AW: Morning Pages 2024: No.5

I can hear the rail yard down the street. They seem particularly loud this morning as they are pushing cars around with those big engines. My eldest son loves those engines and he got really upset when he read that they were going to be getting replaced with more modern ones. The engines are a bit over 60 years old and getting worn out. But just about the whole town is up in arms over this and the company is receiving a lot of angry mail. I'm hoping that they can donate one of the engines to the transportation museum up by the city and keep one for the annual leaf peeper train.

The last leaf peeper train was in autumn of 2019 and it was a big hit. We're hoping that they'll resume running it this year. The kids had an awesome time riding the train. I watched them board with their father and uncle. There wasn't room for me and my social phobia was already making me feel claustrophobic just standing with the people taking pictures.

Morning (somewhere) Pages 2024: No. 4

 I apologize for forgetting to write in here. I have been struggling with sleep issues (to the point that I now use a CPAP machine). It isn't resolved yet and as a result, it is messing with my memory and my ability to focus. As of right now it is 8:41 pm, so it isn't morning when I'm writing this. To say the least I am some what embarrassed and disappointed with myself. My health isn't doing too great and that's having a negative impact on everything. I can't just force myself to stay awake and work on things when my blood sugar is over 170. I'm working with my doctor and trying very hard to fix my eating habits so that I don't have that happen as often as it has been.

I try not to be ashamed of being ill. It's really hard because my parents stupidly treated all illness as a moral failing. Or I was accused of being a hypochondriac. Imagine that, a six year old kid with pink eye being accused of faking it for attention. That's just how they were and this is why we are not in contact with them. I don't know if they've changed but I don't rightly care.

I still have several minutes left on the timer and no ideas on what to add. I'll do my best to get cracking on this work and hopefully you will have more uplifting content to enjoy.

First attempt highlights: AW: Reading Notes - Spiritual Electricity and the Basic Tools.

 This really is all that I wrote regarding my notes on this book. Then 2019 turned into chaos which continue into today.

AW: Reading Notes 1

I will be revisiting the two chapters discussed in this post in the coming weeks.

Morning Pages 2024: No. 3

I have come to the conclusion that my prompt box is pretty lame. It has questions in there that don't apply to me. It has prompts on topics that I can't really talk about. I mean, 'what's your favorite television show?' doesn't work when you don't watch television. The closest I get to that is listening to NPR's news podcast on Spotify. Which now has advertisements, much to my annoyance. The rest of the time I am listening to neoclassical, electronica, medieval folk, medieval, and renaissance music. I suppose it is time to hunt down more prompts for the box. The last time I added any was in 2016.

2016 was a bad year for me. I was hospitalized for a major depressive episode. Almost ten years later, bit and pieces of what happened during that year come to mind at random times. Otherwise it is a gaping hole in my memory. I was talking with my Auntie A. about that year and she told me that before the depressive episode hit, I had a major trauma memory nail me between the eyes. I was saddened but it made sense.

Morning Pages 2024: No. 2

Every time I try to do this digitally, it's truly difficult to write these pages every morning. The household is chaos and then I am exhausted and I take a nap. It's just not right but here we are. Looking at my keyboard, some industrious and tiny spider spun a web between the J and the U keys last night. That was weird. But weird things happen  here. As a devotee of the Norse god of mischief, I get my very own weirdness magnet strapped to my butt. I get exasperated with the Marvel franchise distorting the relationships between the deities of the Norse pantheon. There's enough drama and wtf in the old stories, you don't need to change the relationships. You can just write new stories keeping the deities and spirits in the same relationships. 

Indeed, by exploring these relationships, one may find that the new stories discourage extremist parties from absorbing cultural symbols as part of their identity. Among the heathen subculture, there are a large number of people who are getting angry with things like the runes being appropriated. There's a subtle fight going on between heathens and neo-Nazis (and their supporters) over the runes. The general reaction to the failed self-coup on Jan. 6 was horror, embarrassment, and fury at the sight of the Q-Shaman's enormous Mjollnir inked onto his side. The same was for the tiki-torch march in Charleston (if I recall it rightly) where there were people in the white-supremacist crowd carrying badly made 'viking shields' with runes on them.

If you are looking for the people who'd be willing to throw down with these people, that would be the heathens. The community is actively rooting out, shunning, and passing around lists of who in the community fall along theses lines. Change is happening in a slow fashion right now but it's beginning to speed up as more heathens get on board with this idea of drop kicking the fascists out. 

Morning Pages 2024: No. 1

 So, I have decided to do the Morning Pages exercise as a timed writing thing. I have a sand timer that takes ten minutes to do its thing. I like it. It helps me stay organized and focused. I also enjoy the look of it because the sand is pink. I admit, my two favorite colors are pink and black. Most shades of pink, I like. But it is that bright, neon pink that I love. I don't really know what about it I love so much. It could be that it's a shade of pink that isn't found in nature. It could be that it is a color I associate with happiness and joy. It could be a lot of things, and I guess that is ok.

I forgot my eyeglasses in the other room. I'm squinting at the screen right now and debating enlarging the font so it is easier to read. I tell you, Friend, getting older just isn't much fun now. Birthdays turn into regular days of the week. Health starts going down hill. And, if you're lucky, you may be losing your hair like me. Sounds odd, but I am losing my hair. I've gone salt and pepper grey, with streaks of white. I have a buzzcut to hide where my hair is thinning and falling out. It's not fun, at all.

Sorry that I am a week late. Life caught up with me.

 Dear Reader,

My schedule has been a mess since I was sick a few months back. I'm trying to fix it but I'm having problems sleeping which just makes things worse. Sleep deprivation is not your friend. Books are still in a holding pattern because this week has been full of appointments for various family members and I'm cleaning up a disaster. You know how they say if Mom gets sick, the whole house will go to pot. For a long time, I just thought it was an expression. Then I had pneumonia for two months and it happened.

I do have one thing to report, I'm making slow progress on all this knitting and crochet I am doing to make presents for people. If I'm lucky, I will have things finished by the holidays. I feel a bit guilty that I knit so slowly, my son's sweater has been on the needles for two and a half years. Fortunately, I have the back third partly done. Now I just have to knit 24/7 to finish it. It's a WWI pattern from the Red Cross that I found on the Smithsonian's website. I thought 'oh, this looks easy enough.' and then my son saw it and declared that was exactly what he wanted me to make for him. Looks are deceiving and it is clear that my son has inherited his father's patience of death on this front.

I would post more, but I have knitting to do and coffee to drink so I can stay awake. Tomorrow, I will do my best to come up with something more directly related to this blog and not so boringly domestic.