Why Obama's Election Makes Me Jubilant PLUS a Moving Commentary by an Unknown British Woman

I found this commentary online following an article that reported international reaction to the election on the CBS website. It really touched me. Whether you supported Obama or not, I think it will touch you as an American. As an Obama supporter, I am jubilant and optimistic. I hope that the disappointed McCain supporters among you will come to believe that this was right choice, at the right time.

I have raised (almost - Tori is only 17) two biracial children. I married Alix's father, a black man, in 1973. The world was so different then that many people in my own family refused to attend the wedding or even acknowledge it. Thankfully, my family long ago found the heart to accept my three children, black and white, birthed and adopted, but many incidents throughout the years have reminded our family that racism, especially institutional racism, remained part of the American scene.

Obama's victory in this election gives me hope that the spector of racism is diminishing quickly enough that my future grandchildren will not suffer from it. May it be so. (No more racism AND grandchildren someday!!)

Lane

From a comment board in The Guardian Newspaper (UK)
Posted by SubstanceD on the CBS website 11-5-08

Sometimes I wish I was an American, in those moments where they seem to stand apart from us. Their endless optimism, their endless desire for change, and movement, and history. They make history, where, as an English woman, I feel I am just you know in it. I sat up and watched Obama become the 44th American President, I watched Americans cry and I cried and I believed in him and his words and the fact that really this is going to have an impact on us all, and to say that we are not involved is really fruitless.

Sometimes I wish I was an American just so I could be proud and wave a flag and not feel like a loser. I wish that I could hold my flag and say you know what, I want my country to be amazing and believe we are, in many more ways that you will never ever understand; and, most of all, I am proud to be English, I am proud to be British.

But I cannot, not just yet, but maybe one day we will chant, Yes we can! and I will teach my children to believe that they can do anything and be anything; and , more over, that we are all safe tonight. And we will live to a dream that those Yanks make seem a little less fluffy and at times like these very real.

Obama, not as an American but as a Human, has given me my Human flag, and for this moment, we live in hope.

Thank you America, and I wish us all a happy and optimistic future!

Thoughts on Hurricane Ike

Hurricanes. When we moved to the Texas Gulf Coast 19 years ago, I gave only passing thought to hurricanes. I grew up in tornado country and vividly remember riding with my family to Fargo, North Dakota to look at the aftermath of a big tornado there as a little girl. Two of the sights that awed me that day included a ladies slip streaming in the wind from a tree branch high above the ground and a house opened like a child's toy with the tub and commode gleaming whitely in the after-storm sunshine. After my eighteen years in North Dakota, I spent many more years in Missouri and Kansas, states also very susceptible to unpredictable and dangerous weather.

My next residence, California, did not have tornadoes, but it did have earthquakes, which, like tornadoes, are only marginally predictable. Our first California earthquake scared the beejesus out of me and resulted in two funny (now) family stories. In the first bit of humor, I leaped out of bed and rousted Alix and Lupe (our foster daughter) planting them in the doorway of their bedroom. This is the correct thing to do, but planting them in their doorway meant that they were staring straight across the hallway at Michael who, because he slept nude, was therefore trapped in bed and unable to protect himself from the earthquake!

Leaving Michael, Alix, and Lupe in their awkward triangle, I rushed into Nick's room. Nick was about 6 at the time and sleeping in the upper level of his bunk bed. I snatched him from his covers without a word and stuck him in the doorway of his room before he even had time to wake up. Later, Nick said to me, "Mom, next time we have an earthquake, do you think you could say 'Excuse me, Nick, there's an earthquake.' before you grab me out of bed?"

When we then moved to Houston and people mentioned the possibility of hurricanes, I blithely said, "Well, at least we'll know they are coming."

Turns out that isn't so much help.

When it became apparent that Houston would be involved in Ike to some degree or another, Michael and I made our plans. We had evacuated for Hurricane Rita, joining the maddeningly slow exodus of millions of people, most of whom - like us - should have stayed home. Although we had an enjoyable visit with my brother and sister-in-law in Omaha, getting there and getting home was beyond awful. Why did we evacuate? Because our elected officials told us to. They forgot to mention the now-familiar mantra: Run from water, hide from wind. Why did we run to Omaha? Because when Nick and Julia left New Orleans fleeing Katrina just days before, they planned to be gone 5 days and they didn't get back for 6 months. They lost almost everything. We figured if we were going to be homeless, we should go to a place where we could stay a while without spending our entire retirement fund.

So we fled Rita and swore thereafter that we would not evacuate ever again. We had to prepare to weather Hurricane Ike.

Aside: Isn't it interesting that we use the word 'weather' to indicate coping with the effects of "weather'?

I dutifully acquired enough canned food to last us for ten days. I filled two bath tubs with water for hygiene and etc. I also filled two ten-gallon collapsible containers with drinking water. We moved breakables to safe locations away from windows. Michael taped up the picture window in our bathroom, the only one we felt really worried about because our other windows are mullioned. Michael, with some help from me, cleared everything from our front and back yards that could possibly fly around and hurt someone. We planned to take down and wrap our artwork in plastic, but by the time we got to that, I was too exhausted to care.

A safe spot for us posed a big problem. Our house has no interior rooms unless you count the foyer coat closet and it would not accommodate one of us for very long! We decided to use the bedroom hallway which is enclosed for about six feet and turns out to be the exact width of a twin bed mattress. Victoria's mattress would work, so, on Friday afternoon, we put clean sheets on it and positioned near the hallway for later use.

The coming storm and its television coverage seemed to hypnotize us and we kept watching the reports over and over again while we waited patiently for it to arrive in our area. Ike moved slowly and we live on the northwest edge of Houston, in an unincorporated area of Harris County. From Galveston to our house is one hundred miles and our wait for the storm seemed to last forever.

We did not turn in until 1:00 in the morning. The hallway felt stuffy, so Michael plugged a fan in and pointed the welcome coolness at our pallet. Our cats, Jack and Trixie, seemed baffled by our decision to sleep on the floor. We had moved their litter box into our bathroom from its usual hallway location, for our nose comfort and also to keep them from walking back and forth on top of us during the night. Unfortunately, neither of them stayed put in our bedroom as we had hoped. (To be able to corral them more easily if a disaster occurred.)

By 1:30 a.m. we had snuggled into our cozy bed. Our very cozy bed. Our cozier cozy bed than any we had ever shared in thirty-two years of marriage. Michael and I are not as thin and svelte as we once were. (I have pictures to prove that we were once svelte!) Laying flat, we touched each the hallway walls one side and each other in the middle. Turning onto our sides scarcely helped matters but we soldiered on. At about 2:00 a.m., our power went out. Now fan-less and A/C-less, we added sweltering to cramped. After a horribly miserable hour of dosing and waking, we abandoned safety for comfort.

Our headboard sits directly in front of two large, side-by-side windows. We closed the mini-blinds, piled pillows between the headboard and the blinds, crawled in and stretched out. Compared to the floor of a three-foot wide hallway, it was the Waldorf Astoria.

During this period, the wind rose and the rain pelted our roof harder and harder. We slept in snatches, an hour here, twenty minutes there, rousing and checking out the storm as the noise came and went. Amazingly, the night sky stayed so bright that we could see the storm's action clearly. I had heard how dark it became in Galveston when the storm hit and didn't expect this, but perhaps by the time Ike reached Cypress, the nearly-full moon had risen and was reflecting off the cloud cover.

We never heard the "freight train" sound, but I sat on the bench in the office and watched my neighbors forty-foot tall pine tree wave back and forth like a sparkler in a kid's hand. I watched the rain 'fall' horizontally. Standing by my front door, I felt the pull and push of wind moving the metal door in and out of its frame with odd little sucking sounds occurring at each pull. Our front door has a small entry area that is brick on three sides and open to the yard. Leaves plastered the window on the front door and pine needles danced on our welcome mat.

We worried about our pergola and Michael had tied clothesline rope through the lattice work top in 15 or 20 places to - hopefully - keep it in place. We expected to lose the vines that grew up the supporting beams and across the top. During the height of the storm, we watched out the backdoor window and saw that the clothesline rope hardly moved despite the wind's fury. Apparently, Michael and I built a sturdier structure than we even knew when we put the pergola up two years ago. The vines suffered some, especially the night-blooming and star jasmines which were on the exposed side of the patio, but all-in-all, the plants held up well.
We even had flowers blooming on our bougainvillea within a few days!

During the eye of the storm, when the wind dies down, we ventured out. By this time it was daylight. We pulled on ponchos and opened the front door. We had pulled our cars onto our front terrace the day before, thinking that in front of the house, they would be protected from falling trees, while in the driveway they would be exposed on three sides to danger. They blocked us in a bit, but we crawled through a gap and onto the driveway for our first good look at what had transpired in the first half of the storm.

Walking up and down our block, greeting others who had the same idea, we saw a lot of destruction. Fences were gone; big trees were uprooted, leaving peculiar looking hillocks where front yards had been. Many, many branches littered yards and streets and we saw a few roofs stripped down to bare wood and many others missing shingles. Our neighborhood has lots of pine trees and the usual mat of orange pine needles had been accented with lots of green needles. All the trees looked like fall had suddenly transpired: branches were nearly bare. In our case, we lost shingles in six or eight places,had a water leak inside the house, lost one large tree limb in the back yard (that landed safely in an open area!), had lots of small branches down, and the gardens were flattened. (The elephant ears took a real beating, probably the worst of all the plants. They remain flattened even now, so I suppose we'll have to wait for a crop to grow in.) We lost power for three days and cable, Internet, and phone for nearly ten days.

Pretty soon the wind picked up and we fled to the shelter of our house. Without power, it would eventually get uncomfortable, but while the storm made its way through our area, it stayed pretty cool. Saturday afternoon, the sun came out and so did our neighborhood. Everyone was cleaning up - raking debris into piles, propping up fences where they could, cutting up trees and tree limbs.

By Sunday afternoon, the wild disarray of the storm had disappeared, leaving remnants that I expect will be with us for quite a while. Fences are torn apart and piled on front berms along with other types of debris, like the old tire someone deposited on our berm when we weren't looking. Roofs sport blue tarps. Windows are boarded up. People aren't supposed to repair things anymore than absolutely necessary so the insurance adjuster's can see the damage and once seen, probably won't get repairs done until they get checks in hand, so I suppose the tattered look will be around for a while.

Texas insurance policies changed after Hurricane Rita and now insurance deductibles for "tropical cyclones"
are twice as high as the deductibles for any other type of damage. That means many people will not get covered, including - most likely - us. Michael had hoped for a new roof, but the adjuster who finally came by yesterday, says it will be "just repairs" for the roof and the foyer ceiling. With a deductible close to $4,000, we will most likely be paying for this out of our own pocket despite having insurance. That said, I wouldn't trade places with any of the poor souls who had more severe, even catastrophic, damage. We were lucky to be spared serious loss or injury.

Now that I have added hurricanes/tropical cyclones to my list of weathered weather, I can truly say I will be happy to go another nineteen years without seeing my next one!

I had a lot of difficulty getting this blog written. Although the date says 9-18 (when I actually started it), I found I did not want to keep working on it. In the weeks since the storm, I have felt terribly fatigued and down. The aftermath of the storm includes an emotional let down - from being ramped up on adrenaline? - and physical exhaustion. Many of my friends report these same feelings. I probably won't write any more about Hurricane Ike now that I've gotten it out of my system. I'd like to have a happier topic next time!!

Middle-of-the-Night Randomness and Naughty Sock Monkeys

Once again, I cannot sleep. Insomnia is a plague for me. On the nights that I go to sleep and stay asleep, I feel so blessed. This night, I went to bed at 10:55 pm, turned off the lights at 11:18 pm, awakened at 12:55 am (due to various acrobatics involving my husband and our very large cat Jack). After an obligatory potty stop and drink of water, I slipped back into bed and tried every go-to-sleep trick I know. At 2:01 am I gave up and got up. When this happens, I usually get back to bed about 5 or 6 am. This particular morning, I have to be ready to leave the house at 6:45 am. Not a very promising start to my day.

There is this wonderful moment at bedtime when one reclines against her pillow and drifts away into the void. Or, there is this terrible moment when one is teetering on the edge of the void and suddenly her brain kicks in and says, "Whoa, look at that, you're about to fall asleep. Way cool. I don't wanna. Let's play."

My Let's Play brain is inventive and creative. Some of my best work originated in the middle of the night. So I got this idea that if I actualized my creativity during waking hours, I would be able to sleep at night. The entire plan for creating my recent "Naughty Monkeys Peep Show" altered book came in the dark of night. I got up and wrote out a 13-point plan of action that translated into some remarkable art.

Let's talk art. I love to construct things. Always have. I am an architect in my soul and could have been an architect in real life if I had been born a little later than 1950. Math and science were verboten for us females. I found myself steered firmly into feminine jobs, graduating from Webster College with a degree in English lit and a teaching certificate for grades 1 - 12 in Missouri. Fortunately, I stumbled on to an exciting graduate program at Washington University in St. Louis called Technology and Human Affairs. This now-defunct program (it lives on as Engineering and Public Policy, but I wouldn't be able to get into it anymore with my liberal arts degree and paltry science and math background) excited me tremendously and gave me the tools that resulted, after two intermediate jobs, in my career in telecommunications.

While at Wash U. I discovered architecture. More to the point, I discovered a fabulous book titled "The Universal Traveler" by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall among the School of Architecture textbooks. "TUT" is subtitled: "a soft-systems guide to creativity, problem-solving, and the process of reaching goals." I bought it then, lost it along the way, and got a new volume from Michael for Christmas last year. Thank you, Michael!!

Anyway, that got my attention, but I was too far gone down my educational path (in graduate school and already making up for missing bits of undergraduate education, like taking graduate Economics - two semesters of undergraduate economics in a single semester) to pick up the requirements I would need for architecture. But I bought books on home design and building your own home and anything else that caught my eye about how buildings are constructed and how they turn out. I have a tidy little collection and would happily show them off or recommend them if anyone is interested.

That's the long way around to my point - sorry! I love to construct things. I can figure out what's wrong with stuff by looking at it and reverse engineering it. Sometimes Michael gets frustrated when he has struggled with a repair, let's say, and then I come along, study it for five or ten minutes, and then say something like, "Oh, see this widget over here? I think if you moved it over there, the whatsit will go back in its track and work again." And it does.

So, WIVLA announced its annual print show at the Museum of Printing History in Houston. Theme? Unabridged Edition. What the hell does that mean? I really struggled with the theme because it just didn't translate into artwork for me. When I asked others about it, the general response was that the theme didn't matter for this show (it is a great WIVLA tradition that even beginners are usually welcomed into) and I should just do whatever I wanted. Something printed, of course, and preferably something embellished or altered after printing.

Still, I struggled for meaning. Unabridged Edition. GGGAAHH!!!!

Until on insomniac night when it all came to me and I developed my construction blueprint for my Naughty Monkeys. I would alter a book - the edition - making it into an old-fashioned peep show and I would put a titillating photograph inside - the unabridged part. Ah, but it is for the MPH and sometimes they have children tour, and there have been issues about "fleshy" photos in the past. Besides, who would I take a titillating picture of? I couldn't see my friends or family signing up to be featured in a peep show.

But I have a lovely sock monkey couple, beautifully dressed, thus beautifully available for UNdress, and, as far as I can tell, sock monkey sex doesn't count as pornography!! I did do research on the subject. There are an amazing number of sock monkey websites (who knew??) but any naked sock monkeys I saw (and I saw a lot of them) were innocents.

Oh, I should mention YouTube. There is sock monkey porn on YouTube, but it is of the most puerile and unimaginative sort. Themactically, they involved drunk (or silly) teen-agers, sock monkeys, and sock monkey tails waved around between sock monkey's legs. Nothing like my high-class peep show.

I also researched peep shows, discovering that the shows from the olden days, like the 1904 World's Fair, were much more elegant and well-appointed than modern peep shows. Many photographs of peep show booths and peep show pictures are available for the canny researcher. Apparently stereoptic shows (where you get a 3-D effect) were popular when live women were unavailable.

I devised a construction plan for cutting a door into the front cover of my book, removing the center of about half the pages to create the space for my "show," "papering" the front and back cover with torn tissue pieces (small and a pain to work with, but I didn't know that until too late), hinging the door and putting a doorknob on it ... well, a 13-point plan to create my peep show. I also had to stage and photograph the actual sock monkey pornography.

I felt pretty creepy making them do "stuff," but they didn't object and it was for art's sake. Although there is a fine point to be made about whether sock monkeys can technically be pornographic since they are toys and they don't have the requisite parts for anything sexual. Well, that's a discussion for another day.

Some insomniac nights have better outcomes than others. Tonight I am writing this blog, so you will have to judge how good the outcome was.

I did create the "Naughty Monkey Peep Show" complete with an attached collection box for quarters. (Based on my research, 25 cents a peep is about right for the olden days). My dremel came in very handy for several parts of this art project. I love my dremel. The first attempt failed because I had problems drilling some holes that I later decided were unnecessary. But book two turned out beautifully.

Sad to say, the curator of the MPH, Amanda Stevenson, rejected the piece for the WIVLA show. Although, she told me in an email that she liked it, she also said it didn't fit in the show because it was "architectural and interactive." Being bumped from the show just about broke my heart, but I LOVED the architectural and interactive part. Yes, I am an architect, if only of my own small constructions. But I love them and they work, and people can do things with them - interact by opening the door and peeping at the sock monkeys inflagrante delicato.

I'd like to show you pictures, but that would involved going to another computer and turning it on, and , hey, its 4:11 am and I don't feel like it. But I will put photographs up soon. I have also decided to make some more naughty monkey shows, so stay tuned. At the moment, I don't have the right books to desecrate. I need hardbacks around 6x9 or 6x10 and at least an inch thick. They will not be returned and they will be cut up, so the books have to be junk. I used an old alumni directory for the original peep show. If you have books and live in the area (or want to mail them to me) let me know and something can be arranged!!

Now I am going to spell check, publish, and go back to bed, "to sleep, perchance to dream ...." as the Bard famously said. Or in my case, perchance to sleep!!

Look for future posts on such troubling topics as the raging pit bull in lipstick (her words, not mine) who happens to be running for Vice President on the Republican ticket.

Ciao.

July 1st Miscel-lanie

A new month, it must be time for a blog entry. I think about entries quite often, but usually in the middle of the night when I can't sleep but don't want to get out of bed. When I do write an entry, I just can't remember all the great ideas I had at 2:00 am. Such is life ...

A few notes come to mind. One of my older brothers had two strokes recently. He is 61, a year older than my husband and he owns/drives a big rig. He happened to be on the road, but not driving, when it happened and fortunately, he is doing well now. His speech is impaired a bit and he has hired someone else to drive his truck while he rides shotgun, but overall, he seems okay. But I am not prepared for my parents, in their late eighties, to have strokes, let alone my siblings. We are all getting older, a fact that I know intellectually, but my inner child refuses to grow up and I don't feel like I'm as old as I truly am. Now, I hear some people making snide comments about my age, but I always thought 58 years old was a lot older than I am now that I am a month short of 58. I don't feel old, but Tim Russert died last month at 58 of a heart attack. My brother had two strokes. While I don't feel so old, I do feel vulnerable.

New topic. Tori seems to be settling in to her new environment. I am driving up to get her and bring her home for the 4th of July weekend on Thursday and we will see then how well she really is doing. But she has changed her nickname from Tori to Vicky. When I call and ask for Victoria, the girls yell out "Vicky." It sounds very strange to my ear. The summer I turned 16, I had the good fortune to attend a summer school program at the Mt. Herman and Northfield Schools in Massachusetts. Over that summer, I turned 16, had my first seriously returned infatuation, and changed my name from Mary Lane to Lane. I doubt that my mother had the same difficulty with the change that I am experiencing because she never called me Mary Lane until I went to Catholic school in the second grade. Up until then, I had been Lanie or Lane, but Sr. Theodosia, my second grade teacher, refused to call me Lane because it was not a saint's name. I refused to answer to Mary - honestly, I didn't recognize the name as belonging to me - and eventually my mother convinced the teacher to call me Mary Lane. Oh, how I hated that name, especially the way it slumped into one word that sounded like a drunk talking ... Marahlane ... Anyway, my mother told me often that she regretted including the Mary part of my name first and wished she had named me Lane Marie instead. So I believe she found it easy to switch back to Lane. Vicky is a little harder for me. It is a family name in both Michael's family and mine (a niece and a cousin respectively), but it has never been Tori's name. Oh, well. I will have to change with the times - eventually. I'm not ready yet.

My friends Marilyn and Ken had a meet and greet for Larry Joe Douherty, our Democratic candidate for Congress, at their home on Sunday. I enjoyed meeting Mr. Douherty. He is quite polished - not the country-bumpkin his Texan name and twang might suggest. This was my very first meet and greet and I must say it tickled me to be able to ask direct questions of the candidate and hear the answers up close and personal. Our congressional district is gerrymandered beyond belief, one of the abominations created by Tom Delay et al when they stole Texas Democratic seats a few years ago. (How the mighty have fallen. I hope Tom Delay gets every single thing he deserves. None of it will be pleasant.) My son used to live in Austin, Texas, 160 miles from Houston. He lived in the same congressional district as Michael and I because of the gerrymandering. Austin was too liberal, so the Republican stretched the district sideways all the way to Harris County (Houston area) to pull in the ultra-conservative, religious right voters we have to live with here. The Delay thugs got away with murder, but the tables are turning now and we have Shrub to thank for a lot of it. Life is funny when you least expect it!

I have much more on my plate, but it is 11:02 PM and I am trying to get to bed at a reasonable time these days, so I must sign off.

Ciao.

The Artist's Way and Robbery on the Electric Highway

Have you heard of The Artist's Way (TAW) by Julia Cameron? It is a program for encouraging one's creativity and artistic growth. I first became aware of TAW in 1996, when an acquaintance invited me to be a part of a group of other artists, all strangers to me, following the program. Five of us signed up for the 12-week adventure and two of those five are close friends of mine to this day. In fact, the three of us, plus three additional people, have recently started another TAW group and are re-exploring our creativity.

The first time I did the program, it sent me off into a glorious whirlwind of unexpected creativity. I hope the same thing happens this time. Each week, we read a chapter and complete tasks associated with them; each day we write three morning pages (MP), journal entries where we just dump all of our gripes, miseries, etc. so that we can get on with our day unimpeded. Once a week, we are each supposed to take our artist-self on a date.

I find it difficult to think of artist dates for myself. Last week, I made cotton candy with my very own cotton candy machine. I loved it. Michael and the kids gave me the cotton candy machine many years ago as a gift and I haven't used it in a while, so spending an evening making and eating the fluffy, sugary stuff tickled me pink. I have recently seen special sugar advertised for cotton candy "floss" and wonder if it is much different from fine granulated sugar. (Besides costing more, that is.) I use extra fine sugar and I dye it with a little food coloring so that it is colorful.

If anyone knows about cotton candy floss sugar, please let me know.

This week, TAW instructs us to engage in reading deprivation all week. Yes, you heard me: know reading for a week. I can hardly bear it. The concept is that if an artist is NOT reading, said artist can show up and do something more creative. Actually, Cameron has a point. I can get so caught up reading that I neglect not only my creative pursuits, but also the basic necessities of life. (Imagine me in my bathrobe, lounging in bed, a half-eaten sleeve of saltine crackers and an empty glass of water in the vicinity. It is NOT a pretty picture.)

Meanwhile, the house is uncannily quiet.Tori has been gone for one week. Everything is tidy, quiet, and predictable around here. I thought it would be terrible, but I quite like it, at least after a week. We have had several phone conversations with her and she is starting to adjust. They are teaching her how to drive - that started today - so I am sure she will be happy (for a while anyway).

It is nice to have a sedate entry after several riled up one. Reminds me of that curse: "May you live in interesting times." My times are not so interesting at all at the moment.

Oh, except for my electric bill. I forgot tell mention that item. It did rile me up plenty. You know, we had a hot May and so far, it has been a hot June. Not much rain, lots of lawn and garden watering required. So I didn't flinch too badly when I opened my usual $35 water bill today and found it was $52.17. (And the day I forgot to turn the water off for several hours could have played into the total.) But the next bill I opened, my electric bill from Dynowatt, almost caused me to have a stroke. Instead of something around $150, what I expected, it was $496.02!!!!! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I kid you not. My cost per kilowatt hour skyrocketed from 16 cents to twenty-five and a half cents.

When I finally got through - no doubt their phone lines were burning up today - the pleasant young man explained that their cost per megawatt hour had gone up from $100 to $4,000 THIS MONTH. Oh, he did mention that he would be glad to put me on contract and lower my rates ... (It is odd, don't you think, that if I sign a contract their cost is lower than if I don't?) I decided to check out the official Texas electric company choice web site and discovered that , despite the humongous rate increase Dynowatt claimed, everyone else seemed to have lower prices. I eventually went back to Reliant for almost one-half of Dynowatt's rate. Yes, I signed a contract, but at least I didn't feel shanghaied into it.

I recommend checking now to see what your charges for the next bill will be based on. Surely some other electric company is going to have a big rate increase, too.

Keep cool - but not too cool!

Ciao!

Don't Worry, Be Happy

My natural cheerfulness reasserts itself!! The sunny summer days do not allow for feeling miserable and besides, I solved part of my problem with the Fanged Frog (FF). Tori kept expressing her need to ask questions of the FF, to discover information about her infancy, so I pulled out her baby book (which I had been saving for the right moment and kind of forgot about), sat down with her at the kitchen table, fetched the tissues she requested, and comforted her as she read through it, looked at the pages and the pictures, and asked me questions.

The baby book apparently met her immediate needs regarding the FF. I wish I had thought of it sooner, but perhaps had she seen it before she felt this emotional crisis, it would not have had the impact, or given the comfort, that it has. We are talking about other ways to capture her early childhood - a digital photo album perhaps. I do have more pictures from the early years that I haven't shown her and they will be great for the next crisis.

The FF had some pictures of Tori on her My Space that she stole from Tori's My Space or got from her own mother (or mother's house after Marilyn died in December). I have gotten My Space central to agree to remove them based on copyright violation, so hopefully that will happen soon.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have started participating in an Artist's Way process group for 12 weeks with some wonderful long-term friends - Lynn and Carol - and some new friends - Jan and Luisa. We meet at a Denny's from 10:30 to noon once a week, then eat together. Just two sessions already have me thinking more positively about my creative work. And Michael is working with us. Although he can't come to the meetings, he did join us for lunch today.

Beyond that, I am in quite a state of flux and anticipation. Any moment, Tori's new school (where she will board starting in a few weeks) should be giving us a start date for her, which means I can't make any reliable plans for myself. I am also spending a lot of time shopping for clothes with her. (The school has a list of required clothing.) Do you know how hard it is to find chinos for a teen-aged girl in June in Houston? We have been attacking this shopping list for two months and still have only three of the required five pair of chinos. I also must provide a fall jacket and winter coat. Let us hope those items can be added in the fall because they aren't around anywhere except thrift stores right now.

What will it be like for me without Tori at home? Hard in many ways. Tori and I have spent so much time together after school and summers in the last 14 years that I can't imagine my home without her. It will be very quiet, I can tell you that. I will miss her noise.

Tori plays the flute and the piano. She sings. She plays music too loudly. She talks on the telephone, plays music, and talks to me all at the same time. She bangs every door or cupboard she touches. She knocks things over. Tori is a bundle of auditory overload. How quiet my home will be without her. It makes me almost sorry for yelling at her to turn the music down!! Almost sorry ...

She is a hugger and I will miss those hugs. She is a weeper and I will miss comforting her. She is a laugher and I will miss her belly laughs. She is exuberant and my life will be flat without her.

Waiting for the letter or phone call about school is hard. I have had a constant knot in my stomach lately. I tell myself that this is for her own good - and it truly is - but it seems hard to remember in June the pyrotechnical events of last January that started us down this road to boarding school. It tempts me to just say things have settled down and she can stay home, but I know that would be a mistake for her and for us. So I prepare as best I can for the quiet days ahead by anticipating the creative work I can accomplish in those empty hours.

Despite my anxiety about Tori's departure, I do feel cheerful; I just can't help myself.

Ciao.

The Fanged Frog Returns

The week after our return from Nick's graduation should have been lovely, but it has brought us more worries. Sunday a week ago, the very day we returned from our wonderful trip to New Orleans, Victoria found her birth mother (Rana) on My Space. This was not an accident, as Rana explained to Victoria in a subsequent email. She created her My Space in the hopes that Tori would find it and, since she had it listed on Tori's aunt Stacy's My Space, it seems inevitable that the connection would be made.

I guess some explanation is necessary for this to make sense. Our adoption of Tori was totally open because we actually knew her and Rana before the idea of adoption ever came into being. We got caught up trying to help Rana, a person who at the time could not benefit from a helping hand. She proved to be a disaster for us, stealing from us and wreaking emotional havoc on our family. She left two-year-old Tori at our house while she tried to find a place to live and a job, but after Rana hit Tori with a belt buckle across the shoulder during a weekend visit, leaving a terrible bruise, CPS decided to take Tori into protective custody. That started the series of events that lead to our adoption of Tori when she was four years old.

We tried to allow contact with Rana at first, but it did not work out because Tori was terrified of her. We did keep Tori in regular touch with her grandmother, aunt, and other extended family members, even though this created a lot of emotional turmoil for everyone involved. (Keeping Victoria in contact with her family was a promise I had made to Rana, and I kept it.)

All of Tori's various mental health professionals over the years have told us not to allow Rana contact with Tori because of the detrimental effect it has had on her the times we tried it. We have followed that advice. We never told Tori bad things about her mother - a lesson I learned many, many years ago after I divorced my first husband - but Tori's grandmother told her plenty of bad things in graphic detail and "living color" as the TV promos used to proclaim during my childhood.

Now Rana is back on the scene and she is the one dishing the dirt. Too bad she isn't dishing the truth. Tori has been variously hysterical, weepy, and conciliatory about the situation. My husband is very distressed and I am caught in the middle between Tori's desire to see Rana and Michael's determination that that will never happen. I see both points of view. I know that Rana has been an extremely toxic person in the past, but I don't know if she has changed (or not) over the last decade. I also know that the draw of a birth parent is very strong, the need/desire to know one's roots. And even though her family history has not been a secret from Tori, Rana owns the mystique of fantasy. She is the "real mother."

I also know that Rana manipulates everything and everyone, that she is a masterful reader of other people (street smarts and con artist finesse par excellence) and that she can look like Mother Theresa to anyone for a few hours at a time. I have already gotten a whiff of her sad story, the one she has undoubtedly been practicing for the last fourteen years, because she told Tori in a My Space email (before I cut that off) that Rana's mother and I turned her in to CPS unfairly because her mother wanted to get back at her and I wanted another child.

For those of you who did not know me then, I was desperately ill, in and out of hospitals, and in no way whatsoever was I looking for another child. Michael and I fought over the decision to take Tori in because he was so concerned about my health, but I felt like we had to do it, had a moral requirement to do it, for Tori. CPS was ready to place her with strangers and I didn't want her to disappear into the system.

OMG, when I think of all the struggles we have had since we first met Tori and Rana, it is frightening and astonishing all at the same time. But here we are. Tori is nearly seventeen. She is a kind-hearted, affection girl most of the time. She is going to graduate from high school in a year and plans to go to community college. At the same age, her mother was in the custody of the Texas Youth Commission for drug dealing and prostitution and, upon her release to a half way house at eighteen, would promptly get pregnant with Tori. Our daughter's life has turned out so much more hopefully than Rana's and I fear that recontact with Rana will knock her backwards.

The most terrifying part of raising Tori right this minute is her current fascination with having a baby. She talks about it all the time, how having a baby would give her someone who would always love her, how wonderful and cute baby's are, etc. It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy leading up to a pregnancy to parallel her birth mother's pregnancy with her. I keep pushing the down side and encouraging her to think about college, career, husband, before she thinks about a child. Is that falling on deaf ears? I don't know. So far, she has not had that kind of relationship with a boy, so that gives me hope.

Yesterday, she had her last shot of three to protect her from the viruses that cause cervical cancer. I am so happy she could get that protection. I wish someone would invent a vaccine against bad choices. She needs that, too. We probably all do ...

Anyway, this situation is a big worry for me right now and I am struggling to find a balance between Michael, Tori, and "the forces of darkness" out there. It is interesting that Rana, in Spanish, means frog, and that there is a frog whose Latin name is almost identical to Rana's first and last names. The translation of this Latin name is "fanged frog." How apt. The fanged frog is back in our lives. How I wish that I could say to Tori today what I could say to her a week ago, "I don't know where Rana is. She knows where we live and she could contact us if she wanted to."

Ciao.