as the saying goes...

"A leap year is never a good sheep year".

I'm afraid this may be indicative of my year as a whole. Which is sad because it's only the 29th of February and I have quite a bit of year left.

Though I have had good sheep years in the past:

Can you have a good sheep year, sans the sheep, when you don't live in Jerusalem?

Is this post merely an excuse to post pictures of myself with animals? Perhaps. 

The point is, I'm depressed.

No. The POINT IS I have a new baby nephew. Welcome, Andrew Daniel Fortner, you perfect little human! I can't wait to meet you. And I love love love being an auntie again.

Now someone give me a baby and a sheep and I'll be happy.

Okay? 



my favorite video of all time

10 cool things about being a secretary

Almost as cool as Maggie [via Detour Magazine]

1. If you purposefully put an extra large selection of paper into the three-hole puncher, you have to use both hands and thus get a good deltoid workout.

2. Important people get so used to your unimportant presence that they will say any important thing in your unimportant presence. So you end up knowing a lot of important things (I am being vague on purpose in order to emphasize the important mystery of my importance).

3. It's so easy to stay hydrated.

4. It's so easy to eat candy (It's really really easy to eat candy).

5. You learn to beat the copier into submission even though you know nothing about technology, but everyone asks you to "fix" the copier and you say well yes, certainly, and since you always do end up "fixing" the copier, everyone sees you as some sort of wizard. Which you're okay with.

6.Pinterest.

oh... that's about it, actually.

love, electric staplers, and spinning around and around and around and around when no one's watching,
Banana

it gets cold then warm

then cold again.

brookie and I spent the long weekend with her lovely old camera.

  


I've always figured February had something against me. Something about the word "doldrums" that seems to epitomize the very generally grey feeling that wraps its tentacles around the month and anyone living in it and refuses to let go. Can't you feel it? It told me to come home and go back to bed today, so I obeyed. And then to take a bath and then to go back to bed again. Oh February, you naughty, restless thing.
 And this mostly snowless winter has suddenly become a snowy one. And then springy and warm. And then snowy again.

I wrote a poem about it [or about the evasive something inside me that just wanted to be written about] a couple Sundays ago. Enjoy.

snow falls
deathly quiet--
doesn't anyone else want to scream?

the window protects us
from the chaotic wash of white,
and inside we talk of God.

I am so alone in here.
I am so cold in here.
But I see Him out there--
tickling the trees til the branches break.

Those who listen do so on
hand palms,
heads loll in lethargic worship
and God blows past in silence.

Where does He live in Winter?
We see Him risen so effortlessly in Spring--
in Daffodils and Blades of Grass,
in the resurrected sun that cradles
our newborn love.

Can we find Him in the
hard sky, solid ground, blank dawn?
Where does He live when all life
is gone?

Does He sleep in the silent snow?

We wait to awaken.
We listen with dull ears and
frosty hearts;
We shut the door til Spring.

back.

I'm getting feisty in my old age.

 I am very quickly irked, it seems, by everything. Racism, sexism, general rudeness, road rage, people who scam elderly people, genocide, my own intellectual limitations, everything... zero tolerance. And it gets to the point where it makes it very hard to be happy about anything because pretending to be Little Susie Sunshine when everyone else seems to be hurting feels insensitive and fake. I vowed to never use my acting skills to be someone I'm not. There are just so many things to care  about everywhere. So many injustices.

Sooo...what right have I to go on a lovely little bike ride in the sun and read some poems and just feel all lovely and tickled and ignore all the disgusting pride and arrogance and cruelty out there????

Well. It also seems like a disservice on my part to be Little Susie Raincloud all the time, you know? I'm not contributing anything by just caring and getting pissed and being rude to everyone because I think they are just preserving their comfort by ignoring important human rights violations. Oh dear. Listen to me! 

I decommissioned this blog for a while because I was disgusted with myself. I do NOT want to be another post-pictures-of-myself-every-day-so-I-maintain-a-carefully-constructed-illusion-of-what-my-life-is-like-and-everyone-can-envy-me-and-validate-me-with-their-comments-and-giveaway-entries blogger. And since I began to sort of lean that way I pulled the plug. Straight up.

BUT. Here's the point of all this ranting. No matter how much I care, I can't solve the world's problems. No sirree. And by  acting all put-out all the time about things that really are awful, I'll just become a negative person and you just can't keep friends that way, not even the ones that really love you.

What to do then? Well, I've decided to keep caring. Stay human. But a big part of being human, I've decided, is also loving despite things. Not just loving the underdog, but loving everyone. Loving women who PREFER to be controlled and don't want to think about the alternative. Loving grandparents who were raised in the 30's and 40's and really didn't have much of a chance to not be racist. Just loving.
Because, as I discovered, being intolerant of intolerant people is still intolerance. And probably worse since I consider myself so "enlightened." Being narrow-minded about narrow-mindedness is the ultimate hypocrisy, I think. I am going to change.

I am going to keep blogging because words and pictures and pretty things are my life force, and that's okay. If I can make the world a teensy bit prettier by dwelling on the beautiful things I discover, there's no shame in that, is there? Sharing is caring. Or so my childhood taught me.

So. The point is... I'm back. Come back with me?

banana