The ancient cat has simply accepted her new home without much fanfare. She has staked out Her Place, a corner of the second-hand denim bat-about couch. She sleeps the vast majority of her existence, rarely rising to stretch and eat and scratch various heinous substances through her litter box, then padding back to Her Place for more well-deserved slumber.

Boo, on the other hand, is spooked and goofy and chased by demons all over the house. If it weren't so comical, it'd be pathetic. Wacko pussy alert!!!!!! He's stolen the very hearts of all three kids who follow him around trying to spot his demons.

Wastin' away again in Margaritaville....

Tonight is the pack'a'thon for tomorrow's flight to Cancun. Chichen Itza beckons, along with the woman's health conference and all those tequilla bottles.

The living room walls have their first coat on and drying. Persian Violet walls, whiter than white ceiling, with Passion Plum highlights. The first of the two new cats is en route. I'm about to cohabitate with felines. ***excited***

Just back from 2012. It's the end of the world as we know it.....

If you could save just one book for future humans to read, what would it be?

I brought Jessi in to an empty labor and delivery floor. We had no patients at all for the entire night. Then at four in the morning, in waddles a 17 year old huffing and puffing in active labor. She only spoke Spanish, a recent transplant from the Dominican Republic. Luckily, Jessi studied Spanish for eight years in school and could basically follow what we were saying to one another.

At 8:30 this morning, when I should have been clocking out, I was instead welcoming this young woman's gorgeous baby boy into the world. I had two very green medical students with me as well, so I quietly talked them and Jessi through the delivery. It was the perfect setting for Jessi to learn a few things as well as absorb the power of birth. Mama and bambolino were fine, I repaired a small laceration, got our little man on the breast, and scrubbed out for the paperwork as Jessi sat and breathed off the dazed state she had entered.

The male medical student had to leave twice during the delivery to vomit, so Jessi was relieved she wasn't the only one with such strong emotions at the birth. The nurses supported her so well, as we all firmly believe observing a live birth is the absolute BEST motivation for the use of birth control anyone can give a teenager. A rite of passage for the daughters of all labor and delivery nurses, midwives, and most of the physicians I know.

I took Jessi out to breakfast this morning at our favorite diner and debriefed her, encouraging her to talk about any and all of what she had experienced. Over eggs and bacon she had me clarify various technical points and again explain basic birth mechanics. She rambled on and on about how BIG the head actually is and how shocked she is that our tissue can stretch to that degree and then she kindly offered to 'help' me with births anytime she wasn't going to school the next day.

Now, nearly six hours after we finally arrived home, she is still slumbering off the night's excitement. I doubt she will forget this night for all of her life.

Tonight I am bringing Jessi with me to work. She wants to live a night of what I do. I am so thankful to have a teenage daughter with all of her grit-your-teeth and cope with her moments and all her charming almost-full-grown-woman moments and playful still-a-kid moments. Mostly, I am proud she is a person who can look me in the face and tell me she wants to KNOW how birth unfolds from the perspective of someone who KNOWS birth. She wants to be the midwife's assistant for a night. She wants to taste my life outside of Mama.

She wants to know Woman in her birthing moment.

I squelched a godawful headache last night prior to my nightly commute to work. When I walked in, the floor was sizzling with ten admitted patients, seven of them in rip-roaring labor. The night unfolded in a blur of bulging vulvas and umbilical cord-cutting welcoming blessings.

Not to mention some major drama with one family who decided at the eleventh hour (fully dilated) to fire their private doctor because he did not provide the labor care he had promised throughout the pregnancy. I caught their paradoxically serene son at their request (insistent demand, actually) and the father vowed to never waste another moment of time in a doctor's office for baby-having business. Drama, drama, drama because life can never get too serene on the labor floor, yanno?

Working nights for the last seventeen years of my life, I have learned a few things about human nocturnalism:

~Grab as many moments of sunshine in the morning before bed as possible, it helps with mood issues and gives your bones a Vitamin D lift.

~Ease into sleep with a cup of chamomile or valerian root tea. These will lengthen your sleep time and encourage soothing dreams. Deep breathe the vapors and you will find the scent becomes a potent sleep cue for your body.

~Try to have quiet conversations with whomever your share your breakfast. You will process the words more effectively as you drift off if the emotions involved were loving and nurturing.

~Orgasm just prior to slumber, there's no better soporific paver to REM than that.

~Allow yourself an hour of ramping up time in the evening. Include some outdoor time prior to traveling to work to feel like a human being, not a human doing.

~Stretch out that bendy body prior to dressing for work, your muscles crave a nudge into good alignment and once at work, you are often restricted by time, space, and clothing.

~Whenever someone on the road cuts you off or is unnecessarily aggressive, do not enter a clit/dick war with her/him, no matter how strong the urge. It is counterproductive to your personal centeredness. If an unfortunate word happens to escape your mouth in such moment, follow it immediately with "om" or "love" or "yum" and breathe. If, God forbid, a horrible accident should befall you on the road and you lost your ability to speak (and/or other abilities), the last words out of your mouth would still be reflective of your inner beauty and joy.

~Great your colleagues with warmth and a solid frame of strength. Some need to go home and rest, having just had a rough shift, others need to know who stands at the helm of the ship tonight with confidence and ability. People look to you for guidance, send them the message that they have chosen well and will have a pleasant ride with you tonight.

~Drink at least two liters of water every night to stay juicy!

~Nourish your body with foods low in sugars and high in fiber and protein, the way our homo sapien bodies evolved to ingest our surrounding nutrients. Try really, really hard to not give in to the sugar addiction siren call. Really hard. The sugar crash in the middle of the night is devastating to the system.

~Remember to allow grace to suffuse as many of your words and actions as humanly possible. Miracles are unfolding all around you, do not let the ubiquitousness of those events lessen their astoundingness.

I am a blessed woman.

I broke my fast this morning with three other women. Collectively, to our family and friends, we are known as The Hens. We have been pregnant together, breastfed in public together, coddled our ten children together through their schooling at the same charter school and now beyond. We have held one another through deaths and births and divorces and crushes-even-though-we're-married sorts of situations.

And this morning over plates of eggs and bacon and mugs of tea and coffee, for the first time in our almost 15 years together, we discussed our bowel functions. And we roared with laughter with the tales and challenges each one of us faces. Not to mention our children's bowel issues. Oh, the silliness as the once-guarded truths were unveiled!

I am a blessed woman to have such fantastic friends that bowel function talk over breakfast is a joyous thing.

It's been a jam-packed three days:

~We finished installing all of the drywall in the living room. There were several touchy spots with multiple outlets and the production slowed as we had to be careful and precise with measuring and cutting out the correct spaces. Now, we are waiting for the first layer of joint compound to completely dry before the sanding and re-mudding and re-sanding unfolds. Starla and I clocked over twenty hours on the walls this weekend, EACH. Both of us are achy and sore and wildly triumphant today. :-)

~The kids seemed extra needy this weekend, so I had many moments of Mamatime with them individually. It meant staying up into the night to finish our jobs, but the boys especially needed talk time, as is their way.

~Jessi went to the East Coast art college fair on Saturday and was told that her portfolio was already impressive enough at her sophomore level to get admission to her first choice of schools, Cooper Union. ***Mamaprayer to the Great One that she maintains this degree of dedication and work effort through the next six years of her formal education.***

~Brought a tureen of homemade organic vegetable barley soup to a friend whose lesbian partner of 21 years died on Friday. Our neighborhood funeral home director wouldn't let my friend make any arrangements because she couldn't prove she was next-of-kin despite the health care proxy and living will papers in her name. Another dear friend contacted the Lesbian and Gay Community Center and had the remains transferred to the recommended gay-friendly funeral home, where the director apologized to my friend on behalf of the industry. THIS IS WHY WE NEED GAY MARRIAGE TO BE LEGAL!!!!!

Misty, moisty Saturday night: good for Italian food, family reading time of Eclipse, and yet more drywall installation.

I think I broke my cell phone today and I am laughably unconcerned about that. A bit of peace from feeling leashed isn't a bad thing.

Also, I got a call last night from a woman who identified herself as someone who pushed her daughter out into my hands ten years ago today. She told me her birth story and said some lovingly wonderful things about me. And then she put her daughter on the phone and the child thanked me for touching her the way I had as she was born. She told me she wanted to be a midwife when she grew up to help other people feel the way her mother does about her birth.

**************melt*************

The US government just seized several mosques and a skyscraper in NYC, all owned by the Alavi Foundation, that is believed to be secretly backed by Iran. $500 million dollars of property has just been scooped up by our government. Perhaps this is in partial response to the horror last week at Fort Hood.

I don't have a good feeling about this, folks.

Such a whapbamboogey of emotions and needs and tasks of late.

I am now on the verge of laying down for a nap in my own bed in my own bedroom. This is the first time in four and half months that I will sleep in my bedroom, and the first time in perhaps years that there will be no mold festering behind tragically under-insulated walls. I have re-made my home to my own specifications. I am beyond delighted and relieved.

Onward, the living room's completion!

Putting out fires everywhere in my life lately. I'm gonna get me a firefighter hat for such time frames.

Ah, procrastination!

Having just returned from a lovely autumn jaunt with Jovan and procuring roofing tar and weathering strips, I need to now ascend to my brother's deck and saw through the planks covering the crack that is causing YET ANOTHER leak in my ceiling. Then I need to patch said crack and replace the planks. Sounds like a simple job, yet there seems to be nothing in me that in any way resembles motivation.

God gave us exquisite sexual union as a way of reminding us huge-brained-beings that love manifests in forms mysterious and musky as well as concrete and decipherable.

I've been very seriously mulling relationships of late. Perhaps that is the purpose of this go-round for my soul.

The study and pursuit of various forms of relationships has been central to me from early childhood. I have had the opportunity to explore all sorts of relationship paradigms and lived several intimate ones long-term (which translates for me to be longer than ten to twenty years). I am still discovering the forms of relationships that most soothe, excite, and delight me.

As I gradually take on the mantle of my fifth decade, I am a bit shocked to find myself so peacefully placed in a loving, supportive romantic relationship that I find I want to more deeply explore the relationship model of friendship.

I would appreciate some insight from you all here:

What is the longest friendship you have ever actively maintained?

How often do you have telephone/email/face-to-face contact with that person?

Has that relationship ever morphed into a romantic one and did that challenge or enhance the relationship?


Thank you all for your comments and thoughts on this. I am working with a ball of clay right now, attempting to allow form to evolve in my hands.

Yesterday, prior to heading to work, I baked eight dozen brownies for the kids' school parties today, as is our family tradition from the first day any of them set tiny toe into institutionalized education.

Tonight, I will bake a chicken and make some rice and brussel sprouts and Starla and I will hunker down for a quiet evening alone. Perhaps we will paint a coat of Passion Plum on the walls, perhaps measure out a few sheets of drywall and screw them in. What we really need is just an evening of discovering the true color of one another's eyes by candle light. Romantic is as romantic does.

Tomorrow is all about more renovation projects, greeting the doorbell ghouls with yummies and plastic rats, and then hosting a small gathering of my hen-mamas and our broods and accompanying the kids at night for their legendary trick-or-treating run. Oh, and we have a large-ish vampire pumpkin to carve.

May you all get more treats than tricks tomorrow!!!

Random Windi joy:

~Jasmine green tea to blast me into work tonight.

~Boys juggling concrete blocks over my head in my brother's apartment upstairs (or so it certainly sounds).

~Jessi's nose has healed and actually looks fantastic with her tiny blue stud.

~Starla cleaned the house whilst I slept today. It was like waking to a fairy land of dust-freedom.

~I am all about vampire teeth for Halloween. It's from reading the Twilight series to the kids, undoubtedly. We are preparing to become the vampire family this weekend. Jovan's having it hardest, fitting the teeth over his braces.

Jessi did a home piercing of her nose Sunday and kept it a secret from me until yesterday afternoon when her incision abscess had grown to the size of a baby lima bean and I had to drain it for her with an onion.

I love this teenager bit, really I do.