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!