Autumn

The weather is definitely turning cooler. Our leaves started to turn weeks ago and are now starting to hit the ground. I love the coolness of autumn after a hot summer. The colors are so beautiful. It is nature’s last hurrah before it starts its winter nap. Merlin of course has the winter nap bit down to a fine art. He practices spring, summer, and autumn to get ready. His coat is getting real thick in preparation for winter though why an indoor cat needs that thick of a coat I don’t understand. The picture called “Autumn Barnyard” is my tribute to one of my favorite seasons.

Winners

I was reminded of two big winners in my life this week. One was my late Dad and one was my cat Merlin. My week started out with me in the emergency room of the hospital I worked in. I had been fighting off horrible headaches and around 12:30 p.m. the combination of pain and nausea finally decided to get together with vertigo and make the room spin around. I felt like I was back in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. My boss grabbed hold of me before I could fall and my cube mate got my chair under me so I could sit down, another colleague called the Emergency Room to get a wheelchair. A CT scan showed some sort of bubble that needs further investigation but no bleeding. My doctor thinks the migraines have taken another phase and we need to try and figure out how to pursue them without beta blockers constricting the already constricted COPD scared airways. By the time I got home I needed something to cheer me up.

Merlin was there waiting for me to get home. He had tried that morning to make me stay home with him. He put his large paws over my arm and licked my hand and purred while cuddling next to me. He knew I shouldn’t go to work but you only get so much sick leave before they start thumbing through applications for your job. When I got back home he was my nurse as the pain medicine kicked into high gear and I was able to fall asleep. He has stayed close to me for the rest of the week.

Merlin has always been my cat. He is a full fledged Momma’s boy. He is friendly to my Mom but avoids my brother. Mike’s voice is just too loud and it reminds Merlin of my ex-husband. He has a tendency to distrust all men after my ex so never warmed up to Mike. When Pixie joined the household three years ago Merlin realize that this little black and white interloper was going to take over the household. Pixie is sweet natured and a little con artist. She will sit on Mom’s lap for hours, bonk noses, do cute things to make her laugh. Mom’s conversations are filled with Pixie as are Mike’s. I will give affection to Pixie but I also provide the only discipline she gets. Mom and Mike let her get away with everything. I make sure that Merlin gets his share of affection though.

Merlin knows he is second place as far as Mom and Mike are concerned. He is much more timid and doesn’t show affection easily except to me. He has feelings too. This week Merlin was the winner as my Mom realized that Pixie was a fair weather friend. If it is cold she will snuggle all night with her to keep warm but it she is warm she takes off and plays. Merlin on the other hand snuggles all night with me regardless of the temperature. Merlin also purrs for me, something Pixie does for Mike and myself occasionally but not for Mom. Of course there is the possibility that Mom’s hearing is so bad that she can’t hear the cat purr. So second class Merlin got recognized for his unconditional love.

The second winner was my Dad. Jason had stopped by to work on cutting down two trees that were dying and needed to come down. It turns out that he was one of my Dad’s students. My Dad was a superb teacher in the fields of Math and Science. Dad was one of those rare teachers who made you want to learn. His enthusiasm for learning was contagious. I have run into several former students of my Dad in the years I have lived here. They all talk about what a wonderful teacher he was and how interesting he made things. I inherited my love of reading from my Dad. He awoke in me very early the constant thirst for knowledge. I had to explain to my Mom that Jason’s statement, “Mr. Wilson sure was a swell dude,” was a very high compliment.

So here is to this weeks winners in my household. To Merlin for never failing to show unconditional love and my Dad whose ability to make learning exciting for being one swell dude.

Losing Mary

When I was growing up the first real genre of music I listened to was folk music. My Dad was very fond of it and I listened avidly also. We had albums by the Kingston Trio, the Limelighters, and Peter Paul and Mary among many others. I loved how the use of acoustic guitars and an occasional banjo could bring music to life that had its basis in culture that we brought with us when we came to America. Celtic music remains a large part of my life.

As a woman I loved the fact that the folk musicians were well represented by my sex. One of my favorite performers was Mary Travers from Peter, Paul and Mary. With her deep husky voice Mary managed to bring a pure beauty to every song she sang. She also made you really hear and appreciate all the lyrics. You felt “The Cruel War” that was raging and destroying lives. You wondered “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” taking the young with them forever.

I had the pleasure of seeing Peter, Paul and Mary in concert many times over the years. I knew when I saw one of their concerts I was going to listen to music new and old but music that would touch the heart. I knew I would go out of the concert thinking about not only the music but what they had said. They were people who really believed “This Land is Your Land” and they took pride in their country. The never hid their heads in the sand but spoke up when they saw injustice. They are the true patriots. They are people who love their country enough to say “you are wrong on this and let us do better.” Love means having to say your sorry and let me make amends when I am wrong.

Mary Travers has lost her battle with leukemia and the world has lost one of its most beautiful voices. Mary not only sang but she talked to anyone who would listen about the things she believed in. She never lost the idealism and belief that we are a great country and had the obligation to make sure our country used our resources to help make this world a better and safer place for everyone.

I am a huge fan of Mary Travers and Peter, Paul and Mary and I want to thank her for the years of music. She has enriched my life. Every time I hear her sing “Follow Me” I’ll try and be spiritually ready to follow and continue the fight for what she believed in.

Chances Are

Chances are that if you are sitting in a room that has two PCs, two printers, a pocket PC that hooks up and transfers back and forth from your main PC, a cell phone/camera that surfs the web, a MP3 player, a flat screen TV hooked up to a combination DVD/VCR, a second TV, a second DVD player, a second VCR, a stereo set that hooks up to you MP3 player if you want, a Galadrial doll, two Irish fairy dolls, a doll of Colonel John Shepherd from “Stargate Atlantis”, a digital camera, an Advantrix camera, and a 35mm camera that you might have to admit you’re a geek. If you add the fact that one of my all time favorite shows was McGuyver then it is a foregone conclusion that I’m a geek.

I grew up a geek. I love fantasy and science fiction. I’ve worked many science fiction conventions. I even ran my own science fiction convention. I write fantasy. My art work has a strong fantasy/science fiction/astronomy slant to it. As far as I’m concerned everyone should embrace their inner geekness. It has always bothered me that there is such a bias against geeks as if there were something wrong with it. Where do they think science comes from? It isn’t in the realm of the macho man that’s for sure.

This old house that I live in has a lot of quirks and problems that keep cropping up. Sometimes it takes a McGuyver moment to fix them. Shortly after I moved in I needed to fix the towel rack upstairs in the bathroom I share with my brother. He had tugged too hard on a towel one day and having no mechanical ability what-so-ever just left the towel rack dangling. My Mom wanted to know if I could fix it. To start with that particular wall was hallow. The studs Dad had put in to hold the towel rack had torn loose on the one side. There was nothing to put them back into. Okay I could plaster the holder back into the wall with heavy caulking. No problem. The towel bar has to be in the holder however. Problem. It made the thing too heavy to stay in the wall until the caulking dried. I didn’t plan on staying up all night holding it up until it dried. Ah a McGuyver solution presented itself. My Mom has a flat basket with flowers right above the towel rack. A long piece of dental floss attached to the nail, wrapped around the towel rack bar, an viola. It stays up until the plaster dries.

The McGuyver moment number two comes up on Sunday. The power had gone wonky on some of the circuits. This house would be an electricians nightmare. It turns out there is a little circuit box behind the panel in the family room. This box was covered up by a couple of pictures. The man who repaired the circuits that had blown needed to enlarge the hole in the paneling. We don’t know if we are going to need to go back in there some day to fix something else. This house is so weird we probably will. Not having a piece of paneling to fit and not having anything that I can really put the little pictures over without a hole showing I needed to do something. It so happens that in our bathroom upstairs is a clothes hamper with a wood colored base. Too many towels on the fabric top and it was shot so I got some wood designed Contact paper and recovered it. Since it is plastic my brother can throw all the wet towels he wants over it. And guess what else was the same color as that Contact paper? You guessed it. A piece of Contact paper goes over the hole in the dining room panel, it matches perfectly, the little pictures go back up and no one knows any different.

One of the reasons that shows like McGuyver appealed to me so much was the fact that the hero actually knew how to think and think outside the box. I have always been an outside the box thinker. I love science fiction so much because of the speculative quality of it. I always want to know what if. What if we tried this instead of that? What if life on other planets exist not as carbon based but silicon based? One of my favorite quotes is from Hamlet, “There is more to heaven and earth, Horatio, then is dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Many people think geeks are nothing but pie-eyed dreamers. That geeks only inhabit a world of make believe. In reality it is the geeks who are the ones who are the scientists. It is the geeks who will have to solve the problems in the ecology. It is the geeks who will take us to the stars and other planets. And you better believe it will be the geeks the world will turn to when we actually make contact with an alien species. We’ve known how to talk to them for years.

I believe that our young people should be encouraged to be geeks and dream. It is in the dreams of geeks where we will find the answers to the problems facing this planet today. Thinking inside the box all the time is never going to work. Children have to be encouraged to think creatively. Some one has to use up all that spare dental floss and Contact paper.

Throwing Stones

“The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.” Mahatma Gandhi

It was a weird week at work. Sometimes I wondered if I had walked into the loony bin instead of the hospital business office. The tensions and emotions could be cut with a knife and you had to make sure that the knife wasn’t aimed at your back. It was not a week that I could say I enjoyed but it was a week that proved some of the old saying such as “you reap what you sow” and “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

I had mentioned in previous diaries that a couple of the people I work with live to make lives miserable for others. They are not happy in their lives so why should someone else enjoy what they don’t. The fact that they themselves have made their lives miserable doesn’t dawn on them. A third person came back to work after milking a workman’s comp for all she could get. She was put in a position that she hates. The CFO has flatly said she is not to be allowed to work with the public again because of all of the complaints against her. There is nothing specific enough that they can fire her for and given her litigious nature they need to be careful. She got them on the Family Medical Leave Act because of her injury and they had to provide a job for her by law. Before going out she had viciously turned against a young lady who had finally become pregnant. We were all thrilled for her but this woman had once had a miscarriage and her fury that one of the sweetest people in the office had finally succeeded in becoming pregnant knew no bounds. It was a very difficult time made more difficult when the lady miscarried. She had targeted another lady in the office who finally fled to another department not being able to handle the stress any longer.

This woman came back though to changes that bode ill for her. We have a new manager, a woman that the troublemaker did not want hired because she was prettier. The fact that this woman was highly qualified and is doing an excellent job and was exactly what our office needed was ignored, she was too pretty. My friend is back working in our office and working with me. The troublemaker was put as a junior biller, a job she hates, and being supervised by two people who can be as vicious as she is. They don’t like her and the smugness and hostility from the next cube can be felt through the whole office. It is almost enough to make you feel sorry for her.

I have kept my contact coolly professional. I have no use for this woman and talked to my manager before she came back. I needed to make sure that I would not have her in my department. This woman tried to file false sexual harassment charges against my brother. She claimed he was looking down her dress. He did nothing of the sort. This woman is “beautiful” in her eyes only. She has let herself go to the point of obesity. There is nothing worth looking at. She was angry because she had brought her son to the Emergency Room for something minor and he was kept waiting because of a couple of real emergencies. Her husband was screaming and cursing at the clerks and my brother told him to cut it out.

Any sympathy the woman could have gotten from me was destroyed when she decided to try and get my friend in trouble. The cash posting job is not easy. My friend is still learning. Considering the shear volume of the accounts we work on every day her posting is very accurate. She cares about her job performance and is working hard. This woman decided she was going to go through the posting and try and find any errors and report them to the manager. She is not going to drive my friend out of the office again. I have a guarantee from the manager that she will never be moved over to cash posting. My friend and I are the department and that is how it will stay.

As tense as the week was it did serve to reinforce some of my own beliefs. Ultimately you are in charge of your own life. You can make yourself happy or you can make yourself miserable. The type of person you really are shows in how you treat others. If you treat others with respect it is because you yourself live your life with respect for all living things. If you treat others with contempt and anger and brutality it is your own nature that is perverted. You have allowed the ugliness that exists to overcome the beauty that is all around us. I will continue to be polite and professional towards this woman but that is all I can really offer her. I choose not to have the ugliness that she has filled her life with near me. It has taken me many years to get real serenity in my life and I am not going to jeopardize that serenity. I often turn to my art work in times of stress. In this picture I took a garden and based it on a Tiffany lamp. All the textures are glass. I guess the moral of the story would be don’t throw rocks at glass flowers.

This Time Eight Years Ago

On this day eight years ago I was working in Illinois for a company that supplied kidney dialysis supplies to clinics and home patients. I was working in the home patient division. I had a lot of my patients on vacation. They were terrified not only by the events that had just happened but how would we be able to get their life saving supplies to them. For people whose kidneys no longer work dialysis was the only way to stay alive. We had no airports open to fly supplies out of. I lived close to Chicago and we didn’t know in those days whether or not there would be more targets and Chicago was a logical one.

In the days that followed 9/11 I spent long hours at work trying to comfort and reassure my patients that somehow I would make sure that they would get their supplies. These people and their families had become friends and were not just customers to me. Somehow we managed to get the supplies where we needed them to be. None of my patients on vacation went without. None of my patients in the Pacific Northwest, which was my territory, were without supplies.

I was as scared as every other American in those days. I was never so thankful for that degree I have in Theatre/Communications as I was during those days because I was able to pull on that training to pretend to be a lot more calm then I was feeling inside. The last thing my patients needed was to have a representative who was scared. They were scared enough. I needed to reassure them that they would be taken care of no matter what else happened. It was one of the most frightening times of my life but one in which I take pride in. Everyone I worked with pulled together to take care of our patients. While some dealt in death during those days I worked with people who literally provided life.

Eight years later I am in another state and another job but I still remember those days. I remember with pride that we took care of the people we needed to. I still keep in touch with some of my nurses and patients from those days. I am so thankful we made it through those terrible times.

Not An Ideal Labor Day

Somehow life manages to always smack you along the side of the head and change your plans whether you want them changed or not. A three day Labor Day weekend sounded absolutely great. I planned on doing my shopping early on Saturday, getting Mom what she needed at the store and then the rest of the weekend was supposed to be dedicated to doing art work. As Marvin the depressed robot in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” moaned, “Life. Don’t talk to me about life.”

Saturday evening around 10 PM a cry of panic came up the stairs from my Mom. Rushing downstairs I found my brother collapsed against the breakfast bar, breathing very shallowly, white as a ghost, barely conscious. My Mom was trying to struggle to get him seated, get him awake, get him to respond. I took over and got him in a seated position rather then face up against the wood. He responded somewhat while I ran to the phone to call 911. I was rather curt with the man wanting an ambulance sent first then I would answer all the rest of the questions. It was an emergency damn it get help now then ask your questions. My brother was trying to say he was okay. I told him an ambulance was coming and that was final.

Because all of us have worked at the hospital, they let us sit in the consulting room while we waited to see what was going on with my brother. Unfortunately in the room next to us was a raving foul mouthed drunk whose favorite word started with “F”. Three hours we had to endure listening to that man scream, swear, insult the police, doctors, nurses, rave about waste of resources, etc. I was so tempted to go in and tell him he was a waste of life. My mother was scared to death and she didn’t need to hear that garbage. Fortunately they let her into the room with my brother for much of the drunk’s tirade so she was spared the worst of it.

Two thirty in the morning Mom and I pulled into home. My brother was kept in ICU overnight for observation. Mom insisted that she had to put the dishes away before going to bed. I let her because she needed something mindless to unwind. We don’t know for sure what happened but suspect a seizure. More tests will be done providing the insurance company will okay them. Welcome to the wonderful world of health care.

My brother thanked me this morning for supporting him. I was the one who insisted he was going to the hospital via ambulance like it or not. I may be half his size but don’t mess with us little ones especially if we are red heads with tempers. My brother and I are worlds apart politically but he is still my brother and I was going to do what was necessary to help him. I kept his daughter and three brothers informed as to what was going on. I have tried to make sure that the stress this has caused my Mom isn’t going to lead her to start having more heart problems.

One of the contributing factors the doctor thinks to my brother’s collapse was injudicious mixing of over the counter medicine with his prescriptions. If anything comes out of this maybe he will now start being more cautious. You can’t mix NyQuil and Tylenol PM with blood pressure medicine. In this world of drug companies pushing their products all over the media we need to make sure that the public realizes that over the counter medicine is still medicine and it has side effects.

The rest of the weekend has been spent trying to fight off a migraine intensity headache. I can’t imagine where it came from. I did do a couple of pictures this weekend. One for my Mom of her favorite subject, Pixie and one with a space theme because I needed to get away from reality for a bit.

Snickerdoodles

I went to bed last night with the scent of Snickerdoodles wafting through the house. Today is the last day for a friend at work who is moving to another company. Beth is a sweet person and we will miss her but the chance at a job in her major with more money can’t be passed up. Especially considering the stress of where she is working now. We are having a pitch-in today for her and I volunteered to bring cookies. Beth let me know that Snickerdoodles were her favorite cookie. So just having to have a good recipe in my tons of recipe cards, magazines, cookbooks, computer files, original cookbook, etc. I came home from having Chinese food with friends to baking. All under the supervision of Pixie who lucked out in not being named Snickerdoodle.

It got me thinking though because we call Pixie ”Pixie Doodle Wilson” and refer to her as a doodle. So what is a doodle? When you are on the phone and have a pad of paper and a pencil a doodle is random scribbling and drawing that probably would say more about your mental state then you would want known. ;-P. In the cat world a doodle would be just about like those drawings. You know random, off the wall, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and able to fill up a vast space of nothing with chaos.

Pixie is young and she still thinks that the day should be filled mainly with play and her reserved naps on Grandmother’s lap. Pixie will race through the house at full tilt chasing after her imaginary playmate. Sometimes the imaginary playmate chases her. She loves to lie in wait for my cat Merlin and then chase him up and down the stairs. Merlin isn’t amused. In fact Merlin gets the brunt of Pixie’s rambunctious nature. He is twice her size so she considers him a challenge. She loves to hide underneath the foot rest and wait for him to walk by so she can pounce on his rear end. I told her once not to hit Merlin in the face with her paw and she sat up on her back haunches and whacked him with both paws.

Chairs are her own personal jungle-gym. She will pull herself by the rungs and go over and up and around from chair to chair. She does something that my Mom calls “pony in the circus” where she will lie on her back and with grossly exaggerated head movements wash her little white spot on her chest. Of course she has to make sure she has an audience first.

Pixie likes to play hide. Unfortunately she isn’t really good at coming out at the “Pixie where are you” cries from my Mom. I have had to take more then one of my lunch periods coming home to help Mom find her cat. One time a repairman was there and she decided to hide behind the boxes under my brothers bed. Another time she had gotten herself closed into the bathroom cupboard and was cheerfully exploring. Another evening before my Mom retired she woke me up at midnight in a panic because Pixie had gotten out. I had to ask my Mom to keep quiet for a couple of minutes and sure enough there was the sound of Pixie’s bell and I pulled her from the bushes and gave her to Mom who was in tears.

So I guess you could define a doodle as a spicy little rascal who can drive you nuts. You can also define a doodle as a little black cat with big gold eyes and a couple little white spots who has given an 83 year old woman a new lease on life. That’s a happy thought to start out a three day weekend with.

Over Coming Fear

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you should not fear the results of a hundred battles.” Sun Tzu

This is the story of coming face to face with some of the worse fear imaginable and over coming it. It is a deeply personal story and a difficult story to tell. I hope others will find in my story that even when things are at their darkest there is hope for change for good.

I am a highly intelligent woman. I qualify for Mensa. I always placed near the top of my class. I have a B.A. in Theatre/Speech/Communications. But all my intelligence did not stop me from falling in love with the wrong man. One of my biggest problems has always been my ability to fall for a sob story. I am compassionate by nature and hate to see others suffer whether they be humans or animals or even plants. All living things are precious to me. When my ex came into my life he came pretending a gentle geeky persona. He acted like a sensitive man who was in the throes of a bitter divorce not of his making. Oh the stories he told about his ex-wife. If I had paid a little closer attention to what his teenage son was saying or if mutual friends had thought to warn me I would have known that I was being given a gigantic snow job. Wisdom came too late to save me from the marriage from hell.

The fear started early. He had a tendency to drink too much and when he drank his mouth became abusive. His 16 year old son was 6’ 5”. I had been warned by the boy’s psychiatrists not to be left alone with him at any time because I was in danger of being raped. His father managed to work all sorts of very long hours ensuring that there was a lot of time that the son and I would be alone together. After a few months it became quite obvious that I was unqualified to help this highly disturbed child and his Dad was the major reason he was so badly screwed up. One too many confrontations with the police and this child went to a Foster Home which saved his life. Forced to get help and forced to stop blaming everyone else for his problems the son went on the meds he needed for his mood swings, finished school, got a responsible job with Microsoft and has embarked on a successful marriage.

My marriage was drug out all over the country as company after company he worked for either closed or let him go. I was constantly struggling to set up new homes. I constantly had to deal with his increasingly bizarre behavior. I had colleagues and his bosses on me all the time trying to figure him out. I had to hear his paranoia about “Guilds” spying on him. Most of all I was the emotional whipping boy for his mental illness. Everything was my fault.

I sought help for myself. The doctors told me nothing was wrong with me except I was in an abusive marriage. I had been in cars with my ex and his driving made it quite clear he was trying to kill us both. I had to follow him once to a car repair place for his car and he wove in and out in front of semis. I was terrified but fortunately the trucks seemed to know what he was doing and made it safe for me to stay behind him. I have COPD and one evening I went into a massive asthma attack. He allowed me to choke for 20 minutes before he finally called for an ambulance. I knew that this was one of those attacks that my doctor warned could kill me as I struggled from lack of air, my throat raw from coughing, and I was close to blacking out. The ambulance attendants were furious that he had waited that long to call for help and rushed me, sirens wailing, to the nearest hospital. I was finally told straight out that I needed out of the marriage but to be careful that my husband would try and kill me. Through help from family and friends I was able to flee and get away. I took my precious two cats with me, the cats he threatened to send to the pound and have put to sleep.

I ended up bankrupt, starting over in a new part of the country, and trying to put my life together. I still have an occasional nightmare but I doing much better. I am happy. I found a strength that was buried inside the fear. With this strength I not only pulled myself through but I helped my niece pull through an equally abusive marriage. She, as have I, found that there is great courage even in your darkest fears. She has gotten the legal protection needed to keep her wacko ex away from her and their children. He abandoned her and their three children aged 6, 4, and 2 with $15.00 and one suitcase of clothes for the four of them and has never financially supported the children or her. He tried to come back and manipulate the children against her only to find out that she has over come her fear and has taken him to court terminating his parental rights.

The thing about fear is that it is a two way street. You can be overwhelmed only for so long before the essential survival instinct starts to kick in. It was terrifying to leave my ex but more terrifying to stay. I knew what had to be done and with the love and support of family and friends I managed to do it. I have come to realize that the people who are the lowest form of life are those who try and instill and rule others by fear. They are the real cowards in life. What these people don’t realize is that the victims can and will start to fight back. You can not live your life with constant fear and you either give up or fight and the thought of taking my own life was so appalling that I fought back and so will other victims.

The victims of the intimidation campaign against health care with the lies about death camps and if you are elderly, ill, or soldiers that the government wants you to kill yourself is a campaign directed by people who are morally degenerate. To prey on the fears of others whom you consider weaker then yourselves is the actions of cowards. These people have abrogated any right to make decisions on health care. It is time for President Obama and the Democrat majority to pass the health care reform by majority vote alone. It needs the public option. It needs to regulate the health insurance industry so that they can not drop health care if you become ill or deny it if there is a preexisting condition. All emergency care needs to be covered. Health care needs to be a right not a privilege.

I lived face to face with death for six years. I know what real fear is. I know what it is like to lay awake at night knowing that the man next to me wanted me dead. I will not live in fear again and I will do everything in my power to make sure that others do not have to live in fear also. It is time for the lies to stop. The cowards who spread the lies on health care have gone too far. I am tiny, only 5’1”. I over came fear against a 6”2” and 350 pound physically strong man. It wasn’t easy but if I can do it so can others. I will help any way I can. There is nothing so beautiful as living your life without fear.