2007-03-30

Rain awoke me at dawn, a gentle pitter-pat that soon died away to leave a mild, cloudy day for us to enjoy. Suddenly the tiniest tinge of celery-green has touched the branches of our big maple tree in the front yard. The dogwoods and redbuds are blooming. It’s a wonderful day in the southern part of heaven.

I had goosed my UPI editor – not literally, merely an e-mail note - because for the sixth straight week, my article got lost and I had to ask him where it was. After so many glitches it is easy to lose confidence that you are wanted! The note prompted Larry to call me and assure me that they love my work. It’s just getting balled up for some unknown reason. Larry gets my e-mail, but Renee, the assistant and apparently the one who initiates editing, does not. Larry suggested writing my articles a day ahead, on Tuesdays, and asking for confirmation. That way, they have a day to fix the glitch, as the articles air on Wednesday. I told him I could do that!

Gary had transcribed last Sunday’s channeling session, so I edited that after Morning Offering while Jim set out for a day of very hard work, clearing storm debris in the morning and tearing ivy out of the ground in the afternoon. One of his customers wants a focus garden instead. And we know about clearing ivy!!! Gadzooks, that’s stubborn stuff. I did not get to have lunch with him as he was on the go all day.

Late in the morning I took a bit of time to answer Barbara Brodsky’s note. She and Aaron had done the needed abridging of a particularly long story in a co-channeling I was editing and I checked through it all to be sure it was a good cut, which it was. I had sent her the finished product. She wrote to thank me for the job.

She also asked about my health. A lot of folks are writing in asking about that. I assure everyone that although I am thoroughly uncomfortable, I am in no way seriously ill! I have a good many symptoms with which to deal. Some of them have me in diapers and dashing off to the bathroom at odd moments and others have me feeling ill, nauseated or just plain achy with nerve pain. None of it amounts to any life-threatening condition. All is well!

After eating not the LAST of the leftovers from our trip to the Cheesecake Factory last Saturday, but the NEXT-to-last serving for my lunch – I have gotten five meals out of that restaurant trip – I came upstairs to tackle the orange-ray discussion of one’s relationship with oneself. Finally the section stopped slipping around and settled into a good, flowing story. I was so pleased! By evening, I had read it through to my total satisfaction and finalized it. Tomorrow I’ll read it through one more time, for in reading it to Jim, I noticed a couple of copy errors. But after that I shall be ready to start writing on the big Kahuna subject, our relationships with other-selves in orange-ray.

May I say, hoo boy. Can I do it? Hoo ah. Will it be fun? Boy howdy!

Mick got home utterly exhausted, almost fell asleep in the bath and we retired to my room, where we both napped gloriously, awakening to Jim’s rising romantic interest and a lovely tryst before we got organized for dinner. We had missed the Gaia Meditation hour in our unplanned date, so we offered that before having a late supper, or in my case, a beverage and a handful of nuts. I am fasting from dinner these days.

We found Syriana on the TV and enjoyed most of it – time out for snoozing again – before saying good night around midnight.

2007-03-29

It was a gray day, cloudy and moody and warm. After Morning Offering Mick set out for a morning of mulching while I edited an Aaron/Q’uo session – I should say re-edited. I’d asked my co-channel, Barbara Brodsky, to look at one part of the session which was repetitive. She did that and shortened the story nicely. My job was just to be sure it all worked. It worked!

I decided to chew through some e-mail before tackling the next A/Q session, as I believe Gary will have the latest L/L Research transcript ready by tomorrow morning and I wish to give that priority.

So I wrote a note to Scot H, who likes a movie Don and I made in 1972 called The Girl Snatchers. He noted that Bub Asman, who edited our flick, received an Academy Award for his work on Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers. I’m so pleased for Bub. He was such a good guy, the salt of the earth. I am so glad he has made good, as we say in these parts.

I thanked Frederico for his enthusiastic volunteering effort on behalf of L/L, which we had to shut down, as he had duplicated our site’s transcripts on his site, but without the copyright notices and paragraphing. That does not work. We spend a lot of time and care getting these transcripts in fair shape for smooth reading, so we would prefer that people download the transcripts down from our site, where they are available for free.

Frederico’s hope was that having a compressed data file of the readings by year would be a help to people. Ah well! Not so! I suggested that he think about translating our work into his native tongue. I know he is European, but whether his first language is Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, I am not sure. We like to have translations on site, and already sport some, notably Terry Hsu’s Chinese version of TLOO.

I wrote Roberta, an ardent LOO fan who is 90 now and struggling to keep things together in her life. She recently had some financial trouble, and I wrote to encourage her to keep her courage up. She is an amazing woman who has traveled widely and buried a couple of husbands, and now is barely eking out a living in a trailer in Florida. Her spirit shines through, and her sense of humor.

I began reading Melissa’s comments on the work I have done so far on 101, and wrote her several short notes answering questions she had. I fear Melissa is way too oriented towards more advanced seeking for her comments to be helpful in making the book easier to understand. She feels I am leaving nuances out that people would like to pursue – not realizing that the audience is those who have never pursued anything spiritual, so KISS is the operant protocol. However I greatly enjoyed her comments and the play of her mind.

I also caught up with Michele M, who is working on graphics for 101, Steve M, whom I thanked for comments he made on 101, and Dana Redfield, who had sent me more material for her alphabet book, Mosaics. She just got that finished and off to Hampton Roads. If they publish it, great! If they do not, she would like us to publish the book after she dies. She is presently in the later stages of metastasized cancer, and her life expectancy is down to the last, precious few months of her incarnation now.

Jim came home for lunch weary and happy, for he had finished a huge job! He laid out 128 big bags of mulch for a customer this morning! We enjoyed lunch together and then he went to do chores and address some ivy a customer wants removed from his yard. I came upstairs and spent the afternoon adding and deleting on 101, orange ray. I am still not entirely happy with the section. It plods. I shall attack it again tomorrow. We’re looking for dancing prose here!

Mick and I had a sweet, quiet evening at home with Gary, enjoying conversation, Amy Goodman’s news, dinner and offering the Gaia Meditation. I came upstairs early to spend some extra time in the bathroom, hoping to clear away some cramping which had gotten out of hand. These symptoms continue to be a challenge for me to manage. I feel sure that as I get more used to this illness, IC, I will be much better at managing the discomfort of it.

Jim and I said good night after a good snuggle with the kitties at 11 PM.

2007-03-27 and 28

I awoke yesterday and tried to write the Camelot Journal entry for the previous day. However, for some reason Bell South decided today that I should use their home page as my own. I went through the procedure for choosing my home page – again – but I had lost the time in which I generally write the entry. And I never got back to it all day. So this entry tells the story of a couple of days.

Tuesday morning, after Morning Offering, was dedicated mostly to a long planning session with Gary, who probably had a dozen matters to work through with me. He’s on the front line at the L/L Research helm and fields all kinds of questions. We had a good time chewing through it all. Jim managed to complete his tasks also before weather came through around lunch time.

In the afternoon, I worked on the orange-ray discussion in 101: The Choice. Jim arrived home and drew us a lovely bath, after which we visited with Romi and had a good Gaia Meditation before we watched an episode of “House” together.

This morning, it being a Wednesday, I spent the morning writing my weekly article for UPI. After Morning Offering, Jim was again dodging raindrops and attempting to work at lawn clean-up jobs. He just got a substantial extra job from one of his customers, which means that even though he’s not mowing yet, he is now officially full-time again. The off-season is over. I will miss him!!

We met for lunch and then he was off and running to power-seed and mulch while I again worked on orange ray. I believe I am closing in on the final writing on this part of the topic, which deals with a person’s relationship with himself, but shall need to read through again tomorrow to be sure.

Ian sent good news about site statistics. Apparently the number of people who access our site per month is over 300,000 now. This number has been increasing slowly but steadily since the beginning of the site twelve or more years ago. It is good to see that people find our material useful!

Ian had forwarded me a note from a gentleman in Turkey who wanted to know if believing we are one with God is pantheistic. I wrote to the gentleman suggested he figure it out for himself. We have thousands of words on the site for him on this very topic! The Confederation point of view is available. And it does not need my defense. I told him, “Happy Hunting”!

Before I quit for the day, I collected a recipe for asparagus with dill aioli and added it to our recipes database. Jim and Gary both adore that veggie, so I keep my eye out for good a-spear-a-gus recipes. I finished my work day off by writing notes of thanks to three people who had written in to comment favorably on my UPI article on “Living Well”.

After Jim’s and my bath I went to choir practice, where I enjoyed singing some lovely music which we shall trot out for the various services of Holy Week. I got home in time for the Gaia Meditation and shared some conversation with Mick and Gary before heading upstairs to bed.

Everything is bursting at once now – tulips are joining the daffodils, while the redbuds and dogwoods are now in bud. The trees are just faintly beginning to swell into bud as well. I’d say the peak of spring color will be this next week or so. It is ineffably lovely here in Kentucky when the spring begins to set in. I have never lived in as pretty a place as right here. It truly lifts the heart and soul to see such beauty.

2007-03-26

After Morning Offering Jim set out to work at two lawn jobs, getting them ready for mowing and doing all manner of power seeding and mulching. I edited the transcript of the channeling session we had on March 18th. Gary, Jim and I also took a bit of time around lunch time to send a three-way birthday greeting to our web guy, Ian, who has been so incredibly helpful for so many years.

We enjoyed lunch together and Jim and I did our stretching exercises before he set out for an afternoon of scraping and painting for a customer. I came back upstairs to work on the orange ray section of 101: The Choice. I read through the work from Saturday and then wrote through the section again, becoming more happy with it as the afternoon progressed. I finished the work on this project for the day by regularizing the footnotes for Chapter Four so far, as several of them were missing from my records.

Papa’s letters, which I am currently reading, expressed some fairly urgent concerns, so I took a bit of time to write him and reassure him. And just before Jim called bath time, I managed to work up a couple of new recipes. Jim is very fond of pork chops, and I found a very easy but delicious recipe for baking them with a simple glaze. And I found a new cole slaw recipe which I would like to try for my own food.

I have begun fasting each evening, except for special occasions of course. This seems to be the first idea I have had for self-monitoring my wellness in a while My “Boost” fast was a clunker, as the substance, taken alone over a period of several days, locked my bowels up tight. I also fasted from alcohol for a couple of weeks, to no good effect. The alcohol seems actually to damp down the IC symptoms and I have fewer runs to the bathroom the day after imbibing some spirits. However, the evening fasting seems to have a relatively good effect on the symptoms with no obvious side effects, so I’ll stick with that for a while and see if I can lessen my tummy ache.

After a very refreshing whirlpool, Jim and I came upstairs for a “date” but got delayed by TV problems –our upstairs set was on the fritz. Kitty marauders, no doubt! Gary sprang to the rescue, knowing what was wrong, and got our little world working again. Then we relaxed into the evening and had a lovely romantic tryst, creating wonderful, joyful energy together.

We had a late supper and enjoyed the Gaia Meditation before closing out the day with a discussion between Gary and me about channeling sessions. A devoted reader had cancelled a session because he lost his job and could not pay. He apologized and promised to set up the session again when his finances were secured. Gary wanted to volunteer the session for him for free, feeling sympathy. However the guy had not asked for this service. It may seem cold, and does so to Gary, but one must be very conscious and attentive about offering a service like channeling. It must come directly from a request of information on a specific question. This may seem a small thing, but free will is no small thing!

We had to agree to disagree on that, for now, which we were able to do easily. No household’s members agree on everything! We honor each other with great affection anyway. So we said good night and Jim and I ended our day with a snuggle with the cats before saying good night at 11 PM.

2007-03-25

The Sabbath was an incredible day, a day that was more July than March, a day in the high 80s F, a sunny, glorious day indeed. I spent the morning at church, rehearsing and then singing the service. We sang a pretty version of “Wash Me Throughly” and I got a new phrase to use in my daily process from Fr. Joe’s sermon, which was about not getting “stuck on stupid”. We all have that tendency at least in some areas!

I relaxed and enjoyed some basketball with Mick, had lunch and then checked my e-mail. I spent a good deal of early afternoon time working on a letter to a girl friend who is in a difficult position right now. Carmen came over as I finished and we talked about the Papa’s Archive project we are to tackle next Saturday.

Jim and I bathed and welcomed Romi, who came a bit early for meditation so that he could set up to broadcast the channeling session. The channeling was in answer to questions about sexuality, Muhammad the Prophet, bless his name, and the sacredness of spoken letters and vowels. It was a diverse set of questions. I will be interested to edit the transcript.

Romi served his Love Tea and he and I sat and talked for a good deal of time about these broadcasts. The people who tune us in are generally less than a dozen, and for the six-month period of this broadcasting trial, the cost is about $700.00 to reserve a private chat room. It could be that there are better ways for us to serve seekers.

I am thinking about generating, eventually, CD versions of all our sessions to be available on-line for a modest download fee. I know that nothing beats that live experience where no one knows what will happen or what shall be said. That’s why we had this broadcasting trial. But I think it may be that we need to conserve our funds for other uses, in terms of continuing to broadcast after May. We’ll be asking for feedback on that.

I had thought that Jim’s alma mater, the University of Florida, was out of the NCAA play-offs, but I was wrong, which is great news for the Mick! Both UK and UL, the Kentucky teams, were eliminated early on. We watched a bit of b-ball before turning on a program called Planet Earth. It is a beautiful series with breathtaking views of species migration being the focus of this episode.

After the Gaia Meditation and a late supper, we bade farewell to Romi and Carmen and called Mom McCarty. It was a good phone call. She so appreciates the attention, and certainly deserves it. Sometimes I can almost feel her thankfulness that we bother to call and catch up. Her life is small, as she seldom leaves the house except to go to church or secure food and necessities. Our Sunday call is a big item in her week.

I was delighted that Mom took me up on my offer to get her an outfit for her coffin when she dies. At 89 and counting, her mind is on such preparations for the inevitable, and Jim’s and my discussion, while we were visiting Mom last month, of our own preparations for the event of our deaths prompted her to voice concerns over what she might wear in the open casket at her funeral. She did not think any of her current clothing worked.

I found a really sweet pink suit in a clothing catalog where the jacket has a tailor’s detail at the neckline that will look stunning on her. I shall order it tomorrow. It may seem ghoulish to think of such things, but it is a relief to her to have the outfit on hand. She has always been extremely fastidious about her appearance. I promised her I would see to it that her regular hairdresser did her hair and that she looked her absolute best. She also gave me a list of hymns she likes, for that same solemn occasion.

As for me, when I die I will be cremated, so I have no wardrobe worries at all!

Mick and I hung out with the kitties in an atmosphere of great contentment after the call and said good night around midnight.

2007-03-24

We had a lovely, lazy, sunny and warm Saturday, culminating in a celebratory dinner out as we took Gary out to thank him for work for L/L Research and our little community of three far above and beyond. We went to the Cheesecake Factory! I found a brand new item to adore, their sweet corn tamale fritters, which we had for an appetizer.

We did do a few things before that! After morning Offering, Gary was at the admin desk most of the day, working to lessen the ever-growing pile of e-mail and other work on his desk. Jim worked in the house in the morning and outside in the afternoon, scraping up under the eaves of this old bungalow. We need to paint, and Jim’s getting started on that big job. Fortunately we have a brick home, so no outside maintenance needs doing there, but the outside trim gets shabby after a decade or two.

I divided my day neatly between falling asleep in my chair, which I managed to do twice, editing an L/L Research channeling session from last December and working on discussing the orange ray, writing on The Choice. The session I edited was all about teaching and I enjoyed the advice the Q’uo group gave. I made a good start on discussing orange ray matters, getting just far enough in the writing to discover why I will have to do some more thinking as I proceed! After writing until I got stuck, I worked my way through all my collected quotes again, starting to organize my discussion points better.

When we three got back from our feast, there was some good NCAA play-off action on TV which Jim took in while Gary and I read until time for the Gaia Meditation, after which Gary took off for Valerie’s. She bought him a pillow for his birthday, so now he does not have to go over there carrying one when he sleeps over, which is a step forward in their relationship and in his freedom from public pillow carrying! By such small increments do relationships progress.

Jim and I came upstairs eventually for a good night snuggle and lights-out came around midnight.

2007-03-23

I began the day by vastly oversleeping, so was quite late for Morning Offering. I wrote the Camelot Journal entry for yesterday after that and started to edit again on the December channeling session on which I am currently working, but time overtook me and I zipped down the expressway to the Images salon where I get my hair cut by Jazz, a young woman of great talent and pizzazz.

Talk about a disaster! The object was simple: take the green tint out of my hair. I had fun being a Christmas elf and a St. Paddy’s Day gremlin, but three months is enough for a fey hairdo. However, like many things about me, my hair seems to be anomalous. The color is expected to last six weeks; no more. Mine lasted three months and counting. The first, somewhat mild, color remover did nothing.

So the salon tried again, this time with a color remover that smelled like pig farming. Another half hour under the dryer and voila – nothing. Moi, the hair she is still green. They very kindly did not charge me for all the work they did, since it did not work in stripping the green from my hair. Meanwhile hours had flown by. It was fortunate that I always carry a book in my purse. I spent a lot of dryer time!

I was prepared to re-color my hair to match my roots, but instead Jazz suggested giving me a super-short haircut. She has seen a lot of short styles like this in Europe, and I really liked the effect on me. It is very transparent. There is no vanity, just he plain person. I like the look. So it all turned out well!

When I arrived home, still not having eaten lunch, it was already 4 PM. Mick had a very urgent need to get his truck, which had been at a repair shop for the afternoon. Gary had helped him take the truck in while I was gone, but now Gary was totally involved in cooking, so I drove Jim over to the repair shop and we retrieved his all-important work vehicle.

It is amazing to see how suddenly the spring color comes. On my first run down LaGrange Road headed to the salon, I noticed that the Bradford pears were blushing white with new bloom. On my second run, helping Jim, a redbud which definitely had not been in bloom before had burst into that incredible, NOT red but pink bloom that is so saturated with color! What a feast for the eye. And don’t blink - you’ll miss the joy of it.

So I had my lunch at 5 PM! After that, Jim and I bathed and got ready for movie night, a practice we began at Romi’s request. However on three out of the five occasions we have made time for him on Friday night and rented a movie for us to watch, he has decided not to come. So we will talk about that with him this Sunday. All things being equal, we would prefer to have that time to ourselves.

I found some time in the early evening, while Mick was preparing dinner, to write Steve M about creating a game based on the book I am currently writing. It is a fun mental exercise to contemplate how that could be done.

Carmen and Jim and I enjoyed watching the new James Bond film, which was so over the top for ridiculous feats of super-agility as to be cartoon-like. Yet the actor playing Bond was most successful, more so than anyone except Timothy Dalton in being as dangerous on screen as the original Bond, James Bond - Sean Connery. The film was a most enjoyable ride.

We polished off the evening, after the Gaia Meditation and saying good night to Carmen, with watching the Trojans get whipped. I was sorry to see that as the University of Southern California is a team for which Papa roots and I know he was disappointed. He can join Jim and me there – both our alma maters are also out of the tournament.

We enjoyed snuggling with the kitties before saying good night at midnight.

2007-03-22

It was a picture –postcard pretty day and after Morning Offering Jim drove me downtown for a meeting with Bishop Gulick. The forsythia is suddenly in bloom in the city and it was good to see the brave yellow flags of spring. It was also grand to see the Bishop and he was most helpful in agreeing to write a blurb for the Book of Days’ back cover after he looks over the manuscript. He says he will do it after Easter, which means another two-week delay on getting this book published. Patience is needed in these matters!

I got back just in time to get a call from Carmen, who had been job hunting and wished to meet for lunch. She took me to the Cheesecake Factory, where we ate very well and talked over her situation. She’s actively seeking another job here and would like to stay in Louisville. I certainly have my fingers crossed that she can stay, for she has been an excellent addition to the meditation circles and has been very helpful in volunteer work. She has had a tough year, with moving, ending a relationship and finding one job already, so there is too much stress by far on her pretty shoulders right now.

In the afternoon, while Jim was scraping the old paint off of a customer’s house’s outside walls preparatory to repainting, I got all set up to work on orange ray and promptly nodded off. I awoke a little after 4 PM and decided to leave the book’s writing alone for the hour remaining and instead tackle an office clean-up. Things had gotten pretty disheveled and one was needed badly. I must have put four dozen of Papa’s MP3’s and CDs away as well as a dozen or so tapes – those being the last of the items in Papa’s Archive to which I had not listened. Now I have listened at least once to every tape, CD and MP3 he has sent me and over the years, there are hundreds. That’s satisfying! A student should study! And I have.

However, Papa’s Archive is a disorganized mess after my rifling through it repeatedly to suss out new material to study during this time of my feeling under the weather. I am most fortunate that Carmen has offered to help me get that Archive back in order. I feel sure we can do it together in an afternoon. It will take removing all the audiocassette tapes and other media from the various media drawers, sorting them all out according to type, program, person and date and putting them back into the media drawers which we label. Thank heaven for battery-driven labelers!

I also combed through all the snail mail, adding yet more letters and cards from beloved friends to my pile of unanswered mail. Usually I catch up on snail mail during our drips to Nebraska, but this February’s trip was booked, as Jim and I took that time to work up a new document for our Board of Directors along the lines of “in case of our death”. We have had that document for decades and every few years it needs updating. Currently we are also interested in enlarging and restructuring the Board, with the hope of providing a good governing unit after Jim and I pass into larger life. So there was much talking and writing to do, and I never got to the letters this trip.

But I will! Eventually, I always do!

I found that Gary had most kindly created a CD of my recent Camelot Journal entries and recent channeling sessions to send to Papa, who just sent me a new batch of his diary letters, hundreds of pages which switch continuously from the weather, sports and local and personal matters to riffs on everything under the sun from history to politics to economics to spiritual principles. I knew Papa would want to know that the material had arrived safely and on what date – Papa has a healthy concern for federal snoopers, although what they could find to censor in Papa’s writings or in mine, I cannot imagine. But obviously, as recent news items show, the government is in a mode where lists of objectors and protestors are made and those people are surveilled. So I wrote Papa a quick note and put that in the mail with Gary’s CD.

It is good to have a relatively neat office again! One depredation which I had not noticed before is the Venetian blinds. I hauled them up the windows halfway as soon as the kittens started chewing through the plastic slats last year about this time, so the blinds are still in fair shape. However, it seems one of the cats – probably Dan D. – has been chewing through the strings that control the blinds. I went to change the level at which one of the blinds sits in the window and found I cannot do that until I repair the string. There are joys and there are aggravations in having pets, for sure!

Jim and I had a very pleasant bath together when he arrived home, finally, somewhat late but having finished a punishing job. Then we had a romantic tryst, after which he, Gary and I spent a most contented evening watching Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert, a CSI Miami and a Gray’s Anatomy on the tube. Gary offered the ending prayer at the Gaia Meditation. Jim and I said good night around 11 PM after a bedtime snuggle with the kitties. It is the anniversary today of our going 65 miles, to Breckinridge County, Kentucky, to adopt our two babies! Dan D. and Chloe are great additions to the family and I am so glad we made that trip!

2007-03-21

What a parade of daffodils marches through our yard now! For over two decades now we have planted a few more each year so that they could begin to naturalize. They are indeed beginning to do that and the effect is stunning. Getting the paper this morning was great fun! And the honeysuckle is in bud!

After Morning Offering I worked on the weekly article I write for UPI, telling the story of a guy, Mike Berg, whose attempts to make a difference have run up against so much static. I wanted to look at the cost of standing up for what you believe is true. I hope people will enjoy it!

Jim came home from a morning of estate work and we shared a good lunch and stretching together before he took himself off to do more of the same. I spent the afternoon fishing for the right quote to begin orange-ray discussion of the relationship of the self with the self. I found what I was looking for on the fifteenth page of quotes found by doing a Google site search on our llresearch.org site on the word, “orange”. I found what I was looking for just as Jim called bath time.

In the morning, I had taken some time out to get Linda D, our tax preparer, the information which she had requested at our meeting yesterday. Two faxes later, I got the good news that she was OK now. Whew! No more details and numbers to capture before they wiggle away! Not until next year at tax time, of course!

Late in the day I realized I was going to see the Bishop tomorrow armed with a manuscript of A Book of Days which was unfinished, so I e-mailed Ian for the current pages. The text, of course, had not changed, being channeling, but the introductory and appendix pages had changed a lot. Thankfully, Ian was still at his computer and e-mailed me back the needed pages right away. The refurbished manuscript now awaits Bishop Gulick’s attention in all of its finished glory.

Jim came home having picked up sticks all afternoon and we had a most refreshing whirlpool and got cleaned up before I had to head out for choir practice. We caught some of Amy Goodman’s news in the meantime. After I sang my little heart out, I came home to a good supper and the Gaia Meditation, with me offering the ending prayer. I read some on Papa’s letters – he just sent me hundreds of pages of his thoughts – while Jim did laundry and then we retired upstairs for a bedtime snuggle with the cats. Chloe, our little inkspot, gets a bit broader in the beam each month. I believe she will be a fat cat! Dan D. is a much more svelte pussycat, and Pickwick is the lightest of the three cats now. The kittens are now over a year old! They are very affectionate and sweet kitties and a joy to share life with.

2007-03-20

We ushered in spring with mild weather today and a shifting kaleidoscope of light and overcast. After Morning Offering Jim set out to clean a customer’s yard of winter debris while I came upstairs to do some editing on a transcript I just received from Carmen, from December 12 of last year, I believe. However I managed handily to fall asleep soon after beginning, not waking up until close to lunch time. My recent narcolepsy-like snoozing is a mystery in that I do not lose sleep at night because of it. Always before, if I have napped during the day, I am awake all night. So I must assume this is health-related and probably the rest is needed.

I did get about half of the session edited, in the short time I had left before lunch.

After a good lunch with Jim and doing our stretching exercise, I set out with Gary for the tax preparer’s office downtown, enjoying the sight of the swelling buds on some of the trees. We managed to find a parking place in the crowded city garage and spent the afternoon going over tax details, high above the city in a high-rise. It is amazing just how much tax information I do NOT know! We came home with several details to look up and send to her tomorrow. It’s grand to have that done for another year – almost!

Romi came over for a visit in the evening and we enjoyed a late supper, the Jon Stewart/Colbert Report political wise cracking hour, an hour of Stargate Atlantis and the Gaia meditation. That ended Romi’s visit, and Jim and I said good night to Gary soon thereafter, ascending the stairs for a bedtime snuggle with the kitties.

2007-03-19

Ah, Mondays! This was an unbelievably active day for my Interstitial Cystitis symptoms! I made 13 trips to the bathroom before lunch! Nevertheless, after Morning Offering, I did manage to fit in some work on the latest issue of Light/Lines, the newsletter for L/L Research.

Meanwhile Jim was trying to outrun the weather and work for several customers on clearing winter debris from their yards, but was eventually brought home by the plenteous rain.

We enjoyed a late lunch together and stretched before I came back upstairs to find that the way I had edited the newsletter session did not work for Ian, so I went back and created the file a different way, putting all my editing changes in it, and sent that off. Hopefully, that will work.

After a delicious whirlpool with Mick, he and I enjoyed a romantic tryst before I got set for a late call. Gary was also on the line, talking with Monica L about the possibility of opening a forum for L/L Research, which Monica will moderate. This may occur over the summer. We had a good conversation, getting a good basis established for future work.

Jim offered the prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight. We said good night around 11 PM.

2007-03-18

It was a pretty, though chilly, Sabbath, and Jim cleaned while I went to church and sang the beautiful music of an Anglican Lent – today, a Herbert Howells piece at the Offertory and a lovely old hymn for Communion. After a delicious lunch, I napped until bath time while Jim enjoyed March Madness on TV.

The channeling meditation was attended by Carmen and Romi as well as Jim and me, a small but excellent group today. I had been pondering the worthiness of describing life as a game, which I have been doing in 101: The Choice. I wanted to get the Q’uo’s thoughts on that if I could. Since the question was mine, I am especially eager to see the transcript!

Carmen stayed to spend some volunteer hours working on the poetry database which she is committing to digital form for me. I had thought we were all done until I found the folders of songs which I had not yet given her. Generally speaking, the only difference between my poetry and my songs is that the songs have been set to music at one point. So Carmen is now adding the songs to the database.

Romi handled the broadcast of the channeling today with ease and I believe all went very well with that. After the meditation, he went around to the various computers, doing maintenance. He alone keeps this little computer set-up functioning!

Basketball came back for the evening, naturally. Gary joined us and Gary, Carmen and I read our books while Jim watched his game. It was a cozy non-conversation which we enjoyed along with Romi’s Love Tea. We had dinner later and offered the Gaia Meditation together, with Gary offering the prayer, and then the party broke up. Jim and I called Mom McCarty and then had a good snuggle with the kitties before bedtime.

2007-03-16 and 17

It has been a challenging couple of days for me in terms of staying awake. There is no worsening of my health situation, except for a pronounced tendency to fall asleep, even in the morning when I am usually at my perkiest.

Friday’s work for me involved getting the last of the puzzle pieces in place so we can print A Book of Days. We have now finalized the choice of printer and secured funding to pay said printer, thanks to a very generous contributor. Ian is working on the front cover and I have an appointment next Thursday morning with Bishop Gulick, whose comments I would like to place on the back cover along with Fr. Joe’s.

In the afternoon, I worked to find a good quote to start off the orange-ray discussion in Chapter Four of 101: The Choice. I found quite a few good q’uotes from Q’uo as well as from the Ra sessions but was not satisfied with any yet. I am not worried. I have explored only the first six of 15 pages of suggestions for quotes, using the key search word, orange. I will find the right quote soon!

Today being Saturday, we slept late and offered the Morning Offering around 10 AM. I continued to sleep all morning, inadvertently, in my Mama chair in the upstairs office, feeling mighty silly when Mick woke me for lunch. My afternoon was spent working up Gary’s notes into our next Gatherings Newsletter. It was very good to get that out. It has been much delayed by my working so slowly of late. We talked in it for the first time about next fall’s Homecoming. I imagine that will fill up quickly. Our only question is in the numbers. If we get a lot more than a dozen people wishing to come, we shall need to look for a venue other than Camelot. Our topic this year will be “Who Am I”.

We’re in the middle of the NCAA play-offs, so basketball uniforms have been plentiful images for our viewing this whole week, and continuing for the next couple of weeks of the March Madness routine. Gary and I read our books while Jim takes in the action on the TV. It works well for us!

Jim and I had a romantic tryst after the game and the Gaia Meditation and then snuggled with the kitties until bedtime.

2007-03-15

The Ides of March was a fortunate day for L/L Research! After Morning Offering, Jim and I turned on the lights to brighten the gray overcast coming through the windows from the chilly day and got the last of the tax preparation work done, including filing all the 2006 records away and shredding 1998’s paper records, a joyous moment!

Gary talked with Pat S, the tech guy at our tax preparer’s office, and found how to make a CD of all our QuickBooks records. So all is prepared for the tax preparer! At last! I called and made an appointment with Linda D for next Tuesday afternoon. We’ll be on time with taxes this year – an improvement over the last three years, which have all been cliff-hangers.

I also called and made an appointment with Bishop Gulick for next Thursday. I will ask him for a quote to put on the back of A Book of Days. Gary got the final quote from Blitzprint for printing this sweet book, and I sent the information on to Morris, who wishes to make a further donation towards its publication costs. It’s coming together!

After a celebratory lunch and stretching, Jim went to clean winter debris from a customer’s yard while I read through all the red-ray quotes from the Ra sessions one more time, just to be sure I had not short-changed the discussion of it in 101: The Choice. I decided to add one small quote to the section. It was great to read the whole section through and not feel the need to change anything. At last!! The red-ray section is finished! Now I can move on to the discussion of orange ray.

I have felt quite weary lately and today is no exception. Jim and Gary watched a video after Jim’s and my bath, but I slept through most all of it. Perhaps it is my body’s way of removing itself from the discomfort of my current situation. At any rate it is working for me! I sleep quite well at night no matter how much I find myself napping during the day. So the napping is natural and good. It is somewhat aggravating to feel that I am missing out on good things like the video, and yet at the same time I rejoice that relief from the discomfort I feel is so easily come by!

We offered the Gaia Meditation after a good dinner together with Gary. Jim woke me after the video was over so that he and I could come upstairs for a bedtime snuggle with the kitties. We said good night early, around 10:30, as Jim must rise early tomorrow. He has an appointment with a surveyor at 9 AM, and it is an hour’s drive there.

2007-03-14

The day was glorious, the temperature reaching 80 and the sun popping in and out of rapidly changing clouds. After Morning Offering Jim worked for a customer while I wrote the UPI article for this week. I had finished the writing and was just getting it read through for copy errors when my computer quit cold. No article, no computer and no clue! That was my situation.

It was time for a dental appointment, so I left the tangle here and got my teeth cleaned. Jim and I had a good lunch and stretching and then I went back to my broken computer and ganged up on the problem with Gary.

Gary tried fixing the problem himself but was unable to do so. We decided to go for the big guns and Gary took Traveller to Uptech, a computer repair company, which had the computer all the rest of the day, calling just at closing time to say we could pick Trav up. He had a broken power adaptor replaced and now was good as new. Or, my preferred version, they had a prince there who kissed Sleeping Beauty awake again! Gary kindly retrieved the machine while Jim and I bathed.

It was choir practice night, and I sang soprano all night tonight, having been permanently moved from the alto section now at St. Luke’s. I have a mezzo-soprano voice, neither true soprano nor true alto but in between. So I get switched back and forth between the two parts as singing groups need strength in either part. I like singing soprano because it’s so much fun to have the melody and I like singing alto because the inner parts have a more interesting time of it in most pieces. So I am always happy. We are doing a repertoire I have not seen before, and the sight reading is a blast! I do love to sing!

Jim had worked on repairs to our fish pond in the afternoon and had occupied his time while I was at rehearsal by doing laundry and other household chores. We were both quite sleepy. We watched most of a good documentary on John Lennon and the Nixon Administration’s persecution of him, but foiled ourselves by falling asleep part-way through. We eventually awoke, got our supper together and offered the Gaia meditation with Gary before coming upstairs to snuggle with the kitties and coast on CSI to bedtime at 11 PM.

2007-03-13

313 is the number on Donald Duck’s license plate – a little known comic book fact, but one that always comes to my mind on March 13th. Our Donald Duck Memorial Day was swell, with the temperature soaring to 80 F and the skies cerulean and decorated with puffy, innocent clouds. Our yard is full of budding daffodils and a sea of tulip leaves is marching towards the light from our rapidly warming earth.

After Morning Offering, Gary and I set in to do tax work while Jim worked for a customer, gardening all morning.

We met for lunch and Jim and I had a good stretch together, and then Jim was off again, to garden for another customer and to spread 55 bags of mulch for her. Our humidity is unbelievably low for Kentucky, 18%, today, so Jim came home black as the dust he was raising all afternoon. Rain has been predicted but so far it has evaporated before hitting the ground. He was clearing his eyes for a good hour after he got home! Mick was doing “mulch” hard work,

Meanwhile Gary and I powered on with the tax data collection. By quitting time, we had collected almost all the data for the household, which is the hard part.

Now we just have to check L/L Research and Jim’s Lawn Service files and archive the information in our tax file drawers. I greatly look forward to the crowning action of tax time – shredding the most distant year for which records have been kept. We keep everything for eight years, so I guess we will be free at last of all the paper for 1998, soon!

It is frustrating to have to take the time from writing on the CHOICE project. However, it’s that time of year, and we need to get this information collected and into the hands of our faithful, long-time tax preparer, Linda D. She first did our taxes in 1984!

Mick and I had a refreshing whirlpool and then took Romi out for dinner to thank him for the tremendous amount of hard work he has done for us lately. We have had a rash of technical problems, most notably my keyboard on Traveller needing replacement, and he has managed to keep us up and running flawlessly. So we took him to Lentini’s, an old Louisville restaurant, where I had the most wonderful tenderloin in mushroom sauce. The taste was superb and the meat was cooked to perfection. I do love good food!

We said good night to Romi at the restaurant and offered the Gaia Meditation on the way home, with me offering the closing prayer. When we arrived home, we gravitated upstairs for a snuggle with the cats and then a romantic interlude before bedtime at 11 PM.

2007-03-12

Our weather continued to glow with early warmth and light, the temperatures in the seventies today. After Morning Offering Jim and I worked on taxes while Gary worked on the credit cards. As part of tax preparation, we always report to my credit card service bureau what our credit cards are, for the household, Jim’s Lawn Service and L/L Research. Not that the two are the same job, but that they are sort of related the way changing the batteries in your smoke alarm is related to changing your clocks on “spring forward” day. Both taxes and credit cards need to be organized yearly. We spent a productive morning and are about 2/3 through the job now, having only office-in home, tax and tax preparation information to capture.

After a good lunch and stretching, Jim went to a customer’s to repair their stone patio, which had gotten disarranged due to frost heave, and had a good afternoon’s work there under the beneficent sun. I worked through the red ray section, perhaps finishing it! I shall read it over tomorrow after reading the collection of material I have on red ray from the Ra Material one more time. I want to be sure I have given red ray a solid treatment, leaving nothing of importance out.

Having just a few minutes left before bath time, I had a short meeting with Gary and we got the “donate” button on the archive site changed from a thank-you to all who donated in the matching funds campaign to a new chart of ways to donate time, talent or treasure. There will still be a home page button that says “donate or volunteer”, but that presence will be small compared to now. It’s a good change, cleaning up the home page a bit.

I seldom hear from Papa these days, as he has taken to collecting his material for me and sending it all at once, so it was a banner day for me, as getting new material from my teacher is a blessing indeed. Papa sent hundreds of new pages of his thoughts for me to read and ponder, plus some suggested health remedies and a Spanish language CD and calendar. Gracias, Papa!

Jim and I had a quiet evening, being joined for supper and the Gaia Meditation by Gary. Jim and I said good night around 11 PM.

2007-03-11

I woke to more springtime and wrote the Camelot Journal entry for yesterday before going to church for choir practice and then to sing the service at 11 AM. The early switch to Daylight Savings Time made the wake-up a moon-lit one! But the crocuses and daffodils outside our door tell a story of warmth and light to come.

Meanwhile Jim was busy at housework all morning and I came home for lunch to a spanking clean abode – our Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness tag-team expression of the Sabbath! We had a good lunch and stretched.

Jim worked for a while on his e-mail and other small concerns while I worked on editing the channeling transcript from the February 11th Sunday meeting. Then we bathed and welcomed Carmen, Romi and Tom F. Again we had a silent meditation, as Romi had already informed the broadcasting people that our next channeling will be on March 18th. Would that he had contacted us first, as we would have preferred channeling today and then on the 25th, to give m a week off in between the sessions, but since it was already stated, we decided that our channeling Sundays for March would be on the 18th and the 25th. To avoid my channeling three weeks in a row, our channeling Sundays for April will be the 2nd and the 4th Sundays.

We had a really interesting group discussion, going around the circle and talking about our progress and issues and of course U of L sports, since Tom, Carmen and Jim follow the Cards and were sad to see them have to bow out of their conference championship. It was a thoughtful group this week. Then we tuned up and meditated in silence. This is always a delicious time for me, when we have a silence together, and today was no exception.

I had found more poetry for Carmen to enter into the poetry database, thanks to Gary, who had come to me last week asking for the lyrics to some of the songs on “The Journey”, a story with songs which I wrote years ago. The audio of this contains only the songs, however, not the story. In digging around to find where I had lain those lyrics, I found two big folders of “songs” which I had not remembered to give to Carmen when she typed up my poetry. Now in my little filing system, poems become songs when they are set to music – which does not keep them from being poetry.

I feared that Carmen would be disappointed, as she thought she had just finished with that large project, but thankfully, she welcomed more poems to type, saying she enjoys my work. Bless her! And she spent some of the rest of the evening working on them, while Romi did some computer maintenance and Jim fixed dinner, having roasted a turkey.

We gathered again for dinner, Gary arriving from a protracted weekend away, as he had spent Friday and Saturday celebrating his girlfriend’s birthday and Sunday serving at Cracker Barrel. Conversation and the Selection Sunday program for the NCAA basketball tournament reigned until time for the Gaia Meditation. Gary offered the ending prayer for that.

Our guests left after the peace meditation, and we all wended our way to our various beds soon thereafter. Jim and I had a good snuggle with the cats before saying good-night at 11 PM.

2007-03-10

Saturdays are always welcomed for their weekendish nature. There’s no news and weather to greet me in the morning, so already I am adrift compared to Monday through Friday. It’s the weekend! God’s time.

After a late Morning Offering, Jim cooked for next week while I came upstairs to finish the revision of the long “in case of our death” (ICOOD) document for our Board, responding to initial comments from them on the rough draft of that document. I spent most of the morning just finding the work I had already done. I must have hit the wrong key at some point the last time I worked on it, because the considerable work previously done on this had disappeared from my computer. I did searches on “board”, which yielded two dozen results but no joy. Searching on “death” was eventually efficacious! The work had been consigned, for some reason, to the recycle Bin. Argh.

I was thrilled to lay my cyberhands on it and pounced, renaming it and saving it, by golly, by gum! I got the ICOOD document all snugged up, but was unable to finish the accompanying letter, which lays out some of Jim’s and my plans for enlarging and further structuring the Board for smooth transition and good working, ICOOD before lunch time.

Jim had, as is his wont, spent a most fruitful morning not only finishing up the cooking Gary had started yesterday but also clearing away a host of errands, including getting my new choir robe from the tailor’s. The tailor, Sergei, had put pockets in the robe – you KNOW how handy pockets are for the portable singer – and replaced some unwieldy buttons with snaps so my weak hands could work them.

Jim also came home with some fast food, which we enjoyed. I discovered that if you get a Big Mac and then remove all three pieces of bread, the sandwich breaks down into a tasty and rather small serving to eat with a fork. Jim and I stretched afterwards, and then we headed for the KY State Fairgrounds and Exposition Center. Our passive solar architect, Gary Watrous, a man of some renown in his field, had invited us to the Home and Garden Show, which was occupying the South Wing of that enormous edifice.

It was fun to remember the time I sang there, back in 1972, as a back-up singer in the rock band, Wayne Young and Company. We performed at the Toys for Tots concert at Christmastime and the audience was 20,000 strong. What a great experience! Of course, the humongous speakers probably were the culprits in taking down my upper range hearing later in life, but feeling the love come back from all the people while we sang was worth it! I danced and sang my heart out, ducked a pass from a fellow singer by explaining that I was in it for the money, and had a great time. Of course there was a fly in the ointment – the venerable and witless Colonel Sanders, then alive, asked to meet me and in the process pinched my bottom. Yick! Talk about a dirty old man! We don’t eat at KFC, ever!

The home show was endless. Jim rented a wheelchair for me, as my little scooter is acting up and needs repair. It is like one of those bad grocery carts that keeps getting locked into going around in small circles. The wheelchair was a life-saver for me and Mick and I viewed seemingly endless displays of flooring, garden supplies, home insurance, furniture, kitchen designs, appliances, furnaces, generators, clothes and food and more. We collected a bagful of brochures, which was fine because one of the vendors was giving away plastic bags with his ad info printed on them. Two hours later we had seen it all and Jim rolled me to our car.

Well, eventually, we found the car! Those enormous parking lots for big venues like the Fairgrounds are notorious for eating cars and it took us a while, wandering back and forth in the hinterlands of blacktop, to find Stanley Outback. Fortunately we had a magic key and finally we heard Stanley’s answering chirp.

Traffic was atrocious and getting home was a project taking up the early evening, we’ll probably see news about an enormous pile-up on the expressway today. But the weather was fine and spring was in the air, so we put the windows down, turned on some music and grooved quite happily, getting off the expressway and into the maelstrom of heavy surface traffic, having a good conversation and outlasting the tangle of cars and tempers and endless red lights around us.

The evening was most pleasant and very quiet. We offered the Gaia Meditation and had a late supper while we watched a movie, The Guardian, with Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher. The movie was a “Top Gun” wannabee about the Coast Guard Rescue teams that attempt to retrieve hapless boaters from the briny deeps when their boats sink. It was a feel-good movie with excellent ensemble and production and a heartstrings-aweigh kind of story – an odd combination of almost mawkish sentiment and good, stout action.

And so to bed, after a sweet snuggle with the kitties.

2007-03-09

The day was streaming with sunshine after Morning Offering when Mick and I settled into the downstairs office to spend a morning working on our tax information. There are things which QuickBooks does not catch. If a taxpayer wants to capture information for use on Schedule A, the Itemized Deductions part of the tax forms, he must shag those balls himself. I began adding to our 2006 worksheet the information Pam had already gathered on our donations and “donations in kind”, like Goodwill boxes of clothes and old household effects. Jim took on the medical records.

By lunchtime Jim had chewed his way through all the medical file folders of receipts and insurance forms and we had the information we needed on medical mileage. Meanwhile I had gotten the charity donations and donations in kind done, including adding up all charity mileage from my car log. I did myself in on that, writing for part of the year with a red pen. Now I know why officials always ask for people to write on forms with black ink. The red color does not Xerox well at all. I must have spent 30 minutes writing in unreadable bits of that log copy for our tax preparer.

There is more tax info collection to do, and Gary promises that Monday morning, he will join me and Jim in ganging up on the rest of the work. Hopefully, that big push will get every I dotted and T crossed!

Pam was not able to continue her good work on the taxes as she had gotten another bookkeeping job, which she needed. However, it takes up every remaining hour in her work week. Hence the work by the house crew.

I came upstairs after lunch and stretching, intending to work on the book, but I promptly fell asleep in my chair, worn out by the morning’s work, during which I had been uncharacteristically vertical and running around from cabinet to labeler to folder to form in a merry dance. When I awoke from the inadvertent nap, it was almost five o’clock and I expected the call to bathe quite soon, so I decided to do some e-mail, to make use of what little time was left in the work day. I wrote a good bit of e-mail as follows:

The last two members of our Board had written in to give consent to the changes we wish to make. Now it is a matter of continuing to work on the document responding to the concern we had that a larger Board might mean a less wieldy Board. So we are structuring the Board as we enlarge it – or at least proposing to do so. Hopefully I can work on this document again tomorrow. I wrote both gentlemen to thank them and assured them that more was coming on this subject soon.

I responded to quite a few people who had written in on the article I wrote for UPI on the hospital experience. I really touched a nerve with that writing! So many have responded now that I think another article awaits the writing, on the concern people have about my illness and possible death. I certainly have no intention of dying soon! I have had poor health for my whole life, having come from the womb with many birth defects in my left eye and brain damage from the eye being turned into the third eye area of my brain, piercing the amygdale. I do feel quite fearless about death, for it will only mean that I have concluded my lessons and service here and am ready for new life, new lessons and new service.

Dana R and I corresponded on several different points. She is donating a good bit of her writing to L/L Research to archive and possibly reprint one day, plus some of her books. We are working through her various concerns now. Meanwhile, as we are both feeling a bit under the weather, we are sending each other encouraging words, prayers and angels. We share a tremendous love of Jesus the Christ, so we have a wonderful time praising His way, His truth and trying to live His life with Him, not that we have crosses or crucifixions to bear, but that we follow the way of peace, service and love with all our hearts.

Steve M had sent back Chapter Three of 101: The Choice, corrected for the second time, and I consolidated his comments, taking most of them to heart and enjoying them all, and finished with that Chapter for good, until the final read-through of course. I wrote to thank him after putting the Chapter to bed.

Donna N had written in concerning a case she was working on, a patient of teenage years and schizophrenic diagnosis who was convinced that she was possessed. Donna was at a loss as to how to help her. I made a couple of suggestions.

Melissa T wrote in and I spent a bit of time being a girlfriend. She is having a really hard time getting settled out west.

Ian and I communicated on a couple of different issues concerning A Book of Days and the web site.

Jim arrived home late, almost 6 PM, from gardening for one of his customers. He had cleaned up their sizeable estate of winter storm debris and had a heaping trailer-load of bags of leaves and bundles of sticks to join the stack of limbs he placed at their “curbside” – our little village has no actual kerbing – for garbage pick-up.

We enjoyed a refreshing whirlpool and a bite of supper before greeting Carmen, who, along with Romi, had been invited for Movie Night. Romi called at the last minute to beg off, but Carmen, Jim and I enjoyed Robin Williams winning the Presidency of the USA. Anything he is in is predictably going to be worth the watching, and we enjoyed it, although the depth of political commentary was like a very large wading pool. The movie reflected the entire nation’s growing concern about the present administration and articulated the array of concerns well, without ever going more than wading-pool deep in offering any sort of solution. He was, of course, immensely witty, and one always knows most of the riffs were not in any script. We are grateful for his gifts!

The University of Louisville had won a cliff-hanger of a game yesterday night – a game I mostly snoozed through - and that put them back at Madison Square Garden for an attempt to win the conference tourney. They, however, lost to Pittsburg in tonight’s game fair and square and will not be coming home with the conference title. March Madness begins in earnest this next week, as the play-offs of college b-ball start up, all 65 teams who make the cut being named soon.

I slept through a lot of this game as well, but Carmen and Jim enjoyed the game. We said good night to Carmen after offering a late Gaia Meditation, and went up for a kitty-cat snuggle before our own good nights were said around midnight.

2007-03-07 and 08

While the weather turned the corner and started springing into spring, I spent a couple of days mostly resting. I really hit a snag with drinking nothing but Boost. It would seem that for my gastro-intestinal tract, this is not a good idea. I finally capitulated at lunch today, and told Gary and Jim, “I give up. It is time for extreme measures.” Gary said, “You mean the hospital again?” I told him, “No, I mean White Castle cheeseburgers!” When my tummy is so unhappy that all seems hopeless, White Castle belly bombs always do the job for me. And so they did this time, clearing out enough gas to fly the Goodyear Blimp! However the remaining intestinal distress still laid me low, and I gratefully sought sleep for the remainder of the day. I am most grateful that sleep comes so easily right now, as a good rest almost always improves things.

I cannot figure out what is going on to cause me such gastric woe, but I am confident that it is not serious. A number of people who follow this Journal have written to ask after me, and I want to reassure everyone. Although I cannot say that I am well right now, I can definitely say that this is just another bobble in the continuum.

Some items were accomplished despite all! Gary B and I met again to work through some L/L matters. I managed to attend choir practice for the first time in weeks. Jim and I met with Gary W, the passive solar architect who is working on our house. He discovered that he had exceeded our budget by a couple of hundred THOUSAND dollars in designing the house. So it is back to the drawing board, to shrink the size of the place to what we can afford. I just hope we do not have to give up having a library and meditation space in the Avalon domicile.

I also finished my work writing on red-ray sexuality and began to work on red-ray survival, in Chapter Four of 101: The Choice. Little victories!

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day!

2007-03-06

Today, with its cold breezes and mostly overcast skies, was tough weather for working outside, as the thermometer hovered at 20 F, but after Morning Offering the intrepid Mick went off to garden for one of his customers while I spent the morning working on the “in case of our death” document. I have most of the new information Jim and I discussed written into this document now, but I lack finishing the last bit because Gary and I needed to consult. Hopefully I shall finish that document up on Thursday morning. I sent an e-mail to Gary asking for some insurance information to put in that document. We want it to be complete!

Jim arrived home to find Gary and I deep in a discussion of our opportunities for volunteers chart. We try to keep a current list of our volunteer needs on site for people to see. A good many of our volunteer efforts are already assigned to specific people and they do not need help in working on those projects. So we actually had fewer volunteer needs than I expected us to have.

Gary and I were not able, yet, to come to a conclusion as to how to present our donation needs. We have two sorts of needs: we need money to pay the staff and we need money to print projects when they are ready. I thought it might be good to have various ways available to donate – for the staff costs, for the overhead in general or for one of our projects. Gary suggests one “donations” button only. And it is true that when we have a new book ready, we do write a letter asking people t contribute to its printing cost. Gary probably has the right solution. We will revisit this on Saturday, when he works for L/L again.

Jim’s call to lunch ended Gary’s and my planning meeting, and I came down to enjoy my “Boost”. Yesterday I began a modified fast. I cannot really afford to go completely without sustenance, as I am already anemic and also take a lot of medicines – for seizures, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, hormone replacement, tummy, decongestant and anti-inflammatories. It is not a good idea to take all this prescription medication on an empty stomach. So I am having a Boost liquid supplement three times a day, plus a handful of trail mix each day, to keep my digestive system working on something solid. I hope to improve my health by resting my tummy and quieting down some of these GI symptoms which I am guessing are allergic.

After I have been on this diet for a couple of weeks, I will start adding foods back in and see what my body’s reactions are to each food. It is patient work, but worth doing, as the doctors do not have a clue as to how to help and I continue feeling poorly.

In the afternoon, I went back to work on Chapter Four of 101: The Choice. I removed some material from the red ray section that belongs in orange ray instead and created new text for the red ray section. Slowly this chapter is taking the shape it needs to take.

I worked until Mick came home from doing a slew of errands and ran our bath. After we enjoyed our bath, and came upstairs to my room for a very pleasant nap together, Jim and I came back downstairs to greet Romi, who was over for a visit. We had a good supper, watching Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert and then an episode of House before sitting for the Gaia Meditation, with Jim offering the ending prayer.

We enjoyed the kitties before saying good night at 11 PM.

2007-03-05

After Morning Offering, I had a planning session with Gary until lunch time, as we had several things to review, plus he had a slew of e-mail questions. Gary has put together the first draft of our next issue of the Gatherings Newsletter. He was also kind enough to send me a copy of the “in case of” document which had somehow gotten away from my records, after I had gotten it together in Nebraska and sent it out. I wish to work further on it.

After a most pleasant lunch with Mick and our stretching exercises, I worked on the red-ray sexuality portion of Chapter Four of 101: The Choice for the duration of the afternoon. I created three new pages for the beginning of that section. I think it is a good addition and I will look forward to working further tomorrow.

Several people wrote to thank me for the article on the hospital I wrote for UPI last week. One lady wanted me to send it to the hospitals. I wrote her to thank her and to say that I would fear to get the very kind nurses in trouble if I did so! It is not the nurses’ problem; it is the whole paradigm of how to treat patients which hospitals use.

Jim and I enjoyed our evening. Gary joined us for supper and the Gaia Meditation and then Jim and I came upstairs to cuddle with the kitties. Before bedtime we waxed amorous, a delightful romance, and said good night around 11 PM.

2007-03-04

I slept late on this Sabbath morning, getting up barely in time to write the Camelot Journal entry before Jim came back from checking St. Luke’s to be sure that none of the snow that had fallen here was sticking to their parking areas or walks. All was well there.

We had a quiet morning, with me doing puzzles and napping further while Jim cleaned the house, as is his Sunday habit. Ian had written with some good suggestions concerning Jim’s and my proposal to enlarge the Board of L/L Research and over lunch we worked together to resolve some of his very good questions and find some solutions. The challenge when enlarging a governing body is to enlarge it in a way where it is able to do business and not become paralyzed or polarized to the point where it cannot make decisions. We are addressing that concern.

I came upstairs after lunch to work on the “in case of our death” worksheets and found to my unhappy surprise that the version I sent out to the Board members had gone missing. I was left with two versions, neither of which is the finished version. So I spent the remaining time before the meeting reconstituting the document. I shall need to check tomorrow to be sure all is restored.

Carmen was our sole attendee today, since Romi is still visiting Dana R and Tom F had a swim event to attend on behalf of his grandson. We had intended to do a broadcast channeling session today, but Romi was absent, making that impossible. So we had a silent meditation instead. It was a good session! Afterwards, Jim handed around the Love Tea and we conversed until dinner time. Gary came back from his serving day at Cracker Barrel in time to share the meal.

Carmen spent quite a bit of time working as a volunteer today, finishing up the formatting on my poetry database and getting g a bare start on organizing Papa’s Archive. In my zeal to listen to each and every tape and CD, I have gotten his materials very mixed up. She will tackle the job of straightening the archive out. It is a wonderful resource of living history and well worth the work. And I feel unrepentant about messing the filing system up, as I can guarantee you I’ve listened to everything he’s ever sent – and through the years, the material has become massive.

Carmen, Jim and I shared the Gaia Meditation and then Carmen and I watched some TV while Jim called Mom McCarty and worked on his e-mail. Jim and I said good night to Carmen at 10 PM and to each other around midnight after a wonderful snuggle with the cats.

2007-03-02 and 3

Jim and I traveled from Nebraska back to Kentucky over these two days. The wind was howling and gusting almost the whole way, trying to blow Stanley Outback off the road, but other than that, our driving was unimpeded by any sort of weather-related difficulty. Snow spat around and past us both days frequently, but no accumulation occurred and we drove home without incident.

The clouds were outstanding on this trip! I lived for a few months in 1967 and 1968 in Burnaby, BC, and had a little cabin which overlooked Vancouver Bay. This continuously changing sky drama reminded me of the sweeping clouds over the Bay.

We chose to go a new route home, leaving I-80 at York, Nebraska, on the old Route 81, which goes south to Salina, Kansas, where it connects to I-70. We enjoyed seeing parts of Kansas which neither of us had seen before, rolling, female land, very fertile and much farmed. The energy of the area and its foothills were sweet and we liked the route far better than our usual one until we hit Kansas City’s traffic at rush hour. We must have lost a solid hour in slow-and-go driving. And so we arrived late at the hotel.

This will be our last stay at this particular hotel. The telephones did not work. The bathroom floor was soaking wet with a leak and remained so despite our mopping-up efforts. After Morning Offering, we found we could not order breakfast as the hotel had omitted their room service menu from our room’s supplies. It was discouraging. Next year, we shall try the casino down the road from Columbia, The Isle of Capri in Booneville, MO.

Arriving home after our second day of driving, we found the cats, the house and Gary in fine fettle. What a joy to light at last, sit in my own Mama chair, pat my very own kitties… and promptly fall asleep. Boy, was I tired! I remember little of the evening, except being awakened for the Gaia Meditation. We said good night at 11 PM.

2007-03-01

The local area dodged the continuing winter storm which is paralyzing Omaha and Lincoln. We had a divinely sunshiny day here. I wrote in the Camelot Journal and answered a bit of e-mail. Steve T and Gary B both wrote to OK Jim’s and my plans to hold a mid-year meeting of the Board and I wrote them to say thanks.

And it looks as though we have found our printer for A Book of Days: Blitzprint. Even though it is a POD printer and might be expected to charge more per copy than an orthodox printer, they beat Beechmont Press’s estimate handily. I wrote to Gary and Ian urging them to find out for sure about shipping costs and, if all was copaesthetic, to go ahead and put in our order.

Romi wrote to say that he would stay longer than he intended on his visit to Dana R, in Utah, so that we could not do a broadcast of our Sunday meeting’s channeling if we channel this next Sunday. He won’t return to Louisville until next Tuesday. So we re-set the channeling Sundays for March to be the 18th and the 25th. I wrote Gary to ask him to get in touch with Mark G, who has been driving up from the Nashville, TN, area for our meetings. I imagined he would rather wait until we channel to make that drive.

Lastly, I wrote Maureen at World Puja about a channeling she placed in her comments for March. It was eerily similar to material in my column for this week, on making poor circumstances better by realizing the glory of the present moment and all the help and guidance we have. I wrote to tell her so, and attached a copy of my column for her to look at and see the similarities. I love synchronicities!

Other than that small amount of work, today was a day of resting and enjoying Mom’s company. We went to the cemetery to put a white rose on Dad McCarty’s grave and started packing to leave tomorrow morning.

We enjoyed TV with Mom until quite late – David Letterman was holding forth when we finally admitted we were sleeping in our chairs. We wanted to give Mom the maximum amount of our time, since it was the last day we’re here! I know she appreciated that. We all sought our beds somewhat after midnight.

During Jim’s and my travels today, we were out past the cemetery on one of the county’s surveyed roads, which are often unpaved. The original surveyors surveyed out a grid of roads north-south and east-west at a one-mile hatch all along the railroad, which runs right through Lexington. These are access roads, rough and basic. I like driving them because the winter colors come through so cleanly away from civilization’s details. It is the peak of winter color around here, with the grays, browns and blacks of old stubbled grass, tree trunks and fields singing their song to my eyes. It is a kind of beauty that you see in old people’s faces, full of dignity and worth – my article’s themes for the past three weeks.

Imagine my surprise on seeing a large vehicle coming towards us on this unpaved road! It was large as a truck to see from far off. When we grew closer to it, we could see it was a tractor. And when we drew abreast of it, we could see that the farmer driving it was on the telephone! Civilization is everywhere these days.