BTW

Another Great Wrongness

I've been so busy lately, I haven't been able to pause to think.  I've been so busy I totally missed the Carnival of the Recipes.  And The Friday Ark, and the Thursday photo challenge.  And I missed Chocolate Friday!  I haven't done any blogsurfing for days and days.  I feel like everything is falling apart.  This is just wrong.  A person's job should not interfere with their bloglife.  I want my bloglife back!!!

Stormage

The last few days I've been swarmed by ants (my feet are STILL swollen from all the bites), overrun by mice, and last night the finger of god blew through our neighborhood. 

Ok, maybe not the finger.  Maybe the pinky toe.  It was a scary storm, though, we truly thought the roof was coming off.  The weather channel said flood warnings and 60 MPH winds, but it felt like a lot more than that.  When the worst of it had passed, we heard sirens all around us.  Trees had blown over and were blocking the streets, power was out for a large chunk of the grid 1 block north of us.  Apparently we were on the very EDGE of the worst of it.  Cripes.  I can't imagine what it was like in the center. 

The hubs went out - in the dark - in the rain - and climbed the roof to see how bad the damage actually was.  It could have been a lot worse.

But I hate it when he does stuff like that.  He scares the crap out of me, and he's so confident he won't fall or get hurt, but he can't control the wind.  I nearly had a heart attack waiting for him to come down safely.

Here are a few photos from the morning after. Some of the stuff in our yard is from our own house, but some of it came from somebody else's.

This used to be a pretty rose trellis, now completely smashed.  I'm not sure where the wood trellis pieces went.  The wind took them.

Me trying to be artsy fartsy.  The wind blew a lot of crap into the pool, again, some of it ours, and some of it from god knows where.  Somebody 3 blocks over is missing a couple of buckets, some roof insulation, a boatload of that little white popcorn stuff for packing (now covering my patio) and a deck chair.  I liked this shot of the morning sky reflected in the pool with some of the junk in the foreground.

The "morning after" sky.  Looks like one of those "god relented" kinds of things, doesn't it?

Hey, I'm just glad we're not in the path of any hurricane.  My sympathies to those of you who are!!

Fruity Morning

We finally got some relief from the heat last night - a thunderstorm.  And it looks like more coming, all week the weather predicts thunderstorms and period showers.  I don't mind the thunder or lightening, except for the dogs that try to bury themselves in my lap or behind my spine (when you're afraid you can never get close enough). 

Yesterday the light was very strange.  Kat was talking about having a Stephen King kind of day yesterday too, so maybe it wasn't just here.  And I don't think it was storms approaching either.  The hubs said (in his logical fashion) it must be the distant fires, smoke drifting so high we can't really see it but it's affecting the ... blah blah blah...  After a while the scientific stuff turns into a blur in my ears.  I nod my head and say "Huh, maybe so..." but inside I'm still feeling disturbed by the eerie color of the sky.  The sun, usually bone-chalk-blinding-white at 1 in the afternoon is ... soft pink.  Almost red.  The color you might see at sunset, but not early afternoon.  It disturbs me in some deeply visceral way I can't explain. 

The dogs seemed to be bothered too.  Did they feel something off in the air?  Or were they responding to my mood?  They're very in tune with momma.

I tried to take some pictures but the camera doesn't do justice to the color.  I'd have to take a picture of a regular high-noon here to have a comparison shot.  Even that prolly wouldn't communicate the feeling.  Ah well, in place of pink-noon-sky, I have mid-summer fruit bowl. 

Fruit blogging?  Produce blogging?  Whatever.  I'm still experimenting with closeup shots and whatnot, learning the camera.  I just loved the colors.  These are Rainier cherries, white nectarines, and strawberries, soon to be breakfast.

It's Too Damn Hot

It's supposed to hit 115 today.  It's 120 on my patio.  It's a problem, a heat pocket where the air doesn't circulate for some reason, and it gets hotter right outside my office door than anywhere else.  I hate Phoenix in the summer.  Worse, I hate that I seem to be entering that dreaded "hot flash" phase.

It's the only symptom I have, and so I keep telling myself I'm too young to be going through the "pause".  But it surely does FLASH.  It comes on so quick and so awful.  It flares and blazes and I feel like my blood is boiling and the marrow of my bones is becoming molten.

I try to just stay inside in the air conditioning.  I wet down a tank top and stand under a vent.  I have little spray bottles full of water in every room, quick to hand if I need a shot in the face or down the front. I have about 20 of those little wet-um scarves you tie around your neck, the kind that puff up when you get them wet, and I keep a supply in the refrigerator.  But they get warm so quickly, absorbing the heat as it radiates off my skin, fairly steaming.  I'm rotating them about every half hour.  Sometimes 15 minutes.  No kidding.

Heheh.  The photo challenge for tomorrow is HOT.  I wonder if I could get a picture of myself in the throes of a burning-hotflash that would do justice to the sensation?  I've never looked in a mirror when it's happening.  I wonder if my face gets red?  I wonder if smoke comes out my ears? 

Now THAT would be an interesting photo.

Hopeless

In case I haven't mentioned it before, I am prone to depression.

I also have a tendency to go back on myself a lot.  That means I blurt something out and then regret it and spend huge quantities of time trying to explain, justify, apologize, or just plain hide.  That's what I did yesterday.  I posted something, and then went back on myself about it.  Fortunately, resolution is easy here.  One click - ok TWO - to delete the post.  But then I spent some time spinning in the "dumb" zone, with that voice droning in my head "you're so stupid to delete that post why can't you just speak your mind and say what you feel and have done with it have you no guts have you no backbone have you no SPINE???"

My internal war rages on, and self-absorbed as I am, it's much more interesting to me than the world events.  But it's the world events that are triggering all this. 

I had a big cry after yesterday's posting/removal and managed to shave off one layer of heartbreak and rage at the world.  I slept and dreamed and felt a lifting, a lightness, and a hopefulness.  But I went about blogreading again this morning, surfing the blogosphere to see if things are really as bad as they seemed yesterday.  And got triggered again, of course.  I won't go into details and say something I'll have to beat myself up about later.  Maybe I should stop reading other people's blogs, especially the ones about the war, politics, terrorists, religion, who is to blame, and who we ought to kill in order to stop terrorism.  Sure, genocide is the answer.

There's so much hate!  It's everywhere!!  Blame blame hate hate.

So I think I'll crawl back to bed, hide under the covers, cry through another layer of this anger and gut-dragging sadness that's lurking behind my eyes, stealing my breath.  It says human beings suck.  We suck!  We are the most self-centered judgmental cruel heartless hateful beings in creation.  And that includes those of us who think we're so loving and great and "right".  We all suck!  There is no hope for heartfulness.  The experiment failed!  Nuke us from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

Family Jam

I have a passel of pictures I wanted to post from our family day, but I thought I'd better ask permission before putting people's mugs on the internet.  Not that the 3 people who read this blog are much of a threat, but ... oh hell, I'll post them and remove them later if anybody objects.

We had a great time.  The little family (euphemism for my brother, his wife and their two daughters) are in Hawaii for another week, so it was a small group.  My aunt J, cousin J, other cousin C, the hubs and me.  After we stuffed ourselves silly, we got out the guitars and started singing and playing. 

The hubs decided to bring out the large artillery, and dragged a keyboard and amp out from the music room and set it up for my aunt to play.  Then he brought out the bass guitar for himself and we had almost a full band. 

I realized later that we couldn't have done this kind of spontaneous jamming if we'd had the fully family group.  There's a different feel when it's a larger group, and it's harder to find something everybody knows and can participate in.  Once you get past Michael Row Your Boat Ashore and Kumbaya, where do you go?  Everybody says they know all the Beatles songs, but the truth is, they only know the first line, or just the chorus.  After that it's a lot of ahhh, lalahmmmlala. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Anyway, we had a good time galumphing through a couple dozen songs.  We only murdered 2 or 3.  Most were halfway moderately tolerable for private consumption. 

We laughed a lot.  And that's good medicine.  And we have both photos and video proof of the day to share with future generations who might wonder what their ancestors did back in the old days for amusement.

Hardware Hell ... & Heaven

Day two of hardware hell.  I've come to conclusion that there are larger forces at work here, converging with malign intent to keep me from the computer. 

Ok, maybe not malign intent.  Maybe said forces actually have my best interest in mind.  Maybe sitting in front of the computer 20 hours running isn't good for my butt.  Or my eyes.  Or my neck, or shoulders.  Not to mention my social life. 

But it's so hard to pull myself away!  It takes hardware crashes and network downages to get me away.  Enforced separation.  It's weird to find myself going through withdrawal when I can't check my email every few minutes.  Actual withdrawal!  Hair-pulling agitation.  Some of it is stress that I won't get my work done, and then what?  I won't get paid.  I won't be able to pay the bills.  The dogs will go hungry and ... I won't be able to buy ice cream. 

The hubs and I were both disabled.  So, we mustered our resources, girded our loins, yanked up our bootstraps, and took ourselves down to the computer store to buy a new router-network-hub thingee.  I don't really know what we bought, but there were 2 boxes and some cables, and the hubs was very happy.  While we were there, we bought a replacement hard drive for me and some rechargeable batteries for the new camera.  A few other odds and ends happened to fall into the shopping cart - a couple of DVD's and a computer game.  Since it was my credit card taking the burden, hubs didn't complain.  In fact, I think I saw him knock a DVD off the shelf into the cart as we moved up the aisle toward the checkout stand. 

Then we did something we haven't done in a good long while.  We went out to eat.  I don't know if it was the novelty or the atmosphere, but the food was superb and the conversation was better than we've had in a while.  We had such a great time! 

I guess we oughtta have hardware problems more often.  The powers-that-be gave us a good meal and some nice quality time.  And now, several hundred dollars later, we're all back up and running with hardly a glitch.  This is the first time I can remember that we've installed anything without something going wrong.  There's *always* a hitch, a glitch, something that has to be reset, rebooted, reconfigured.  But this time, it was like magic, one-two-three and it all worked.  Maybe the magic was the time we spent together.  Maybe we generated some good joo-joo.

Life Happens

I hate it when everything goes wrong.  But my recent Murphy's Law woes have given me some perspective, a shift in perception. 

I'm raging and moaning about all that I've lost and can't possibly re-create, and suddenly I realize that in the grand scheme of things, I'm very lucky.  What I'm experiencing right now, this sick feeling of lost artwork and writings and precious images (old scanned photos), this is just a fraction of what I would feel if there was .. say ... a fire.  Or a flood.  Or a tsunami!  A hard drive crash is nothing compared to the losses that other people have suffered.

But still.

It sucks.  It feels like my whole life is crumbling and falling apart.  Isn't that silly?  It's just ... stuff. 

And I guarantee, this won't happen again.  I'll be getting a good backup system in place you can bet yer boots.  In the meantime, I'm working handicapped, with a fraction of my software and even less of my brain.