Happy (Belated) Solstice!
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Holidays
Today I celebrated the Solstice with the ADF Grove of the Red Earth, the first of their rituals I’ve been able to attend. It was a lovely thing, with a delicious feast afterwards. Thanks for the invitation and hospitality, folks!
Happy Father’s Day!
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Blogging, Family, Holidays, NaBloPoMo
I hope it was as wonderful for y’all as it was for us.
While Daddy was taking a nap, I did a little work on the site here, continuing the process of migrating things from the old format into WordPress. It’s going to take more time, but eventually all the pages will be uniform. Really! If you find anything that isn’t working, though, please be patient and leave me a comment about it?
The Great Outdoors
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Family, Fun, Holidays, NaBloPoMo
Plinky asked, “When was the last time you enjoyed the great outdoors?”
Does a suburban pool count? Because I was in one today, playing with my niece and nephews, chatting with my brother and sister-in-law and parents. It was a lovely part of our Father’s Day weekend celebration.
It has been a few years since I went out to anything that could be called wilderness, but I’d like to do so again, now that I’m getting stronger and my allergies have improved along with the rest of my health. I haven’t been to a beach (other than the imported one at Lake Lanier) in almost 20 years, either. That’s another thing I’d like to do.
Earth Day
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Holidays
Plinky asked, “Do you celebrate Earth Day?”
Not really. I do my best to be environmentally responsible every day, instead of saving it for one day of the year. I recycle, use mass transit, buy locally produced food as much as possible, and take other steps so that I really have a very small carbon footprint these days.
Gratitude
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Family, Gratitude, Holidays
1) Kids young enough to hunt Easter eggs as many times as they can persuade somebody to hide them.
2) A nephew willing to hide said eggs ’til the younger kids drop.
3) The littlest nephew, too young to understand the whole business of hiding and finding eggs, but happy to run about after the other kids
Explosions Over, Yay
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Family, Health, Holidays
I don’t like loud holidays. I get nervous about all those explosions. There were random fireworks going off during the day today, too. At least they finished earlier last night than they do on New Year’s Eve!
My baby girl is having a bad flare 🙁 She was going to a Braves game with friends earlier this week, but it had to be rescheduled because of some conflict in another family. So they were going to go tonight, but she’s been in bed or wandering around looking like Ophelia all day. Migraine, fibro stuff, nasty allergy stuff–the works. I always feel like I should be able to make it better, and I can’t.
Tags: fireworks, Holidays, Katie
Happy Mother’s Day!
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Holidays
I’ve certainly had a sweet one 🙂
Michelle Sagara wrote a wonderful post today about how mothering is like writing.
Tags: Michelle Sagara, Mother's Day, mothering, Writing
All-Snakes Day?
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Holidays, Humor
Is anybody celebrating that this year? I’m out of touch with the pagan crowd any more. I think the St. Patrick’s Day parade here in Atlanta was canceled because of the tornado Saturday. I was at home all day, so I didn’t bother wearing green or even thinking about it. One of the “daily quote” emails I received included this bit of wisdom:
I have no idea how I got there, but I found myself reading Stuff White People Like. I’d never heard of it before, but from the number of comments on every post, I must be in the minority!
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Atlanta, pagans, pop culture, snakes, St. Patrick's Day, white people
Happy V‑Day!
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Family, Health, Holidays, Relationships
Happy Valentine’s Day to all, whether you’re part of a couple (triad, quad, etc.) or not 🙂
Sambear brought home truffles and flowers! And iTunesiness! And then he went and cooked delicious steaks for dinner!
My baby girl’s sweetie has mono. Ewww. They had to put off their special dinner tonight ’til after he’s feeling better. Hopefully he’ll get over it more easily than she did a few years back! Since she and I have had some sort of flu-thing that we caught from him, I know the poor guy is having rotten luck. Flu, then mono? Ick!
I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at the photos Charlie over at The Daily Coyote. I don’t think it would have occurred to me to call a coyote “cute,” until I saw this. He’s a very well-behaved coyote, raised with lots of help from a cat. ‘d love to show you one of Charlie’s photos here, but I don’t want violate his Mom’s copyright. Go look!
In the not-fun part of the world, the CDC says that at least 82 kids have died in the US playing “the choking game.” I will admit that I initially assumed they were talking about accidents involving autoerotic asphyxiation, but those are actually counted separately. Whodathunkit?
The players are mostly athletes and well-behaved kids who want to get a “high” feeling without drugs or alcohol. Those who have died were all playing alone. The researchers do state that the statistics aren’t reliable, because there’s not a separate category for coroners to use to differentiate suicide from a possible “game” gone wrong, but the expectation is that the problem is being understated rather than overstated.
I really hope my daughter knows that even temporary loss of oxygen to the brain can cause brain damage, but if she didn’t before, she will by tomorrow. She isn’t in the prime age group for this but of craziness, but it’s easier to talk to your children than to bury them. I know, just 82 in how many years? But that’s 82 young people who might be alive if they’d had a better understanding of physiology, at the very least.
Tags: dinner, flowers, Sam, sickness, the choking game, The Daily Coyote, truffles, Valentine's Day
Further Prof of Insanity: Blog365
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Blogging, Family, Fun, Geekery, Health, Holidays, Home, Homeschooling, Music, Reading, RPGs, Writing
I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridiculous as it was to commit to posting at least once a day for a month. So of course that small success has led me, in a moment of more-than-usual-lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (otherwise known as “Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire”).
The purpose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. February 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be written on any site, rather than sticking to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get something on the actual site on a particular day due to net connection issues or whatever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or something!) a journal entry and transfer it to a blog as that day’s entry.
It would be far simpler to have a system of some sort. Maybe I’ll create a rotation:
- Fibrant Living — health, living with a disability, podcasts
- Academy Caritas — homeschooling, education, college
- House Fireheart — polyamory, particularly my and Sam’s approach to it
- Heartsong Handicrafts — home of my original needlework patterns, and soon to be home for the rest of my stitching information
- Cyberstalked! — internet safety and privacy issues
- Cynthia Armistead — my professional portfolio, where I put the geeky stuff
- Enemy of Entropy — here, of course, where I put general stuff, book reviews, and the like.
Hopefully there will be new podcasts up soon. There will definitely be more music, as we have that lovely concert piano we received via freecycle all repaired and put together. It’s beautiful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the nearest authorized repair center rather than doing it ourselves.)
2007 wasn’t a stellar year, but neither was it terrible. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an organization that’s allowing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health problems, but I’m hoping that we’re on the right path to resolving them. Shelley passed away a little shy of her 18th birthday, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d gotten an “extra” 8 years with her anyway. Kioshi has grown into a nice companion, too.
We really kept to ourselves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our former housemate’s sudden craziness in 2006, there’s a lot of healing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanksgiving without trepidation again, but we had a good one anyway. The stress did contribute to the deterioration of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re working on it, though. We certainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never forget that.
So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, better health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attending as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gaming, upgrading some web sites, eating good food and watching movies. If it’s true that whatever you do on January 1 indicates how your year will go, we should be just fine.
Tags: actual site, Blog365, Blogging, Cynthia Armistead, Design, Disability, food, Friends, Gaming, Health, internet safety, Katie, Movies, Music, NaBloPoMo, Piano, Podcasts, Reading, Sam, Stitching, thanksgiving, USD, Web Sites, Writing