tollermom | Reading

April 2017

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

Custom Text

I discovered that the bottom shelves of the bookcases in the library were largely empty due to reasons of inaccessibility -- that is, I didn't want to have to bend over that far to find a book -- so I carried the comics into the library and K put them on those low shelves. The dining room table is still a mess, but it is no longer a mess that I hold primary responsibility for. I am going to take this as a victory and move on.

Last week, I saw a Facebook ad for Tortorice's Pizza which included a picture of their deep dish pizza. I looked at that and determined that it looked pretty good. We've been looking for an alternative to Malnati's simply because there is only so much of one kind of pizza that you can eat before you get tired of it. Gretchen prefers pan to stuffed, so Giordano's (which has been slipping lately) was off the list. We tried Rosati's last month and it was, well, ok.

On Saturday, we decided to give Tortorice's a try. It's at Busse and Central, so only a bit farther from home than the Papa John's that I've been going to when we want *cheap* pizza. We got the deep dish pizza with sausage and black olives and it was excellent. It had a solid crust, plenty of mozzarella cheese, and a slightly sweet chunky pizza sauce on top. It was substantially less sweet than D'Agostino's, which Gretchen had proclaimed to be *too* sweet.

Half of the 14 inch pizza was plenty for the two of us (and slightly too much for Gretchen). The other half reheated nicely as tonight's dinner.

We will call this a success. :)

Tags:

I have a friend who recently mentioned having trouble falling asleep. I came up with this method long ago, and have previously shared it verbally with various people, but he and I chat online, so I wrote It up. I told him, “I hope this works for you, but of course we are all different, and nothing works for everybody. “

And then I thought, I probably have other friends who are having trouble sleeping, and since I wrote it up, I should share it wider. So I hope you enjoy reading this, and if you are having trouble falling asleep, I hope it helps you.

And if you have a different method, I’d love to hear it.

Deirdre’s Meditation for Falling Asleep

The first step is to remember some day or days when you were very deep asleep and had to wake up. Pick a time where the process was slow, rather than the sudden adrenaline boost of an alarm or emergency. Remember it as clearly as you can, with all your senses. For me, it can feel like being all warm and safe, in a friendly, dark, quiet, restful state. Gravity is cradling me and I’m warm and comfortable. The call to wake is reaching me through a soft foggy darkness.

But you probably experience sleep and waking differently than I do, and knowing your own process of transition between waking and sleep is the key to this meditation. So just take a little time to remember what it was like for you be still mostly asleep, and then how it felt as you slowly woke up. Remember those sensations, feelings, textures, whatever your experience has been, as clearly as you can. Remember, also, the sequence of whatever happens as you wake up slowly.

Once you have that memory or those memories clear in your mind, the next step is to relax. Do anything you have to do at night (like take meds) if you haven’t already done so. Get comfortable in your bed. Set the lights and sounds of your room appropriately.

Be aware of your intention. Know that the goal is to allow yourself fall asleep, to allow this particular meditation to be a temporary guide. That may be very different from other meditations you have done, where the goal is to relax but not fall asleep, to consciously focus instead of letting that focus gently go for a while. So set that intention in your mind in whatever way works best for you. Say it aloud if that will help. Know that if you lose track of this meditation and fall into sleep, that is a complete success.

Once you’re comfortable, take those feelings and experiences you remembered, and do your best to be inside the memory. Make them as real as possible in your mind—but do it backwards. If you felt like you were climbing, let yourself drift downward instead. If you became aware of the sensations of your covers or your pajamas, imagine letting those sensations fade. And so on.

This isn’t a meditation where you follow someone else’s words. Only you have experienced the metaphorical lands between your sleep state and your waking state. So take what you learned from remembering your own experience, and let yourself do it backwards, traveling not from deep sleep to wakefulness, but from wakefulness to sleep. You are gently guiding yourself, until you don’t need a guide any more because all you have to do is let it happen. And when you get to that point, let it happen.

Current Location: One's own bed
Current Music: If you want it

Tags:

K has asked kindly that I get the comic books off of the dining room table, which *is* a mission that I wholeheartedly agree with. I have been trying to convert the dining room back into a dining room for about three years now, but when the stack of comics in the hall got too high because I was buying them and not having enough time to read them, I ended up stacking them on the already overstacked dining room table for the sake of expedience.

Now I am laid off and have fewer excuses for letting the books pile up. There were some stacks that had been sorted into runs of eight or so issues, so I figured I would start with those. I ended up reading about an eight inch stack of books this afternoon. Sadly, this has barely made a dent in the problem.

I am going to see if I can find a place to stow the books until I get a chance to catch up on my reading. This may be around 2027 -- the catching up part, that is!

Tags:

I'm not really sure how the week went, because think my brain was turned off for most of it. Actually, I think it mostly still is. To be fair, this isn't surprising. My cat, Ticia, crossed the Rainbow Bridge last Thursday. She was my dear companion for the last eleven years. I've done enough grieving to know how it goes.

I don't have a song for any of the cats; don't know if I ever will. My creativity has ebbed considerably. The song that kept coming back, for some reason, was my setting for "The Cap and Bells", by Yeats. It was one of the last songs I sang to her, the morning of her passing. She loved music. I sang it again this morning at the Festival of the Living Rooms Saturday evening circle.

Also The Cat and the Moon (which is pretty obviously relevant, and which may get read in a circle sometime soon) and Sailing to Byzantium (which is certainly relevant to me; it's been on my mind of late). That is no country for old men...

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Meanwhile, just a reminder that The World As it Ought To Be, by Naomi Rivkis is on sale for $2.99 until the rest of the month, and that the Goodreads book giveaway is still in progress.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Current Mood: grieving
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: Festival of the Living Rooms #30

Tags:

Today, I managed to knock a couple of small projects off my list with help from K. The hand towel bar in the upstairs bathroom had been falling off the wall, so I took it down earlier this week and filled the holes with the heavy-duty spackle. By today it was dry enough to work on, so I asked K to fetch the huge level from the basement. Then she held things up while I positioned the towel bar using the level, made a couple of pencil marks, and took things back down so that I could screw the mounting hardware in. It seems to be holding nicely, the towel bar is reinstalled, and we'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I had noticed that the "they don't work" chains on the ceiling fan in K's room did not seem to be due to a failing switch, which is a pain to replace. Instead, they were just routed very badly. I got K to help me take things down, rerouted the chains correctly (transferring a missing grommet from a spare piece of hardware that I'd saved), and now everything is working properly.

K now complains that all of her friends are going to ask her to fix things. Knowledge is its own reward or something like that.

In other news, when I was at Sam's Club yesterday picking up a couple of items, I decided to wander through the electronics department for my entertainment and discovered that you can now buy Starlink dishes at Sam's Club.

Clearly I am living in the future. :)

Tags:

Oh, good. Retirement doesn't mean that I've gone into a cycle of being blocked on songwriting because of having been laid off. :)

In this case, I managed to find a song prompt in a long discussion that Bill Sutton and I were having.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

Tags:

The tech from La-Z-Boy came today and my recliner chair has been repaired. Yay!

I did not get a lot else done, which is a shame, but that's how it works out some times.

Tonight, we set out to watch an episode of "The Rookie" on Hulu. This included one power outage and two tornado warnings, both of which required us to fire it up again. The second tornado warning was just before the end, so Hulu thought we had finished and we had to fast forward through the episode to get back to the last thirty seconds.

Whee!

Tags:

Today I am thankful for...

Eleven years with a wonderful, cuddly cat. Thanks, Ticia. I'll always love you.
Solensia (injectable arthritis medicine for cats).
Bronx finally (hopefully) learning to keep his claws to himself, and not to nip so hard.
Finally getting the hang of the Sigvaris Doff N Donner, which makes putting on compression stockings somewhat less annoying.
Our immigration lawyer/law firm.

Current Mood: grateful
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: maybe Eurofilk tonight

Tags:

thanks,
ticia

Julie had Tuesday off. K had today off, which was good, because she woke up feeling sick. She feels much better now, so both kids should be able to go to work tomorrow.

I got a message from my old employers in response to my latest email and have provided all of the information that should result in them sending me a final reimbursement for Internet expenses. We'll see what happens.

And tomorrow, the service tech from La-Z-Boy is coming to fix my broken recliner. Yay!

Tags:

Our asphalt driveway is not in terrible shape, but replacing it is not necessarily a bad idea. I've been kicking it around for several years, but that southwest facing angle helps melt the snow off it in winter and keep it in better shape.

Our neighbors, on the other hand, do not have this advantage and their driveway, only a couple of months older, is pretty much shot. They got a contractor out to look at it and while he was here, he took a look at our driveway in order to develop an estimate.

The company then failed to send me the estimate. Our neighbor gave Gretchen the phone number of the person she'd been dealing with, I called her, and I got the estimate via email. As it turned out, there were a few problems with the estimate that would need to be corrected before I could sign the contract and send them a deposit, so I called the number on the estimate and left a message.

A week later, I called and left another message.

A week after that, I called and left messages on every extension that I could find.

At the end of last week, I located the original number that I had called and left a message.

No one ever called back.

Today, the workmen showed up to work on my neighbor's driveway. I waved at one of the guys before he started and let him know that if anyone in his office returned phone calls, they could be doing my driveway now too. He agreed that this was a problem that he'd seen before, which is impressive for an office that he said had ten people working in it.

None of whom, apparently, know how to use a telephone. Or maybe an answering machine.

Ah, well. The driveway should last for a while longer.

Tags:

In my sunlit bedroom on the fourth of June, I held Ticia in my arms as she fell asleep for the last time and slipped away across the Rainbow Bridge. Our little old lady cat was nineteen years old, and dying from kidney failure. I sang to her, but it's hard to sing when you're crying.

My biggest fear had been that she would crawl off under the bed while I was somewhere else, and die alone with no-one to hold her and soothe her. I was especially worried about the week-long vacation we have planned for August. We were able to save her from that, and give her comfort and love in her last moments.

She found us at the Cat City shelter, in Seattle, on the Third of November, 2015. Or maybe I should say that we found each other -- I coaxed her out of the box on the floor that she was hiding in, gave her some skritches and pets, picked her up, and cuddled her in my lap. The shelter staff told us that she'd never allowed that from anyone else. I thought I was mostly over the untimely loss of Curio back in July, but she must have sensed that we needed each other.

They told us that her name was Morticia (though it was soon shortened for daily use), and gave us the Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer dog toy that had arrived with her at the shelter. From that and her affectionate personality, we could tell that her previous Person must have loved her very much. We never found out what happened to them.

In addition to petting and cuddles, I found out on the way home from the shelter that she also loved music. She had been meowing and restless, but settled right down when I put on a Heather Dale CD. She was also very fond of cellophane "crinkle balls" -- she would often carry one into whichever room I was in and set it down where I could see what a good huntress she'd been, while making a peculiar bark/growl that I called her "hunting call". In her younger days she would chase after them -- it was a reliable way of getting her into a room when we needed to.

She took over the spot on the bed that Curio had occupied. I sleep on my side, with my arm up beside my head, and that's where she loved to sit, while I scritched her tummy and waited for sleep to come. In the daytime, she spent a lot of time on Colleen's lap, getting treats and attention.

She did not get along with m's cat, Cricket. Actually that's an understatement. We never found out why. (Cricket, when asked, would only say that it was from a previous life and none of our business. A cat thing.) We had to keep them in separate rooms. But both of them were fine as long as they had their people.

She was timid with strangers, and would hide under the bed the first couple of times a new person came into her room.

I had been singing to her, and N and I both took pictures. When Stefan, the vet, came back from giving Cricket her Solensia shot I picked Ticia up and carried her to the white chair in the corner of the room -- her favorite chair -- and talked softly to her as she fell asleep, her head resting comfortably on my arm.

She slips silently through the Veil between the worlds, and onto the Rainbow Bridge. She looks back, a little concerned about the family she left behind, but there is only the pale shimmer of the Veil. Well, they'll just have to take care of one another without her.

She's made this trip before.

As she climbs the rainbow-carpeted stairs her age and her illness fall away, and once again she is a queen in the prime of life, as she was on the day eleven years ago when she met her latest Person. Back then she had been frightened and unhappy, still grieving her recent loss. But a man with a soft voice and gentle hands had coaxed her out of hiding, petted her, and picked her up, and she'd settled into his lap with a contented purr. He had been grieving, too. A cat can tell these things.

A pair of sleek black cats -- Desti and Bast -- meet her near the top of the stairs, and lead her to where Colleen and her previous Person are sitting, sipping tea and getting acquainted. Curio is there too, Colleen's previous Cat. They all have a lot of catching up to do.

The Goddess briefly re-manifests: a slim woman with the head of a cat, before dashing off to her next appointment. A psychopomp's work is never done.

Links:

The Rainbow Bridge
Ticia's page
Photos
Vet@Home (site can be viewed in Dutch, English, or Spanish)
Dierencrematorium Haaglanden/
Aiming to double cats' lifespan by improving kidney function | The University of Tokyo

Current Mood: sad
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: Music For Cats

Tags:

Julie and K have survived their first day of their summer jobs as camp counselors. Today, they were on different shifts, which made everything a bit more complex. This may (or may not) change in future weeks. We'll see.

Tags:

Today was a day for doing nothing and that's pretty much what I did, other than a trip to the grocery store to pick up sweet corn and potatoes, followed by firing up the grill to make hamburgers and take advantage of the surfeit of hamburger buns that remained from last night's meal of sloppy joes with Clif.

And, you know, I needed a day of nothing.

Tomorrow, I'll go back to working on something. Who knows? Someone might return my phone calls...

Tags:

Bad week. I mean, really not a good week. It had its bright points -- most bad weeks do -- a common thread of love, friendship, and care. And grief is lessened by being shared. It was still a bad week.

Thursday our dear old-lady-cat Ticia crossed the Rainbow Bridge. There will be a full post in a day or three. Meanwhile if you're triggered by such things you'll want to skip over 0611Th. And maybe Wednesday and Friday.

Not a totally lost week, though; I got in five walks (missing Wednesday and Thursday -- see above), and wrote a Songs for Saturday post, along with my usual Thankful Thursday.

Linkies: Ukraine and Moldova on course to start formal EU membership talks in June Sailing Alone Around the World, by Joshua Slocum - Standard Ebooks Disordered, Deficient, Dehumanized: How the Language of Aphantasia Research Shapes What We Think About It (more on Friday),

‘Happiness is not just about GDP’: ambitious plan or utopia? (More, including the whole report, on Saturday. Up to you to decide how it compares as Utopian fiction to The World As it Ought To Be, by Naomi Rivkis, which is the subject of a Goodreads ebook giveaway, and also on sale for $2.99 until the end of this month.)

Rage-inducing: DOD Officially Drops 180 Faiths From Military's Recognized Religion List

See you later this week.

( Notes & links, as usual. CW: pet death )

Current Mood: not depressed, but something like that
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: from the demoscene

Tags:

The bench has departed for a new home. The recliner chair is still here, but I have hopes.

Clif will be departing for his home tomorrow as the Nebula Awards convention will be over, but we had a good time hanging here when he wasn't there.

And laundry was laundered, despite our best efforts. :)

Tags:

This is an impressive ~~hack~~ bit of madness: Anyway, I Made a Choir - YouTube. Two hundred tracks.

And for that matter, why build a mainframe when you can just buy one on eBay. For a song. Of course there's a bit of a catch...

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: see post

Tags:

I am making some progress on things around here. This would be greatly aided if people would answer emails and phone messages, but that seems to be a lot to hope for in some cases.

*sigh*

Tags:

My financial advisor took us on the annual excursion to a Cubs rooftop. The Cubs scored multiple times in the bottom of the ninth to beat the As 7-6. Wow!

Tags:

Today I am thankful for...

Compassion.
A vet who makes house calls.
Ticia.
Bronx, for being gentle, caring, and mostly staying out of the way.
My chosen sister, N, and her husband G.
Loading the dishwasher for mindfulness and self-soothing.

( Content warning: pet death. More specifically: )

Current Mood: grateful, grieving
Current Location: Schildhaven in Den Haag
Current Music: singing for Ticia

Tags:

Clif has arrived for the weekend. He'll be attending the Nebula Awards which are near our house. We spent this evening equipment geeking.

While Clif is at the awards convention, we'll be shuffling children around. And I'm going to a baseball game. Scheduling is like that. :)

Tags:

Page Summary

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Style Credit

Style: Elegant Notebook for Gold Leaf by rosecarmine
Resources: Yusuke Kamiyamane and Atle Mo

Drummer's Corner of the World

... tollers rule ...

Reading

Profile

April 2017

Custom Text

Comics and Pizza

Sleep, Wonderful Sleep

Catching Up on My Reading

Done Since 2026-06-07

Progress

I Used To Know Things

Chair Repair

Thankful Thursday

Bits and Pieces

No Driveway For You!

River: RIP Ticia: 2007--2026

Summer Jobs

Plenty of Nothing

Done Since 2026-05-31

Progress

Songs for Saturday: You Can Build a Choir From the Things You Find At Home

Less Than Meets the Eye

Cubs Win!

Thankful Thursday

House Guest

Page Summary

Expand Cut Tags

Style Credit