2006-09-30

The last day of September was full of gregarious sunshine and happy, skippy winds as well as spitting rain off and on in a gentle way, so that it felt as though a kaleidoscope were whirling through the day, bringing a succession of moods.

After Morning Offering, Jim was chef in the kitchen, preparing the food for next week. I sat down with the Jim’s Lawn service statements, checking the trial printing of the statements against the Daily Reports. There were a good dozen mistakes in those books. I was very glad I had taken the time to double check, as I would have disliked having Jim’s customers billed wrongly. By the time Jim headed out for errands, I had the statements ready to mail and Jim took them with him – a tidy way to get the statements mailed.

I still had a concern with the books which I had not addressed, as there was a thick stack of receipts which I had printed out when I made on-line orders, which had never been checked off. I pored through them, looking at the just-finished Amazon Visa monthly statement, and found almost every charge, so I could dispose of a lot of paper. Slowly the books are beginning to come into more order. I think if I persevere with doing a half hour or so of work each day on the books, when I usually garden, we can squeak through this period while I am looking for a good bookkeeper and get our bills paid.

Jim and I talked at lunch and determined we would place an ad for a QuickBooks expert in the paper rather than try to train someone who does not know QuickBooks.

After our lunch and stretching exercises, Jim set out to do a bunch of planting. We had ordered perennials galore last spring, having decided that we would switch all our annual plantings to perennials in order to have less upkeep and expense in the yard, in the long run, and also to function as an advertisement for Jim’s Lawn Service. We and our customers live in what is basically a well manicured forest. Shade gardening is needed in every yard, even if that yard has a few sunny spots. Our aim was to create a perennials-only look that is pretty and easy to care for.

However, nothing showed up from the nursery last spring. All summer, much of our cross-shaped patio and our Wuthering Heights stone gardens have been bare dirt and good intentions. Now, for some reason known only to them, the nursery from which we ordered the plants has decided that this is the perfect time to put them in the ground, so this morning, the Post Office delivered such a pile of boxes one could hardly see over them as they sat on the porch! So Jim got busy. By dusk, everything was in the ground that had been sent. Jim said it was indeed a great day to plant, since the gentle, soaking rains kept coming every so often.

For his last hour outside, Jim took his loppers and went around the entire yard, trimming up the hedges and trees around our house. We had a tulip poplar whose branches were on the roof. They now are free of the house! I was amazed at the size of the debris pile he created. I imagine that will soon be mulched in our chipper and recycled as we put the yard to bed for the winter.

After lunch I had some planning time with Lynn as she worked on the books, then made some cookies for Gary as he was expected home later today. He likes chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips. Go figure. At any rate, I made them and wrapped them up for him as a surprise welcome-home gift, and placed them at the door to his room so he’d find them when he rolled in.

Then I came upstairs to see how far I could get with the ever-increasing e-mail before bath time. I:
- wrote Ian with some suggestions for editing in the second round of Aaron/Q’uo sessions
- wrote my UPI editor to OK shortening my middle name to an initial in my 100-word blurb
- Thanked Rho M for sending me some material from http://5thworld.com, which included their use of my article on Indigo Children. I did not know they had reprinted my article but still, I am very glad to see that the work is getting around and hopefully being of use to people.
- Wrote a response to a note from the daughter of a former participant in our workshops here at L/L Research. It’s always such a trip to realize we are an old enough organization now to span generations of people.
- Thanked Monica L, who wrote in commenting on my article about 9/11
- Thanked Dave G for sending us a request to put two more people on our UPI send list, and sent the names on to Gary.
- Thanked Tim M for his sending out of our Light/Lines newsletter, the e-version.
- Sent Steve M my rewritten Chapter One of the 101 book. He is being of much help, functioning as a second pair of eyes on my writing. As he is a scientist, he can set me right with terminology.
- Sent my Maine friend, Rick C, a Kentucky report and rejoiced with him that he has finally received all of L/L Research’s master tapes. Rick is a sound man, recently retired from Glen Glenn Studios, and he has volunteered to put all our audiocassette tapes which we offer for sale into CD format and then remaster the CDs. We have two voice tapes and three song-and-story tapes to remaster and I greatly look forward to the end result. I also shared in his pleasure at nature’s bounty. He and his wife just harvested a huge pile of beans. Rick is a wonderful country cook!
- Thanked Ian B for his question on the British Study group’s sweat lodge experience.

Bath time came and useful work ended for the day, for me. Jim cleaned the kitchen during the evening while I patted kitties and relaxed, and then we both sank into Saturday Night mode and shared a lovely, quiet evening at home. We read for a while and conversed at length, had our supper and the Gaia Meditation, and sought our beds around midnight.