Zorya sits on the porch and thinks

I thought this was pretty cool



Via: Online College Advice

I've been getting mental bumps to start writing again. I really do need to do something beyond the occasional tweet on Twitter and random posts on Facebook. I'm much happier with life when I have a creative outlet.

I'm not sure what all I want to write about here, but I'm thinking everyday stuff. It's been 7 months since I pulled up stakes and moved from Dayton, Ohio, my home for 19 years to Nashville, Tennessee. It's taken a while to really absorb the reality of leaving the place I considered home for other fields.

Up to our move to Dayton I was a bit of a gypsy. As an Air Force "brat" I moved every few years. I went to 9 different schools, and 3 of them were high schools. After college and a short stint teaching I was active duty Air Force for 12 years, moving from California to England to Crete, Greece to New Hampshire to Arkansas to Ohio. By the time I hit Ohio I was out of the Air Force, and a few years later my Air Force husband declined an assignment to North Dakota and found a job as a computer engineer in Dayton.

So moving, once as normal as breathing, became a hard thing to do. But I can't spin my wheels forever. I'll be 58 this year, and while the camel hasn't knelt at my tent yet he's on the way across the desert. I don't have time to get into a rut.

This is a good time of the year to learn a few new divination methods. I am fairly comfortable with reading the Tarot, but there are a couple of other things I can work on.

I got this a couple of years ago: Russian Gipsy Fortune Telling Cards I've played around with them occasionally but I have never been very serious. The cards are beautiful and while you have to use the book to read them properly they have been surprisingly useful the few times I have tried a reading.

The other thing I am thinking of working with is an oracle set I got when All is One closed back in 2003: The Celtic Tree Oracle: A System of Divination I finally broke them out last week. The cards are also quite beautiful and interesting. As far as I can tell it uses the Ogham symbols with the corresponding tree and an interpretation of meaning for each. It's going to take a while to figure them out, though so this may wait until later in the winter when I am in hibernating mode.

I've been resisting it for a while but I think my patron deity has been dropping a few barriers behind me on the path. One of the things I learned in the Air Force was that when you go on a permanent change of station that the old job stayed at your last base. It didn't matter if your pet project was not complete, nor if you had developed emotional ties to the folks with whom you worked. When you got your orders you packed up your stuff, finished what you could and moved on to the next assignment.

I've come to realize that I need to treat the move from Dayton to Nashville the same way. Yeah, I know I still have a house up there that needs to be formally turned into a rental or put up for sale and I know my older sons still live there (for now, Son #2 might have a job down here after he finishes his last two classes at Sinclair). But the projects I was working on in the Dayton pagan community have to be turned over to someone else and I must move along. I am very confident that I have left DPA in good hands, and that whatever they want to do with the merged coven will be for the best. However, it's not my job anymore.

Samhain is a time between times. Not quite winter, but not summer either. I suppose you can call it the tail end of autumn, but the harvest activities are pretty much done and we are just waiting for the weather to turn all the way. Samhain and the month of November is a time for remembrance, meditation and contemplation of the spring to come. And for me it will be a good time to decide what comes next for Zorya.

I'm slightly more left brain than right brain, but not much. For what it's worth.

Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others. Left Brain Dominance: (10) Right Brain Dominance: (8) Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz

This guy sounds like a 1960's hippie, but the houses are way cool.

Inspired By... SunRay Kelley from Shwood Eyewear on Vimeo.

Tom is beginning to get a bit bogged down in the garage. He is not really sure where he is going to put everything, much less if he needs everything in the garage. He has packed quite a bit and thrown away quite a bit but while it has made a dent there is still...stuff.

Also, he is leaving Saturday instead of Sunday so he can have a day to recover before getting back into the normal work week. (I've made a small wager with myself in that idea).

I told him to pack what he wants to take, throw away as much as he can and then leave the rest neatly on the shelves. I explained to the boys that after the PODS is gone and I've loaded my car that anything they don't want to use and/or keep to take over to Goodwill or whatever non-profit will take it. And make sure they get a receipt for me for tax purposes (neither of them itemize). Or they can have a yard sale.

Tomorrow I will pack what I want to take from the kitchen. I'll also round up the bits and pieces in the bedroom and box them up. If I miss anything, well, I'm back up in July to get Kyle off on his People to People trip and I can evaluate left-behinds then.

Still some utilities to move over into Kris' name. Will also need to figure out who needs address changes but that may wait until we are down in Nashville.

The carpet squares I ordered to replace the ruined laminate floor in the basement den and the saturated carpet in the bedroom down there will arrive between 11 am and 3 pm tomorrow. The UPS driver will need help getting it off of the flatbed. Flatbed? I only ordered 15 boxes. Apparently 15 boxes are over 500 lbs.

Yet something else to walk around in the garage until Kris and Jesse can get the carpet ripped up from the bedroom and the floors in the den and the bedroom really clean so they can lay the tiles.

Kris has never laid carpet tiles before. We used them to replace some nasty carpet in the main floor bedrooms 8 years ago and it's not really hard - just tedious.

Tom made some good progress on the garage today. I got dragooned into taxi service part of the day so I'll have to make up for lost time tomorrow.

We have until Sunday, June 19th, to have everything we want to take to Nashville in the PODS and ready for a pickup on the 20th.

I still have some drawers to go through and sort as well as some shelves to clear out. Tom is making progress on the garage, but there is so much stuff out there. I am planning to pack up the kitchen things we intend to take on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday and Saturday we will be arranging the boxes in the PODS and figuring out how to put in the non-box items like the secretary, the drum table, my computer desk and the exercise bike. The beds will go in on Sunday morning.

Tom is heading back to Nashville Sunday morning. He will be taking my iMac and the Vizio HD flatscreen TV in the Element. Depending on some house factors Kyle and I will go down Tuesday.

The cats and the dogs are going to stay with the kids in Dayton until Kyle gets back from his People to People trip to Europe on the first of August. With all the unpacking to do and Tom's quirky schedule it will work out much better for everyone - particularly the pets.

...you have probably been ordering too much delivery pizza. ;->

Honestly, ordering a pizza is easier than a lot of other options as we work toward getting the stuff packed.

Papa Johns is getting a lot of custom from us. :-)

I just hope that the thunderstorm that is blowing in won't be a problem.