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For my birthday I bought the original Carl Sagan Cosmos TV episodes on DVD. (Thank you Bill and Carol for the Amazon gift certificate!)

When I first watched this series, Dr. Sagan got me through a hard time in my life. There is something very soothing and comforting about Carl Sagan.

Young people would find the series boring. Dr. Sagan talks slowly with dramatic pauses. The episodes are long drawn out affairs with lengthy special effects overlayed with music crescendos. Nothing moves quickly in Cosmos and that is what I love about it.

Dr. Sagan gives you plenty of time to think about what he is saying and conveying. Those lengthy pauses are pauses for thought. The music and special effects stir the imagination. Cosmos is a meditation.

The show originally aired on PBS and every so often they had telethon fund raisers, where you could pledge money to this organization. They had great commercial free TV, non interrupted episodes of Cosmos and Nova, as well as sitcoms and other programs like Sesame Street. During one telethon, they were offering to the first 20 callers or so the album, The Music of Cosmos. Well, I dialed my finger to the bone to get one, and I did! Not only that, I got to speak with the President of PBS. I still have that music record today! I wouldn’t part with that for anything, even though I no longer have a record player. My next gift to myself will be the CD.

Watching the series now, it is eerie the accuracy of Dr. Sagan’s predictions for the future. I don’t currently agree with everything he believed, but there is nothing outdated in his commentaries.

Thank you Dr. Sagan.

I have a beautiful view of the Experimental Farm from my apartment, and most days, I can see the Gatineau Hills. Then there are other days that I cannot see the hills at all, and downtown is smudged out.

This is smoke from the terrible fires consuming our beautiful north lands. It gives me chills to think of how much forest is being wiped out by flames. It is devastating. It sickens my heart.

UGH.

I much prefer clear days.

On my dog shit day, I also had an interesting nectarine purchase.

I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from the library and my adventure of being smeared with dog poop. See previous blog about that. My strange day had not ended.

I selected two nectarines along with a bunch of other produce and waited at the designated spot for nice cashier to ring it up.

The fruit slipped out of the bag as the cashier weighed them. She attempted to put them back in the bag and one escaped and rolled down the counter. She fumbled the next attempt and said fruit found the floor and scurried under the checkout.

Nice cashier searched for it. Found it. Wiped it on her pants and put it in the bag for me.

Seriously.

It was the perfect ending to dog shit day.

At the end of the summer the libraries opened and I resumed reserving and picking up books when they were ready.

One beautiful day at the end of August I took my bundle buggy and headed out to get my books and do some grocery shopping too.

Since the cart was empty, I tucked it up under my arm and carried it, cursing the wind that thought my bag was a sail and kept pushing on it. I held it in tighter.

As I got near the library I noticed something brown on my leg. When I stopped, I noticed something brown on my shirt. I noticed something brown and slimy on one of the wheels of my bundle buggy. And when I stopped to further examine this brown something, I discovered I had it ALL over me. My shirt, my pants, my legs and my purse!

That brown something was dog shit that I must have run over with the cart before I picked it up to carry it!

Fortunately, I always wear latex gloves. Double fortunate it had rained the night before, and I found a puddle in a parking lot and well, with a little ingenuity, that did the trick, more or less!

Lately weird things like this have been happening to me. Makes me laugh!

I am one of the most cautious persons on earth. I hardly ever take risks. I know, yawn, boring.

Yet I fell for a computer tech scam.

Yep. I did.

And like countless others, I knew better. But it hit me when I was tired, not feeling very well and at one of those, ‘I lost my mind’ times, that seems to happen a couple of times a year.

The emotional aftermath of this is something few people write about. There are countless articles on how to avoid scams. Some outright terrifying shame on you articles and the like. All of which do not serve a woman who just wants to create stuff and live happily ever after.

Women process these situations differently than men. Men would be angry and attack. Women go into the ‘shame-blame’ mode. This is just a general observation of people of my generation.

We also take this very personally. It is computer rape. I feel violated. It severely altered my perspective of the world. It is going to take a long while to come back from this.

I immediately took action to correct my faux pas, all the time battling the shame and blame I felt for having so easily been deceived. Damage control took a week. A week of not much sleep, no exercise, poor eating and feeling BAD.

No one but myself shamed me. Not the police. Not the Fraud Protection Centre. No one pointed fingers at me and went TSK TSK. No one rolled their eyes up at me and groaned. No one blamed me or said I should have known better. The turmoil was within.

You cannot be proactive about everything in life unfortunately. You can’t know every damn thing. And even if you do, you forget most of it. Most of us just bump along this rough old road called life and dig ourselves out of pot holes and messes.

A lot of good came out of the ordeal, as I find most things have a silver lining. It forced me to get things up to speed. To examine areas that need cleaning up in my life. It taught me that computers are like swiss cheese and colanders and almost impossible to completely plug up. I have a new and deep empathy for fellow victims. I learned an awful lot. The HARD way.

The best thing is it convinced me to work even harder on my creative stuff. I’ll show you! You scammers who try to steal my joy!

I received a knockout punch. Now I get back up, dust myself off and get back into the ring. Life is too short and too precious to lose your joy and your reason for being. You have to get back into the game.

I am stubborn because I am stupid most of the time.

But I have learned that when something refuses to happen, you need give it up. Usually there is a good reason for delays that I find out or figure out later. If I’ve been frustrated trying to buy something on-line, I’ll discover it on sale the next day or I needed the money for an emergency. Or if I can’t reach someone to tell them something, I’ll discover it is something they should not know! Or if I keep getting interrupted while talking, by phones ringing, noise, other people, well, it means I should keep my mouth shut. I’ve learned these things the hard way. One scary time I was delayed going to the bank, and had I been on time, I would have been walking up the very sidewalk that a man lost control of his car and hurled down and plunged into the bank. I missed that event by mere minutes! So, yeah, I kind of trust delays.

But still I sometimes persist.

I had a barrage of medical tests to do, blood work, urine sample and x-rays. I decided to do them all on the same day and get it over with. I had my mind set on it. That was probably my first mistake.

I went to the usual place for blood work, they also have (had) an x-ray facility there. It was near where I buy cat food too, and a dollar store (YAY!). 2 buses to get there, 2 buses to come home. Because of covid, you can’t reserve an appointment, it is first come first serve, and there is NO way to contact them by phone, so I went early morning.

Because I had fasted, I could not pee. A man banged on the bathroom door for me to hurry up. That was helpful. If anything was there it was not going to come out now! So I left the lab and filled myself with water, orange juice and food, and still could not pee. I went and bought cat food and visited the dollar store and returned to the lab and squeezed out a couple of drops for analysis.

I went to the basement for my x-rays. They were gone. A surly lab tech told me the closest place was way out in the east end of the city. Being loaded down with a bag of cat food, I went home.

But I was still determined to get those x-rays and probably not thinking straight since they took 10 vials of blood from me. As a bonus, it was the hottest day of the summer, a mere 33 degrees celsius.

I found a lab that only required 2 buses to get to, it opened at 12:30. I had lunch and away I went. A big notice on the door said ‘X-ray machine not working.’ and gave the address of the next closest place.

Now I am getting stubbornly stupid. I take 2 buses to the next place, but I got on the wrong bus and it let me off in the middle of nowhere – I mean, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest crop duster cornfields nowhere! By now it is late afternoon, and I am wiped. The only building in the distance was a funeral home.

I guess x-rays today was not meant to be. Gee, what was my first clue?

So much written and discussed about procrastination. The plague that destroys lives.

Here is what I discovered about my own procrastination.

Why do we not do what we love?

We’ll do things we hate, really hate, before we tackle the thing we love. All of a sudden housework, mowing the lawn, clipping our toenails has an urgency, and we kill hours doing the despicable. And there, collecting dust is our masterpiece. The unfinished painting, the needlework kit unopened, the book unread or unwritten, the application papers for University untouched, that dream job unexplored, the music lessons we don’t attend.

Why?

I read that we suppress negative emotions, anger, depression, worry, and that we freely express joy.

Not so.

When I was growing up, silence and good behaviour were the rule. Parents did not want an excited, unruly kid on their hands. I was taught to suppress joy. Be a good girl. Keep my enthusiasm under wraps. Does this sound familiar?

I was taught there is something wrong with being happy.

So when there was something I really wanted to do or have or be, I kept it to myself. Stiff upper lip. I held back boisterous joy and laughter. I was not allowed to show unbridled passion, nor was I allowed to pursue it.

Hello? So whenever something in my adult life arose that imbued that bubbling sense of joy, I shut down. I did other things to keep it at bay.

That is why I procrastinated. This is why I worked at jobs I hated. Had lovers who were crap. Never bought a home, a car or took trips.

WTF.

I still find it difficult to express joy, but I seldom procrastinate now. I allow myself to make noise, messes, get dirty, be intimate, just as much as I allow myself to be angry, sad or just plain miserable (though I keep those negative emotions at home and yell and cry to the houseplants. No I am not suppressing my feelings, I’m just not making anyone else suffer them.)

I bet a lot of people procrastinate for the same reason.

Gradually I have come to believe that the cause of many of our mobility and other problems is a lack of good circulation.

I came to this conclusion after seeing injured animals restored with daily massage and manipulation of their limbs.

It gave me pause for thought.

Going for a massage is NOT something I would ever do however. I am squeamish about a stranger touching me.

So I do it myself.

If only it’d work on money!

There were two girls who followed me around when I was in Public School.

They weren’t my friends.

At least once a week they beat me up. They’d drag me off to a corner at recess and treat my face and body to some fists.

They tormented me by following me around like a cat stalking its prey. I was a shy little kid and defenseless.

Those two girls would escort me home from school nearly every afternoon. It was terrifying.

My Mom wanted me to invite them for supper. She insisted they were my friends. And she actually came out of the house one day and invited them in for dinner! And they ate with us!

She never believed me when I told her they were most definitely not my friends, and she didn’t hear me when I said they liked to rough me up. She thought I was making it up.

Until.

One day I came home with a black eye.

“I fed those two girls!” Was my Mothers angry response to my beating.

My Mother trusted everyone. Complete trust. She always thought the best of people.

Unfortunately, this was not the only time my Mother put me in danger. There were many times I learned some shocking truths and endured abuse because my Mother either put me in harms way, or did not defend me.

Mom never believed people would do terrible things, even though some people did terrible things to her. A paradox I could never understand.

My brother also was bullied but solved his woes by brandishing a two by four. In the 1950’s and 60’s you were on your own, kiddo.

In August my teeth decided that they needed attention. And what attention they needed! It really bit off a lot of my savings and put me a few months closer to being a bag lady.

But I will be a bag lady with great teeth!

I got to warm the dentist chair for two hours every session. My mouth has been stretched somewhat I suspect. Not good news for those who are sick of listening to me.

One thing I’ve learned as I watch my money disappear as fast as I can take a breath, is that your health is always way more important than money.

If you come into some money, think about your teeth first and spend it on that. You won’t regret it. A healthy mouth equals a healthy body.

So when you pass me wheeling my grocery cart around town at least I can flash you a brilliant smile!

And if you can’t spare some change (who has coinage nowadays?) maybe you could buy one of my books and that’ll help pay for the teeth that blinded you!

God Bless.