this summer, i have been reading books written for kids. i know a lot of you read Harry Potter, so you know what a joy that can be. Why do i feel so embarrassed about it?

i've been reading the Twilight Saga, which is very fun. vampires versus werewolves in a small town high school. The last book i got in the series actually came with iron-on transfers. lol. the final book comes out next saturday, and i am looking forward to it. B^D

it's ok to put aside grown-up things, right? for a short bit of entertainment?

i'm disappointed in myself that i've fallen victim to the idea that every-moment-not-spent-productively - is-a-moment-wasted. but i do feel guilty that my reading isn't teaching me anything. and i feel guilty for feeling guilty. aargh.

"man wasn't created for the sabbath, the sabbath was created for man." (and womyn.)

...

throughout my life, i've wanted to write children's books. i have high respect for the medium.
when i was younger, i actually tried. ... i miss a few of my characters: i had a character that was a blue tropical bird (for very young kids) and a character that was an angry teenage boy (for older kids).

i stopped writing when I started taking all these ms meds. i now have trouble accessing my creativity. i stare at paper a lot, and doodle. eventually, i guess i just gave up. ... i should try again, i guess, now that my meds take somewhat less of a toll on me. maybe this is where the guilt i feel reading books-for-kids comes from? a subconscious reminder that i could be writing?

hrmm... i'll have to think about that.

...

thanks for helping me work through that little bit of free psychotherapy! i feel better already! lol
peace, smh

( Some Things That Happened In My Life While Skookie Was With Me )

The point is that a lot has changed in my life... i don't quite know how to be without her.
I want to be angry with someone, but there's no one to blame.
If someone gave me Cubs tickets, I wouldn't yell at them when the game ended. Whether we won or lost, it was still fun to be at the park.

It's just weird sitting here alone. Eating ice cream - the whole bowl all to myself. It's not as fun as I used to imagine. That's all.

It also occurs to me that for the first time since I was 10, I have no living responsibilities. No one relies on me to feed them. If there's a fire or tornado, I can just leave.
How weird is that?!?

We hates it.

( Some Things I Miss About Skookie (for starters) )

Her death isn't my punishment any more than her birth was my reward.
She was a good girl.

It's ok to be sad.

Good news!
When I was walking to the elevators in the hospital, I ran into my Dad coming out.
He was getting his car to drive Grandpa home! They've released him!
So now I'm at Dad's waiting for Dad and Grandpa to arrive.
Yay!

Hi Y'all.

I just got home from my Dad's.
I didn't see my Grandpa, like I normally do on Thursdays. Dad didn't get home from the hospital until 9pm.

Grandpa had skin cancer on his nose. Basil Cell Carcinoma. or something like that. The slowest-growing, safest form of cancer. His surgery went well. Everything's fine. It all went as planned.
Except that he woke up in quite a bit of pain. His nose doesn't hurt, it's the part of his forehead from which they took the skin (to graft over the part of the nose that had to be removed) that bothers him.
They decided when they'd given him all the pain pills they could, and it still hurt him, to keep him overnight on a morphine drip.

Dad's going back to Lutheran General in the morning to find out how he is. I guess on all these meds, he needs someone with him. The nursing staff can keep an eye on him through the night.
Dad says he (grandpa) is pretty miserable when he's awake, but otherwise he's completely healthy.
So that's good news - outside of the pain, which is temporary.

Dad will call me in the morning as soon as he learns anything.
I told him that I'm available to come up and help if I'm needed.

And I'll stay with him while Dad's picking T & V up at the airport in the evening.
I don't yet know if that'll be at the hospital or at Dad's house or in Grandpa's apartment.

I'll let you all know whatever I learn when I learn it.

Please pray for Grandpa to get a good night's sleep and wake up in less pain.
Thanks.

Good night.
That's Grandpa on the right. :)

In my disappointment over the past week's United Methodist General Conference proceedings, and as I recover from a busy weekend before it, I've taken refuge in fiction.
This page seems particularly relevant. Page 83 of Merrick by Anne Rice.

...

Context:
David and Louis are vampires. In life Louis was a pre-civil war Catholic plantation owner (& slave holder) in french-speaking New Orleans. In life David was a 19th century brittish scholar, and a Candomble priest in Brazil, a devotée of the Orisha [deity] Oxalá. So they both, in their own ways, have come to know enormous respect for Voodoo.
A few centuries ago, Louis lost a dear friend/daughter vampire named Claudia. She was murdered. He avenged the murder. This is the first novel in the series.
But lately he's heard stories of her ghost haunting other vampires - never him - and he's afraid that she's been unable to find her way to God.
He's asked David to seek help from a Voodooiene witch named Merrick, a living woman, and a former lover of David's, to invoke Claudia's spirit, and if necessary, show her the way to the proverbial 'white light.' The hope is that Claudia can't be raised because she's already in 'heaven'. David asked, and Merrick didn't say no. But she did cast a warning spell to show David that magic is nothing to be trifled with.

Quote: (the I is David, the other is Louis)
"What I do know is that I want desperately for Merrick Mayfair to try to raise Claudia's spirit, and I'm prepared for whatever might come."
"You think you're prepared," I added hastily, perhaps unfairly.
"Oh, I know. The spell tonight has shaken you."
"You can't imagine," I said.
"Very well, I admit it. I can't imagine. But tell me this. You speak of a realm beyond the earth and that Merrick is magical when she reaches for it. But why does it involve blood? Surely her spells will involve blood." He went on, a little angrily. "Voodoo almost always involves blood," he averred. "You speak of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as magical, and I understand you, because if the Bread and Wine are transformed into the Holy Sacrifice of the Crucifixion, it is magical, but why does it involve blood? We are earthly beings, yes, but a small component of us is magical, and why does that component demand blood?"
He became quite heated as he finished, his eyes fixing on me severely almost, though I knew his emotions had little to do with me.
"What I'm saying is, we might compare the rituals the world over in all religions and all systems of magic, forever, but they always involve blood. Why? Of course I know that human beings can not live without blood; I know that 'the blood is the life' saith Dracula; I know that humankind speaks in cries and whispers of blood-drenched altars, of bloodshed and blood kin, and blood will have blood, and those of the finest blood. But why? What is the quintessential connection that binds all such wisdom or superstition? And above all, why does God want blood?"
I was taken aback. Surely I wasn't going to hazard a hasty answer. And I didn't have one, besides.

I went to lunch with my father and grandfather this afternoon.
When we came out of the restaurant, this cool car was parked next to ours.
I assume--based on the plate--that it's a 1930 Model A.
B->



( more details )

Here's a blog worth reading...



...

I woke up at 1pm today--just because it was time to be awake. :)
It seems like years since that's happened... I feel really good!
Yay me!

I received this today from the group (sangha) in Madison that I used to sit with...

For those who, like me, have a heartfelt interest in this horrible situation in Tibet, I thought you might like HHDL’s actual words re how he practices tonglen, especially around the issue of Chinese government.

“I use meditation technique called giving and taking,” the Dalai Lama explained. “I make visualization: send my positive emotions like happiness, affection to others. Then another visualization. I visualize receiving their sufferings, their negative emotions. I do this every day. I pay special attention to the Chinese — especially those doing terrible things to the Tibetans. So, as I meditate, I breathe in all their poisons — hatred, fear, cruelty. Then I breathe out. And I let all the good things come out, things like compassion, forgiveness. I take inside my body all these bad things. Then I replace poisons with fresh air. Giving and taking. I take care not to blame — I don’t blame the Chinese, and I don’t blame myself.” Source: The Wisdom of Forgiveness

...

I just had a long conversation with a Tibetan expatriate in Boulder who told me the following anecdotal information currently circulating in their community:

* families living in Tibet have been asking their relatives NOT to try and contact them as these attempts are monitored by the Chinese and can result in unpleasant visits by the TAR police and Chinese Army
* each family unit has ‘political affairs officer’ assigned to it to monitor for any “aberrant behavior.”
* untold thousands of Tibetans have been arrested and, it is assumed, tortured. They are being forced to sign confessions of guilt in the ongoing civil unrest which is still sweeping the country.
* a conservative estimate of the number of Tibetans who have lost their lives since the beginning of the unrest said to be “about 10,000.”

I pass this information along to you all because I believe it to be reasonably accurate, although, with the Chinese Black Bubble firmly ensconced over the Tibetan Autonomous Region, independent verification is virtually impossible.

...

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always."
- Mahatma Gandhi

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=28AD1887A6EB2B38

There are supposed to be 14 cool videos here - showing trains, singing about trains, just being cool. Some soul, some country, some rock, a few i don't know how to name. (Name boxes are silly anyway.)

I find trains the ultimate expression of American Freedom. Real, uncensored, proletariat, freedom. I find hobos to be romantic... and i don't think they killed JFK. I could probably write for hours about the awesome-ness of the American Railroads.

But other more-creative types have already done a pretty good job.

I wanted to show them to you. I will keep trying.

In the meantime, i hope you get more than a white box here.

Note: You have to disable *Auto-Formatting* to get rid of the white box. Also, some of the posters of the videos in my playlist have disabled embedding, so they don't appear here.

I highly recommend RolnThundr. You can view his channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/RolnThundr. But I would skip the Positivity bit and go straight to his good stuff. :)

This is gutsy. I love Björk anyway. But now I'm very impressed.

http://chinaview.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/china-to-crack-down-on-performers-after-icelandic-singer-bjork-shouted-tibet/
http://bjork.com/news/?id=779;year=2008

2008-03-04 Statement
i have been asked by many for a statement after dedicating my song "declare independence" to both kosovo and tibet ( amongst others ) on different occasions.

i would like to put importance on that i am not a politician, i am first and last a musician and as such i feel my duty to try to express the whole range of human emotions. the urge for declaring independence is just one of them but an important one that we all feel at some times in our lives. this song was written more with the personal in mind but the fact that it has translated to its broadest meaning, the struggle of a suppressed nation, gives me much pleasure .
i would like to wish all individuals and nations good luck in their battle for independence.
justice !
warmth , björk.

I'm really very terrifically upset about what's happening to the folks in Tibet.

I'm also unhappy about the fact that the Chicago action in support of the Tibetan people is tomorrow, and I'm booked all day.

Health care and employment get in the way of activism... i feel like I'm letting the world down. I know I'm just one person, but I truly believe the Margaret Mead quote: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. This is an issue I don't want to see fail. The Dalai Lama is working so hard to find a peaceful solution! My first ever political march was with Students for a Free Tibet and the Monks of Deer Park outside Madison, Wisconsin. There are many Tibetan refugees in Madison.

Anyway, here's the info:
"The march will start at Water Tower Place (Chicago/Michigan Ave) at 10:30 am and proceed with a walk through downtown Chicago to China's Consulate (100 West Erie). The protest will continue at the Chinese Consulate and will end at 5:00 PM."

If you are in Chicago and can go, please do! If you're somewhere else, I'll bet there's something you can do, too...

Background Information - in no particular order:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/mar/17/dalai.lama
http://studentsforafreetibet.org/
http://www.bpf.org/html/resources_and_links/statements/statements/tibet_08.html
http://www.savetibet.org/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/17/tibet.china1

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

I had no idea they did this! You can read the entire book online for free.


I loved this book the first time I read it, and haven't been able to find it since I moved last August. [Yes, I've been looking.] And now, here it is!

I hope you like it as much as I do... You'll never look at a stranger the same way again. :)



http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/02/nature-of-free.html

Which Epic Poet Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as John Milton You are John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. A devout Puritan, you sought to re-orient the epic tradition in more radically Christian terms. You see the completion of true epic in English as the arrival of that language in the company of great languages. John Milton 80% Dante Alighieri 70% P. Vergilius Maro 65% Torqauto Tasso 55% Homer 30%

My wish lists at List Ideas

My sister-in-law sent out her holiday gift wish list, and i thought it was pretty cool.
Anyway, here's mine. I don't expect y'all 2 get me anything, don't worry.
I just think it's a clever way to, well, ask for stuff.
cq2m [chuckle quietly to myself]

Happy Holidays!

Love,
Me

It's been oh... 44 weeks I’m told, since my last post. Sorry about that! I am still alive.

...

I took the week off from work - to unpack and get moved in. I made some progress, but there's still MUCH to do.

...

We joined a group: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction for Couples dealing with MS. It's self-acknowledged paradox is that people that are stressed out don't have 45-90 minutes a day to practice. But it does seem to help. My jaw is loose enough again that i can close my mouth all the way to chew! yay!
http://www.mbsrchicago.org/Home.html

...

Sunday is World Communion Sunday. My church is joining with other local churches to celebrate in the Elks Lodge in Des Plaines. Very strange. Maybe it will be good, who knows? I'll be playing my bass in The Branches - our church band. And Jeanette, our 90+ year old organist, is gonna rock out with us! She's awesome! :)

...

WXRT releases a live album every year. ON XRT #10 is out now, and the proceeds go to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society! :)
http://www.93xrt.com/ONXRT-10/963511
http://www.msillinois.org/site/PageServer?pagename=msgsite_homepage

...

The Cubs had a great 2nd half of the year! They're in the post-season! Yay! Well done, boys! How about that Geovany Soto? A rookie catcher w/a post-season homer! :) I'm officially #66,028 on the season ticket waiting list for the 2008 season. sigh. chuckle.


...

Amnesty International's taking on Gitmo. www.tearitdown.org
I heartily endorse AI.

64646

...

I'll try to keep in touch. Cheers! -smh

Read these first:
http://fishonthesand.livejournal.com/5960.html
http://fishonthesand.livejournal.com/6333.html

Felix was a beautiful child. Carmody people, who stayed at home, thought so; and old Abel Blair, who had roamed afar in many lands, thought so; and even the Rev. Stephen Leonard, who taught, and tried to believe, that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain, thought so.

He was a slight lad, with sloping shoulders, a slim brown neck, and a head set on it straight across his brow and falling over his ears, after some caprice of Janet Andrews, the minister's house-keeper, was a glossy blue-black. The skin of his face and hands was like ivory; his eyes were large and beautifully tinted -- gray, with dilating pupils; his features had the outlines of a cameo. Carmody mothers considered him delicate, and had long foretold that the minister would never bring him up; but old Abel pulled his grizzled moustache when he heard such forebodings and smiled.

"Felix Moore will live," he said positively, "You can't kill that kind until their work is done. He's got a work to do -- if the minister'll let him do it. And if the minister don't let him do it, then I wouldn't be in that minister's shoes when he comes to judgment -- no, I'd rather be in my own. It's an awful thing to cross the purposes of the Almighty, either in your own life or anybody else's. Sometimes I think it's what's meant by the unpardonable sin -- ay, that I do!"

Carmody people never asked what old Able meant. They had long ago given up such vain questioning. When a man had lived as old Abel had lived for the greater part of his life, was it any wonder he said crazy things? And as for hinting that Mr. Leonard, a man who was really almost too good to live, was guilty of any sin, much less an unpardonable one -- well, there now! what use was it to be taking any account of old Abel's queer speeches? Though, to be sure, there was no great harm in a fiddle, and maybe Mr. Leonard was a mite too strict that way with the child. But then, could you wonder at it? There was his father, you see.

Felix finally lowered the violin, and came back to old Abel's kitchen with a long sigh. Old Abel smiled drearily at him -- the smile of a man who has been in the hands of the tormentors.

"It's awful the way you play -- it's awful," he said with a shudder. "I never heard anything like it -- and you that never had any teaching since you were nine years old, and not much practice, except what you could get here now and then on my old, battered fiddle. And to think you make it up yourself as you go along! I suppose your grandfather would never hear to your studying music -- would he now?"

Felix shook his head.

"I know he wouldn't, Abel. He wants me to be a minister. Ministers are good things to be, but I'm afraid I can't be a minister."

"Not a pulpit minister. There's different kinds of ministers, and each must talk to men in his own tongue if he's going to do 'em any real good," said old Abel meditatively. "Your tongue is music. Strange that your grandfather can't see that for himself, and him such a broad-minded man! He's the only minister I ever had much use for. He's God's own if ever a man was. And he loves you -- yes, sir, he loves you like the apple of his eye."

"And I love him," said Felix warmly. "I love him so much that I'll even try to be a minister for his sake, though I don't want to be."

"What do you want to be?"

"A great violinist," answered the child, his ivory-hued face suddenly warming into living rose. "I want to play to thousands -- and see their eyes look as yours do when I play. Sometimes your eyes frighten me, but oh, it's a splendid fright! If I had father's violin I could do better. I remember that he once said it had a soul that was doing purgatory for its sins when it had lived on earth. I don't know what he meant, but it did seem to me that his violin was alive. He taught me to play on it as soon as I was big enough to hold it."

"Did you love your father?" asked old Abel, with a keen look.

Again Felix crimsoned; but he looked straightly and steadily into his old friend's face.

"No," he said, "I didn't; but," he added, gravely and deliberately, "I don't think you should have asked me such a question."

It was old Abel's turn to blush. Carmody people would not have believed he could blush; and perhaps no living being could have called that deepening hue into his weather-beaten cheek save only this grey-eyed child of the rebuking face.

"No, I guess I shouldn't," he said. "But I'm always making mistakes. I've never made anything else. That's why I'm nothing more than 'Old Abel' to the Carmody people. Nobody but you and your grandfather ever calls me 'Mr. Blair.' Yet William Blair at the store up there, rich and respected as he is, wasn't half as clever a man as I was when we started in life: you mayn't believe that, but it's true. And the worst of it is, young Felix, that most of the time I don't care whether I'm Mr. Blair or old Abel. Only when you play I care. It makes me feel just as a look I saw in a little girl's eyes some years ago made me feel. Her name was Anne Shirley and she lived with the Cuthberts down at Avonlea. We got into a conversation at Blair's store. She could talk a blue streak to anyone, that girl could. I happened to say something that it didn't matter to a battered old hulk of sixty odd like me. She looked at me with her big, innocent eyes, a little reproachful like, as if I'd said something awful heretical. 'Don't you think, Mr. Blair,' she says, 'that the older we get the more things ought to matter to to us?' -- as grave as if she'd been a hundred instead eleven. 'Things matter so much to me now,' she says, clasping her hands thisaway, 'and I'm sure that when I'm sixty they'll matter just five times as much to me.' Well, the way she looked and the way she spoke made me feel downright ashamed of myself because things had stopped mattering with me. But never mind all that. My miserable old feelings don't count for much. What come of your father's fiddle?"

"Grandfather took it away when I came here. I think he burned it. And I long for it so often."

"Well, you've always go my old brown fiddle to come to when you must."

"Yes, I know. And I'm glad for that. But I'm hungry for a violin all the time. And I only come here when the hunger gets too much to bear. I feel as if I oughtn't to come even then -- I'm always saying I won't do it again, because I know grandfather wouldn't like it if he knew."

"He has never forbidden it, has he?"

"No, but that is because he doesn't know I come here for that. He never thinks of such a thing. I feel sure he would forbid it, if he knew. And that makes me very wretched. And yet I have to come. Mr. Blair, do you know why grandfather can't bear to have me play on the violin? He loves music, and he doesn't mind my playing on the organ, if I don't neglect other things. I can't understand it, can you?"

"I have a pretty good idea, but I can't tell you. It isn't my secret. Maybe he'll tell you himself some day. But, mark you, young Felix, he has got good reasons for it all. Knowing what I know, I can't blame him over much, though I think he's mistaken. Come now, play something more for me before you go -- something that's bright and happy this time, so as to leave me with a good taste in my mouth. That last thing you played took me straight to heaven, -- but heaven's awful near to hell, and at the last you tipped me in."

"I don't understand you," said Felix, drawing his fine, narrow black brows together in a perplexed frown.

"No -- and I wouldn't want you to. You couldn't understand unless you was an old man who had it in him once to do something and be a man, and just went and made himself a devilish fool. But there must be something in you that understands things -- all kinds of things -- or you couldn't put it all into music the way you do. How do you do it? How in -- how do you do it, young Felix?"

"I don't know. But I play differently to different people. I don't know how that is. When I'm alone with you I have to play one way; and when Janet comes over here to listen I feel quite another way -- not so thrilling, but happier and lonelier. And that day when Jessie Blair was here listening I felt as if I wanted to laugh and sing -- as if the violin wanted to laugh and sing all the time."

The strange, golden gleam flashed through old Abel's sunken eyes.

"God," he muttered under his breath, "I believe the boy can get into other folk's souls somehow, and play out what his soul sees there."

"What's that you say?" inquired Felix, petting his fiddle.

"Nothing -- never mind -- go on. Something lively now, young Felix. Stop probing into my soul, where you haven't no business to be, you infant, and play me something out of your own -- something sweet and happy and pure."

"I'll play the way I feel on sunshiny mornings, when the birds are singing and I forget I have to be a minister," said Felix simply.

****
I'll add more tomorrow. I'm off to go hear about the Death Penalty in Texas. Adios! - smh -

By L.M. Montgomery
(c) 1912 By L.C. Page & Company - Entered @ Stationers' Hall, London. Printed in the United States of America By The Berwick & Smith Co. Pages: 78 - 115


The honey-tinted autumn sunshine was falling thickly over the crimson and amber maples around old Abel Blair's door. There was only one outer door in old Abel's house, and it almost always stood wide open. A little black dog, with one ear missing and a lame forepaw, almost always slept on the worn red sandstone slab which served old Abel for a doorstep; and on the still more worn sill above it a large gray cat almost always slept. Just inside the door, on a bandy-legged chair of elder days, old Abel almost always sat.

He was sitting there this afternoon -- a little od man, sadly twisted with rheumatism; his head was abnormally large, thatched with long, wiry black hair; his face was heavily lined and swarthily sunburned; his eyes were deep-set and black, with occasional peculiar golden flashes in them. A strange looking man was old Abel Blair; and as strange was he as he looked, Lower Carmody people would have told you.

Old Abel was almost always sober in these, his later years. He was sober today. He liked to bask in that ripe sunlight as well as his dog and cat did; and in such baskings he almost always looked out of his doorway at the far, fine blue sky over the tops of the crowding maples. But today he was not looking at the sky; instead, he was staring at the black, dusty rafters of his kitchen, where hung dried meats and strings of onions and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins.

But old Abel saw not these things; his face was the face of a man who beholds visions, compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain, for old Abel was seeing what he might have been -- and what he was; as he always did when Felix Moore played to him on the violin. And the awful joy of dreaming that he was young again, with unspoiled life before him, was so great and compelling that it counterbalanced the agony in the realization of a dishonoured old age, following years in which he had squandered the wealth of his soul in ways where Wisdom lifted not her voice.

Felix Moore was standing opposite to him, before an untidy stove, where the noon fire had died down into pallid, scattered ashes. Under his chin he held old Abel's brown, battered fiddle; his eyes, too, were fixed on the ceiling; and he, too, saw things not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music; and of all music, only that given forth by the anguished, enraptured spirit of the violin. And yet this Felix was little more than twelve years old, and his face was still the face of a child who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse. Only in his large, gray-black eyes was there something not of the child -- something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts, now ashes, which had aforetime grieved and joyed, and struggled and failed, and succeeded and grovelled. The inarticulate cries of their longings had passed into this child's soul, and transmuted themselves into the expression of his music.

Isn't that a fantastic intro to a story? 
"he, too, saw things not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music."
I love that. 

More to come after I eat something. :) -smh-

Hi Y'all! I'm in bullet point mode today:

I'm in Dallas, visiting my Mother and Brother and Sister-in-law for Thanksgiving. Both Mom and Tom are sick [8-p] but both managed to go to work today. [8-)]

I'm going to hear Rick Halperin speak on the Death Penalty tonight at SMU -- Rick is the chair of Amnesty International -- so that will be both exciting and depressing, I'm sure.

I started a group room at snapfish - i'm hoping for bizarre, funky or otherwise fun [PG] photos. Feel free to join up and post! Be creative! I know you can do it!
address: http://sarah-sees-something-fun.snapfish.com
room code: santo10

My mother has sirius radio. I'm hooked! Especially Sirius 30 - the Coffeehouse, but there are a ton of other channels i dig. I hate to be a commercial, but I'm stoked that there's an internet version for $15 / month. Has anyone tried it? [My mom has the full satellite dish version.] Is the limited version still worth it?

My mom returned to me some really old books - Nancy Drew and Anne of Green Gables. One of the books - by Lucy Maude Montgomery is a collection of short stories called Chronicles of Avonlea. Anne herself only makes cameo appearances. I really dig it. So much, in fact that i think i'm gonna post one of the stories. It was copyrighted in 1912, so it's public domain now, right?

Um, it's kinda long, so I might type it in installments. I can play like i'm the Saturday Evening Post! or something.
Anyway, remember that it's from a long time ago... And Mary Magdalene hadn't yet been redeemed in the eyes of pop culture. Some of it's old fashioned. But I was able to get past it -- the obvious moral is worth the telling. [8-D]

It's called EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE. I'm not going to put a "[sic]" in all the gender-exclusive etc. places, just know that i'm aware of the non-pc bits.

Peace and love...

After all the recent political rhetoric and hype, i found a graphic that gives me what I was looking for.
It's a silhouette of the continental 48, with the text, "Enjoy Responsibly."

Happy Veteran's Day.

-smh-