I'm glad that I'm not just overreacting. Haven't heard from her; will go put some clothes on in a bit, and hope to god this other doc is more reasonable.

You're not overreacting, Erin. This is ridiculous.

I'm totally wrecked after a night of rampant insomnia and usually can't work a full work day. I don't understand how your doctor can downplay that, Erin, and that's an incredibly important criterion in someone who's responsible for your general healthcare.

or clog-dancing Irish misanthropes

You rang? t /Lurch

Not to take everything that's come before this lightly (seriously, SO MUCH ~ma going out for y'alls), but I've been trying to catch up and meaning to start posting again (or more, or both) for so long, and that so totally felt like my cue (though technically only 1/2 Irish, and a set-dancer rather than step/clog dancer...still) to come back in, I couldn't resist.

And geez, I hope that didn't come off as mememe as it feels like it did. I just really wanted to get back in the action, and put up the visible ~ma, and start talking again to people that I feel like I'm friends with, even though I've never the active-est, and lately am Queen Lurker.

So any way, glad to be back.

Sympathies on multiple fronts for amyth. Sensible medical support wished for Erin. Excellent and thorough surgery and quick, problem free recovery for Perkins. Swift and finally complication-free recovery for Drew. Happy new house! to Seska and her Girl, and a personal aside. We're coming up on a year, and I'm really starting to get torqued about the two rooms that need construction and installation before we can finally finish unpacking. I'm at the point of hiring it done, even though we really can't afford it. So.frickin.frustrating. So may your settling in take far less long and may you be comfy and settled very soon.

Raq, boob~ma to you.

As far as belief goes, I think I'm very close to Pandoran, actually. Having spent my yout' until I escaped to college in a fundamentalist So. Baptist home and church, then having worked my way through intense studies of Roman Catholicism, with a brief fling with the notion of being a nun (service, solitude, go with me here), and then with Judaism and kibbutz life (service, community, are we sensing a theme?), then back to decreasingly specific forms of Protestantism, through agnosticism, Native American and Celtic paganism, to a non-specific, non-deist, earth-based spirituality with a Buddhist cast today. I believe in the life force of the universe, but I feel no need to have it personified. I honor, rather than worship that force.

To allow personification for a moment, if there was--or is--a god, then I suppose I "believe" she designed and crafted the universe, much like a 21 jewel Swiss watch, each miniscule gear and cog working meticulously and interlinked with the others to perform flawlessly. Except there's an eccentric gear called "humans" that keeps disrupting the timing by microns. The gears are beginning to rub and wear, and things are exponentially creeping ever further out of their set tracks. Unless she remembers the toy she abandoned and comes back to repair and replace the faulty parts, we will inevitably tick erratically down to a dull and rusty stop.

I'm a bad pagan, when is the Equinox?

23rd, according to the calendar on my left.

The Fall Equinox is in the evening Sept. 22 (US time) or in the wee hours of the morning on Sept. 23 (Greenwich time). [link]

Welcome Week has begun. Now there are folks on campus newer than me. (please don't ask me for directions.)

continued ~ma to everyone.

a brief fling with the notion of being a nun (service, solitude, go with me here)

Ha, Bev, toatally identifying with you there. After seeing the Sound of Music on stage (while going through a period where most of the men in my life were not improving its quality), I thought of Maria trying to go back to the abbey and thought, "Wouldn't that be great, nothing to do but work and pray and study, etc." That Sunday the service (So. Baptist at the time) specifically used the phrase, "You can't shut yourself up behind walls, you have to get out there..." Made me sorta look up at the ceiling and go "Geez, I was just thinking about it..."