My Commonplace Book

Hello? Is anybody still here?

I was so busy a a couple of weeks ago that I didn't have time to post for a few days. And then I was feeling really lousy -- too tired to type, too tired to think, and since I hadn't been posting, it was all too easy to say I'll get started again tomorrow ... and tomorrow ... and of course tomorrow never came. I was starting to feel better and think about posting something when I got insanely busy again, and by the time that settled down, which was two or three days ago, I was out of the habit.

Plus I had managed to screw up my Semagic filters so it wasn't alerting me to anybody's posts. So I wasn't writing or reading. So if something important has happened in your life this month, please tell me, or point me at the relevant post.

But woofiegrrl nudged me, and a nudge is exactly what I needed to get me started posting again. Thank you, Sweetie!

[ADDED: Right after I uploaded this I checked my email and found that some time between when I started writing and when I actually posted it, lesliepear sent me a nudge too. Thank you!! It feels so good to be missed! ]

I have sooo much to write about, but I'm not sure how much of it will ever get written. (I'm not sure how much of it I can even remember! Some people have a mind like a steel trap ... I have a mind like a steel sieve.)

In reverse order....

This week I was tied up with the Yamanner worm, which targeted yahoo.com and yahoogroups.com addresses. Many of my Yahoo groups got hit, but the worst was the large (6,000+) freecycle group I co-moderate. We recently had to dismiss a fairly new moderator, so there were only four of us to deal with a huge amount of fallout. You may have heard that the worm came from the address av3@yahoo.com, but that was fixed very quickly -- the ones we were getting all had spoofed addresses, which made explaining it to the members much harder.

Many members recognized the From address as that of another member they'd freecycled with and sent us angry complaints. Many of the worm emails had To addresses of "lesbianpicsnpersons@yahoogroups.com" which offended some members, so they sent us angry complaints. Still other members heard something about it being a virus and sent us panicky pleas for help. Meanwhile, they were coming in to the group itself so fast that we had to put it on full moderation so nothing could get through without our approval. Of course, locking it down meant much more work than usual because instead of most posts going through on their own, we had to approve every message at the rate of over 80 a day!

The lesbianpicsnpersons group was apparently created specifically for the purpose of having these messages go through, since it was founded on June 13, the day Yamanner started, and only has one querulous message. (Why it has 74 members, I don't know! I guess they joined out of curiosity.)

At any rate, between handling all those pending posts, answering members' letters, doing our own research to find out what the heck was going on and posting Admin advisories when we found anything out, the four of us were running around like Energizer bunnies on crack. So there certainly wasn't any time to even think about LJ.

Before that, I had a bad bout of fatigue/listlessness/depression. I'm too old for it to be hormonal, so I don't know what brought it on, but I had to take a nap in the afternoon a few times because I was so very tired. I didn't realize I wasn't reading, and didn't care about writing. I didn't have the energy to do anything, but I spent so much time doing nothing that I was very restless. All I could do was wander around the house going from one sedentary activity to another -- take care of freecycle, play solitaire, read a book, play Tetris, read the newspaper, take care of freecycle, read a magazine, play solitaire....

Before that I had a lot going on. I went to Charlestown for an open house, which included a tour of the restored historic section, including the gorgeous chapel; a free lunch; and five open apartments in the building next to the nature trail, where the visitors could go in and see the what they looked like. I attended an all-day (9 am to 4 pm!) long-range planning workshop at church. (About 40 leaders of the church had been invited to participate, and I was pleased to be asked, since in the time since I finished 6 years in the church leadership -- two consecutive terms on the Board of Trustees and a term on the Leadership Council -- I've otherwise been totally ignored.) The farmer's market has started up again (yay!), I had an acupuncture appointment, I'm still seeing my volunteer, etc., etc.

Tomorrow I'll be out all day again, though, because I'm going to the National Zoo! It's a trip I bought at my  congregation's annual service auction last fall, and I'm really looking forward to it. CP is an ornithologist, and the trip was billed as "Introductory Ornithology at the National Zoo." The program C has planned is:

8:30 meet at the church to carpool
9:45 arrive at National Zoo
            tour the bird exhibits
            talk about species identification
            learn how to study animal behavior
            start recording animal census information
11:45 picnic lunch provided for you
12:30 organized program ends

After that a couple of people have to leave, but the rest  of us will spend the afternoon just walking around the zoo. It's going to be another long, exhausting day, but I'm really looking forward to it.

And I'm really glad to be back on LJ!

I am so exhausted and sore after two days of constant running around and dealing with a perfect storm of problems on freecycle. Except for freecycle, most of it was very good, but I've been totally worn out today.

For now I'm just listing everything in the hope of remembering to amplify the things I want to write more about:

• Saturday night
1. Saw Moolade, a marvelous and fascinating film about female genital mutilation in Burkina Faso.


• Sunday
1. Played the handchimes and also participated in the service about Passover; I had to be there at 8:00 am to rehearse, and then run back and forth between playing the introit, the first hymn and the offertory and lighting the chalice (for which I sang the Sh'ma) and helping to lead Dayenu for the children's greeting.
2. Went home after the second service and baked cookies for the potluck that evening at 5:30
3. Found an e-mail at 4:35 from the county rare bird alert list that there was a Cattle Egret in a cow pasture about 20 minutes south of town; ran to put shoes on, packed up cookies, grabbed binoculars and cookies, raced down there and saw the egret (yay -- a lifer!)
4. Drove back up here and made to the church in time for the potluck (though I missed the spare ribs ), then sat through boring annual meeting
5. Got home around 9:00 and found two problem posts on freecycle that both needed long, complicated letters and ended up in back-and-forth correspondence that I really didn't want to leave till morning
6. Finally got to bed around 2:00 am


• Monday
1. Dragged myself out of bed around 10:00 and spent the morning trying to find out what was going on with my Small Group Ministry group, which was having a potluck lunch followed by a service project (I had missed the last meeting and specifically asked the facilitator to give me any information I missed, which she failed to do); I wanted to carpool with the others since the member's home where we were meeting is a fairly long drive, but couldn't reach the facilitator; finally got hold of GH, whose house it was at, and found out what time to be there (noon) and what to bring (nothing, since it was past 11:00 and I had to leave by 11:30)
2. Went to G's house, had lunch (delicious curried chicken salad and shrimp pasta salad with 12-grain bread and fresh fruit salad) and went down to the workshop to  hammer together bluebird houses
3. Went for a walk in the woods with G after the others left -- she's at least 15 years old than I am but very healthy and in much better shape from walking frequently on the hilly trails in the woods where her house is; was really worn out after about 2 hours of hiking up and down some very steep hills on narrow, overgrown trails
4. Stayed up late handling problems on freecycle, including a long letter to a problem member who was explaining our rules to us and telling us we weren't following them 


• Tuesday
1. Dragged myself out of bed half asleep around 10:00 am
2. Found new issue to deal with on freecycle and wrote letter to co-mods
3. Ate breakfast and read today's paper
4. worked on freecycle problems
5. Collapsed

I really enjoyed everything but the crap on freecycle*. The movie* was excellent; I went with my friend Ann S., and we had a good conversation about it on the way home. The services* went great (thanks in part to cues from WA, another handchime player who was more awake than I was) and I got a quite a few nice compliments. The egret was very cooperative, coming in two minutes after I got there and wandering close enough to give me fairly good view with just my binoculars (I don't have a spotting scope yet). It's a gorgeous  bird that was a treat to watch, and I also enjoyed watching one cow licking another for awhile (they were both adults, I didn't know cows did that). The potlucks at my church are always good, and I'd rather have a boring annual meeting than an anxiety-filled controversial one. The food at lunch was delicious and building the birdhouses* was a lot of fun. The walk in the woods* was lovely, albeit much more strenuous than I'm used to. And even though I spent much of the day today working on freecycle, at least I got to just sit! It was a beautiful day but I couldn't face even a gentle walk with everything sore and hurting.

Tomorrow I have an orthodontist appointment and then I'm going to just crash.


* Things I want to write more about if I can find the time

And to tired limbs and over-busy thoughts,
Inviting sleep and soft forgetfulness.
                    —William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet, in The Excursion

The "spoiled" meme seems to be morphing into sillier and sillier forms. But I like this one, which sounds more like an "anti-spoiled meme" to me! (from starcat_jewel)

( Anti-spoiled meme )

The busy have no time for tears.
                —George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Anglo-Scottish poet

I like the explanation of prayer offered in the current issue of UU&Me, a 4-page children's insert that comes inside each issue of the UU World magazine.

To introduce the topic, the article describes what happened to UU minister Marta Valentin, whose home and church in New Orleans were severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina, and quotes her as asking, "Please keep the prayers coming."

Prayer can be understood in many different ways. For some people it simply means asking God to do something. My son suggested that prayer is saying honestly how we most deeply feel and what we mostly deeply want. Simply hollering out, “Why does this have to happen?” or saying,“Please let things get better!” is, for him, a prayer.

Marta later told me, “When I ask someone to pray for me I am asking to be held close in their hearts, in that very special place where love lives.” So that means if you’ve ever sent loving thoughts or healing energy to someone who is sick or sad, you might say you prayed for them. If you’ve been kind or generous or helpful, you might say you’ve lived a prayer. We can’t magically change nature’s course. But when people ask for our prayers, we can offer our love and our care.

For most of my adult life I was irritated when someone said they would pray for me, and mentally rolled my eyes when someone asked me to pray for them. It annoyed me that they actually believed they could make things better for me by begging a supernatural being to do a magic trick for me. But during the last ten or fifteen years, as I've been discovering and developing my own spirituality, I've come to a much larger definition of the word prayer that includes the concepts described in the article, particularly the one about sending loving thoughts or healing energy.

A few years ago I started doing a Buddhist metta (lovingkindness) meditation, in which I meditate on each individual I name as I mentally recite over and over:

May you be filled with lovingkindness,
May you be safe, and well,
May you have peace, and live at ease,
May you be happy.

I try to keep it in the general order of starting with myself and moving outward from the most dear, through people I feel neutral toward, and finally for someone I dislike or resent, before ending with "May all be filled... ." (Let me tell you, it's damn hard to do this for George Bush! I know it's good for me, but I still can't bring myself to include him very often!)

I'd been doing this for a couple of years before I finally made the connection that it's a form of prayer. I'm still getting used to the idea of saying "I'll pray for you," but when someone asks me to I'm now very comfortable saying, "Yes. I will," and including them in my meditation.

Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?
                    —Katharine Whitehorn (b. 1928)