We plan to travel to Holland in a couple or three weeks to visit Jess. She's attending school there for a semester and we figure we can use the old credit cards and get us a visit, my first to Europe. I wonder if my biography will note this trip as significant or miss it entirely. If you think about it, every moment of time we spend in this existence has the potential to be the last. Each breath could contain that virus that takes us out, each sniff of a flower could be as a gunshot to the heart. So every journey could be the first step in your new life or that final trip from which we never return. I suppose it should make one think about what all we've done, but in my case it makes me want to wash the windows and get rid of all them dust bunnies under the couch and chairs. Forget about under the bed! That's no man's land.

Lately there's been a few shows which mention comas and PVS and such like. I suppose because in part there are a lot of people coming back from Iraq with blows to the head from IED's tossing their (un)armored humvees into the air. So talk shows occasionally mention it, although they don't actually bring in a TBI survivor to try to explain what's up. I think it would be interesting if Dena could bring in her husband and have him suddenly decide to stand up and pee on the floor. It's one thing to have him do it at home, but on Letterman? Nah, better to talk about them, around them and thru them. But there's more of them every day.

We're talking about life insurance now, trying to figure out how to put enough on me to help pay the bills, especially Jess's school loans. Being disabled and over 56 I'm not sure anyone would be willing to sell me insurance but it would be nice to have her able to pay everything off instead of spending so many years working and working and not being able to save anything. Of course, she's used to having very little money to work with so she'll be alright no matter what we do. I have a lot of faith in her. I had a fair amount of faith in Jon, except his inability to see the logic in wearing a seat belt bothered me a lot. I also worried about him always looking for Ms. Right in local bars and concerts. My experience has been that you tend to find fun girls and sometimes interesting girls, but maybe not so many stable girls and in Jon's case I would have to vote for stable, given how unstable his mother was.

If we go to Holland and something happens to us, or to me, what happens to Jon? NObody would be able to take up the slack, although Margaret will most likely try to do something for him. I know that visiting him would be way hard on her, maybe too much to handle. But on the other hand, I have no indication that anything like that will happen. Normally you don't get too many clues about life's little surprises, but stuff like that comes thru. The big things come thru. But still you wonder. With no father coming in to inspect his feet and hands and breath, his wounds and tubes and scars, who will love him like I do? Who will cry when he's sick, or go to some second hand clothing store to find an amusing shirt for him to wear, hoping that he will understand the joke? That would suck. So I suppose I'll have to stick around and be the guy who gets to deal with all this until the Goddess takes him back. Next time I bet he wears his damn seat belt! Assuming he goes to a place where they have cars anyway...

I'm tired and I hurt. I have flowers to plant, trees to trim and things to sculpt. I can't rest yet, I can't 'retire' until some of these things get done. I bet I have a dozen sculptures banging around in my head now, some decades old. The series of God as Woman isn't very far. I'm working on Krishna now, the sketches anyway. Likewise a few sketches of Buddha as woman are coming along. I think I'll use the Crucified Woman as Jesus since there isn't any good description of Yaweh, except maybe a burning bush. That would make an interesting sculpture insofar as womanly attributes are concerned, but not really my genre or taste. Maybe things would go better with a Fosters. Kill the pain, rest the mind, get on with it. Well, I suppose that these blogs may get shorter if sitting is the only way to write them... the lower back seems to feel that spasms are a happy celebration of Spring, whereas I see them as my alternating days of pain and glory. The days I rake are glorious, and the next two days are sleeping, resting and choking down more pain meds. Kinda slows one down, but the clay is thawed so it's time to work. I really want to try this year to switch the noborigama to propane and to build a smaller updraft kiln to fire Persephone. Two projects, three if you count the roof on the sauna. So we'll see what I have to say about this in the coming Winter.

At the moment we're surrounded by critters. What we fail to recognize is that we are always surrounded by and inhabited on and in, critters. That's the natural state. So I laid out piles of critter goodies, like sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, grains and nuts, hoping that the chipmunk would take to the piles rather than strip the birdfeeder of it's goodies. But since the piles were added now I have a squirrel chomping away on the porch while the chippy lays into the bird food, probably watching his/her ass vis-a-vis that great grey thing over there chomping away. That's the way of things. Then, as I walk thru the house I see the birdfeeders on the south side simply dripping with birds and I don't feel so bad. There's a couple of chickadees who insist on hanging by the back porch, but they ought to ignore the chippy and the squirrel and go south where the other birds are. Their karma or something I guess.

But some of the birds on the ground are robins, and they are mostly carnivores, so some of that hopping and pecking is probably taking some life. Some early worm or early bug, maybe one been laying around in a frozen daze just woke up and took a hop... and before you know it the bird is a little more energetic, bravo, Bug. There are daffodils just now sprouting up, down by the stream. The reeds are so thick there that you almost miss them when they open up, probably a couple of weeks from now. And the reeds are useless for seeds for the birds, and useless for the human walking thru them, both for seeds and a thatched roof. Nope, the stuff is too old and dry, like a spinster aunt living in the back cottage, forgotten almost but still occasionally recognized for what it is. We forget that all those 'things' had a history, a past and some kind of future. Well, not really forget per se, but we certainly focus on other stuff somehow. Like I lose track of the fact that some of the stuff I throw out or drop without thinking about it will feed a critter that night, maybe warm up the cockles of some foreign heart. There is no waste in Mother Land. Just maybe in the Father Land. Certainly some waste there. I have these rodents living in my house and I hear them scratching in the walls and ceiling like some Poesque background music, except my sweety-pie hears them too. Now, I hate to put up traps, but I have found that there is no reasoning with these people. They will, of course, come into my house and take what I have around that they need. To them I am perhaps a noisy meat mountain. Just like I am learning to think of them as eating machines with runaway batteries, and they poop, too. The poop is bad enough, but the piss is real bad. I've rid myself of several beasts that did that sort of stuff in my living space. I understand they can't help Doing It, but they can be warned, maybe post humously, to stay out of the big meat mountain thingy's stuff. If it smells like Human, walk away. It works for awhile but since I'm not allowed to surround the house with signs written in rodent, sometimes I have to use brute force. it's something we humans are very good at.