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!

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?

Plinky asked, “When was the last time you enjoyed the great out­doors?”

Sea-swim­ming (Medi­um)

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.

Plinky asked, “Do you cel­e­brate Earth Day?”

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.

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

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.

I’ve cer­tain­ly had a sweet one 🙂

Michelle Sagara wrote a won­der­ful post today about how moth­er­ing is like writ­ing.

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!

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.

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.