2008-04-07

It was delightful weather, in the 70s F and sunny. After Morning Offering Jim set out on a busy round of cleaning, gardening and mowing for his customers that lasted till bath time. Melissa did town chores and worked at the computer while I read Barbara Brodsky’s excellent Brazil Journal and wrote her in response. The material was very synchronistic and I forwarded excerpts from various entries to several people who are working on similar issues. This took me the morning and part of the afternoon but it was worth the time to catch up with my old, old friend and co-channel, whose work continues to be superb.

For lunch, Mel and I went to Cheddar’s Restaurant for an Avalon Planning Session. She filled me in on the situation there. Due to her hard, hard work, using only a hand saw, she has felled trees for the mushroom project and limbed them as well. This weekend, Michael from the Law of One Community will visit Avalon, bringing with him 10,000 mushroom plugs with which to inoculate the trunks which Melissa has so lovingly prepared.

We have had a chain saw on our wish list for Avalon for some time, and Melissa even knows the model she wants, a “488”! But she feels that she wants to do the work on the mushroom logs by hand, so that she can invest them with the maximum amount of love and light. It makes far more work for her, but she feels strongly about it. She says when this mushroom project is up and running, she will go ahead and acquire the chain saw, as she wishes to cut wood for sale this summer. For that use, she will accept the less personal machine to help her cut.

She took the chickens into the outer room of the cabin during our recent storms. The water rose almost to the coop, but spared it by inches. However more storms are expected for three days straight, later this week, and so it is good to know that this technique works for the birds. She has just treated them all for lice, a springtime necessity. They continue to produce lots of eggs.

Tractor repair continues. Now that the battery is replaced, she has found that a solenoid is damaged beyond repair and also needs replacement. She will replace that. A tire specialist came out for a visit and repaired the tractor tire which had gone flat. He suggested that she either get a new rim or have him do a soft weld for a temporary repair, and she had him do the weld. It is frustrating her that before she can use the tractor she must keep repairing it, but such is life sometimes.

Now that all the culverts are extended out over the ravine so that the rain water run-off from them does not wash out our ravine’s bank on the access road approach, she has dug the areas that needed cleaning and says she’s ready for the next storm. We still are losing gravel, but she has dug a rain bar at the top of the steep slope where our access road begins and that is working.

She will have to wait until after this next round of rain to work on leveling the road more, since the tractor is too heavy for her to work on the road without the tractor making ruts. We have not had a chance to dry out much lately! I think we are 12” over the average yearly rainfall so far this year. I also think our average is changing. For the last few years we have seen repeated extremes like this. Hello, global warming!

Melissa's hope is to build a shelter for the mower before Mick brings it up to Avalon. She does not want any more equipment left out in the weather. She showed Mick and me plans to build a four-bay shelter, a pole barn at first. It looks well-planned and we gave her the go-ahead to acquire the materials.

We need to replace the exterior cabin doors. The present doors are made for interior use only and the weather has warped them, cracked them and finally split them. I suggested that she go to Joe Ley’s Salvage, which has a rich supply of good salvaged doors. We have only to find exterior doors of the measurements we want. We’ll do that next time.

Melissa also has plans to replace our two sets of kitchen faucets here at Camelot, which are failing slowly. We approved those plans as well, with many thanks. She will include a filtered water addition. We had a good water filter for several years, but it failed and it seems that any replacement like it would also fail, due to the way our piping system is set up under-sink. So this is a good substitute.

When we returned, Mel went back to her paperwork and research and I returned to Barbara’s journal and also wrote a few other e-mails, pecking away at the to-do list. I also spent some time adding to it, since I found a forgotten stash of old and unanswered letters lurking in the correspondence box I had taken to Nebraska early in March. Now the to-do list runs to two pages, even though I’ve been working on the list bit by bit.

I notified Ian of the change in my suggested donations for counseling and channeling, and he made the changes before the end of the day! He also has the announcement up that I will not be doing any counseling or private channeling sessions in June, July and August. Hopefully this will help me recover a better energy level. My physical energy has really dropped lately.

Rho M sent me a beautiful set of National geographic photos which included a spectacular close-up of a cheetah with its pride. It reminded me of Vara L-R, to whom I owe a letter, so I wrote her and sent her the photos.

At 5:00 I went outside and gardened for the first time in many months; perhaps more than a year. Interstitial cystitis defeated me when I last tried to garden. Every time I bent over to get a weed, I had to run to the bathroom. Medicine has gradually eased those symptoms and I was able to do a modest amount of work, taking excess ivy off Jim's beautiful waterfall by the front-yard fish pond.

After our bath, Mick and I had a lovely date and then came downstairs for dinner, conversation with Melissa and the Gaia Meditation. It was my turn to offer the closing prayer, but I distinguished myself by falling asleep and so Mick offered it instead.