Reflections

Dragon Mood? -- philosophical

S and I had a far-ranging, rather spiritual conversation yesterday morning, over breakfast, that I want to try to capture here for posting.

We were talking about our friend, Jeanne. Jeanne and S have always felt this 'connection' that defies rational explanation. They met only about ten years ago. Within a short time after their meeting, S said to me that she felt like she 'knew' Jeanne in ways she couldn't explain. When Jeanne speaks, S feels like she can finish her sentences for her. S has actually said that she believes (hard as it may seem) that she and Jeanne knew one another intimately in another lifetime. (Soul intimacy? Probably a more common expression is "soul mates.") She has spoken about this before, so it was not a surprise for me. She thinks other people probably experience these kinds of feelings or beliefs as well. What is unusual is to meet or know someone who can validate the feelings. That is what Jeanne can do. She validates S's sense of 'connection' in the same way that S validates hers.

From that unexplainable, spiritual 'soul connection,' we talked about how each of us is feeling, about our lives and our relationship with one another.

S said it this way: "I am where I'm supposed to be." Silence.

"Where is that relative to our relationship?"

A jabbing finger pointed at me. "I'm with YOU."

I chuckled. "Yes, you are."

She went on to say that she believes we may have known one another in another life. The 'sense' she has of me is as a young, rather insecure, little girl. She believes she was an adult (rather than a child), who felt protective of me. Beyond that, she doesn't know.

And for me? What does this mean?

I don't have any knowledge or prescience or sense about other or previous lives. I do feel that I'm supposed to be with S. I used to check my feelings about her and I always wanted to be with her. It felt right. But, honestly, our relationship is not an easy one; it requires a lot of hard work and determination to be together. When I consider leaving, moving on, seeking elsewhere, seeking out someone else, there is this very clear (repeat, very clear) sense that that would be a huge mistake. I am meant to be here, in this relationship, with S, easy or not. There are things I am meant to learn from her. She is the mentor, I am the student. I will learn from her, I will benefit by her. Part of my task is to be patient, to be still and listen, to observe, to learn. That is what is very clear in my purpose in this relationship, in this life.

S, too, says having this sense of being where she is supposed to be, creates a sense of comfort. But, beyond that comfort, there is a feeling of peace knowing that she is where is supposed to be.

I suppose, that in the large scheme of things, being where one is supposed to be is a reason to be thankful.

Salivating

Dragon Mood? -- licking and slurping her dragon lips

• I'm thinking about salmon patties (I just had one for lunch, over a bed of fresh organic, baby spinach with olive oil, raspberry 'blush' vinegar, grated parmesan cheese and lots of freshly-ground black pepper).
  
• I'm also thinking about cucumber and yogurt salad with dill and pepper, possibly for supper; doesn't that sound yummy, especially when it's so hot and humid?
  
• I'm also thinking about blueberry buckle, something that came up during a conversation with Jeanne about her birthday, blueberries and a killer, blueberry buckle recipe that her mom used to make.... Which I then immediately zeroed in on while looking at Elise's website, Simply Recipes and her posting about Blueberries!
• Which then led me to scroll down, down, down to a real o-l-d recipe for Blueberry Boy Bait (this lesbian's gonna ignore all the catch-a-boy-through-his-stomach stuff)
  
  

  Blueberry Boy Bait
  2 cups flour
  1-1/2 cups sugar [you can use as little as 1]
  2 teaspoons baking powder
  pinch of salt
  2/3 cup vegetable oil
  1 cup milk
  2 eggs
  2 to 3 cups blueberries, fresh or frozen
  1 cup (or less) sugar [you can use as little as 2 or 3 tablespoons]
  1 teaspoon cinnamon

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a medium bowl mix the first 7 ingredients with an electric mixer for 3 minutes. Pour the mixture into a greased and floured 9x13-inch baking pan. Arrange the blueberries on top, then mix together the sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle evenly over the batter. Bake 50 minutes.
  
  
• Which then led me to finding, again at Simply Recipes, one of Elise's favorite things, Tapioca Pudding, made by her dad.
  
  My memories of tapioca pudding swirl ALL AROUND my Nana, my mother's mother. She used to make tapioca pudding, from scratch, pretty much done as outlined below. As she would lovingly take it out of the refrigerator, where it was cooling in one of her deep, old bowls, to show us the "fruits" of her labor, she would remind us how tapioca pudding requires the cook to stand at the stove, stirring, stirring, stirring -- never leaving, even for ONE MINUTE! It was Nana's way of reminding us of her sacrifice and saying she LOVED us, all in one economical statement.
  
  Tapioca Pudding
  
  "... tapioca pudding is one of those comfort foods that conjures up happy childhood memories. It is actually really easy to make.

  1/2 cup small pearl tapioca (it comes in a box, we use Island Tapioca brand)
  3 cups whole milk (or skim milk with cream added)
  1/4 teaspoon salt
  2 eggs
  1/2 cup of sugar
  1/2 teaspoon of vanilla

  Combine tapioca, milk, and salt in 1 1/2 quart pan on medium high heat. Stir until boiling. Simmer 5 minutes, uncovered at the lowest possible heat, adding sugar gradually. Beat eggs in a separate bowl. Mix in some of the hot tapioca very slowly to equalize the temperature of the two mixtures (to avoid curdling). Return eggs to pan with tapioca. Bring to a boil. Stir 3 minutes more over lowest possible heat. Stir constantly. You may cook a little longer than 3 minutes if needed to get to a nice thick pudding consistency. Cool 15 minutes. Add vanilla. Serve either warm or chilled.

  If you want to make a more light and fluffy, but still rich, tapioca pudding, separate the eggs. Use the egg yolks to stir in first to the pan with the tapioca. Once the pudding has become nice and thick, beat the egg whites in a separate bowl to soft peaks. Remove the pan of tapioca pudding from the stove, fold in the beaten egg whites into the pudding.

  Also, it pays to check the instructions on the box or bag of tapioca pearls that you have. The Island Tapioca I used in this recipe doesn't require that you soak the tapioca pearls before cooking. Another brand that I have used requires that you soak the pearls overnight."

• Don't ask me WHY I'm so preoccupied with FOOD today ... I just AM!
  

Using Google's Notebook

Dragon Mood? -- dragons love to collect glittery, notebook-ish things!

You know, I honestly can't remember how I stumbled upon Google's cool app, Notebook, but I LOVE it! I'm using it FAR-R-R-R-R-R more than I ever anticipated.

Check it out!

[Update] Oh, you wanna know HOW I'm using it? Well, I'm collecting information, hyperlinks and web pages on Adobe Photoshop, XHTML and CSS code, fun and/or inspiring quotations that I want to collect/remember/quote sometime, information on health issues pertinent just to me. That sorta stuff.

Just this morning, I gathered over a dozen web pages of tutorials on a software I'm teaching myself. The web pages had a published "shut-off" date and I knew that I wanted to access them after that time. Now, they're safely stored in my Google notebook!

New word: heuristics

Dragon Mood? -- excited

heuristic As an adjective, heuristic (pronounced hyu-RIS-tik and from the Greek "heuriskein" meaning "to discover") pertains to the process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following some preestablished formula. (Heuristic can be contrasted with algorithmic.) The term seems to have two usages:

1) Describing an approach to learning by trying without necessarily having an organized hypothesis or way of proving that the results proved or disproved the hypothesis. That is, "seat-of-the-pants" or "trial-by-error" learning.

2) Pertaining to the use of the general knowledge gained by experience, sometimes expressed as "using a rule-of-thumb." (However, heuristic knowledge can be applied to complex as well as simple everyday problems. Human chess players use a heuristic approach.)

As a noun, a heuristic is a specific rule-of-thumb or argument derived from experience. The application of heuristic knowledge to a problem is sometimes known as heuristics.

Late night wanderings

Dragon Mood? -- slurping up colors dragoniciously

Here's a cool site with links back to flickr:


http://krazydad.com/colrpickr/

About us bloggers

Dragon Mood? -- ???

Twelve million of us. Yup, that's what the Pew Internet & American Life Project [PDF format] said.

As reported in the New York Times, the report, released yesterday, goes on to say that "Bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives."

Well, thank you, but I'm not young, nor racially diverse, but like the other 12M, I haven't published elsewhere. YES! I fit RIGHT IN!

The report also said that 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog, and that 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.

Yup, I do both!

“Certainly, as a research center, we get asked about blogging,’’ Ms. Lenhart said of the reason for the surveys. “It was something igniting the American consciousness. Blogs were perceived as having a big impact on politics, technology and journalism. We wanted to go in and see what bloggers were doing.”

Pew is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center based in Washington.

So far it appears that most bloggers view blogging as a hobby that they share with a few people, Ms. Lenhart said. “The new voices are being read in relatively limited spheres,’’ she said.

Yup, my, myself and I; we are the regular readers ... and occasionally Lina-girl reads my blog, too.

More numbers:

Among the report’s findings was that while many well-known blogs are political in nature, 37 percent of bloggers use them as personal journals. Among other popular topics were politics and government (11 percent), entertainment (7 percent), sports (6 percent) and general news and current events (5 percent). Only 34 percent of bloggers considered blogging a form of journalism, and most were heavy Internet users.

More than half of bloggers (54 percent) are under 30, the report said, evenly divided between men and women. More than half live in the suburbs, a third live in urban areas and 13 percent in rural areas. Bloggers, the report said, are also less likely to be white than the general Internet population: 60 percent are white, 11 percent are African-American, 19 percent are English-speaking Hispanic and 10 percent identify themselves as members of some other race. By contract, 74 percent of Internet users are white.

Despite a potentially vast audience in cyberspace, the Pew project found that 52 percent of bloggers said they blogged mostly for themselves. When asked for a major reason for blogging, 52 percent said it was to express themselves creatively and 50 percent said it was to document and share personal experiences.

Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, a magazine about technology and culture, said the Pew report was accurate. “The finding that jumped out at me was the recognition that people are talking about the subjects that matter in their personal lives,” he said.

"Express themselves creatively." Yes, I like that. I like to think that is what I'm attempting to do here at calypsoDragon13!

A four-page application

Dragon Mood? -- oddly exhilarated

Having just sallied forth, out into an impending thunderstorm, that unexpectedly turned into a summer cloudburst ...

I gingerly sat down in their artsy chair for artsy customers, filled out the four-page application (they want to know what are my personal goals? Do I have any?) and savored the feeling of twisting myself into yet another variation of a human pretzel, applying for a job.

I am home now, ahh, the sweet expansive bliss of being out of a linen interview suit and back in my Farmer Jean denim overalls, pondering the meaning of life and design. The following quote somehow seems appropriate:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
--Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"

BlogHer

Dragon Mood? -- a lover AND a joiner

Feeling only a little bit guilty, I surfed to BlogHer (from dooce, of course)and joined their blogrolls. I don't necessarily 'get' all the functionality at the site, but I'm E-X-C-I-T-E-D about joining!

This past weekend

Dragon Mood? -- memory overload

In the course of this last weekend:

• we had six different people spend the night or nights at our house; fire up the laundromat!
  
• we smoked numerous Cuban cigars smuggled to us by Paul via Amsterdam
• we tried to enumerate the endless list of furniture being saved "someday" for the "Someday Cottage"
• Paul and I sat for a whole two hours and talked and listened and conversed. A relaxed, meandering conversation. Wow! How long has it been since we did THAT?
• we celebrated as Paul learned of the Miraculous Moving Van Company's miracle feat of scheduling five, count 'em, FIVE days worth of labor between now and the end of July to box and pack all of Ruth and Paul's earthly possessions for the trek from southwest Virginia to Chicago.
• we celebrated only one twin's 24th birthday as the other twin was working and neither twin wanted to celebrate with the other
• we order three pizzas (something we haven't done in a long, long time); my body is noticing the likely elevations of glucose and cholesterol.
• we played countless hands of euchre and just one long, noisy game of "Bullshit!"
• we pretended not to ... but couldn't help overhearing Luke speak to his French girlfriend ... in France ... in French! Ca va? C'est bonne!
• we listened to all the stories, drinking-related and non-drinking-related, about the belated wedding reception held for the two Mormon nieces and their nice Mormon husbands by the mostly non-Mormon, definitely-drinking branch of the family.
• we listened and encouraged, chided and chastised, joked and laughed, teased and tickled, taunted and trash-talked .... and ALL the other WONDERFUL things that family members do with other family members when they get to BE TOGETHER!!!
  

What do YOU know about human rights violations?

Dragon Mood? -- back at the blogging mines too

In her semi-annual employment review, my partner, S, told her boss how disturbed she is that their employer has figuratively gotten into bed with China for some oh-so-cozy moneymaking ventures ... and how outraged she is that said employer does business with a country that has a long and disturbing history of human rights violations.

Today, I was surprised and pleased to see that Rayne Today has resumed blogging and has a post about human rights violations right here in the good ol' US of A. In response to her challenge, I'm posting about it with the intent to learn more. I encourage you to do the same.

A veritable human pretzel

Dragon Mood? -- feeling twisted

I've been threatening to do this for awhile. I think the time has come.

This week, I sent out nine resumes responding to job postings. I also sent out a cover letter and resume to a "cold" prospect today.

Here are just some of the job titles of the 50-plus postings that I've responded to in the past three months:

• Design Engineer
• Designer Unigraphics
• CAD designer
• Mechanical Drafter
• Interior Trim Designer
• Light Automotive CAD Designer
• Product Design Engineer
• Unigraphics Design Engineer
• Instructional Designer
• UG Designer
• PowerPoint and Presentation Designer
• Technical Writer
• Instructional Systems Designer
• Senior CAD Designer
• CAE Specialist
• 3D BIM Modeler
• Content Developer
• Automotive Illustrator

Is it any wonder that seeking employment is tough on a person's self-esteem? At the end of every day spent searching, I feel something like a human pretzel, twisting and contorting myself to fit the descriptions and requirements of these many, many jobs.

*big sigh* Ahhh, the realities of being unemployed! Will it end soon? Will it EVER end???

and then there's that preoccupation with death ...

Dragon Mood? -- peaceful

People who love me tell me that I'm preoccupied with death. I think about, I talk about it, I even worry about it ... occasionally. Or when I'll admit it. *heh-heh-heh*

I was perusing this morning's online version of the Detroit Free Press when I visually grabbed this article, written by Susan Ager, a regular columnist for the Freep. Here's most of it:

For Aunt Helen, we needed no concrete burial vault. She asked to move, after her death, to a mausoleum.

We did, however, choose a mid-priced casket and enlist the services of a funeral home, including embalming. With other incidentals (transportation, newspaper death notices, holy cards, a tip to the minister) we managed to work the cost of her no-procession, no-limo, five-hour funeral up over $6,000.

This time, like every time I've helped plan a funeral, I think: I sure don't want this for me.

Even the government Web site of the Federal Trade Commission says funerals "rank among the most expensive purchases many consumers will ever make." Many funerals, it says, run well over $10,000 and people rarely dicker with a funeral director.

Neither did we.

For me, the issue isn't money, although I'd rather give $6,000 to a family lacking health insurance. For me, the question is why pioneering Americans still follow rigid funeral industry traditions. First, we rush death from the house, into the hands of strangers. Then, we buy caskets and vaults to pretend to protect a body from inevitable deterioration.

Like plants and animals, our bodies should disintegrate into the earth, to nourish new life.

A simpler way to mourn
This week, I spoke by phone with a woman who has done it differently. Beth Knox of Maryland founded a nonprofit group called Crossings (www.crossings.net) in 1998, after her 7-year-old daughter was killed by an exploding airbag. She has led workshops around the country on after-death care for your loved ones. (See also www.finalpassages.org.)

Beth told me about the death of her mother two years ago: "We kept her at home in New Jersey for three days afterwards. My sister and I bought dry ice to keep her cool. From a funeral home we bought a basic casket, with a base of plywood and a top of heavy cardboard, that fit together sort of like a butter dish. We decorated that with stickers and Magic Markers.

"Then we set it on her dining room table, and my brothers carried her downstairs and lay her in it, and we put flowers and other treasures in it. We had wrapped her in silk, in beautiful clothing, and then we carried the casket feet first out into my sister's van. We drove to the crematory, which has a very nice chapel. We all said good-bye and I sang her a song. And then we put her in.

"A few days later we came back for her ashes, which we sprinkled on the dunes near her beach house. In all, it was the most intimate experience of my life."

Michigan laws a hindrance
Beth's story impressed me. She said the law is generally on the side of families who want to care for their own dead, then bury or cremate them without funeral home fanfare. Activists like her are working to help families stand up against officials who, she says, "often invoke the law inaccurately."

At the Funeral Consumers Alliance (www.funerals.org), though, which keeps track of legal nuances in every state, Josh Slocum said new Michigan laws "pose significant problems for families." His group is working to overturn them but, in the meantime, offers telephone advice at 800-765-0107.

"Your husband," Beth told me, "should have the right to load your body into his vehicle, drive to a crematory and watch as your body is put into the chamber, then come back two hours later for your ashes." Those I hope he will scatter over my garden.

One more trend Beth told me about: "green burial" preserves. In a handful of states (not ours, yet) natural areas are set aside for the burial of bodies in blankets or simple pine boxes, without embalming. Graves are marked with trees, shrubs or fieldstones.

All this pleases me. If I'm going to be dead, it's good to have options.

Well, as for me, skip the burial and just have me cremated.

As for the dry ice and being laid out on the dining room table, *big sigh*, geez, I dunno. I gotta think about that yet.