Seeking Wholeness

Every day is like Sunday

2011-07-30T17:00:00.007-04:00

Where has all my previous desire to blog gone?
For those of you who still occasion to check back to see if I've posted anything I do apologize.
Gone, gone, gone. I seem to be gone from the world of blogging stuff.

The creative interest that I once had in posting blog entries, videos, photographs, has quite subsided to a bare whisper of yester-years.
Everything changes and a season for each change I suppose. As the Moodys once sung, "Isn't Life strange?"
Each breath truly is a step in time.

Now, lest all this sound maudlin and moody I assure you dear reader that that is not the case!
All is well with me indeed. Quite well in fact. Better than well even. Should I go on?

Excruciatingly ordinary by all accounts (and the ordinary does not exactly generate interesting blogging) but it is with this ordinary life that a kind of wonder has crept up from behind and enveloped me with its magic.

It's a subtle kind of wonder energized by my age no doubt (66.. I think) and an understanding that comes with growing old and growing older and then growing even older still, an understanding that.. we all take our turns at this thing we call Life.
I've taken mine, to be sure it's mostly done (smiling) although I've got a bit of a ways to go no doubt.

I remember thinking as a young teenager "Wow! I have my whole life ahead of me". And I did have my whole life ahead of me. Now, most of my "time" is behind me!
Wot Happened?!
Where'd it all go?
If I was a little pot-bellied buddhaI would be jiggling my fat little jelly-belly with laughter at that. hahaaaa..

But endings do arrive finally. I like to think of it as "graduating".

Well.. so.. here we are. Here I am. There you are. tat tvam asi -Thou art that
Everything spins around and becomes it's opposite.
Routine become freedom.
Boredom becomes wonder.
Doing nothing becomes doing everything.
The common becomes the miraculous.
With a sharp intake of breath, Little Guy falls from Above to be caught safely in cupped hands of Love.
I am reminded (again) of the first line of a poem, "Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence."
Self awareness is grown, one breath, one step, one life at a time.

...and so it all goes... :-)bill

Teaching The Daughter To Fly

2011-04-01T09:06:00.005-04:00

When my daughter Brie was visiting me here on the old Iowa family farm a short time ago... I decided that she was old enough now, and also.. that it was time for me to reveal a long and closely guarded family secret to her:
..that sometimes members of our bloodline inherit the incredible ability to actually levitate.

Neither my mother nor my father could do this unusual feat, however there has been handed down through the generations an old story about my now-long-gone Aunt Pearl (on my mother's side) who used to be able to jump farther than anyone.. In fact she could, uh.. 'jump' so much so, to such a great distance, that people of her generation avoided her, thinking that she was part-witch, or some other superstitious foolishness. She died alone many, many years ago.. poor old Aunt Pearl.. never finding love nor having any children of her own... cursed by the narrow minded paradigm of her generation.

Early on in my life (if any of you have been tracking my blogging in which I previously revealed to the world this ability of mine), I discovered as a youngster that I too had inherited this incredible power to actually lift my self off the ground and float in any direction or height that I wished. It has been something, this ability of mine to fly ...that I have up until now.. kept as a closely guarded family secret, revealing it to no one other than my own mother, when I was a child. And.. for almost the whole of my daughter's life, I have known that she too inherited this astounding ability to lift-off the ground.. Since day-one, I had always watched her closely wondering "what-if.." and one day it came.. when she was just learning to walk as an 18 month old.. she too lifted off the floor several inches. I quickly and gently pushed her back down, shaking my head "no".. Fortunately we were alone at the time.. and no one else saw what she had done. From that moment on I kept a "eagle's eye" on her life.. but she never did it again... and I suspect had long forgotten the whole incident.

Fast-forward 18 years to the present...
Daughter visits her old man on the ancient family farm here in Iowa.

After a lengthy conversation with her explaining all of this.. and revealing it all to her wide-eyed wonderment and amazement, we both agreed that now was the time for her to consciously try her hand at it herself.. to see if she could do it.. and experience for herself this unique capability of ours.
We had some breakfast, and headed out into the yard on a lovely spring morning in March, where I could further explain the theory and demonstrate the complete technique to her..

I lifted off first to show her exactly how it was done.. demonstrating to her the particulars of being in a certain "frame of mind" (although it really is a certain frame-of-beingness).. that allows a perfect state of limbo-like stasis between two opposing energy forces, the earth below and the sun above... sensing both these incredible forces "as-one". Then, the subtle shifting of emphasis from one energy pull to the other.. thus allowing actual movement of the body in between these two forces.
After I finished my own demonstration (and LOTS of talk on my part), we decided it was time.. after all these years.. it was finally time for her to experience this family-phenomena. Following my explicit instructions.. and a little energy help from the old man.... well.. as you all see..

O yeah!!!! You got it!!! Rock and Roll, daughter! rock and roll....

After a couple of short "runs" with me below and being her safety net, we decided it was time for her to try it completely on her own.. I stood back, grabbed the camera and took the next photo.. AND having to emphasize to her more than once, "don't get cocky!.." (kids love driving parents up-the-frickin'-wall with their stunts!) and..bruises from an ill-performed energy-shift are not fun! (of this I know all to well.)

..but I could tell already.. she's got style and she's got grace and it would not be too long before she would be out-performing-to-perfection her old pops.. doing things that I would never have dared even to try..
After "playing" for awhile in the yard.. lifting off no more than a few feet because of trees and electric lines overhead, we decided to walk down into the corn field and away from all overhead obstructions, where we could move on to the next lesson... one that seriously ramped-up the danger level.

I talked a great deal to her about the fear that would be felt when one is a hundred feet off the ground! .. and that this fear, if you let it.. well, it can kill you. As for myself, being quite experienced from years of multiple lifts throughout my life, I no longer feel any fear whatsoever... and occasionally I go way-high.. if the weather is good enough to do so.. (no wind is important.. and night is better, in that no one can see me.. and spin out of their minds from seeing a body floating around way up there in mid-air). I informed her that she was to concentrate fully on keeping "in-line" with the energy fields.. and not how high she was going... and that it was exceedingly vital to subdue the fear of being high.. if she was to maintain this position of freedom and not come crashing down sideways like an out-of-control kite. I gave her the camera and showed her exactly how to do it.
She was dumbfounded.. and yelled up at me to "not go so high.. come back down!"
..and so I did.. But I had to laugh at her.. I think it freaked her just a little, my going up that high.

But now the real test was at hand. She was apprehensive to be sure... and rightfully so. (as was I.) but I said "as soon as you feel the fear, let up.. and you'll come right back down... just don't get cocky!"..
Confidence with practice is good.. but false confidence can kill you if you're not careful.. know the difference.
Now... now.. it was her time to try... "You'll be fine.." said I "just keep the energy lines straight!"

As she lifted off and up, I could see she was beginning to waver off to the right side, and I yelled up at her to "straighten it up!".. she yelled back down to me "poppeee!!.. I don't like this!" I managed to get off one picture as she gently came back down to the ground...a little spooked for sure.

"hmmm" I said..."I think that this is enough for one day."
And so we walked back to the house... to make some hot chocolate..
in silence..
two wonderful smiley-faces, ear to ear...
and a day in the Life to remember...
Isn't it all just grand!

...and may all we Fools everywhere..
(even you, dear reader..)
have just the grandest of all Aprils.. and beyond.

(we deserve it.)

:-Dbill

Be Very Afraid

2011-03-13T18:14:00.005-04:00

"Be Very Afraid" by Patti
NFS (already spoken for)

And connected to the painting, below is an March 11th interview with Jim Sinclair (old dude who has been around the block like a few of us oldtards).
I'm posting this for my trader/investor friends should any of you have the time to listen up. It's maybe about 20 or so minutes long, I don't know.

Florida Adventure 2011 wrap-up

2011-02-22T08:00:00.017-05:00

We're not in Florida anymore... ..Dorothy boy.

Wrapped up is right!
I just snapped this, this morning ago out in front of the apartment building here in DC.
Brrrrrrr! Cold! Ice!
hurty fingers!
(click to increase my misery)

Ok... Florida was all fun. And I do love driving the Interstate Highways especially in the mornings.. heater below, cracked window above and a Grande Starbucks by my side all giving me wings to fly.
Maybe I should plan another mini-adventure but west of the Missouri next time.

Anyway...
Thanks again to all of you in Florida who put up with me.. you all did wonderful in providing me with lots of "fried chicken" hospitality, comfy beds and endless laughs (still laughing out loud at.. "dinner?" :-D ). And you are all invited to stay in my back bedroom (not all at once!) here in Washington should the spirit move you to do so. I'm a good tour guide. (but remember, 3 nights max ;-)

Below is a hodgepodge of video and stills I took on my 18-day excursion into the sun.
I finally found the time to put it all together.
The show is a long 7.5 minutes. Deadly long for amateur web videos, but I cut and slashed as much as I could.
Seven and a half minutes! Can you stand it?! Go pee and make some popcorn.

First one below is Hi-def for the well-connected. Smaller one below it is for computers of a lesser god. Same stuffings in both. Well, you know the drill. Sound on and up for Satchmo singin' his song.

So there we are. I'm digging in for the rest of winter with nothing on my calender.
If any of you reading this are not on my adventuring email notification listserve and would like to be, send me an email request. I'm at bbouslaugh/gmail.

So Happy Trails to all. And to all of you gaggle of readers I so do appreciate your passing interest! Without you, doing these little personal blogs would not be anywhere near the fun that it is for me. So... thank you!

Sir Wilbur of the House of Cornfed (along with the spirit of our Pioneer Princess)

The Call of the Barn

2011-02-20T11:50:00.021-05:00

I got to change my ways.

For those who have been checking this poor blog to see if there have been any more of those promised daily updates from my adventure to Florida.. and have been righteously disappointed.. well, I really do need to change my ways on blogging about any future adventures into the lands of who-knows-where.

Again it happened.
I start off on the journey all whoop-de-doo taking pics and videos and writing my worthless tripe for all to shake your heads at.. but then as I encounter people along my way, it just all wusses out.
Truth be told (again) and verified without doubt is that I cannot post entries while I am with other people. There is simply not enough quiet time, alone time, to edit photos and video and tell the tale of my travels.
Doesn't work.
So, as the song goes, "I got to change my ways" in this blogging thing.
I really do enjoy it and knowing that a bunch of you are reading it and hopefully getting a small bit enjoyment out of it is just frosting-on-the-cake for me.

So.. future journeys... I WILL.. I WILL (got that?) schedule in between visiting folks full days solitude (at campgrounds) where I can be left alone and catch up on everything. I would like that. You would like that. I will make it happen.. Intention and planning ahead will do it.

After my stay with Bob and Francie in Venice and having been on the road for 18 days I felt "the calling of the barn".. For those of you with no kind of farm background it means like a herd of cattle (or horses) at some pre-determined moment in the late afternoon the animals all turn tail, pick up their grazing speed and head back to the barn for the evening. Creatures of habit as am I.
So it was for me as well. The DC Nest was calling me loud and clear.
I-95 North, where the hell are you! Oh, there you are! Let me climb on your back and fly like an eagle!

Today is Sunday. I pulled into the condo garage Thursday night and I am just now finding the time to put this entry together before going into my usual blogging hibernation in a few days.

More to come tomorrow after I edit the photos
Smaller screens click thumbnail to view full background image

Texas Table

2011-02-08T10:25:00.012-05:00

Now what kind of joker made this picnic table?!
At first I did not notice how high it was from seat to table-top. But then after I fixed a bowl of cereal and sat down... well let's just say that if I was but a few inches shorter I would have been able to set my chin on it. Certainly not kid-friendly.

Not only that but it slopes.. as you see in the photo the right side has been built shorter than the left side. It's like.. totally cock-eyed.
hmmm govenment campgrounds.. government furniture.

oh well... it works, aesthetics be damned.

It was hot and windy yesterday and reminded me of Iowa summers. Not pleasant and I found myself running the air conditioner while traveling around Sebring. Rain came through last night so that did cool things down a bit.

As you see I have nothing fancy to report today so far but will bug you all with an email notice anyway. (If any non-subscriber reading this wants on my subscriber list email me at bbouslaugh/gmail.)

Here's the video of the day:

..and the Photo of the Day:

Ok, time for a late breakfast then I am off to the Atlantic ocean again for one last night with relatives in Hobe Sound.

Here's to New Friends!

2011-02-06T09:02:00.010-05:00

For two days now I've have holed up in South Miami with Pilar, Mickey, Mary, Nic and Orso (the dog). My gracious hosts have not yet kicked me out but alas I am feelin' the pull of the road and will shortly leave this little corner on their Florida Paradise.

Here's the clip of the day: (23 seconds)

I've taken the kayak out onto the canal for a meditative run on the water and may have a hour to do so again this morning before packing my wagon and heading out onto the road. I have yet to decide whether to travel further south.. or east.. or north.
I'll make that decision when the moment comes to do so and my angels tap me on the shoulder and point this-a-way, bub.
The important thing is to keep moving.. keep exploring.. meet up with new things and with great luck pick up some new friends. You can never have too many real friends.
Indeed, where would we be without our friends?

Image of the Day:

Beachin' weather (Day 5)

2011-02-04T12:42:00.004-05:00

But of course we made it to the beach and much to my surprise SOME Florida beaches are not just repetitious exercises in flat, boring, sandy sameness.
Shoes off, wading, beach combing (no luck) even some solitary sitting and... breathing in the ocean air which bore with it just a faint hint of that fishy, salty and seaweed smell. (If ocean odors are not too overbearing, I do like it.)

Video of the Day: (2+minutes)

Background Picture of the Day:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Leaving for Miami in about an hour with an overnight stay at friends and then I'm off to hunt 'gators in the swamp. .. or something.
Not sure yet of the plan but then again I kind of like that.

Florida Day 4

2011-02-02T22:45:00.007-05:00

I lost day 3..

Arrived in Hobe Sound last night.. lots of talk, talk, talkie-talk with sister, nephew and Kari and 3 year old Alex so I really had no time or energy to blog an entry. I have found a bit of time at the moment so will do my best to edit some photos and maybe chirp out some newsy news. (or if nothing else just make it up!) Those of you have read me before know that sometimes (occasionally) I do stretch the absolute truth because I find it fun to do so. I mean the whole point of this blog writing is to have fun for everyone.. me writing / you reading.

Two things (at least!) I want to do from now on.. even on busy social days such as this is to post a short "Video of the Day" lasting only a minute more or less and also post a "Photo of the Day" as a background image. (scroll all the way to the bottom and it should present itself in all it's glory. Not all images are going to fit perfectly all computer screens.. that's just the way it is.. so I will optimize the photo to fit my laptop's screen and also post a little thumbnail that you can click on to see the whole photo should you want to.
Ideally I can post commentary as well but when I'm around people and we're talking and doing, well.. I just can't.

Today's photo of the day is one I got yesterday as I was cruising around Daytona Beach. I passed the "place of business" and it's sign and about a block or two later the humor of it started to "sink in" to my little turtle brain.. so I circled around the block to get a picture.
So, today's "Picture of the Day" even though I took it yesterday is called "Biggins".
Sometimes humor takes a while...
Here's a thumbnail of the image. I found it to tickle my funny-bone, so to speak.

Tomorrow I will start fresh with both a quickie video of the day as well as a new photo of the day.
Miami tomorrow.

Florideee: Day 2 on the road

2011-02-01T14:37:00.006-05:00

Perfect weather for traveling down I-95. Both days. Flat gray skies, traffic-lite, a starbucks Venti coffee that I can make last for 2 hours in the morning, heat from below, window open a bit (cold from above), only the sounds of the road and I am reminded how I do love driving... especially in the morning freshness.
The road, the road, the road. The only thing I am dissatisfied with is the Road Food. Do they all deliberately try to make it all so bland, dry, greasy and just bad???
I'm beginning to think they do. A hot bowl of creamed Kudzu would be more satisfying.

I am currently sitting in the back of the truck/camper at the first Florida Welcome Center. Lucky luck, luck! Their WiFi is strong so I can begin my 2 weeks of silliness in fine form.

And pity all of you fine folks who make up my "fried chicken" stops for you are all doomed to play some kind of humiliating part as a reluctant participator. Ladies, put on that make-up. Gents, suck that belly in. I'm gonna make you a star!

Tonight I plan on finding a camping spot and mingle with the other Snowbirds then tomorrow it's off to Hobe Sound for a stay with family.

Glad I'm not in that little snowstorm goin' on up north. Yesiree bubba.

ps: video doesn't load in well at this rest stop.. slow load.
Hopefully it's working better for you at home.

3 Years Gone

2011-01-30T06:36:00.002-05:00

Today is the 3rd year anniversary of our Patti's passing.

Reading over my previous entries I realize that little more can I say about it. Unrelenting Time keeps moving us along.
We get better.

All things.. they are what they are.
This is life. We each take our turns at it, for better or for worse until the parting of ways.
This year I will practice more the concept of Savoring.. for all things are in process... the disappearance of one thing as it becomes another thing, all and everything, small and great, in some kind of monumental transitioning "dance in time" toward becoming Whole. (hence the title of this poor blog)

And after that? Who knows.. maybe there is no "after that", maybe we do just disappear and all these experiences and relationships formed in a lifetime are just quietly forgotten.
On the other hand, maybe not and the process toward wholeness continues never really reaching the End.
Infinity is a bit too much to comprehend this early in the morning.
A cup of coffee is more the speed.

But Time does tend to mend holes in hearts as all of us who have lost others we love know to be true. It must heal lest we become some dark and pitiful abberation of nature which even nature has little use for in its own Grand Process.

Still and all, not without scars and caution as all of us continue to learn about ourselves and living (or at least trying to live) at what is important to each one of us.
Fascinating are the changes, the "spaces", the process we may find ourselves in. So many ways of seeing. So many attitudes.

I'm turning 66 tomorrow.. I am reminded of a line from one of my favorite movies "Meet Joe Black" in referencing the years of one's life... "..don't they go by in a blink?".
They certainly do. Here one moment..
Savor the moment when an angel taps your shoulder and says "Look! You Here! Grab hold of this before it vanishes!"...for it will be gone in a blink.

Somewhere just beyond savoring the thing at hand lies Wonder that can be grasped for a moment. Then, that too we are compelled to Let Go of lightly. The parting of the ways.
This practice of Savoring is the way to Wonder. Of that I am convinced.

* * *

I've decided to go on a little winter adventure to Florida. (can visiting Florida really be called an adventure?! ) Ok, a nice safe adventure if "safe" and "adventure" are not too oxymoron-ish.

My intention is, again, to make some pictures and video and of course put on a few entries here along with a teacup full of personal philosophy.
It's what I sometimes do but for the life of me I'm not really sure why.

My plan was to leave this morning, however because of a dream I woke up with awhile ago.. that at a gas station my truck was stolen as I was inside paying for the gas, I've decided that I may wait one more day, throw off the possible sequencing of events into a completely new line-of-time and experience and go tomorrow instead.
(yeah, I'm like that when I can be. I pay attention to early morning dreams. And I'm on no schedule that matters to others.)

On this 3rd anniversary of Patti's vanishing from this world and also in memory of all those who have journeyed on before us, I'll post the poem sent to me by Matthew & Family, during my time of loss 3 years ago today that has always struck me deep with hope.

“I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
"There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"
Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, "There, she is gone!"
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad
shout;
"Here she comes!"

-Henry Van Dyke

2011 Predictions: "Bartender, another round please!"

2011-01-01T11:16:00.033-05:00

On the 1st day of January of last year I wanted to have some fun and test out my future-predicting skills. See My Crystal Ball may need a new battery

For those of you who always enjoy having a good laugh in my face, (my real friends) you can read my January 1st, 2010 predictions in more detail by clicking on the link.
It ain't pretty, but who cares?.. My Crystal Ball clearly did need a new battery.
So rather than reading all of it let's quickly go through them, tortuous as it is.

1) Federal Reserve Discount Rate
I actually was not too far off on this one. I predicted the rate would be increased by half a percentage point. The Bernanke raised it a quarter point.
(Give myself a point.. hey, it's my blog.)

2) The Stock Market Last year I predicted "The Highs of 2009 may not quite be in at S&P 1130.. Dow at 10,580.. but they are close. The lows for 2010 will be 698 on the S&P and 6538 on the Dow."
Totally WRONG! Year over year the Dow gained 11%, the S&P 500 gained 12.8%.
My predicted lows were not even in the ballpark. I got nothin', you hear me? Nothin'! Zero points where it counts in my real world and I actually had to cut-my-losses on an inverse fund because of this belief of mine.

3) Employment: I said a year ago, "Ok.. Employment will get mildly less bad in 2010 but that doesn't much help so many desperate job seekers.."
I actually scored on that one.
(I get another point in the Right column)

4) Taxes I clearly stated"A "VAT" (Value Added Tax) will be introduced sometime this summer. Congress will get even more creative in taxing us this year."

OH WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, Mr Bill! There was not even much talk of a VAT tax and extension of the Bush Tax Cuts has been extended. A VAT in Europe, yes, but not here in the ole USA. I still believe there will be but being early on predictions is being wrong. No denying it.
Dead battery Crystal ball layin' in the road.
(Two wrongs, two rights.. more or less )

5) OIL Last year I predicted, "So I am bettin' on both ends of the stick on this one. One or the other, hedging my bets: $40 or $140 a barrel before the end of the year."

Now, one would think I would have gotten one of those right! Nope. Oil climbed gently throughout the year and is 91.40 lip smackers today. Still gently climbing.
(So then, 3 wrongs do not make a right, no, no, no..)

6) Housing ..and he said "We are as high as it will get for years to come. Except for certain areas (like the DC area where there is lots of money floating around) there ain't no way but down for the next year (or 3)."

ummm I can give myself a point on this one I think. From what I've read the Housing market continues to be under pressure

3 wrongs, 3 rights. neck and neck and the next up is the Decider.

7) Inflation, Deflation, or WTF was that?!
"The sucking (deflation) will happen first this year and the next ... the blowout(inflation) to follow as our money loses huge degrees of purchasing power. There will be no afterglow from this gangbanging."
OK...
Nothing has seriously broke yet.. (except in Europe) and the perfect balancing act between the tugging forces of deflation and The Bernanke's forces of Quantitative Easing (flooding the system with hot money) remain in place. Some call it "kicking the can down the road" in hopes that inflation can save the day from a devastating downward spiral that could lead into Great Depression II.
That Game is still on. Nothing is clear on that front. Even the smart money cannot agree on where these dueling gods of destruction will take us.
2011 and 2012 will be interesting. (Got gold?)
Another Wrong. That's 4 bad calls. This is getting tiresome, can't we all just have some disaster please?! (kidding, of course)

8)and finally the Hangman lets loose his floor door:
Black Swans or just little baby chickens?
And I said so boldly"So.. do I predict a game-changing event before year's end?
Sure, why not."

(Baby chicks are so cute. Then they grow up and we eat them.)

D'OH! There really was no out-of-the-left-field game changer that made headline news. (the Gulf oil-spill changed nothing) NO BLACK SWAN made any kind of obvious move down here on us earthlings.
He shoots..he misses.. buzzzz. game over.

So, there you have it.
Clearly more wrongs than rights. Don't count 'em! As the Beatles would sing...

Hmmmm, I must suck at this prediction thing.
And on that note I think I'll try it again for 2011. Practice doth maketh thee poifect, duth it not?

OK.. here we go. I'll keep it short for the ADHDers among us, which I dare say is most of us over 50 (but without the "H" part)

Politics: I predict that Elizabeth Warren will announce her candidacy for the top spot before the end of 2011.
She is the only person alive I would bother voting for with the possible exception of Eliot Spitzer if he could learn to keep his rooster zipped up in its own barn yard. A third party candidate may indeed have half a chance in the next election in that more and more folks are realizing that there is little difference between the two-party oligarchy, controlled by the so-called TBTF Banks. (Too Big To Fail)

OIL If the can continues to be kicked down the road and there are no disruptions in the supply line then we'll see $120/barrel oil and $4/gallon at the pumps before year's end.
If the deflationary God is gaining the upper hand then crude will see a $50 category.
(demand destruction) An outlier event could breach those guesses in either direction, depending on the event. (again, I'm hedging my oil prognostications hither and yon) (yawn)

Employment & Housing
Employment numbers continuing to drift higher (good) and Housing continuing to drift lower. (good or bad, depending on where you sit)

Now for my fav..
Economics and the Stock Market Whoop-de-doo!
Up and down she goes and where she stops nobody knows.. except perhaps for Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.
Oh just never mind about that.

Since money makes the world go round, along with Love of course, I predict with confidence that we will begin to see a very real Flight to Safety that has begun in the economically developed/developing countries.
It's starting already as the basic resources/commodities are increasing in value as money pours into them from worried investors as a safe-sanctuary is sought from a world possibly going haywire.
The world's fiat currencies (and that dollar bill you have in yer pocket) are backed by nothing but confidence and as the Federal Reserve is flooding the arena with even more trillions of non-asset backed debt. Growing debt claims to underlying fixed assets (like gold used to be) can, in turn, be a bad-ass task-master as time goes by. (Can you really get out of debt by creating more debt? Yes, you can pay off one credit card with another credit card and then pay that credit card with another credit card but for how long can one do that?? ummmmmmm Can you say "ponzi", m'dear?

Deflation (and resulting Depression) is nipping at the world's heels and our ever-calm Helicopter Ben is desperately fighting it with hot money (debasing the dollar) with the hopes for inflation winning the confidence battle and thus recovery from recession as we get back to the business as usual, hopefully growth. He's creating new debt to pay off old debt. He'll deal with inflation and possibly hyper-inflation later.
As mentioned above, the battle between the twin gods of deflation and inflation are quietly raging and there is no clear winner as yet and I'm not predicting this one. It could go either way or muddle along in a state of equilibrium for some time. The world stands balanced on razor edge.
However sooner or later, default of the dollar repayment is likely through either deflation or hyper-inflation.
But not this year will that happen. The water has as yet to come to a boil. 2012 could prove to be even more interesting reaching.. ah 212 degrees of rapidly roiling financial waters.

Until it does, flights to dollar safety will put huge piles of dollars into government bonds and commodities, most of all gold, silver and oil as is currently happening by folks who are paying attention. (I consider myself to be paying attention, not always right is an understatement but still, I'm paying attention 'cause I got skin in this game, as do we all.)

Got Gold?
Currently at $1400/oz. Lots of chatter saying gold is currently in a bubble. I don't believe them for an instant. Not even close to going parabolic as is the nature of bubbles. In an inflationary environment gold and silver will continue to rise as a storehouse of value as your dollar buys less and less and your income stays the same. In a deflationary environment gold and silver will take an early hit but will consolidate and after that will either hold steady or creep up. (Gold is money... always has been for thousands of years). In a severe deflationary environment banks and your 1/100th of cash on hand will stowe up in a bank holiday.
I predict by year's end that the value of the dollar will continue to be debased and worry-warts like myself will continue to push gold up by investing in the yellow stuff.
It will settle 1850 per oz by year's end. If pension fund managers as well as sovereign nations start feelin' the real fear, I predict gold will see $2200 an oz. by year's end.

Got silver?
Currently at $30/oz. By year's end we will see $55/oz for the same reasoning as above. Fear will bump it to the upper 60s.

Got oil?
As mentioned above, $120 per barrel sometime during the year. Inflation will squeeze it on up. Deflation will pressure it down. (demand destruction.. some crazies are predicting $10 dollar a barrel oil as deflationary pressures grind the whole machine to a stop.
I won't do that, but we all remember not too long ago that oil was at $30.)
Safe to say that things can go crazy as fast as sentiment can change.

Well, enough of this. I've had my say for today. I've wasted a whole day sitting in front of this computer when I could have been painting the back bedroom.

If you feel like it, make a prediction or two of your own in the comment section below. It's all in good fun, don't ya know.. So hey, how about a hug..?
;-) bill (and patti)

Happy Birthday, Gramma

2010-12-10T12:48:00.002-05:00

Where ever you are..

Dec 10, 1908 ~ April, 1991

You know something's happening

2010-12-08T13:38:00.005-05:00

"but you don't know what it is... do you.. Mr Jones" ~ Bob Dylan

Recent trip to New York City to visit the Daughter. Video above says it all.

Also, I recently listened to a most interesting RadioLab podcast on "Memory and Forgetting". If you have the time in your busy life, give a listen.
bill

All in all you're just a..

2010-11-01T08:49:00.002-04:00

..nother brick in the wall...

Music artists doin' their stuff.

The Australian Pink Floyd is a tribute band. (no chance of ever getting the real Pink Floyd to ever play Washington, DC so we enjoy the next best thing.)

Here's a near 4-minute clip of their show that I attended a couple nights ago and below is some footage of Jon Stewart's Rally-for-Sanity on the DC mall. All fun stuff.

On this day

2010-10-26T06:58:00.003-04:00

Remembering a most fine day at on Ocean Beach, MD a few years ago.
The technical quality is not so hot as was my first camera and Quicktime skills not-so-hot.

If there would be one day out of the year that Patti's spirit would be visiting me (if ever she could) it would certainly be today.
I will spend the day in silence, removed from the world, listening... each breath a step in time.

Under new construction

2010-10-24T05:38:00.015-04:00

We'll see what presents itself to these pages as time goes on. I tire of my old ways of writing here. It now seems pointless to me.
Things change. Life exhales.

I do not know where this new journal writing will take me, if anywhere.

A couple of things to mention:

Regardless of what I write and photograph and video and post here, email notifications of new entries are finished.
I'm done with all that.
They've served their purpose for the kind of blogging I've been doing but that's enough.

Recently I had a complaint from a subscriber of my being too self-effacing and negatively oriented in my journaling here. That it was a bring-down.
I realized also that there is some truth in that, perhaps a great deal of truth in the complaint.
I've given it all a lot of thought over the last few weeks. It made me realize that if only one person was courageous enough to step up and tell me that then no doubt more than a few are feeling the same but are too polite to say so.

At first I thought that I should try to modify my thoughts on future entries, to edit them and pass them through some kind of "light, bright, happy & uplifting, G-rated, Walt Disney family-friendly-stand-up-and-cheer" filter on everything I post here so as not to bring down others who themselves may be struggling with their own pain and dark sides.

It sorta made sense to me because it's really unfair to others who read me that I add my "stuff" even more to their own contained pain.

But as these weeks have went by I began to think, "Oh screw that!".
My life is not some kind of single-sided, day-long exercise in sugary sweet cuteness reminiscent of a feel-good family movie.

I am indeed at times self-effacing. On occasion, I do think myself to be the "merde de au merde" (did I say that right?) and I do put myself down. (I like to think of it paying a debt to the easily angered God of Hubris lest he burn my ass for the other times of being a cocky-locky rooster.)
I have my dark sides and my weaknesses, my culturally-induced shame of serious lack of life accomplishments (Please don't ask again what I used to do for a living, how I make my money! ), all of which I can easily justify but still I'm not particularly proud of.

Who doesn't have their dark sides? Show me that soul and I'll show you one who walks in their sleep.
Life is not singular in neither form nor action but rather a most holy trifold, the Inner Triumvirate interacting for control... the forces of Light, the forces of Dark and the Willful (Holy Ghost) blending of the two giving rise to creation-renewed which itself becomes predominately Light or Dark.. and so it goes if not forever then a pretty damn long time, great and small waves of Time.

I believe the real question may simply be "Who do you trust?".
Who do we trust enough to share the real stuff with?.. and who won't betray that trust, or even try to "fix it" with quicky home remedy and worn-out cliche'. Indeed, do we even trust our own selves not to deceive. Protection in the forms of deception and diversion are means to the end game of ego-survival.
Do we trust another to handle-with-care? Do we trust ourselves to undress, arms held high and just Let Go?
Figure that out and we just might be able to give ourselves permission to move on toward renewed ascendancy in our journey through this world.

What a gift that could turn out to be.

As mentioned above, I do not know where this new journal writing will take me, if anywhere.
For better or for worse, up or down, light or dark..I'm just going to let it happen (or not).

~ bill (and patti)

Hi yo my giraffee! I am here, you are there.
We were not finished.

ADK2010: Journey's End

2010-10-10T11:55:00.010-04:00

I've been back home in DC for a time but now that my journey has ended I find I have great trouble finding the desire to do follow-up work on this last entry.
The trip was good. In and of itself it was enjoyable.
However the blogging about it I feel was a clear bust. Which was unfortunate.
It lessened my trip for me.

It seems that when I'm out in the field I'm naturally inspired to post entries of my miniature adventuring, and I was this time as well. It makes the solitary segments of my trips meaningful. However I found trouble posting entries this time because of the lack of electricity for my computer while camping.. the battery doesn't last long enough. (take a car charger next time, bopsy!) as well as borrowed WiFi often not working for me.

On-the-road blogging... knowing that friends and family are all "tuning in" only a few hours later from various parts of the country is fun for me and hopefully mildly entertaining for you. As I've mentioned to some of you before, in some weird way my writing, photographing and making videos takes the place of having Patti alongside me, and the two of us being naturally silly together as we enjoyed being so.

But after the journey is finished and I tire of being out and about without the laughs and interactions of friends..and I "turn tail" and head back to our "treetop nest", I lose all interest in continuing to write anything that is quickly becoming days and weeks old. Even now that I have mustered up some afternoon writing energy to throw out this one last entry, it is still a bit of a struggle. Old news and all that.

Anyway, now that I'm home and everything has been unloaded from the truck, washed, organized and put away and I'm back in the routine of ordinary life, I will try to post this one last entry of my little journey into the Adirondacks.

Btw, click on any of the thumbnails for the larger versions.

Here's a video mix of my kayaking Blue Mt Lake and Eagle Lake. It's a little over my self-imposed 3-minute video limit.

My next possible trip is to Florida in February. Maybe.
I know of at least 3 "fried chicken stops" that will entertain me for a night or two (ahh, Bob & Francie, Laraine & Don, my sister and Eric & Kari.. ) and who knows who else may invite me out onto their lanai for a couple of Happy Hours tipperies and a glass of laughter. What would we do without our friends?!

Anyway, until then I won't be sending out any email notifications should I occasionally make more postings. Those entries (if any) will probably be more of the inner journey through this world that we all find ourselves to be on. That is often what I would rather write about but sometimes they get a little too personal and never get posted. There are more than a few that have been filed away into that great psybernet Trash can.
Check back on your own from time to time should you find yourselves bored with everything Internet. On occasion I become quite happy to pile a little more of my own "stuff" onto that great waste-of-time and ever-growing pile of WEB dung.

Stay safe, be well and be happy.. as the bumper sticker on the back of Patti's car reads "For Happiness, Cherish Others"

A big Amen to that.

Launch! Lost! Oh Crap!

2010-09-22T11:03:00.011-04:00

I followed around the shore line of Lake Pleasant south of Blue Mountain a few days ago.

The idea was that if followed the shoreline I would circumnavigate the whole lake and end up back at my campsite.
Bad idea.
After about 4 hours of paddling and thinking that the campgrounds should be presenting itself at any time now, but was not presenting itself where I thought it would be, only more trees, I realized that I was a bit lost. (Can you be just a bit lost?)
It was about 4 pm and I still had not found the campgrounds and I was getting a little worried.
I knew that I was not in any real danger because there were occasional houses sprinkled here and there along the shoreline and that if worse come to worse I could always take out the kayak and ask for help.

I WAS in sheer danger of severe embarrassment though.

I kept on for another 45 minutes as the sky began to darken and then upon rounding a point I saw campers!

Ah, relief!

Offshore I yelled to one of them as to what number their campsite was and she shouted out "350, which one are you looking for?"
I replied "196"..
Another 10 minutes and was "home" and high and dry.

I took out the kayak and started my evening fire and Most Happy Hour beer.

Lesson learned. Pay attention to where you are because the shoreline can all begin to look the same when you are out on the lake.

Midway through the outing I come across a little sandy beach. I decided to make a short video of getting into the kayak and launching myself out into the lake.
HD:

Altogether I was out about 5 hours. Needless to say, my arm muscles were sore from the paddling for so long. Not used to that kind of upper body workout.

Blue Mountain Lake is up next. Can't get lost there. It's too small as well as being much prettier.

Slow Children Playing

2010-09-21T12:32:00.007-04:00

Scene of last week's young minds, aging bodies at play: Martha's Vineyard

At 65 I'm the "baby" of the group. But at a certain point in one's "sage-ing while age-ing" (ala crazy Shirley Maclaine) none of that makes a bit of difference.
Selma, Bob, Barbara and myself have most certainly all reached the age as you can tell by our childlike behavior, being idiots together along with nearly non-stop laughter. (got to sleep some time, ya know.)

As mentioned in the subscriber notice since parting company with my friends and to embark on the solitary part of my journey into the Adirondacks, I have had a difficult time trying to find WiFi that will upload video or an electrical socket to recharge the computer's battery. (NY State Campgrounds have neither.. only bears)
But in keeping on I think I've finally found a place where I can catch up on this journal a bit.

In the meantime here's the HD video of our days on the island. about 3 minutes I guess:

Currently holed up at The Hedges. The day started out perfect, blue skies, sunshine, so I got a cabin for the day thinking to go out onto the Blue Mountain Lake in the kayak. 90 minutes after I got here the rain moved in and is covering all and everything with it's slow wetness. This feels like it could last all day or perhaps for the rest of the year. We'll see how the day progresses. If I go out on the lake it will be a short outing since it's already after 2pm.

Here's a picture I took from my campsite this morning when things appeared whole lot cheerier.

Insufficient Data

2010-09-17T12:49:00.013-04:00

I think apologies to all may be due.
Been on the road for a whole week and I have to admit it has been next to impossible to find enough time to put together this next journal entry. Currently I’m holed up in a motel just on the southern edge of the Adirondack Park as cold rain is welcoming me.
I will travel further into the park in a couple hours and into the general direction of Blue Mountain Lake. I’m thinking seriously of getting another warm and dry motel for tonight. It’s not much fun camping when a heavy sky is pelting one with cold rain and then later climbing into a somewhat clammy sleeping bag in the back of a covered pickup truck for the night. If the sun refuses to bless me, that will at least give me more time to put together videos of this week of being on the road.
Except for hours mandated by body for sleeping it has been non-stop “doing” things with others. (and you all know how that goes!)
I’ll give a short recap of the last week.

I arrived at a large campgrounds in Massachusetts and near the Atlantic Ocean where my sister, nephew Eric and wife Kari and 3-year old Alex have been staying while they work the nearby Renaissance Festival. (They are Festival “roadies” and they have a large “5th wheel” trailer with all the amenities that you and I have in our homes, internet service, Sat dish, running hot water bath, kitchen etc., so it’s not like they are all squeezed into some soggy small tent and biting off one another's faces for the lack of space.

There is a certain vagabond sense in traveling and working the fairs all around the country that I do find somewhat magnetic because of my own past (which we won’t get into here) and I have to admit I am somewhat attracted to the life style. Certainly there is a sacrifice of creature comforts for the sake of movement and new experiences, not to mention making money. But that's always the case which is why workin' folks take vacations but with vacations one tends to spend more than making the $$s. Always there are trade-offs no matter what our life styles are.
Their next stop is Texas in October... then Florida for the winter fairs, then... well, even they don't know that far ahead.
Eh, they’re young and tough and haven’t been made soft and flubbery by a regular house and central air like I have. Again, I say it’s “all Patti’s fault!”. She made me go fluffy!

This was my first Renaissance Faire so I found it to be most interesting. Below is video of some of the action.
By the way, I’ve set myself the task of making videos NO LONGER than 3 minutes or the length of the chosen background song playing so as to hopefully maintain interest, without dragging things on and on for you. A lot of footage hits the “cutting room floor” with those self-imposed limits when I put together videos.
Anyway, here’s some fair samples:

Ok.. Martha's Vineyard images and video tomorrow. It's time for me to get back on the road.. still heading north, I think. I'm feeling a bit like a blind butterfly flitting this way and that hoping to fill up my sense of "now what?".

Here's the route I've taken so far. Wish me luck in finding open WiFi and sunshine. I'm thinking maybe to roll up and into Maine where I once-upon-a-time some 30 years ago I hiked up Mt Katahdin in Baxter State Park.
Not sure I'm ready to repeat my past because of my well-aged fluffiness!
:-D

Love is being stupid together

2010-09-10T06:52:00.005-04:00

..and so is camping in the Adirondacks!

Welcome aboard to all of you subscribers to my once-in-a-blue-moon online journaling.

At this moment I am about to step outside my door and again mix up my normal routine for the next couple of weeks.

A Renaissance Festival in Massachusetts and Martha's Vineyard are the first stops of the journey and the last stops of my relatively easy and clean days on the road. After that comes the plunge into the woods of the Adirondacks, just to see what comes to present itself round a solitary campfire. However, I'm not looking for night visits from any bears that roam around the park tearing apart tents and people.

As many of you know I've done this before, my September solitary camping journey into the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
A more-than-expected number of you recently signed up to "come along" this year, and that did surprise and please me greatly. I had hoped for only a half dozen or so audience-friends that would even be interested in my little fall presentations, silly and boring as they sometimes are.
You delighted me in "filling the house".

Connections, friends, caring.. these seeming small things are essential to all of us.
So I thank you each and all.

But on the other side of that, I'm no pro showman here and thus no promises as to the entertainment value forthcoming. I and the world in front of me are making it up as I go along.

Oh one thing before I close the door behind me in a few minutes, and that is about you, yes YOU!.. in making comments along our little journey for the next couple of weeks.

Well...the Truth may set us free but on the web nothing lets a person be themselves like anonymity when making comments.

I like comments.
All of us here enjoy reading other people's comments. But from prior blogging experience I know that folks reading my frivolities rarely make comment. Sometimes a few of you do. Mostly not.
Reasons?
I surmise one of two things: 'cause ya got nothing to say. I'm boring you to pieces and you could care less about any of it (certainly valid reasons. I feel that way about most everything I read online) ...or... you really don't want a whole bunch of other people who read what you've commented and then think what an empty-headed blooming idiot you are!
And that too is a valid reason and believe me, one that I am acutely aware of in my own writings and stumble-bumblelings. I do pour a lot from the empty and into the void as no doubt you have noticed.
Most bloggers do.
I should just shut up, [Oh. SHUT. UP!]shut the billandpatti blog down and maybe then, if I'm quiet enough, no one would know that I'm not the brightest star in the night sky by writing all these kinds of idiotic, empty-headed things. Still, I like to believe that space dust has not entirely glazed my eyes (my "I"s) over and well, it is kind of fun.

Alas, I'm afraid it is too late for me and that you all know I am truly an A-1, first class, bona fide empty-headed idiot who should not even own a computer let alone let loose to spew out his nonsense for others to waste their valuable time on..

But what about you, Dear Reader? As long as you maintain "radio silence" then noooo one will knoooowww the same about you... yes? no? maybe so?

Some mighty fine folks in my life have signed up and are reading this today and there is no telling how many are sneaking over from Josh's Play House to take a peek 'cause they too are bored out of their freakin' computer skulls and are looking for something half-way entertaining. (uh, you might not find it here too you know!)
But if all you're going to do is keep quiet, sit in the corner with the Mute button pushed while I'm doing all the work then I'm not inviting you to any more of my little parties, see?

Well, hey kids.. there is a way around all of that instinct to keep quiet lest others think you an idiot: anonymous comments can set your inner idiot FREE! No one will know who you are and your image-to-the-world is safe!

So, in remembering the title of this entry (um, "Love is being stupid together"..and so is camping) which Patti and I certainly proved 'til the Grand PooBah Blogger took her offline) what I would really, really like is some audience participation for the next couple of weeks.
BUT.. participating anonymously so nooo one will knoooooooow who is commenting.
No names, OK?
Throw your rotten tomatoes at me but don't sign your name. (unless you want everyone to knoooooowww!)

Here's how it is done for those old turkeys unfamiliar with the blogspot commenting mechanism:

- Click the comment button below. ..see it? I know you see it. No more denial.
- Select "profile" and scroll down to "anonymous" and click it
- Write your comment
- Click the "preview" button to read it over and edit it (if you want to)
- Click the "Post Comment" button

Done (and forever enough about comments). I promise.

So to begin.

Open the curtains..step out the door onto the world stage and let's just see what happens! There is no telling where the roads, the roads, the open roads may lead us to. Journey on the inside, Journey on the outside.. into the woods, out of the woods. By the time most of you are reading this I'll be humming along the roads heading north toward Massachusetts.

Until the next entry then somewhere up the road, I will leave you with Bernadette Peters as the witch in the play "Into the Woods" and I'll wager was never afraid of playing any part.

Bernadette Peters - Into the Woods

..and Home before dark!

Hope I don't meet a witch out there in the dark woods. bill :-D

ADK -In the works

2010-08-23T11:06:00.009-04:00

Another journey in the cool (cold) mountains of New York's Adirondack Mountains is currently in the planning stages.
A heap of "stuff" piled high on the floor of the back bedroom... sleeping bags, coleman stove, pots, pans, all the usual junk for being on the road in search of a little adventure before winter sets in to the Adirondack National Park.
Ah yes, not to forget the Kayak which I shall latch onto the top of my 5ft x 6ft home on the road.
I'll be blogging from where ever I can find a wireless signal which is not too difficult.

I know, not too exciting relative to what one can find on the web these days but hey, there's still a considerable amount of suffering that happens to me that you all will get glee from seeing as I in the back of a cold wet pickup, laying in the fetal position at 5 in the dark morning, having desperately to go pee but refusing to climb out of my sleeping bag to do so. Embracing unrelenting conflict until one side wins (and we always know which side that is.)
Oh Intrepid Warriors of the Road! Relent to the cold.. and just get up and go..

Anyway, nonsense aside for the moment and to all of you subscribers who may chance be reading this, I will send out a notice in a couple of weeks to let you know when I am actually on the road. If any stranger has happened upon this and wish to subscribe then send me an email (bbouslaugh at gmail) and I'll put you on my listserve. (and you will no longer be a stranger as you join a small but special group of generous and good hearts)

First stop will be Martha's Vineyard.
Oh.. god..the misery of it all! Why do I do this?

Somehow I relate to this joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?".

The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."

There is a silence, then a shot is heard.

Back on the phone, the guy says "OK, now what?"

ok then.. 'til we meet up on the road. I am "now what?" aka bill

Happy Birthday to Brie!

2010-08-10T06:08:00.004-04:00

Wishing you a most great and grand birthday today O daughter and the same for years and years to follow!
May "being stupid together" with friends always be with you.

from Bob & Barbara & yer ever lovin' poppy xoxoxoxoxoxo

An extraordinary Dream

2010-07-11T09:04:00.007-04:00

Many years ago I had a most remarkable dream.

I dreamed I was pulled up and out of my body that was laying there asleep in bed.
With dizzying speed I was mysteriously pulled far out into space, with the earth behind me growing smaller and smaller, passing the moon by and heading into the star-filled depths.

I knew not where I was being pulled toward with such increasing velocity. Strangely, I wasn't frightened.

Then in the far distance ahead I saw a small light that was not a star, growing bigger and bigger as I drew nearer and nearer, traveling toward it with increasing velocity.

But then as I grew nearer, as I approached this Great Light the speed of my travel began to slow.. ever slower and slower, almost like coasting in to a dead stop until I came face-to-face with this huge Light unlike anything I had ever seen before. A Light that did not blind...

There I was stopped still.. gently floating there in the vasty deep of space, stripped of all pretense..holding onto nothing... facing this magnificent egg-like shaped of living Light Energy.

Then.. something even more miraculous happened.

I heard a Voice "speak" directly to me, and the Voice now inside my mind did put to me a singular question as It ask:

What have you done to help?"

And in that moment of Light bathing my soul I realized that in all the years of my living I had done nothing to help.. nothing save that of helping myself from beginning to end.

Then, with a deafening roar like that of a great waterfall all happening for several seconds inside my head, I opened my eyes to find myself again in bed where I had always been, now wide awake and wondering what had just happened.
For hours afterwards I suffered with a pounding headache.

Even now, after so many years of having that most memorable dream, I have yet to answer my own question as I continue to wonder.

The Doing of Stuff

2010-05-04T13:35:00.023-04:00

As time continues to transport us all along our various ways through this world, visibly displaying first rapid growth, then sometime later an often fetching fullness of bloom, we attract our opposites of sorts in our search for Wholeness and reproduction.
Later still the inevitable long, slow slog toward an olden but not always "golden" age and after that, there is the inevitable disintegration of the body.
I have noticed in this, my own dance with time and the circle of my life some odd psychological metamorphosis of spirit as well as the changes occurring in body time.
Well of course somehow the two, body and spirit are always connected at least in this earthly plane, so the one influencing the other should be a given, I guess.

I'm 65 years old.
By all human accounting and in the overview of my own time (using a baseball metaphor) I like to say that.. I've "rounded third and am heading for Home".
I no longer run as fast or with such self-assurance as I did between say, my leap out-of-the-box and toward first base.. or even second base for that matter.

I don't mind that I'm slowing down.. in fact I rather like it.
It's a part of the Game we have all been borne into (or out of) and to be honest there are occasions when the thought of sliding into "Home Plate" with a holler, a cheer and a great and grand laugh in the face of Completion, of the Great Death.. is not such an undesirable thing as we are always making it out to be.
If this foolish baseball metaphor is in any way apt (and I'm not saying that it definitely is) then isn't getting to Home what a good deal of all this monkey-business of living is about?
I sometimes like to think so. It is next Great Adventure in this mysterious, touchy-feely-thinky theater we find ourselves in.

Things change in the journey between the "whack of the bat" and sometime later our sliding headfirst onto the home plate or.. "biting the dirt" as some wise ass has quipped.
But boy!.. do things change in the going around of it all.

In as much as I now sense having passed "third base", I have noticed some of my own changes in a life in my slog toward Home.
The changes themselves are often slow to appear but as we know are quite undeniable.

One such change I have noticed is a slowly growing desire to.. "stay put". To do nothing. To go nowhere. To make no schedules or commitments I am to appoint myself to. To shut myself in to a very comfortable and routine life in this above-the-tree-tops apartment, like being in a squirrel's nest comfortably looking down on the hurry-scurry trafficking of people and cars below.
Stress-free days (knock wood) passing by too easily, one only rarely differing from the ones before or those to come after.

Amazingly, I'm not even slightly bored with the repetitions, in fact I rather like the circular sameness of my life from one day to the next, month after month, year after year. Just puttering around like I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that.

This comfortable "sameness" began long before Patti and I bonded and began living together. In hindsight I will say the process occurred in her even greater than myself. There was that spirit of similarity between of us and perhaps like addicts so often do, we enabled one another to being "home bound". It was good. Youthful restlessness and ambition and dissatisfaction entirely subdued perhaps by the aging process as well as having a good partner to do only little things with.. just to be with one another.

Anyway, there is peacefulness and safety and even joy in sitting in one's "nest", living the predictable life where the only thing that changes is what one is having for dinner. And even that repeats on a regular basis.

Youth and middle age I doubt can even begin to fathom that but a good many of you will in your own running with Time. It happens automatically like wrinkles, hair loss and sagging everythings....until we drop like flies after a hard frost.

The urge is upon me, if you can call it an urge, it has been upon me for some time. I believe this slowing-down phenomena comes with age yet it is clearly not sleep nor loss of self-consciousness but rather a heightened and serene self-awareness that whispers "we need not go anywhere because we are already there". (paraphrased from Huxley's Island)

Still.. in wanting to sit serenely on my living room swing, one leg tucked under the other like some potbellied Buddha and remembering what peace there may be in silence, I can easily justify it all and do nothing different forever.. or.. I can on occasion shake it off by the Doing of Stuff.

I will probably do both, at least until the hard frost hits and I drop "ker-plink" and rejoin up yet again with that Light that never goes out.

Even though I often may not want to do anything, I have indeed learned that there is a big and multi-faceted payoff in the doing of stuff.
Well, of course, of course Oh silly goose... Such a trivial and obvious truth! We all know that about Life.

Well,as usual I've run on with this inner dialog meant for no one in particular way too long.. so will stop now until the next potential video presents itself to me.

Keep the Light burning!
high def video.. some of you may have to buy a new computer to see it.

Kayaking the Potomac from bbouslaugh on Vimeo.

blow it up!

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards"

2010-03-11T15:00:00.010-05:00

For the past year or so I have been continually intrigued by the concepts of incidence, co-incidence, presentments, intentions, and of course synchronicity. This interest remains and I am constantly on the alert once I grab my coat and keys and move outside into the jumble of worldly things and people where one never really knows what will happen next.
I've lived for some time now with suspicions that everything is connected by some vast mysterious medium although it would appear on the local level that very little is connected. At least that's what we get from sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and of course the most important experiencing/reacting part of us all.. our feelings.
When not in the same locality where we may see and touch or talk in a direct or alternating current sort of way, we must necessarily use our email and telephone and Skype and Facebook to connect with others, insufficient as those electronic inventions of medium so often are.

The question has come upon me: Can intentions (conscious or not) lead to (or create) coincidental presentments that in turn connect us up and move us toward fulfilling or manifesting the intent?
It doesn't matter whether the intentions are, for what we may describe as "good" or as "evil". It is the intent from the intender (not sure that's a word) that I am compelled to wonder if there is another, more meaningful, immediate, localized as well as ubiquitous, incredibly vast energy field that we are all part and parcel of, observable and unobservable.
Science almost says it is so. Waves and particles and packets and strings (blah blah) existing everywhere, connecting all things, all events, all Time in one Great interlacing multiple-dimensional interacting Soup of Life.

Back to being little and a simple question: If you look for trouble does trouble begin to look for you?

I say it does. But why? and how?
Somehow the force that one puts out eventually kicks back the same in essence. (different events, different time.. same essence.. so maybe there is some kind of objective justice here)
The "kickback" is seldom right away in our linear time paths but does it, regardless of time (and multiple lives if there really is such a thing) come back to the source, the "essence point" from whence it emanated?

One may substitute anything one likes for the word "trouble" and the question remains.
If one intentionally, consciously looks for, or "puts out" (fill in the blank) does that then put into motion certain esoteric waves of energy that at some point begin to flow back to the source from which it came?
If I do good works towards others, do good works eventually return to me?
If I exhale am I then compelled to inhale? (ok, that may be an unfair analogy)

This idea of acausal connecting principles is something that I have become fascinated by.

Are there these acausal connecting principles at work constantly? Or....
am I, as we humans are given to do, making something out to be more than what is? Sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar" and nothing more and we all should stop making something out to be more than what it is, often imagining and making something out of nothing.

Still... sometimes... random coincidence, events and people presenting something new that leads us along new pathways in our time goes beyond all the odds.

It just does.

2 years gone

2010-01-30T05:04:00.005-05:00

Today is the 2nd anniversary of our Patti leaving us.

Has she faded from our view?
Memories, photos, recordings are all such poor substitutes for the real thing.
We all remember the slices of life we had with Patti but have now receded in diminishing time, gone way beyond our shared laughter.
Do you remember the sound of Patti's voice?
Images and experiences stick somewhat but it's the sound of another's voice that vanishes so damn quickly. Sometimes I have to view an old video or two just to remind my mind of her once-upon-a-time physical reality.
It's not the photographic images of another that stab down into the depths but rather the sounds that touch the heart where real things and people live.

Time resumes. Life moves on.

People fade in memory though I believe all the experiences remains underneath forever being cloaked in new experiences like falling snow piling upon one another, layer after layer after layer of new experiences ..and never melting off.
Still, the realness of what once was and of our relationships are all still there, grounded and deep underground. Affecting us in so many subtle ways.

Two years gone. 24 little months. A mere 730 days. It's as nothing in Time.
A mere blink in Time as our own laughter with the living returns.
This human experience is at times and in between all the other feelings, remarkably intriguing.

She is missed.

On this the 2nd anniversary of her departure I would wish that for a few seconds after reading all this, each of you , and in your own special way, send to her your good thoughts.
This was her request that I found hidden on her computer after she was gone:
"Please try to explain to all who love me and us that I hope they will send kind thoughts our way and prayers for my progression to a better place."
For all the love and the laughter that she provided for us we can easily wish her that. We would want to wish her that.

* * *

Patti did have another request. As the cancer in her body grew, chewing and altering the life from her, I watched over her as this request became progressively more important to her... listening to her and Karla talk about it.

She wanted her long-time good friend Karla to write a book about her many years of staring into the dark Abyss of Death, of her 21 year long fight and depression, of the relentless grinding down and finally her eventual capitulation to all of it where it became time for her to just Let Go.

In this world Patti was always for helping others and she felt that having her story told could be of help to other women who had been hit by the cancer death sentence.

Karla has for the last two years been engaged in this request and emotion-filled project. The book is approaching it's first completed write (as opposed to re-write) and at this point in it's evolution requires serious professional editing. Neither Karla nor myself are worth the proverbial hill-of-beans when it comes to slashing and burning our own words and passages previously sweated over.
With Luck prevailing (and some objective editing) the book will soon enter into the finalization arena.

The following is from the book's intro:

Why Patricia and I wrote this book

This is Patricia’s story. This is Patricia’s legacy; as expressive as her art, as soulful as her life. This is a book which she again and again asked me to write.

Perhaps Patricia’s story is distinctive because it is hers; or because each of us may find a bit of us within her dreams and fears. Perhaps we can understand her because of her everlasting desire to make a positive impact in the lives of others. Or maybe her legacy will remain blessed because of the sacred friendship between two friends which was founded within and grew upon a deep spiritual belief and connection - recorded in these pages for all to witness.

Patricia’s gift as an artist (painting her primary medium, then mosaics) provided extensive outlets through which she would express her inner joys and attempt to exorcise the demons which crept not only into her dreams, but her daily life. From childhood to the end of her life on earth, Patricia was engulfed with often overwhelming waves of self-doubt. Yet as a sister, daughter, wife, friend, and member of a supportive extended family, her light would always shine and help to show so many of us the way to unconditional love.

Patricia Helsing was diagnosed with breast cancer in August of 1986 – ironically nearly to the exact day when I moved to Washington, DC from New Haven, Connecticut to begin a new job at the city’s ABC television affiliate. Yet we would not become friends until – perhaps 1992 or 1993 after she joined a small metaphysical church which I attended. Although I eventually moved to Seattle in 1995, Patricia and I remained very close friends.

From that unforgettable day in August of 1986 and each one that followed throughout the next 21 years, Patricia would, round after round after round, struggle to eliminate, suspend, or come to peace with the tormentor which had infiltrated her body. Patricia won many fights, but each left her a bit worse for the wear. In the end, like so many brave people who have also engaged in this fierce war called cancer, Patricia succumbed to the tattered remains of her ravaged body.

Within these pages lie the intimate, sad, tender, sometimes irreverent, and often tedious daily exchange of our thoughts, questions, and love for one another. While I was still living in the Washington, DC area, Patricia and I had many conversations about life, death, suicide, and her wishes if she were to ever enter hospice. By the time we began our daily e-mail exchange in August of 2007, I knew that she would not seek any further medical treatment to purge the cancer from her body and that perhaps, just maybe, she would take her death into her own hands.

Paramount to all of her requests (even before they became intimate or married) was Patricia’s desire to have her dear friend Bill by her side when she died. By the grace of God, Bill and Patricia spent the last few years of her life together; whether they were in Iowa cleaning out mouse dung from the bureau drawers of their farmhouse, lazily enjoying the company of their dear friends Barbara and Bob during the warm days of late summer in the Adirondacks, or simply lying in their bed together—swaddled in their love during their short, last hours together, she did receive her wish for Bill’s physical, emotional, and spiritual comfort as she died. Although Bill was her primary caregiver and love-giver we all paid homage to her needs by surrounding her, the best we could, with love.

Throughout our e-mail dialogue, both Patricia and I discuss and sometimes question—our faith. I ask that you be tolerant of our discussions, and read and feel the love between two friends rather than focus upon the “right or wrong” of a specific religious dogma. In the end, it’s love which overshadows all.

Regardless of what you believe are the similarities or differences of what is or is not beyond your physical life on earth, our hope is that you or someone you love might more easily understand how important it is to talk with and listen to, the desires, needs, and quiet company of someone who is dying. With vast resources on “how to” grieve as well as scientific details about the process of a specific disease which is consuming your loved one, Patricia felt it important to address the theme about “what to say” to someone who faces imminent death. Why me? Because Patricia asked me to write this for you.

I am not an expert on death and dying; I am not a physician, hospice nurse, or professional caregiver of any kind. This book was not written with any intention of it being an instructional manual about the ABCs or “Do’s and Don’ts” when communicating with the person you love—or in some cases, the person you know but perhaps not really well. I am not sure this book actually addresses what to say, because each individual and every situation is uniquely special. It simply documents the last thoughts, questions, emotions, and days of a woman who is dying. Both Patricia and I hope that from it—from our raw, honest conversations—you might find a way to talk with the dying person who needs you. Too often we opt to not say anything—or not visit or communicate with our friend or family member who is dying—rather than say something which might offend. And while each and every soul is uniquely different, saying that you care and that you love is always the right thing to do.

I miss Patricia immensely. But if through this book, just one person is comforted, we both know that our work has been divinely inspired and that our lives—this time around—were worthwhile.

God speed.

This story begins with Patricia’s private journal - 3 days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. No one ever read these diaries but I believe she wrote them not only as a cathartic exercise for herself, but knowing – somewhere deep within her soul – that her words might someday help…you.

My Life

Part 2

By Patricia Helsing

Friday, August 8, 1986 approximately 11am

TO:

This book is for the person I love. He knows who he is.

August 11, 1986

Dear Nooper,

It’s now the third day since Part 2 of my life began. Part 1 ended abruptly 3 days ago, on a black Friday morning at Sibley Hospital in the outpatient surgery room.

My guess is that most people in my situation would consider that a major chapter, at least, had ended the moment they’re told they have a potentially fatal disease. But, fortunately, the majority of people don’t hear this news until they’re relatively advanced in years.

I am right smack in the middle – 41 – so it seems right that I might consider this an appropriate time to call an end to Part 1 and begin a second and final part. It is also likely that while I’m in the middle of my statistically promised life span, my Part 2 will be considerably shorter than Part 1.

But I have given Part 2 a theme, and that is to make it qualitatively superior to what came before. “Quality Time” is term in vogue now.

Ok, so what was so terrible about Part 1, anyhow?

Well, it was far from terrible. In fact, a lot of it was wonderful. Let’s say it had its high periods and if you strung them end to end they’d probably take up about 2/3rd of my 41 years. And if you added in the not so high but not so bad years, it would come to about ¾. That leaves about 10 years of low-moderate-extreme unhappiness, mighty dispersed.

So, really, what was so terrible about Part 1 that made me destroy my only written record of it last Friday? My journal, recorded in a book just like this one, covered 14 years starting in 1974, about ½ my adult life…ripped into shreds and dumped from the ninth floor down the trash chute to the basement at 4600 Connecticut Avenue, NW.

Why did I kill all those words – tens of thousands of them? I did it because they were a disease – not individually, but together as a whole – in that book they were a disease. Like alcoholism, they were an addiction. Like cancer, they spread with time blackening page after page after page…

Those words, even when they were about love, which was often, were a vomiting of mental illness. And while keeping the journal was meant originally to alleviate the pain, it never worked. In fact, it seemed to do just the opposite; to magnify and reinforce it. There was no catharsis in writing. It was like a quick fix to the heroin addict; always with the guarantee that I’d be back for more and back sooner. And, in fact, the entries did increase in frequency over the years. In the beginning there were some times years between entries. Toward the end it was down to weeks between major episodes of fear and despair.

That book of black thoughts, terrifying fears, unbridled negativism didn’t cause me to develop breast cancer. The book didn’t. I know that to be true. There are many scientific studies showing how emotions can cause serious physical illness, but even without them I’d know the truth of it. There are certain things one knows...........

* * *

(to be continued in the book ~bill)

All helpful suggestions are welcome.
This is a huge project taken on by Karla (and Patti) and one that is too raw and painful for me to be much a part of. I'm too close to it all, even after these 730 days.
If you have any ideas of where and how to go from here with Patti's request please email Karla at kaerae[at]comcast.net

Gramma Phyllis... end of an era

2010-01-17T09:47:00.012-05:00

She would have been 95 years old in March, this tough old bird finally made it out of here. She died this morning (tuesday the 19th)
Beloved by many including myself, Phyllis Helsing is Skip's mother. Skip was Patti's first husband and my best friend of days gone by. (Skip died of cancer in 1991).
There is a noticeable pattern-stream to this living thing.
Those we love are lost to us in time and in memory as then we too are lost to those who love us.
And so it goes.
We each and all take our turns, living as best as we can and as well as we know how.

After being called about Phyllis's deteriorating state, I hopped a couple of planes to Sioux City and was at the Helsing camp by Thursday evening. Phyllis wanted to finish this off in her own bed, in her own familiar home so that was the guiding way.
She was still reasonably alert and able to effectively communicate.

I have to say that the whole Helsing clan, (and there seems to be a mob of 'em! :-) being mostly inexperienced in handing off a loved one to the Angels, was most impressive. (forgive me kids if I'm in error of this)
In any case, along with the wonderful hospice adviseors, all were there rising to the sad occasion and being perfectly helpful in every way, each doing what they each did best to get the job at hand finished.
In between the tears it all worked very well.

Here is short 60 second video for us to remember her by

March 3rd, 1915 ~ January 19th, 2010

My Crystal Ball may need a new battery

2010-01-01T16:28:00.029-05:00

OK, everyone else is doing it on this first day of the new year so this time I WILL follow the crowd by making my own predictions as to what 2010 will bring. Never done this before but who cares.. I've been wrong about so many things in life that a few more calls added to the 65-story high dung heap won't make a snitch worth of different. Besides, it's all in good fun and meaningless.

Federal Reserve interest rates:
Just to test the waters, Big Bank enabler Ben Bernanke, being the "SuperMan of Year who saved us all from the Abyss" (according to Main Stream Media) decides to raise rates by a half percentage point. Banks continue to borrow the small but somewhat stronger dollar from the fed at these small interest rates and continue loaning it back to the Treasury (purchasing t-bills) at much higher interest rates. This is much more profitable than loaning to "iffy" small business that might actually help the economy. The to-big-fail-banks NEED to make a ton of bucks so the Chosen Ones can again pay themselves their end-of-year bonuses from our taxes while doing God's Work. The Vampire Squid (also known as Goldman Sachs) has pretty much captured our government. A fait accompli but with that pesky growing PR problem.
Wonderful Ponzi scheme for the financial elite, doncha think? They really do need the money to pay the lobbyists to pay our Reps so the circle will not be broken. (problem is it will break the rest of us in the course of time.. but who cares about that?) The Bush deficit continues to increase unabated as Obambi's financial handlers keeps scoop-shoveling trillions into the steam boiler to keep the LOCO-motive Gravy train betwixt Wall St and Washington a-puffin'and a-haulin' the glass beads.

Money down the old rat hole where there is a nest of 'em engaged in a feeding frenzy on our tax revenues. Oh, the gleeful drooling from all the openings of their furry little rat faces. These $$$$$$ presents are like crack, Viagra and adrenaline all wrapped together in a green pill. Oh the RUSH! Give me more! Hogs in a trough. Oink Oink!

Stock Market:
"Double your pleasure, double your fun, it's double-dip, double-dip, double-dip ugh".
The Highs of 2009 may not quite be in at S&P 1130.. Dow at 10,580.. but they are close. The lows for 2010 will be 698 on the S&P and 6538 on the Dow. I expect the Great Bear to awaken from his winter slumber by around the 20th of February and the slow (or fast.. depending on your attitude about such things) slide down will start then. We'll see those scary lows being tested by Halloween, which will be a GREAT time for our Reps to give more trillions away. Option Put buyers will at that point be a-smiling all the way to bank. (I hope to be one of them.)

Employment:
Disheartening for so many who have been let go.
I'm the first of a long, long line of retiring baby-boomers (b.1945) who will never work at a real job again. In any case, the unemployment numbers will continue to be skewed low by the reporting agencies and that info then transfered to us as truth by the MSM. At some point folks will start getting angry at the Enablers..both Dems and Repubs and come to realize there is no difference in our two-system governance. (In 2012 an Independent may finally have a shooting chance at grabbing the golden ring of presidential power). But that's not now. Hope springs eternal as resumes' by the billions are submitted to employers. Guess this is not much of a prediction, eh?
Ok.. Employment will get mildly less bad in 2010 but that doesn't much help so many desperate job seekers.. no light, no light, no light.

Taxes
In the words of Bart Simpson's friend.. "Ha Ha!"
No other direction than UP of course. (not much of a prediction I know)
A "VAT" (Value Added Tax) will be introduced sometime this summer. Congress will get even more creative in taxing us this year. If you work for the Gov or the major banks you're pretty safe. The rest of us just stay on our hands and knees, smile and lift up our southern parts.

Oil
Currently at nearly $80 a barrel, I got this one dead wrong last year (and lost a bet to my friend Bob in Florida) in that I predicted it would hit $40 due to demand destruction. oops! (Don't fight the Fed! You'll lose every time.)
I still think it will hit $40 a barrel for the same reason and am stickin' to my guns for all of 2010. A "black swan" world event could shake things up in the energy market and make me eat some tasty crow again.
So I am bettin' on both ends of the stick on this one. One or the other, hedging my bets: $40 or $140 before the end of the year.

Housing
We are as high as it will get for years to come. Except for certain areas (like the DC area where there is lots of money floating around) there ain't no way but down for the next year (or 3).

Inflation, Deflation, or WTF was that?!
"Oh Gumby! I thought I heard something break!"

Deflation, Yes. Inflation, Yes. WTF, Yes.
But not all at the same time. (Ok..This prediction really does encompass more than just 12 months.. let's say 36 months at best.)
I liken the world's economic situation to an exploding Atom Bomb.
We've all seen those old 50's black and white government movies of a big ole A-bomb going off on the testing grounds. After the B-jesus Big Light there is that SUCKING wind/vacumn just sucking in all the air (deflation) and buildings and cars and dummy people toward the center of the PoP! and then.. a few seconds later the K-BOOM and an even bigger BLOW OUT (inflation) outwards, head faking all and sundry into teensy-tiny pieces.. Oh that raptuous afterglow. Earth having a bit of an orgasm.
Well Scrooge McDuck.. the money bomb has went off (Thanks to our bankers and our elected enablers) and if you look closely beyond what you are hearing on TV and your preferred rag, it's not a pretty picture, kids.
The sucking (deflation) will happen first this year and the next ... the blowout(inflation) to follow as our money loses huge degrees of purchasing power. There will be no afterglow from this gangbanging.

The Great Depression II
If you have a mortgage to pay, kids to feed and clothe and you don't have a job or reliable income, and consider your home as an ATM, Duuuude.. (as our impressionable and parroting youth used to squawk) you ARE in a depression. And it's going to get worse for many more as that great sucking sound of deflation gets louder. However, it will NEVER, EVER be labeled as a Depression by those who are positioned to stick labels onto things through the main streaming media outlets.

Black Swans or just little baby chickens
If an outlier event is expected to occur.. can it still be called unexpected? (BTW, for some of us who do not live our lives in academic discussions that go no where, do not waste your money as I did on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan". I got thru about 3 chapters before my little brain went "tilt". It's for folks who live in the university stratosphere with their zippers unzipped and not for us blue-collar worker bees.
Just read the Wiki page and you'll have a complete knowledge of the book.)

So.. do I predict a game-changing event before year's end?
Sure, why not.
Whatever it is it will involve the universal-to-all-things type of collapse.
But collapse of what? hmmmmmmm..
Three things appear to me to make this world stay lit up and operational: energy and economics and love. (yes, love.. we need to continue to care about others)
What can make these things go dark, one must ask? The distribution systems that conveys transference (and subsequent transformation) of energy into something else which in turn serves to "feed" another similar but often smaller system of transformation and transference. Trickle-down energy systems like the Sun shining on Earth keeps life from wholly wilting away.
The beat goes on until the "Sun" goes dark and the system collapses in on itself.
Cutting the connections (so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) is the game-changer, sooner or later.
Economically speaking, our Representatives and the Humongus Banks and Brokerages who own them have severed the aorta for their own feeding and no amount of IVs (Uncle Ben's Quantitative Easing) will help unless an operation is performed to "clear the airways, stop the bleeding and treat for shock" for our nation which doesn't look like that is going to happen. Like no longer being able to pay you own little credit card or mortgage, Universal Debt (stealing from the future to pay for today) unable to keep up with the needs of people will cause the system to collapse at some point unless the bleeding is stopped and the rules changed. In eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act and going off the Gold standard our captured politicians changed the whole Glass Bead Game to benefit themselves and their big bank handlers in the short term but leading to systemic failure in the relatively near future.

Energy.. ok.. oil. a blockage of distribution will change the game and may well occur this year due to social volatility which is directly connected to economic changes. Natural Gas of which America has plenty of will be the new source of energy to be developed.

Love... always a game-changer, right? :-)
Well, plenty of that will be needed should either of the other two come to pass.

* * *

Ok.. I think my Crystal Ball battery is plumb dead... enough of my crap for one day, no doubt you will agree.
A year from now I will repost this and see if I ever want to embarrass myself again. (but of course I will!:-)
As you can see I read way too many Doom and Gloom blogs. Can't help myself. I remember back in the early 70s when the whole damn world was about to fall apart.
A few reading this may remember those glorious times. Back to the land, grow your own, 10 acres and freedom, and a just-you-wait attitude. It's all comin' down.
But... the system didn't fall apart. We threw our wheat grinders away..moved back to the city.. got a job.. got married.. had a kid or two, got divorced and started all over again.
All normal, ordinary stuff. The world hiccuped..(or at least the US did) but it didn't fall apart. However, it sure was fun thinking that it might and acting as if it would.
What can I say?.. history doesn't really repeat itself, but there are surely some familiar echoes to it all.. like now.
In any case,
Wishing any and all reading this mind-detritus (that I live with 24/7) a most, most, MOST happy and fulfilling and healthy and prosperous 2010.
stay safe... and if you need to, WORK at being happy. And May all good things come to each and every single one of you reading this. Yeah YOU! :-)
As the bumper sticker on Ruby says "For Happiness, Cherish Others".

Outa here for a while. Time for me to sit in my swing by the window. I am just an Old Lying Toad you know and as always, "It's all Patti's fault!"

wheeeee... east coast SNOW!

2009-12-19T09:12:00.003-05:00

Now this is more like it. Glad I don't have anywhere to go today!
I hope it piles up all the way to my 9th floor window. I could jump out and slide all the way to the Washington Monument.

Ah Christmas!

2009-12-17T11:57:00.014-05:00

Shopping, shopping, shopping! Heat those credit cards up 'til they glow, would ya please?! ..and add a little stress just to top it all off, OK? We'll worry about paying off the extra load next month when Visa sends to us their "Minimum Amount Due".
But for now, buy, baby, BUY! whoo hooo!

I went to the mall the other day not only to buy some flannel sheets (love flannel sheets in the winter time, warm, fuzzy, enveloping a body with instant warmth) but also to mingle among the throngs of holiday shoppers.
(Now why the hell would I do that!?)

The malls at this time of the year make me imagine what it must be like inside an ant colony. (I used to be an ant, you know)
Everybody is busy going this way and that, up, down, left, right, store to store to find if not THE perfect gift at least one that is useful (for men) and romantic (for women) and fun if a kid.
Good people dutifully and briskly walking hither and yon with their bags of goodies and gifts and who knows what else.
I go to the mall a couple times before each Christmas, sit on the bench, legs outstretched, ankles crossed and eat an ice cream cone as the throngs cascade around me, veering around my outstretched legs.

I do this for myself of course, just to remember the time that I too did the same scurrying about as everyone in front and behind me is doing.

I remember once a distant time ago, another life ago, that I set about to find a specific gift but was having big-time trouble in locating it in any number of stores. (I think it was a particular multi-functional "Walkman" radio for Josh )
As I was fast-walking in the mall that Christmas Eve afternoon I came up behind a person who was slow walking and I thought, almost said out loud to her, "Get the fuck out of my way!".
I was finally able to get around her, like a car trying to pass on a busy road, glancing with disdain at the side of her face as I passed her and sped on ahead in my quest to find the requested gift.
I never did find the right radio/recorder. Popular item no doubt and so bought a lesser version, spending 40 bucks for a gift guaranteed to disappoint, as it did.

Echos of the past does so often influence our spirit-presence in the now-world. The older we get it seems the greater the reverberations from our own vasty deep.

And now..?...
HA!
No! Wait..Double that: HA HA!
I sit on the mall bench, eating my ice cream, participating in an in-the-moment savoring of my escape from those times. Re-experiencing the sage-old advice to "Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence." (Desiderata )

Malls are eternally all alike in their essence and in this similar scene-of-the-crime a sense of my freedom from the holiday shopping madness that overtakes us in the two weeks before Christmas comes upon me.
Freedom from our obligatory buying of gifts for other people at precisely this time of the year.. is wonderfully renewed.
I leave the busy ant hill with the slightest of smile and walk slowly back to the car much the same as that women walked slowly in front of me in some mall a distant time ago.
I do not turn around to see if any are disturbed at not being able to pass by me.

(Now before any of you reading this jump all over me for not participating in the gifting ritual, let me add my asterisk to that way of seeing/being: if there were children in my life at this time my attitude would certainly be different in that I have always maintained that "Christmas is for the kids" and I still do harbor that attitude.)

But c'mon folks.. we're adults here, aren't we? AREN'T WE?
Do I really want or need to buy someone something (often anything!) and do I need to receive a present of something that I probably could care less about?

For me that answer is"no".. I do not need to give a present in pretty paper to those I love nor do I need to get a present from those that, without any kind of proof positive, care as much for my own well-beingness. Gifts that I give to others and gifts that I receive from others occur throughout the whole year and these real gifts to and from ourselves to others are never wrapped in any kind pretty paper with "to" and "from" tags.

Patti's attitude was exactly the same as my own, of which I was always thankful to her for that. Our giving to one another of the "no-gift" gift, was our Christmas Gift to each other. We were (still are) one another's Gift.
We had nothing to prove to one another. Love was enough. Love is enough.

If anyone is reading this, I would wish for you that kind of real Gift.
But only if it's something that you would really like. It appears that many folks do enjoy the traffic and the mall and the stress of finding the perfect gift and often spending big bucks that they don't have all for the payoffs that occur on Christmas eve and morning.
It appears that most folks do and I am in a tiny minority.

We pursue happiness [and unhappiness] in a so many ways, but occasionally, even I when it suits my fancy, go against such mighty social pressures [like buying everyone a present] by deliberately not doing what everybody else is doing.
In any case...
Merry Christmas to all and as they say, to all a very good night. (and maybe even treat yourself to some flannel sheets) :-)b

Ready for flying on a shoreline of Martha's Vineyard (sept 09)

THE MOUSE THAT WOULDN'T

2009-12-10T07:47:00.015-05:00

I recently received an email from our good friend Matthew-Daniel Stremba, Jedi-Master of the literary vignette, short story and parlor play, the only Stremba in Baltimore and who surely must also be the incarnation of Edgar Allen Poe's lighter side.
With his permission I have reprinted his missive for your enjoyment.

* * *

"Caught a glimpse of her just twice. Gray fur flashing along a line perpendicular to my lateral peripheral vision.

What better time to consider a mouse? I say right now—(1) it's between the two St. Nicholas Days (today, and 13 days hence, 19 December); (2) it's during the commercial Christmas thing that's been cranking-up since before Black Friday; (3) and now when even the grimmest municipal offices pretend joy with cheap stock no-brand holiday hangings. It's time.

I've been imagining ONE individual celibate mouse that scurries back and forth between two houses, ours and the next-door neighbor's. Informed by me that her mouse was making uninvited visits into our house, neighbor lady asked: "What would you like me to do? Get an exterminator?" Well, no—just keep your mouse fed well enough so she'd have no need to intrude into our kitchen. Such a pain, you know, to find mouse droppings on the counter. For one thing, I grind the morning coffee there and wouldn't want to mistake a freakin' fecal part for a dark-roast coffee bean. And excrement or no, who knows where the creature's wee feet have trod before galloping along the sink-top?

You're wondering, dear Reader, why I stick with the idea of a she-mouse. Well, if this mouse is indeed celibate, that's so much easier to live with if she's a she. You just naturally feel so sorry for a male celibate, you know? Makes telling the story very very difficult. But, now, maybe it's a whole family—not always the same mouse either glimpsed in body or detected in her production. In which case, obviously, celibacy is no longer a player in the story. A tribe of incestuous mice?

My fiddle teacher lives in a much better district, stand-alone houses nowhere near any train tracks. In fact, the only public transportation he and his neighbors know is the taxi-cab. No thundering buses. And no routes nearby preferred by emergency vehicle drivers pressing their harrying horns and screaming sirens. Anyhow, there in that classy neighborhood, even a fiddle master has mice. (A mouse is no respecter of social class.) And teacher wonders how this state of affairs originated—this plague of mice—given that his block's rife with cats. The explanation was obvious to me. Every aristocrat quartered there has cats but him—so, naturally, yes, his house has become a mouse's safe haven, a place of refuge, sanctuary. No mouse in her right mind would pass up the opportunity.

We, too, here in a block of rowhouses, have no cat—not since Mamura died a year ago. Nor does our next-door neighbor. Never did. But of the 25 residential units on this street, only seven keep cats. A mouse here has rather free range to locate a home to settle in and stir things up. And our next-door neighbor's cat-free house has so much more besides to suit a mouse-ideal.

To manage this matter of the mouse not staying firm with the better choice—i.e. next door—I purchased a Have-A-Heart trap. Cost me a hefty 17 bucks! That's how much I can't bear to think of the sticky paper solution or the instant kill of the traditional original snap trap. The Have-A-Heart is excellently designed. It caters to the habit of mice to insert themselves into tight spaces almost as if they had some competitive streak—"how tight an opening can I overcome?" Once squeezed inside, a mouse finds exit impossible. Crawl-in, honey—no crawling back out.

But a householder opting for the Have-A-Heart has got to be attentive. Pick that tin box up and take it out back behind the neighbor's house, open it up and let the little critter loose into the grass. Because I am, obviously, such a softy, I've taken the box out a number of times, not sure whether I heard from within a shake or a rattle—taken it out for fear a trapped live mouse might expire horribly from hunger and thirst, stress, loneliness, major disappointment with life, loss of faith in Divine Providence. Each time I've taken it out and opened it—nothing.

The Have-A-Heart's been in place now going on three months. Without result. But very near it, once, twice a week, the mouse turds appear.

Maybe we should consider housebreaking her? Or them?

Happy Nick Day!

Yours unimproved, keeping his ear to the kitchen counter,
Matthew-Daniel, the Only Stremba in Baltimore"

You can find more from Matthew at
Storeyman Live!
Anyone who has any advice for Matthew on catching his elusive mouse (or mice) please let us all know in the comment section.

bill
ps: This photo is of a mouse that patti and I captured one night with our homemade triggered gravity trap. The table the trap was set on is glass so I could take poor mousey's picture looking up from below.
We released her away from the farm house.

DC's first snowfall

2009-12-06T11:25:00.010-05:00

Oh you poor, poor Florida folks. (sister, nephew & family, Bob & Francie, Laraine & Don) Never again getting to experience the beauty and the wonder of the first snow of the year.
Yesterday it started in on us here in the Washington, DC area.
It was great.
I was helping my friends the Smuuuuckers paint their basement but just had to go outside to play a little in the snow.
Perfect snowball-making snow to throw at the camera man.

SPLAT!
Gotcha! hope my camera survived..hmmm
It snowed big wet flakes for hours yesterday afternoon and into the early evening. After all was said and done it looks to be around 4 or 5 inches had accumulated.

Of course it won't hang around long and that's ok too. (it's not a lot of fun to drive in.)
Here's some higher rez images I also took. click the pic for an up close look

Thanksgiving on the road again

2009-11-26T14:20:00.006-05:00

Short trip to Edison, NJ to spend the Thanksgiving evening with Patti's family.
Patti's cousin Ruth lives in Edison and everyone is driving to her home this year. Ruth and her 2 youngn's live just south of NYC and 200 miles north of DC. I'm going to try to blog on this little adventure as I go along.

I took off this morning from DC in the middle of a giant fog (somewhat of a mental fog as well, but that's not unusual). Foggy driving rather.
I was a little concerned but the fog never was terribly thick so I didn't feel too much in driving danger. It lifted about 150 miles into the trip.

The hardest part so far has been trying to stay awake. More often than not I don't have a problem with getting "the sleepies" while I'm on the road but I sure did today. I put on favorite music on the cd player and that helped for awhile but still it was a battle.
About 2:30 I arrived at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Edison. Some of the relatives will be here as well. We'll meet tonight at Ruth's house about a mile away.
In the mean time, IT IS NAPPY TIME for this guy.. after all the fighting to stay awake on the road, laying down for the next hour is going to feel deeeelicious!
Melting into the mattress....

another update after I return from the the partay tonight.

11pm
That was most enjoyable. It was realized that I now hold the prestigious distinction of being the oldest soul in the family. (well ok, the oldest one attending tonight anyway:-) I thought maybe I could now sit on my fanny and be waited on hand and foot.
Oh, but no.
I guess I haven't quite reached that venerable state of aging just yet.

Here's the group.
Missing a couple folks since not even my wide angle lens could candidly capture everyone's image.

Of course the kids had to have their moment being wonderfully silly.

I want to thank you all for having me with you. And a special thanks to you Ruthie, whose home we gathered in and who lost her husband Jerry just a year ago.

We toasted all those who left us for the other side of this life.

ok.. I had so many sweets that it'll be a wonder if I ever fall asleep tonight.. but now that I'm back at the hotel, I'll watch a little tv under the covers and see what happens.
Until tomorrow then..

On your mark, get set..

2009-11-23T06:48:00.020-05:00

Last Christmas when my daughter Brie visited me we inevitably talked a fair amount about my playing the stock market (or I should say how the central banks and other big players play us traders and swing traders and long term investors).
It was and still is my hope to get her interested in what I refer to as the "Glass Bead Game". (not exactly the same as Hesse although one could stretch it to be so I suppose..in case you were wondering)

Now just to assuage concern any of my friends or family who may be reading this about my continuing ventures into the market, I want to let you know that I only "play" the market on a very small scale and do so for the fun of it. I'm not a long-term "buy-and-hope" investor soaking every extra penny into this crazy Wall Street Casino. If perchance overnight I were to lose everything I have on the line I would not lose any sleep over it, if that gives you a clue as to my risk taking which is certainly minimal.

I do it for the challenge and not for any real-world need for the money.
The "win" column versus the "lose" column at the end of the year is how I keep score of my own skill and luck. (emphasis on Lady Luck)

Many folks do the same thing but in many different ways, often in unconscious ways to prove something or other, or just for the adrenaline rush but mainly just for the fun of it. Many are safely addicted to going wonderfully crazy watching their football games, rooting for the home team with all the drum-beating hoopla and intensity that goes along with all that. Folks study it all and come know a great deal about the team players and coaches and etc, etc and it gives them something to roll-on about with others of similar interest and it becomes a social thing which is supremely good. Many folks also love playing video games on their computers. It's the safe challenge to often ordinary life which overwhelmingly so, most of are engaged in. It enlivens our often dull existances.
There is a world of competitions to choose from and "get jazzed" about. And a lot of different and valid reasons for doing it.Most are safe.. some not so safe. These are the things make our lives more interesting as well as being a diversion from less than fun things we also find ourselves in.

But neither sports nor video games nor most other forms of competition whether with others or strictly with ourselves have ever sparked the kind of interest and alertness in myself as putting real money on the line. For me, there is no real-world payoffs or real-world losses in any sports or game-playing like there can be on stock exchanges. (and I'm too damn old and certainly way to chicken-shit for ski gliding down Mt Eiger). The "chicken-shit" factor plays into of our all our competing diversions.

And even though it's been demonstrated time and time and time again that ordinary folks such as myself can never beat the "Humungous Banks and Brokerages" who systematically deprive all the rest of us of our hard-earned dollars (as is what is happening now in the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen), I still find the Glass Bead Game to be an enjoyable past time that I can do right here safely at home being a "mouse jockey" buying and selling shares of stock, then waiting and watching to see if I register a "hit" or "miss". I've done both. Hits are a "yippee!". Misses are a "grrrr".
It is a proven fact that so many investors buy into the market when it is nearing its highest and sell when it's at its lowest thus losing their money a good deal of the time. The Glass Bead Game is all about people. The Markets are all about people and our emotions. However, it is a rigged Game between those in-the-know (ie Goldman, JP Morgan and the Federal Reserve engaged in what one could call a bloodless coup) and all the rest of us.
Still, we play the Game with trust (becoming gradually less so with voters and investors)

Anywhooo... it all is what it is.

As I stated previously I am going to try harder to update this blog if no other reason than to record what will become some of my own personal history to look back on later in my life. I'll try to publish something at least once a week no matter how boring it will be. That will be a good start for me.. once a week. Check back on Mondays...
When I'm not out on the road blogging, life up here on the 9th floor overlooking Connecticut Avenue traffic can be pretty common and uninteresting. Hell, I'm pretty common and uninteresting, so whatta you expect?!
So check in at your own risk of falling asleep and your face falling down and painfully hitting your keyboard.

I'm not sure when my next roady is going to be. I probably should go get my pickup in Iowa and toodle down Florida way this winter again. I'm not going to drive old Ruby anymore on long distant trips, poor aging thing that she is.
So until next week sometime.. have a good week all.

My "squirrel's nest view from 9 floors high
(click pic for closer view.. been playing with high rez imaging)

As idiotic as my blogging is...

2009-11-17T18:07:00.008-05:00

..I really do miss it when nothing is happening in my life which is.. like..now.

You know, as with so many things if you just start then something else so often appears next. Newton's First Law of Motion can be a dark and seductive bitch when she locks down on the Spirit like some huge vampire squid, tentacles wrapping everywhere around.
Patti knew that, "just get started" she would so often say to me and was always trying to get me to write something, anything.. but so often I just couldn't get started because of motionless inertia along with the deep desire not to bore any readers into oblivion.

But after a certain time "The Need" appears out of nowhere. The creative urge is always there but often hiding deep or squeezed into submission. Still, after so much intake, a strange need appears out of nowhere and you have to hustle off down the hall to that special closet.
Online journaling is a creative release but can also be like going to the bathroom, that is for all it is worth so often.
Once there, you can just "let go" of it... it just all goes. Blah, blah, ticky ticky tembo no sa rembo charri barri ruchi pip berry pembo
(remember that Oh daughter?)
Writing for me anyway is kinda like that and no doubt is more often that not in the same valuation arena.
Paragraphs of poop. (flies like poop)
I might suggest that all writers need to be somewhat sociopathic to do what they do.. sick with the virus to write, to create something for some truly unclear reason. Maybe all artists are just sick with the virus to create.

Then to flush it all online as well for some unclear reason. aaahhh.. whew. done. Now I can go watch TV or do something worthwhile.

Well then enough of this bathroom comparison.
Just stop this non-sense, bouslaugh.
Yes, I could certainly follow more on this got-the-flu-bug analogy of the intellectually crap-filled retarded such as myself to be, but for the sake of implanting further really bad images in any happenstance readers or stretching the limits of analogy here, I will cut short my going any further down that goofy path, pull up my pants, wash my hands of it all, shut the light off and move back out into the world of harmless and creative idea structure.

Boring or not. Doesn't really matter now does it.?.

I do have a few readers because no doubt they also have nothing better to be doing at the moment.
Am I right?

Ok.. a short bit more then.
I am dug in here in our 9th floor "squirrel's nest" for the winter. No plans whatsoever until next spring.
On the one hand I am liking this.. no commitments of any kind, just day after day of being retired from the world, reading a lot of financial blogs, sitting on my swing, sipping coffee (except Patti made me give up coffee) and engaging the rusty mental machinery like the gears of a windmill, round and round and round it goes, crunching and munching on previously crunched and munched thoughts. Sort of like a sleepy-eyed cow chewing a regurgitated mass.

Not really bad work if you can get it.

But on the other hand (do'h.. just when life gets easy again) up comes that other hand, snaps it's fingers a couple times and then with the slightest hesitation, doubles itself into a fist and punches one right on the nose!.. blood thus.
Another reminder... life, always and everywhere, in all conditions and circumstance is a veritable double-edged sword. Or caressing hand folding itself into punching fist as the case may be.
You can have your cake but really, it doesn't do much just sitting there on the swing until you reach out, take a piece and stuff it in.
follow?
Get started. This should be the 11th Commandment. Just start. Overcoming inertia and starting up one's engines sets up a kind of butterfly effect which can be beneficial (or destructive) but that's life.

So.. I really am going to start blogging again as you can see. Guaranteed to bore the Holy Crappola out of all of you and probably even myself. Like I said... the next 6+ months I've got no plans or commitments for anything.

Bathrooms and blogs are often connected or at least should be.

Time to quit for now...I'm out of beer. ooooh.
bill (and patti)

Yeah Ralph, that works for me too.

2009-11-12T18:08:00.009-05:00

“To laugh much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affections of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition.; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived--this is to have succeeded.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Lives are like rivers, eventually they go where they must.."

First snow..

2009-10-10T20:16:00.008-04:00

Clearly nothing special.. but still a skiff of the white stuff lay all about when I got out of the sack this morning. Good thing I have enough wood to get me thru the next 2 weeks before heading back to Washington, DC.

Yeah, yeah I know this is hardly a worthwhile posting.

Wipered out

2009-09-28T20:26:00.005-04:00

On the road again but this time to the farm in Iowa. Got off at 8 this morning, stopped for a Starbucks Latte (never had one before so thought I try to see what all the hoopla was about... mmmmmmm hot milk spiked with a little coffee.. spells.. disappointment.
I'll stick with a regular cup of joe from now on.)

Sometime after passing through the above pass it stated to rain. See those dark clouds up there? They were for real.
Shortly after I entered into the rain god's domain.. windshield wipers slappin' time, my windshield wipers ceased to work.. chink! goodbye wipers.. helloo! Can't see crap as I am careening down the mountain road.

I'm frantically twisting the little on/offy knob to get them to work as I'm coasting slower, listing nearer to the side of the road.
Whoops! Hey now, they are working again. OK, Hit it!

Umm, definite problem here, I'm thinking. (well yeah)

I go a few miles further, wipers working fine and I'm hoping to find an exit.
Chink.. dead again. double the crap. Slow down!

This time the wiper blades stop at full extension and I roll the window down, reach my hand out and around and give the wiper a flip.
Hey, working again! That did it. Just thump the damn thing!
Yep.. clearly we have a problem here, Houston.

Some luck presents itself finally. (wipers still working chinka chinka chinka chinka)
An exit somewhere south of Cumberland, MD presents itself and takes me down into a little country berg.
Whew.. made it safe.
I roll into a small restaurant parking lot. people outside smoking.
Wipers quit again, but so has the rain nearly let up. Only light sprinkles now.
I go in and have breakfast and try to think what my next plan is.

Not being one to automatically call for help (yeah, I'm a guy, do-it-myself is in my DNA.)I come back out of the Greasy Spoon Cafe, open the hood and stick my nose into the works to see what I can see. I turn on the wipers.
nothing.
I go back to the front and wiggle the wiper motor. It starts again. Watching the action I notice that a screw is loose. "AhHa!" I thinks.

Of course I have no tools with me. (I will rectify that from now on).. neither does the restaurant folks. No gas station, no stores in sight but there is a small market place I passed just after exiting the Interstate.
I hop in the truck and drive back up the road to the parking lot of the market.. I slow down for a bigger white pickup pulling in just ahead of me.

Now here is where this whole little show gets just downright interesting.
Serendipitous presentments, one might say. I really do like them when they happen.

I pull in beside Big White.
I see there inside the truck is a woman readying herself to go into the market to buy something.
An "angel" was there just waiting for me (unbeknownst to the angel of course), just at that exact passing moment in time when I needed her.

Ok.. This is hopeless, I think.
Chances are small and none that she will have a socket and ratchet that fits so I can tighten up this bolt (Also I discovered earlier from seeing a spark as the bolt wiggled that it was a grounding bolt for the wiper motor.. quite essential for the motor to work and I was 50 percent happy that I at least knew what the problem was.)

I get out of my truck, walk around the front, do a light tap on her window and step back. (I really hate doing that. No doubt a twinge of apprehension coursed though her. You know, "oh gawd, what's this guy want?"
Glad I at least shaved this morning and didn't look too bummified!)

I quickly told her my problem and ask if perchance she might have a socket set on her.
(do you see the humor of this?.. I mean, how many women carry around a socket set. I don't even carry around a socket set!)

I think she realized that I wasn't going to hit her up for some change (or worse) and quickly enough said to me, "Well let's see. This is my husband's truck and he might have something here."

She digs around behind and underneath the seat and comes up with a rolled up, dirty old leather something that has an assortment of tools inside.

Waaa.. there's a socket and ratchet. It fits.

She goes inside to buy whatever she stopped for and I tighten up the bolt. I try the wipers. They work. I must assume that that was the problem and they will work fine now.

I'm feelin' much better. The sun is even peeking out.

The Angel (her name is Barbara) comes back out of the store. We speak for a couple of moments throwing sparsely chosen essentials at one another so we can both get on our separate ways. I tell her of Patti and she tells me she is a psycho-therapist.
We both live in Washington DC not far from one another. She occasionally comes up this way for a reason I've forgotten. We both shop at the Tenleytown Whole Foods. I give her my billandpatti blog address for her amusement along with my thorough appreciation.

And.. off we go.

I don't know.. there's just something about that whole roll, the perfect timing of pulling into the parking lot that hints slightly of a mystical coincidence.
Or.. maybe not. Sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar". Who's to say for certain about such small wonders in this life.

A few miles down the road I gave thought about the concept of "6 degrees of separation" and if it might apply in this case.
We'll never know. It doesn't matter.

So Angel Barbara.. if perchance you are reading this I thank you again so much for being in the right place at just the perfect time. May someone be there for you when you need them.
Presentments. Nexus.

The rest of the day went fine.
It didn't rain.

The highway was my skyway as I sailed along.
Tonight, writing this I'm in Columbus, Ohio in a motel surrounded by fast fooderies.

Time for bed.
I've got a long day ahead tomorrow.

That' a wrap!

2009-09-21T09:27:00.015-04:00

Made it home, clippety-clop.
About 7:30 last night.
Boy did feel good to crawl into a real bed for a change.
Living out of the back of the pickup I was beginning to feel like I was living in a Goodwill drop box, it was that messy with everything piled all around.
But I did learn a lot of what I needed to modify to keep clothes, cooking, bedding, computer et al those things from getting totally out of hand as it certainly did.
I think for the next camping expedition I will get a carrier to go on top. But that won't be until next year so there is mucho plenty time to think about it.

back home.. and yeah, yeah I'm gettin'and lookin' old.. Time does it's little crunch job on all of us, doesn't it.. A lousy 15 years from now I'll be 80, totally Over-The-Hill, .....right Bob?

It's been said uncountable times in uncountable ways by all artists through time.. that if it wasn't for those toward which we bring forth our art, our works, our efforts to present something to others.. then a good deal of the doing of any of it would be rendered pointless.

Such as it is with me as well and in the doing of this little and occasional blog of Patti and me.
And so I thank all of you, whoever you are for I have no real way of telling aside from the sprinkling of comments, of who has actually continued to follow along after I quit sending out my email link backs.
Well, you know who you are, though you be named nameless here.

Future plans? pretty simple stuff.
In a week or so I will hop back in my little white wagon and drive to the Iowa farm for about a 3 week stay. Shut down the old farmhouse with it's mice and crickets, drain the water pipes, pull the electrical, lock it up and say so-long for the winter.

Then bringing Ruby out of her summer storage and putting the pickup into winter storage I will return to our DC 9th floor "nest" to hibernate for the long winter ahead, living a simple routine which has always worked well for me (and I daresay Patti too).

If the past is any indication of the future then I probably will not be blogging much, if any at all, until another road/camping trip is in the making.
But we'll see how that goes. Life is change and new things present themselves to all of us.
In any case, when another small adventure is to begin I shall send out another notification and if you want to, we can do this again.
I had fun presenting it to you.
I hope you found something in it as well.

So.. as Roy & Dale would sing.. (or Bill & Patti would sing)..

"Happy Trails to you.. until we meet again".

Cut! ..aaand that's a wrap.

Time to run

2009-09-20T08:21:00.008-04:00

..but not just yet.

I'm fogged in.

It was a fitful night because of the cold. Next time I will bring two sleeping bags, one to crawl into and the other to put on top of me. In the night, laying there awake, curled up, I wondered how homeless people with their stolen grocery cart of bagged possessions manage to sleep out in the woods.
They are certainly a lot tougher than I could hope to be.
Damn it was cold.

I arose about 7 this morning hoping to get a good jump on the day in heading for home. Not gonna happen.

The campgrounds was fairly high up in elevation and after driving to the lower lands this great mass of fog presented itself to me.
There was no telling how far it extended and to attempt to drive it would be stressful at least and disastrous at most.

I decided to pull into the next town, get some coffee, find a "hot spot" for my internet link and just wait it out.
At the moment (8:30am) I am parked outside a little village's Chamber of Commerce in the south part of the ADK park.
Again, available Wifi for people to use.
Only on this side of the building can I connect with you all.
The other side is a dead zone.

Time for another cup of coffee.
The sun is now out and trying to burn the gray stuff off. The road is a little better than what you see in the photo. I'll give it another half hour and then take off. If it's still too much I'll stop at the next town and have breakfast. That should do it.
I've got a long ways to go and may not make home by tonight because of this later than anticipated blast off.

But then again, ooooohh the thought of a hot tubby and crawling into our big cozy bed tonight might just drive this old horse to near exhaustion. We'll see.

Now.. what did I do with that Interstate Highway..?

Almost time to giddy-up GO!

until tomorrow..

last night camping

Ok, so I told a little fib..

2009-09-19T13:17:00.004-04:00

..does that mean I'm goin' to hell?

Canada/US border crossing:

The big dude in the uniform and a gun says "May I see your passport please?"

I say back, "I don't have a passport! I wasn't paying attention and I took a wrong turn back there [LYING TOAD!*] all I want to do is turn around and go back south."

He looks somewhat perplexed and probably thinking "another dumb shit American tourist".

I add "How about that No Left Turn there.. can I spin around that and go back the way I came?"

He almost said no.. but after a couple of seconds said "go ahead." There were scores of other border patrol people there and as I drove into the one-way going the wrong way I half expected to be chased.
I keep checking my mirror until the backwards border sign was lost to view. That could also have been fun, to have been chased for awhile.

I play the dumbshit American tourist quite well 'cause a fair portion of time I am one.... but heheh, not this time.
This time it was deliberate.
Sometimes, fun is when you make it happen.

ta haaaa.. I accomplished my little mission of making it to Canada. ok.. almost.. close enough for the proverbial cigar.

So yes, now I'm officially headed back to DC.
I'll have to visit Aunt Ruthie another time if she permits me to do so.

So... this is a small update on this fine, sunny Saturday afternoon in northern NY state. I'm sitting outside of Hosler's family restaurant, just had breakfast. Parking lot wifi is strong (and a full breakfast for only $5.16.. amazingly cheap compared to the big city.. I gave a 60% tip to the waitress just to make me feel more at home.)

Just to let you all know I intend on taking "the little blue roads" (rt 30) back thru the Adirondacks until I hit Saratoga Falls. After that I will probably jump onto the interstate and GO FAST. I'll camp out again tonight. (got COLD last night.. had to put on extra clothes in my sleeping bag.. but I had a number of lovely dreams in my light sleeping. Go figure.

I'm liking this camping out.. campfire at night. Running the roads at day.
You can the meet some interesting characters in the campgrounds who all have a story to tell and for some unknown reason feel compelled in telling them to me. Maybe it's because they unconsciously know that I'm "safe" to speak their personal stories to.
At least that's what I like to think.
Right off the bat I kabash on all conversations about politics, religion or sports. (the latter being perfectly senseless to my thinking, I am not even slightly interested in.. the first two, politics and religion can often ruin otherwise perfectly good friendships).

OK Kids-of-the-Blog.(Children of the Corn) Whoever you are.
I have no idea how many or who is reading this in that I have no hidden counter or IP logger to let me know.

In any case that's all for today. Thanks for the comments and my apologies for not responding properly to them. I read them all several times each.

....back on the road. Another update tomorrow.

*Patti often said to me "You are such a 'lying toad'", especially whenever I would say to her how attractive and beautiful and clever she was. I wasn't lying whenever I told her that in a number of different ways, but that was her response and we both giggled like silly school girls.
"Love IS being stupid together."
..and is the Royal Road to Wholeness.

Going down, down, down...

2009-09-18T10:54:00.004-04:00

...[but not] in my attitude. (There is a song that has that central line in it)

Anyway, arriving at the Wilmington Notch Campgrounds a short while ago. (It’s 5 now.. happy hour!) I found that my internal and previously gloomy atmosphere had lightened up considerably.
In giving my compass a flick of the finger this morning it eventually settled down and pointed NORTH. Now who would have thunk that?

So north I headed.

On the drive to who-knows-where, I toyed with the idea of getting a motel for the night.. cracking a beer.. turning on TV, kicking off my boots and wondering where the closest restaurant might be.
It was the idea of having a television looking at me with little or nothing of real interest and blasting it’s commercials at me that made me decide to camp out again tonight. It’s been 6 days since I have heard or even seen a television set. Not only is not missed but the idea of it is repulsive to me. This is a good thing I am thinking.
All of a sudden I am liking camping out. (but Barbara is right.. I need more sleeping/mattress space and will work on that for next time)

Someone in a nearby campsite just now turned their radio on. NPR news.. you know the music lead in.. do do do dooo do do do doooo... and my reaction was “nooooo..” I don’t want to hear it.

They must have read my thoughts because they turned it down low.

Well, I'm here for the night. It's heavy clouds and threatening sprinkles.

There is path leading sharply down to a gorge. At first I wasn't sure if I should go, it is that steep... but I went anyway. I was so pleased with the jump down and waterfall at the bottom that I decided to make a silly little video.
I got a couple of chuckles in the making of it and drained my computer battery to where it was threatening me to stop, or else!
Hope you get a grin or two out of it as well..

and the Angel of the Night whispered..

2009-09-17T09:17:00.010-04:00

..."leave".

My little travelin' companions

I've clearly felt a turning point in this journey. The essence of it is completed. I (we?) came again to the Lake and Patti's beloved Eagle Nest. It's finished for this year.
My proposed hike to Castle Rock has become fogged over with a sense of 5-6 hours of walking the trail of boredom.
"So what?" I ask myself.
I've been there.. I've done that. It's not that thrilling. It's just walking and climbing until some blisters and thoughts form themselves on my sole (soul).

Again I am cursed with my own life-long dark demon of "So what?".
This wraith rides his haggard black stallion with me always. I cannot remember when the last time I thought to myself in being involved with something.. "Goddamn I love doing this!".

As you can see dear reader, the journey has now turned inward ..where I live. As "out there" in the world there is both Light and Dark so too
in here" there is Light and Dark. As it is with all of us.
Our internal worlds are also filled with moving parts, cycles..seasons of change.

I sometimes envy Barbara and Margaret.
They both are endlessly interested in the slightest of things.
Ever attracted to this and that and finding the light-fandangle of it all, I sometimes wonder if either of them are ever bored with their lives.
Well, that's silly.. of course they know boredom and the turn of the screw into worlds of stress, who doesn't?..but you wouldn't know it to be around them.
Maybe that's why I like being around them. They have a way of lifting me up out of the doldrums with their ceaseless winds blowing this way and that.

That is until I begin to long for the silence of my own calm again.

"Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence" (desiderata)
I do like the silence... It was one of Patti's qualities that so endeared her to me and allowed us to live together in fullness. We could drive for hours at a stretch and never utter a single word toward the other. Neither of us ever had the compulsive need to talk. We fit one another like a yin fits a yang.
Wholeness moving as one. I do believe that underneath all aspirations that is what we long for most.. wholeness.
I do like the silence..and heaping helpings of silence as has been with me this last week after leaving Martha's Vineyard.
That is until the quiet that comes naturally from aloneness turns on me.

So here I sit in the Museum parking lot typing this..9:43am. I'll move into the foyer in about 15 minutes where there is a electrical outlet. My laptop battery is flashing red and needs some re-charging.
I'm thinking I may need some re-charging as well.

________________________________________

It's 3 hours later now.. afternoon. Time to get on the road again. Time for some breakfast.
We'll see what the day presents. I will be leaving this area. That's decided.
But first to give the compass a spin of my own. North, south, southwest.. unknown as I write this.

Just to let you all know.. I've decided to end email notifications when I update this online journal.
If you are not following along out of a sniggling of interest by now then prodding you daily seems pointless. I will continue to write here until I pull into the parking garage back in DC. So, bookmark me if you are so inclined. Update notifications are finished.
Until tomorrow then.. :-)

Eagle Nest revisited

2009-09-15T18:49:00.012-04:00

Seriously folks.. in making these videos I'm getting plum tuckered out in looking at my 64 year old face (well I used to be pretty! ..guess a few of us here could say the same, eh?) and listening to me talk, yak, yip, and yap on and on about nothing but "out there" rather than "in here" leaves a bit to be desired.
In any case it feels as though I may getting close to becoming finished..(with the blogging and journey that is) but still.. I have a ways to go.

Today marks the completion of the central core of my little journey... and my promise to Patti to bring "us" back to here in the dead center of the Adirondacks where she so often felt a longing to be. If she is with me now by our numerous attempts to "merge" our two spirits.. but I'm too much of an insensitive brute to be able to say for certain whether we were sucessful, then hopefully she enjoyed the day and our stay.
She's been gone for over 19 months now. My own sense of Wholeness has been seriously diminished.
Nothing can be done for it, I know. She can't be replaced and I wouldn't even try.

What comes next in this little ADK journey did not reveal itself to me until this afternoon on my return trip over the water.

So..
Tomorrow I will take a hike up to Castle Rock which is on the far side of Blue MT Lake. I hiked it before several years ago while Patti stayed on here in our cabin. It's not too difficult a hike but does take over 5 hours (3 hours up and 2 hours down) if I remember right and it requires some actual climbing (and huffing & puffing) and not just casual upright walking while whistling a happy tune.
But we "billy goat gruffs" can do that without skinning up our backsides. 64 revolutions around ole sol but I still have some "P & V" left in reserve.
I think.

Then, I plan on staying the night at Hemlock Hall (another lake lodge a few miles from here) and the following day I'll give Patti's & Nancy's Aunt Ruthie in Syracuse a call and seek her permission for me to pay her a little visit. (a 4 hour drive)
She is a Grand Master piano player and hopefully I can video her playing.
After that... back to DC for a couple weeks before heading to Iowa for some time on the farm before the winter sets in.

So here's today for us. It's 11 minutes which is way too long for a homemade video (I hacked off a lot of my superfluous noise.. trouble is, it's ALL superfluous noise).
Slower connections may have to give it some time to load in of course.

Until tomorrow..

Update (wednesday morning): as is with so many things, change is Life's operative M.O. I decided to not hike today but rather just hang out here at the Hedges and reply to some emails, take a short Kayak ride without my camera, drive to Long Lake and wash clothes (I reek of campfire odor), and just walk-about with no particular adgenda in mind. I'll camp out again tonight and do the Castle Rock trail tomorrow. -bill

You call this camping?

2009-09-15T11:09:00.007-04:00

Bear above..bare below
2nd night in cabin bliss

Today I kayak over to Eagle Nest Camp on Eagle Lake. When Patti was growing up she and her family would stay at Eagle Nest for a part of the summer. Patti had fond memories of this place and every September we would come here. Once she even got permission for us to stay at Eagle Nest for a week. You can see our journal of that gone-forever time here

But first, today is today and I've quickly put together a little video before I hop into the kayak and go paddling across some very choppy water for the rest of the day. The video is a little fuzzy. I'm still learning about this SLR/videoHD camera and I'm not about to do the whole thing over again. You'll get the idea.

into the wilds.. sorta

2009-09-14T12:33:00.003-04:00

Sunday night campfire

Zoom!
I ran right by the Durant Lake Campgrounds, whipped a U-eee a few hundred feet further on down the road and decided to check it out and give it a try.
We'll see what happens.
I don't think I've ever done any solitary camping in my life before but it's time to give it a whirl. I doubt that it'll be as much fun as camping out with other folks to joke with and do things with but we'll see soon enough.
Maybe I can get Bob and Barbara to accompany me the next time I travel to the Adirondacks.

As you can see it's a most spectacular view. I've walked about 20 feet down from my campsite. That is Blue Mountain in the distance. You'll be seeing more of that small mountain in future posts.
Somebody cut a tree down at just the right height just so I could sit atop it and admire the view. That was nice of them to do that although I suspect the tree might have disagreed with that point of view.

Just in time for "Happy Hour" too.
The sky is darkening as the sun sinks low. As you can see I've got water boiling for the pasta and sauce warming up. It's a special sauce tonight.. flavored with a few ashes. I must remember to buy some tin foil the next time I'm in civilized territory.
After a hard day of wandering about, this beer does taste good!
Here's lookin' at ya, kids!

GOOD MORNING COLD AND CLAMMY WORLD!
Is it time to get up already? ..and why is it so damn damp in here?
Windows totally fogged up. I had a small dream of my father who died in 1954.

Ok.. the day begins. First off to the Museum parking lot to see if anything on line needs my attention before my computer's battery is gasping for more juice. Then breakfast at Long Lake, then to the Hedges where I shall stay in Great Comfort and maybe even work on tomorrow's entry.
I guess if all this gets too boring for any of you and you have more interesting things to read/do, then I will certainly understand.
I sometimes bore even myself with my mental meanderings.
However it will at least be fun for me to read all of this years from now when I'm sitting in my rockin' chair in DC, too stodgy and stowed-up to go anywhere but the kitchen and bathroom and bed.
I guess maybe I'll see how that all works out too.

Until tomorrow then...it's adieu to you all. :-D

Yapping Chihuahuas..

2009-09-13T13:57:00.010-04:00

This blogging on the road is a bit more difficult than anticipated and I'm certainly behind with it all. I had hoped to have something posted on Friday but discovered that when there are friends around, the talking (hence the title "yapping chihuahuas".. Bob & Barbara & Selma and myself)and exploring the island, well it all becomes non-stop. There simply is no time to stop and edit photos and video and then drive to find someplace that has wireless and then to post it all to this blog. I'm about 3 days behind in my intentions to blog my travels.

First stop was Martha's Vineyard.
These two short video below gets me started on the journey and hopefully as the days go by I can catch you all up on more current events.

Yesterday morning we left Martha's Vineyard, caught the ferry to cross over into the mainland and after a breakfast at a dumpy diner (but much better than my road stop breakfast!) we then parted company.
Bob and Barbara headed back south to DC and I turned tail and drove north into the Adirondack National Park, about a 6 hour journey.

Oh I must not forget to take a moment of appreciation for our gracious host on Martha's Vineyard.
Selma is her name and being a wonder is her Game.
Selma is 92 years old. She is sharp as a tack.. spends a good deal of time on line and is a wonder to behold. So THANK YOU SELMA for letting me come and stay with you for those few days. It was a pleasure to meet you and perhaps we can do it again someday.

Here's the photo of you that we all got a chuckle from. I'll email the higher resolution copy to you after I get back to DC.

Stay tuned.... bill

The World is filled with moving parts

2009-09-07T10:24:00.015-04:00

..and it is time to kick one of my own parts up a notch.

Greetings to all that I've sent notice to!

For quite some time now I've been wanting to take a road trip as Skip and Patti and I had done a number of times in the past. Road trips with friends were always enjoyable and filled with laughter. It is now time for me to venture forth once again into the wilds (ok, maybe not so wild as in the past) but still to venture forth and see what Life presents to me.

Even though my two past travelin' buddies have truly passed into and are on the Greatest "road trip of all", I like to think that they still will be coming with me (with all of us) to experience the pleasures of being on the road. As with all road trips, no doubt some dis-pleasures will be tossed into the mix as well, but that too is a part of the little adventure and adds immeasurably to the story telling after all is said and done and life returns to normal routine.

I have recently purchased my first laptop which is WiFi enabled (I guess they are all WiFi fixed at this point in computer evolution) and I intend on blogging the whole damn journey. At least as much as I can.
I've rigged out the back of the pick-up you see above to enable me to sleep, cook, and blog. All I need to do is drive around until I find an open wireless signal to swipe a little bandwidth from and upload my detritus onto this site.
I suspect I can do this easily enough since so many businesses and homes are now wireless connected.
It should be fun for me..hopefully not too boring for you.

I'm not going to reveal the whole plan for the plan will probably change. Staying open to change is a key note here and watching out for what or who presents themselves to me, any single thing can change my whole time line for not only the trip but perhaps beyond as well. As we all know in looking over our pasts that the slightest of our decisions can have the greatest of effects down the road.
One never really knows about such things now do we..?..

"Presentments" [not presentiments..geesh I hate typos!] Presentments: What is being presented to me, here and now for me to act or not act upon will also be a key feature to my little road trip.
And Good Gawd Laud a-mercy! We'll even have some High-def Video! Just don't expect it to be too polished coming out of my VERY SMALL studio in the back of my pickup truck.

Here's a 60 sec sample: (Barbara, never trust me when I have my camera out.. I can be a sneaky Paparrazi. Besides, no one can tell that your clothes are filthy and your wig is on crooked :-D)
(oooo I'm gonna pay for that)

So.. Come along. Let's see what happens. Feel free to comment at the bottom of any page. It's all for simple fun...and the more comments there are makes for even more fun reading by everyone else. Don't be shy... shyness gets you nowhere, haven't we all learned that by now?
One of Patti's favorite sayings was "Love is being stupid together" and she and I certainly proved the truth of that practically everyday she was not feeling down. Being stupid together on a road trip is also a good thing. We all like comments which often leads to even more desirable idiocy. Let yourselves go. I obviously will be doing so. Update: For those of you unfamiliar with posting a comment: Hit the "anonymous" button or "name/url" button.. write your message.. preview and make any corrections..and hit the "publish" button. It's all very simple and you DO NOT need to get a Google account to post a comment.

I take off Wednesday morning (North and East) and should have another post sometime Thursday. I hope. Blogging with photos and video to edit can take time behind the computer. In any case I'll send off a notice to all as updates are created. (Some of us are at the age where we need to be reminded occasionally..often..all the time. :-)
see ya all on the road.

bill
oh btw, sorry about messing up the link in the email notice. Gmail links things a little differently than yahoo and I messed it up. (I'm just getting senile, can't ya tell?)
Also if I missed anybody and you happen to be reading this, send me an email and I'll add you to the list serve.

Ok, we're going to try this again.

2009-07-06T17:46:00.020-04:00

That is, keeping an online journal that probably will be little more than pointless "barking" of the human variety.

A number of people have told me over the last 3 years that I can be a fairly good blogger/writer/or whatever you want to call it. In reading over my past writings I and my too-often-lack-of-humility tend to agree. Also what I've found is that the words spring to me but only if there is some kind of emotional charge going on in my life that releases itself into the writing itself. In other words, only when I've got something to say that is emotionally important to me am I able to say it in such a way that it might be somewhat interesting to others as well.

Well.. one can't get too much more emotional than when the writing corresponds to either love or death, both of which applied before, during and after Patti's disappearance from my own and other's lives.
Since that time a lot of my life has been just a bunch of "blah, blah, barking.. have you any fleas?" in practically all arenas of my personal life, be it my once-in-a-blue-moon writing/photo taking or my life in general.
So why should my telling of any it be any different than ever more pointless and incessant barking as we humans seem compelled to do?
I am not all that good at taking some next-to-nothing "something" and making it appear as a big and important "Something!" (with a capital S and exclamation mark).
Some people can do that. They often get paid for that talent. I'm obviously not one of them. Read me at your own peril (injury or death by falling asleep as your face hits your keyboard).

Not long ago a good and lifelong friend accused me of being "too wordy" in my writings. That certainly gave me pause-for-thought and I've thought about it a lot.
My conclusions were boiled down to an either/or analysis of why one would think that. Or perhaps a mix of both:

1) Because what I write really is as boring as watching paint dry on a Friday afternoon and the reader can barely wait to get to the end of the passage but feels for their own reasons they must wade on through since the only ones reading this are in fact people I know and who know me.

or 2) the reader is totally addicted to the essential internet need (skill) to skim over the tops all things readable, hoping to find some kind of "nugget of golden interest", absorb it for a second or two and then to move on, getting to the end of the piece as quickly as possible.. then, moving on to the next thing to skim and search for something that actually blips up one's interest, the next "hit".

The internet is a good and addictive invention but like all addictions it too has a dark side. (and I don't mean porn.. I do mean boredom from mediocrity overload, sorta like most of us with a dollop of intelligence have come to feel about TV.)
Granted.. my writing is nothing to.. uh.. write home about.

OK. Skimming. We all do that.. skim the reading material on our screens as fast as we can read to find something..anything of interest whether from friend, stranger or professional writer.
Often, deep down we feel we have even better things we could be wasting our time on, if that makes any sense.
No doubt some are you are doing this right now and feeling the accuracy of the mild accusation. Too wordy. get on with it. Give me something that will at least make me chuckle for 1 second. Is that too much to ask?
Blog hopping and channel hopping are the twisted twin sisters of the little screen. Whattaya gonna do to get yer fix. ?
108 channels of shit.

Sometimes the struggle on our computers to find ever greater interest can feel endless and hopeless and after a while we put it to sleep and do something else with our time.
But like all addicts.. we'll be back with renewed hope, check our email how many times a day?.. looking to see if there is another Christmas present under the tree, "does anybody love you today?", often repeating the same cycle again and again. I know I do.
Skimming is a coping skill with something that is powerfully addictive.

What can I say?.... Life Itself can be "too wordy"... too boring... except on those rarefied occasions when it's not.
Blessed are those who can whisper to themselves "god damn I love doing this!".. whatever for them "this" may be. I am envious of those who actually love what they are engaged in. Nearly 16 months and I'm still coming off of Patti Trippin' her Light Fantastic.
Like standing under the space shuttle as it blasts off into the glorious heavens.
Overcooked bacon.

If I were in the Grace of Love.. or the Grace of Imminent Death with sensibility still with me, or just helping someone close to me die as I (as we) have done.. fighting the good fight whatever it might be, no doubt I could hold your interest and leave you hungry for more. That's what good writing is all about.
I can't do that.
There needs to be either great Fire or Great "something" in my heart before it can wake me up enough to write about it. Then, with only words to transfer the emotion to the reader, to tug on the reader like trying to move a stubborn mule out of their ordinary sitting space and on into the shared extra-ordinary place of "whoa!" (meaning the opposite of course).
It's called Art (regardless of the medium) and I tell you, Art aint easy. Art requires power and will never arise from ho-hum.

Still, there exists those special and subtle states of Beingness...(those "spaces" that come upon us, that are us for a moment) definitely rare and different than the other greater part of our lives. Epiphanies that can occur out of the blue. "Whoa" stuff.

Pointless and incessant barking at next to nothing is what most of us do in the blogosphere. I would say in life as well. We skim along not really wishing to get to the end of life as soon as possible.. but still so often feeling "is this all there is?".
Could be Alfie... could be.

I have decided to resume my online journal writing, right here. Beginning again, now.

And yeah, it's going to be wordy and boring and pointless "barking at the moon", signifying not much of anything. At the very least it's pure and simple record keeping that 20 years from now when I can barely see and perhaps have to wear diapers, I can do an occasional life-in-review, remembering things otherwise forgotten.
With a little luck there might even be something worthwhile to take along for the both of us, reader and writer alike. The mind has unexplored depths that with luck and the right conditions can be opened up to The Mystery. Can reveal and open that little "trap door" in our brains where one can shower in the healing Light of Love and of Wonder if only for a moment.. then float gladly for a time on the residue.
Perhaps it's those most rare moments that make all the rest of this too-wordy flat-lining worthwhile.

If dogs can do it, bark and even wag their tails at the same time, then so can I.

Stay tuned.
(ah, if only we could!)

Mission Accomplished

2008-12-19T12:20:00.002-05:00

On the 8th of September..

..I left our Washington, DC apartment at 8am and driving "Ruby" I arrived in Saratoga Springs, NY at 5:30pm.
About 460 miles from here to there and about 80 miles shy of tomorrow's final destination at Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, where Bob, Barbara, Margaret and myself will kayak out onto the lake and ceremoniously let fly Patti's ashes to the wind, as was her request.

But right now I am sitting at the Amtrac station waiting for Margaret's train to arrive at 7pm.
Yes.. she took the train from DC instead of driving with me. She says she felt the great urge to take the train and besides that she says she doesn't do well in sitting in a car all day. I am in agreement that when "the angels tap you on the shoulder" to do or not do something then it's best to listen up and consider the feeling.
I found the drive to be easy and enjoyable and according to Margaret, her train trip was enjoyable as well but also relevant in that she made friends with and was able to help another person to not take a wrong train.
That's how it works sometimes.
So very many things, people, events are connected in time way beyond our small sense of the "right now". We "catch up" to one another, some more personally important than others, and we "connect", if only for a moment and then move on our own way in time.
As we all know in looking back over our lives, the smallest of innocent choices can have the greatest ramifications down that road of time. More often then not we just don't know which of our small decisions, our smallish connections eventually turn out to be the ones that have profound influence in our lives or in the lives of others.
As Ram Dass has written: "We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another. ... and being Love is the supreme creative act."

I personally believe that Life pays back its debts to Itself, be they consciously creative or consciously destructive. (Oh we all secretly know the difference on which thoughts to act upon and which ones to unstick ourselves from.)
You are racking up some Good Karma, Margaret.. I suspect that the gods favor those of we mere mortals who help others and do it with no expectations of any kind of reward (save perhaps the required "thank you"). Caring matters.

The next day we drove on into the center of the Adirondack Park and to Blue Mountain Lake where we were to meet Bob & Barbara. The 4 of us would be kayaking over to Eagle Lake adjacent to Blue Mountain Lake and there doing the sad honors of spreading Patti's ashes, fulfilling her wish.
It was a little rainy on this last 80 mile lap and I fretted a bit about having foul weather the whole time we were scheduled to be here. (my concerns were thankfully unfounded in that the weather was good for our 3 days there.)

We all arrived in the afternoon. The chilliness of the air was a welcome reprieve from the oppressive heat and humidity of the city life that we had left behind. We remarked on this a number of times. Chilly!
Good thing we all brought our warm jackets...and spirits in the bottle to keep both body and soul aglow.

The four of us had a wonderful dinner in the lodge that evening.
Then breakfast in the morning. Meals included in the cost and they fed us too well!
Won't you join us for breakfast? (The waiter volunteered to take our picture after he took our orders.) Click the audio bar for a 2 minute podcast.

Continued on Page 2

"Letting Go Lightly"

Alone again and back to the Iowa Farm

2008-05-20T18:25:00.010-04:00

Bill (and Patti) Update [21May08]:

Warm Greetings to our friends who are reading this.

It's been going onto 4 months now that our Patti vanished from our lives (30 Jan). Death is sort of like a silent "explosion" where something or someone disappears entirely, a radical change that occurs in the blink of an eye, the animating Spirit separating from and leaving the body behind.
Then there is that period afterwards where a kind of slow-motion fall-out ensues over the days, weeks, months in all the people who were close by and left behind with having to reconcile in various degrees all the internal conflicts that are always created after someone we care about... dies.
I suppose things are better now for all of us. Well of course things are better. Normalcy returns faster or slower relative to the degree of connectedness that one has to the deceased.
Things are better for me and I think I was standing closer than anyone when the event of Patti releasing that last breath occurred in the early morning hours.
I've reclaimed my familiar aloneness, or perhaps it has reclaimed me.
No matter, I miss her like crazy more often then not. Her picture and lock of hair ride with me on the dash of Ruby as though we still are driving quietly together.
I miss what we had for those quick four+ years of our two Spirits "dancing" the Main Dance of the Universe.
Often, I would ask her when we both knew she was on her way out, "We had fun didn't we..?" and she would always, always shake her head in the affirmative with a little smile and the look of love in her own eyes..

Two children of God.. often being so incredibly silly.
Best playmates being as stupid together as the circumstance and our own
spontaneous creativity would permit.
Being..dancing to the real but silent Music of the Cosmos, the essence of which is indeed Love. It's an experience that does not come to everyone in this life and I am the better for it although often in my aloneness I do not feel it to be so.

Still, such stuff of life tends to pass by too quickly. When it is gone there is a longing for it to "come back..", a longing for Love that can and often does occur even between old married couples after the flame changes its texture through the years, as it always does.. often becoming just so small, at times extinguishing itself like a candle run out of wax through no real fault of anyone.
Things happen, life happens.
Those who say we choose everything in our life must surely be choosing their own idiocy as well.
Change, diminishment and endings are always the greater part of life and to think they are not is delusional.

Then, after a time, renewal.
Well, perhaps renewal. Maybe renewal, but obviously not always. Sometimes when things die they are just dead and that's the end of that.
It is all such a mystery and faith must and does enter the picture at that boundary separating our experiences with our unknowingness
We carry on. We are carried on. Tears dry. Laughter returns, though sometimes not quite as hearty as before.

* * *

I've been back to the Iowa farm for nearly two weeks.
The old farmhouse required some serious cleaning of mouse poo and cobwebs and dust and I don't want to mention what else. (think raccoon and possum) I have had little time (that is, energy left from my work day) to post an entry here, so I'm giving it a whirl this evening, sitting here with the computer in front of the big picture window that my father installed into this old house some 55 years ago.

I feel somehow "contained" here, (not oppressively like being in a prison) but more so a sensation of protection in this place of my arising as though some part of me was still a little baby in my mother's arms and warmth, only now it is the house, the yard, the hills surrounding creating a kind of "bowl" of which I am down here in
the middle of it all.
I sense myself being cared for by even the land itself.
What a thing to feel, something I've never felt, nor will ever feel walking the busy, noisy streets of Washington, DC.

It is hard to explain. But it is here, right in the middle of all these hills of grass and grazing horses with their beautiful and frisky new-borns running all over the place in short spurts. It is among these acres and acres of newly planted fields of
corn and soybeans that I am able to "recharge my batteries" so to speak.
Being here never fails to "trickle-charge" my Spirit and regain my real strength which has more to do with spiritual stamina than muscle.
This little "postage stamp" of land in nearly the middle of American somehow envelopes me with care and always puts back the pieces of my occasionally
fractured soul.

It is doing that now.
Mowing the lawn.. re-screening the porch.. I've got some plumbing to do tomorrow. Then there's my continuing to put siding on the house..painting, replacing terribly worn shingles on the roof (well ok.. nobody likes to re-roof.. it is grinding, backbreaking work and no fun at all). I haven't started that project yet and am in no hurry to get to it, but I must, I really must before returning to that other world in Washington.

Renewal.. even coming in the form of simply washing all these windows so I may see clearly out and upon the world around me.

Speaking of renewal.. I have a "dead soldier" here and so will quit writing for now, crack open my 2nd beer for the evening and sit on the porch swing for awhile before putting together my evening meal. It's 7:30pm in DC..
Bob and Barbara are watching The News
Hour.. Margaret is probably zooming around in her BMW.. no telling what the rest of you are doing. No telling what Patti is doing. It is my pure hope that she and Skip are back with each other once again.

I just now noticed that there are ads being placed on Patti's Memorial slide show.
How crass is that?!
I need to find a different host for the slide show.
UPDATE: Thanks to Beth's generous offer to host the Memorial slide show on her own server, it is now ad-free, as it should and must be. Thanks again Beth.

Oh, one last thing to each and every one of you reading this:
In the spirit of staying connected to any of you who wish to stay connected to me, I am generating another "Bill (& Patti) Update" email listing for those wanting to be notified whenever I put on a new entry here. The Feedblitz notification system has not been working well after all and I have eliminated it entirely.
If you want to be on this new list-serve to be notified then you MUST send to me a request to be put on my (shit)list. I insist upon this and that includes
you, Barbara and Bob, and you Margaret, and you Brie and Josh and Judy and Tom and.. and... and anyone else who has just received the one-time email I sent out to you all today.
My email address is still bbouslaugh at yahoo which most of you have.
I never know when I'm going to put something new on, but I guarantee you there will be more to come. Now that my focus is no longer just taking care of Patti and I am once again out and about in the world, posting could be more often than it has been for the last year or so.
Let me know if you want to be on this new email listing.
If not, then hey.. do nothing.
:-)bill

Mindfulness

2008-04-30T13:09:00.004-04:00

For the past week I have been experiencing a rather strange but not entirely unfamiliar sensation that I have not much experienced in my life. I say "not much" because I have experienced it before, although infrequently and only during those times following some or another great event that has taken place on a personal level, significant only to myself.
The word that keeps coming to mind to describe [inadequately] the sensation is "mindfulness" although I am not certain that is what it is. It is definitely a pervading sensation.
The remembered times of my past when I did experience this "state" are few and far between: A few days following my departure from the army back in the fall of '68... then again after my mother died in 1991.. followed by Skip's death 3 months later as Patti and Judy and I drove somewhere, to some restaurant by the water. I felt it again for the 3 days on the road during my journey from Oregon to the farm in 2001 and now once more for the past week but this time is the longest that it has ever stayed with me. It seems to occur when certain intense things are finished.
Patti's sickness and death, my unreconciled loss of her presence (perhaps becoming more reconciled?), the stress of the two memorial services, The anticipated arrival of my daughter whom I had not seen in too many years.. has all come to be experienced and now are all receding into my past.

This indescribable sensation is by no means a bad thing. In fact if I could have my way with it I would keep it close to me. I like it a lot. Perhaps it's nothing more than the "swing of the pendulum".. or a wave of pressure having passed by. Perhaps after seemingly unrelenting stress comes a kind of self-awareness of non-stress, a kind of automatic "letting go" which afterwards gives rise to a place of inner peacefulness.. a kind of "deflation" of pressure where I can actually feel that I belong here in Life, surrounded by all these things of Life.. which clearly includes both my body and thoughts.

I say "my body" and "my thoughts" because with this sensation that I am writing about there is a line between what is Me and those things about me that I claim as mine.
But I am not them. I am not my self during this time of calmness.

I googled the word "mindfulness" and directly came up with this site which sort of describes the sensation, except so far for the week it is not something I have had to work at to attain. It's just there after I wake-up in the morning. (by the way, I have finally begun to sleep the whole the night through, no more waking up at 4:34AM.. the exact time that Patti took her last breath). I think I could better describe it as a kind of free-floating calmness being watched over by a detached Me-ness, if that makes any sense.
If any of you reading this has ever walked around outside in the midst of people and activity while having your brain plugged into an ipod, listening to some favorite tune, you'll know the flavor of what I'm talking about. There is a similarity of detachment from the outside world when you "plug-in" and take a walk thru the world happening all around you. (If you haven't ever done this I highly recommend it).
The difference is that now my self is also a part of that outside world.
bizarre but most pleasant. This could be addictive. ..and it's legal.

I walked to the bookstore today to try to find any book on "mindfulness" to take with me on my upcoming return journey to the farm slated to commence tomorrow morning (thursday morning).
No book on mindfulness appeared to me.. but I did purchase two others that almost hopped into my hands to take them home: Ten Zen Seconds (maisel) and There Are No Accidents (Hopcke). We'll see what they are all about between now and then.

Anyway.. House is cleaned.. laundry finished, bags packed, car nearly packed, and then there is also an urge of not wanting to leave and journey cross-country without my Patti. Maybe I'll keep her seat in the car clear of maps and things just in case she decides to ride along as we always did before.

Guess I'm ready. sort of. Never stop exploring. There's always something, "in here" as well as "out there".

[posted 30 April 2008]

It's been awhile..

2008-04-21T18:20:00.004-04:00

It's been a few years since the daughter and I have see one another so having her jet plane down from NYC friday and spend some time with her old man has been a treat.
I especially wanted her to meet certain folks with whom I had met and became good friends with through Patti...Bob, Barbara, Margaret, Judy & Tom.
Unfortunately Barbara came down with the flaming crud and so could not
party with us on Sunday night.
I felt I needed to provide at least a modicum of entertainment for Brie and myself, so we drove out to Great Falls on her first day here just to walk around a bit, see the Potomac River doing it's little rushy thing (noisy!).
It was a fine weather day, maybe just a tad too hot and we soon discovered that we weren't the only folks looking for a little diversion on a Saturday afternoon.
There was quite a few river seekers there in fact.

On Sunday morning I dragged her to church!

Now that is the first time I've ever done that and the point was not to
save her sorry ass soul from some kind of eternal damnation but rather for the both of us to hear some fine singing performances from the Unitarian All-Souls church about a ten minute drive away.
The sermon-theme was of course Earth Day since yesterday was Earth Day.
They did not disappoint by finishing up the morning with a rousing blues piece (complete with whale sounds, some moving singing and trumpeteering from an
old blind guy).
The church is always packed. I think it's because of the moving singing by the gospel choir and this huge, huge pipe organ that can shake their stain glass windows as well as rattle and roll any kind of sleepy body on a sleepy sunday morning.
I like what they do there and I will return. The singing
sometimes transports me to that near teary-eyed place (easy to do these past months) and the sermons can be (but not always) inspiring.

We were a little early when I took this photo of Brie sitting so lonely-like in the pew. Behind her is the organ I mentioned.

The daughter and I have had a good time reconnecting these past 3 days. Yesterday and today lots and lots of rain has been drenching the Washington area and so we just decided to have a mellow indoor day today, playing with our computers, talking and taking it easy.
Tonight Brie is fixing us a nice pesto dinner replete with garlic bread and salad. We'll watch a horror flick and try not to laugh too much nor have nightmares afterwards.

I will take her to the airport really early tomorrow morning for her 6:30, 45 minute flight back to the city. She has promised to to not let so much time pass between future visits.
The next time she's in town we'll try again to party on at my friends the Bob and Barbara Smuckers. (poor cousins to the jelly people)
Barbara does like to party.
She is a bad-ass Mother Smucker.

Coming up
Soon I will be heading back to the farm in western Iowa.
After all that has transpired with Patti and myself in the last 6 months (and more) I think it will really do my spirit good to return to my roots. It's been two years. Spending time on the old farm, the place of my arising, and continuing the never-ending job of fixing the old house is good for my soul.
Sitting around the campfire circle out in the yard in the evening, occasionally with some of my relatives but more often than not with only myself and hopefully Patti's Spirit..(and Kaiser the cat). It is a healthy thing for me to do and will "re-charge my batteries".
I will leave Washington on May 1st and return to DC sometime in July.
As any of you have been following this blog know, I have not been posting much here on billandpatti for the last year or so. Understandable so.
I hope to change that as I get out and about and begin again to do more
things out there in the world.
I invite any of you reading this now and who may be so inclined for the future, to check in with me here from time to time. I highly recommend that you submit your email in the form below. The notification system works good most of the time and
it serves as a good reminder to interested people that I've just posted a new entry.

Also, I reiterate my request that if anyone has any dreams of Patti, to email them to me as best you can remember. Matthew had one recently as did I, crazy and seemingly irrelevant as they may be. Still, I will take whatever I can get from Patti.. or from other people's dream creations. I miss "us" a lot.
If I can get one or two more dreams from anyone or myself I will
post them here for all to read. This blog remains about both Patti and myself and even though I seem not to be able to communicate with her in the Spirit World, I intend on keeping this little running commentary about the both of us.

trust & love.. trust and love. (and staying connected to real friends and family) That's the stuff that will get us through anything that Life may test us with.
Keep that in mind the next time the shit hits your own fan.. because it most certainly will.
Bill (& Patti)

There, she is gone..

2008-03-25T15:04:00.004-04:00

"I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then some one at my side says: 'There, she is gone!'

'Gone where?'

Gone from my sight. That is all...

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when some one at my side says:
'There, she is gone!' there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: 'Here she comes!'

--Henry Van Dyke

(thank you Matthew & Barbara & Hadicha)

chopping wood.. carrying water

2008-03-07T10:08:00.005-05:00

or.. a superficial attempt at painting some lightness onto a dark background

OK... but forget the "carrying water" part.

One of the things I've been doing which has been helping to "burn off" some of this dark energy that has formed within, is to drive over to our good friends Bob and Barbara and chop wood for their fireplace.

New construction next door had destroyed a couple of their trees.. and Bob, having no inhibitions at fussing at the people responsible, proposed the deal that they should now at least chainsaw the trees into 18 inch rounds for him, which they agreed to do.

We considered renting a motorized splitter but decided the cost was prohibitive and besides which neither Bob nor myself are too keen on actually putting in a full days labor, which this little project would surely have required of us.
We are both retired, you know.

So I had a better (?), but certainly less expensive method of getting all this wood whacked into fireplace pieces and then carried and stacked up by their house.
We would buy an eighteen dollar chopping maul and we would just do-it-ourselves on a "whenever-we-feel-like-it" basis.

So that's where it is at right now. I figure that we are about a quarter of the way through the pile.
Of course we had to try to make a foolish little video of our woodsy, He-man like adventure.

Patti's memorial: fait accompli

2008-03-02T14:26:00.004-05:00

I want to thank everyone who came to Patti's Memorial service on Wednesday.

What a crowd was there and filled to over-flowing with so much love and warmth for her. I was amazed and it goes without saying, highly pleased.
I just hope Patti was there in spirit so she could see so many who loved her.

For those of you who could not attend I will tell you that in spite of all the endless troubles in dealing with the ISD church to even have a memorial date set and then at the last moment on the evening before the memorial was to happen, we were informed that no eulogy was even going to be given, we all just "threw our hands into the air" (enough of this BS already!) and decided that it had now become truly and completely pointless to even have the memorial at the church.
(The old cliche' of that last straw breaking a camel's back might apply here.)
Then, with some fast and furious phone calling and emails into the late hours of tuesday night we all decided to go to the Lebonese Taverna only a mile or so from our apartment, to meet there at 3 pm the next afternoon.

It was a perfect choice. It could not have been better.

A large room (with stain glass church windows even!), tables for 50 people were moved to the outer perimeter of the room along with a buffet of delicious Lebonese cuisine.
On one of the tables we put Karla's large laptop computer to loop the slideshow that I put together for the occasion, along with a large photo of Patti and some smaller ones as well.
After perhaps an hour of standing and sitting and eating and socializing, a spoon rapping on a glass (thankyou Richard) as our call to attention.
It was then that Tom Esposito taking on the natural borne mantle of MC, brought our attention together to now focus on our memories of Patti and any story-telling of days gone by.

There was tears.. there was laughter.. there was specially written poetry and letters read. There was incredible love for our Patricia, from all who attended.

This was the real Memorial for Patti... and it was done with perfection and with class.
For those of you who could not attend or because of the last minute confusion I am truly sorry.
And I thank all of you who spent so much time and energy (and frustration) in making it work out as it should and in protecting me as much as you could. (Nancy, Judy, Ruthie, Barbara, Margaret, Karla..you are all magnificent!)
Supposedly there is being planned by the ISD church for yet another Memorial for Patti on the 15th of March, but who's to say for sure.
However.. in speaking only for myself, that memorial would be decidedly anti-climactic to the one that has already occurred and for it's worth, I will not be attending it.

I feel a certain palpable relief in simply returning to my own thoughts, sad as they may be, of my beloved wife, rather than the stress of yet another memorial with ever more and more problems to overcome.

The Memorial to Patti is done.

In the poignant written words from Margaret into the sign-in book at the Memorial:

"To my friend Patti.. please always be with us"

I like that... I like it a lot.

Messages from the Depths and Above

2008-02-20T12:52:00.002-05:00

When someone that we love "passes away", when someone whose spirit that we've known and laughed with and cared for up to that moment when, shockingly enough they become no longer with us but "somewhere else" like something out of the Twilight Zone, what do we, at that moment and beyond that deeply etched javascript:void(0)moment, have left? There's the body.. laying there on the bed, deadly still and cooling down by the moment.
But where is the animation, the energy that was there just a moment ago but now has "passed on"? Or even has that animating force passed on?
Has that energy really retained some kind of coherence in some way resembling the individuality we once knew and loved? or has it just simply extinguished itself like a candle flame running out of wax and the upward trail of the smoky remains dissapating into the air..?
I tell you it is a freakish feeling not to know for certain if any of our many belief systems, often wrapped in familiar cliche' and relentlessly affirmed by so many of us as.. The Truth, is what has reeeally happened to this once warm-bloodied human beingness that so many of had for so many years called "friend".

Of course these are the age-old questions that I am not about to answer with any kind credible authority, regardless of my own belief systems which I, like everyone else hold tight to.

What do we have left after the energy is gone... the body removed by the men in black quietly closing the door behind them..?
A lock of hair, a wedding ring, in time a jar of ashes, pictures, paintings, favorite clothes so often worn, a shower cap still on the back of the toilet where she had last put it, now over a month ago.
Don't touch it.. don't move it. Don't move anything lest I upset the tenuous make-believe connection that seems to be stretching thinner by the day.

What do we have left that we can hold onto? Memories are poorly made stand-ins for the real thing.
In going through some audio recording on my computer that I had made in September of '06 I accidentally.. sychronistically, came across a snippet of Patti speaking as she was speaking to me then feeding the ducks, as though she was telling me now..
"try not to be sad though we're leaving".
Uh.. easier said than done, honey..
3 weeks have gone by. I still walk through the day with a tightness in my throat, "on the edge" as our Hospice Nurse told me yesterday on the phone.

Every night as I turn out the light I wonder if that "Patti Spirit" will speak to me as I am asleep. I have questions but not about what it is like on the "other side", but rather "are you alright?" and "Did you find Skip?" but mostly, simply, "are you OK now?"
As Kalil Gibran wrote centuries ago: Love knows not its depth until the hour of separation.

So far I have not "heard" from Patti in my dreams.
I am somewhat self-ashamed of that. You would think that at the very least, my unconscious mind that creates all these other dreamy scenarios every night would somehow involve itself with creating something that has such profound effects upon me during my waking hours of everyday.
But nothing. I dream of printing presses and old white cadillacs.
Maybe I'm just not "psychic" enough. Maybe I'm just another dumb brute of a man doing what we guys do. I question myself along these lines. I shut out the light again, pulling up the covers and again wondering and wanting to make some kind of contact, real or imagined, I don't care at this point, to answer my questions.

But my being too insensitive to receive any kind of message either from the depths or above does not mean that others cannot receive messages. It is to this thought that I write this to all of you who are reading this and who knew Patti.

If you have had or will have any contact with her while in your own dream worlds, please let me know and I will publish your "Message from the Depths and Above" here for all of us, who also may have questions needing answers, that we may read and consider for ourselves.

One such friend of ours has had the dream, the message, the connection.. whatever you wish to call it. I am so glad I was told the dream-message during the course of our conversations. It has helped me and no doubt the dreamer as well (who wishes to remain anonymous):

The dream is follows:

Patti was just there. In my dream. I cannot honestly say it was more than that. Her hair was light blonde, like cotton candy, only softer, like a fluffy cloud surrounding her head. She was so joyful, throwing her arms around me and repeatedly kissing my cheek. I noticed how smooth her skin was, and how completely beautiful and healthy she looked. She kept saying "I feel great" as though she really wanted me to understand. It was not so much to me but from her.

Then it was obvious to us (not sure who else was there but I was not alone), that it was time for her to be on her way. She left rather reluctantly. After awhile - moments, longer?, she returned, fluttering about, happy, free, with three other female beings who seemed -- I don't know, older, more mature yet that's not quite right either, wearing dark clothes (Patti wore white). We had a very clear sense that they were from the other side. Again we became aware it was time for Patti to go, to move on. She seemed oblivious. Finally, she drifted away, happily, with her three companions. We felt it was goodbye.

So what do we, at that moment when the Spirit departs and beyond that deeply etched moment have left?
A little bit more than what we had a moment ago.
Thank you. Thankyou both.

Memorial Service

2008-02-15T17:23:00.004-05:00

CONFIRMED!
Patti's memorial service will be on the 27th of February.. 3pm..
at the INSTITUTE FOR SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT,
5419 SHERIER PALCE, NW; WASHINGTON, DC 20016
(it's one block from the intersection of MacArthur & Arizona, in the Chain Bridge area)

Congratulations to everyone (seriously) for actually pinning down a date. (it's been a struggle) There will be a second "celebration" of Patti's life on the
15th of March, same place, not sure of the time yet. Everyone is welcome to both. Bring your hankies.
(I hate memorials, but Patti requested one so we are all going to give her two!)

looking for flowers on a gravel road

2008-02-14T09:20:00.002-05:00

"I could have had a V-8!"

2008-02-12T04:46:00.000-05:00

Yesterday a veritable barrage of phone calls put both my answering machine, my brain and my patience to the test.
From dear little Aunt Ruthie to the lawyer, to Mayor Fenty urging me to vote for Obama and a host of other well-meaning folk ringing out their messages inbetween my ears.

But it was "Sniffles" from Seattle who pushed me over my line last night with the last telephone call of the day concerning ever more "stuff" as to when this memorial to Patti is to be. My thought was that the memorial to Patti has become more important than Patti.

Shortly after we hung up I had my "V-8" revelation. Just unplug these goddamn telephones. (before waking up [again] at 4am a little while ago, I dreamed that I was trying to hide this little guy, with big glasses, from the storm troopers.. I told him if he would just hold real still while they were in the room that they would not see him.)
Well hell's bells a-ringin', that IS all I need to do, unplug the phones, and no one will be able to find me.

Ruby and I may run to Florida during memorial week. I need to remember again how to become a singular force now that Patti made it into the parallel world. We might even be able to stay at John & Ruth's empty condo, visit my sister in the Keys, catch the ponies at Gulfstream or Hieleah, maybe even check out Epcott for a day.
Sounds like more fun than this is.
The latest date for the memorial will be the 15th of March.
Let me know how it all turns out.

Final "Patti Update" to families & friends

2008-02-06T07:29:00.006-05:00

For the last 4 months practically all of my daily and nightly life has been dedicated to taking care of Patti in every conceivable way and detail. All of that came to an abrupt halt at 4:34 AM on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008.

Patti died peacefully and as far as I could tell, she was feeling no pain. (There was no grimacing or any kind of agitation coming from her.)
Throughout the early morning hours as I kept vigil over her, a small lamp on the floor, I watched as she sank deeper into her sleep and no longer responded when I would ask her a question. At some point I stopped asking, stopped giving her the morphine and I just laid beside her, watching and listening to her short and labored breathing. Often I would speak to her as the hours passed, telling her at times to go find Skip now and be with him, or to "go with the Light" when it presents itself. Others times I would gently stroke her forehead as she sometimes liked me to do when she was feeling bad, reminding her of a long ago time when her mother would pet her forehead and hair, comforting her with such love and care when she was a child, perhaps as only a mother can.
Sometimes I would sing to her a song I had made up 20 years ago to sing to sleep my then wee little daughter. It went like this:

"gnomee, gnomee, I love you..
star faeries, I love you too..
we're going to sleep and I'd like you to..
bring us a beautiful dream.
bring us a beautiful dream."

"we're all together going to sleep tonight..
we'll all go flying in the blue Star Light..
we'll find some friends and it'll be all right..
if you'll just bring us a beautiful dream.
if you'll just bring us the Beautiful Dream."

Gradually the pause between the sharp intake of her breath and the low moan of her exhale began to lengthen.
First a pause of perhaps 5 seconds or so.. then time later, the gasp in, the little moan out, then pauses lasting up to 10 and then 15 seconds. I listened close, my hand lightly rubbing her tummy which she also liked me to do for her comfort.
Finally, at 4:34 in the morning, a final exhale.. the pause between breaths.. I waited for another, but no more inhales came.. no more were coming. It's done.
After a moment I put my ear to her chest and I will never, ever forget what absolute silence sounds like. It is the kind of silence that is heartbreaking.

* * *

By the time you all are reading this Patti's body and the insidious cancer that she fought for 21 years, will both be reduced to ashes. Patti wanted me to divide her ashes so that a third of her remains would be buried alongside of Skip's ashes in Iowa, a third would stay with me to do with as I wished and the last third to let fly upon the waters of Eagle Lake in the Adirondack mountains, the one place on earth she loved more than any other, the one place she felt had always been her spiritual home.
She requested that I and our good friends Bob and Barbara and Margaret, all of whom have accompanied us on past adventures to that magical place in the Adirondacks, would go with me. That we would perform our "good byes.. until we meet again" and anything else that we needed to say to her, just off from the dock at Eagle Nest, out in the water of Eagle Lake in our 4 kayaks. ..and then.. to freely let fly her ashes into the breeze and the water, as her Spirit has now been let free from her body.

* * *

Several of you have asked me if I am going to be OK financially.
The short answer to that is "yes".
The somewhat longer answer is that I have always added to Patti and my own pooled resources from income derived from my farm in Iowa. Add to that my drawing of social security every month.
Patti has graciously and lovingly set me up with a steady income stream from her parent's estate, that taken altogether there will be enough for me to continue to pay the condo fees here in DC as well as to continue buying health insurance and the other basic necessities of an ordinary life.
I feel a responsibility not only to Patti but also to her parents, Nathan & Hilde, for this. As it stands, by my calculations, I have enough to carry me through to my own "last breath", however long that may be, that is if I don't go and do something stupid.
It is hugely important to me that when I finally catch up to Patti again, that in facing her parents they would be able to say to me "Bill.. you damn well did OK by our daughter." (or something to that effect)

* * *

Patti wanted a memorial so there will be a memorial. But I don't know when. (possibly in about 3 weeks) Many people ask me if there is any way they can help in any way. Well, whoever wants to, can just jump right in and help with all the details. The memorial will be at the Institute for Spiritual Development. This is the church that helped Patti to get through some of her darkest years after her husband, Skip's, death back in '91. The Reverend Pat Makin will be in charge and anyone wishing to participate or contribute in any way in this gathering to celebrate Patricia's life should either email Pat Makin at: pmakin@mris.com or call her at: (202) 678-2697
When I find out exactly when the memorial is to occur I will post the info onto our blog at billandpatti.com or anyone can email me.

* * *

Finally, I want to send out a thousand thank you(s) to everyone who has offered their sympathies to me. But I also want to acknowledge your own pain of losing a friend that each and every one of you who knew Patti have also been feeling. Although this is the hardest thing I have ever had to go through in my life, still, I'm not the only one who has been hurting because of our beloved Patricia's passing. You all know who you are and I pretty much know who you are too. Whether friend, cousin, sister, aunt, niece, nephew, whatever.. you too need to take some time and space to reconcile and accept your own loss of an extraordinary spirit that will never come our way again.

On these thoughts of mine on this 4th day of "now what?".. may we each and all gradually become reconciled to the conflicts created by her too early death.
May Peace prevail in this often bitter sweet world of ours and may we all "go flying in the blue StarLight". Just maybe then, we too, like Patti, can find that most Beautiful of Dreams.
I think she would like that.

Bill (and Patti)

Addendum:
Memories are a piss-poor substitute for the real thing.. and the real thing is by day receding into the past. I hate this more than anything else.
It has been a week now since Patti died last Wednesday.
Everyday we all move further and further away from the reality of Patti, the hands-on, touchy, talky reality of Patti that tells us that at any time I could walk into the next room and ask her something, or you could pick up the telephone or send her an email and she would be there to respond to you.
At some point up ahead in time she will vanish on the ocean horizon and the only thing left to carry along will be all these memories trying their futile best to substitite for that real thing.
Clicking on the music above again opens the floodgates. Nice way to start the day, eh?

No word yet when the memorial will be. -bill

It's a slippery slope

2007-06-05T12:08:00.000-04:00

For the last few weeks Barbara, Bob and I have been constructing a treehouse/slide for their grandkids, Hailey and Leah. It's been a fun little project and is nearly complete.

Lots of back-and-forth discussions between everyone about kid-safety which of course is everyone's principle concern. The little ones are pretty young and thus unlearned in the ways of paying attention and cautiousness.
After all was said and done about safety we think (we hope) we've just about covered all the possibilities against any kind of potential accident.
I might add that Barbara here is the chief architect in the project. She is a fine wood-worker with her own well-equipped woodshop in their basement area.

Of course all of us adults (using the term loosely) had a go at going down the slide.
For a some of us it was a really tight squeeze sliding down (heheh, I won't mention names for fear of retribution). Also, we old turkeys tended to light on our butts, unlike grandkids Hailey and Leah who would zoom down and light on their feet, then run back to the ladder and do it again.. and again.

Below is Irma. This lady is a delight to be around. She is funny and kind and finds great joy in doing such things as sliding down a kid's slide.

Irma and I created the below video of her coming down the slide to send to Irma's daughter who lives somewhere not around here. (ok, I forgot where.. florida maybe.) But it was such fun that I decided to post it here as well.

"How long has it been since you've done this?"
"Never I think!.. ..oh except this morning"

Little B and the Isle of St Lucia

2007-05-20T17:42:00.000-04:00

Patti & I don't usually post about other people. (afterall this little blog of ours IS about us!) However this is one time I think I will.

Yesterday I received an email of a Flickr link sent to a number of folks from a young lass that I had not heard from for quite some time. Her name is Brieanna Endura and above is a photo I took of her many years ago.
Time passes when we aren't looking and now she is, ..ummm about 21 years old (Ok, I could be off on that, Brieana) and I will give readers a little personal history about Brieana and myself along with some silly pictures of her that I keep in an old cardboard box containing my entire photo-history.

I think I first met Brieana when she was perhaps 6 or 7 years old. Her older sister, Autumn, was one of my own daughter's best playmates all through their grade school years. Often Autumn would come to our home in Oregon and "Little B" (as we called her then to distinguish between her name Brieana and my daughter's name also being Brieanna), Little B would tag along.

She and her sister Autumn quickly wiggled their ways into my heart nearly as much as my own daughter had. (remember "missed a spot!" ?? hahhaa I still think that thought whenever I see someone else is cleaning something and have to say it to them.)

But the one thing that especially endeared Brieana to me was her unusual interest in black and white photography which by happenstance I was also engaged in, even to the point of building my own darkroom and being a member of a local photo arts gallery.
So.. how many 6 or 7 or 8 year olds do we know that are seriously interested in fine art black and white photography? Little B was/is most unique.

Brieana had this clunky old camera that had to have black tape around it to prevent light leaks. Money was tight for her and her family as well as for myself, but still I could afford to at least buy her some film and have it developed so she could take her pictures.

Unfortunately there was always too little money during those times to spend more on such non-necessities as photography by either her family or my own to seriously help develop this intense interest she had in photography. So we both had to make due with what we little we had.
For me it was both meaningful and grand fun to take her under my wing as "photographic mentor" to this unusual child who actually wanted to learn not only about the technical aspects of photography but also in developing her own path toward artistic expression in the photographic fine arts.
Along with her mother Debbi, we even tried to build a small darkroom for her out in an old shed that was behind their home at the time. Using extra equipment that I had on hand and scrap lumber, tape and blankets to prevent light leaks, we tried.. but our efforts didn't work out too well in the end.

Still... I could tell from several of her works we had printed off that Little B had some kind of genuine talent. She had this keen "eye" for the unusual and capturing metaphorical image that bespoke of some or another emotion which is an important aspect of any art. I could tell that she could see and then capture images on film in a way much greater than I ever could, and I wanted to help her as much as possible to at least develop the fundamentals of the craft, along with perhaps a kind of initial guidance in not only printmaking, but more important, to consciously become the hunter. (of the meaningful image metaphor)

BUT.. as life does play it's little game with so many of us, the age old story of the lack of money and available time played it's part in our "failure to launch". At least that was the case while I was still there in Oregon.

Zoom forward to the present and my receiving Little B's email link to her Flickr slideshow. My first thought was, "Where the hell is St Lucia?" for I had not a clue that it was an island in the Carribbean.
Nice warm temps, blue skies, lots of sunshine, layed back life style, killer hurricanes.. sweet.

Little B is no longer quite so little as I knew her then. She's all grown up now and has become a striking young woman... Indeed, I'm wondering if anyone but me even thinks of her as "little b" anymore. doubtful.

So, here then is the link to the island of St Lucia as was sent to me. Little B will be your tour guide for her slide show.
take the pictorial journey. explore. feel the ocean breeze. enjoy..

and thanks Brieana! ... for keeping an old man on your mailing list. It brought to me a smile.

bill

Get 'em while they're hot!

2007-04-28T11:22:00.000-04:00

Patti won't wave her own flag so I'll do it for her.
Congratulations go to her.
Yesterday Patti sold another one of her glorious paintings, "Negative Space", to fine art collector David Stang of Washington, DC.

The painting was one of my personal favorites of Patti's and I hated to see it go, but since I know it shall have a good and appreciative home I guess it will be ok.

So.. exactly what is negative space?

In art, generally, negative space is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, and not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space is occasionally used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image. The use of negative space is a key element of artistic composition.

In a two-tone, black-and-white image, a subject is normally depicted in black and the space around it is left blank (white), thereby forming a silhouette of the subject. However, reversing the tones so that the space around the subject is printed black and the subject itself is left blank causes the negative space to be apparent as it forms shapes around the subject. Rubin's vase is an optical illusion in which the negative space around the vase forms the silhouettes of two faces in profile.

The use of equal negative space, as a balance to positive space, in a composition is considered by many as good design.

This basic and often overlooked principle of design makes a composition more appealing to the viewer without their knowledge of why because it gives their eye a "place to rest".

For more of Patti's work visit her website... and don't forget to scroll on down to participate in the moment.

Nose in the air

2007-04-18T21:45:00.000-04:00

OH! Another subscriber to the blatherings of bill and Patti. This time thanks to our good friends Bob and Barbara for subscribing to our little blog. (It makes us feel loved, it does.)

Both Patti and myself spend a good deal of time in front of our computers, probably too much time and that is especially true throughout the winter when our being engaged with the outside world seems [by choice] to become severely limited by little more than gazing out the window at the tops of trees. Fortunately (or unfortunately perhaps) we both are more or less content with our self-imposed "exile" from the world at large only punctuated with cross-town trips every week or two for dinner at our good friends' (above) home, or the occasional afternoon movie (we've even laxed out on that this winter).
I prefer the concept of "hibernation" to that of "sloth" but either/or, it seems to have become our norm. Some of us really do slow down after 60...and dem dar "Golden Years" have opened up their cushy, warm arms and embraced us both for better or for worse. (never thought I'd make it this far, but hey, I'm not complainin', my parts are all still working painfree. Knock on wood.)

But then in spring when the sap rises in one's veins, Patti & I, urged on by some subtle natural law to "come forth" out of our sleepy routine, shake off the dust and mange from a winter's worth of laying around doing not much of anything and to..gee, "let's just go do something different for a change".

Nose in the air, sensing the scent of new life and ready to connect with the Great and Ubiquitious Whatever...

However, we're not there yet. Until that happens, interesting journal-keeping is definitely at a bare miniumum until we actually do make a plan, get off our dead-like fluffy-buns, get into the car, start it up and actually drive off into great unknown in search of some kind adventure to report on.
Spring or not, sap or not (damn these Golden Years! c'mon sap, rise!), we're not quite there yet... and in case no one has noticed, our writing and lack of writing here magnificently reflects our sorry state of unconscious bliss. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

(more blah, blah)
Well now, I suppose I could write about what we will have for dinner tonight and how to make it. Or with slightly more effort I could bleed on and on about nothing until you, dear reader, died of a kind of intellectual blood loss and concurrent asphyxiation, but what would be the point in doing that? Far too many blog writers are already engaged in "yawn journalism" of which I am narcissistically and sadistically participating in right now. OH, you lucky, lucky subscribers, you. Now if I can just get you "lurkers" out there in the shadows to also subscribe (oh yes, I know who you are, heheh), who knows, I might just be inspired to do something genuinely creative. So scroll down a bit and sign up for the year. You can always unsubscribe, you know.

Oh, I almost forgot. As you see the ole bloggerooney has been modified a bit. Change is good and I like what I've got so far.
This year there will be a full photo BEHIND the journal entries which will serve as background. Scroll all the way down and you will see the full image sans blog entry. My intention is to have future background photos relevant to the newest blog entry.

Right now there is a really cool photo of Patti in a Kayak on Eagle Lake during our trip to the Adirondacks last september. I've also installed an audio button so you will be able to hear our own recorded ambient sounds during the moment I took the picture. Some I'll set to music I have on hand.
It should be fun.. and that in itself is enough reason for you to subscribe. right? So sign up below and you will no longer have to check back just to see some same old entry that hasn't yet been replaced.

Ok.. enough for now. It's after 6 and I gotta get dinner going.. tonight it's Tofu "chicken" Paprikish (without the chicken). ..and no, I'm not writing about how to make it. but damn it is good!
:-)
bill & patti

Daughter got a brand new blog

2007-04-04T16:54:00.000-04:00

Brie has her first blog site at Crowdawg.
Now maybe I can keep up with her comings and goings, at least more so than what I been able to for the last few years.
Having recently (like a couple days ago) flew the California chicken coupe, she alighted in downtown Connecticut and is cooling her heels at her main squeeze family home. (none of whom I have had the privilege of meeting as yet, but hope to some day.)

So welcome to the blogosphere, Brie.

Having an online journal can be an addictive thing (addictive in a good way) for some writers.. and serve absolutely no purpose at all for others who have better ways to spend their time. There are countless valid reasons to put or not to put slices of one's life "out there" in psyber-space for anyone on the planet with a computer to take a peek at. One either hears the calling.. or not.

I have always thought of creating and maintaining an online journal as a grand and easy way to "stay connected" with friends, family and even others folks whom you will never, ever meet in "real life". I've been at it for over 5 years now.. and when people visit our site and especially when anyone signs on I feel a kind of life affirming connection to them...as though I was writing just to them, all of which is a good thing to feel.
Hopefully Brie will find the time and energy parallel to the great demands of attending graduate school in NYC to keep up her blog.
But as she herself wrote in her notice email, "we'll see"..

My "staying connected" thought reminds me:
Because Patti and my entries are soooo hit-n-miss, sporadic and sometimes going for weeks without posting anything, I highly recommend that anyone finding interest in wanting to be/stay connected to Patti and myself thru our jounalistic "brain drizzles" here, to sign-up your email below. If you do, you will be automatically notified of any and all entries that we post here. Our most recent "sign-me-up"s for our upcoming spring/summer/fall season-blog-fiasco are Sue (welcome back Sue) and cousin Joe (welcome Joe, what a nice surprise!).
soooo.. don't be shy, scroll down and sign-up if you're so inclined. Patti & I can promise you at least a couple of grins once in a while. wothehell!

ok.. it's after 5 o'clock and time for BEER. I'm outa here.

beeeer.. beeeeeerrr...
bill

March to the Pentagon protest march

2007-03-18T16:35:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I bundled up and took the Metro down to the mall to take pics of another protest march, this time to the Pentagon.
Without doubt temperatures hovering around freezing reduced considerably the size of the crowds. I would say there were between 10 and 20 thousand antiwar demonstrators ..much less than the 100 thousand or so that turned out en force during the previous protest in January. It was into the 50s and thus perfect marching weather that day.

Also turning out in force were the pro-war/pro-Bush supporters, perhaps two thousand or so black-leather jacketed folks mostly lined behind fencing and waving flags, throwing "one fingered salutes" and shouting a great deal of verbal abuse upon the marchers.
There was definitely a rougher feeling to the protest march than previous anti-war rallys although still nothing like my memories of the late 60s Viet Nam riots here in DC.

According to news reports no violence broke out as police were also out enforce and worked at cooling flared tempers between antagonists.

Here's a short 2 minute video of saturday's march that I did not put much effort into.

A friend of ours, Jim Goodnow is a life-long political activist. He drives a big ole bus with his message plastered all over it. His website is at: Yellow Rose Peace Bus

I didn't make it all the way to the Pentagon. (4 mile round trip) My fingers were freezing off from taking pictures which I can't accomplish while wearing gloves. (ok, so I'm a wussy and a fair weather marcher.)
Below is a 10 photo slideshow of some of the action.

(mouse over image for slideshow control)

Winter is almost over. yeaaah! Thoughts of returning to Iowa are again dancing like sugar plums in my head. (do sugar plums dance?)

in the meantime.. life is good.
Patti and I wish all of you reading this great heaping helpings of goodness as well.
-bill

next chapter in a life

2007-03-02T19:59:00.000-05:00

AHHHHHHHHH
Just wanted to let you know, I just got a phone call... and I GOT ACCEPTED TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!
brie

The Program

Our workshops, master classes, seminars, and lectures are created for writers by writers who discuss student work and examine literature from a practitioner's perspective, not that of a scholar or theorist. We draw fully on the cultural resources of Columbia University--its faculty, libraries, archives, scholarly centers, diverse students, and wealth of facilities. The other Divisions of the School of the Arts--Film, Theatre, and Visual Arts--enrich the Division's programs. The 28 departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences offer courses that provide incomparable opportunities for a developing writer. In addition, the Division offers its students the chance to edit, manage, and publish their own magazine, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.

We also draw fully on the cultural resources of New York City. As the publishing and arts center of the country, New York provides writers with opportunities and experiences not available elsewhere. Editors, publishers, agents, and other literary professionals participate in our classes, panels, and informal discussions. Current students serve as interns at magazines such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and at literary organizations such as PEN and the Poetry Society of America, and work as research assistants to writers who also serve as mentors, such as Anna Quindlen, Rick Moody, A. M. Homes, and Phillip Lopate. In addition, the Bank Street/Liberty Partnership enables more than 20 Writing Division students to teach creative writing to New York City high school students.

We were just informed (by that short email above)that daughter Brie got an important telephone call today..
and.. will soon be attending The Columbia University Graduate School. On average 680 people apply and only about 70 get in.
So yeah! serious congratulations to you, daughter.. the next chapter of your life has just opened up to you.

(way ta go!.. from yer very proud poppy)

Be My Valentine

2007-02-14T12:11:00.000-05:00

need we say more?

bill & patti

March on the Capitol

2007-01-29T08:52:00.000-05:00

No one could have ask for a better weather day to launch a major protest rally and march upon the capitol and against the Bush War Machine.

Blues skies, sunshine, mid-fifties temperatures and a singlemindedness to protest the war in Iraq brought out the crowds en force. This was the biggest rally since september of 2005 and possibly eclipsing the 100 to 200,000 protesters who come to say "NO MORE WAR" 16 months ago.

Kicking off the late morning rally were such noteable speakers as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Susan Sarandon and Jane Fonda who had spoken out against Richard Nixon and the Viet Nam war 34 years ago.
Flash version (19MBs)

Quicktime version 50MBs

By 1:30 the march had begun circling the Capitol building with a wide and very long line of protesters chanting, some singing, some yelling and beating the drums of "peace now!". Along the route a small contingency of vocal anti-protesters were cordoned off in their own protective space. Using signs and bullhorns they let their displeasures be known to the throngs of protesters passing by. A half dozen armed police stood between the 30 or so pro-war, pro-Bush protesters and the multitudes passing by. Words and "one-finger salutes" were exchanged as police tried to keep the calm on both sides.

An interview (not mine) with Susan Sarandon

Men at Sea

2007-01-20T16:12:00.000-05:00

25 x 31 glass, clay, agate, ceramic on board

Broken

2007-01-12T12:58:00.000-05:00

As was mentioned in a previous entry, Patti's 3 year hiatus from doing anything artistic has come to end.
3 years ago she unceremoniously layed to rest her paintbrushes, paints, canvas and her active 22 year love affair in creating masterful oil paintings. Thus commenced a 3-year journey of essentially non-creative activities in dealing with other things in her life, some [unmentionable things] of a not so pleasant nature and other things moreso to our liking (as in us living together, being stupid together and getting righteously hitched in 2005).

But now in a new light of creativity springing from out of the depths of who-knows-where-it-cometh, Patti has roared back into action and has begun to engage her creative talents into an entirely new medium.. that of glass and tile mosiacs.

Broken ~ 32 X 24 glass,clay,ceramic

Little web photos of her work as you see above can do little justice to the real thing. Believe me, in real life these works are impressive to behold. They are heavy, (the "mule" of our family, me, has to carry them). Heavy laden, both physically and with significance.
(I won't presume to try to present any kind meaning of her works to anyone reading this. That's Patti's job should she choose to, or perhaps the job of the spectator.)

As each piece becomes finished, we shall present it here on our webpage for your interest and pleasure.

It's a 007 year..

2007-01-02T12:06:00.000-05:00

So here we go again..
I still don't have anything of interest to write about, but I want to write something.. anything if for no other reason than just to put all the 70 entries of 2006 behind and make some kind of fresh start for the new year.

So on this "fresh start" note, I want to introduce to you a new website that I've created. It will not take the place of this one but will be more oriented toward our on-and-off artistic expressions.

Deliberately so, it's a bit different than the old billandpatti page here that allows you to take occasional "peekaboos" at the goings-on in our lives.
The page is at:Looking Out Looking In
[UPDATE: this thing really didn't get much off the launch pad. I deleted it. ah well ~ bill]
Essentially the site will be a kind of "open canvas" for me to dabble in any direction that I'm moved to dabble in as well as a display of Patti's mosiacs as they are completed. (finally after a 3 year hiatus our Resident Artist is back in action. Go Patti Go!)
There will be no email notices when something new is posted on the new site so I invite you to bookmark the site now if you think you may be interested. Syndication links are at the bottom of the page for those familiar with such things. Entries will not be often I'm sure, but I invite you all to click back from time to time just to see where our minds and spirits have taken us along the lines of artistic expression.
Comments and emails are of course always desired. (they let us know you care..yes they do.)
I've posted a first entry which is not necessarily a forecast of similar things to come through the year. (We don't go to that many performances and besides my "muse" does the all the driving, the writing, the videoing and anything else here, that is when the dipsy, schizy bitch is around.. but I'm sure both video and music will be a part of it.)
ok.. enough for today. may anyone reading this (that means YOU!) have a healthy and most satisfying 2007. blast off!

A thought on our years as we all pass along with them..
"all these moments are lost in time.. like tears in rain"
(just a line from Blade Runner that resonated with me while watching the movie last night)

recent email to billandpatti subscribers

2006-12-15T10:15:00.000-05:00

Happy Year-end Greetings to all!
The old billandpatti website has not seen much real action since we returned from our little adventure last september in the Adirondacks.
That may be because our own lives have not been too adventuresome of late, especially at this time of the year as Patti and I go into a kind of hibernation mode for the winter. Truth is, there isn't really much of interest in our lives that are worthwhile writing about or notifying you all about.

It is also that time of the year that we cut all of you wonderful subscribers loose from our subscriber mailing list.
(I do that every december and then send out another mass email invitation-to-subscribe to our journal in the spring, that is if we even intend on continuing our web journal.)
So.. consider yourselves free as of now, from any future notifications about any kind of update to our webblog.

Our web journal needs to go thru some kind of metamorphosis. It's getting old. For me, it has become stale and uninteresting and in general, just blah.
I'm not certain which direction to go with it, if any. We may just let the whole thing sit here and do nothing.
If it has become boring for me, I can only imagine how boring it has also become for you, the reader.

Well, we have all winter to come up with some kind of renewal before spring rolls around and we make our yearly pilgrimage to farmlife in Iowa. I've got some ideas to possibly start in January but oftimes ideas have a way of evaporating as easily as morning fog.

We shall see, said the blind blogger... we shall see.

connections, caring...

2006-12-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

Word has come our way that a friend and his dog need some help.

Each and every one of us have needed (or certainly will need) a bit of a boost on our journeys through this world.
Now Mark is asking for donations to help him and his friend "Sixto the Wonder Dog" get through a rough place in their own road.

I think I will always feel indebted to Mark.
Mark scored BIG TIME with me a few years back. When my daughter Brie was a young teen she developed a spinal condition called "scoliosis" and needed a major operation. (The surgeons clipped out one of her ribs.. put the rib bone in a blender to use as "cement" to fuse her lower vertebrae together. Then they screwed on a titanium rod along the side of her lower spine with a bunch of screws to hold it all in place... and.. they did all this totally invasive surgery from the front side of her body, collapsing her lungs, pushing organs aside in order to fuse and splint her spine into proper shape.
..to this day it still disturbs me to even think about it.)

Anyway.. daughter's recovery was long and painful and round-the-clock attention was required. During that whole ordeal, Mark was right there to give comfort and aid where ever he could.. Daily, he came to the house to sit with her at bedside.. he played games with her when she was able.. he made her laugh (but not too much because it would hurt to laugh).. Mark did lots for her healing spirit in "kid ways" that a parent could never accomplish. As a young lad just out of high school, Mark "stepped up to the plate" for his young friend and gave her his time and his care. Amazing!

So yeah, in my world and I would imagine in many others as well ('cause that's the kind of guy he is), Mark is a champion care-giver... who now in his own turn needs just a tiny, little boost from others to also "step up" and be counted.

Well, you can get the full story from Mark himself at the Mark & Sixto web page.

Patti and I will chip in to help cover the cost of Sixto's operation. If anyone reading this is feeling somewhat generous this holiday season, even to someone you don't know, kicking in five or ten bucks would certainly give much deserved aid-and-comfort back at him, now in his own temporary need for a little help from his friends..

Happy Birthday Gramma.....

2006-12-10T10:03:00.001-05:00

Where ever you are...
Dec 10, 1908 ~ April, 1991

An interesting and fun lecture from the TED talks

2006-12-01T21:23:00.000-05:00

Atlantic City, New Jersey

2006-11-30T10:24:00.000-05:00

On our recent trip to NYC to spend Thanksgiving with Patti's relatives, we split the heavy traffic journey into two days with an overnight layover in Atlantic City.
Of course we had to hit the casinos for the evening.

Patti is nearly a professional BlackJack player but the minimum bets at the tables were a little too rich for her so she didn't play at all. Instead we sat at the slots and fed nickels and eventually quarters into those bastard bandits. After a time, I hit a 30 dollar pot and then a bit later Patti scored a $10. We decided to quit after that since we figured that we were about even and had had enough of the silly game anyway.

We walked out onto the boardwalk and then the beach but we didn't stay long because of the weather. Cold, windy.. spitting rain.. general yukkiness.

Here's a short 40 second clip so you can see that I'm not a lyin' toad.. ribbet.

Thanksgiving was fun... Thankyou again Richard & Nancy for the feast and the laughs.

Quick trip to the coast

2006-11-02T16:37:00.000-05:00

Ok, so this really is a pretty boring video of our little overnight trip back to the beach at Ocean City, but I wanted to document our very pleasant 2 days that we spent there.

*A.T.L.H.E.A.

2006-10-26T10:33:00.000-04:00

Today is the one year anniversary of Patti and I becoming officially married.. and of course we have to mark the day here on our journal.
So turn your sound up, click the image below and join us for a special moment in our most lovely of occasions..

It is also coming up sometime within the next few months (but neither of us can think exactly when because the old brain cells have gotten a little mushy) that Patti and I have known one another for.. can ya believe it?.. 40 years!
And through these many years, even from the very beginning, we have remained as best friends which neither time nor geographical distance nor each of our own personal losses beyond our control, have been able to disconnect our two spirits. Indeed, even our losses have maneuvered us closer together. We shine with our own Light now.

So, today marks a special day for both of us. We found what we were looking for both in Life and Beyond Life, if there be such a thing ..and we found it in one another.

As the great Satchmo would sing, "Oh yeah.." (*And They Lived Happily Ever After)

on nurturing creativity

2006-10-19T12:24:00.000-04:00

Eagle Nest Kayaking video

2006-10-03T15:06:00.000-04:00

I finally got together the video footage of our recent adventure into the Adirondacks. It's packed into one 13 minute Flash video. I'm not fond of the lower quality that Flash offers and I certainly dislike being an advertisement for Jumpcut, but because of the length of this video I don't seem to have an alternative.. just yet.
We also were able to burn a high quality version of this to DVD and watch on the television which is a lot better than this tiny Flash screen below.
oh well.. it is what it is and still makes me want to go back to Blue Mountain Lake.

Eagle Nest slideshow

2006-09-24T18:09:00.000-04:00

I put together some pics of our recent adventure into the Adirondacks that you can view.

More boating bungles

2006-09-20T16:37:00.000-04:00

Ok.. so we are all back home now. It's the day after. Everything is unpacked and put away. One of us at least is feeling the "post-adventure blues" spiced with a bit of crabbiness. (all of which is normal stuff)
Anywaaaay.. now that we have high speed again I can post even more of our foolishness in the form of videos. (being stupid is so much easier than creating art)

QuickTime Version (better quality but 20mbs)

Flash version below (lesser quality at 10mbs)

If the Flash video doesn't work right, you may need to download a more recent version of Macromedia Flash for the browser you are using. Go HERE and it will tell you what you have installed and also if there is a later version to download.

End of Eagle Nest days..

2006-09-17T21:06:00.000-04:00

As all things both good and bad must eventually come to an end, so too does our very fine and good days here at Eagle Nest draw to a close.
Tomorrow we pack it up and head south toward DC. As I mentioned to Patti today, the biggest shock will hit us tomorrow afternoon when we take the on-ramp onto the New Jersey Turnpike and begin again to play "dodgeball" with a thousand and one other cars zooming along their ways. Although it is only a ten hour drive to home port, we'll probably stay in a motel monday night and make it back to DC sometime tuesday afternoon.

But what about today?
The sun did shine and we put on miles and miles of toodling around the lakes in our little boats. This time we took some bread with us to feed the duckies that live on a nearby beach.
Good thing they don't have teeth. When they try to grab the bread one is holding out to them, they will often miss the bread and get your fingers.
It does feel kind of weird to have a duck's mouth try to pull your finger off. They get all shakey-like and it kinda tickles.

So we hung out with the funny ducks for awhile and then decided to ply our way back home. (there were lots more ducks than the 3 in this photo.. like about 20 or more)
Patti still had a few bread pieces left so she fed them from the kayak.

They splash and squawk and carry on like crazy.
I'm glad I'm not a duck. I'd rather carry on like crazy in my own little way.. which is maybe what I'm doing right now.

Quack.. and goodnight!
bill and patti

One day left.. that's not right!

2006-09-16T20:51:00.000-04:00

Finally the dark clouds gave way and the sun shined on our little party of two.
Unfortunately we're booked into this luxurious joint for only one more day and then we need to vamoose on monday. Oh rats and mice! I could get used to this kind of livin'. Easy..peaceful.. no newspapers nor television or news reports or politics nor the daily death reports both near and far. (Like everyone else over a certain age, I too get easily "I.V'd" on reading newspapers and listening to all the "Oh so interesting" crappola on the tube. Maybe when I get back into our normal city routine I will do something about that. I mean, really.. which lifestyle is the healthier?)
In any case, all this wilderness withdrawal from the worlds "noise machines" sure beats choosing to remain hooked up to them.

Patti and I did some serious boating today now the sky has stopped spitting at us.
When we first got here last week, our arms became really sore after only about 20 minutes of paddling around. Now it's barely even noticeable after 2 hours of paddling. Interesting how the muscles adapt through use.

We decided to take a little break out in the middle.

ok.. enough for one day. Tomorrow is clean-up day.. sweep the floors, wash the bedding, get in more fire wood... get the place all spiffied up for the next guests coming in next week.
Our last journal entry will be tomorrow night before we head out for our return journey back to Washington.

Haha.. Patti got stuck!

2006-09-15T21:03:00.000-04:00

The weather finally cleared off this afternoon and so we took off across the lake on our kayaks.
Patti (in her endearing ways) somehow managed to get herself and her little boat stuck on a rock that lurked just under the surface. There she was, dead in the water and flailing around helpless as a beached whale. Fortunately I was following her and.. (heheh) caught the whole episode on video. (which I can't post until after we get back to DC).
Well, in any case I decided it was best that I not just sit there and laugh but come to fair damsel's rescue. After a couple minutes of positioning my own kayak so I could give her a shove backwards, we succeeded in freeing her up and disaster was avoided.

The weather folks say blue skies and sunshine tomorrow, so we shall see what more adventure lies in wait for us.

Chasing the wild loon..

2006-09-14T21:06:00.000-04:00

Another drizzling day so we decided to hit the Adirondack Museum. That's always a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. (but no pictures.. I mean we all know what museums are like).
However all was not lost to foul weather. About 5 this afternoon the sky ceased its relentless whizzing on us and so we decided to take a chance at being caught out in the middle of the lake and getting drenched. Donning our raincoats and then hopping into our trusty kayakenmobiles, we paddled out into the middle of the lake. Actually it was quite nice.

We have noticed over the past few days that there is one lonely loon that seems to regard this part of the lake as its own domain. It is always out there swimming around, diving deep underwater for little fishes (or whatever loons eat). We saw him there today. Sometimes you can slowly paddle close to the bird and it just kinda watches you as you come closer. Patti wanted to see how close she could get, so she paddled right towards the bird. I stayed back and took these pics.

Once a loon thinks you are getting TOO close, it dives underwater and swims a good distance away... like in hundreds of feet away from the point it disappeared. Amazing how long they can stay under. And this one was no different. Slish! vanishing down under.

Supposed to be bit wet again tomorrow but then sun shine after that.

Well.. we'll will see what tomorrow brings... and adjust accordingly.

double boo and hiss!

2006-09-13T19:38:00.001-04:00

Not only has it been a drizzly rainy day all day (with more to come tomorrow) but the video I've been working on all afternoon will take way too long to upload from our very, very slow telephone connection. (think about 6 hours at the snail pace of 5 kb/sec).. So it looks like I won't be able to post any decent video while we are here for the next few days.
so yes.. boo and hiss.

So what does one do when any form of disapointment sets in?
Head for the kitchen and get ta cookin'!

We were informed today from the groundskeeper that this new stove cost $10,500. How'd you all like to fix your evening meals on this guy?
La chef boozelow with the specialty tonight ..will be... beans and rice, buddy. S git yer fork and go sit down.

Well then maybe the Sun God will take mercy on us and clear the skies by tomorrow so Patti and I can get back onto the lake.
Here's a pic of Patti from yesterday.

We'll let you all know what happens tomorrow night.

Kayaking to the hangar

2006-09-12T19:39:00.000-04:00

Another fine day at Eagle Nest.

When I got up this morning there was a foggy mist still on the lake. The sun was rapidly burning it off and I knew I needed slip on my shoes and then scamper down onto the dock if I was to get this picture (no time to get out of my PJs into day clothes). 10 more minutes and the rising fog was entirely gone. Now if I could just drag my lazy buns out of bed by 7, maybe I could really get a spectacular shot.

After cooking up a mighty fine breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, we decided to paddle on over to the airplane hangar about an hour away. The lake had been mirror-smooth a couple hours ago but as usual a bit of a breeze came up as the morning progressed. But since the breeze was to our backsides we figured that the paddling would be even easier going. (oh well, we'll deal with any breeze in our face on our return trip later.)

Inasmuch as one of the original residents of this place flew a rather large plane, a befitting hangar was built to keep his airplane in. Today all of the original owners have joined their own ancestors and there is no longer an airplane but only the still-standing hangar which is not much used for anything.. just a big and aging building with nothing much in it.

Patti and I hung out there for about an hour.. catching some rays and just feeling the peacefulness and history of it all. I took m'shoes off,rolled up my pant legs and waded around a bit.

The below photo was a mistake.. I wanted to take a picture of both of us on the dock but forgot to set the camera timer and the picture snapped without giving me time to hustle out and join Patti. I like the picture so I decided to post it anyway.
Poor little dock waife..

Here's a short 20 second, mostly unedited video clip on our return home. It will give you the idea of what it like to be out on the lake, kayaking. In this clip we have almost returned to home port. The building you see is the boat house that belongs to the place we are staying at. The blue roof panels are solar collectors.

(ps: I'm having some trouble with this video so if it doesn't work I'll mess with more tomorrow)

Needless to say, we are doin' well here. Wouldn't it be nice if we owned this place? We could invite you all up for a humdinger of a party!

Patti says it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so we may not get any kayaking in for a bit.. guess we'll see what happens.

We are only going to be here for a week, so bookmark us and check back everyday if you are interested in this. I'll try to publish an update everynight of the day's doin's.

Splish! Splash! we was taken a Kayak..

2006-09-11T19:27:00.000-04:00

Incredible hassles (like 3+ hours of multiple phone calls to ISP support) in trying to secure an internet connection to this phone line here. I'm "telephone stress exhausted" ..but the damn thing finally works. I'm not sure any of you reading this are really worth it! (just kidding)

Nevertheless.. we are here in the middle of the beautiful Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. The weather is just about perfect and we've been doing our little Kayaking thing.

Patti got in her kayak, started paddling like crazy but she just couldn't figure out why she wasn't moving. I sat down on the beach and watched her for awhile and also tried to figure out what the problem was.

Well, after about an hour or so of watching her waving the paddle around like a lunatic, and still not moving an inch, we decided to get out the "Professional Kayaking Manual" to see if we could determine what the problem was.

On page 2 of the manual it says.. "after sitting comfortably down in the Kayak, have your assistant give the kayak a big ole push off the sand, and into the water ye shall go."

Hot damn! I think we got it. So I gave her a shove off the sand and away she did go.
Hey we ain't so dumb!

(maybe this also explains why it took 3 hours to connect to the internet) Hmmmmmmmm.
maybe.

Anyway.. it's late now on a monday evening.. we're tired from all the paddling around.. so for a first Adirondack entry to our journal, I guess this will just have to do.

bill and patti out for the night and puttin' out the light.

DO resuscitate

2006-09-01T12:26:00.000-04:00

In going though some of my prints I came across a photo of our century old farmhouse in western Iowa as it was when, in the late spring of 2001, I returned from my life in Oregon to renew and resume a long forsaken life in the Iowa countryside... that safe place deep in rolling hills farmland that I once called Home.
The picture above is how it looked the week I returned.
No doubt you will agree.. not too pretty.

As one might imagine, when I arrived and walked through the yard full of weeds that many years ago was a neatly mowed yard of bluegrass, I began to feel a sense of hopelessness in my actually being able to bring the place back to life.. I knew it was bad but this was more than I had anticipated.
It had been 15 or 16 years since any human energy had actually lived there. Except for the occasional vandal looking for anything worthwhile to steal and other forms of lowlife (raccoons, ground hogs, squirrels, bullsnakes, bugs and of course the ever-present mice), the place had been deserted of any kind of real caring and preserving higher energies.

On one side of the roof there was a rotting hole the size of a volley ball that as I looked up from the inside, I could see blue sky and sunshine. On another section of roof a long stretch of shingles had blown off. Rain water had poured into the house in both places for who knows how many years. Parts of the flooring had rotted away where the rain had come in, carpets thick with mold and little red worms and animal feces...layers of dust and cobwebs and crawly bugs like something from a halloween movie.
This place I once called "home", that was at one time clean and warm and loving and very much alive, now seemed to be not much more than a stinking shell of abandonment.

As I cautiously made my way down rotted steps leading into the dark basement, I could see with my flashlight that a section of the foundation had caved in from years of rain, helped along by an ever-digging family of groundhogs that even now was living down there in the basement and had taken refuge in their holes when they heard me come into the house. I could see at least 6 inches of dried caked mud spread out from wall to wall on the concrete floor of the basement.
I remembered at that moment watching my father digging and building this basement by himself over 50 years ago and I was not pleased at what I was now seeing.

Then even worse and more disheartening, as I went outside again I could see that the whole house had actually shifted a little on its foundation. It now had about a 3 or 4 inch twist to it, a slight leaning or listing because of the washed out and crumbling foundation. I wondered how could I ever fix that!
At that moment I felt pure hopelessness seeping into my own inner foundations.

I found an old aluminum ladder that no one had stolen, leaned it up against the side and climbed on up to the peak of the roof as I had done so many times in my life. I sat there high up on the roof ridge, a tightening lump in my throat. With watery eyes, I just stared away and into the tree tops, feeling the loss of something important to me.. feeling the loss of my own personal history. One's own personal history can be a terrible thing to lose.

I had felt abandoned and forsaken before in my life. We all know what that is like. Everyone of us gets to personally experience such dark nights of the soul when, without relief, things just keep going badly again and again and again in our lives.
But this was my history now being brought down by natural law, those pre-ordained instructions from Above that all things must fall apart sooner or later. This was my psychological "safety net" from an outside world seemingly steeped in uncaringness, aggression and generalized lunacy.
This was the place of my arising, my teenager foolishness and a fair amount of adult years as well. Now, even my own history seemed to be abandoning me, becoming unstable and like a ship with a hole in its underside about to slowly sink into the deep.

I sat there on the roof of the house like I was sitting motionless in a saddle strapped onto some dead horse that had not quite yet fallen over. Consciousness was acute and I remember being struck by the irony of such a perfect spring day..blue skies above, perfect temperature and the sun shining so brightly upon me overhead, and there I was just sitting up there on the peak of my roof, rocking back and forth, tight throat, bleary eyed, helpless.. a silly little homing pidgeon looking sideways at nothing and not really knowing what to do next.

After a time as my butt began to hurt from sitting up there on the ridge, I skidded back down the slope and then climbed back down the ladder and into the weeds. Returning to the car, I drove back to my sister's house 16 miles away, thoroughly dejected and still wondering "what next?".

* * *

But of course, as we all know that was not the end of this little story, but only the beginning of a new chapter and I might add, a grand chapter at that!

I didn't pack it in and I didn't "hit the road, jack" and fly on to some 9 to 5 city grind that I had come to passionately detest. Life, in its occasional mercy upon we poor and wretched souls here on earth, surely did send to me in that first night an Angel of Transcendence to lighten up my dark heart and to draw me (and my history) back in and away from the abyss. In the usual form of inexplicable transcendence (and after a good nights sleep at my sister's house), I was by that next morning struck full face now with an overbearing sense of hopefullness! Amazing was the change of attitude and my new perception of reality (and along with it an urgency I might add. I had only a bit over 4 months of good weather, and very little money to make the place liveable before another bone-cold Iowa winter would be setting in.).
I would need to draw on all my blue-collar handiness & scrounge-ability to slam-bang the breathe-of-life back into the old place before the november snows began to fall.
I did indeed make it through that spring, the hot, humid summer and the following winter too. I chained-sawed a huge supply of wood for my heat (after making 2 barrel stoves), reinstalled basic plumbing and ran new electrical lines. By winter's edge I had won the race and settled in with my two cats, my computer, my music, my fire to huddle around and sip coffee by. And yes, many pats on my own back (literally) for having done the job and done it well, at least to best of my ability and satisfaction.

Of course the old hacienda didn't look quite so good that first year as it does now in 2006 as you see in the picture here. Much work was and is still to be done.
And thanks to my run in with Patti 3 years ago, I too seem to have mellowed and transcended my back-to-the-land "Jeremiah Johnson" phase. Not only does my... I mean our little history-house now sport used (but perfectly good) cedar siding and insulation, a new coat of paint and foundation jacks, but thanks also to Patti's insistence, we even have a hot water heater too!
(Oh dear! Am I now becoming all soft and wussy-like?!)

Well, perhaps just a little.
Still, ya gotta love them Angels of Transcendence, the ones that help modify perceptions of realty in the night as well as the one you can snuggle up with on cold winter nights.

I think that I shall never see...

2006-08-27T21:42:00.000-04:00

Staring at this picture of my great niece and I begin to realize that this is one of the oddest photographs I have ever seen.

Falsifying news.. is not against the law.

2006-08-21T15:16:00.000-04:00

..and some of you wonder why Patti & I no longer do dairy?
(or watch Fox news)

(yawn)

2006-08-14T08:22:00.000-04:00

At present there seems to be not a lot happening in our lives that is worth writing about here at billandpatti.com. Our days somehow flow quickly by as Patti and I repeat our daily routines of more or less uneventful activities (like most everyone else I would guess).
I've been spending some time in the photo darkroom as well as working on a "pre" Chippewa Lake Park website when I'm not puttering around and doing other ordinary things. It is all good.. certainly enjoyable to us as the wellspring of loving silliness between us seems never to run dry, but doubtful is any of it worth writing about that could be of interest to an uninvolved reader.

Well, in about 3 weeks, hopefully that will all change and a little more inspiration to here record our dodaddlings will occur. The day after labor day we plan on heading up to Blue Moutain Lake in upstate New York and deep into the Adirondack Mountains again. We missed out last year because of Patti falling and breaking her leg. The leg is all mended now (with only an occasional, mysterious and fleeting pain in her foot) and so if all remains ordinary in our lives, we shall try again to flee the big city and re-experience the mystical-magical life of the lake, the loons, the kayaking and of course, exploring Eagle Nest, which is an important part of Patti's history and a fun thing to do.
If we can get an internet connection while we are there we shall definitely be posting our thoughts and nearly real-time photos (hopefully video as well) of our stay.
Anyway, just before we go we shall send out a notice of our impending adventure to our subscribers.

Happy Birthday Brie!(video)

2006-08-10T07:48:00.000-04:00

Ah yes.. another year has zipped on by and that cute little monkey in the red dress above is today 23 years old and living on the beach in southern California. (watch out for sharks & tsunamies, daughter)
Anyway.. The four of us here in Washington, DC just wanted to send to you Brie, a little slap-happy birthday video-greeting on this your 23rd. Great fun for us to make and hopefully you'll enjoy it too.
Dare you click on the go-button? Join us in the living room below.

So, here's hopin' you have just a mighty fine day (and beyond) from me, yer pops... Patti, yer evil step-mother.. Bad Boy Bob (man that dude can sing!).. and Barbara, the irrepressible ole Mother Smucker that she is.

Here's a smaller modem version (3.7mb) of the same thing.

2006-08-08T12:15:00.000-04:00

How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine

(there's a stupid 10 second ad you first have to get thru)

Slide show of our farm stay

2006-07-31T11:40:00.000-04:00

So I finally figured out how to generate a Flash slideshow of all our farm photo of the day pictures. I'll be using more of this technique in the future.
(modem users: let me know if/how this displays for you)

click on Patti's head and she will fly you off to our new little theater on the web.