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I'm at a chapter about loving everyone & treating everyone with kindness & letting go of ego. She gives an example that even when she is furious she knows that everyone is happier when her ex-Dh's wife is happier, so she makes the ex-wife happy. My first thought is 'but then she wins' and that is ego. you're supposed to give up your need to be right, to control & to be angry & then this kindess comes to you. You are supposed to love EVERYONE as much as a mother loves her child. everyone. That is a hell of a leap. One I'm not so sure i am ready to make. This is a version of the Metta Sutta, tHe Buddah's Words on Kindness. Many people chant it or just read it aloud every day This is what should be done By one who is skilled in goodness, And who knows the path of peace: Let them be able and upright, Straightforward and gentle in speech. Humble and not conceited, Contented and easily satisfied. Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways. Pe

There are a lot of people I would like to meet who are famous historically, not really too many who are famous currently living, in fact I am not really coming up with anyone currently alive. Foremost among the no longer living I would like to meet Mary, the mother of Jesus. His whole childhood, apart from that episode in the temple, is unrecorded and I am really curious about it, and about her and what it was like being the Mother of God. Were there temper tantrums when he was 3? Was he a moody adolescent? Did he do his chores willingly or did you have to nag him? How much of a scandal was there really about his birth and what exactly does the bible mean by "the brothers & sisters of Jesus"? what did she think of Mary Magdalen? I have a lot of questions for her actually. I'd also like to meet Elizabth I and Henry VIII and get a few historical ambiguities cleared up.

of your house and redecorate it for you, which room would it be and what would you ask them for? hhhmmmm... I'd love my kitchen to be remodeled but that requires major structural changes and involves an architect... So if it was just a designer I'd like my family room redone. It's big, L shaped and white, with creamy beige carpet. It has an odd conglomeration of furniture (I've expounded on this in other posts - the sofa!)and lacks any coherent...well, any coherent anything actually. I'd like it to be warmed up with color & warm toned wood floors. I'd love furniture that at least went together if not actually matched. I'd love some built in storage and a new desk for my computer. Moving the wood stove from the far corner to the middle corner would be nice (so would a new wood stove). and something needs to be done about the former entryway area that is part of the family room as well.

blog ver 4.1 this poor blog gets redone more than any other. i think should start a new one but then I look at this one & think "I haven't done anything with this topic in ages. just reuse it, everything is set up already" and so I do. this blog has been about weight loss & about random things & about spirituality. This time it's parenting. We'll see how *that* goes.

See entry about a week ago where I say the tabs on Firefox just didn't do it for me.... I decided to give Firefox another try with my new faster speed & find I kinda like the tabs. Especially for browsing galleries, now that things are loading at a decent speed. I can open 18 layouts in one window on separate tabs and comment & alt-tab to the next, comment, alt-tab, etc. I am doing much more commenting this way rather than flipping to new windows (and my laptop never likes me having that many windows open) or haven's to go 'back' 3 pages to get to the main page. I also like that I can set the 'my homepage' option to be several sites so everytime I open it the 5 sites I visit regularly during the day are already there waiting for me. Just in case anyone from Microsoft were to come by this post...the reason I decided to try FF was I DL'd IE7 and discovered you had tabbed it. If I am going to deal with the tabs anyway I'd rather go with the less b

Here are some responses to the prompts I have missed this week Guilty pleasures? Trashy romance novels. Regency era bodice rippers. I feel guilty even buying them & could never face have a record of them at the library so I don't borrow them (though I donate them). Not sure why. It isn't as if I read 'improving' books or stuff from the NYT Best seller list. I read a wide range of things, travel essays, food essays, various historical things (mostly non-fiction). I just finished reading a book called "Sex with Kings" which is all about royal mistresses from the 15th to the 20th century. But for some reason reading "Scandal's Bride" or "the Lady's Chosen" is just too embarassing to admit in public Throw it or save it? Save it - 99% of the time. I am a horder. I had at one point over 2000 books in this house, many from my teen years. I had so many pullover sweaters I could wear a new one every day for a month & s

I've had sinus problems starting Saturday. By Wednesday I knew it wasn't allergies but a sinus infection. So I went to the doctor. I have a history of bad sinus infections. She checked me out & the verdict was sinus infection & bronchitis. Bronchitis? I'm not coughing. Nevertheless I have both. These were the two illnesses, individually & combined, that kept me sick for nearly all of 2004. She put on a mega dose of amoxicillin and gave me a second presecription of something else (can't recall) and said if I was no better in 2 weeks toget the 2nd prescription filled. Lovely. As soon as DH came home Wednesday night I went to bed. I felt like someone had stuck a knife under my left cheekbone and I had begun to cough and ache and sweat and have chills. Flashbacks to 2004. About 9pm I told him that if I still felt this way in the morning I would need him to stay home. At 6am I tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom and the left side of my he

really. I swear. This is not a complaint but a simple statement of fact. The reason for the disclaimer is that what I am about to say relates to my internet connection and as I have said before complaining about my internet connection is just my 'thing'. The one topic I am guaranteed to have something, usually negative, to comment on. Let me reiterate, this is not an actual complaint. But Stacey, you may ask, did you not a mere week or so ago tell us how fast your new connection was? What could you possibly have to complain about now? As I said, this is not a complaint. I find my new fast speed to be a bit of a detriment to my established surfing style. I admit that is a negative statement, but it is not a complaint. See, when things loaded slowly I would have 2-3 browers open and while a layout in a gallery loaded in one, I was reading an already loaded thread in another, while waiting for a comment to post in a third. Having just one browser open did not make thing

I'm really bad at this sort of thing. I had to go to Thesaurus.com S - silly T - tolerant A - ambiguous C - complex E - easygoing Y - youthful I guessed correctly & did not make Round 3. Oh well, I don't have to think about giving up my paying job at 1hourscrap.com now. I would have if I made the DET but it would have been hard to do. I've been flitting about elementalscrap.com, digitalscrapdivas.com and digitalscrapbookpages.com (Digitals). They all have great challenges. Digitals wants you to use their stuff & I have nothing by anyone there. You can still do the challenges but you are not eligible for the prizes. They have some good sales right now but I have so many kits I bought in the past 6 weeks that I haven't used I can't justify buying more at the moment. Maybe next month. this is my latest layout

I was at work. My bosses Dh called her & said he heard on the radio a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center Towers. Nothing was up about it on the Post or MSNBC websites yet so I called my DH, who was home overseeing air conditioner installation, and told him to turn on the TV. People are getting calls from freids and family about it. I have the only unrestricted internet connection in my immediate area so everyone is coming to me for details. YOu can't get any online, the sites are swamped. Everyone assumed it was some tragic accident. While I am talking to DH another plane hits the other Tower. Everyone is in an uproar when I announce this. (keep in mind I work in a call center, we have about 50 people taking inbound sales calls while another 10-30 people are milling about talking. everyone is on the phone. Rumors & reports are flying) Then we hear about the Pentagon. We are close enough to DC that people here have family there. I remember being on the

100 words? Only? I ramble. We who ramble cannot be constrained by mere numbers. We must be free to go where our thoughts lead us, use as many graphic, evocative & creative adjectives as our minds wish. Ruthlessly ignoring the rules of grammer. Participles dangling, sentences unparsed (whatever that means) and verbs placed so far from their nouns, with so many intervening prepositional phrases, it is difficult to tell if they are the correct form or tense. Even the original topic is subject to discarding as thoughts free associate. 100 words? A mere 100? Exactly? Have you lost your mind?

For those who don't know how these things are defined, apparently the regulatory body incharge of such things defines a broadband connection as being over 400kpbs for download and upload. My connection speed all these many months has been about 200 for download and as low as 27 for upload. Not technically broadband, but better than the 19.2kbps I was getting on dial up so I was not complaining.....not too much anyway. OK I was complaining, but complaining about my internet is just what I do. It's my *thing*. Everyone has a thing, I'm sure you do to if you think about it. There are worse things to complain about than your internet connection I am sure. But back to the matter at hand. We now have a blight on our landscape in the form of a 50ft pole and assorted guide ropes that results in me surfing at 557kbps download and 463kbps upload. DAMN! I'm surfing the DET contest gallery and pages are loading at incredible speed! Of course I am also perched on an upend

Internet issues again. We had that all day storm yesterday and leafy trees + thick misty rain = no internet for Stacey. Well, almost no internet. I did manage to rig up a dial up with the internal modem from my dead PC to the laptop, with some network cable, duct tape & a really really long phone cord. The things you do for love. :) Connection was the usual 19.2 but the error rate was low enough to remain connected to the download of the DET kit, which was what I was most interested it. So over an hour & a half later I had the kit. Good thing I was on the dial up too because the power went out in the middle of it & the laptop stayed on battery with the phone line connected. Had I been on broadband I would have lost the connection. (and I only had 1 DL attempt left due to previous failed tries) Last night I did the preliminary of my layout. It needs a little something & I have not quite worked out how I want to do it, so I am browsing the DET contest gallery. T