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It was a wild and stormy night at the Tarot Festival…

The Empress held court amongst all the other gorgeous altars we’d set up that morning.

Strength was the card chosen for my altar creation.

There were so many beautiful altars and amazing costumes, it was a whirl of ritual and feasting and dancing. The feast table was so sumptuous, with a gigantic cornucopeia full of pomagranites, smoked salmon, chocolates, gourmet black sesame tahini balls, lavish heaps of fruits, cheeses, olives… An endless pouring of libations.

My costume was cobbled together hastily, I bought those fuzzy, pretty tubular scarves that are soft as gossamer, and so stretchy that you can wear them like a dress, hastily sewed two grey ones onto a shiney purpley one, so that I had a fuzzy dress with extremely long and floopy sleeves. It was such a fun costume to wear on the (luckily ample) dance floor-I kept twirling out my sleeves so they’d woosh out twice my arm’s normal length and tossing them over my shoulders and into the air.

I took my awesome new(well, I guess I’m the one who’s new-they’ve been here a while) neighbors, Tessa, Hans and Christopher with me and we danced and laughed and ate and snuggled and ate and philosophised and ate and sat in contemplation and ate and raised our voices with intention and ate…

Around 4am, when the guests had dwindled, we stuffed our pockets with the still overflowing goodies, with much not-so-serreptitious giggling, and then decided to raid the co-op dumpster on the way home…

Holy basil! I had NO idea… We scored so much awesome, slightly bruised organic produce-ten bags of basil, bananas, lemons, apples, two cantalopes, ‘taters, various and sundry berries and herbs.

It was so riotously fun. We had to keep ourselves from shrieking, waking the whole sleeping ‘hood with our outlaw triumphyells.

I drove us all home-between the four of us, only my car works-and crashed out at their sweet, friendly little home for a lazy musical night-into-morning…

Now, I’m home, tired and so happy that there’s beautiful, dreadlocked, earthmama-loving freaky people just over my back fence.

Nate’s Taquitos!

They’re yummy, my kid likes ‘em and they come in a box.

Right now, that’s what I need.

We carved us some gorgeous jack o’lanterns yesterday. Had a feast, made merry and celebrated with Kristen’s mulled wine and fresh cider courtesy of my lovely new backyard neighbors, Hans and Tessa.

Tessa in fact, bravely leaped the fence, tore her pants and taught me how to make a dreadlock!

Look, isn’t it pretty?

Man, it’s been a hellacious week.

I’ve been running my mom from hospital to hospital all week, trying to get an appointment with an orthopaedist. The ones NW hospital told her to go to wouldn’t take medicaid, Harborview wouldn’t make an appointment for us because she’d been seen at NW… Finally we took her to the UW emergency and they got us an appointment for the next day-at Harborview!

Sheesh.

Finally, mom has a pretty blue cast on her wrist and it looks like she won’t need surgery.

Thank goodness.

I’m such a friggin’ stressball-I just found out the bank racked up FIVE overdraft charges while I wasn’t looking!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Five times twenty-seven is more money than I even want to add up.

I ’bout EXPLODED all over Wedgewood this afternoon when I got back from the 3rd hospital trip in the last few days and checked my red, red, red account balance.

It ain’t purty when angryZans blow up.

Getting the header together was a rather elaborate challenge. I made this painting for it(now framed ala photoshop), then had to make another painting to extend the columnade and it took ever so much futzing about and cussing to get the image together with the photo of the grass and then the shovel and text.

It’s not quite perfect, but then, neither am I!

But I’m not sleeeeeeeepy! Durn it.

I had a nice afternoon. Met some loverly pagans, showed off my art and happily cuddled their velvety sweet dog as we sipped genmaicha and talked of goddesses, kid antics, internal martial arts vs. external martial arts, polyamory vs. polyagony and community in the midst of an isolation prone culture.

Good folks. S’nice to know they’re out there. All the freaky people.

Like the man says, they make the beauty of the world.

OK, OK, I’m going to bed now…

I wish I had a blanket made of dog’s ears. I know, that’s gross.

But, they’re so soft and velvety and warm. Can you imagine if you had one as big as a blanket? ‘course then you’d have to watch out for a slobbery mattress-sized tongue and teeth as big as your arm…

Hmmm… I guess I’ll stick with down.

Sigh.

I’m gonna have to go see Serenity.

Elaine just pushed the scale right over tha top by adding her enthusiastic thumbs up to the already heaping pile.

The chicks kick ass-really, what more did I need to know?

…that’s amore!’

Sam and I were tuckled into my big, plush bed tonight, gazing at the pretty full moon as she peeped now and again from the thick cloud covers…

He loves the way the window is so nice and tall, so we have a perfect view. We’re reading ‘Eragon’, which is a pretty good tale, written by a kid(I think he’s fifteen or so), full of dragons and swords and magic. Somewhat Lord of the Ringsish, but without Tolkein’s mad, magnificence of detail. It’s pretty quick-paced, with very short chapters-perfect for my hyperbunctuous kidlet.

It’s one of my favorite times, snuggling up with him. Sometimes I sing us the smattering of buddhist chants we know. Occasionally he even joins in-he knows them all by heart, but doesn’t often sing himself. It sounds so pretty when he does, I almost hold my breath.

Most often we read a chapter or two and then indulge in rampant silliness. Like the other night, when I catalogued his explosions from the lamest, stupidest explosion ever-bam- to the most super-awesome explosion in the universe(completely unreproducible-it almost took the bed out, posts and all with it’s dramatic sound and fury).

Sometimes he’s so damn sweet and loving and fun it blows me away and really makes up for the other times… Like when he practically mortifracated me to death at my dad’s housewarming by yelling: ‘Is it normal to have THREE toes?’ in the pool, when confronted by his 3 year old cousin’s feet. Gah.

I sort of froze, then said no, then explained that it was normal for her, because she was born that way. But he was so freaked out by it that he wouldn’t even look at her feet.

Luckily she’s a total sweetheart and wasn’t even fazed by his behaviour, but I was pretty livid-which didn’t help matters much.

I s’pose it’s only normal to be afraid. To be honest, it was slightly hard for me to pick up her foot and look closely too. But Sam absolutely would not look. It wasn’t my best parenting moment. I felt pretty awful even tho she didn’t seem hurt in the least.

I told him it wasn’t acceptable, that he could have really hurt her feelings, acting like that… He just insisted that he couldn’t look. He seemed pretty paralysed with fear. I told him that I knew that he could.

They did play together, well…

…really mostly they watched TV together(kind of scarey to see-with Sam glazing over like a zombiechild and her piping up: ‘mom can buy me that’ with every single commercial until her dad’s head exploded). As long as her socks were on, Sam had no problem hanging out with her.

Grah. I guess I need to get that kid out in the world a bit more.