy.

And there we are.

And now to another subject.

Facebook.

Yes, it's a strange addiction, this social networking. But it's also infuriating, in it's way.

1) People... it's not a private diary! Please, please, please don't tell me the intimate details of your love life, or drag any fights you're having with a significant other, complete with graphic details of what they were doing when you caught them in bed with whoever. REALY. Especially when a quick look at our mutal friends list tells me that our Pastor can read this too... And our pastor DOES read our facebook posts... honest...

2) You do not work for MTV and you are not a Video Disk Jockey. And even if you were, I can not think of any thing that would induce me to look at a video of the latest single from a group of people that call themselves "The Vagina Divers" Never heard them... never hope to. OK?

3) Fine. You found an abandoned puppy and you're trying to find it a home. That's cool. However, in the last week, you have found 3 abandoned puppies, 2 full grown dogs and innumerable kittens, and now your posts are not only about finding them new homes, but are filled with pleas for money to buy animal food and veterinary care. All of which is laced with much hand wringing and wailing about these helpless innocent victims of society and how we are obligated to help them, and quite frankly if you, and several other people out there devoted half this amount of time, energy and money to alieviating human suffering, the world would be a much more pleasant place to live in.

And now... I'm gonna see if I can get off this soap box without breaking my neck...

Just a little rant...

We're expecting our first snow of the year in Dallas - Ft. Worth this evening. Usually we get it a bit sooner, but then again, there have been a few years where not a single flake fell. The newsmen, in their typical panicky level, are telling me that the storm will start with rain and then turn to snow. as much as two to five inches of the stuff... which means that there will be a layer of ice under the pretty white powder.

Now, I realize northerners will find this a bit of a yawn. But the truth is that southerners don't know how to drive on it.

I actually do. I drove in Illinois over a few winters, but I am a little out of practice. But even if I did want to try it, NOBODY ELSE ON THE ROAD CAN DRIVE ON IT. It honestly doesn't matter if I can drive a straight line when there's likely to be a chevy sedan plummeting towards you at any moment.

Whether or not I go to church tomorrow depends on what happens in the weather tonight. It's quite likely that I will be reading the first chapters of a friends writing project that was sent to me via e-mail. Even though I have been published in magazines (not that you can tell from this stream-of-consciousness posting I do here) I am a much better editor than writer, so occasionally friends will forward something to me to look over. There's a 66 page chapter that I've actually scanned the first three pages of and found some major grammar problems with. That and it seems to be Chick-lit. Not my favorite genre. But there's a few intriguing themes presented, and it doesn't actually look that bad for a first draft. There's something to work with here.

But authors, especially first-time authors, can be touchy. They tend to think of their work like a baby. You really have to be careful of what you say. Consequently, an editors notes to the writer are often more subtle and creative that the novel they're working with.

I should also add that I had a really bad day at the flea market.

One of our dealers got into an attitude flinging contest with a former dealer who had dropped by, and for some unknown reason they decided to do this at the front counter, beside my cash register. And for some other reason they decided the I would be the perfect person to mediate this little drama.

Unfortunately after about five minutes, it boiled down to every sentence that began with "Well, I think..." or "Well, she said... " was met with me blurting... "DON'T CARE."

Really, I wouldn't even let either finish a statement. I just started barking before they got it out of their mouth.

Which means they both bounced their little selves to the back and lodged a complaint with the manager. And when she came to the front for a little talk with me... she got "DON'T CARE."

Fortunately, she had a pretty good idea what was going on and basically told them that my job was customer service, not group therapy... and they both bounced out the door, their fight forgotten and now united in a huff.

and I... "DON'T CARE."

Happy New Year!

Again, no photographs.

It may be a good thing....

Anyway, myself and two of the church guys decided to spend New Years Eve at L's house in Mineral Wells... a mere 67 miles from my house, and I had to work New Years Day at the flea market, so I would just spend the night there and drive to work from Mineral Wells. OK.

So we had an OK time. We played dominoes. We played scrabble. We watched movies.

L & H drank beer. (we're a drinking, cussing kinda church... anything but holier-than-thou) I was drinking Mikes Hard Lemonade, because I never could choke down beer and I wasn't up to vodka. But nobody got drunk, we were just chilling.

L's parents, who live on the same block also stopped by, I think they wanted to get a look at the guys that their son has been hanging around at church, just to make sure we didn't have pentagrams tattooed on our foreheads or something.

Anyway they are one of those country style couples that you don't see much of anymore. They talk at the same time as the other, carrying on completely different conversations and you're supposed to keep up with both of them. And they're both about as deaf as a stump.

L's father wanted to discuss his days in the navy, and was telling a rather amusing anecdote about a rather drunken trip to Juarez, Mexico when his mother broke off from discussing the merits of various cornbread recipes and shouted... "Why don't you tell them about the green stamps?" Of course, this interjection didn't warrant so much as a eye blink and he continued his stream on consciousness...

"THE GREEN STAMPS. Oh you wouldn't tell them about THAT would you now?" and something along those lines several times through.

And he continued despite it all until she finally just couldn't take it any more and finally blurted out, "He was in a Mexican bordello, and he was trying to buy a prostitute with green stamps!"

At that point, L's father stood up with full military posture and announced, "It was nice meeting you boys, but I think it's high time we moved along and let you have your fun..." and marched out the door.

H & I were both about rolling on the floor, laughing so much it hurt, and L was saying, "Y'all, don't make fun of my parents!"

Make fun of them? Hell, I wanna adopt them.

So, after the ball dropped, I went to sleep and woke up in plenty of time to get to work, and since I didn't wanna bang around a strange kitchen making coffee, I said to myself, "Self, why don't you just stop and get one of those jumbo coffee's from 7-11 or Racetrack or someplace on the way in... you got plenty of time."

So off I go, and stop at the first convenience store I see, and they haven't got any brewed. Neither did the next. Or the next. And they're looking at me like I'm requesting caviar.

It's 8 AM, on January the 1st, after a very large percentage of the population has been intoxicated, and nobody has any blasted coffee!

It wasn't until I got to Weatherford, about 17 miles down the road to Ft. Worth, that I finally walked into a convenience store that has one of those giant walls with a dozen coffee dispensers, and one, count them.... one... of those blasted coffee machines actually had hot coffee in it.

I swear, I could have scored heroin easier.

Finally got some caffeine in my system, and got to work, and it was actually a decent day.

And one of these days, I'm going to actually post that I had a boring uneventful week and everybody who reads my blog will have an aneurysm.

Well, it's probably no secret that this was a rather thin Christmas for me... money problems have shown their ugly face, so I didn't have the where-with-all to be buying presents, and seeing as I'd been stuck in the house due to a truck in the repair shop, I didn't really have the ability to go shop anyway... I made a few calls, with apologies and planned to spend this holiday much as I'd spent the last one. Midnight Mass, then spend THE DAY curled up under a quilt, with purring cats, reading a book.

Now, when I tell people this, it makes them crazy. What most people don't understand is that I grew up in a house with an unmedicated bipolar sibling, and Christmas wasn't so much a holiday as it was prime staging for a fit, so I don't have a huge fund of warm fuzzy Christmas memories to draw upon. I truly PREFER a quiet holiday. If I do go to a party, I find myself doing what I always did at our families Christmas dinners... namely, sitting in a corner, sucking all the joy out of the room while waiting for the inevitable tempermental explosion. So, rather than torture my hosts or going into long-winded explanations about it, usually I just tell people I have plans.

The church guys however saw through it.

So, I was finally confronted with an invite that I couldn't get out of.

And to be blunt, I'm really glad I went. True, I showed up at somebodies house without a present in hand, which is very un-Southern and enough to make the ghost of my Grandmother rise up and come get me, but I did have a nice holiday dinner... actually, a traditional Mexican holiday dinner, complete with home-made tamales, carnitas, barbacoa, guacamole, hand made tortillas, stuffed jalapenos, and the list goes on and on and on... all complimented with my church friend Hectors mama shoving plates under my chin and demanding, "EAT!" I didn't spend my time worried about how to act or if I was depressing anyone, because I was too busy chewing.

So, I shouldn't need a full meal for the next 4 days...

And, I got the recipe for those stuffed jalapenos. SCORE

And the Trauma continues...

so... here we go... get woke up bright and early Monday morning by someone ringing the doorbell.

It's a cop.

someone two doors down has had their truck broke into, and cop noticed mine had been hit too...

Cops before coffee... wee haw.

They stole my stereo... which quite frankly is no big loss since it stopped working last year sometime and I never replaced it. I gotta hear a GPS talking, the dispatch talking and occasionally my cell phone... I didn't miss it. But, like a fool, for some unfathomable reason, I had left my GPS unit in the truck... and that's gone. so, damn.

So, can't work Monday like I planned, and off to get some things done at the flea market... Pick up a used GPS for 50 bucks at a hock shop... (yes, I realize that I may have just replaced my stolen GPS with someone elses stolen GPS, but money is tight right now... ) and I get home to find an envelope stuck to my door... Inside is a Christmas card that says "I realize you're having a tough time right now, please accept this..." and there's a $50 bill inside. It was signed by one of my neighbors.

Then I see my other neighbor, the snotty ones I rarely talk to, but I know that she's there alone at night sometimes with two kids, and the right thing to do is give her some warning of what's going on in the neighborhood, so I mention that there's been a rash of robberies lately. And she gives me her typical snotty look and says... "Oh, I know... they stole my husbands stereo last week... they got the gun he had locked in the truck too..." and she kind of ambles off...

Now 1) Well thanks for giving the rest of us a head up, sweetheart. Then 2) Why the hell does your husband keep a gun locked in a truck that doesn't have a burglar alarm? and 3) Now we have ARMED burglars in the neighborhood... that's just spectacular....

And now that I think about it... that's kinda how my life has been going lately... something that makes me feel like crap, followed by something that makes me feel all warm and blessed, then followed by something that pisses me off royally, and this see-saw is bloody exhausting and I wanna get off... really. I'm not kidding. It's wearing me out.

Ok.

Got that off my chest.

Sorry about that...

Ok... so you know when you are trying to get your Christmas poinsettia on the overloaded shelf, because that's really the only place you have to put the thing, and you accidently knock something else off the shelf, so you kinda instinctively grab for it?

well, that doesn't work out so well sometimes. Especially if what you knocked off was a cactus.

What I'm trying to say is... OUCH!

And, speaking of ouch... one last statement about my fabulous career as an angel. Wearing wings hurts. Seriously, they are strapped on you with elastic straps that cut off the circulation to your arms, bite into your flesh and pull your shoulders back into an unnatural scrunch. Four days running of that, and I feel like somebody has pounded me between the shoulder blades.

But now I have a little extra time to catch up on my blogger friends.

Merry Christmas, y'all...

gabriel update...

well, I was the angel... didn't fall off my milk crate or nothing... here's somebodies pic from a cell phone... it's the only one I could find right away...

and this is an old pic of my younger and wilder days, but it's the only one I can put my hands on of "The Hair" and it's not quite that long right now, but that's it. And I'm used to the questions, so here are the answers... Yes, the curls are natural, and No, I don't particularly like it when strangers run their fingers through it, but I only really mind because they tend to get caught in it. (I've now established a policy that any jewelry that gets lost in my hair is MINE) And Yes, I do know how much women pay to get their hair to look like that, because they keep telling me and I guess it's your money you can pay that un-Godly amount if you want...

And there we are.

of Engines and Angels...

So... haven't checked in for a while...

Last week, the engine went on my truck. It has to be replaced... I did manage to find a used engine at a junkyard, only 88'000 miles... damned good actually, got a ride over to pay for it and it was supposed to be delivered to the mechanic last Friday.

It wasn't.

Nobody, however, found it necessary to call and tell me this.

So Monday, I call Reuben (the mechanic) to ask for the status. Eventually, through broken English, I find that no engine was delivered Friday.

So I call Chris (the junkyard) to find what's up, he apologizes profusely, tells me he got slammed, and the engine is already on the truck and on it's way to Reuben.

Tuesday, I call Reuben, and again find out, no engine.

Again I call Chris. He tells me that when they pulled the engine out of the wrecked vehicle about noon (WTH? Then how the hell was it on the truck Monday morning?) it turned out to have a cracked head. But he's found another one at another junkyard, and it's going to be delivered instead, and there would be no extra charge (dang straight there wasn't gonna be no charge, I could have told him that...)

I then called Reuben again, reported what I'd just heard, and his response I don't care to report here. But I must add that it was the clearest English I'd ever heard him speak. I'm not gonna get judgemental about it though, because what was coming out of my mouth wasn't much better...

Then, when Wednesday rolled around, I, for the first time, actually get a call... this one from Chris. The new engine is here... it's in good shape except for some minor things that have to be replaced. He wants to know if he can pick up the old engine from Reuben, pull off the parts and replace them on the new engine. Junkyard mechanics are actually pretty good at putting engines together, so I'm not too worried about this... The reason Chris wants to do this is so that he can deliver an engine that he's willing to back up with his guarantee, and if he delivers this to the mechanic as is, most will charge 300 to 400 to do this extra work. (Reuben wouldn't charge that much, but I will concede that point.) Again, no extra charge.

Call Reuben... again a torrent of perfect, albeit unprintable, English... I finally impress upon all of them that I don't give a flying **** who does the **** work, I want the **** truck on the **** road.

So. They call each other, and it has been arranged.

But five minutes after I've had my little unprintable, although impeccably pronounced, fit... the phone rings.

It's the church.

The Christmas Cantata, which will be performed this weekend, has hit a snag. They want me to portray the Archangel Gabriel.

I was not, at that precise moment, feeling particularly angelic. Fortunately I have a way out.

"I'd love too... unfortunately I can't get to the church, my trucks out of commission."

Fifteen minutes later... another call... "Great news... one of our assistant pastors will be there to pick you up and bring you home for the next four days..."

Now, I live 20 miles from church. If the pastor feels so strongly that I, and nobody else but me, has to portray the Archangel Gabriel, and has harangued some poor assistant pastor into chauffeuring me... can I really argue?

I get there. I don't know why I'm the only member of the congregation who can do this, but I'm there...

What's going on is silhouette vignettes. We stand behind a white screen that has projected lights and we, with the aid of sheets, hats, and various other impromptu objects, cast shadows on the screen. And I find out why I'm so necessary.

HAIR.

I have been blessed, via a distant Jewish ancestor, with hair that hangs in long spiral curls. I haven't cut it in over a year and a half, and I must admit it's a pretty impressive mop. Plus, I'm generally tall and thin. Wrap me in an old bedsheet, add wings and stand me on a milk crate... and I project a shadow that looks pretty darned angelic.

So, there we are.

Pastor did ask me if I was happy being the Christmas Angel...

I replied that I was perfectly comfortable being an expression of divinity on earth. Did it all the time.

She laughed, then said something about crucifying me next Easter.

I laughed.

I think she was serious. Hair gets cut off next week...