Katrina Rasbold

Winter is not the time for change unless it happens on an inside level, like winding up in a cocoon to turn into a butterfly while the rest of the world sleeps.  There has been nothing typical about this year so far, so I am not surprised that even at a time when we are supposed to be hunkering down for the Winter, life continues on at full tilt with all kinds of fires to put out and situations to manage.  I can definitely feel the slow down, but there is no way to ignore the activity that is being demanded.

As I write this, we are a week before Thanksgiving and it’s almost 70 degrees out there.  To me, that’s just not late Fall weather.  That’s weather that says that regardless of what the calendar is telling me, there is still work to be done. 

There isn’t a one of us who lives a life that is unaffected by the choices of others and as hard as that is, there isn’t really anything we can do about it except submit to that reality.  “No man is an island” is certainly an understatement.  There are always people in control of some part of our life who can affect it profoundly without even trying.

I have never been comfortable with the idea that I have to depend on other people to do certain things for my own life to run on course.  It has taken a lot of inner work for me to get to the point where I can surrender to that.  I fought against the unfairness that I could be doing all I needed to do and someone who doesn’t even know me could drop the ball and land my life in the crapper.  Mortgage companies and general contractors and co-workers and all kinds of people hold the keys to my happy locks.  Finally, it dawned on me how stupid it is to waste time being angry about the effect others can have on our lives.  Sometimes it’s positive and sometimes it’s negative and we can go through our lives feeling like perineal victims or we can change the things we do have the ability to change and wait for the Wheel of Life to turn again.

I realize I should probably be more amped up about Eric losing (not losing, client originated postponing) his contract.  The feeling I have is “Meh, same shit, different day.”  As an aside, “Meh” has apparently been admitted into the Collins English Dictionary as of this week.  If life has taught me anything, it is that situations can turn on a dime.  Eric’s spirits are good too, even though he is, at the moment, picking up what may well be his last paycheck for the foreseeable future. 

I spent 9 hours of yesterday on a trip to take Delena to the dentist.  The office is around 90 minutes from our house.  I allowed an extra half hour to get her some lunch, then we waited over an hour for the dentist to see her.  The procedure itself took over two hours.  They actually milled the crown while we were there, but the doctor was not happy with it, so he wanted me to bring her back next week for it.  This was around 4:45, so I am sure he was eager to get out the door, especially since he left before we even did.  We finally got out of there around 5:15pm (our appointment was at 1pm) and $540 in co-pays poorer.  There was a comic book store next door to the office, so Delena stopped in there for a bit and asked for a zip up sweat shirt that was there as one of her birthday presents.  Then we went to a grocery store in the same complex and got the things she needed for her sweet sixteen party on Friday.  She is making shrimp scampi for a few of her friends. 

After the shopping, began the trek back up the mountain to home.  We got in around 8pm, I guess it was.  The night was almost over.  After putting the groceries away and cuddling the boys for a while, I went to bed and watched a movie I’d TiVo’d, “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.”  I love retellings of the Cinderella story and this one was fantastic.  Then it was off to sleep and the alarm going off too early this morning.

I was determined to figure out how to get the AdSense ads onto EOS today since we didn’t make our site expenses for this month and I had to kick in some dough.  Given the circumstances, there is no guarantee I will be able to do that again, so if I can generate a little bit to supplement the donations, I will be happy.  I made 36 cents so far today, so maybe I can get $10-20 a month to pitch in.  I just don’t want to lose EOS because of something as stupid as money.   With Wordpress, the program we currently use to create and maintain EOS, it is not as easy to embed items as it was when we were a straight html site, so I had to figure out the puzzle of getting the ads to be even remotely close to where I wanted them to be.  I am still not thrilled, but hey, they’re on there.

I am very excited to find a draft of the novel I was writing a couple of years ago.  I actually started it in 1986 and I take it out now and then to tinker with it.  I thought it had been lost in a computer disaster of that year, but it turned up out of nowhere, so I might play with that again.  That was such a blessing to find.

Today in particular, I was grateful for all of the work I put into the house last week, which lets it coast for a tiny little bit.  I have many, many loads of laundry to do, but today, I just don’t care.  My heart isn’t in it.  I’m not depressed or anything, I am just very, very tired.

I feel really grateful that I did not get any sicker than I was.  The cold stayed 100% in my head and never really went to my chest or permeated my sinuses much.  I got a runny nose and a few days of real fatigue.  I was power drinking Emergen-C and I am sure that is what kept me from getting any worse than I was.  I also went to bed for a couple of days when I first started feeling quite sick, which also helped a lot.  Now, I can breathe well, but still have to blow my nose a few times a day.  I get tired easily, but that is fairly easy to fix.

It hardly feels that we’ll be having Thanksgiving next week and Christmas next month.  I started picking up a few things here and there and I am confident I can piece Christmas for the kids together on our limited budget.  I am so grateful for what we have and for the miracles that have come our way, big and small.  I have no reason at all to believe that they are not limitless.  I don’t have to hope.  I just believe.

We found out on Friday that Eric has - well, how does it work really? - he has not really *lost* his contract with the West Sacramento School District that was going to carry us through the Winter.  The county just has no money and therefore, cannot contract him to complete fire system testing on the rest of the schools.  So it’s not really that the contract is gone, but more that it is postponed indefinitely until they have some money.   They pretty  much have to do it because some of the schools are out of code and do not have monitored fire panels.  They just are not doing it right now.  They will pay him for the work he has done so far and - according to the person he last spoke to - will approve some of the repairs that have been idenfied as necessary.  Beyond that, no one knows. 

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For several months now, the country as a whole has contemplated the idea of and desire for change.  There is very little that is more powerful than the phenomenon of mass consciousness.  The Hundredth Monkey Theory has been re-proven and disproven to the point that it is now difficult to tell if it is true or not.  That is the typical casualty of stating something as fact.

If it is true, a portion of society believing or acting in a particular way will subconsciously spread to the rest of the collective consciousness of a particular group even without it being communicated on a conscious level.  Do we just start knowing or feeling something because that knowledge or feeling reached a critical mass point in society?  I don’t pretend to know if that is the case or not, but there is no denying that feelings can reach a point of being very nearly tangible.

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Tomorrow is the Mourning Moon, or Thursday, depending on whether you believe the calendar in front of me or the moon tracking program that sits in my little system tray on my computer screen.  

I have always appreciated the energy of the Mourning Moon and the psychological release it provides if it is used correctly.  

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Did we just set back the clocks or speed them up as well?  It seems as though every day is blowing past me, melting into the last one.  It’s hard for me to believe that we are already in November, heading into the snow in a month or two and just barely away from Christmas.

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I feel as though I ran a marathon this week and it is only Wednesday.  Do any of you know how hard it is to get individual health coverage?   Wow.  They really, really make it hard!  Because Eric owns his own company and is the only employee, we qualify for pretty much nothing.  After 3 days of phone calls and constant online searching, it finally came down to DeltaCare USA and Safe Guard.  Safe Guard won because they were able to back up the coverage so she can be eligible for care after November 1st instead of December 1st.  It cost $400 for the whole family for a year and it is for both dental and vision.  The website is here if anyone is looking.  I never would have known this plan existed if my dear friend, Georgia, had not suggested it.  It did not come up in any of my searches.  There are two levels and we decided to go for the higher end one because the co-payments are lower and we are looking at some major work to be done in her mouth alone.  If we were just getting preventative care, we likely would have gone for the cheaper plan.  There is no annual cap on benefits and there is no waiting period for major procedures.  

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It’s hard to believe that November is almost here.  The harvest year came and went so quickly.  It’s also hard to process that it’s almost November because it is still so damned hot.  It’s very comfortable at night and the days are beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it’s far too warm to actually feel like Fall.  We are hitting in the high 80’s - low 90’s every day and getting into the 60’s at night.  It’s supposed to rain this weekend and my hope is that Halloween will not get washed out.  My kids really do enjoy it.  We also have a nice community Halloween party on Saturday and I would like that to go over without complications.  Otherwise, just let it pour!  We are so in need of rain that I am thisclose to not really caring if we trick-or-treat in the rain.  We had one good rain since May and that was not nearly enough.

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Finally, it seems to be happening.  After running at full steam since around May or so, there finally seems to be some quiet here and there.  It’s like finally getting some sleep when you’re exhausted.  I am not used to this kind of pace, even though it is how things have been for the past two years or so.  Typically, I guard my quiet time and solitude with tremendous passion, but life led me to a place of working in the community and taking up the challenge of being more and doing more than what I was before and this is where I landed, for now at least.

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My horoscope for today:

Thursday, Oct 9th, 2008 — There is a great deal of emphasis on the details of your daily life now, which isn’t out of the ordinary for you. But your regular routine isn’t necessarily the same old thing these days as you seek ways to reinvent yourself to prevent boredom from settling in. Don’t be afraid to shake things up, for the invigoration you’ll feel will outweigh any fear of change.

I am troubled by my ability to only update once or twice a month, mostly because it helps me to clear out my head and put my mental furniture in some kind of order.  A good bit has happened and I am still trying to make sense of it all.  Usually, writing it all out here gives me a decent perspective compared to when I first sat down in the chair, so maybe that magic will start to flow and life will start to make sense again.

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