Spinning Wheel

The Sunday Morning Muse, September 29, 2013

A lovely sunrise today with purples and white and orange and pink over a light blue background. The sun coming up over the valley. Cat looking up occasionally out the window, taking a break from cleaning her toes.

Speaking of toes, a cat with 6 toes on each paw showed up here and now thinks he lives here. I feel sorry for him because, though he has numerous toes, he has only one good ear.  The other one is seriously deformed. He's not a bad cat. Someone could take him in. Just not us. We are full.

Sipping decaf tea. Plain Lipton tea. I got talked into trying some kind of pumpkin flavored decaf coffee this week and spilled just about all of it down the drain. I don't get it. I like things to taste like they should. All this flavoring is not for me.

Finished reading Pain Free. Lots of stretching and exercises for back pain. The gist of it is posture related. You have to retrain your body to rely on your load bearing joints. The book gives you various positions to hold yourself in to do this. A lot of it makes sense. It goes on to say humans--for millions of years, bent and twisted and climbed trees and walked barefoot and such, and the body developed in a certain way. Now we
hunch over computers--and no longer forage for food, so here we are letting ourselves go. Underused muscles atrophy, posture wanes, and we are left with aches and pains and "compensation"--whereas smaller, specialized muscles are being taxed from repetitive use in awkward positions. All this leads to pain. There's a good deal of yoga in the book. I see that as reinforcing some of my beliefs all along about stretching and postures.

Met a nice Alpaca farmer yesterday. She has 50 of them and spends her time in her little shop behind a spinning wheel making yarn. Beautiful stuff.  She was selling it at the farmer's market.  She told me she even as a portable spinning wheel she takes around to use when she has time and is not at home. Now there's something I never knew was invented. Or still in use. But that's great.

The Sunday Morning Muse, September 22, 2013

Listening to Autumn Song by Van Morrison as I write and sipping a bit of coffee. I gave up coffee this summer in an attempt to limit caffeine, but once in a while....I just like a few sips in the morning. With a piece of chocolate...or an oatmeal cookie. You gotta live.

It's fall. No looking back. I can sit here entranced in Van singing about the glory of fall, but the reality around here includes gutter cleaning, digging up the cannas, taking out the screens on Coco's Porch and, breaking out the warmer clothes. I need a style. I have none. A few pairs of boots, a couple of  winter skirts that are all too big now. No real fashionable coats. Mostly functional snow shoveling type coats. My 87 year old aunt gave me a leopard print ear warmer thing. It's not muffs, this fabric thing just sort of wraps around your head. She said someone gave it to her but it's not her 'style.'  (At least SHE has a style.) On the plus side, my hair is beautiful now thanks to the beautician/magician.

I discovered an old barber's table in the storage garage at next door to the used furniture store and they let me have it for a sweet 30 bucks. It needs a little work but eventually will work great under the window in the kitchen. Looking around in the store was a trip back in time. I saw the bedroom suite I had as a kid. I also saw the entertainment stand I had in my first apartment. I got rid of it when it started to"sag" in the middle due to the weight of all my albums and the heavy box style TV.  I had these huge speakers next to it, too. And between hooking up to a VCR,  a "tuner" (with 24 pre-set), a pre amp, and a turntable, that fake wood should have collapsed on day one.

Autumn Song

I just love this. Want to live it. Look at me and take my breath away...

When the Leaves Come Falling Down

Louis C.K. Hates Cell Phones

Today's Thought

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

-Oscar Wilde

The Sunday Morning Muse, September 15, 2013

It's Sunday morning. Fog again over the valley. Sigh. Summer slipping away into furnace season.

Musing on my Google history. I notice that I am often "signed in" to Google based on my signing into this
blog site and that no matter where I search somehow I am still "signed in" and getting ads based on what I search for. I get that. But I wonder what someone will do with this information someday. If a real human being looks at my Google history and tries to speculate about my interests, my whims, my purchases, etc
and come up with some sort of profile, they are in for a lot of head scratching.

This week, along with searching for my usual assortment of various medical maladies,  I have spent a fair amount of time studying The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, a painting by Richard Dadd.  I bought an album by Queen over thirty years ago (Queen II). On a whim I searched for the meaning of the Fairy Feller song and discovered it was based on the painting. The words truly never made sense to me and now they somewhat do. It is a complicated song with a lot of overdubs, and I read somewhere that they never performed it in concert. Enough said on this really, except for the "Dragonfly trumpeter" mentioned in the song really IS a Dragonfly trumpeter.

I spent a lot of time searching for old photographs of our town. I enjoy looking at the flood of 1913 and the "big snow" of 1950 and old black and white cemetary photos.

The other thing I like about Google is that I saw the face of an actor I had a crush on in high school on a TV promo for the old "Emergency" TV show. Not all that long ago you had to strain your brain to try to come up with a name for the face, or ask people if they remember.  Now all you do is search the IMDB for Emergency and figure out who he is and then find out what other TV shows/movies he was in that I would remember him from.  And I did.  He was on an old soap opera called "Loving."  Richard Mantooth. I don't find him all that attractive now. Don't really know why I did then.

What did I buy this week?  Well Google, you can quit showing me ads with kitchen wall fixtures.  Also I did order the book "Pain Free" because 350 people gave it  5 stars, so don't show me that one anymore. Keep on showing me console tables, but it is highly unlikely I'll buy one off the internet.  I prefer the used furniture store.

Oh, and I looked up a saying, an expression that Aunt Millie used to use.  "If you are born to hang, you won't drown."  Apparently this is an English Idiom and she didn't make it up herself. An expression of fate.

So there you go.

Another Trip Around the Sun

The Sunday Morning Muse, September 8, 2013

(Singing Star...above... a shout out to my friend Anthony who gave me this 30 years ago.)

Almost another trip around the sun. Birthday coming up this week. One good thing about it is a coupon for a free adjustment from the Chiropractor, which I quickly put into action.  Now the neck feels a lot better. Still have other assorted aches and pains but no one wants to hear about them.

Sun peeking through clouds this morning. Lazy cats on the window sill. An occasional growl when one gets too close.

I'm sure the Sunday Morning talking heads will be discussing what to do about Syria. Do we live in a world where nations stand by and let thousands of innocent people be slaughtered?  Do we start dropping bombs and hope that this will put a stop to it? I don't have the answer. The footage of the millions of refugees to neighboring countries is also disturbing to me. They are scared of their own government. They fled their homes and are living in tent camps, some with no water or bathroom facilities. It is horrible.

Back here at home, it's pulled pork dinner and birthday cake, watching the Steelers, paying bills, and basically living life. When we switch the channel on the TV the refugees are gone. But they aren't.

Another birthday here in paradise. 

Carbon Monoxide Detector Going Off

Dad must have got the first one ever made, and he's been dead 15 years now.  He's the one who put it downstairs, so I have no idea how old this carbon monoxide detector is. It's a plug in type so it's not the battery causing the problem.

Hmmm.

No one is suffering any headaches and we didn't die yet.

Brother in law brought over another one to plug in for the night to see if that one sounds an alarm tonight.

Could be the hot water heater. I'm not sure why.  But we need a hot water heater anyway. Not that it leaks but it's old and it will leak someday and I don't really want to ruin everything in the cellar AND buy a hot water heater.

Something to think about as I lay in bed tonight waiting to hear the alarm.  

Labor Day

How many years has it been since someone painted behind the buffet in the kitchen?  It's anyone's guess. Heck, it's been at least 15 years since someone painted the rest of the kitchen so it must be more. No one has ever moved it as far back as I remember.

So the kitchen is now a beautiful yellow.... but no one knows what color is behind the buffet.  Because we are not moving it.

Shark Week Cat Video