So this is not the post I thought I was going to write tonight. I thought I would be telling you about all the stuff I did today, and I did indeed do dishes and laundry and blow bubbles and put buttons on a sweater and open my package from Amazon. And that package is what I want to talk about tonight.

I have found through the years that God has a way of bringing synergy into my life. A word from a friend here, a realization in my spirit there, a third piece of information from somewhere that clearly points in a direction I am meant to pursue.

For some time, I have been struggling with the things that have happened to me in my life, and how to deal with those things as the ramifications of them rear their heads in my today life. I’ve come to see that this is my time to own my own personal truths, to explore where I have been and where I am going, and how I plan to get there. That was the realization in my spirit: it is time.

Last week, when I met with my friend, she told me about a book she had once started, The Artist’s Way. She said it was life changing and that she’d like to get back to it. And I said I would order it and I did and it came today, as you know. That was the word from a friend.

The third thing, the piece of information, has come from several sources. It came from my daughter, and then my friend, and then my other friend, and then two more friends and then my cousin saying “you can write”.

And so, here I am with word, and information and tool, and I am going to do this thing for myself. I am as excited about it as I was about my life list. Today, I just read the introduction. There were several quotes in it, but these three showed me that I was on to something that could really help me: mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. — Anne-Wilson Schaef

Yes, it is time to embrace it, pain and joy, and use it to help myself and others. It is time to be ME. And to all those who would tell me to shut up, “shut up”. Someone told me today that they had been second their whole life, and I said “I know, I have too. But it is time for us to be FIRST.” That means admitting the truth of where I am, because the thing about trying to hide it is that you end up lying to yourself, and if you can’t trust your own self to tell you the truth, who the heck are you gonna trust?

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order…the continuous thread of revelation.—Eudora Welty

This is true for me, as I am sure it is with a lot of you. I am in an intense period of personal revelation just now. I’m finally ready to say something out loud: I was abused. I am a survivor. And it was not my fault. That right there is a very empowering statement, folks. And while I am a survivor, abuse does carry some consequences. Those events loom large in my personal memory arsenal. They far outweigh other events that should be just as significant. It is time to work through all that garbage and put it in it’s rightful perspective. Some people won’t like that. I’m sorry, but it’s time for me to protect me, it’s time for me to be first, and I’m going to do that. Ms. Cameron promises right from the outset that this 12 week program will bring up some painful stuff. I believe her. And I am committing anyway. I am worth it.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.—Simone de Beauvoir

Exactly.

Hi, my name is Cass and I am ready. I might also be looking for laptop insurance, because there’s gonna be a whole lot of blogging going on. And also, a journal, because I need to do my morning pages.

There comes a point in life where you have to stop blogging and go do things to blog about. Today is such a day. Today I plan to blow bubbles, plant lantana, wash dishes, do laundry, sew buttons on a baby sweater, make tacos, start my hands file and start gathering photos for the BoW. Also, my amazon.com order should be arriving. If I have any free time after that, then I can review some of the books I have stacked in my room, clean out my car trunk and start re-organizing my cubbies. Also, I have appointments at 3 and 4.

Or I can just sit here and type some more. But I think I better get moving, since I already need protective clothing just to tackle the dishes. I’ll be back tonight with some actual blogging about actual stuff, ok? ok!

This past weekend I watched a couple of movies. I’d never seen Monty Python’s Holy Grail, and That One insisted it was a must see, so we watched it. Umm, I’ll say that it was pleasant to sit with him and watch a movie he enjoyed. How about that for politically correct? I mean, it was ok, but I don’t feel like it made my life complete or anything. Not like, say, when I made him watch Time Traveler’s Wife with me, yk? It was ok, but I won’t be looking at prevera review to erase new laugh lines.

Then we watched Apocalypto. This one movie was like watching two different movies for me. It’s about the ancient Mayan civilization, and it portrays that civilization with gruesome accuracy. I spent a good bit of the first half of the movie averting my eyes. There was a LOT of violence and gruesomeness, and while I understand that it was historically accurate, it is one thing to read about something in black and white and quite another to see it acted out in full color with bloody special effects. My motto is that you can’t unsee a thing, and so I avoided seeing that which I knew would bother me later. I’m told by Micheal that That One and I had matching looks of distaste on our faces during the first part, so I guess that’s comforting. I don’t think I’d much like to know a man who could revel in that. Just sayin’

Now then, the second part of the movie was awesome. The switch from group violence to one man’s desperate struggle for survival was what made it seem like two different movies. As much as I found the first part distasteful, I enjoyed the second part. Watching one man outwit and destroy a band of 10 men one by one changed the movie into a mental game, and I was swept up in it as he fought to live. It was still quite gory, but the overwhelming oppressiveness was gone, replaced by pure action adventure. The special effects remained awesome, and I was able to watch every bit of it. They did a great job depicting arterial spray from a head wound. In the end, of course, he……..never mind, not gonna tell ya, but it reminded me very much of the Bourne movies, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Does that show my penchant for mental violence as opposed to physical? Probably so.

The movie is still very much on my mind and not in a bad way. Mel Gibson did a great job with it, and even though I chose not to look at parts of it, I think I came away with pretty much the lessons he meant to teach in it. Fear will destroy you from the inside out. Conquering your fear will free you in the same direction.

June 28 Ouch So, forget the thing about not being able to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. Apparently, I can’t even *talk* and chew gum. I was walking to the car with Drama, and she spoke to me and I looked at to answer her and sprained my ankle on a depression in the sand in my yard. Not even an actual hole, people. A depression. Only marginally less embarrassing that getting caught reading colonix reviews by my kids.

June 29 Oops I guess that when I spend the day blogging, I kinda forget the picture taking. Sorry.

June 30 Dead This is what my roses looked like when I got back to the garden shop last week. That just aggravates me to no end!! I did figure out why later in the week, though. Apparently the young man they are putting in there while I am gone did not understand that you water plants gently. He was using the power wash setting. Yeah, on my flowers. No wonder they looked beat and bedraggled and dead and ruined.

July 1 Buttons for a Baby Sweater Pretty self explanatory, right?

July 2 Sleeping I absolutely love it when I get to come home to see this. I could try to explain that, but I won’t bother. But it’s totally worth sleeping on the couch for!

The other night, we had a flash boom banger of a storm. Now, you might think I am getting ready to tell you how scared I was, but this is not the case. I actually love a storm. I feel safe and warm during them, as long as I am inside. I think it goes back to childhood and the sound of rain on the metal roof of our mobile home.

Back in the day, mobiles were called “trailers” and they pretty much were boxes covered in thin metal. Metal walls, metal roof. And when it rained, the sound was tremendous. Not tremendous as in loud, but…….magnificent. From the shupshupshup of a gentle fall to the bangbangbang of a torrent, you could hear exactly how it was precipitating. Today, in my “mobile home”, it’s very different. I have a shingle roof, and I don’t hear the rain at all unless it’s coming down pretty hard, and then it is more like white noise, and not individual pings.

If I ever have to do a roof restoration, and That One assures me that I will before too many more years go by, I am going to look for something that will more closely mimic the sound the rain made back then. Because feeling safe and warm is a good thing, and I like to crawl into my bed and have the rain sing me to sleep. I’m thinking ceramic tile, in a nice cozy red.

So, the kids and I went to party on Sunday. I was very glad when an alternative to our …..untradition popped up, because it certainly saved me a lot of explaining of stuff I don’t want my younger kids to have to deal with yet. We had an awesome time. In addition to the hamburgers and hot dogs and fireworks and pool time, there were pigs to be fed. It kinda made me miss my grandparents. Same smell, same …. how do you say? The term that comes to mind is easy-going life-style, but farming is not easy, …. simple rhythm of life, I guess is the best way to put it. A rhythm I want to recapture for myself one day.

Anyway. I did eat enough food to make me think about adipex p, but then I decided against it and had a second helping of Micheal’s mother’s homemade baked beans. They were out of this world delicious!!

And I also saw a thing I want to do in my yard. The neighbors there had a huge fire pit in their yard. They had made it using the ceramic tree ring pieces like we sell at work. I want to make one of those in my backyard, and the materials are cheap enough to make it practical. I’ve been looking at the dinky portable ones that sell for nearly $100 and thinking that would be nice, but this would be bigger and better for about the same money, if not less. And I am actually thinking a lot less. I’m guessing it could be done for less than $50! And so, once I hit publish I am adding it to the life list.

Speaking of life list, it needs financing. I need to figure out a way to stash money just for that. $10 here and there adds up pretty quick, I have discovered.

You know, sometimes you say and mean one thing, and someone reads it and hears quite another. It’s a downfall of the medium of the written word. People who know you well and talk to you everyday can often take your written words and understand exactly what you mean. Other people, either because they aren’t familiar with your writing style, or because they are bringing to the table a set of emotions that is overwhelming to them at the time, take an entirely different meaning.

It has come to my attention that some of my family members have read what I wrote about Granny’s death and taken an entirely different meaning than I intended. Part of that is my fault, for a couple of reasons. First, I had a very hard time writing that post. I cried most of the way through it, and while I am usually able to proofread a piece to ensure that I have been clear in it as a whole, this time I wasn’t able to do that. I proofread it one sentence at a time. Each sentence stands alone, and each sentence made sense and conveyed my thought, but I failed to make a paragraph break to delineate the facts of Granny’s death from my own personal feelings about the way I would choose to die, if I have a choice.

I want to make it perfectly plain to anyone who misunderstood that Granny wanted her family around her. She was ready to go HOME and she wanted those she loved around her when she went. And I am so very glad for her that my family members were able to give that to her. I know it took a great deal of strength and courage for each and every one of them to set themselves aside and give her what she wanted. There’s nothing ghoulish in giving a dying woman what she wants, and there is nothing ghoulish in wanting to die with those you love around you.

For myself, that’s not what I want. It’s the idea of my own death happening that way that I found repulsive.

The second part is wholly on me. I have mentioned that I have a public face and a private face. My private face is just that, private. I can count on one hand the number of people I allow to see it, and usually not one of them gets to know all I feel about any given thing until they read it here on this blog. Not one of those people is related to me in any way except love and friendship. My most private face is revealed only here, and I do that by pretending to myself that I am anonymous and no one reads this crappy ol’ blog anyway.

For the almost two weeks that Granny was in the hospital I wore the public face. No one there at the hospital knew that I was barely eating, drinking two pots of coffee and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and crying myself to sleep on the nights that I slept at all. They didn’t know that because I didn’t let them know. It’s one of the few times that I regret not letting more of my private face show, because I think if I had shown more of how I really felt, my later words would have been less likely to be misunderstood.

This set of pictures is a little different from most I publish. Usually I show you pictures of things, and not very many faces. This time, it’s the opposite. Lots of faces I love and only one thing. Well, two, but one of them has my face under it.

June 23 Stuntman just because we were sitting and chatting.

June 24 Diva on her birthday

June 25 Lots of Books Somebody has a lot of reviews to write, and that someone is me. I pulled them all out to work on and stacked them ever so neatly on the bed. And then I didn’t get to them. When bedtime rolled around, I had to move them to the floor. Since that time, I have managed to review a couple of them, but I still have quite a stack. No, this is NOT the time for ya’ll to start sending subliminal “sell books” messages. Aint gonna happen.

June 26 New Hat That One picked this up for me on his travels this week. It makes a nice driving hat. On the way up to to Polkton, it kept my frizzed out hair out of my face, and on the way back, it preserved my small and curly hair from being blown about. I never realized a hat could actually protect your hair as well as hide it. Yay for hats!

June 27 Baby You’ve seen this one before, but it’s worth a repeat.