2006-09-27

I awoke deliciously late for me, almost 6:30, and had to hustle to finish my Camelot Journal entry and get it posted. Now my poor mouse is ailing, so work on the computer has suddenly become a challenge, as the mouse skips and slides without moving anything on the desktop. I have taken it apart and cleaned it thoroughly, which does not help. My first request of Romi when he arrives home from abroad is for him to go shopping with me for a new mouse! However both kittens were in the office early to make me smile and share their purrs. That helped!

Chloe is about half-grown now, a shiny black halfling who loves to perch on my left-hand chair arm, put her little paws around my neck and stick her nose behind my ear. Then she purrs up a storm. It is the dearest little quirk, and I must say she is the first cat that has ever figured out a way to have body contact with me, yet not be in my way as I am working on the computer. Chloe Saraswati the Fearless is a smart pussycat.

It was the morning to write my UPI column for the week and I targeted QuickBooks for some comments. I had a good time musing on the topic of just where those monster databases come from and ended by wishing them all into the Recycle Bin. On the way there I wandered through negative polarity and Wanderers overbalanced on the side of wisdom over love.

I came down for lunch by myself, as Jim was once again mowing extra lawns today, preparing for a rain day tomorrow. I found Lynn there, which was a surprise! I knew she had planned to come over but I thought it would be after her regular work day was through. It turned out that she had taken a day off her regular work so that she could finish up here. Lynn’s ethical integrity is wonderful. She got things almost solved by the time she said farewell, around bath time.

We talked more about replacing her. I am waiting for Carmen to decide if she wants to learn QuickBooks. If she does not, I believe I will take Lynn’s advice and put an ad in the paper for a bookkeeper who is already an expert at QuickBooks. I truly feel it would be an error to press anyone to do the books. It is not a fun job for most people. We need to find someone who likes this job! That could be a challenge!

Meanwhile I have decided that instead of going out to garden at 5 PM, I will come down and enter data into QuickBooks. I was the bookkeeper here for years. I can do this! However the truth is that I do not do it well. I do not have good instincts for accounting. I have gifts, all right, but accounting is not one of them. So I look forward to the day when this need is met with a competent bookkeeper who is able to stick around. We’ve lost a succession of short-timers in this job.

I got the snail mail in and worked it, then did a bit of e-mail, writing my thanks to Larry at UPI for his kind words about my column, letting Fr. Joe at St. Luke’s know I would help with their photo directory project, and thanking Jean-Claude for his kind comments.

I have been trying to work an hour a day at editing older creative work and today I did that, editing the second session from the second weekend of Aaron and Q’uo’s co-channeling here at Camelot back in April of 1992. That is truly magical material. Whenever I am working on the Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues, the concerns about which people are writing me turn up immediately in the material. It is uncanny. I sent off parts of that session to Marcelo G and Jean-Claude K because the coincidences of discussing precisely the same issue were too great to ignore. That finishes the second weekend’s worth of sessions out of nine total weekends during which Barbara B. and I channeled together over the span of about a decade.

Finishing my editing, I sent the rough draft on to our web guy and also to Judy R, who transcribed and pre-edited these sessions. Jim called bath time and we whirlpooled together and then came up and snuggled with Sedgie before I went off to choir practice. After the rehearsal was over, Jim and I offered the Gaia Meditation in the car as we ploughed slowly through more heavy rain on our way to enjoying a set of cool jazz with Walker and Kays at Clifton’s.

Clifton’s Pizza is a great joint. The lower level is pure pizza parlor. One walks right through that and up a ramp into a nice-sized room overlooking the street. The tables are covered with oilcloth but the silverware is metal rather than plastic. You get your drinks in those huge pebbled plastic glasses that you hardly ever see any more. The decorations are a raffish collection of old wall clocks, none of which works, and a motley selection of ancient license plates. Christmas lighting of the white, tiny-bulbed variety winds its way around the various decorations.

The food is pasta and pizza and the company is the best – fellow jazz fans. Walker and Kays are a Louisville institution. My dad and Jeannette Kays founded the Louisville Jazz Society together back in the sixties. My dad was a drummer who worked his way through college drumming for Freddy Schlott’s band, which played all over Iowa and Illinois back in the thirties and forties. He always allowed that he would have stayed on the road with the big bands if it had not been for the arrival of World War II and me, in close succession. He was drafted and then a dad! In such ways does every life have its transitions. Often we do not choose what happens next. It just happens next!

Jim and I picked up the L/L Research P. O. Box mail on the way home, as well as a cup of coffee for me as I was freezing in the steady downpour through which we walked to the car. The colors of the storm and the traffic lights and other lighting on the way home were just breathtaking! There is beauty all around us!

Jim and I said good night about midnight after a most pleasant snuggle with all the pussycats.