Yellow Jackets at Moss Rock Nature Preserve

Yesterday Jim and I set out to hike our usual mile or so through the woods of the Moss Rock Nature Preserve with our dog Annabelle. Moss Rock is a lovely place and much more interesting than walking on the sidewalk in our neighborhood. Moss Rock Preserve is only a mile or so away from our house.

We were on the blue trail just off the power line when suddenly I was being attacked by a swarm of yellow jackets. I felt just like a scene out of one of those made for TV SciFi channel horror movies. I am not a girly girl but I started screaming nonetheless and Jim came rushing back and so did Annabelle. Jim took his hat off and started beating me with it...actually not beating me, but killing the yellow jackets that were on me. Annabelle got stung a couple of times too.

I had never been stung before so didn't know if I was allergic to them or not and we had to walk about a half mile back to the car or longer and I was hurting but trying not to panic because I had a ways to go before getting back to the car. I ended up with about six stings, two on my hand, three on my arm and one on my leg. As it turns out I am allergic to yellow jackets but not as allergic as some people. I've been up all night long with painful welts, throbbing and a low grade fever.

If this post isn't very literate, I have a good excuse.

Stay or Leave

I'm listening to Dave Matthews' "Some Devil" CD and the song, "Stay or Leave" is making me weep. I've always liked the song but today my sister is leaving the East, heading out to Seattle to live and even though I know the song is about lovers, I feel exactly like that...

My sister Suzanne is five years older than me. We grew up in the 60s and 70s in Nashville and Lexington, KY and later Nashville again. When we were moving to Kentucky from Nashville my friends gave me a surprise going away party (I was 12) and Suzanne took me all over our neighborhood that day to all the places she hung out with her friends. I was bewildered but very happy. She helped me put on makeup and get dressed up without ever hinting I was going to be fete'd by my own 12 year old friends. Funny but I remember very little about the party. What I remember is running around with my big sister.

One time she decided to teach me how to drive. When I ran into a drug store (with the car) it was Suzanne's car and I felt guilty for the next twenty years. It became one of those family stories, you know the kind....the story that seems to get dragged out at every family gathering for all the rest of eternity.

Suzanne was the big sister who did things with me and taught me how to survive the world. Funny, my other big sister who was a year older than Suzanne was the oldest in the family but our relationship is completely different. Suzanne is the one who was my big sister, the one I could tell all my secrets to, the one who could tell me when I was being stupid when nobody else could have.

And now she is leaving. Moving from Cincinnati to Seattle. I feel just like I'm 12 again and this time my sister isn't around to show me how to act. This is a day for weeping and joy because I am weeping for my own selfish reasons but somehow feeling joyous for her and only pray to whatever gods there might be that she will find the fulfillment that has so far eluded her. She is the only person I've ever known who has done all the things you are supposed to do, worked hard at everything and excelled in both art and teaching without being recognized for her accomplishments. Maybe Seattle will be more amenable to an artist than is Cincinnati.

Good luck Suzanne. I already miss you. My heart hurts.

Take me back take me back take me back in time

Dear Santa,

Please bring me a Cello.

Judge Roy Moore believes Alabama Democrats will elect him to governor?

Apparently the state's Republicans have finally decided they shouldn't allow crossover voting in the primary elections. In an Op-ed peice I read in the Birmingham News recently, the Alabama Republican party wants to prohibit crossover voting and is proposing legislation to that effect.

When I moved to Birmingham in 1994, I was surprised to learn that as a Democrat I was allowed to vote in the Republican primary if I wanted to.

Now, leaders of the Alabama Republicans want to change all that. Ousted Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore thinks the proposal for the legislation is aimed at keeping him out of office. It may be, but if it is, they haven't thought this thing through.

Here is where the irony comes in. Roy Moore is worried that without me and my fellow Alabama Democrats, he can't win his bid to become governor of Alabama. He thinks that way because way back in the old days, say ten or fifteen years ago before we crossed into this alternate universe, a Democrat voting in the Republican primary would have voted for the worst possible candidate for governor in an attempt to aid the Democratic candidate. Hah! That was then. This is now. No Democrat in her right mind would vote for Roy Moore in the primary because in this alternate universe we are living in, he might actually get elected.

I'm afraid! There was a time when I would have deemed such a thing impossible. Even after the 2000 presidential election I still believed I was living in the right universe. I just thought it was all a colossal mistake that would be easily remedied in 2004. That was then. This is now.

In the last gubernatorial election, I voted for our former governor, Don Siegelman, a Democrat. The Republican candidate, Bob Riley scared me when he said things like, 'God wanted' him to win.

One of the first things Riley did as governor was try to raise taxes. He pushed for slightly higher taxes to aid Alabama's poor and Alabama's children (ala education). I have to admit that I was amused by the outrage voiced by the Republicans who had elected him but was quite disappointed when the proposal was voted down.

Though Riley is a TheocRepublican I have confidence that he is sincere (unlike the vast majority of Theocrepublicans). He actually shows signs of having a conscience and worries about poor people, even the ones who don't vote. That's unusual.

I'm realistic. I live in Alabama. The chances of us having a Democrat serve as governor anytime in the near future seems infintesimal (sp) and so the days when I might have used the Republican crossover primary voting to try to get my Democratic candidate elected by voting for a buffoon (such as Roy Moore) are long gone. If I vote in the Republican primary this year in Alabama, Bob Riley will get my vote.

If I can only vote in one primary this year, it will be hard for me to decide which one to vote in. Former governor Don Siegelman plans to run in the Democratic primary but I wish he wouldn't. Too many accusations against him have been spun in the last few years and even though so far, all claims of wrong doing have been proven false, the damage is done I think.

Lieutenant Governor, Lucy Baxley, a Democrat, has announced her intention to run for Governor and I think she has a better chance than Don Siegelman does. Yes, she has two things going against her in this alternate universe we are living in; she is a woman and she is a Democrat. But I recently had a conversation with a friend that has given me a glimmer of hope.

I won't name my friend but she comes from a very conservative background. Just to illustrate how conservative, her parents actually believe that Nixon was framed. Yeah, Richard Nixon. My friend is a tenured professor at a local Baptist university and she is not particularly political. She's active and busy with her work and her children. She rarely even mentions politics. It is usually me that introduces political topics into our conversations.

She shocked me recently. I asked her if she knew anybody that she thought would vote for Roy Moore. I was thinking of her conservative parents. She told me she wasn't sure but that she thought she would vote for Lucy Baxley. "The Lucy Baxley?????" I asked her if she knew Baxley is a Democrat and she (my anonymous but wonderful friend) raised her chin in defiance and a stubborness I've come to recognize over the years and replied, "Yes."

And suddenly a small glimmer of hope beckons from the horizon that could be the real universe, you know, the one where we used to live back when it was okay to question the doings of the folks in the White House and not be accused of being a "Communist who hates America, God and our troops overseas"

But here is where the real decision making comes in. If I have to choose between voting in the Republican and Democratic primaries, how will I decide? To choose between Lucy Baxley who I think has a tiny little chance of winning the general election by voting in the Democratic primary and voting against Roy Moore in the Republican primary is going to be exceedingly difficult.

The choice may be made for me if the Alabama Republican party gets their way. I'll have to wait and see.

More Crazy Religious Right Wingers

My mother took in strays. She started doing this when I was still in high school. She believed she could help people. It was her calling. Her degree was in English but that didn't matter.

She believed that if she let someone talk enough and she kept on mothering them, they would be healed. It didn't always work but often it did. The last stray she took in was a disturbed young woman named Dawn. Dawn Jones had been through a terrible divorce and mom took her in to try to save her from herself. The first time mom took Dawn in, she thought she could help her. But the second time she took Dawn in, mom told me she thought Dawn was "disturbed". If someone was "disturbed" in my mother's book, they were pretty well down the road to real craziness but my mother felt she couldn't turn her back on Dawn now.

She took Dawn in and gave her free room and board and the use of her car. Dawn was grateful and helped cook and clean the house a bit. But when mom got sick with pneumonia, so sick that she was literally out of her mind, Dawn was too unwell mentally to recognize my mother needed immediate medical care.

Both of my parents (divorced) had suffered some serious illnesses in the last year or so and I was driving to another state once a month to spend the weekend with one or the other of them. That weekend, I had been seeing about my father and phoned my mother to make sure she was home before driving to the city where she lived. She sounded normal on the phone but a bit out of it. She was after all, getting older.

When I got to her house, I could see she was seriously ill. She couldn't walk to the bathroom by herself. I took her. She was talking out of her head. My brother and I had her hospitalized of course but she never recovered. Apparently mom had been that sick for several days and Dawn hadn't seen the need to tell anyone or take my mother to the hospital. We didn't blame Dawn who was living on the 'kindness of strangers' and not responsible for herself much less my mother.

Mom was diagnosed with MRSA (Methycillin resistent staphylococcus auerelius ) or what is commonly known as staph pnuemonia. She had contracted it at the hospital when she had been in a couple of weeks before for some sort of treatment.

To make a long painful story short, my mother never recovered.

It is two years later and for the last two years I've been getting mass emails from Dawn, my mother's last stray. They aren't frequent but just when I think she's finally forgotten me, I get some crazy ridiculous email forwarded to me from Dawn.

What she sends en masse are the type of emails that most people would call spam. During the 2004 presidential election, she sent me a torid email outlining what horrific torture should be inflicted on all Democrats and or anyone who disagreed with the right wing agenda. I was shocked and asked her not to send me any more emails like that. I told her I was surprised that she would advocate violence that way. She told me I should find Jesus.

I haven't received any mail from Dawn in a while (thank goodness) and thought I had finally gotten taken off of her list of people to send mass emails to but was wrong. Today I received one from her asking me to sign a petition to send to the president to ask him to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

Ask me what's NOT wrong with that petition and I'd be hard put to find anything. I tried to rein in my temper but apparently used no tact when I wrote back to her explaining that the Pledge of Allegiance is still being said in public schools and that the email was a scam that goes around every few years (I've seen it before of course).

I didn't even mention to her that I couldn't possibly care less about the Pledge of Allegiance. I defended my son's right not to say it in the sixth grade when he was learning to question authority. What I did say in the email to Dawn was that as people who have children in public schools know, the Pledge of Allegiance IS still being said and that instead of spreading the ignorance, why didn't she give a donation to St. Jude's Research Hospital to help children with cancer. I then asked her to take me off of her list of people to send mass emails to.

I suppose I could have been more tactful. But I am tired of being tactful with ignorant right wing people. My mother was a liberal but obviously she never talked politics with Dawn.

Or maybe I should have explained to Dawn that after watching my son's dearest sweet friend Caitlin die of cancer at 16, that sending bandwidth eating spams about the stupid Pledge of Allegiance irritate me. Maybe I should have explained that I was tired of chain mail asking me to send soda can ring pulls to the American Cancer Society or chain mails asking me to pray for so and so when the truth is that none of those things ever accomplish anything more than consuming my time and the internet's bandwidth. If you really want to change the world, give money to St. Jude's Hospitals. I guess that is what I should have said but instead I just wrote that : "

This is a scam that goes around every year or so. The pledge is still being said in public schools as anybody with children in public schools knows.
So instead of passing on the ignorance, why don't you give money to St. Judes Hospitals to help support children with cancer and do something constructive?

And Dawn, Please please take me off of your email list. I don't like spam.

Deeply Disturbed Dawn didn't take what I wrote very well. Something in those words just above really chapped her ass because the following is what she wrote to me and forwarded to the hundred or so other people on her mass email list:

You know what? You are a real treat, Karen. I like to call people like you pseudo-intellectuals...folks with no REAL education and certainly no people skills...you just like to feel superior and look down your nose at other folks just because they may not be as "well read" as you are and you have to service your feelings of inferiority. Your mother would be ashamed at your attitude. I remove you from my mailing list with pleasure.

I'm not the only one who thinks of you the way I do.

You have no idea how much you and the rest of your family other than Frank hurt your mother. She was one of the most giving, wonderful people I have ever known and I miss her everyday. How she raised someone like you is beyond me. I stayed with her not because I "needed" a place to stay but because I loved her as my own mother and friend. More than I can say for you.

And just for the record, I am not in the practice of forwarding emails very often and I do send my apologies for that.

Find Jesus. Your mother would have liked that.

Have a good life.

Luckily for me, my mother and I had a very strong and loving relationship or I might have been hurt by what Dawn wrote. I wasn't hurt, I was alarmed that Dawn is so much more disturbed than I had realized.

I just don't understand people who proclaim they are Christians and walking with God and Jesus and yet live a life so far removed from anything purportedly said by Jesus in the bible. Extremism is scary in all its forms, whether it shows up in Christians, Muslims or any of the big religions followers. Give me religious apathy any day.

Is the Ridgeback the Right Dog for You?

[Very informative page for anyone considering getting a Rhodesian Ridgeback.]

Read more at www.geocities.com/~kala...

Gatwick, the other London airport

I thought that flying directly from Atlanta to Gatwick was a fabulous idea. Don't let anyone tell you Gatwick is in London the way Heathrow is in London. Gatwick is out in the middle of nowhere. I didn't discover this until I explained to Linda, my cousin with whom I had reserved a free bed that I would be arriving in London via Gatwick.

I started researching options for traveling from Gatwick to my cousin's house. A cab from Gatwick was way out of my budget. Linda suggested I take the Gatwick Express train to Victoria and then ride the tube or take a cab from Victoria to her house. It started sounding rather complicated but I 'm talented at denial or is that optimism?

In an effort to rationalize why it was good I was flying into Gatwick, I decided Gatwick would be faster to get through than than the sprawling Heathrow. After all it's smaller and out in the suburbs, right? The last time I'd been through Heathrow, it had seemed to take forever and that was before the 9/11 travesty occurred.

Well, Gatwick is smaller and Gatwick is out there. But getting through security checkpoint and customs at Gatwick took over two hours and even though it was October it was a blistering 90 degrees F in the airport.

We foreigners were told to queue up one way and then another airport representative came and had us reshape our queue so I ended up losing my spot. The Gatwick personnel didn't seem to understand the unwritten rules regarding line or queue breakers.

There were hundreds of us and the line wasn't moving for over an hour. They had us queued up in Texas cattle corral formation and when the line finally began moving, I spotted the infamous 60something Atlanta trio and thereafter every 100 feet or so that we we inched along I met them again. We weren't the only people fanning ourselves. It was unbearably hot there. I was ploughing through Gatwick with a huge peice of brand new luggage from Proffits (or was it Macy's?) that was jam packed with as much clothing as I could stuff into it plus my carry-on, my laptop computer and my purse. Being a packrat ensures an automatic talent for getting more things into compartments than other less evolved humans. My point is that I was carrying a huge load. Did I mention I was insane enough to be wearing new shoes and had a sprained ankle?

After paying £14 for a train ticket for the privelege of a ride to Victoria station, I had originally planned to take the tube to my cousin's house but I had been traveling for well over 12 hours and was exhausted and took a cab. The cabbie had trouble understanding American even though all I was trying to translate from American to real English was my cousin's address.

It was four hours after I was expected that Linda finally opened the door to my knocking. I had never been so glad to see a relative in all my life. Funny thing about it is that we hadn't seen each other in 26 years since our grandfather's funeral. Linda is a year younger than me. When we were growing up in the 60's and 70's, her family would visit ours every summer. Her mother is my father's younger sister. Linda's sister Donna is a year older than I am. All those summers the three of us spent together must have counted for something because as Linda welcomed me into her home, the years fell away and our relationship fell into the comfortable realm it always had, affectionate and humorous.

Linda told me she had begun to worry about me. She tried my mobile phone but I never heard it go off which is very usual for me. I explained the problems I encountered at Gatwick.

Even though it was October, London was warmer than Atlanta was when I left. I was wearing autumn attire and all I wanted was to take a shower and fall into a bed for an hour or two nap.

That's my cousin Linda and her son Daniel at the top. I was trying to figure out how to get the picture somewhere down here but I'm too lazy to worry about it. Just remembering the Gatwick experience, I'm forced to admit that fatigue has conquered my intention of working on my belated travel diary and so I'm going to bed.

A Trio of 60somethings at the Atlanta airport

Right after establishing my blogspot, I left the country for most of October.

Jim drove me to the Atlanta Airport. The drive from Birmingham was excruciatingly tedious because all the way through Atlanta we kept getting stuck behind FEMA's houses on wheels on their way to Mississippi and New Orleans.

I got to the British Airways gate after going through the cattle corral, ehrm, I mean, the security checkpoints at Atlanta's International Airport. I deposited all of my accoutrements (laptop plus carry-on and purse) on the seat next to me. I was early enough that very few seats were filled in the gate area but 15 minutes after settling in and beginning to peruse my mother's journal of childhood memories, a small troop of retired Atlanta ladies surrounded me. They were wearing tour badges that would identify them to their guides and to each other. The three ladies were somewhere in that nether region of age that is impossible to pinpoint but they reminded me of my mother and Aunt Eleanor. Their obvious excitement about the trip was contagious and they were fun.

They engaged me in conversation and we became quick friends the way only southern women can. When they went purse diving looking for change for one of the ladies to call her daughter from the pay phone I offered her the use of my mobile since I have free roaming and long distance. The lady let her daughter know she was safely delivered at the airport and then had to explain why she was calling from a Birmingham number. Then another one of the ladies liked the novelty of using my mobile and called her son and so of course the other lady did the same.

I was enjoying the trio and even showed them photos of my cats when they started talking about their cats. They liked that I had photos of my cats on my phone. Yeah, I know, having your cats' pictures in my mobile phone practically sentences me to spinsterhood but I'll have you know I'm married (for the second time) so there. Anyway, back to my story. Just when the BA folks started calling rows to board, the jolly lady sitting to my left leaned over to whisper in my ear, "I was as scared as a negro at an election..." as a footnote to the just ended discussion regarding the first time she flew. Then they were gone and though I caught a glimpse of them at the Gatwick security corral, I never saw them again.

1978 Hobbit Desk Calendar

The passion with which one feels things in youth never really leaves us, we just learn to suppress the yearning, disappointment and bliss in an effort to repel the inevitable pain that is left in the wake of time's regardless passage.

Traveling backwards down through time and visiting my own past has as usual, been both painful and giddy. Painful because the vague air of trauma that clings to certain memories and giddy for the passion that hails from my heart long ago.

Thanks, Rusty.

I used to know you

There was a time when I could sense your mood, read your thoughts by the bend of your neck or the way you held your pen. Touch you and your living pulse excited something in me. I knew you. I never doubted you. Your dreams held my hopes and all was right with the world.

What happened? There are no more dreams and my hopes are dashed. I can't see you anymore. Your face is hidden in shadow. Who are you? I whisper in the dark hours alone, haunting mirrors for a glimpse. Hoping for a clue.

Crazy right wing people at Estate sales

Of all places. We ran into Ken Weezel as he so proudly calls himself at an estate sale this afternoon. Jim and I were trying to keep him onto subjects that were neutral....like gadgets and radios. It worked for a short period of time. Ken loves to give advice in a godfather sort of way, expecting you to do something for him in return. But then someone else came up and Ken started into his wreckless and demeaning dribble about politics. He is the first person I've met who actually believes that FEMA's Brown did a good job (well okay, besides the president, ala "good job Brownie"). Ken is a social darwinist though and his bottom line take on things is that the people who couldn't get out of New Orleans and Mississippi and died are only demonstrating his idea of attrition. All this I heard in a matter of minutes today. He went on though....regarding Iraq, we ought to just "nuke 'em", keep fighting all the muslims until they are all dead. For him that is the ideal attrition. My only excuse for him is that he insane. Jim and I try to avoid him when he becomes a maniac and works himself into a frenzy. He is loud and obnoxious and I can barely stand to be around him. His words just serve to remind me that there are others like him out there. He thinks we should send more troops over to the Middle East. He's never been in the military or volunteered for the U.S. but he thinks that it's okay for my sons to go and die in the desert so he can have more oil for the generators he is stockpiling.

I guess that is why I am living in a great big fat red state when I'm a blue person. We need more blue people down here in Alabama.