Lukie in the sun...Bela in the moonshine

I went into our bedroom this afternoon to put on jeans and a sweater because I was feeling a bit chilly from the 60-something temperature. There was sunlight shining on a little square of our bed and Lukie, our cat was sprawled out in the sun. Every bit of his rather large body was bathed in sunlight and the rest of the bed was in shadow.

Leave it to a cat to find pleasure wherever it shows up.

Life might not get better than that, finding a bit of sunshine on a September afternoon to take a snooze in. Really.

As soon as I quit typing this, I'm going to take Bela, our Puli dog, out for his last bathroom of the day. We most likely won't get out of the front yard before he pees. But I know we'll be bathed in moonlight because it an almost full moon tonight and it it clear and by 10:30 p.m. this time of year, the moon is above all the trees around our house and will light our way.

Bela is so BLACK that moonlight is necessary to see him. Often on the back porch and deck, I loose sight of him and he'll brush against me when I don't expect him to be there. I have a flashlight on the ready in the kitchen because if he goes down in the yard at night that's the only way I'll find him.

Light and darkness. Sun and moon. Warm days and cool nights. A cat and a dog.

What's better than all that except Maggie, our parakeet is singing along with the classical music on WSHU from the radio beside her cage and Bern is upstairs watching TV, probably getting ready to go to bed.

Simple things are all I need to give me joy. A yellow cat and 'black as midnight in a cypress swamp' dog and singing bird and the sun and the moon, Bach on the radio and Maggie singing, warmth and cool and the woman I love upstairs moving around.

That's all it takes to give me joy.

Lucky me. So blessed, really.

Most of the time I feel like a yellow Maine Coon Cat taking a nap in a patch of sun.

Just like that.

What I like about being me

So--this sounds so goofy I apologize in advance--but I really 'like' myself. I've not always, but I do now and really do.

Nothing much bothers me. I have a real involved detachment with stuff. I did notice in Baltimore last week that my granddaughters can say thing that 'hurt my feelings' a bit--like things I ask them not to say to me (mostly 'potty mouth' things, which all kids do but which I don't want to hear from Morgan and Emma and Tegan's mouth--though Tegan's stance that anything proceeded by 'Poop' is funny is amusing to me.)

I'm way past having friends or acquaintances or strangers distress me. It just doesn't matter. And Bern never says anything about me that causes me pain. Josh and Mimi still have, to some degree, the power to make me cringe, but mostly they don't and even when Josh starts dissing Obama, which he does, I just let it go mostly.

It is truly wonderful to 'like yourself', no kidding.

I know myself through and through and even though their are things about me that I am concerned about, I simply embrace them and 'like myself'.

Which is good news for other people since I try, as best I can, to lean into 'loving your neighbor as yourself'' and I do 'love' who I am. So that frees me to be uniformly loving to those around me. I simply am not 'upset' at anyone--unless you ask me about Tea Party members, who I'm not kind or accepting of at all.

But exempting the radical Right of the Republican Party and racists and terrorists, there aren't many people on my shit list. Which feels good.

I run into lots of folks who don't like themselves and thereby don't like a lot of people they run into on a daily basis. I simply try to be present to those folks and seek to not judge them and remember how lucky I am to like myself so much.

Here's my advice (beware of anyone offering 'advice') 'like yourself'. Like really. Like always. Like just because you can choose to do that.

In the times in my life when I didn't 'like' me, I was full of conflict and distress and confusion.

Liking me frees me from most all that.

Wake up tomorrow and greet yourself in the mirror as you 'best friend'...someone you like and love a lot.

Then let me know how your day goes....

23 and me...

About a month ago I spit into a test tube about a dozen times and then sent it to a lab in California and now I have more information than I needed about my DNA.

Prior to the test, I would have bet my house that most of my DNA came from the British Isles. However, imagine my surprise, only 11.1% of who I am in the genome is from Great Britain and Ireland. I am 99.8% European (a minuscule amount of Central European--Polish--and a less amount of Eastern African.) The rest is 'unassigned'.

The great majority of my gene type is from, amazingly, northern Europe (Scandinavia, to be precise). There is a map showing where my gene pool was 500 years ago--mostly in Great Britain and Sweden and Norway and a tiny bit in Denmark. Then, I suppose, all those Norsemen who invaded England began to show up in the DNA I wear.

(I've tried to decide what DNA is all about and concluded that I'll talk about 'wearing' it, like it was my clothes and shoes and socks and hat.)

I've been reading Scandinavian writers for several years and tend to love them (though pronouncing the names is troubling). I've always loved Irish music and British writers and thought that said something about 'where I'm from'. This whole Northern European thing has me thinking I have an affinity for Scandinavian writers for a reason. But who knows?

I'm sure I'll be sharing more and more with you about my DNA analysis. I'm fascinated by the plethora of information they've sent me. Bern did it too. We've already decided that Christmas presents for those close to us and family will be 23andme membership (though they'll have to spit in a test tube--not the most pleasant of undertakings....

One more thing this post: the two diseases I fear most are Alzheimer's and Parkinson's--and, according to my DNA, I am below the average possibilities of both! I do have an above average genetic chance of having asthma (which I have) and prostate cancer (which I've had)--so no surprises there.

Owning up to my lie

I promised to take my lap top to Baltimore and blog from there and I didn't. Oh, I did take it to Baltimore but I didn't blog there. Three granddaughters can distract you from stuff like that.

We had Tegan (4 next month and a force of nature) all day and I'd pick up Morgan and Emma from the Calvert School at three. Their in what most everyone would call 'first grade' but Calvert calls 'Age 7'. They usually do after school stuff until Cathy picks them up after 5. Josh takes them at 7:30. They have a long day, but so do their parents (both lawyers that they are). What amazes me is that they've done such a wondrous job raising those girls given how much they both work.

We took Bad Dog Bela with us, tranquilized to the gills so he wouldn't bark all the way. Bern wanted him to go since he'd been in the kennel for almost two weeks while we were at Oak Island, North Carolina. The vet gave us some tranquilizers that make him shaky-legged and prone on the way there and back. He fights the drug like hell for 20 minutes and then needs to lean against something to stay upright. Normally, he barks the whole time he's in a car, which would be an issue on a 280 mile trip....

Bern loves Bela so. It touches my heart to see how much she loves a Bad Dog. But I do too. He was good, if drowsy, all the time we were in Baltimore.

Being with the girls (as we call them) is like wading through the gene pool uphill. But it is worth doing. It's what you do for children and grand-children. And we see so many things that remind us of Josh and Mimi. And other things we don't recognize that must come from Cathy's shore of the pool.

Saturday was Morgan and Emma's birthday party out at a farm about 20 miles north of Baltimore with a sunflower field and a bouncy blown up thing and a bonfire and lots of food and lots of privileged kids from their classes at Calvert School. We stayed about half-an-hour, until a quarter of the other kids were there then we slipped away to Connecticut.

We drove home in 4 hours and 14 minutes--with one stop--280 miles, you do the math. It was a Personal Best for the trip.

I love those little girls gut deep. They get under my skill...Well, their skin, in some real way, is my skin as well....I love them so, so much. But from time to time, they make me crazy....Just as their father and their aunt did from time to time so long ago. And they turned out nicely, if I do say so myself, though no fault of my own! And I love them, Josh and Cathy, like at the marrow of my bones level, and their mother only a bit deeper....

Baltimore

Going to Baltimore tomorrow to be with Morgan and Emma on their 7th birthday and to hang around with Tegan.

We're even taking Bad-dog Bela. Got some tranquilizers that will almost surely not work....

Bern looked on line to find the high tomorrow in Baltimore will be 95 and the low 82. Great.... And, since the humidity is always awful there, it will awful-er.

But the girls will make it worth the heat.

I'll take my lap top and, if they give me any alone time, I'll tell you about them....

I have ankles...

About a month or so I realized that when I woke up I had ankles but by the afternoon my ankles were swollen and gross.

They never hurt, so maybe it had been happening for months before and I hadn't noticed.

I told my GP, Mike Olsen, two weeks ago and he told me to stop taking one of my medications--Amlodipine besyate . I don't know what that was, but I'm glad to be down to 2 prescribed meds and it is 12:32 a.m. on September 9 and I still have ankles.

God bless Mike Olsen and God bless my ankles. So good to see you so late at night.....

Another WVU moment

Yesterday, I blogged about Gino Smith, former West Virginia University quarterback. Today, another reason to be glad that WVU is my Alma mater.

WVU is rated as the top "Party School" of all colleges and universities! Ahead of LSU and Alabama and UCLA and Penn State and, well, everybody.

Something that often happens and has for decades after a WVU football win is that students, for reasons only they know, drag mattresses out on the street and set them on fire.

It is difficult to imagine the symbolism in that, so far as I can tell.

When I was at WVU from 1965-69, mattresses were being burned on and off--but the football team was pathetic, so it didn't happen often.

And I suppose there were lots of parties, though it difficult to remember through the haze of alcohol and pot from those years.

I went to college with Jorge Gutierrez, who, like me, became an Episcopal priest. Years after college, someone asked me in front of Jorge, how long we'd known each other.

I said, "we went to college together."

Jorge, who was known to drop acid back then but today doesn't even drink, said, "that was you!?"

I rest my case. WVU deserves it's ranking as a college party school.