Ugh…

Itch itch itch itch

Scraaaaaaaaatch-ch-ch

Ugh!

Itch itch itch itch

Scra-scra-scra-scraaaaaatch-ch-ch

Mmmuh(!)

Sure, some raccoons have been ha sled (literally), but the fleas are still around, and I suddenly have a handful of extremely itchy spots…

I guess it was useful that my mother gave me a bottle of ammonia the other day, despite the fact that it was over a week after I didn’t need it anymore… guess I need it now.

Hmm… this really is quite dreadful… what shall I do l, when we can’t treat with a bomb or anything of the sort, due to the nature of the house and what has to happen here regularly – there is no naturally flea bomb yet, is there?!

Just sprays so far, which has certainly done a good job of killing them, but only when I manage to spray them directly.

Ugh…(!!!)

So much for sleeping soundly anymore – that might have been the best part of the retreat this weekend…(not having to worry about fleas)

Post-a-day 2019

Look what we found…

R(ac)oonmate Part III

Within just two days of two guys stepping up and volunteering their time and efforts to help where pest control has thus far failed, we have evidence to support my case…

Evidence beyond doubt of a raccoon’s living with me:

Further evidence to support my belief and argument that it had become a family living with me:

Appropriate reaction to evidence:

“D’aaaawwwwwww!!!”

So, we’ve only one captured so far, but they are so darn cute, these babies!

Almost makes the whole thing immediately forgives me.

(Actually, I’ve already forgiven the raccoon, but maybe don’t tell anyone about that yet…)

There are still more to gather – they ran off to the far side of the house, and then light ran out for the day, so the search had to stop… also, rain is expected, so it might be a bit before the walls can be opened up again (since it is done from the outside of the house).

The saga is coming to a close, but not before we’ll have to deal with a “monster rat” seen under the house today…, so there’s still a bit more to go, in addition to the raccoons.

Hopefully, all goes well, and the critters all move out!

As for now, signing off – goodnight!

Post-a-day 2019

Tax dollars…?

Just a quick thought here tonight:

I was thinking just yesterday, after I purchased my feminine hygiene products at the store, how I paid the standard 8.25% sales tax for Texas on the items.

I wondered briefly at how certain items (e.g. raw food items) are tax-free, and began to ask why feminine hygiene products weren’t tax-free.

And then it occurred to me that they needn’t be tax-free, because they are, in fact something people purchase, which is the whole point of sales tax, after all.

Therefore, since women can’t exactly avoid being women, which includes menstruation, and it is not acceptable by any means to walk around dropping blood all over the place in public, and women therefore need some sort of feminine hygiene items, would it not make sense that women have an ever so slightly higher vote as to what to do with those tax dollars they are paying?

There doesn’t seem to be anything that comes to mind for me that men have as necessity, at least that doesn’t balance out with a similar version for women (e.g. shaving)…, so the whole menstruation thing seems to stand alone with these extra tax dollars paid by women.

(For that matter, I guess pregnancy falls into it, too, but it can be avoided naturally and easily, whereas menstruation can’t, so it is kind of different… however, when the government wants the population to grow, it makes sense to have financial incentives [which, I think, are kind of in place here, but nowhere near the degree of other countries with their children-having people’s financial situations].)

Therefore, women ought to have a little extra sway in voting on how that money gets used by the government.

I know that isn’t really at all how things go, and I fully admit many flaws with the idea, but, in terms of sales tax alone, isn’t it a bit funny how this actually makes a tiny bit of sense, after all, despite how silly it is? 😛

Just a fun thought I had yesterday and today – hope you enjoy it!

Post-a-day 2019

Some sort of workout

We did some CrossFit tonight – or, as I sometimes like to call it, XFactor.

I also started menstruation today.

Not that I initiated it or anything, of course… it just began.

Usually, if I have any pain, it is right at the beginning of menstruation, Day one or Day two.

And, naturally, Day one this time around opted to give me a bit of pain.

Not much, but some pain, nonetheless.

Add to this my significantly lowered energy level – yes, this is totally normal for menstruation, in case anyone was unsure – and the high humidity and heat of this afternoon, and you can imagine a tough workout ahead of me when I arrived for the class.

So, the sprints for the first fifteen-ish minutes were tough, but I made it.

And the weight stuff was okay – I was just generally weaker and shorter-winded than usual.

But the plank stuff at the end – by the way, plank is usually no big deal for me at all – was one of the oddest experiences I’ve ever had with all of this.

You see, plank was fine… it was when we continued from regular into what light have been called a marching plank, where you put one arm stretched in the air in front of you at a time, while keeping your back flat, legs wide, and butt still low, that I hit a tiny bit of trauma…

For that part, followed by mountain climbers (still with the butt low), a lot of the lower abdomen ends up being used.

… a part which had not clicked for me ahead of time…

And so, as I struggled through my second round of the plank combo, and was on the marching plank things, I actually had to stop – something I’ve never done in plank work – for the extreme and intense pain that felt like my ovaries and uterus were about to explode forward out of my lower abdomen… I skipped over the rest of the marching things and just finished the mountain climbers before stopping, but it was still enough to leave me almost rather paralyzed when I sat back, crying.

I’ve never cried in the middle of a workout before, but I did it about three times today.

Yes, the one cry could have been enough, but I had to make sure I wasn’t just being lazy, wanting to get out of the hard work simply because it was hard, and using the excuse of my menstruation to get out of it… and it turned out that it was a combination.

So, I did a few of the marching things and all of the mountain climber things each round afterward, thereby still putting in the work, but not putting myself in unnecessary and useless pain.

I know I have lower energy at these times, and so I have aimed recently to allow for that (and rather successfully for the most part).

Tonight was just the first time I had to factor that into my goals of becoming more fit – I always push hard when my fitness is on the line these days, and it was surprisingly hard to scale back tonight, despite the fact that it was necessary and good for me to scale back.

Anyway, speaking of all of this, nature calls, so I’m off.

Sweet dreams, World at large.

Post-a-day 2019

R(ac)oonmate: Part II

Well, after some extreme readjusting with things – including people actually using their brains and taking over (which, oddly enough, actually meant doing what I had thought and said that I thought we needed to do all along and also just recently, with developments) – my housemate is now spending the night in a cage underneath the house… :/

The little buggar looked just oh-so-sad and pathetic, like a dog in trouble, when I first saw him down there this evening.

I had only been inside about an hour and a half, but that was enough… she hadn’t even eaten the can of sardines that had lured her yet, so I wonder if she had just been trapped when I found her.

Nonetheless, I talked with her a bit before I left, and then again when I came home just a bit ago, offering reassurance and well wishes, and explaining the rough plan of what is to come next.

Whether she can understand me or not, I feel she still deserves the care and concern, as a creature of God and all, you know?

He’s still one of us – even if he isn’t human, he’s on this planet to live life with us.

Fortunately, his cage is covered by the house and behind the protective fencing around the house bottom, so he ought to be safe down there tonight.

The guy who actually has been quite helpful with everything (who, by the way, doesn’t even work for the pest control company that has done such a terrible job of this all, but who offered to help, once he saw how things were going the other day while he was here to work on the A/C [also volunteered work]) will be here around four in the morning to take the next step.

Supposedly, if the guy opens up the house wiring and then the cage, the raccoon will do one of two things based on the situation.

1) It will leave the house immediately, because it is on its own.

2) It will rush back into the walls of the house, where it had had no food for days recently, instead of taking freedom, because it has babies up there.

If it is option number two, there will be these other little traps put out that are like super weak mouse traps with food on them, so that they will be annoying to the raccoon whenever she takes the food from them, but likely would be enough to convince her that this is not a safe place for her babies anymore, and so she then would go gather her babies and get out ASAP.

The down side of that is that she might go find someone else’s house for residence.

However, winter is over, so she doesn’t need the same protection, and most of the houses around me are so new and super protected that nothing could get into them, anyway.

Usually, he would be simply taken to this property someone has outside of Houston, but the possibility of babies complicates the matter, since raccoon moms somehow always find their way back to their babies, if the moms are moved.

So, we’ll just have to see how things go tomorrow…

Until that point, I wish blessings onto my housemate who is currently caged downstairs… may you have a beautiful life that is not in this house.

P.S. Please, take your fleas away when you go.

Post-a-day 2019

Speedboats and slow thoughts

I might have shared about this already, but I’ll share it again, because it’s on my mind…

I was thinking tonight about this boat thing.

(Well, actually, I was thinking about Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and how I’m looking at reading it with a friend, so we can talk about it, but that this time I might do well to make a list of reasons why it’s good that I didn’t live in Pride and Prejudice times.

You see, I usually get lost happily in the story, such that I am sad when I finish it and just return to real life… it only ever takes me a couple or few days to read, because I end up doing little else once I start reading it.

And so, at the end of it all, I am covered with a sort of depressive feeling of my life being inadequate and/or uninteresting and I likely to be anything wonderful compared to the world of which I’d just been dreaming in Jane Austen’s book.

Anyway, so I was thinking about making a list of reasons, right?

I’d thought, ‘Oh, the whole bathing part makes me glad I don’t live there… that’s for sure,’ because I like being clean, and clean didn’t seem to be so precise a thing in those days, and smelly was all too common…

‘But then,’ I thought, ‘I couldn’t have ridden on speed boats or gone water skiing…, though I could have ridden on big boats between countries… like the Titanic!… only not the Titanic, because that was terrible, and, besides, it was much later in time, anyway…’

And that was then I thought of tonight’s topic renewal!)

Sophie Kinsella has a book where the main character has amnesia… when she watches her wedding and honeymoon DVD to help jog her memory, she sees herself beside her husband, who happens to be driving a speedboat.

She is absolutely delighted by the fact that her husband can drive a speedboat(!), and brings it up in her mind somewhat regularly, partly as a reminder that it it worth staying with him, despite the fact that she doesn’t remember him or seem to have a connection with him, and partly just as an adorable and silly reminder of how amazing her life has become (since she can last remember it), because, goodness, a man must be amazing if he can drive a speedboat(!), and it is even more amazing to be married to such a man.

Totally silly, I know, but that in no way changes the fact that I love it every time I think of it.

The main character does such a good job of convincing the reader of her belief in the fact that her husband’s skill is spectacular, that I found myself even thinking how amazing it would be, even dating someone who knows how to drive a speedboat.

‘Wow!’ I would think, ‘What could that be like, knowing, let alone dating or marrying, such a person?’

And this thinking continued for rather some time – even a couple or few years, I dare say – before something absolutely absurd hit me.

Growing up, two of my grandparents lived in a private community of lakes a ways North of Houston.

It would take us about two hours, door to door.

My uncle kept a ski boat there.

And we grew up kneeboarding and water skiing.

The damn broke terribly when I was supposed to start to learn to ski, but I eventually had the opportunity, when the damn and lake were restored.

And so, for the last couple years my grandparents lived there, I was the only child living at home, and so the only one who went to visit with my dad whenever he went up (the other went, too, but nowhere near as often).

My dad, therefore, taught me just about everything needed in terms of caring for and using the boat.

The ski boat… a speedboat…

Meaning, of course, that I not only know my dad as someone who can drive a speedboat, but that…, well,… I know… myself… you see…

Yeah… not too sure how I missed that one… for years.

😂😂😂

Not so impossible after all, to find someone who can drive a speedboat. 😛

Post-a-day 2019

Love one another?

I mentioned just the other night about my interaction with another person who maintains true eye contact while in conversation.

As I do the same thing, we often ended up with what felt like locked eyes, it lasted so much longer than it does with most people.

He also gave me a simple compliment in my hair… I don’t remember quite what it was he said, just that it was something to the effect of that my hair looks [insert positive word] long.

And I am both comfortable and clear that it was not flirting nor an expression of interest.

Yet, my mind keeps going back to it all.

I feel like it speaks strongly on our society that such attention is difficult to be seen as regular person-to-person love… such love is hardly regular these days.

And I don’t know if it used to be either – I just know that it isn’t regular now.

And I so want it to be.

…

I guess this is just a place for me to step up my own expression of person-to-person love in my little corner of the world…

You know?

Post-a-day 2019

“Compliments”

I’m part of a ladies group for my former job in Japan, and someone recently posted about how these old ladies always compliment her nostrils as being proportionate to her nose, and so she wonders if anyone else gets funny compliments from other Japanese people.

In a quick think through, I came up with this for my own experience:

I’m dirty blonde and blue-eyed. Students often complimented my ‘beautiful’ hair, asked to touch it and my arm hair, constantly complemented my ‘amazing’ and ‘beautiful’ ‘high nose’, and even, on occasion, discussed how ‘amazing’ my ‘soft breasts’* were (which, by the way, are proportionate to my body and are a small B cup for US sizing)…

Also, I once had a new student, who had just learned that my eyes are blue, specially request to see my eyes… he then gazed into them for a full thirty seconds, and then thanked me and walked away. 😂

*Because, naturally, they discovered that I was not wearing push-up or padded bras, and so, from the outside, my breasts were ‘soft’ and not ‘hard’, like their extremely padded bras…, which they explained to me by tapping loudly on their own surprisingly solid bras…

Oh, Japan…

I do miss you… ❤

Post-a-day 2019

Eye See You

How often in life do you consider length of eye contact?

It comes up somewhat often for me.

When I was little, my dad usually would ask me, just after our leaving a conversation with someone who had just been introduced to me, what color the person’s eyes were.

We both knew that it was his way of getting me to look the person in the eyes when meeting him or her, and we both actually enjoyed the fun little game that had become of the goal.

It was partly a distraction from what the person was saying, because I was focusing on noting and remembering the person’s eye color, but it had me be conscious of my eye contact, and encouraged me well to increase the amount.

As an adult, I now occasionally have what feel like eye contests with people, usually men, where we seem to be aiming to stare into the depths of one another’s soul, because we neither of us have the tendency to look away upon making eye contact.

In all the movies, it is the love scene, where the two lovers first make eye contact, and it is undeniably clear that they are meant to be together.

In my life, it mostly just has a message of good manners on both sides… I know, totally lame in comparison… but real life can be at times, especially without the specifically designed soundtrack and close-ups to go with it.

Anyway, when these – now, I don’t want to call them staring matches, because it isn’t like staring, but it isn’t quite a soul-searching look either… let’s go with gaze sessions – gaze sessions happen, I inevitably get the impression that the other person has a vested interested in what I am saying, and, therefore, in me, too.

And it is odd at times to understand that this young and happy and beautifully in-love, engaged man is uninterested in me in a romantic sense, despite the fact that it is always totally easy to understand quite well, because his interest in and attention to what I have to share is so strongly pronounced by his continued eye contact.

I usually have no thought of looking away from eye contact, because the other person present looks away long before I might consider it.

But, with these guys, neither of us is used to looking away before the other person does, and so we end up in this love-scene-like gaze session with one another, unsure what to do, and even unsure as to what we want to do – we’ve never had to consider looking away, because the other person always does, so we don’t even know if we, ourselves, want to look away.

And so, I always end up considering afterward how I want that kind of interest and invested attention from someone to partner with me in life… while these gaze sessions are not filled with romantic love but human love, I want ones with my future partner to be the same kind of expression, but with the romantic love present, too.

And then I consider how I might be making other people feel.

Sure, the gaze sharers are probably in a similar boat with me, realizing that I, like they do, look into people’s eyes when they talk with me, and they therefore think little else of it.

However, the people who are always looking away first, what are they always thinking about my eye contact?

Do I intimidate them?… Falsely occur as interested in dating them?… Freak them out?…etc.

And then, after several minutes of dwelling in the whole conversation, inevitably going onto weird tangents, I shake it all off (quite literally), and move on with my day/night and life.

Perhaps I’ll talk with someone about it, and if I bother people with my eye contact…, but it is unlikely that I would be willing to change it simply because people are scared to make eye contact, so I’m not in any rush.

Anyway… a final note: I love having these gaze sessions… whether the person has the vested interest in me or not, the romantic interest or not, matters not to me… what matters is that it feels like they love me on some level of humanity, and that is a wonderful feeling.

🙂

Post-a-day 2019

Some days

Some days, you want to go back to sleep, but you get up and go anyway, and you end up meeting just the right people (and rather unexpectedly).

And then, you want to nap, but you don’t, and you meet just the right people and you serve your community wonderfully in a much-needed way that no one else had been able to manage.

And then, you want to go to bed super early, but you don’t, because you’ve met just the right people.

And you discover that this mantra and meditation class is exactly where you needed to be, and things had to go this way today, in order for you to end up here as you did, being where you needed to be.

And you are still totally exhausted as you stumble up to bed, but you feel great through and through, because, all-in-all, it was a great day.

Yeah… some days…

Or maybe that’s just the case for me…

😛

Post-a-day 2019