2 be Bliss, as I dance along the road to Nirvana...

In late April, T, a long-time friend passed away. Her funeral was held the first Saturday in May. I drove six hours round trip that day, to say goodbye to my friend and visit with her family. Her mom, M, and I have grown close in the 25+ years I've known their family. The last time I saw M was at T's funeral. This morning, M was in the last dream I had just before waking. A, a guy I dated in my early 20s, was in the dream too. A and I were in M's kitchen with M. She had lost a lot of weight and she was wearing a wig, something she's never done in waking life. I knew it was her although she didn't look like herself. A was sitting at the table. M was at the stove cooking something in a frying pan that looked like Native American fry bread. M called it something that I can't remember. I was standing near M, off to one side. She and I were talking about T and how much T loved the bread M was cooking. A was quiet, anxiously awaiting his bread. Sudde...

Happy Sunday folks. My weekend turned out to be a mostly quiet one. Quite the opposite of what was planned but it's obviously what I needed. As some of you know, for many in America, Thursday is the celebration of the country-stealing holiday we call Thanksgiving. Hurray. For me it's a time to spend in reflection and fellowship. Sometimes with family, sometimes not. My birth family has been the source of many life lessons. But that's the way it's supposed to be, right? Lately there have been lots of lessons. One family member voted for Trump. Another texted several family members begging for money for an adult child who chooses to stay unemployed because he is too full of himself to take a job that's not in the field of his college major. Then there are the enablers who always make excuses for the others, regardless of the situation. I really don't want to share a meal with these people. I also know they'll want to talk about Mr. Bliss. H...

Lest we forget, the Universe is always keen to remind us: The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,  Gang aft agley. (The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.) - Robert Burns On a happier note, I can see beautiful leaves drifting past my window as they make their descent toward what might become their final resting place. 

Tired. Achy. Sleepy.

I'm getting just awful at publishing my blog posts in a timely manner... Shame on me! I did have a date Wednesday, with a guy I met online. (Of course.) It was... interesting. We met face-to-face at the car dealership because it needed to go for servicing and he wanted to introduce me to his service guy. (We drive the same make of car.) Although we'd planned the date the week before, the night before he told me that though we were meeting at 11 a.m., he had a doc appointment at 1 p.m. Okay... Well, we met and then he wanted to grab a bite with me. Um, okay. I reminded him of his 1 p.m. doc appointment and he said not to worry. We had our meal then returned to the dealership. The good news: my car is in great overall shape. It needed an alignment and some fluids flushed and replaced. I also requested that they restore my headlight covers. The bad news: my car is 10 years old next month and it's time for my hybrid battery to be replaced. I wasn...

Hello everyone. My Monday turned out to be busier than I expected and happily so. After taking Baby Bliss to work, I drove to our local healthy foods store to find it had been remodeled since my last visit. I was floored. The appeal to the staff was understandable but my sense of aesthetics was offended. In addition to my general feeling of disconnect, I couldn't easily locate the organic apples I wanted to buy. Later I realized it wasn't a super urgent purchase because I don't have any yogurt or almond butter to eat with my apples. Probably won't have either until Thursday earliest which means I should wait until next week to buy the apples. I already have a fridge half full of leftovers and I'm expecting a friend in town this weekend so it's not likely I'll be eating at home much from Friday until Sunday. So yeah, I'm being allowed time to adjust. Yeah... When I returned home, I stopped in the parking lot to talk to a neighbor's mom...

Good morning y'all.* I'm "in my feelings" this morning, as the young folk would say. Lots to do today so I won't let that deter me. In case anyone is interested, I did have a second date with the gentleman who drove two hours to meet me Halloween weekend. The festival was scheduled to end at 8 p.m. so he had made reservations to stay over at a local hotel. We enjoyed our outing until we decided we'd had enough then headed back this way, maybe around six. We went to his room to relax for a bit then made a food run. We ate and talked in his room for a couple of hours. He's a hardworking man and his body is used to waking up in the wee hours for work so he was tired before 10 p.m. Which was cool because I was tired too. Spending the whole day with a stranger, whether the day is fun and exciting or boring and tense, comes with its own kind of exhaustion. Although my date and I had a whole month of getting-to-know-you tucked under our belts, it ...

Oh my. Some time before the farce known as Election Day, I began writing this post in the wee hours and before I could finish, Morpheus dragged me to his lair and I was unable to escape. Apparently I was so shocked by the election results that I plum forgot to finish the post. There are many forecasts and predictions about what a Trump presidency will look like for the majority of Americans. If the most dire of them come to pass, my blog could become something akin to a digital Diary of Anne Frank. Seriously. For all my readers outside the United States, I ask that each of you pray that this country manages to make it safely and sanely through the next four years. I ask not just for myself and my fellow Americans but for the whole world because what affects this part of the globe in many ways affects the entire planet, in terms of global trade, climate change, etc. While there has already been some backpedaling by Trump of many of his loudest (and nastiest) campaign promis...