~ my "sexy psychic" look ~

It was just yesterday that my friend Clever and I talked on the phone about luck. I'd recently had a dream of being given papers (by Brent Butt, of Corner Gas fame) worth $3 million, and Clever herself has had some winnings worth crowing about in the past.

My wake-up call this morning came from the local Co-op store, telling me I've won their Valentine's Day hamper and can pick it up next time I'm in town.

When I came up to the kitchen for coffee, it was to see a bouquet of beautiful pastel-hued roses on the kitchen table. I had to smile.

I'm feeling lucky, but now I have to come up with an idea for making Scott feel special when he gets home tonight. I've been thinking about it for a few days but getting nowhere. Of course, sex or food always works ... and I may have to fall back on one or both of those old standbys.

*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,

~ not exactly what Marya had in mind? ~

This sounds like an interesting film plot: Moon Palace tells the story of a man who gets a job at a Chinese restaurant where all the tables are bugged, the better to produce well-informed fortune cookies.
- from the Globe and Mail

For you snow lovers, here's my walk yesterday. The temperature was up to 20-below or so by mid-afternoon and I was warmed up after five minutes of a brisk little trot, and then didn't want to come in:

Joan and Trinket started it when my sister got her new iMac. They sat in front of the "photo booth" and skewed pictures of themselves, then sent them to us. It started a veritable new pastime around here, for Scott and Everett anyway. Yesterday Everett insisted I sit on his knee here so we could play with the thing.
We had some laughs, yeah.

We're easily entertained, around here.

Not to let the instigators off the hook:

~ my sweetheart~

~ my littler sweetheart ~

And here we are, looking as normal as it's possible for us:

~this gal is packed away for another year~

Dysfunction Junction is one of my favourite online journals.

Nance is writing almost every day, so I'm rarely disappointed when I go to the site to see what she's up to. She's making me grin and chuckle. She's dragging herself to work five days a week, and much as I recall my turn in the 9 to 5, she inhales deeply on Sunday night and doesn't exhale till work is over on Friday afternoon.

Nance has her own peculiarly skewed way of seeing her world, and when she writes about it, I am right there with her. I'm in her head.

She cracks me up. Go read.

Yesterday I was invited to a perogie-making day at my sister Karen's. I was late getting out the door to go to her place, but when I saw the thermometer reading 28 below, I took out the camera to take a photo especially for you readers who live in balmy climes. Naturally, the camera batteries died just then.

Today it's warmer, but I went out and snapped a picture anyway.

Which reminds me! I have two large trays double-layered with perogies on the two back seats of the van. Must go bring them in and bag them for the deep freeze.

Karen and I and a friend, Brendalyn, spent most of the day in the kitchen. Karen boiled and mashed potatoes with cheese, and mixed, rolled and cut the little circles of dough. Brendalyn and I stood (me) or sat (she) at the table and pinched teaspoonfuls of potato/cheese into dumplings, lining them up neatly on giant trays. We stopped long enough at noon to eat a meal of freshly boiled perogies with sour cream and fried onions, and a side of tossed salad.

It was a companionable way to spend a day. I don't get too many of those, so I enjoyed it quite a bit. That's not to say I wasn't relieved when we finally ran out of potatoes!

Today's lunch:

Garden path:

~ to the third floor of the girls' dorm `

Tues 6 Feb 2007
3:45 p.m.

On the weekend I got to visit one of my old high schools and tour the girls' dormitory. Over the 30 years since being a resident, occasionally at night I'd dream of being back there and roaming through the halls. It was a delight to take a tour and rather amusing to be treated like an honoured guest instead of the mischievous class-skipping brat that I was back then.

Even better than revisiting my old stomping grounds, though, was reconnecting with an old friend I had lost touch with. I'd googled his name and not found him, I'd had the odd dream about him, and thought regretfully that I might never see him again.

Gerry and I met in Regina when we were both about 12 years old and enjoyed each other's company while growing through our teen years. He was always sweet and funny and fun to be with, much like every girl dreams her own brother would be. And now, after about 25 years, a friend discovered that she was a mutual acquaintance as well as Gerry's neighbour. She facilitated renewed contact so that Gerry and I, and our spouses, could get together on Saturday night. (Jo, I owe you!)

Like I emailed to Gerry after Scott and I arrived back home, I am still feeling the warm fuzzies from that.

~ a mask Everett made at school ~

Last night I watched a documentary about a 10-year-old girl named Maeve, who died in a traffic accident. Actually the documentary was about how her family and community are coping creatively with her death. Today I looked up their website, called Planet Creature.

Maeve’s father has written about the actual events of his daughter’s death, and I read that with great interest. He, like me, sat with his loved one’s body after death. In common were our feelings of wanting to do something but there being nothing to do, other than quietly communing with the body, saying a silent loving goodbye to it. I could recognize my own emotion in his use of a word that fits my experience around Mom’s death: disappointed.

Maeve’s mother told of a prophetic, symbolic dream the girl told her about on the morning of the accident. The dream clearly showed that Maeve was about to take a distinctly different path than that of her parents and sister. This dream was a huge comfort to both parents after Maeve’s death, and reminded me of Mom’s dream of meeting God and talking about what she was going to do in heaven. The dream seemed so right, to me; a sign that there is some meaningful force that does have a hand in our life, and death, stories.

Scott and I headed toward Regina on Thursday afternoon. There was no blizzard warning at the time, though there had been a blizzard "watch" the day before. It was not snowing, but it was blowing, and unless we were passing through stands of trees near the highway, visibility was poor. We considered turning back, and not only did I give my permission, but I actually said, "If I was driving, I would." However, Scott forged ahead and we made it safely to Saskatchewan's capital city.

Saskatchewan has been in a deep freeze of about -30C. Add the windchill to that, and it feels like 45 below. The van was doing a lot of rattling at certain speeds so Scott was worried about a breakdown. You don't want to be stuck in your vehicle when it's this cold; worse, though, is to leave it. There were four or five deaths last month due to people walking away from their stranded vehicles in this weather. It's always best to stay in your car, out of the wind, where you are more likely to be rescued.

We had a sleeping bag or two with us, longburning candles, and six chocolate bars ... just in case. And we both had cellphones, too.

My friend Cathy, who was being honoured by our old high school and her old college, was staying at the Hotel Saskatchewan so we checked in there, to make it convenient to get together. It's a lovely old building right downtown; a bit pricey, but I just received a generous cheque from Aunt Jean's estate so felt like I could splurge a little. Both evenings, we met with Cathy and her husband in either their room or ours for an hour or two before bed, and sipped on brandy and just relaxed.

On the first morning we were there, I went with Cathy to our old high school for breakfast and a tour of the classrooms and girls' dorm, where she and I had both lived. Scott took the van for diagnosis and repairs, spent $400, and the thing still rattles and shakes. If anything, it was worse on the way home than on the way to the city.

Passing through the Qu'Appelle Valley, one of Saskatchewan's glacier-made features:

~ lunch, a veggie&cheese omelette with whole
wheat toast; plate from Jolly Old England ~

Annette noticed that I don't write here often, or much, these days. I've been thinking about that and can only figure out that I'm in one of those cyclical periods that come in a person's life, where they don't write much at all, period. I do make the odd attempt to keep some semblance of "flow" going, so I do pick up my paper journals once in a while and find it easy to knock off a few handwritten pages. Or I write into a computer journal that is private.

I could do the same here by just getting online and letting myself ramble. Something would always come of it. It's just a matter of deciding to make the effort.

A lot of my sensibility as I go through the days is only notable because it is plain and simple grief... a kind of deep-sighing resignation. Most of us have experienced similar states of being; I wouldn't be telling you anything new by regurgitating more. I don't want to come across as feeling sorry for myself or as someone who thinks they are the only person who has ever felt this sort of loss. Also, I don't want to blame my general lethargy on Mom's death; she'd be appalled.

Written on my birthday, Saturday:
I miss Mom today, more than I have in a while, or am thinking about her a lot, I don’t know how to articulate what I feel. I couldn’t get warm all morning and after getting dressed I laid on the bed with a green wool blanket (thanks for that too, Mom) thrown over me. It was when I pulled it over my head and everything turned black and warm that I thought “Hm, maybe it’s only natural that I’d long for Mom on the anniversary of my birth, which she and I shared so closely.”

///\\\

Then there is the time issue. I realize that we all get the same number of hours in a day, and I neither work full-time nor have small children to care for. But whenever I do write, it is taking time away from getting paying work done, or time away from cleaning the kitchen (which has to be done or I'm not happy, but takes one to two hours from a day), or time away from cooking and staying on top of food issues (eating well is important to me, but there goes another hour), or time away from doing yoga or going for a walk.

I cannot figure out why it is such a struggle to find time for all these most important things, including reading and writing, when I only work 20 hours a week. Am I perhaps slowing down that much? Or is there too much to fit into each day? Most likely it’s a bit of both.

/// \\\

I have probably, now, at age 48, lived at least half of my life.

While laying down Sunday afternoon I thought about death, and about the process of dying, which scares me. I fear pain and helplessness, my body not working. I remind myself that I cannot avoid dying; everyone before me has died, no one has lived forever. Mom said it bluntly when she got her terminal cancer diagnosis and we spoke for the first time on the phone and she held herself calm and matter of fact: “It’s going to happen to you, too.”

We have to accept that this is the way her death is going to be, she said; we must accept it, not spend our time struggling against it in anguish. She wanted to make the best of the time she had left, to enjoy her family and friends as much as possible.

And that's what she did. She took it right on the chin. She didn't make a tragedy of it, and I don't want to either.

///\\\

Haven't been notified lately when I've written something new? Email me and I'll try again to get my notify list up and running properly. A lot of my addresses (your addresses) are on my old computer and I can't get at them since the monitor quit. Or if you haven't joined the official notify list, do so below; I'll get your address from there.

~ Scott went into a conveniently located liquor
store on the way home from Saskatoon;
we're off to a post-Christmas party tonight
and wanted to take some Drambuie with us ~

From a letter to my cousin (once removed?) Judy, with whom we stayed in Saskatoon Wednesday night before Emil’s appointment with the ear/nose/throat specialist yesterday:

When we arrived there for 1:15 the doc's receptionist said the appointment had actually been for 11:15! Fortunately the doctor was still there and they got us in almost immediately. I'd have been plenty pissed off at myself otherwise, after waiting months to see this guy.

They did a pressure test on Emil's ears, and an electronic hearing test. The doctor pronounced there to be absolutely nothing wrong with them, but said he knew exactly what was causing the "weird" feeling in Emil's ears since September which, he said, is common among people who have a tendency to clench their jaws.

Emil, having spastic diplegic cerebral palsy, tenses his muscles when he gets excited, and he does actually grit his teeth when he gets worked up. That's what's causing it, the doc said, and it's very common, and all we can do is apply massage to the jaw and neck, and heat to the ears. I said it seemed a strange coincidence that the plugged-ears feeling came at the same time as a bad sinus cold. He replied that any kind of stress or tension, even physical, can bring it on.

***

Afterward we did some shopping to use gift cards Dad had given us for Christmas, then got onto the highway about 4 o'clock, stopped for groceries when we got into town, and were home for a slightly late supper with Everett.

Dad phoned last night to wish me a happy birthday (it's tomorrow; I'll be 48 and relieved to have lived longer than Grandma Johnson, who I believe died at 47 of a sudden heart attack and who I am supposedly so much like that I always wondered if I might follow in her footsteps) before he forgets, he said. Joan had reminded him. He says it was Mom who always knew everyone's birthdates and he has been trying to keep on top of them too.

~ outside the liquor store ~

I stayed up till 2 a.m. reading The Meadows Find Their Roots, the Engene (which means "meadows" in Norwegian) family history book generously sent to me by Connie Criswell and her husband. There are so many men named Ole that it’s hard to keep track of who’s who, but I’ve been perusing the book so much lately that things are finally becoming a little clearer.

I am completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of ancestors whose genes have contributed to my own makeup. And that’s only through Grandpa Benson’s line! It amazes me to think how many couplings had to occur before I came into this world just as I am. I have an army of ancestors, as do we all. It’s a mindbogglingly large inverted pyramid of connections.

The book follows the descendants of Ole Amundson Engene and Guri Flaget of Norway, who are my great-great grandparents. They emigrated to Minnesota in the late 19th century. Their daughter Caroline is Grandpa Emil Benson’s mother, the one whom my sister Karen is the spitting image of. Caroline married Ole Benson and they came up to Saskatchewan to farm.

One story tells of Ole Engene’s own parents’ courtship. Ole Engene’s father, yet another Ole, was courting his cousin Barbo, whose father didn’t want her to marry him. The young man had a friend, Oddmund, who was courting Barbo’s sister Anne. Oddmund was welcome, so Oddmund would go there after dark on Saturday nights, carrying his friend Ole on his back so that Barbo’s father would only hear one set of footsteps coming into the house. This went on for many Saturday nights until finally Barbo’s father agreed to let her marry Ole, my great-great-great grandfather.