When will we have running water and electricity again? Haven’t any idea at this point… no means of even finding out either…
Post-a-day 2021
^Easy
When will we have running water and electricity again? Haven’t any idea at this point… no means of even finding out either…
Post-a-day 2021
^Easy
Okay. Power just went out at 7:58pm. Not sure what the deal is or for how long the power will be out. I had stopped to play guitar for a bit just now, and was thoroughly enjoying it. The plan was to do at least one more category of tidying – letter-writing materials and tools – if not two – also Japanese art supplies. However, I will do neither tonight. I pulled out the rest of everything (I think, but will do a final check in the morning) for the letter-related stuff just now, after lighting two candles.
I’m hoping the water pressure will return in the very, very near future – I prefer flushing the toilet to pouring water into it. I was contemplating this all earlier, how we are what is call a first-world country. That involves civility, – lacking a lot this year with all the violence and hatred from both ends of the spectrum – electricity, – just over 57% of Houston has no power – and clean drinking water – a huge chunk of Houston has no water at all. So, it seems we have gone this year from a first-world country to …. what? Pathetically incapable of being self-sufficient? Utterly miserable due to our reliance on being a first-world country? Yes, I suppose. Yes, indeed.
Well, the satellites surrounding or planet are still allowing a signal through this phone, so I shall finish this business while that connection still exists.
May we all have calming, healing, empowering, and magic-like nights tonight, that we may awaken rejuvenated and filled with light and love. And dear Lord, please allow us to have that include electricity and running, clean water.
Gratitude. 🙏
Post-a-day 2021
^Easy peasy this time, for some reason 😛
Okay. Power just went out at 7:58pm. Not sure what the deal is or for how long the power will be out. I had stopped to play guitar for a bit just now, and was thoroughly enjoying it. The plan was to do at least one more category of tidying – letter-writing materials and tools – if not two – also Japanese art supplies. However, I will do neither tonight. I pulled out the rest of everything (I think, but will do a final check in the morning) for the letter-related stuff just now, after lighting two candles.
I’m hoping the water pressure will return in the very, very near future – I prefer flushing the toilet to pouring water into it. I was contemplating this all earlier, how we are what is call a first-world country. That involves civility, – lacking a lot this year with all the violence and hatred from both ends of the spectrum – electricity, – just over 57% of Houston has no power – and clean drinking water – a huge chunk of Houston has no water at all. So, it seems we have gone this year from a first-world country to …. what? Pathetically incapable of being self-sufficient? Utterly miserable due to our reliance on being a first-world country? Yes, I suppose. Yes, indeed.
Well, the satellites surrounding or planet are still allowing a signal through this phone, so I shall finish this business while that connection still exists.
May we all have calming, healing, empowering, and magic-like nights tonight, that we may awaken rejuvenated and filled with light and love. And dear Lord, please allow us to have that include electricity and running, clean water.
Gratitude. 🙏
Post-a-day 2021
^Easy peasy this time, for some reason 😛
BOOOOM!!!
And then all the lights go out.
And the air that had not yet been turned down from 80°F from during the day cuts off.
We had just arrived home, close to 2:30 in the morning, and I was in the middle of folding towels, so I could put the sheets on the bed, so we could go to bed. We hadn’t planned on being back until tomorrow afternoon (technically this afternoon, but whatever). But he wanted to go ahead and drive back tonight, after we finished around midnight. And so, we did. Now, it is growing harder to breathe by the minute, it is uncomfortably warm, and it is practically impossible to use the bathroom safely.
I managed to call out to Siri to give us light, and then turned on my phone flashlight to find some candles and matches in the living room (which are now dripping wax all over the cardboard we set under them on the floor – glad we did that! Whew!). I worked for a while in efforts to report the outage, but the system is idiotic. Fortunately, it was reported somehow anyway, despite its having been at 2:30 in the morning. Estimated recovery time is 5:00 in the morning, just another hour and a half from now.
One comment on the stupidity of the outage reporting: They all want you to do it online… when there is no internet, due to the power outage. Also – okay, a second comment – you cant report to outage unless you have the right company and the right user number or ID or whatever… I don’t live here, but am house sitting here. I have no idea what power company they use, nor what their user ID is. However, I know that just after 2:30am on this street, something exploded and then all the power went out, and it doesn’t look like anyone on the street has power right now. Geez… stupid systems suck big time.
Anyway, I’m off not to shower and not to have a normal night of rest, but o continue my bedtime routine stuff, and see if I can manage to sleep at all until we have air flow again.
I feel so spoiled with all of this talk. However, here’s the thing: We pay for a service that declares reliability. Therefore, we expect it to be reliable. And it hasn’t been reliable. And we’re exhausted, and I just wanted a shower and a bit of cool air, so I could pass the **** out until I had to get up to tutor in the morning.
Ugh…
Anyway… turns out that it is three and a half streets with no power right now.
Post-a-day 2020
I saw the light
I’ve been baptized
By the fire in your touch
And the flame in your eyes
I’m born to love again
I’m a brand new man
As these words rang out across the stadium – quite clearly, surprisingly, seeing as where we were – my lips were already moving in synch, silently matching every word since the initial “I”… and tears welled in my eyes, beginning almost immediately to overflow.
I was attending the Brooks and Dunn concert at the rodeo tonight in Houston, kind of as a celebration of my life, for my birthday – something for me, on my own.
I’d asked my mom to stick around with me, but she was ready to head home, so I was okay hanging on my own for the musicians and their music.
When I was about eight years old, I attended the Brooks and Dunn performance at the Astrodome, also for the rodeo.
During their performance, when walking around on the dirt, they pulled two ladies out from the audience to dance with them.
I remember distinctly being upset and embarrassed as the one lady proved, after two quick but failed attempts, that she could not do any sort of partner dancing, let alone the by of two-stepping one of them wanted to do with her.
Rather than rejecting the lady, reading her out for a better model – that’s actually how my brain analyzed it at the time – he just grabbed her around her waist/hips area, and swung her around in a circle or few.
My frustration at this lady for having been unprepared for such a monumental opportunity – dancing with Brooks and Dunn – was not only projected blindly, but had me consider how I would have done, if I’d been the one pulled out onto the floor…
I was rather confident that I would have been able to manage it.
However, I fully acknowledged that I was not certain.
And so I made it my business immediately after this event to make certain that I knew how to two-step and could do it with just about anybody on demand.
Fast-forward a couple decades, and see me at the concert tonight… I found it almost ironic that, though I never anticipated to be pulled out to dance with Brooks and Dunn, here I was, two decades later, likely one of the best country western dancers in the entire stadium, knowledge, ability, and a world title to prove it.
Isn’t that at least a little bit totally crazy?(!!!)?
Anyway, so I can dance, and extremely well, but that’s only part of my mentioning all of this.
When the guys began playing and singing tonight, I was in instant and somewhat constant tears (even throughout the whole show!), right?
Right.
And it occurred quickly to me, This is the power of music.
I was somehow transported to my life when I listed probably daily to Brooks and Dunn music, as I simultaneously saw all that had happened between them and now, how what felt like a lifetime and ten different people ago had somehow led me to today, to who I am today.
There was a lot of good and a decent amount of bad in there, especially early on, and it was a very, very full time all throughout.
And, somehow, here I am, experiencing it all again, while feeling empowered by the open bliss and joy for life I felt back then, reminded of the sadness of what I went through off and on, and encouraged by the fact that I have made it to here so far, and I’ve plenty more wonderful expansion and beautiful growth yet to come for myself in my life.
All of this from music, specific songs and notes and voices and instruments all put together in a certain way, as though, almost, specifically and intentionally with me in mind.
It was of the best kind of medicine.
And this reminds me of how my high school band director always used to tell us that music is a language… tonight, their music spoke directly to me, throughout every place within me.
Post-a-day 2019
Do you ever find that, when you’re with the people who get you, – and I mean really get you – it is easy to stay up late with them; it is no concern getting minimal amounts of sleep whenever they’re around; the traditionally hard bits to sacrifice of life are no big deal to let go? Isn’t it amazing, the power of connection, love, and appreciation present in those interactions, that we are able not only to bear life better, but to bear the usually hardest bits of life better than we ever bear the everyday ones? It’s always worth it with the ones who love us and get us, and whom we love and get. Always.
Those are the relationships I want filling my life.
Post-a-day 2018
Here, I will paraphrase a piece of a conversation I had with my mother this evening.
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Mom: You are living in a culture that doesn’t see that as normal.
Hannah: And I am simply one of the frontrunners of the movement, actively working to have it be something that is seen as normal.
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It was a conversation we had while dancing at the food truck event in a neighborhood. It was casual and fun, and we both chuckled during the conversation. And we both meant what we said. It felt good to state definitely that I am part of a movement. It sounds silly to me now, but the fact that it sounds silly is kind of exactly why I am part of it. And it is not only a powerful statement, but it is fun.
Pictures to come in the future, and hopefully in the very near future. 🙂
Post-a-day 2018
Today’s stuff was intense and deep and wonderful. Rather than explain and describe everything, I turn to selections from the Facebook Messenger conversation I had with my cousin. As a note that you can understand afterward, I have seven large trash bags crammed in my trunk right now, ready to be donated tomorrow, plus a bag of specifics for my cousin. I went through two bags of trash – and no, I genuinely do not understand what trash is in the bags for the most part, nor from where it all came, seeing as how I was going through clothing only today… Anyway, there was hesitation and uncertainty at the start, then paralyzing panic, followed by red-eyed determination, and then finally comfortable relaxation and ease.
At one point, after probably five (of the eventual 8) bags had been moved to the trunk, I opened up my guitar. I had to cut off the plastic ties that were still around the case from having brought it here on the airplane. I tuned it up from the extremely loose state in which the strings had been for months, played a song, and then just played around for a few minutes. All-in-all, it wasn’t even 15 minutes spent with the guitar, but it was blissful, and I was filled with delight by the end of it. It may seem like little, but having done this specifically speaks volumes about how effective today was – I hadn’t even considered pulling out the guitar until today. The guitar is enjoyment and relaxation and fun. Those haven’t really been an option in my life lately.
Anyway, find the selections here, below, and have a wonderful day. 🙂
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P.S. Sonntag means Sunday. It’s German. 😉
Post-a-day 2018
Today, I share something I received yet again in the e-mail for yesterday. I love the quote in it, and something similar lives always within me in my everyday life. I say and have said for years, “We are what we eat, and we are what we think about all day long.” And I ask myself, “So, what am I? What are my thoughts? What am I thinking about all day?”
I now ask you the same. Who and what are you? What do you eat, and what do you think about all day long? What words do you think (even if you do not say them)? And what would you like to think?
I do a regular cleansing, so to speak, of my own thought patterns and language. I evaluate what words and thoughts I have been using and entertaining, but which do not suit the self that I want to be. And I make a conscious, daily, minute-to-minute effort to think the thoughts and use the words that I want myself to think and to use.
And I always feel so – for lack of any other way of describing it – clean afterward. It almost feels like bathing, slowly but surely.
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JANUARY 9
We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.
– SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought. We do not have to be afraid of negative thoughts as long as we do not welcome them. They are in the air, and they may knock at anyone’s door; but if we do not embrace them, ask them in, and make them our own, they can have no power over us.
We can think of thoughts as hitchhikers. At the entrance to the freeway, we used to see a lot of hitchhikers carrying signs: “Vancouver,” “Mexico,” “L.A.” One said in simple desperation, “Anywhere!” Thoughts are a lot like those hitchhikers. We can pick them up or pass them by. Negative thoughts carry signs, but usually we see only one side, the side with all the promises. The back of the sign tells us their true destination: sickness and sorrow.
Nobody is obliged to pick up these passengers. If we do not stop and let them in, they cannot go anywhere, because they are not real until we support them. There is sympathy in the world: pick it up. There is antipathy in the world: don’t pick it up. Hatred destroys. Love heals.
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Post-a-day 2018
I am unnerved, and I don’t know what else to share. I feel false even considering any other topic, as this is at the forefront of my mind. This storm is scary. Period. The winds were so weak, it hardly felt like a hurricane as it flew above us, spinning along at its loping pace. And the rain has reached such an amount that I might just forever be afraid of rain from here on out. Water is powerful. It is truly powerful. Oh, how I would love to be the kid with the water ring from Captain Planet right now… or that guy from Twilight…
Post-a-day 2017