me
HEY!! thought you will like to know that Candi_Cruz its now live on dirtystage watch it now.. don miss it!

Bunchy Purse
Bunchy Purse
I'm selling this purse on eBay because I need the cash, so feel free to bid!
Only 2 days left; auction ends on Saturday at 8PM, give or
take like 3 minutes.



(Feel free to delete this if it is against regulation in any way or is unwanted)
x-posted.

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Rumi
It's been awhile, so here we go...

Rest your cheek, for a moment,
on this drunken cheek.
Let me forget the war and cruelty inside myself.
I hold these silver coins in my hand;
give me Your wine of golden light.
You have opened the seven doors of heaven;
now lay Your hand generously on my tightened heart.
All I have to offer is this illusion, my self.
Give it a nickname at least that is real.
Only you can restore what You have broken;
help my broken head.
Im not asking for some sweet pistachio candy,
but Your everlasting love.
Fifty times Ive said,
"Heart, stop hunting and step into this net."

-- Kabir Helminski
"Love is a Stranger"
Threshold Books, 1993

Have a good week, people.

Current Mood: sad

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B'day Cake
It's been an age since I posted here - hell, it's been an age since ANYONE posted here - but I need some help. My birthday is Sunday, and I am looking for a really good spice cake recipe, preferably for a bundt pan, or adaptable to one. I have a pan that makes a cake that looks like a rose! It's very cool. Anyway, I'd appreciate any help anyone can offer.

Current Mood: creative

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Mom's Day
Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there - you know who you are.
This is such a bittersweet holiday for me; my mom's been gone almost 5 years now, and it just doesn't seem to hurt any less.
Well, with any luck, the weather will stay decent, and we'll get to ride in the annual Mother's Day poker run (and Will is riding the Wide Glide now, and looks so awesome on it!). The temps will be fine; it's finally in the mid 70s. It's the "isolated storms" that worry me. Ah well, Mother Nature will do what She Will, no use whining about it.
Here's to all us Mothers!

Current Mood: nostalgic

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Yep, it's all about MeMe
Discordian Archive meme
Go back into your LiveJournal to the 23rd post you made.
Then copy the 5th line of that post.
Post that line with these directions.

Ah, ancient history...

"Other than that, it's been quiet, and I like that, because I know it"
The next line was "never lasts".
As we all know, in my life, that is SO so true.

On the other hand, life IS very good today.

Current Mood: satisfied

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My kid's a "real"adult now!
Well, Will's all moved in to his first house - it's so awesome; he's got a great view, and the whole place is solid and really pretty nice, and I'm so proud of him I could bust.
And we went to see Godsmack together Sunday night down in Wheeling (W.Va.), and had an absolute blast. The band was amazing.
Gods, I am SO grateful that my son and I are friends. He has grown up so well, and I really can't take credit for all of it, nor would I try - he's just a really terrific person.

Current Mood: Proud and grateful

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Ghazal 2155
Seemed like time for some Rumi - and for me, at least, it's incredibly appropriate...


How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?

Don't try to put out a fire
by throwing on more fire!
Don't wash a wound with blood!

No matter how fast you run,
your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes, it's in front!

Only full, overhead sun
diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you!
What hurts you, blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.

I can explain this, but it would break
the glass cover on your heart,
and there's no fixing that.

You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.

When from that tree, feathers and wings sprout
on you, be quieter than a dove.
Don't open your mouth for even a cooooooo.

When a frog slips into the water, the snake
cannot get it. Then the frog climbs back out
and croaks, and the snake moves toward him again.

Even if the frog learned to hiss, still the snake
would hear through the hiss the information
he needed, the frog voice underneath.

But if the frog could be completely silent,
then the snake would go back to sleeping,
and the frog could reach the barley.

The soul lives there in the silent breath.

And that grain of barley is such that,
when you put it in the ground,
it grows.
Are these enough words,
or shall I squeeze more juice from this?
Who am I, my friend?

-- Version by Coleman Barks
"The Essential Rumi"
Castle Books, 1997

Current Mood: relieved

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I'll be damned...
It's amazing what ending up with one's head hanging over the edge of a sofa can do for one's painful neck...
It didn't start hurting until about an hour ago, and that, my friends, is almost a miracle!

Current Mood: giggly

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Page 23, line 5
Grab the book nearest you, turn to page 23, find line 5. Write down what it says, along with this sentence, and post it in your journal.

"Chieftain, to conserve supplies - she had spent the night here"

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Enough!
I want off this fucking emotional roller coaster. This is just nuts. Poor Julie had to put her cat down day before yesterday, the one she and Skinny raised together!And of course, a few people who were supposed to be friends have turned into vultures, and I just feel so sad for her. Not to mention, there are a couple of people who just need slapped, and I'm generally not particularly violent. but these people need it. Badly.
And to top it all off, Mother Nature played a lovely April Fools' trick on us, in the form of a freaking snowstorm, just at "rush hour" (what passes for it around here, anyway) - that's when I had to GO to work, and the slush was 2 inches thick on the roads, and there was maybe an eighth of a mile visibility. Such fun. Will said you'd have thought he was driving in North Carolina, there were so many cars off the road! I mean, it's not like there's been no ice and snow this winter; how can people forget how to drive in three weeks?
And in the middle of feeling sad and angry and memories of putting my own cat down five years ago coming back to haunt me, and just general tapped-outness, I thought Herb blew me off when he really didn't, and I'm SO glad I was calm when I asked him about it, instead of freaking out, which I'd done earlier. By myself. While I was obsessing about whether or not he really did what I was thinking he might have done, but then again, why would he do that, I must be nuts. Like that. I don't know why I'd even think he would do something like that, why can't I trust the people who love me??? Why do I always expect I'm gonna get hurt? I probably set myself up for it, by expecting it. Not smart.
I think, at the moment, I'm just wiped out. I even took myself off the schedule at work Saturday - I didn't have anything yet, anyway, and no one else is working, so fuck it. I need to re-group. Again. I'm certainly doing a lot of knitting! It's very soothing. I've made 3 scarves in the last 3 weeks!
Ah, shit, the weather needs to straighten up, and I need to get a grip on myself.
It's not healthy to be so anticipatory of the next awful thing.

Current Mood: drained

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Herb's son, Herbie, scared the bejeezus out of all of us over the weekend - had a mild seizure at school, they found fluid on his brain, which turned out to be congenital, and the seizure may be hormonally-charged (he's the right age), and may or may not ever happen again. Or he may be developing migraines. At any rate, while it may cause him some misery, it's not life-threatening.
Fridays are beginning to not be fun.
On the other hand, it ended rather well, in spite of everything.
In fact, a lot of things are coming together - or maybe, falling apart, that remains to be seen - and Life is quite adventurous.
Work's pretty good, too.
And my ass really IS a size smaller than it was a couple of months ago! How cool is that?

Current Mood: loved

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He's right, ya know...
Wow, I love this quote...

Quote of the Day:
Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
- Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)

Current Mood: buzzy

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TheTuesday after...
Well, no one has died, at least no one I personally know, for almost 10 days. Sometimes, one must be grateful for the strangest things...
Skinny's funeral was amazing, probably 200 bikes rode the 20 miles to the cemetary in the worst, and I mean WORST, driving deluge I have EVER ridden in (and the temps were barely in the 40s too). What a hellride! Between the bikes and the cars, the procession was probably close to 5 miles long! What a tribute, and he deserved it, too.
So this week is looking better - I did 3 massages today, have 3 scheduled for tomorrow, 4 for Wednesday, I get to get worked on Thursday (YAY!!), and am also going to a Spice of Life party with a girlfriend (it's one of those parties women have at their house, like a Tupperware party, but this one sells sex toys ). And by the end of the week, not only is it payday, but the temps are supposed to be in the 60s!
So there appears to be light at the end of this tunnel, and maybe, just maybe, it's not an oncoming train.
And my friend, whom I haven't seen since Novemeber, noticed my weight loss, and said so, and thought I'd lost 20 pounds (it's maybe 5 or 6)! Did my ego and my motivation good.
And now, my bed is calling me to get horizontal, and so, I believe I shall listen.

Current Mood: sleepy

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St Pat's
Well, it's St Pat's, and the last thing I feel like doing is partying.
There's been yet another death - this time, the son of a friend was found dead in a U-Haul parking lot at around 5AM yestrerday morning. Probably a crack overdose. The guy was pretty much a waste of oxygen, which is a terrible thing to say, but it's the truth - he stole off anyone he could, fathered three kids with a woman who is, herself, in jail, so his mama is raising those three kids (and since she didn't do a swell job of raising her own kids, I worry for those grandbabies), in all, just not a terrific human being. But, I'll go to the funeral home, to be there for his mom and sister (one of them, anyway - the other isn't much better than he was).
This shit needs to stop NOW. In the last 10 days, there have been 4 deaths, and 2 that we found out about a year or two after the fact. ENOUGH!!!!!
All I know is, I'm glad I have the support system I have - we all kind of prop up each other, and when one of us starts to go down, so to speak, there's usually someone to catch them. And that's more than a lot of people have.
Oh yeah - and we got buried under about 8 inches of snow yesterday, just to top everything off. If we can ride the bike in the funeral procession Saturday, it'll be a miracle (they're predicting rain, which means, with all this snow, the roads will be lakes). Skinny1%er deserves a huge bike procession, but unless he pulls some strings with the weather gods for Saturday, he may not get one. Maybe they'll do a memorial run for him in the summer, like was done for another friend of ours last year. He'd died on New Year's Eve, massive heart attack too, and it was just too cold and nasty to even be able to put his ashes in the ground, so we did it in May. And it was chilly and drizzly THAT day, too.
Nothing's ever easy, ya know?

Current Mood: distressed

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Dammit anyway...
OK, I just knew life was going too well. This past Monday, 2 people we knew from back in the day before the Paris Cafe was a cop bar, passed away. One from lung cancer, one from a heart attack. That was bad enough, but in a detached kind of way, since they were bar aquaintances. BJ took it harder than I did. But Friday...
Friday, Skinny 1%er, Warren chapter, American Outlaw Association, had a massive heart attack in his recliner, and died at 2:37 PM. His wife tried to revive him, so did the paramedics, but he was done for. And he was only 47.
And as he was like a brother to me, this one is just hideous. And poor Julie, his wife - she's only 38, and this is the third partner she's lost! The first 2 were suicides (one hanging, the other blew his head off playing Russian Roulette, while sitting on the couch beside her - she tried to stop him, but I don't think she could have, it's amazing he didn't take her with him), so this time it's totally different, but my gods... How does a woman deal with something like this? That's a rhetorical question, BTW, since no one really has an answer.
So this week is gonna be pretty awful. There will be calling hours at the funeral home for the family and friends on Thursday, the wake at the clubhouse is Friday, and the funeral is Saturday morning. It'll be a full blown Outlaw funeral, and the cemetary is probably 30 miles from the clubhouse, so I hope it's halfway decent, weather-wise, or it'll be one liserable trip on the bike - and of course, we'll be on the bike, unless it's pouring rain or snowing, which, according to long-range (which I don't trust at all) forecasts, it isn't supposed to do. I can handle mid-50s. We rode in one funeral that the high that day was maybe 40; that was a COLD ride!
Anyway, if I'm incommunicado for the week, this is why. It's taken me two days to be able to write this without breaking.
Love you all - hope your week goes well.

Current Mood: grieving

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Rituals and weight loss
The good news is that I'm still hanging in there on this topic. The not-so-good news is that the cold I had when I started got much, much worse, so I haven't been getting in much exercise. And my eating has been sketchy because I have an icky throat infection going on. But I'm still working on it, and as the cold goes away, I'm going to add in more exercise and get back to more solid foods!

I'm thinking of doing some sort of ritual for this. . . maybe some sort of ongoing ritual, or something that can be repeated weekly or even daily. . . I don't have anything planned out yet, so maybe I'm jumping the gun mentioning it, but it's on my mind right now. Has anyone done anything like this?

In a way, it feels strange to be focusing so much again on the shape of my body. But I think it's important. I'm not letting my self slip into the obsessions of the past, but this is an issue that needs focus and attention to reach my goals.

I understand loving and accepting yourself for who you are. And that's great. But I do *not* love the way my body looks and feels. I think I missed not letting this particular pendulum swing too far to the other side. I moved from a religious focus that was mainly masculine (Catholicism) to some version of Paganism, but I never let myself swing too far so that I ended up in the realm of Goddess Goddess Goddess with no real thought or attention for the masculine. I recognized (in my charming Libra way) the need for balance. Somehow, though, I missed the balance when I started my shift away from obsessing about weight and hating my body. I took to heart just accepting my body and not focusing on trying to lose weight. The problem is, I never reached a place where I was happy with my body. So I just tried harder at the "accept it as it is" thing. But it's not working. . .

I believe I'm rambling. . .that must mean it's time to stop. :)

Current Mood: okay

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A Good Poem
I was looking through the March issue of Oprah's magazine (one of my semi-guilty pleasures, in the same category as Lucky magazine and french vanilla cappucino), and came across this lovely poem. Thought I'd share...

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott, "Collected Poems 1948-1984"

Current Mood: happy

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My New Favorite Song
I don't know if any of the rest of you ever listen to country music - somehow, I doubt it - but anyway, Clint Black has a new cd out called "Spend My Time", and the title track has become my new favorite song. And it may end up one of yours, too, after you read these lyrics...

Spend My Time

How can we know how far/The long way can be/Looking from where we are/It never seemed that long to me/I've many miles behind me/Maybe not that much ahead/It seems I made good time/With the directions I misread/So I'm gonna spend my time/Like it's going out of style/I'm moving the bottom line/ Farther than a country mile/I still have hills to climb/Before I hit that wall/No matter how much time I buy/I can never spend it all/
Funny thing that time/We're always running out/I'm always losing mine/There's not enough of it about/And though it's always here/It'll always come and go/The days become the years/That'll be gone before you know
I'm gonna spend my time/ Like it's going out of style/I'm moving the bottom line/Better than a country mile/I still have hills to climb/Before I hit that wall/I won't go quietly into that dark night/There'll be no more burning daylight/I'll be living in/Every moment that I'm in
So I'm gonna spend my time/ Like it's going out of style/I'll only use what's mine/I've been saying for awhile/I still have hills to climb/Before I hit that wall/No matter how much time I buy/ I can never spend it all/No matter how much time we buy/ We can never spend it all
Clint Black and Hayden Nicholas

Current Mood: thoughtful

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Satisfied Sunday
Wow, life looks so much better when actual, excellent sex is added to the picture! I'm so touch oriented; when I don't get touched enough, everything goes kind of gray.
The fog has lifted, for the moment, anyway, and it surely feels fabulous.

Current Mood: rejuvenated

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