Today

The day has a bright, washed-clean feeling. Cool air, bright sunshine off fuzzy-edged trees. The bright, high green of pine. Shadows and sunshine running side-by-side in crazy up-along-and-down-again designs, like sherbert in ice cream.

I love this weather.

Feature Fun

I was very glad to see this new feature when I logged into Blogger today. I have been wanting a way to keep up with comment conversations for a while and this saves me trying to figure out some alternative to paste into my template, as I had toyed with doing, but would have to have more time to find. Yay for technology. :)

Fun With Word Verification

I have been toying with the idea of setting up a post for a game with word verifications, so I'll leave a link to this post in the sidebar and see if either two of you are entertained by it as much as I am.

Basically, when you go to post a comment, put whatever word mumbo jumbo comes up in your post and make up a definition for it. Full points for not having to change the spelling of the word to fit your definition. ...Actually, I think new spellings should probably have a special category for creativity and running with an idea. But like they say on Whose Line, the points don't matter anyway; they're like powerful geese in the park that can break a man's arm with one of their wings...being chased by a four-year-old girl..

Not Paranoid

I talk to myself out loud. In Spanish. 'Cos these walls have ears, but they don't speak Spanish.

So now we've ended.

Sometimes you think a particular battle or struggle will never end. This is no transitional period, you're here for the rest of your life, time to get over it. When you've been in that mode for a long time, it can be hard to look around enough to see it doesn't have to be that way.

All of my adolescence and young-adulthood I have wanted very bad to grow up, to take responsibility for my life, to become what I was meant to be--I guess even to be an honor to my parents and God. But most of the time, I both wanted too much too fast, and wasn't willing to take charge of making those things happen. Not a great combination. So the last two years have been about doing what I can and (oddly enough) lowering some of my expectations. Plus, I've been forcing myself to look around and realize a lot of things I've looked at emotionally about myself and my life aren't nearly as bad as I thought they were. I still stumble on things that are, once in a while. But there's a lot that isn't.

This past spring and summer I'd been visiting with a counselor, to have someone's help as I continue to go through this process, and, about a week ago, we decided it was a good place to stop. This is probably the first time I've done that where I actually felt like something was accomplished and that it was right to end it now.

Not all my problems (or maybe goals is a better way to look at it?) are solved, of course--is there any time in our lives when they are? Sounds to me suspiciously like a stagnant state. Most things in nature are growing and changing, that I know of. To be changeless is often to be dead, sick, or an inanimate object. As uncomfortable as it is sometimes to be changing, to be "in process" or striving between two extremes for the balance that I see as part of nature's fight in everything, it seems to be the way things are done in this world. Why waste my time fighting it when I could spend my time fighting for it, which seems to be what we all have to do anyway, whether we like it or not?