Year: 2018

Signing off for a while, my lovelies.  I am too angered by a new chapter of psycho-babble drama that I have been trying to step away from since I was a teenager and I am choosing to, instead of writing about it and how I deal with it in this blog, get to work on refining Haven Point series Book 2 as well as get into the mindset of Eli, my main villain in the Novo:Ridge Lake series.  Might as well use that pissed off for something creative and useful instead of repeating a dance I wanted to stop decades ago.  Not going to let it stop me this time from living the good parts of my life that I’ve given up on too many times to count.

I’ve gotten a lot done with Velod’s Caravan, especially this week with a massive edit, and I am on time with it’s Spring release.  The first expansion pack for Survival:Heaps should be out within a couple of weeks and Survival:Chili is well into it’s conception stage.  I’m about to start up with the first set of mock ups.  Hopefully, it’ll do better than Survival:Worms, which I’m thinking about making into a game about chickens instead.

I’ll be putting out some funny-funnies as I come across them.  Please don’t ask or think too hard about where the oatmeal and pop-rocks one came from.  Let’s just say I was awake and no damage came to the walls in my kitchen.

Have an awesome, my dears.  I’ll see you on the flip side.

Sighs… My work here is done.  I just instigated a snowfight with three complete strangers walking down my street.

We raked a massive pile of leaves this past fall into the front yard for my spring mulching project.  With the snowstorms, it’s a huge mound of soft, wet leaves under about two feet of snow.  Three guys, about 20-25, walking in the road, were busting on each other.

I called out to them, explaining the mounds in my front yard.  My suggestion was rewarded with a scooby-doo chase, all up and down the road, into sidewalks, and a couple of body slams into the banks built up around the driveways.  Snow got down into the victim’s boot, so I kindly suggested that he empty it down the perpetrator’s pants.

What fun!  Lots of laughter, from all sides, and yet another chase with the trailing guy plop-clomping at breakneck speeds, holding his boot and chasing his buddy down.  Not sure where they went after, but I could hear even more laughter echoing from a block away.

I seem to remember a similar experience I had, personally, years ago, that was mid-summer and involved mud.  Lots of it.

LOL.

Have an awesome!

Since I was going through photos this week, I decided to look for some others that I know brought happiness to my eyes.  I have a couple of pictures of me, four to be exact, where I am carefree and happy.  One, my favorite of them, is me wrestling with Mom over a roll of toilet paper.  It’s fuzzy, slightly out of focus, but every time I look at it, I can remember her laugh and the snickers I felt beaming out of me.

She had a love of the outdoors.  Of gardening.

The first picture is of a clematis I grew at my old house.  It was stunning and grew over five feet high.  The second is the giant purple iris I planted for her at our current home.  After she passed, even though I don’t really like the color yellow, I brought that mug to work because it was her favorite.  I kept that photo as my graphic for a very long time, so that every time I saw it, I would think of her and her love of being outside in the sunshine, sitting on her chaise lounge in her big floppy hat and reading a book.

   

Flowers became painful for me a long time ago.  But before they did, I used to work in a flower shop.  I gardened or had plants every place I’ve ever lived.  I did, however, have to give them up at one point.  Mostly, and I have to laugh about this, because my cat Tomtom didn’t know they weren’t a litter box.  My poor spider plants didn’t know what hit them.  LOL!

This week while grocery shopping, I saw these beautiful mini-carns, peaking out and decided, for the first time in years, to bring them back into my home.  They sit, simply arranged, in three vases on my tv stand, between my candles and Mom’s favorite Buda statue.  (Which I keep for both Mom and Tomtom.  We used to call him Buda-belly.)

While this may seem soft and gentle, it isn’t.  This is me bringing the crazy and happy back in, overriding what flowers became as a control device.

Memories of grass whistles, climbing up trees, jumping over or scaling large rocks to identify herbs and flora in the treelines, hiking naked through thick pine trails, waking up in the sunshine on a hillside, walking barefoot through creekbeds, chopping firewood for what seemed like hours, tossing chestnut hulls into flames and watching them light up like a city skyline, getting stuck in blackberry bushes, running outside to play tag in a thunderstorm, going outside the cabin in the middle of a snowstorm so I could take a shower as there was no plumbing indoors.  I remember bonfires, and partying in the blueberry fields in A-P-W, and bouncing at house parties of friends.  I remember the field and bird ID books Mom always brought on road trips and singing oh so off key with my mother and sister.  We’d just get up on a Saturday and pick a direction and go, telling outrageous jokes and exploring the world around us, being in it, with no purpose other than to enjoy.

I see these sturdy, delicate flowers and know they are dichotomous.  That as they bloom, the heads will flourish and fill with color.  The petals are so soft, the stems strong, and they are one of the longest lasting cut flowers.

I think, this weekend, I will pack a picnic lunch and go to my favorite local beach, sit on the benches, and watch snow fly over the ice.  I haven’t done that in so long…

Just had a moment.

It’s been a whirlwind week for me.  A birth (yay, Jana!  So glad Pheonix is in the world) and a death (Sorry, Bill and Shannon, for your loss).  Lots of personal stress.

I do think people come in and out of a person’s life for a “reason.”  Sometimes, to help us grow and build.  Sometimes, to teach us a lesson.  I am reminded of a saying- “Education is what you get when you don’t get what you want.”

Earlier this week, amidst these things that we can not control that shape who we are, I’ve been dealing with past events.  The ones I don’t want to think about anymore and say that I don’t.  Ones that I am partially responsible for.  The ones I am trying to make not matter.  I struggle because these events helped shape me and what I believe in.  They matter a great deal.

Someone who is sort of like me but doesn’t know me personally all that well said- “doesn’t ___ know that they are exhausting you?”

She could see it in my face.  My tone.  My outlook.

I wrote my letters.  Did the “work” to get that crap out so I could either decide what to do or to let go.

In one, I said, “See these pictures?  See the same dead look in my eyes from 25 years ago?  I can’t fake being tired anymore.  I can’t fake putting on a smile when I don’t feel it.  Not anymore.”

By the time I was done, I came back to the same thoughts and feelings I had years ago.  And years ago.  And years ago.  At the end, I wrote:  “While that isn’t your responsibility, I can never go back to living that way for anyone.  Not even someone I consider to be _____.  The only way I get me back is to live it. …  LIVE it.  Because the person I “used” to be would ____.”

The other:  “You cut me down, repeatedly.  I give to you.  Be some part of stable and normal for you.  And you give to others and come back at me for not giving enough, not caring enough, while you continue to take from me and expect that I will keep giving.  Does it ever fully connect in your brain that I don’t give to others as much so that you have what you need, while I still try to take care of myself?”

I wound up not sending either, to either person they belong to, because it’s time for me to walk out of the classroom, even though I know this will bring back more cutting remarks about how apathetic someone else views me to be.  I can’t control the world.  I can control my part in it.

After I wrote those letters, I realized that, even though the action of writing them helps me figure out my messes, it IS banging my head against a wall.  The very thing I keep bitching about.  I looked at the pictures I had put in.  I looked at me.  And I saw the same exhaustion that someone else does and recognizes for what it is.

That was the gift someone gave me this week.

After those letters, I felt better.  Came back to me.  I’m still drained but instead of focusing on the crap, I got back to working on Velod’s Caravan and doing the editing I need in order to get the game out.  I felt wonderful.  Like I had shed years of bluck.

And this morning, as I’ve been sitting down to work, those thoughts of bitterness started creeping back in.  I stepped out of the house and ran an errand.  On the way back, one of my neighbors approached to speak with me.

Her message was clear.  While her belief system is not my own, I do believe there are people and moments and places that help keep us on the right track if we would only listen.  This morning was one of them:  Keep my chin up.  Not every day will be like this.  You may have been here before, but this is the opportunity to change.  It’s time to walk out of the classroom.  Time to stop beating my head against the wall.  If I am going to seek fun and laughter, then seek it.  Don’t bother stopping or traveling those twisted pretzel rabbit holes.  LIVE.

I am uplifted.  By two people I barely know who can see and stopped me to say- “hey, go in that direction instead.”  Same message someone else who does know me has been saying:  “Stop.  Take two steps back on your own and go elsewhere.  Don’t be ashamed of what you feel.”  The same message I’ve given to others.  That gentle nudge.

I feel blessed by this.  By remaining open to this.

Serious.  Gentle.  But by the end of the day today, I will get back to me.  I will get back to fun and letting my passion fly.  It’s already started.  I’ve been dive-bombed twice by my Maine Coone, the music is on, and I have plans to watch Keeping Mum this evening.  Why bother banging my head against the wall if I have all that to look forward to?  All I have to do is leave the door open for amusement and I will find it.  And to do that, I am going to put on a favorite pair of funky socks that will let me slide across the wood floors to play a day-long game of chase and oops.

Have an awesome…

SWEET REVENGE!!!

Anyone who’s ever lived with a Maine Coon knows that they are… different.  I know not everyone out there’s a cat lover or an animal lover.  For me, living with animals is like breathing, and I don’t have a preference between cats and dogs.  I just happen to have cats.

I’ve had sweet ones, loving, aloof, lazy, and crazy.  Literally crazy, because of a slight chemical imbalance.  Most of them have stories like my own.  I’m used to being the emotional shelter for a neurotic, anxiety filled feline.

Maine Coons… they are… different.  How, I can’t exactly put my finger on.

My pillow nemesis, who, by the way, is not my princess cat, is one.  I don’t sleep very well with anything touching my face.  For my Maine Coon… this is his preferred place to be- on my face.  Which means anytime I wake up, which he is normally the cause of, his face is RIGHT THERE.

He does not deal well with his world being out of whack.  Which means- his toys, the food bowl, the water dish, the litter boxes.  Which means he wakes me up or basically throws a fit until there is a “correction.”  And I don’t mean the normal- hey, mom, the food is empty kind of unhappy.  It gets into fits of jealousy, especially when I’m on the phone, and he throws a temper tantrum.  But on the plus side, when mom died, he was right there.  All the time, warm and cuddly.  My constant companion.

Maine Coons are also incredibly talkative and my 18.5 pound beast is no exception.

Tonight, we are watching tv.  He is rolled on his back and I love it when he’s like this.  Loose, lax, sleepy.  Relaxed.

So my revenge, for waking me up starting at 5 AM, when I don’t have to be up until 6:15, is tapping him with my toe.

Think of a furry, cuddly version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy.  You know, poke him in the belly and he giggles.  Well, tap my Maine Coon and he mrrps.  Each and every time.

Tap.

Mrrp.

Tap.

Mrrp.

Well over a half hour of this.  Well over.  I have been cracking up, watching him, because his eyes stay relaxedly closed, but his belly squeezes to sound off.

Tap.

Mrrp.

Finally, after this half hour, he opens his eyes and gives me the look of death.  The same one I give him after he’s woken me up for the 17th time in a row.

As I said.  Sweet revenge.