Good News, Bad News First off, this will be short but meaty. I'm exhausted. The demo continues on the apartment buildings next to us - even on a fucking saturday. So it woke up up about 9am this morning and I managed to nod on and off through the horrible pounding until about 11am. Of course, we went to bed like 3:30am so, yeah, tired.... Also, I need to get ready 'cause we've got some errands to run and our friend Rand's already here.
Ok, first bit of good news: It's our anniversary this weekend. Six years. Wow I know, right? Love had a dozen, beautiful red roses for me and a wonderful card when I got up. I'll post photos later. Also? He's taking me to dinner tonight at my absolute favorite resturant, The Melting Pot. (It's a fondue resturant and you have a dinning experience over the course of like 2 hours there. It's so amazing.)
The next bit of good news? We got approved into the apartment complex we've been working with for three weeks now! We get to move! It's going to cost us a month's rent in security but we already arranged to borrow it from Love's parents and then can pay them back in payments (which is a hell of a lot easier to do then come up with $850 in one chunk, ya know?) I don't have a formal moving date yet, but soon. Soooon! We get to leave! And, joy of joys, I get to tell the uber bitch manager at our current place off and give her a simple choice: the easy way (give us everything she promised us as we go quietly) or the hard way (we sue for everything she promised us, plus emotional distress, health problems, and contact all the media about the damages to these buildings they're trying to sell as condos). Heh. It will be fun.
Ok, but, there's bad news. And it's name is Jeanne.
(yellow arrow is me)
(blue oval is me)
It's getting closer and closer with each updated path. It just keeps relentlessly pushing west which means it's going to rip across the state and is therefore, heading our way. Fuck.
Which means there might be some silence from me if we lose power and/or cable again from wind damage. So, keep that in mind if I don't update in a few days.
Dammit. It was supposed to hit the Carolinas! No one was even paying much attention to it over here. Now look at it. *sighs*
Oh well, I've still finally got somethings going well I'm not going to let a little something like a hurricane bother me today. Heh.
Aw crap... Jeanne is heading to Florida. She wasn't supposed to. She was going to head into the Carolinas somewhere. But, no, now her course is shifting. And the East Coast is going to take a direct pounding it seems.
(yellow arrow is me; thankfully on the other coast)
(yellow circle is me)
Hopefully, our area will be spared the brunt of it, but people on the East coast are going to be in trouble. Felinevamp has already lost power in the last two for example and Lorena is worried about her mom on the coast and herself because she's along it's north-along-the-coast projection.
We'll have to keep an eye on it since the track keeps pushing more and more west all of a sudden and is shifting a lot. I hope it doesn't tear across central Florida again - so many people in the state have already done this twice and had so much damage, I'd hate to see it happen again. Let's all hope it shifts and starts heading East instead - back out into the ocean and leaves Florida alone.
This "new normal" of hurricane season is really sucking.
This, that and the other Went to the beach for the Equinox. Was nice as always, though I really feel like something's missing in my life. Something's lacking. In a spiritual/magickal/soul sense. Yeah there's a lot material that's lacking - a non-moldy apartment for one thing (more on that later) which really is depressing to the soul and makes life sometimes one, large, heavy, painfully over-balanced load - but there's also something more then that. I've lost touch with some inner part of myself. Some peice that's more then the reflection in the mirror. Don't confuse this for a lack of faith. It's not that I'm unhappy in my spiritual path, just that I feel like I forgot to keep walking some time back and I've been just sitting here on the side of the trail, waiting for something to come to me. Dunno, just...missing something somewhere. Maybe I forgot that at one point I was actually walking along the path until now and I just need to start up again. Not sure. Just know that there's an emptiness inside me that I need to address. Because I don't think it's been helping me; in fact I think it's been causing these downward shifts of health lately.
Made a chicken tonight. A whole one. Never done that before. The other day, Love picked up one by mistake. (Yeah I know, it seems like a sitcom plot, but I'm serious. I meant get a breast on the bone and he somehow took it as a whole chicken.) So we didn't know what to do with it. I was going to cook it last night for the Equinox, but we lacked some materials, so we planned and cooked it tonight. Three hours later and nine o'clock at night, it actually turned out pretty darned good. The meat pretty much fell of the bones. And it had a ton of white meat on it. Far more then we get when we pick up a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken from the supermarket. We were pretty proud.
Head's been feeling better the last couple days. Though my neck continues to ache in that really deep, down-to-the-bone kind of way today and so I fear that my reprieve may be short lived. (For those who don't know, my neck is permantely damaged. It happened when I was a newborn and it basically grew wrong. We didn't know about it until it was far too late and it hurts me literally every single day of my life. I've tried chiropractors with no luck - it doesn't adjust normally - and the only thing that helps is massage therapy but needless to say I can't even come close to affording that. When it gets bad, it also triggers migraines for me. So it's a lose-lose situation.) Having your head hurt for so long doesn't help either in that you start getting paranoid about it coming back. And I think it's easy to worry yourself back into one. Anyone who's had migraines for any length of time can understand the fear of the unknown - is it really over or is it coming back...?
When I was at the beach last night, as we were leaving, my Love spotted something and pointed it out to me. Turns out I wasn't the only one who thought to make a trip for the Equinox. There was a lovely altar, facing the water, carefully made of driftwood, shells and herbs. They really spent a lot of time on it you could tell. It made me smile to see someone else's respectful offering and that others enjoyed the beauty of the shore that night.
I finally spoke to the woman at the complex we're trying to get into today. She called on Monday and I called her back. Left a message but hadn't heard anything in days. So I called again today. Seems she still hadn't gotten the tennant information from our current complex manager. Keep in mind, we originally dropped off our application with the potential move-in date two weeks later on the 17th. It's now a week past that so this has stretched on for almost three weeks now. And we still don't know if we're approved. We really doubt it because of poor credit history and I know the current manager is going to do everything she can to say what horrible tennants we are - but dammit. Waiting three weeks to most likely be told no and have to start this process over again....unbelievably frustrating to say the least. If we can't move in here, we literally don't know what we're going to do. I mean literally, no clue. It's been months now since the initial water leak and the air samples that were taken which found mold. With nothing done since then and so clearly more mold growth since July would have taken place. Basically, the place gets more and more toxic every day and here we sit, twiddle our thumbs and pretty much have no clue what the hell we're going to do.
Oh and I might have gotten enough people for the free iPod thingy I posted about earlier. I need to wait three-to-five business days to go through anti-fraud process and legitamize my referers and such but hopefully, it will have worked out. I can't thank my friends enough for helping me out.
Well, I think I spoke too soon about the head. It's really starting to bother me so I'm going to call this a wrap and maybe go to bed early tonight. Who knows? Anything to avoid that pain again.
Fall has come Well, a Blessed Mabon and a Joyous Autumn Equinox to everyone! Fall has officially started (though the 87F temperature outside defies the season change) today. This means that the day and night are equal today in length. From here out, the nights will grow longer then the days, progressively getting longer and the days getting shorter until the next seasonal change - Winter Solstice. Of course at Winter, it is the longest night of the year.
I had someone ask me what the Autumn Equinox meant. And I was surprised. Even before I declared myself formally in the Pagan catagory, the season changes were something I always observed - and always knew their meaning. So it seemed strange to me that some never bothered, or never thought to learn what it was all about.
There are of course four seasons in the year. And they are marked off as Vernal (Spring) Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumnal Equinox, and Winter Solstice. On the two Equinox - Spring and Autumn - the days and nights are equal in length. It's where the word originals; the concept of being equal. The solsitices however are opposites. For Summer, it is the longest day of the year; for Winter, the longest night of the year. See, the seasonal markers are all about the progression of the earth in it's orbit around the sun, definining the slow course of light and darkness.
The days grow longer from Winter through Spring (where they're equal) though Summer (where the day is longest). From Summer's high point, the days slowly grow shorter, though still longer then the night. At Autumn, they are equal again and then move onto being shorter and shorter until Winter, where the day is the shortest and the night is the longest it will be all year. And then the cycle starts anew.
So autumn is a time when things begin to slow. The days begin to give way to more night and of course, in most places, the colder weather creeps in. Autumn gives us one last chance at enjoying summer's bounty and beautiful harvest before we turn our attentions to the long Winter to come.
Celebrate today. Enjoy the fruitfulness of your lives, the bounty and good fourtune you've had - even if it's not much, there are always things to be happy for and greatful of. Eat and make merry with your family and friends; and remember the warm months under the sun and thank whomever you thank for such riches. The simple pleasures of a warm summer day are often overlooked, but today, as it slowly closes, remember that and celebrate it.
Seriously not a scam Anyone want to help me out? Honestly, it's not a scam. Even Wired News talked about the legitmacy of it. It's a way to get a free ipod. Seriously. The thing is, that I need five people to sign reigster and sign up for an offer. I picked the two week free trial to Blockbuster Online Movie rental. Why not? I had been interested in trying out that kind of thing anyway. And, so long as I cancell it before the two weeks is up, I pay nothing. You wouldn't either. Free dvd rentals for two weeks is worth it? Helping me out at the same time?
You don't know how much I've been drooling over iPods. A friend who moved to UK has one and I saliveated over his. Costs you nothing and you can work on your friends to help you get one too. And it's really, honestly, free.
Edit....Oh actually, the infone thing seems really good. five free calls a $10 amazon credit and best of all "You will be billed for only the calls you make. There are no commitments or monthly fees." Ah. That sounds like a winner!
Weirdness So, if the continuing near-migraine and bursts of full-on migraine attack the past week aren't enough, the having problems sleeping wasn't enough and the continuous hyper light sensitivity and after-images clouding my vision weren't enough, this morning I woke up because I heard someone call my name.
Problem is, there was no one in the house but me.
I kid you not. I woke up out of a dead sleep because I heard a man's voice - a voice I don't recognize - clearly, loudly and firmly say my name. It spooked me so much I checked the apartment, the locks on the doors, everything. There wasn't anything which could have even remotely made a sound like my name turned on. PC was off, cable box, tv and stero were off, nothing.
This isn't the first time it's happened either. All the more freaky. Previous times I've passed it off as a dream or something. This time, I swear I heard it physically with my ears as if someone were standing in my living room.
Weekend Recap It sounds like there's a lot to report, but sadly, no. My headaches continue and my eyes are almost continuously at the hyper light sensitive stage where it literally hurts to see. Ugh, it's so very frustrating and I wish I knew what was causing it and more importantly how I could get relief.
Saturday we heard there was a celebration at a museum in downtown Tampa for it's 25th birthday. Supposed to have music, events and free admission. We had never been to it before so me, Love and our friend Rand hopped in his Jeep and made the drive.
Downtown Tampa
Turns out that the museum was a little on the, well...lame side. It was very tiny and it only had two interesting galleries (one was ancient Greek pottery and the other was this really unique moving sculpture contraption that "drew" on paper. It's impossible to explain and they didn't let you take photos.) The rest was all "pop" art - a massive hanging display of shredded tires, a bed in a room all by itself with various random scenes projected on the covers, headless, cartoon bodies on blank colored colored canvases with titles like "Bob couldn't figure out the theory of astrodynamics and so instead thought he'd battle with the wrestling team." Very lame, very cheap and very poor excuse for art in a Fine Arts museum. At least we got out and it was free. Oh yeah, I got a cupcake too. That was cool.
Edit...oh yeah, I forgot On the way home, we stopped by this Pagan bookstore I had never been to before (mainly because it's kinda far away). Turns out they had some hurricane damage and the entire store was 40%. I splurged and got myself a really cool silver charm of a crescent moon, star and moonstone. (I'll have to take a pic.) I also got this pretty oil burner with carved pentacles on the sides. Oh, it's lovely. Both together were cheaper then just the charm because of the discount. I felt good. And the charm is so pretty.
Today, Sunday, we didn't do much. Ran some errands that sort of thing. My head's been hurting all day and my eyes to boot so I haven't really felt like doing anything. It's hard to do something when you can't use your eyes; when the act of seeing hurts. *sighs* It's painful to look at the monitor right now but seeing as I just spent the last hour and change on the couch in the dark with a blanket over my head listening to the tv, I wanted to get up for a little bit and do something before going to bed.
Anyway, something done, so I'm going to close out. No news yet on the apartment we applied to like two weeks ago. We had actually scheduled to potentially move this weekend and, well, you can see where that went. *sighs* Somedays I feel like I'm in quicksand and I'm never going to get out of here at all.
SidheShots - Autumn Since the Autumnal Equinox/Mabon is coming up, represent the idea of autumn in your photograph. You may use anything you wish to convey your interpretation. -SidheShots
Sadly, since Florida doesn't actually have an Autumn (only my favorite season *grumps*), I had to improvise for my photo. It's a shot taken in a local market store. They had a great display of apples, pumpkins, gourds and indian corn and so I pulled out my trusty camera (always with me in my purse) and took this shot. I only wish it reflected the weather outside.
