Why is it I wake with Shriekback in my head? Don't answer that question because I don't think I want to know the answer. We made it back home safe and sound NO thanks to mad drivers out there all going off to ski some place during carnival week. Holy crap guys learn to bloody drive.

Was so glad to pull into our driveway and get home. Home to a nice quiet bedroom with no train announcements or trains rattling by, now I love trains but I don't want to sleep on top of the train station ever again.

Am getting old, I like my peace and quiet. I like my bath tub and my own bed. I can't sleep any where any more. Although to be honest I don't think I have slept well since I was working as a nanny. With the exception of being on the boats. I slept very well when I was working as deck hand / cook on board various tall ships and sail boats.

My SC therapist says I grind my teeth when I sleep and that is what gives me headaches.I have headaches all the time...asprin is my best friend.... that I actually never relax and he's right. I probably won't relax until I am dead. Scary thought really.

Aside from the wankers on the road, the trip back was mostly okay, just the last bit of Germany, through the austrian border and past the boden see, once we were beyond the turn off for San Mortiz it was clear roads and no idiots. 

I read The Rise of Darth Vader by James Lucerno in the car, I was astounded actually this is a very good book, in the SW saga. I have read a lot of Star wars books and let me tell you most of them are not well written, this one actually provoked emotion and thought. I might have to find more written by this guy, he and Zahn.... good books. I need to go back and re read all the zahn books again.

and... I need to work on my own book. now the hard part starts, the begining of tying up the threads ... no easy matter when I don't actully know what is going on.... lol

so anyway we are home. It is nice and quiet. We have a visitor coming for supper tonight and the Monday starts the week and with it work work work. I now have a goal to finish this book before the year is out. Gah! that means six years of stuff in x months. Wheeeeee

so.....

until then , be excellent to each other.

YAY Canada and it's amazing female hockey team!!!!!  Girl Power!!!!!!

It feels like a monday morning but it's tuesday. We bugger off today on a business trip for a few days, drive the San Bernadino route to get to Nürnberg. It's raining and probably up on that pass snowing, I worry a bit we don't have chains.

I like Nürnberg , pretty city. There is an amazing little shop there that sells jewellery making supplies and has a huge stock of labradorite and spectralite ( rainbow moonstone)  pendants and stuff. My favourite stone. We always laugh that I am a cheap date because diamonds don't impress me. I love the fire in the two feldspar stones. They are never the same no matter how many times you look at them. I have this one piece, a small round pendant. It has the barest flash of deep blue in it and a tiny star like twinkle of light aqua/ turquoise/ green. It's very subtle and very beautiful.

On a humanitarian note: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/st ory/CTVNews/20060220/afgh an_boy_060220/20060220?hu b=CTVNewsAt11" title="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/st ory/CTVNews/20060220/afgh an_boy_060220/20060220?hu b=CTVNewsAt11" target="_blank"http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/Art...

check it out.

Until then, be excellent to each other.

We played downstairs last night. I should explain. We now have a den ( upstairs with couch, lcd monitor hooked to dvd player and the computers)  and downstairs a real honest to god living room with a large lcd tv screen ( plus all the schnick-schnack) and a fire place. So when I say we play down stairs we are sitting in the living room with the fire going watching TV or dvds or what ever sans computers ( most of the time)

I say most of the time because the house is wireless. So I can take my itty bitty tablet notebook which had built in wireless and sit down stairs and do exactly the same thing that I do upstairs. Sit in front of the computer and work while half listening to or half watching something from a well seen dvd ( If I have already seen it I don't need to concentrate on it)

I go to sleep with words in my head, I wake up with words in my head. When there are no words there are pictures wanting to escape my brain and be put on paper. If I didn't know better I would think I was actually quite insane. But it's not, it's being creative. And I am only now seeing that this is an amazing thing.

Memory is a strange thing. I have often thought about this, in fact I have pondered this ever since I could remember being able to remember stuff.

I have a vivid and sharp memory of being no more than two, and skinning my knee, being picked up by my dad and carried home. I skinned it on wood, a dock, maybe a porch, the details escape me. But I remember the falling and the being picked up.It was sunny and it was evening, the air smelled of pine trees. I also recall watching a red float plane take off from the lake in NWR and having to hold my hands over my ears because it was sooo loud.

There are memories which are good, there are some which are awful and most fall someplace in between and I am the accumulative sum of these random images which collect dust in my brain the way old photo albums  on a shelf do.
I always thought that I don't like to dwell on the past much although , it does happen and I tend not the consider the future all that much, a fact that drove my dad to distractioin. He often had long lectures on the subject of preparing for the what if.... but that what if is just that and I can't spend my whole life waiting for the inevitable other shoe to drop, jeeze what a waste.So at some point I ended up taking the middle road and I live, for the most part, very much in the right here and now. Yesterday is gone tomorrow hasn't happened yet. Oddly enough the best thing I ever did for myself was run away to sea.

With this in mind, I wonder then why it is so hard for me to let go of old hurts. I never thought I was one to carry a grudge but I do, and I carry them long and hard, wrapped up in layers of protection so they will last forever. They twist in my gut like rotten meat. Seems a strange thing to realise though, and after all these years, after all these hurts building up until they become a huge weight that just sits on my shoulders like a great black beast this understanding is like being set free.

I was always sensitive and I remember mostly childhood as being an outsider. Teased by my peers, bullied in school and hated for being different. Fingers broken, stones thrown that sort of thing...That being said I also remember a childhood full of magic, learning how to build igloos, or snowshoe, being allowed to play with fire, the magic of the northern lights, home made toys and the smell of freshly baked bread and leekie soup. It seems that growing up is a delicate balancing act and I am remarkably slow at it.

So I cary these grudges, these nursed wounds but I also came to the intersting conclusion that I don't HATE anyone. I don't. And the almighty sarlacc knows there is enough hatered in this world to go around, I don't need to contribute. But I am angry with people. It has taken me forever to distinguish between the two.  

Being angry and expressing it is hard and I never learned how to do that quite right as it was somehow muddled up with being disrespectful and supression seemed to be the way to go. Hide one's emtions and squash them all down. We do not show how we feel especially if it is negative and we never talked about things that upset us..., but this is just bad. Shoving anger down and never letting it go is just a sucky stupid bad thing. Anger like joy is a natural emotion and one needs to be able to express it in a constructive manner. I am slowly learning how to do this, but Jeeze it's taking a very long time. I feel a bit like a spring learning how to unwind. My body has paid dearly for all these years of supression and grudge and anger holding. My cervical spine is disjoined and the rest of my spine is twisted, I hold so much tension in my back and shoulders that my shoulderblades don't move. OUCH. My CS therapist says, the body remembers everything. I am having to relearn how to breathe again. It's just really weird. but it helps me to understand the path from where I come and how it dictates where I am going. I look forward to the physical therapy I have just started because I know I need to heal this crap before I can move on to the next bit of my life. Expressing anger in a constructive way is healing. It's just as good as laughter.

So I am remembering things, things I had long forgotten. Joys, and sadnesses, laughter and tears, wounds and wins..and taking stock. Time to let go of the hurts, cannot carry them around with me like a broken down house for ever, it will kill me in the end.

My desperate need to please people and make everything okay, placate and not stir up any trouble for fear of retribution is done. I cannot please everyone, ever and trying is dumb. I am learning to say no, even if this means some people won't like it, as my husband says No is also an answer. It is an honest answer.

So I look back at the sum of 40 years of existance on the physical plane I see the wonders and the hardships, the ups and the downs. I see many many mistakes, most of which were mine, but they were also mine to make and I learned from them. I regret nothing, absolutely niothing because without these experiences I would not be who I am now and I _like_ who I am.

Funny really, because I have always known that I was different, not quite in synch with the rest of the world. This has caused no end of trouble when other people thought they knew what was right for me, and fought against my own choices and the paths I wished to take. But in the end as I look back I see I was right to listen to my instincts and every step I have taken has led me to be exactly where I am now which is exactly where I was supposed to be. It's all about choice.

So now we start the next part of the journey, the next 40 or so years. I am curious what this will bring, a little worried about it too but in the end what ever will happen will happen. So to all you out there who have been on this journey with me hang on....it could get bumpy and it a little wild, but tea and sympathy, laughter and a lot of love will be packed.

 In the meant time the writing continues,in fact I don't recall the last time i was so involved in a single project for so long and it seems to be accumulative, the more I write the more I need to continue, asthough this girl's journey is somehow my own. Living in two worlds, it is a very odd sensation.  The days meld one into the other ( I lost wednesday this week it just vanished) and the scent of early spring is in the air. It's raining today, but I welcome that because it has been so dry that we both feel as though our noses are made out of sand or something. 

So dear everyone, until then be excellent to each other. 

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?boa rd.id=mec&" title="http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?boa rd.id=mec&" target="_blank"http://forums.station.sony.co...;message.id=1158

kinda cool.

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Okay,

so having thought long and hard about the past few days I have decided no more.

that is to say no more wasting of days wallowing in self misery dredged up by rotten memories of things I can't do anything about any more. I know exactly who I am and I am a great person. The only person in the world who has to believe and accept this is me and I do. I am not a failure and I belong in this world no matter what anyone else thinks or says, if I didn't well, hell I wouldn't be here...it is my destiny.

After some serious ( and not so serious) chats with various friends I have come to realise that the absolute worse thing a person can do is wallow in the what was. At the age of 40 time to say fuck it all and get on with the rest of the game.

Of course despite my own negative nature I always felt that as an adult one is wholly responsible for one's own actions and emotions. A valentine's birthday still sucks but I can live with that, mostly i tend to celebrate the day after anyway...

too many hearts and flowers ickky sweet shit for my taste. I like things a little grittier...( sorry TMI)

Time to stop shoving the demons in the deep dark hole, where they fester and get larger than life. Light turns all goblins to stone so shine on baby shine!

So, FLQ, Mi,A. and all you other folks out there who know me better than I know myself..... feel free to dredge this blog entry up in a year from now and wave it in my face! BOO-YA!

 ------------------- ------------------------- ---

 On the novel/book-blog thing front... well after some serious kick in the ass publicity-word of mouth posts ( thanks Stav) the hit count zoomed and people seem to enjoy it. I am still writing , this is a good thing, and the ideas just seem to show up univited on my cranial doorstep. So for those of you enjoying the ride, hang on... after the cold...gonna heat  things up a little ( not that way either :P at least not yet.....)

Reading Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn now, it arrived on Wednesday ( woot) this will mean some readjustment in some of the descriptions in/of Thrawn's life... nothing major ( I hope) but I just need to keep things in the Star wars canon continuum more or less intact. It may just be a fan fic but dude, let's get it right shall we?  The fan girls will hate me though ( eventually). But that's okay.

Also have a very interesting book on deck by Alfred W. McCoy called A Question of Torture: CIA interrogation from the cold war to the war on terror. Nothing like a little horror to scare the good girls and boys. Will let you know how it is as a book.

then there is the pile of Star Wars trade Paper Back comic...... yippie! I spend so much time writingnow that my reading time has become precious...  go figure hell I even take a note book and pen with me when I have a bath!

yep...

writing is a full time occupation that steals your brain.

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life is a gift. Too damned short to dwell on the shitty side of it. like my tai chi instructor says..... tai chi = happy chi :)

I survived another birthday.But I really hate them, not as most people would think because I get a year older, that actually never worries me too much, but because I have to deal with ghosts and family shit.

In my life there have been many pivotal moments some good some bad and most small and inbetween. Two of the worst involve being told by a blood relation that I was either A:an absolute failure and B: that I was not good enough to be in my family, that I had no right to belong in this family what so ever.

Small words but they have a lot of punch that reverberates through the years. I wonder often how and why a father would tell a daughter who has just graduated from highschool that she is an absolute failure. I have gone back to this moment many times in my life and wondered about it. If completion is a failure what sort of bar does this set for the rest of one's life?

I don't think I am a failure in any sense of the word and I don't have to live up to any one else's expectations except my own. But these words have bite and power and they still sting. Mostly I just try to forget them and live my life the best way I can. In the end it is my life and no one else's, while I will try to be do what is right and be a good decent person, I cannot and will not please everyone. I stopped trying.But the words echo.... and sometimes they are loud enough to stop me from even trying. You can't fail if you don't even start.

The second set of words that have certainly done their damage came when my father was dying and were violently reinforced by his sister who for reasons I still cannot fathon seemed to take a perverse delight in spitting her rage on me. This was a bad moment and a very ugly moment in time that has done a lot of damage and had some far reaching consiquences for me.

I keep trying to let these words go. I know I have made great steps in getting past the hurt and the anger, but then something pops up, usually on my birthday and at Christmas which requires I see straight back into this moment of hell. How does one walk away from these things? this bullshit, this anger and pain? These stored up hurts that never seem to go away no matter how much therapy and discussion one goes through?

People say these things, and at that moment in time when these vicious words come out of their mouths they mean what they say. I often wonder if afterwards they regret the words they have let fly like missiles? If they are sorry. It's not a word I have heard very often and never from the people I need to hear it from the most.

My father once commented that all my people I ever drew were angry and he asked me why. My reply was simple. 'Because I am angry.'  I still am but I am also sad and this never goes away.

I fucking hate birthdays.

Ihave known for a long time that emotionally I block everything.It is making me very ill. I store all this shit up and never let it go. Visceral. I also knew for a long time that eventually I would do something about this and now I have.

Cranial sacral therapy.

can't describe what I went through today there are no words, but I know this person who is not just a CS therapist but also a tai chi instructor and many other tings will be able to help me. And I know this will be hard.

It seems strange in some ways to begin this particular journey now but I also knew it was coming. Just had to wait to find a person I trusted enough to do this. Now I have.

that's all. No words to even begin to conjure up what it is like to have someone heal with their hands in this manner, gentle, no needles no pills now cold clinical tables...  I am so tired of being prescribed NSAIds for my back.There is always an alternative.

Now I am home feeling an eerie sense of calm, it's almost surreal, and I am a bit light headed but in a really good way. my shoulders are not up at me ears as I write either.

Will keep you all posted on how this goes, next session on my sister's brithday.

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For those reading the sw soap of the month don't fear... the writing continues... we go off on a tangent though and things get icy cold. :) Pack your parka. It is straneg to me that now I can't stop I am as compelled to write this story as I am to breathe... so goodness knows when it will end.

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 I absolutly have to learn Italian.

until then be excellent to each other.

Flat land Quilter Have a good one! This blog's for you

So yesterday was a write off. Email and router issues, and a lovey nasty headache to boot. I spent pretty much my whole day in a dark room trying sleep past the incredible pounding act that started some where in my shouders and waltzed its way up into my brain. It is still there on the edge so today will not be a big sit and write infront of the not so great working lcd. Today will be try to avoid migrain so that by Sunday I am feeling good.

We drive to Milan on Sunday to meet up with some very old SCA friends and I can't wait.

Next week I go to see Fulvio, the person who has been teaching us Tai Chi, he also does healing stuff, and I want to see what he has to say about my back problems or better to say my pain in the neck problems . I go to doctors and I get given pills, NSAIDs to be exact and they don't do me a whole world of good so I am looking for alternatives to the deal with the pain, discomfort and lack of mobility in my neck and shoulder area. I don't beleiev that pills only are the only answer. Will let y'all know how that goes.

So anyway, we have been getting up super early all week as M. has to drive to Milan every day for trainings. It's long days for him leaves the house at 7:30 ish and doesn't get home till 8pm ish. I am glad that he doesn't have to commute like that every day and I'll give up the living in a cool city any day for a short commute time so I can have him home at a decent hour.

and that's it, so dull I am afraid. Apart from the writing writing writing thinking about writing and then more note taking and writing, there have been some blank scroll making teh deciding what to give H. when I see him and trying to fit in doing dishes and laundry. It's very sunny out today the world is brilliant bright and it's a bit hard on the ol' eyeballs but am not complaining. What makes living here so special is the beautiful weather ( most of the time).

anyway...until then be excellent to each other.

see if the router and the blog behave and this actually gets posted and doesn't go off into virtual no man's land... 

Okay, so this is the third time I have tried to get this particular blog entry up.... no frigging end of complications.

Not much to say having said it three times now...do not feel like writing it a 4th.
It's Wednesday, we did tai chio last night and then had company home for supper afterwards. Mighty cool fun. Now it is back to earth with a bump! Getting work done and hanging out at home. Still muscles and slowness is the theme of this early morning.

Watching Serenity.... love that show!

so.... writing writing writing.....

Until then Be excellent to each other!