ROAD BLOG AHEAD

I’ve gotten pretty bad these past few months about keeping up with my blogging. I’m actually worse on my public blog than on my private blog and I frequently get nagged by friends and acquaintances who keep track of me by reading my blogs. I find myself feeling guilty about it which is sort of strange - feeling guilty about NOT doing something that didn’t even exist a few years ago!

I guess why I’ve been so remiss is that I’ve been back in NA and thus having enough going on every day, between family, work and play, that there’s less time to just sit down and write. More really to write ABOUT, but less hours to do it in! Plus here it’s easier to keep in touch. In India and Nepal (and last year in Mexico) I have more stretches of time that are spent wishing I were doing something exciting! In those circumstances, I think about them and then write about them and use blogging and e-mail to keep connected. When I’m here, I just DO it.

I’ve been intending, for instance, to write about my border crossing experience ever since the beginning of the week when I arrived in Vancouver. For any of you who are familiar with the Peace Arch crossing or those who live near to either side of the US/Canada border, you may have heard about the unholy mess that happened last Sunday. Guess who came into Canada last Sunday?

What a mess!!! I was already utterly exhausted when I got to Blaine (last exit before the border) I’d had rather a rough day and, about an hour north of Seattle, was already thinking about finding a cheap hotel room for the night. Except I couldn’t (find a room that is) - every one under eighty bucks was taken and I couldn’t justify spending more than that just to sleep and save myself a two or three hour additional drive that night. SO I pushed through and headed North.

About 3 kilometres from the border crossing, traffic came to an absolute standstill. I mean, it was a parking lot! No clue what was causing the problem or how long it would last. I figured maybe it was an accident in the lanes or someone had had a heart attack and nothing was moving til the ambulance got through. In retrospect, that would have been much easier than what was going on. The traffic crept forward at the rate of about one car length every ten minutes. I kept thinking it would ease up eventually. Eventually never came, not while I was in line anyway.

After 3 hours, I’d gone less than half a mile and was insane from sitting in the fumes and the chaos all that time. So, when I saw the sign for the very last Blaine exit ahead, I made a decision to quit, to just give up trying to get across in the mess and to get off I5. Figured I could either turn around and head back south until I found a place to sleep or sit up drinking coffee all night in a Denny’s until I could get into Canada. Eiether of those options sounded better than sitting cramped in traffic.

Well, the other thing is that, after hours in traffic, I had to pee like mad so I pulled into a service station in Blaine. As I was standing there, a woman in some kind of uniform came running in rather exited and told the guy behind the counter that they’d opened the truck crossing. I didn’t know it ever closed so I wasn’t quite grokking the whole situation. However, she turned to me and said, “go down the street here, turn right and keep going to the truck crossing. If you go right NOW you’ll beat it before everyone else discovers it too and get across quick!”

So I jumped back into my truck and zipped down the dark streets the way she’d pointed. Fortunately, I’ve been that route before numerous times so I knew you can’t tell where it is until you get there, especially in the dark.

And the woman had been right. The truck cross was definitely open and there were NO lines at all!!! I zipped right through, one of the easiest and friendliest crossings I’ve ever experienced (and I’ve been back and fourth over this border a lot by now.)

At that point it was almost midnight. I’d left Salem OR around ten a.m. So I was exhausted. I drove like the proverbial bat out of hell through the intense fog that shrouded lower B.C., pointing north to Vancouver and, once in my favourite city, grinding my teeth through the labourious stop and goes on Marine Drive, up Boundary to the far Northeast corner of the city. I hit Silva’s house, fell into her arms and cried for a long time with relief and exhaustion! So good to be home!!!

So I guess now I’ve told that part of the adventure. Turns out that, for reasons best known to their union, the Canadian border guards had walked off their posts on Sunday evening, leaving the border in this area effectively closed! It was the front page news here in B.C. the next morning, showing acres of vehicles, a virtual sea of cars and bikes and trucks, sitting and sitting. The wait, I heard, was six hours. If I had NOT given up and exited when I did and tried to brazen it out and if I had not been fortunate in my timing at that gas station in Blaine, I would have waited at least six hours in the misery. So, compared to most of the people who tried to cross late Sunday, my luck was very very good indeed!

Now it’s the following Saturday Morning and I’m happily sitting here in Silva’s jewelbox dining room feeling somewhat spacy but incredibly replete and glad to be here. This week went by really fast. Necessary things got done and I’m at least LESS behind on paperwork and such than I was when I got here, so I feel somewhat less pressured by backlogs.

The best part of the time however has been doing those things that I certainly WOULDN’T write about

I am SO much better by today that I’m much relieved. Once I started taking the Chinese herbal pills Lena recommended to me (finding them was 90% of the effort in a small town in Oregon) I immediately began mending. Clearly they are the right thing! Not only does this mean that I probably won’t have to go through more of that awful (and decidedly non-erotic) agony I experienced Monday night, it means that I should be able to drive up to Vancouver on Sunday! Hooray!!! I was beginning to feel like a salmon, struggling upstream to spawn and encountering obstacle after obstacle in my way. The urge to get there is pressing, on the level of base instinct by now, an urgency that even being sick didn’t diminish. Being sick just made it all the more frustrating not being able to get there faster. By now I’m at least 10 days behind schedule with no flex to “make up” the time. Sigh. Huge Sigh.

I should be sleeping by now but I ended up sitting up after the kids were in bed and having a long heart to heart yak with my daughter. She is such a neat person! I am always so impressed with how much she seems to basically like herself, how sane and upbeat she seems. I said this to her and she replied that it was all her upbringing and due to those of us who raised her. I don’t know - I think she would have been some of who she is regardless. I told her so and she laughed and said she wouldn’t have wanted any other parents. I countered that she could have had better ones, millionaires maybe. To which she replied that then she wouldn’t have been who she is today and she wouldn’t want to change that. However, when I said, “But if your parents were rich, you’d have a better car,” she admitted she couldn’t argue with that one and we both laughed. She really could use another car, particularly, gods help us, a mini van as her ancient Subaru wagon just isn’t big enough with four kids and friends. That Subaru has held up remarkably well however considering how far it’s been driven. She bought it before she left San Francisco to go to University in Vancouver. Come to think of it, she bought it from a friend met on the original Leatherdyke e-mail list years ago! Wonder what became of Rivaud?

So it’s been another pleasant family day, spending kid time and daughter time and a bunch of time making phone calls about car insurance policies, car registration and other paperwork that I need to deal with before returning to Asia. It’s not particularly exciting, just warm and fun and heart touching being with this part of my family. Still, it’ll be good to move on too in a day or so. I’m feeling the pull from to be with other family, to be warmed and have fun in other ways. Soon.

I spent last night in the ER. Took my daughter and the kids out for pizza last night and, shortly after returning home, I started to have abdominal pain. THought at first it might be food poisoning - lord knows that, living in Asia, I’ve had my share of it, but it wasn’t really quite acting like any food poisoning I know of. By the time the pain levels reached an 8-9 on the scale and I said, “yeah, let’s go to the ER” I was pretty convinced it was my gallbladder acting up. I’ve seen it enough, know enough about medicine to recognize the syndrome. I tried not to be too much of a wuss in the ER, but I was moaning by the time they got me onto a gurney.

This hospital in Dallas OR, tiny as it is, was quite good and efficient. They started IV fluids, gave me an anti-nauseant and pain meds. About 20 minutes after the it took effect, I was still in pain but I didn’t care, so I was relatively comfortable, but could answer questions and tolerate the exam. The doc was cool and totally agreed with my self-diagnosis of gallbladder inflammation, possibly stones. No ultrasound in that hospital but he sent me home with enough meds to get me through the night and a referal to a doc in the nearest city with ultrasound equipment. I *may* wait until I get bac to India where ultrasound is cheap as I have no insurance at present. I came home at 5 a.m. and sleep through til noon, then again all afternoon.

GOt in touch with Lena this evening and she recommended some Chinese herbal pills. We haven’t been able to find them so far, but wil keep looking around Salem tomorrow. I really don’t need this right now, ya know? I’ve got more fun things to do, more important people to see than some nice ER nurses. My daughter is fussing over me a lot. She is sooo sweet - I feel very lucky to have a kid like her! She’s competent and compassionate, steady-handed, cool in an emergency and cheerful in the aftermath, able to give really good, clear information to the doctors and not panic or loose her cool. I’m very very proud of her.

I think it’s back to bed time…

Made it to my daughter’s house intact late last night. She and the baby met me at the airport (with a large latte, does my baby know her mama or what?) and it was sooo great to see her! Sometimes being with her is like hearing echoes. We stopped on the way home for dinner and, by the time the waitress came to take our order we both piped up with “it’s a choice between the ribeye combo and the chicke Alfredo,” at the same exact momet. We do this all the time, say the same thing, make the same decision in the same moment. It’s so nice to have an adult child whom I honest *like* as well as love, whose company pleases me and who is pleased to hang out with me.

We work well together also. She’s starting a business doing photo editing and embellishments, mostly of kids and babies for keepsakes. Great stuff, using her Fine Arts background as well as her computer skills very creatively. We’ve been brainstorming and looking at stuff, comparing possibilities, advertising strategies, which pictures to use for them, etc. and having a fantastic time of it. Then I sat down to work on a couple of astrology charts I’ve been commissioned to do. She plopped down beside me and started kibbitzing. Came up with a couple of interesting angles that I hadn’t considered that were spot right on! She’s becoming a pretty darned good astrologer in her own right, having been around it all her life and now doing some charts on her own. So it’s been really satisfying today.

The kids are, naturally, adorable. The two older one, Kellan and Kaia (8 and 7) are really great kids. I’m happy they accept me and show it in ways like Kaia asking me to brush her hair this morning or Kellan wanting to show off his latest lego creation. They’re a little on edge today cuz they had a visit from their bio mom who is sufficiently dysfunctional that she is allowed only 2 hours supervised visitation each week for some very good reasons. It makes them nervous and I feel so bad for these kids torn between love and anger at the mom whose erratic behavior and abusive boyfriend brought so much chaos into their lives. They’re pretty stable here with their dad and my daughter, but it’s hard for them.

The two little ones, both my daughter’s bio kids are, of course, utterly adorable. Of course, the two year old, Alaric, is an absolute monster in the very throes of the terrible twos where every word is NO or I DON’T WANNA!!! Even as I type this, I hear him yelling NO from the other room about something or other. Mostly he likes to run. It’s even better if something’s chasing him.

I got velcro-ed to the carpet this afternoon playing with him. Got down to chase him and then couldn’t get up. Thought it was a new level of weakness in my bad right knee (the one I pulverized in a motorcycle accident 19 years ago) and was cursing and worried. Then I realized that my sandal had come unbuckled and the velcro flap had adhered to the industrial type carpet of the hallway. I guess I’m not actually getting weaker, just more senile!

The baby, Danika, is 4 months old now and just the most beautiful baby! I know, I know “All babies are beautiful” goes the saying. ‘Cept I don’t actually believe that. SOme are cute, some are just… babyish… Occasionally you even see a truly ugly baby. My grandson was kinda cute with great expressions, but he wasn’t beautiful. This one is. Prettier even than her mama, my daughter, who was beautiful enough as a child that she was used as a model by some famous photographers. Danika is just… pretty, is a glowing, sweet-faced way. She has perfect eyebrows and a smoothly moulded head as well as really lovely features. For a baby that is. Her eyes are a deep, mossy green. Can you tell that I’m just totally smitten by this child? She smiles when I come into the room and reaches for me. What more can a grandmother want from an infant?

Sometimes it seems that my life is lived in these different chapters, like a book told from the point of view of several characters. Each of them is a different aspect and each comes out under different circumstances and in different places. Surely most people are like that - having many aspects of themselves. My current life, however, does seem to have this quality in a greater than average way - sometimes I feel like I am living three or four very distinct lives, each with their own locale, cast of characters, needs and motivations.

Mostly I think I do a pretty good job of keeping them all straight. I will admit however that, sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and have to ask myself, “where am I and what am I supposed to be doing here?” There was one time, recently, when I woke up from a nap in the middle of the afternoon and just couldn’t remember WHEN I was or what I was doing there. More than a little disconcerting. I actually had to refer to my PDA calendar to place myself in time and recall what I was there for. Once I knew *what* I was able to remember *where*.

At least here I definitely know the where on sight - waking up in a kid’s bed (Kellan is letting me use his room while I’m here) covered with red, yellow and blue dinosaurs being overlooked by a Batman statue and a pile of kid clothes and toys kinda lets me know I’m not at Silva’s (I wake up and see very different toys there ) and not in a hotel room somewhere in Asia. I guess, for now, I’m in Happy Grammy mode!

Yes, it’s yet another blog entry from the waiting area of an airport. This time it’s Oakland Intl. in beautiful (today anyway) Oakland, CA. I’ll be one my way in about an hour to Portland where I’ll meet my daughter and head for her house in Salem, OR.

In the reality I *thought* I was inhabiting until a day or so ago, I should already be in Salem at this point. For a few hours anyway. My initial intent was to go by train and have a pleasant and leisurely ride from the Bay Area during which I could read, knit, snooze and catch up on my blog entries. The train, at the point where I checked, was going to be about two thirds the price of a flight and, though slower, a more mellow and less stressful way to go. Given the trouble I’m having with my legs, I thought mellow was the way to do it! Right.

Well, as I wrote, the wi fi in the cottage went down earlier in the week. I went out daily to check email and handle emergencies at a cafe nearby and spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out if it was the household’s wireless system or my laptop. It was acting like the household’s system - except that they had wi fi just fine for whatever readon. Or so they said… Finally, last night, Carl came back with his laptop for me to use and IT wouldn’t log on either -gave exactly the same error message as I’d been getting. sooo… I finally got some clear answers and we rebooted the household system and, voila! it worked. Too late for me though cuz I was packing to leave.

Because of the delay, I’d waited until Thursday to book my ticket. And,to my horror, all the tickets were sold out! I was faced with the prospect of spending a fortune and waiting a day. So, yesterday morning, hoping to find a solution, I started hopping around on the internet and, voila again! I found a plane ticket from Oakland to PDX for the same price as the train ticket, leaving this afternoon and getting me in only a few hours later than the train would have arrived. Better still - for a very small amount more, I could upgrade to First Class. So I splurged. It’s not a very long flight, but at least I’ll travel in comfort with a glass of wine in hand and no idiots bashing their seat into my bad knees.

I still wish it were a week sooner and that I felt as good as I ought to feel, physically. OTOH, I enjoyed working the extra week, not just because it helped my solvency, but because it feels really great to be back in the saddle as it were, doing what I do. So good and bad mixed.

Okay, this is humorous. The next gate just received an announcement asking “would all 32 people assigned to row 8 please see a ticket agent right away so we can get you sorted out. We guarantee you’re not all going to fit in that row!” the entire Alaska section of the gate area broke up laughing. Imagining 32 people trying to cram into a row of six seats. Musical airplane chairs anyone?

This new laptop is sooo nice to use. Fits in my purse and has enough battery power to get me easily from one destination to the next. I’m just amazed by it and so is almost everyone who has seen it. Yes, there are moments when a full sized screen would be nice, but the tradeoff of light weight and easy portability is more than worth it in my book. The portable HP printer I picked up is a dream also - battery powered and bluetooth connected, I can pull it out of my bag, stick it on the chair, hit the on switch, print and put it back in my bag, all in about a minute, all in my seat on the airplane! Yeah! The little sheet fed scanner is good too, though I’d still love a real flatbed. This is the size of one of those large bars of Toblerone candy, weighs about 10.5 ounces and runs off the USB port. Not exactly airline seat set up, but close. So I’m really portable. Hey, a ream of paper weighs a lot more than the laptop or the scanner. I’m more stingy about how much of that I carry. It’s just so nice to feel like I”m up an running again, able to do what I need to do.

Other than all this, there’s not yet a whole lot happening. I liked having an extra night with Lena (which I wouldn’t have had if I’d taken the overnight train.) I’m looking very forward to being with Silva soon. And I’m looking forward to seeing my daughter and grandkids in a few hours, though I have a lot less tolerance for their lifestyle than the one I’m leaving or the one Silva lives, so it’s a visit, but not “home”. Daughter Veronica has been working on some new business ideas with me the past few weeks and we’re excited about being able to sit down, brainstorm and experiment with further ideas in person. She and I really, really enjoy that kid of thing, enjoy working on projects together. I got really lucky when karma assigned her to me

Okay, time to pack up the stuff and start getting ready to board in a few minutes. One last email check and then I’ll close up. Hopefully I’ll have decent wi fi most of the time now for the next several weeks and won’t go too silent. Of course, that might have been a blessing, my recent silence. Reading over some stuff that’s been posted lately, I can see I might have gotten seriously flamed if I’d had the connectivity to put in my 2 cents. Of course, I still might…

I am astounded and overwhelmed. I got to this country a couple of weeks ago and, once I found my list of former client phone numbers in storage, I made some calls. Mostly I called favorite or frequent former clients who had been getting readings or charts done for years. I called about as many as I figured would allow for maybe a 60-70% response rate that was about as many I figured I could fit into Labour Day weekend. Well…

The response rate EXCEEDED 100%!!! Every single person I called called me back and booked an appointment, PLUS they called their friends and many of their friends booked. So I was busy, to say the least. Didn’t stop until Weds. when I finally had to take a day off and just sleep. THey’re still coming, though not at the rate they were. So between that and my physical health which is iffy, I’ve stayed in Berkeley an extra week. Especially since I have a comfy and lovely place to stay and to work from here in the Berkeley hills.

My favorite compliment was the woman who is possibly one of my oldest clients, going back at least ten years (I remember when her now-teenager started school) She said that, after I left, she got so desperate for advice she almost broke down and went “to one of those people with neon signs in their windows” LOL!!! So I am feeling particularly validated and appreciated in the work I do.

The woman who owns the house and cottage where I’m staying also paid me a lovely compliment (aren’t blogs a great place to preen about these things?) Linda said, when I thanked her so much for the gift of letting me stay here, “Oh Joy, I never would have found this place or been able to buy it if I hadn’t listened to your advice! Other than my own hard work, I owe you for my success!” It made it nicer that she could see that she’d worked for what she has, but could give me credit for a few pointers, much more real than simply gushing.

So that’s been quite good. Other than that I’ve been enjoying cooking a little bit (bacon and eggs, ooooo) and sleeping A LOT! Twice this week I’ve slept more than 10 hours. I don’t remember the last time I was able to do that. Part of it is the comfort of this bed, part of it is the quietness of the place, the peaceful energy. ANd yeah, part of it, much to my surprise, is that Lena has been teaching in Milwaukee, WI for the past 3 days so I’ve been sleeping alone.

I had dinner with my friend, Michelle, last night and we were commiserating about this very thing: that, no matter how much we adore our respective girlfriends, wives, lovers,we’re both light sleepers and have discovered that we sleep better when we sleep alone. I’ve always thought that I HATE sleeping alone, but the last year or two has taught me that, despite enjoying the closeness of the other person, the warmth, the touch and intimacy of it, I sometimes NEED a couple of nights of sleeping alone to catch up on my deep sleep! It’s kinda confusing really since it’s so counter to my conscious thinking, but I can’t deny the evidence of my senses and experience.

I can’t help but wonder if that has a bit to do with the flare up of my Fibromyalgia. Some researchers into the syndrome are finding that, at the root of things, fibro might be a sort of sleep disturbance. That is, poor deep level sleep might be a CAUSE rather than a result, of the fibro. And the past six months I have been sleeping very poorly, on uncomfortable beds and always with another person in them. THe places themselves tend to be noisy So I don’t sleep deeply, ever. And the pain, stiffness and swelling has flared up again, as well as the digestive and respiratory issues that are the hallmark of Fibromyalgia. I’m lucky - I don’t get the headaches that some people get. But it’s been awful trying to keep up with my life and it’s great opportunities for new and interesting things while I am unable to walk more than a block or two at a time.

Hmmmph, this wasn’t going to be a complaint blog. I really started writing it to celebrate the good feeling I’m getting from having people so happy to have me back! It’s really nice to know that I was missed and to feel… cherished… is the best work I can think of to describe it! My closest ones tease me a bit thinking that it’s funny that I am surprised by this response, but it’s true - I knew that people liked me. They came back after all. But I had no idea they missed me that much or (this is the odd part) found me “irreplaceable” when I left. That is, they couldn’t find anyone else they felt could do what I do for them. And THAT is an amazing thing to discover!

Hello all!!! I’ve gotten more than a little chastised for falling completely off the radar for over a month and worrying people who check in at el bloggo to make sure I’m still alive!  I promise that I’ll do better but, for this moment, what I’m able to do is a really high speed synopsis of the past 37 or so days.

First off, I’m in Berkeley right now. That’s California. I am luxuriating in things Western like coffee makers and *real* mattresses and washing machines and cheeseburgers. Housing codes that require an electrical outlet at least every 6 (?) feet, meaning that I can plug in without rearranging the furniture to death. Wi fi.  Artichokes. Double vanilla lattes. Driving. Drive through double vanilla lattes…  Did I say real beds with real mattresses?  Oooooooo baby!

This particular moment of luxury is being brought to me by my client/friend/angel Linda C. who recently had a baby (Hi Sophy!) and bought a gorgeous house in the Berkeley Hills that came with a cute little 400 square foot in-law cottage in the back yard which she has offered to Lena and I during our stay in the Bay Area. It’s an incredible kindness as well as being just all out gorgeous. I owe this girl big time!

So at the time of my last blog entry, all of our tech went belly up simultaneously. All 3 computers (Lena’s, Nyondo’s and mine) plus my portable printer were either totally dead or not currently working. Lena and I were due to head out of Tso Pema to Delhi and then on to the U.S. by an assortment of trains, planes and buses in order to make some much needed moolah and so that Lena could teach in a bunch of places that invited her. We went to Delhi. Nyondo came with us. Her computer and my computer went to the sick computer hospital while Lena and I got on the big silver bird and flew Westward.  It was a loooong trip. One of these days I’ll talk about the Monday that never ended as we kept flying ahead of the time differential.

We reached SFO in the wee hours and spent a few days here getting our bearings before heading North to Salem, OR and our daughter Veronica. Got to see the new grandbaby YAY!!! I’ll post a link when I have some brain cells. Busy there and then up to Vancouver for a much-too-short visit with Silva then two days HARD driving back to the Bay Area where we hit the ground running.

I had NO idea I’d be so busy. Every single former client I called to tell that I would be available booked an appointment and at least half of them also sent friends!!! So I’ve spent the last 5 days or so doing back to back readings, falling into bed and starting the process over again. We really have been moving so fast that there’s been no time and energy to blog. I’m behind on my e-mail. I haven’t even had time for sex! Not just having it - THINKING about it!!! Plus the danged achilles tendon is really acting up and it’s so hard to travel like this when you can barely even walk!  Whine. Whine. Pass the cheese…

THat’s the nutshell version and I will really try to do better when the merry go round slows down a bit. I’m going to sleep in tomorrow and then call back all the people who’ve left messages. Once I’ve talked to them, I can figure out when I will finish work and be able to leave the Bay Area and head back up - first for a quick stop in OR to kiss a baby and then on to Silva’s again where I actually get to stop and wallow in just being alive for awhile - at least I *hope* * do.  Some time in all of this I’ll get back on the blog thing in a more consistent way. Until then, life is certain a banquet, would somebody pass me the Tums?