Holiday Rounds

Xmas/Yule hit early this year for me. Barely back from Thanksgiving when last weekend off to Galveston to do an early Xmas with my parents, since they are visiting back home. Broke I am, but fortunately I make, buy and sell stuff, so for the relatives I generally loot the store, throw a bunch of stuff I make, soaps that my biz partner makes, some high quality perfumes form India, local hot sauces, tattoo booklets, in a box then dump it on a table and let everybody grab what they want. Well, everyone wants the cookies. I highly recommend this kind of giving.

Mainly we got wined and dined unmerciful by the parents. LM rented us a minivan and we took bikes, but really we were not able to work off the calories they put on us at one of Galveston’s favorite restaurants among locals. Two nights in a row, and on the secong, we found a homemade carrot cake that one of the waitresses had made for us _in her own home_! We even went to Bishop’s Palace, a major attraction which me, living there 18 years and they, many more til they retired, had never seen! My great great grandfather worked on that spiral staircase, and after he died they were going through his stuff, and his carpentry tools that he brought from Germany, nobody, even the carpenters, knew what they were for. And my old highschool boyfriend's sister was a tour guide. Her persona was of a creepy ghost girl, but I’m not sure if it is an act, or if she really is embodying one of Gresham’s daughters! Folks and I agreed, Galveston is better as tourists, rather than living there.

LM is right now snowboarding in Colorado. This is just after he healed up from a very traumatic infection that involved and emergency surgical procedure, loads of antibiotics, painkillers, me driving a car from the emergency room, and lots of figuring out what to do about this huge ugly gash! Man, I love this stuff, as long as it doesn’t threaten my LM. He was saved by modern medicine, and all my herbal remedies could not have saved him. Humbling, and we might want to get used to life being a little more precarious.

I just recently gave a very well received class on magic with Faeries with another local magic teacher. We will be offering a follow up in what could become a series. I have not written much about Faerie stuff here, other than a few poems inspired by Thomas the Rhymer, but this is my main religious/spiritual pathwork, a very edge area of inquiry even among Pagans, and I wonder if mainstream Paganism and most modern religion have more in common than Faery Spiritualism. This has been my spiritual work for some but not all of my first 40 years, and now it is starting to come out as opposed to the taking in of the first half of my life.

Since the weather has gotten colder, I have not spun a hoolah hoop in weeks. Sometimes that is one of the things that makes me not sleep, trying to work out new tricks in my head. But by next summer for sure, I will have performance grade hoop acts together, for a local fire performance group that I love.

Last week I took cuttings of some of my herb plants, because the weather was right, and the moon sign and everything. Lavender, Thyme, Basil (just in case) Marjoram, Sage, and Dittany of Crete. I found an old folder of my landscaping customers, and there was the receipt for this original Lavender strain, from 1994. So this Lavender strain has been with me for 10 years. When the cuttings take root, which could be real fast, I pot them up. Maybe I will give one for my neighbor, the client for whom I originally planted these Lavenders, as a Yule gift! Yes, I will!

I really do not want this blog to become journal or diary entries like this one. What I try to make it is screeds, essays, monographs and expositions. I have one that just needs some more typing. So hopefully before any more of these entries on “what’s going on in my life that keeps me from writing” appears, you will be treated to a how-to paper I wrote in 1996 on facilitated consensus process decision making. This will be my offering to the guy who is putting together the document on how to survive the oil crash. It struck me that self-governance is a skill that could be every bit as needed as how to make rain cisterns or fix plumbing, and after a survey of what is on the web, I think my how-to paper is a better than what is out there. The only purely creative offering I have in mind is a Yule story I have to come up with for a local Xmas/Yule function where I have a storytelling gig. if it translates to written as well a s oral tradition, I will post it here.

Maybe ya’ll didn’t know that I am an Elf in Santa’s service!!?? Buy only items that say "made in USA" which REALLY stands for Union of Santa's Associates.