I'm baccccckkkkkk.....

Hello, Dear Reader.

For the past few days I have been rather dismayed because my blog disappeared from Blogger. I was having a minor meltdown - well internally - I was holding it together on the outside. A friend called after I had posted on Facebook about it, and I didn't even have the strength to talk to her about it. I love talking to her, and in every conversation she says something witty or wise that helps me philosophically digest this thing called life, but I couldn't even talk to her. That's how flatlined I was.

Fast forward a couple of days, and I am getting the wind back in my sails.

Slowly but surely.

However, I am actively looking for another host for my blog. After the "missing" fiasco, I am looking at putting my ramblings in a different format, in a different place. I'll still blog, just maybe not here.

Once I have found and set up a new home for the blog, I will post something here to direct you. A link, gasp.

So on with the post:

Today I got up and went to the old office to have a meeting with an Area Administrator. I really enjoy working with her, and I won't have the chance to work with her for much longer, so I am enjoying her company and picking her brain for wisdom.
Then I went to help a client move some of her things. This took so long I was late in picking up my kids from school - about 30 minutes late! - and then I took them home and dropped them off with St Timothy of the Parental Unit. I then got back in the car, went to the office and sent a fax, and met a staff and drove her to Lexington to meet with a new referred client. And then we drove back to Frankfort, I dropped off the staff person at her car and then went to an Al-Anon meeting. I suggested we have the meeting on gratitude - more on that in a minute. After the meeting I met with a lady I really respect and admire and asked her to sponsor me. I have a sponsor who has been really good for me, and I think this lady will also kick my ass through the goalposts of recovery as well.
I then came home, sent St Timothy, Patron Saint of the Food Run, to get some dinner, and then proceeded to complete some more work calls. Now I'm in bed, having been cuddled and debriefed from the day by Tara. Looking forward to reading until I fall asleep, and sleeping until 7AM, when the alarm will wake me up for another day of fun.
Good night, Dear Reader.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After reading what others have said about this book, I hazard to guess I liked it more than most. Yes, the protagonist was priggish and dense in some areas, and I was not surprised about that. Overall, though, I felt that this book represented some matrilineal pride and was about history - personal history and myths and intergenerational revisioning of history - not exact history or scholarship. It's a novel, after all. I felt the exploration of the subject matter compelling, no doubt because Katherine Howe claims genealogical ties to both Elizabeth Howe and Elizabeth Proctor.
For feminist history on this subject, check out Devil in the Shape of a Woman.
But for a good read, compelling and interesting, this book did well for me.



View all my reviews

Written last night around 2 or 3 am....

Tonight was one of those nights where everyone lost their fucking minds. It began as any other Saturday night. I cooked dinner, Chloe had a friend over (at 15, she cannot bear to spend a single weekend without a peer in her face constantly), and Tara was playing loudly and creatively. Tim was on the couch.

As I called everyone to dinner, the lights in the dining room began to dim, and then went out. The house was dark. The street was dark. Hell, the town was dark. Some kind of craptastic thing had happened to an electric plant transformer somewhere.

Suddenly, no one had any sense. Chloe’s visitor starting telling me she was going to cry, that she is scared of the dark. Never mind that I, hippie that I am, possess enough waxy wicks to candlepower a moderately large satanic ritual. She was not in the dark. She was in candlelight. My kids, never ones to be outdone, started telling each other how haunted our old house is, and discussing the difference between spirits and residual hauntings. The friend called her mother; mother came and got her. Chloe flounced back upstairs to stew in her emotastic miasma of a room. Tara crashed on the couch under four or five blankets. Tim was on the couch.

I retreated to the bedroom, caught up on the meditation readings in the books I use, and snuggled deeper under the covers to get started on the new novel I’ve been dying to read, Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. I didn’t even make it through five pages when the work cell phone rang. It was a staff person at the old job calling to tell me the electricity – and hence the lights and heat – were out at the house she was working. No shit, Sherlock, I resisted the urge to say. However, after listening to her describe how she had called two other members of management who ignored her phone call and told her they were in the same boat respectively, I interrupted her to ask her what she wanted me to do. She had no answer, but continued to bemoan the lack of electricity. I again interrupted, what can I do? She then got haughty, “You don’t have to be an asshole to me.” So I put on my clothes, got in my car and drove through the blackout streets of the Capital City to inform her of the necessity of speaking with supervisors with some modicum of respect. Fake it, for fuck’s sake. As I entered the house where she works, I was struck first by the fact that it is at least 30 degrees warmer than my own house I had just left. Then I was struck by the fact that, although she claimed her cell phones were dead, that she was playing on them, texting and taking calls. Both my clients were in bed, snug as bugs in rugs. And she was sitting on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket with a candle burning. In other words, actually in better shape than I am at my own house. So I explain quite plainly that she is not to call her supervisors assholes at 11:15PM when she calls them at home to whine about unfixable situations, especially situations that aren’t that bad. And then I wait, as she only has 15 minutes left on her shift anyway. The next darling employee comes to work 15 minutes late. Gotta love punctuality, respect and problem-solving skills. While I am there, Tim calls me on the cell phone – no doubt from the couch – saying it is too cold and I need to come home so they can all get in my car and run the heat. So I turn back, get back on the roads, and drive through a darkened town. Four miles from home, my cell phone rings again. This time he tells me the electricity is back on, but the heat is not. Apparently our heat will not come on. I go home to fiddle with the thermostat while he tries to coax a pilot light on. Although we’re not exactly sure it was ever off. However, he has turned it off and on again so much at this point, it appears it will be 45 degrees Fahrenheit in my bed forever.

Maybe I need to go to the couch?