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My dear heartsister Sharon got married saturday to her wonderful betrothed, Jason.

I was honored and delighted to participate in their ceremony and watch them plight their troth in a circle of rose petals and beach stones(with our wishes for their union written upon them) and surrounded by tear-soaked family and friends. It was a beautiful ceremony, Marit did a great job officiating, despite being asked only the night before to fill in the role! She proudly declared them Woman and Husband.

Sunday, we had a big party at the Haller Lake Community center and there was square dancing-

-and so much delight and feasting and fun the whole city surely felt the waves of love…

My heart certainly overflows with the joy of it. So good to see my beloved, glorious Sharon united with such a good man and surrounded by loving family and community.

What a beautiful day!

I did take pics at the party. Enjoy the flickr’d set here.

My sister, the amazing Blackbelt Dreamer, is building a membership site for women on self esteem and self empowerment. She needs input and asked me to put this question out to you:

“What would you most like to see as tools and content on a membership site about self esteem and self empowerment? What kind of tools, content, helpful things would you most like that would be of value to you?”

Here’s a link to an awesome video of an interview with her:

http://www.facebook.com/inbox/readmessage.php?t=1225361714495#/video/video.php?v=105325143594&ref=mf

Yay sis! Tell her what you think, Oh My Illustrious Readers. She’s got a nifty little questionaire page on her site where you can answer directly: http://www.high-self-esteem.com/Questionnaire.html

‘Twas a lovely snowy xmas, with much loot, sledding, feasting, mayhem and merrimaking.

More pics here.

Atiron got her’s flickr’d.

Go, see the great pillow massacre, Me eating Delayne’s arm, Ben french-kissing a dragon and tons of other cool madness!

Mwahahahah!!

It was an awesome Turkey day! Sam, BB, Delayne and I farmsat on Whidbey Island and Rita and Ben came out friday evening for to cookandNOM!

Mmmm…

Quite an eventful holiday.. The three goats(Merriment, Snow Princess and Chardonnay-or as the kids call them: Butt Goat, Nice Goat and Starved Goat) turned out to be quite skillful escape artists and so we spent quite a bit of time rounding them up and juryrigging the gate shut so that Merriment(Butt Goat) couldn’t eat ALL the hay.

Not to mention calming the hyper young german shepherd, Savannah(and cleaning up poop-not my favorite part). She spends much of her time locked in the laundry room, so she’s VERY ENTHUSIASTIC when let out. Luckily, our group included some avid dog fans, so she was well taken care of, even if she did still spend much of her time watching(~pantwhinepant~) the ladder for the poor cat which hardly ever comes downstairs, except to make a mad dash for the kitchen loft where her food is.

The kids had a great time feeding the chickens(Rowan practically adopted them) and ducks and we all enjoyed wrangling the goats and petting Velvet, the donkey, who seemed a bit depressed this time around.

It was lovely to get ‘lost’ in the forest, which is honeycombed with paths to yurts and cabins and farmsteads. We also took a day trip out the Double Bluff Beach and there was much sliding down bluffs,

log walking, admiring clay bastions, stacking rocks(on Delayne’s part) and I made a very odd cliff creature in the sand/clay/sandstone bluff. Most of the oddness due to the act that the head I was carving kept shifting and falling off. Oh well, it was fun.

Our feast was splendid and abundant. We had turkey, stuffing, mashed ‘taters, Rita’s amazing juiced orange sweet potatoes, cider…

(possibly a little too much cider?)

garden pumpkin and Ben’s delicious gravy(made at the risk of his life and to the detriment of his pants).

Dessert was a most delicious triple berry pie that Delayne and I found at a sweet bakery in Langley. He and I had a lovely little browse in an amazing import store there. They have gorgeous rugs, bizarrely cool hats, exquisite gemstone jewelry and these ginormous chairs carved from whole old growth tree trunks-all smooth oiled wood loveliness. I absolutely lOVE them. If I had a few extra thousand smackers, I’da brought one home for sure. As it was, I rang every bell in the place and brought three of the sweet little ones home. Amazing, hand beaten metal bells from India-they all have different tones and I chose the sweetest three of all the little ones.

Aaaaaaaaaah, such a marvelous time. More pics of farmy goodness and all our adventures here.

I’m so lucky to have such brizilliant friends and family.

The new Mountaineers climbing wall at Magnusson is extremely cool.

So extremely cool, in fact that it utterly defeated Sam and I.

Oh wells, we had fun goggling at it and chasing the resident crow away from our leftovers until he wickedly spilled both of our sodas in vengeance.. Then I took him(Sam, not the mettlesome corvid) to the Brig(where I teach clay class) and showed him the cool whale sculpture and the pea patch and we ate lots of raspberries and then went on a gelato procuring mission, starting with the kidnapping of BB so that she could come eat gelato and go walkies at Greenlake.

More wall, whale and walkies pics here.

My new friend Maya lured me off to ‘A Night of Transformation’, a Toltec wisdom performance event saturday evening.

The ginormous beehive of the Nexus Hotel near the Northgate mall seemed quite an incongruous location for such an earthy, spiritual event, but it mattered not-it gave us enough space for transformation, enough space for the band to play, for the stories to blossom, for our spirits to rise!

So invigorating to see men of wisdom speak! Tell story, sing, share music and art. Don Jose Ruiz sitting there(smiling this huge smile like the sun shining on every single wildflower in a brilliant mountain meadow) and giving us his blessing through stories. I loved watching Eric painting, his firey artwork taking shape under the spell of the music and magic. The singers and musicians fueling our yearning and encouraging our spirits with their poignant, funny and tender songs.

I love Don Jose’s Abraham Lincoln quote: ‘When you do bad, you feel bad, when you do good, you feel good’. What a simple, easily graspable, explanation of karma! And his recounting of the joyous memory of hundreds of metalheads OMing at an Ozzy Ozborne concert, and the vision of humans, us, ordinary human beings, as angels, fully capable for change, of taking back our world.

Right here, right now, every day, we are the angels, we can take our world back. That makes my heart so happy, so happy.

And Maya, oh miss Maya, marvelous, dancin’, skippin’, tiny, soft, strong, dynamite papaya woman. So glad to welcome you to my tribe! Many thanks to Yoni for bringing you to my nest and to you for lifting my heart, hearing my poems, reveling in snuggles and chocolate, giant leaves and foggy worlds, for purple cauliflower, for giggles and rubbing my feet…

More pics here.

I love it when my family grows.

A sweet beach afternoon with Sam and Rowan..

Led to the creation of a bizarre articulated sand worm that Rowan says looks like a Pokemon-eeep!

Then the tide came whizzing in and we had to abandon the worm to the inexorable fate of all sand creations as we retreated to a more expansive part of the beach. Soon, the lovely miss Rita joined us and I made her a troll foot and built a small crowd of little rock people watching the multitude of parasailors leaping in and out of the water, with varying degrees of skill.

By and by, to my delight, Delayne made it into town(after much harrassment at customs-forgetting his passport didn’t help, but they never can resist f—ing with his irrepressible inner coyote) and restored the kidz swiftly drooping spirits with delicious sparkly beverages.

A brilliant launching point for a scrumptious week.

Pics in the usual location.

Had a fabulous five day getaway out on the gorgeous Olympic peninsula last week.

Sam and I started out with a day in Port Angeles. I really enjoy exploring a new town with my kid. It’s kind of nice to see things from the perspective of a ten year old-especially one who likes the same sort of things I like.

We played on the beach for hours, browsed the bookstores(quite a well-book-stocked town, Port Angeles), admired and goofed around with the numerous sculptures that adorn the street and waterfronts

We’d cozied up in our little hotel room near the ferry with stacks of books and drawing materials when the gorgeous golden sunset light came seductively slanting in the window.. Somehow(bagels or chocolate usually work), I managed to persuade the foot-weary Sam to go for another little walk with me to capture the loveliness of the world’s turning.

Sooooo purty.

Back at the hotel, we settled in for a snuggly night of reading chapters(halfway through Tailchaser’s song and finishing up Sea of Monsters) and laughing at the monotonous, incessant chirping of the crossing lights, repeating the same call over and over like some deranged wind-up bird.

It was sweet to go to sleep in our little white room, looking forward to meeting Rita at the bustop after breakfast and Delayne at the ferry in the afternoon.

But that’s the next post…

I had a fabulous tween weekend.

Sam and I missed Rowan’s birthday last week, so we celebrated(and said goodbye to her for the summer) by having an all weekend campout in the backyard.

Thanks to Jim’s palatial tent, we all had our own rooms too-perfect for privacy and connection, teleportation optional, but highly recommended.

It was blazing hot, so we filled the hot tub with cold water and the kids tested their Popsicle Samurai endurance skilz.

What a full weekend! We went to WALL-E(good movie that), took the Bday girl manga shopping, tromped around town in search of desserts… There was marshmallow-roasty bonfires, late-nite manga madness, stormy gusts blustering the tent, giggly morning conversations about god, the universe and everything and a lovely trip to the Dobyn’s trampoline.

Where Rowan trounced us all with the sheer power of HAIR.

M’kehla chopped hers off halfway through the weekend, to emerge looking all cute and shorn and elegant. Fortunately, Rowan has enough hair for all of ‘em and then some.

And, apparently(according to Sam) it has rejuvenative powers. It wouldn’t surprise me-she could put the fear of hair unto a horde of rastafarians.

More campin’, trampin’ and hair power here.