2007-05-23

After Morning Offering, I drank my green tea and did just a bit of e-mail, writing Vara L about Planet Light Worker’s use of my UPI articles and talking more with Romi about archiving my correspondence.

Then it was time to go to Indiana for the second time this week. Connie M and I wanted to get together for lunch and she lives over that way. We met at a Ruby Tuesday’s off exit 5 on I-65. Their menu offers a special burger which is delicious – not original, but good!

What was even better was seeing Connie. It has been nine months since she and I were together, a long time apart for us. Connie has often attended our meditation meetings ever since the early ‘90s. And I have missed her since last fall.

We spent a long, long lunch hour catching up. Connie took me through a sad soap opera which she had experienced during this time, as her mother became mentally more and more “off”, paranoid and cruel in her fear. Being a good daughter, Connie was very determined to see her mother through, but ultimately she herself began to become mentally unstable under the pressure of trying to keep up the family business while her mom got meaner in her senility. Finally Connie and her mom agreed to sell the business. Connie has moved away from her mom, closer to Louisville. And her mom, freed from the business and living alone, has become a nice person again. Go figure!

This does mean that Connie needs to find a job, as previously her bills were paid from the family business’s earnings. Fortunately she is a clinical psychologist, and it is a matter of choosing which job to take rather than looking for work, as the Louisville area professionals all know and love Connie’s work.

After reluctantly rising from the dinner table, we decided to prolong the afternoon together by shopping at a local Goodwill. I had a wonderful time fishing round amongst so many garments to find a few that were pretty on me. We used up the afternoon, and then I got in the middle of a traffic jam on the Kennedy Bridge coming home. It is a narrow bridge relative to the amount of traffic it must bear between Indiana and Kentucky, and someone had crashed across all the lanes of traffic going south and stopped the traffic behind them. It took me an hour to arrive back home, just in time to hang up my new clothes and have a bath with Mick.

Gary had been at the admin helm all day and has finally gotten caught up on the meganormous Inbox backlog he beheld when he got back from vacation. He does such a great job! We ironed out some more questions various people had sent in before Mick and I came upstairs to relax.

Democracy Now was most interesting tonight. Jeremy Scahill was interviewed. He has written a book about Blackwater which describes this company as representing itself as a kind of army of the USA. The representatives of this company overseas feel it acceptable to shoot and kill civilians as part of their duties in maintaining security.

I was tickled to hear that a little town where Blackwater wants to build yet another camp to train mercenaries has risen up and refused to allow that company to build within their township. That kind of proactive citizenship is just what is needed to indicate to powerful forces like Blackwater that America is not amused by this descent into Roman Empire-like behavior.

We came downstairs and joined Gary for Jon Stewart and the Colbert Rapport, supper and the Gaia Meditation. I settled into some reading on Tom Wicker’s amazingly long political saga while Mick caught up his e-mail. Then Gary, Mick and I sat down and talked through next weekend.

It will be a crowded time, and an excellent one. Steve E will arrive Friday evening for a weekend of discussion on launching bring4th. He has a ton of good ideas and the ability to do all the technical things needed for running a web site. We will discuss both concepts and technical stuff. The concepts will come first, then the ‘imagineering’.

We also will have our very last meditation meeting for the season, a silent meditation this next week. We decided to make a party after the meditation is over. Gary will man the grill and we'll have corn on the cob, baked potatoes and a big salad in addition to whatever dishes the others bring for pot-luck. it should be perfect weather as we are in draught. Jim's watering mornings and evenings to keep our plantings healthy.

Jim and I bade Gary good night at 10 PM and snuggled with the cats until 11PM before our own lights-out.