Happy November (2005)

It’s now November, another increment of 2005 gone … the years go by faster and faster as you get older … this I know from experience and from the knowlege imparted to me by elders over time.

At some points time seems to crawl and others to fly fastly by, but this is not what I mean, I mean a general overall trend of quicker passage of years.

Time for me personally is something that has never been static, it’s always been extremely “elastic”. So parts of days can be longer or shorter, eb and flow, in other words. The overall General Sense of time is met by the Calendar that we use, which plots out days, weeks, months in a year. This is separate from my inner being, and is what I mean by time going faster, it’s the calendar that goes faster and faster, not actual “time” per se.

I find it interesting to think about time, we are stuck in it – only to escape it entirely when this life of ours ends. God is the Creator, and in His precense Time is not ours. To him a day is like a thousand years, a thousands years like a day. What does that mean? It may be unfathomable by many people, to me it’s fathomable to a large degree. I can grasp it with the understanding my “elastic time” gives me, as pathetic as it is compared to God’s.

So then, November Ushers In The Holidays. Firstly we have a Stryper concert in a couple of days, November 3rd. Then it’s Thanksgiving Day, the next day is Victoria’s birthday, then the Christmas season begins. This might not seem like a lot to some people. for me it is. I mean, it’s not that there are many things we do in the Christmas season, in fact we do little. For me though as an introvert it’s fun atimes, but gets weary and the blanc of January 1 is welcomed. I’ve written of it before, how it’s like a great empty stark white day. The romaticism of Christmas wiped away with the New Year … I like romatic stuff, to a point. The logicalness of New Years Day draws me to it gladly. I prefer to be outdoors and hiking or walking somewhere, with my camera. We have seldom done that. I am hoping we’ll do it this year though, (the dependence on the TV is gone, we now have TIVO!)

For me the day is a pristine winter outdoorsy day, or at least a re-arrangement of some furniture of a room day. In the South it’s usually a crisp bright sunny day, a blue sky that only Winter can show off. There is rarely any snow on the ground, the ice storms generally come later in the month, so it’s a cool to cold day of brilliance. Not a day to be watching football on TV, in my very humble opinion. It’s a day to use to be and do and create. Start the calendar off with activity that is envigorating. Outdoorsy hiking is just that for me. Put me in a football watching party and I’ll wear out fast. :)

I will come to this point eventually, and I must think of it in advance: I need to do my January One outdoorsy hiking photographing whether or not my whole family wants to, so I have to plan to do it alone, or with the children. I’m not usually the driver, in fact haven’t driven but once or twice in the last couple of years. Frank takes me everywhere. So I have to prepare myself to be independent in order to have my vision of the day fulfilled. This will take lots of energy to plan, then all can come to aught if I chicken out. In the end, I may have hubbied company though.

Other people like to Shop on New Years Day, or go the movies or out to eat or all of these things. I like outdoors with nature and few people. Hubby likes indoors with TV and remote and snacks. My second for the day is rearranging furniture, but I do that year round, in fact I’m in the middle of re-arranging my kitchen stuff again, I don’t mean the sluggish re-vamping of the kitchen, I mean the literal “moving the movable pieces around — again”.

I moved the TV armoire to the other side of the room the other day (a miserly 10 feet.) I like it there, but inevitably I’ll want to move it back to where it just was once more. It’s hard in this house to have this way about oneself, the builder plan is bad for this personality, believe me, it’s hard to deal with.

Part of the ideas I have for this whole affair is building in as much “furniture” as wall permanent units as we can so that the functionality of the place is locked, and then I can fiddle with the stuff in some other way, keeping the functionality in place.

My prayers for the remainder of the year rest on God, to give us in this household the motivation and energy to complete the kitchen, to build as much of it that we can, and be able to afford the window, door, sink, faucet, and other things that need to be purchased.

Well the weather of late has been very much “autumn” weather. It’s glorious and nice in the afternoon, nearly too warm some days, but nice and cool to cold at night. Our A/C days are over for 2005. It’s natural air we have once again! :) I like Autmn and Winter.

The next task we have for this season is getting more firewood. We have some left over from last fireplace season, enough for a few days. Traditionally our first fire in the fireplace is nearer to the end of November. It’ll be interesting to note it this year, to see when it’s “the day”. So far the coldest nights into the mid-to-high 30′s haven’t made for needing more than wearing socks or tights and shoes or boots in the early AM, long sleeves or sweater, etc.

It’s within this branch of thinking that I’m re-arranging the furniture, to take possession of better spots to watch TV or read nearer to the fireplace, and to have work spaces in the kitchen nearer to the one window that is there, and also closer to the fireplace, though that won’t have much affect, as the fireplace has no blower on it.

Autumn is truly here

I got an audio book from Audible today, for the Autumn season … it’s not a “Halloween” thing, we “don’t do halloween”. It’s a spooky audio book though.

The cool weather has finally arrived. It was unseasonably warm (really hot) just the other week, and the last four or five days has been heavenly. Tonight we have frost advisories out and just to the north in the more mountainous areas there are freeze warnings.

I find that I have come alive now that Autumn is here in truth and spirit. Summer is nice (when in A/C), but it puts me in doldrum mode moreso than not overall, dulled senses. Autumn means I can wear boots and heavier skirts and I LIKE that, for some reason, though I am a very sensitive person to too many layers, itchy seams, bulky seams, ick ugh gooky yuk.

In this vein I like cashmere, thin soft sweaters made of cashmere are so ultra lightweight and oh so very warm.

Silk mixed with cotton or cashmere or wool makes for a nice garment. In the south the cotton mix is alright for some things, but you Northern-Clime folks, don’t do cotton. Due wool and silk.

Pure silk is pure heaven. Silk dresses, skirts, hosiery, underthings, blouses. Ah, so sweet and warming, light and soft and silky. I have a few silk things, not quite what I deem as what I really need though. The few things are better than none though.

Wool can be itchy, so silk underneath and wool overtop are nice mates.

So in summer-time lighter clothing can be worn, barefoot-ness in the house and yard is nice, but I don’t like the overall heat of the days, and the whole thing gets old after awhile. The cold of Autumn and Winter can be drudgery when it comes to putting on the clothes needed to outdoors, and to keep warm in a colder house if you have one (as we do). But it’s aliveness, it’s senses undulled, not dulled at all, so very brimming with life and energy. It’s the intellect sparking. That’s what it is. That’s why I like the colder weather so much, I guess. It IS because I like the cool, I respond well to it, but it’s the underlying how real do I feel, the real me, my mind … Ah yes, the cold is my friend, it aides the real me in appearing.

As long as the conditions are right.

What can dull me during winter … buildings with artificial heat. Like at church. In some stores. In some peoples cars. In some peoples houses.

What happens to me is: my sinuses close up, gooky or dry and I can’t barely breath, all the while that is happening I yawn and start getting sleepier and sleepier and sleepier … it’s my mind, it sinks far away into the depths of the folds of oblivion. lolling tongue feeling.

Give me the freezing air, let me wear the light warm clothing to keep my body warm enough and give me that cool to cold air to breathe… it is full of life, and the heated air feels nearly depleted of oxygen.

Falsely cooled (A/C) buildings seem devoid of air unless the system is moving air all of the time.

What it feels to me like is slow suffocation.

I have no such problem with my house in the winter. In the old days we had a heat pump and it couldn’t keep our house warm … good job it did. It’s a gentler heat and less stuffy even if it does warm up the house, but it’s still better all around for the air to be natural as possible … we don’t use that now, it broke. The fireplace we use, it makes a nice heat that is natural and doesn’t fill up even one room, but takes the edge of cold off nicely. The air is full of breathability. :) With the heatpump we used the fireplace before, so the heatpump not being used is only the corners of the house that are left without help … and an electric space heater here and there help out when it worse out (like the days of low 30′s or 20′s and no sun for days and day [2 or more]). I like it when it snows or ices over. Everything stops and it gets warmer in the house. I mean, there’s no going anywhere, no one out there moving about, and the house gets warmer from the insulation of the whole region from snow or ice.

We live in Georgia, so it’s not a whole season of snow and ice, but fits and starts of it, then it goes away and mild cold days reign again, till another ice storm comes. We get cold weather in October sometimes, but mostly it awaits November, and we sometimes get some flurries or snow before the end of the year. It’s usually January though, mid or later, when the weather gets seriously icy or snowy. Last year it wasn’t until February. Overall last year was a very mild winter for us.

I’m just thrilled that the weather has changed finally. The trees that still have leaves (some dropped them or part of them in September, curiously) are beginning to really start to show colours changing. Peak colour is usually mid-November. Right on schedule now.

My hens are mostly all molting again. They were laying great just a few weeks ago, then suddenly dropped to only one hen laying, then she quit after a week or so of solo laying. Then about a week ago Hawklady started to lay every other day and a few days in a row as well, with nothing today, but yesterday and the day before, yes. (she’s still in her own little overturned basket area.)

The Leghorns have a flood of white fluff in their pen. The other hens have a sea of mostly black and a little bit of brown fluff all about them (Autralorps and Golden-laced Wyandottes)

I still want to get a pen made for just the Wyandottes and Hawklady, that’d be three of them. It seems nice to segregate them, they tend towards self looking behaviour. Really they do, in my backyard at least.

So it’s colder time and the Leghorns are now sleeping in their laying box, you can tell from all the feather and poop in their every morning. No more eggs being layed, so go for it ladies. Seven of them crammed in that there box.

So then, this weather, it’s bright and fluffy stuff, envigoration-ating. So what nice when it gets cooler, and darker sooner, but some good old-fashion spooky reading … and nothing like hearing it read to you.

This is the audio book I got today: Great Classic Hauntings: Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson and a couple more.

They are having a sale there on Audible.com, 50% off of many books, not all, just many. Each on-sale item has an orange pumpkin next to it. The book I got was a lower priced book and exactly what I had in mind to get, a selection of something, including Poe, but not limited to him, though I’m interested in getting more Poe-only audio books in the future.

So the days are less light, well, very light and bright indeed, but less of it time-wise. This next weekend is when the clocks change for us from EDT to EST. Then it’ll be darker earlier in the evening. It has seemed like the last month the light has gone noticeably earlier, so that the time change will make it shockingly earlier. It’s mostly the lack of light we have in the house due to removing our deck French doors this year. It darkened things up intensely. We had a window A/C unit in over the sink and just took that out today, so now we have a smidgen more light in here again. (House back faces South) It’ll be interesting to see how it feels, light-wise, in here after a few more days of a window view there again, before the Fall Backwards-ness of time on Sunday early AM.

Stryper Reborn

Stryper came out with a new releast mid-August this year, just over a month ago, well a month and a half ago. I wasn’t aware of it until late last week, when I ran into the CD while flipping through CD’s in the S section at Fry’s, actually seeking another band.

I guess it was late last Winter that I was on Stryper’s website wishing for news of a tour nearby, or some material being recorded. There was something, I’m not sure what, a hint or something, maybe. I don’t recall, only that I stopped going there and thought about it at one point to remind myself to check back sooner than later. Well, I didn’t. I forgot. I have even played the albums I have of theirs on my computer many times over this Summer, no thoughts of them beyond that, for some reason.

So needless to say I was SHOCKED when I found the CD ‘Reborn’. It’s a really neat cover. The music is incredible. If you ever loved Stryper before you must love this CD, I think. I know. I feel it myself. I loved them in the 80′s and never stopped loving their music. They are the only “Christian” band I’ve been able to tolerate, and it isn’t toleration at all for me, I really like them, and their simple lyrics that don’t mince words. The music is complex and wonderful.

Styper\'s Reborn CD cover

Their newest then is new. It’s better than ever, truly. One that is really nice is an updated In God We Trust, titled I.G.W.T. this time around. The overall tone of the album is true about this one too: it’s hard, a bit melancholy, moreso glowingly minor and melodic and heavy hard undertone and overtones all at once. Another familiar song, Amazing Grace … done over Stryper “Reborn” style … really good to hear that updated too. The rest is all new material, delicious as chocolate in any way you like it the most.

Frank is away for a couple of days and may be gone longer than scheduled, so after a flurry of “Stryper Talk” I gave him on the phone today, he said I could get a few things I saw and so I was able to order their new album on Vinyl (!) I’ve been buying older vinyl of groups I like, on eBay lately, and this is even better, a brand new just released Stryper albumn, on VINYL! :) I also ordered a T-shirt and a couple of Stryper buttons.

The other good news is that, if we can get them, Frank agreed to go to their concert in Atlanta in November, actually just one month from today. It’s a small venue and hopefully tickets will be available when he can get there later this week. I saw them long, long ago. I was a young person back then. Now I’m old, of course, they are too ;)

Autumn Seasonal Allergies

Yesterday I was busy organizing and dejunking and motivating the children, and pulling out books to input into Library Thing. I had a problem creep up then that I detailed under my UGH post yesterday.

The short sweet version is that I felt very allergic suddenly in the afternoon, worse than I had that morning or the previous days. My left eye felt weird and dry and itchy and I chalked it up to the allergy, my right eye felt similar the week before, but cleared up, wasn’t anything but an allergy. So the point is that yesterday it WAS something other than just an allergy, there was a fleck of something on my eyeball, and tried several things, and it wouldn’t come off. Tamara commented with an idea to try and bless her heart, that’s what helped. Simple old scotch tape did the trick.

But now I realized it’s not that it was just that, it’s more than that. Allergy season has ramped up on me in a big way, and the ragweed map has us in the HIGH zone, just short of totally inundated. I can attest to you that I hadn’t looked up the alllergy map info for a few days. I know that it’s been in the moderate range the last couple of weeks or so, and I’ve been up and down in how I feel allergy-wise. Well yesterday I got really bad and the eye fleck had something to do with it, but once it was out I still felt funny, and funnier all over, and my eyes have been very goopy. I know that my left eye has repercussion to deal with, the underside of my eyelid took a hard scratch hit with that fleck. So I expect irritation of that nature to be healing so it’s not going to feel good at all, beaide that though I have the classic symptoms I get from allergies being pollen related … I can feel it in my chest, itchy dragging feeling there. It’s similar to when you have a cold and first realize that it’s moving into your chest. In my allergies I don’t get a full congestion thing going, it’s only minor and constant and very itchy. My throat gets swollen feeling and eventually raw feeling, and my sinuses clog up inside, or my nose drips, or both, or I get massive mud slides down my throat, or everything all at once. It’s not as bad as it sounds, just sometimes. So today, that’s that. I felt so horrid, and so I went to look at accuweather’s site and they say “air quality is good”. “Pollents counts though are HIGH”. Grass is “moderate” Ragweed is “high”.

When we were new to GA there was a drought going on. Since the drought went away due to rain, rain, rain the other year, I have had a ragweed allergy. I didn’t have massive allergies when I was a child in PA. In FL I had January to March massive allergies due to blooming something, either Mango Trees, or something that bloomed right when they did. Painful times those were. In any case, moving to GA I had the traditional worse in Spring things and the general cruddy reaction to mold, dust, etc. the rest of the year. It wasn’t until the drought released that I had a ragweed-season appearance of allergy symptoms. I took Claratin for my spring allergies the first year it was over-the-counter, it helped some. So I took it again when I had my first taste of ragweed-season that year, and it made me worse. I have realized that Claratin just doesn’t do a lot for me. So I don’t consider it as a useful thing to take.

Benadryl Liquid continues to be my only friend, I take a swig of it if I am overpowered by something only. I take a small swig, I’ll let you know. It’s not a lot, not a full dose. I can’t stand full doses of anti-histamines and decongestants. They hit me hard and leave me high and dry, feeling better, but feeling worse really.

So I took some Benadryl this morning, and I’m awaiting it to take the edge off of the suffering.

My left eye is the one that suffered the fleck issue, and my right eye was fine yesterday, but both eyes seeped more night goo than usual, and both feel like dry gel filled swimming pools, though my left one feels worse.

Allergies like this are just ones that make me feel plugged-out. I can see, but feel like I’m not seeing well, everything is foggy. That’s allergies in full swing.

So we have yet another year of good Ragweed Season coming on, I dont’ have to look at precipitation to know we’ve had enough. :veryshocked: