All Jacked Up!

Goood morning y'all!

I am all jacked up this morning.

I got a very special late Yule/ early birthday present from a dear friend...a Keurig Coffee Machine with a huge sample pack, plus the My K cup thing so you can use your own coffee ( because my broke ass will never be able to afford K cups lol ) and holy hell y'all, it is amazing! My place smells like a Starbucks or something now lol.

Alex and I have been up since 3 this morning. No clue why, but she could not sleep and woke up at 2:30 this morn, and I sent her back to bed but then *I* was wide ass awake, so I got up, expecting her to be asleep, but she was sitting up in bed reading. SO I said screw it, and we stayed up. She started cleaning  her room all on her own, and I fired up the Keurig. An hour later I was listening to 80's hair bands....and Jack got up at 4:30 ( he smelled coffee lol ) and then I turned on the surround sound and really got crazy, cleaning and dancing around and power chugging more coffee. Omg y'all. All jacked up. Best.Invention.Ever.

So everything is dusted, and I ran the vac, and wiped all the counters down, and made the bed, did some dishes, cleaned out my witchy cabinet in my entertainment center ( which was scary, and wanted to start an avalanche every time I opened the door lol ) and cleaned all the glass cabinet doors and table tops in the living  room. Then I finished getting Alex ready for school ( I hope she makes it through the day okay, I bet she will nap on the bus and when she gets home ) and walked her down and I am FREE and starting to crash, so I thought I would write this while I was still riding the caffeine wave down.

Bedtime will be very welcome tonight I bet lol.

I am going to probably chill for the rest of the day and enjoy some quiet time. Jack has PT shortly so I plan to sage the house and just relax. I kind of want to nap but I do not want a headache either so I don't know. I will probably just tough it out.

I am not sure if I will get to keep my net after the 17th, as there will not be funds to pay it as far as I can tell, but we shall see I guess. If anyone has an extra 128 bucks they are not using, let me know lol. ( I have a internet satellite from Hughes. One downside of living in woods is no cable or DSL lines, so we have to pay out the ass to have internet. )

So that sums it up for today. After I sage the place I am going to just relax for a while. I hope you all have a great day!

Gretchen is talking about a different kind of being "All Jacked Up," but this song has been on repeat in my brain this morning lol.

Later folks!

All tricks, no treat.

So it seems every time I commit myself to these blog events ( like NaBloWriMo, 30 days of truth, etc ) something major happens and I am unable to write as I should...so I do not think I will "officially" do them anymore, I will just write and maybe it will all work out.

Yes, I have been gone for a few days again, but for good ( well, bad ) reason. My oldest friend, 27 years of friendship, was rocked to the core a couple of days ago. My 33 year old best friend J went to bed one night, and when she woke up the next morning, she had lost 15 to 20 years of her memory. She woke up and knew her husband, but did not know where she was, who her children were, her sibling in laws, her nieces and nephews, none of them. Any friends she made over the last 15 years, gone. Her church, which she was very active in, gone. Poof. I have been thanking the stars that I have been here for 27 years, because she remembers me, but to her, it is 1997-98 and I just recently had my oldest daughter. ( Who is now just a couple of months shy of 15 )

She had been diagnosed with pneumonia and pleurisy the day or two before, and they put her on a pain med and Ambien at night. A 10 mg Ambien. She weighs like 95 pounds, and is only 4 feet 10 inches tall. She is tiny. My Mother, who is about 180, only takes TWO mg. SO 10 is much to much for someone J's size. Anyway, she did not lose herself, I mean she knows who she is, her parents, her siblings, her husband and anyone who was in her life back then. Just no one or any events from the last 15 to 20 years. Her husband took her to the doc and they thought it might be a combo of fibro fog and the mega dose of Ambien, and since she was lucid, functional and still had her faculties about her she was sent home to basically ride out the meds.

Late that night she woke up in severe pain and thought she was having a stroke. So she and her husband went to the hospital, where she had CT scans of her head and the whole nine yards done. Her brain is fine. No stroke, no tumors, no aneurisms, nothing like that. Her bloodwork came back fine. So they diagnosed her with Retrograde Amnesia, which basically means they have no clue why her mind went on a vacation, and the mother of all migraines, which they gave her a shot for. They told her it is most likely temporary, but to be prepared because there was also a chance it might never come back.

I have been on the phone for two days straight. Back to back calls, callers beeping in while I was already on a call, it was bedlam. No one had any concrete information and we were all going nuts. I finally got to talk to her myself on the second day, she called me ( thank goodness for cell phone phone books lol ) and it was all I could do at first to keep it together. I was so terrified she would call and say " I am sorry, I do not remember you.." I would have died a thousand deaths had that happened. I spent an hour basically trying to give her the readers digest version of MY life over the last 15 years and I thought to myself as it was happening " Jeez...having to explain this to what is essentially a stranger as far as my life goes makes me sound so horrible...she is going to ask herself why in the hell was she even friends with me" and it scared me because she was right there through 98% of it, she understood...so now, she did NOT understand and I must have seemed like a friggen train wreck to her. Which, I guess, for a while I was...but she does not even remember how pivotal she was in my life for so many years. I mean she helped me when I bottomed out on cocaine, she and I lived together for a while, we were pregnant together ( her first and my second ) and so many other battles and victories, and she remembers none of it. I shudder at the thought of what she must think of me.

On the upside, she is exactly as she was before life got stressful for her..which makes ME think that her illness combined with the meds and the stress she was under ( she home schools her three kids, 12, 10, and 6, very active in church, she is the glue for her family, which included all her siblings and parents and in laws and nieces and nephews ) just made her mind say " Okay, time for a little break, lets go back and party like its 1999 " Prince sang about it, but she actually did it lol. It has been, for me, AWESOME to talk to her over the last few days. She is back for lack of a better term. SO much has happened in just her life over the last decade, things that changed her, and now, to see her quiet calmness, that FIRE back in her voice and words...I actually felt the need to apologize to her last night because I knew I sounded almost gleeful that this happened..and of course I was not, I am devastated that it happened, but since I could not change what happened, I was loving what I was hearing. She was not so jaded and cynical and waiting for the other shoe to drop ( which is a feeling you all know I can relate to ) she was almost vibrant and strong willed and ready to kick some ass and get things back to the way they should be, even though she could not remember why they got so bad in the first place. I do not know whether to laugh or cry when I talk to her lol. I am certainly not sad, since she does remember me, but I am heartbroken for her kids and nieces and nephews that she does not remember. I can't even imagine how they must feel, and my heart goes out for J as well, because she has to watch all these little people she loved, three of which she gave birth to, and knowing intellectually and in her heart there is a connection, but she can not remember it. Not to mention those friends she does NOT remember, such as P, whom I talked to for quite some time last night. In all the ruckus and being on the phone all the time, I forgot to let a few of our mutual friends we have made over the last decade or so know and so I have been doing that. P to her is sort of like a male version of me, he is also her best friend, in a different way because their history is different than the one she and I have. He was stunned to say the least and was doing his best to wrap his mind around it.

It has been so surreal.

I do not know if she will come out of it or not, but I am hoping and praying she does...and if any of you wonderful people wanted to add your prayer, healing, candles and energy to the mix, we would all be eternally grateful. I will tell you a secret though. I am praying for her full memory to come back, but I am also praying that when she does get it back, she keeps that fire that has been long absent from her mind.

So that, in a very small nutshell, is what I have been doing over the last few days. There is more things happening in the background of my own life, but none of those are anything major, just day to day stuff.

So until next time, keep my friend J in your heart and mind, as well as her family. It is much appreciated.

I leave you with a pic of the beautiful sister of my heart:

I have exorcised the demons!

Out of my computer that is. Maybe my mind too, but the jury is still out on that one.


I have been feeling a bit...snarly...the last few days. Went in to hiding, to spare the masses, and then decided to reload the operating system of my computer, because it was acting 3 kinds of possessed and not even my PC guru skills could get rid of the gremlins my beloved PC had.


Not to self: NEVER ever ever ever for fucks sake EVER reload the PC when your hair is on fire and spinning around in circles, waiting for the pea soup to spew forth. ( Think Hades from the Disney movie Hercules )


You know how it goes. When you are feeling like that, everything that can go wrong, will, in fact blow past wrong like it was standing still and head on to the 'OMFG the world is about to end' section.


If I had a sledge hammer last night...I would not be typing this today, I kid you not. The files I backed up? Corrupt. Trying to download files while not killing my meter? Pointless. Downloads not complete, had to redownload, meter got sucked dry. ( My bandwidth meter, I am on a limited plan. ) Luckily my music ( A full GIG of music, yes ) and my photos transferred over or I would have set this fucker on fire and danced around it in the yard. Well, in a barrel, we are in such a hot drought I would have been arrested...no burning allowed anywhere.


I still do not have all the programs back on here that I use regularly, I ran out of energy. Finally got to bed at 7 this morning and slept till 3:30 this afternoon, and miracle upon miracles, I felt AMAZING when I woke up. Further proof that I am a night owl at heart. I can sleep 8 hours at night, wake up in the morning and feel like shit all day. Sleep during the day and wake up in the afternoon and feel like a million bucks. Go figure.


I got up, scarfed down some food as it had been a full 24 hours since I had eaten last, and decided to tear shit apart and dust and rearrange some knick knacks. Jack then woke up from his nap so I decided to stop for today and warily use my PC, and other than FB, which always has something wrong with it, it seems to be demon free. Thanks to my day sleep, the demons from my head are also mostly gone. 



I am still kind of dreading tomorrow. We are going to eat at my parents, and because I am a broke bitch I can not get my Dad anything for Father's Day. Hopefully he will be happy with something Alex and I will make for him tonight. I know he will be, but I still feel like shit about it. Hopefully it will all be okay.


So enjoy your weekend folks, and Happy Pops day to the Dad's out there tomorrow. Expect a post about Jack tomorrow lol.


Stay cool folks!

Here it comes again...damn it...

I was SO hoping I could stave it off this time, but alas, it snuck up on me when I was not looking.

It is time for another downward spiral for a bit. Most of you know by now I am bi-polar, but for the most part it is pretty well under control. There are times however when the down times are a bit worse than others, and the timing sucks since yesterday was Yule and I did not one thing for it, and it is my fav holiday. Not to mention Xmas is in a few days and my kids are all stoked and I am just praying for it to all be over lol.

I am not a Scrooge about it or anything, and this time is no different than any other "dark time", it just so happens to fall on a holiday week.

So if I am antsy, more edgy and sarcastic than usual...or lethargic and kind of blah...do not hold it against me, as it will pass....

Hope you all are well, it seems pretty quiet in bloggy land these days. Everyone gearing up for the Holidays I suppose lol...

Have a great week!

Heeding The Call.....

The past few months have been a strange time for me.

I have been feeling the "call" to do some things that I would not normally do. Years ago I felt the "call" from the Goddess, and followed her willingly. Over the many years since then, I know I have been guided by her wisdom in a lot of life situations.

However, over the last few months these "callings" are becoming more and more frequent, louder, and more odd, from my point of view.

One of the setbacks for my entire life is I am (was, as I am getting out of it finally through some fierce determination ) a horrible procrastinator. If it could be done later, you can bet I would not do it until I HAD to. It is not until the past couple of years that I have really started to address this issue, and make steps to better that part of my life. I always did what needed to be done, but the lesser things I would put off until I had no choice but to do it.

Now, while I am not always bursting with energy to do it, I am much more diligent about getting things done and out of the way so I can do more enjoyable things. I also find that if I DON'T do these things in a timely manner, it starts to really bother me, and I find I can not think about anything else or relax until I get it done.

I have wanted to be a writer from a very young age. Because of the choices I made as a teen, which shaped my life forever, I felt like I missed the chance for that dream to ever come true. It was hard to pull out of the whirlpool...the downward spiral...that my life choices had sucked me in to. I have Jack and Alex to thank for that, because without them, I probably would have let the spiral take me. I was tired of fighting, tired of swimming against the current. Lucky for me, Jack got one of HIS callings at that time in his life, and that calling led him to me. For better or for worse, and believe you me, we have been through both....

But I digress...

I thought my chance to be a writer were over. Then I was fortunate enough to receive the physical embodiment of my muse in the form of my now best friend, Maia. She is the one who rekindled my love of writing. She is the one who encouraged me to start a Live Journal, which was the doorway to here, and then she was the one who kept kicking me in the ass to start my blog, because she knew I would keep agonizing over it, and fiddle fart around and keep putting it off. I could very easily turn this into a post about how wonderful she has been in my life, but that is another entry worthy of its own focus lol.

 Last year about this time I had written some poems and the start of my Memoirs of a Crazy Witch series, which I amazingly had published by Authspot.com. I posted there for a few months but it was not exactly what I was looking for. I went back to my LiveJournal for a while but it is private, and only a couple people could see it, and I talked to those people all the time so it seemed rather pointless. So I stopped writing at all for a while. Maia then started kicking me in the ass again, and in addition to her, I was talking about it with another friend, who was just as encouraging as she was, and finally I bit the bullet, swallowed my fear and here I am today, with a slew of posts and 51 followers I never thought I would have. Pretty awesome stuff.

That was Calling Number One.

I have been a smoker for the better part of 16 years. With the exception of when I was pregnant and then breastfeeding, I smoked. My parents smoked ( back then anyway, my mom quit about 6 years ago and dad quit a few months ago ) all my parents friends smoked, most of my friends were older than me, and several of them smoked. ( I know I am just adding fuel to the "Children are more prone to smoke when then have parents who smoke" campaign but for what it is worth, they had nothing to do with why I started smoking, and I think it is a personal choice. My parents did not shove a cig in my mouth, and most other parents do not either. In fact I was still hiding the fact I smoked from my dad when I was 19 years old!! )

Anyway, smoking was just part of my life. I did not want to quit. I enjoyed it. But starting around my birthday this year, which was in May, I started enjoying it less and less. I saw that I was starting to smoke because I was bored, and it was something to do with my hands. I did not feel the need to smoke anymore, but did out of habit. Then I saw the only time I smoked was when I was sitting here at the computer, and waiting for my archaic dial up to load pages, which at times takes forever. I never smoked anywhere else in the house, and would flip out of a cig was taken into either of  the bedrooms. We have 4 big time air purifiers, but she smell was still bothering me. So I started smoking less and less. Other people smoking ( Mainly Jack ) started to really irritate me, and I hauled a fan out to sit here and blow smoke right back at him, away from me. (Which I still do lol ) Finally, July 1st, 2009 I smoked my last cig. I then came down with the friggen swine flu for the next almost 3 weeks, so smoking was not much of an option anyway since I was doing my best not to cough my lungs out of my body. That was brutal. I have never been so sick in my life. ( For those interested, I did NOT take conventional Big Pharm Meds, I did NOT get vaccinated or get a flu shot, and I never will...*kicks soap box back under the table*)

I have been tempted a couple of times, usually when I was extremely agitated, but I have not caved. I am fast approaching my 4 month mark and I can tell you I don't miss it anymore. Jack still smokes, and it irritates the hell out of me, but he is an adult and it is his choice, not mine. But he has smoked less around me which is nice. It was a hell of a lot easier than I expected, and I have tried to quit before...unsuccessfully...

That was Calling Number Two...

Next in line is Yoga. I am still working on this one. I am a fluffy chick, with body pain issues, so I am still in the research phase of this one, other than doing a few stretching poses. I do not have the money for a dvd or anything, much less a class, so I am using the internet to learn. But it is a calling because all of the sudden it was in my face every where I turned. The blogs I follow, the stuff I saw on TV, and things that would catch my attention on the Net..all yoga yoga yoga....so I am working on that one..

That was Calling Number Three....

The most recent one came in the form of another passion of mine, Herbalism.  Always drawn to it, it is a self study thing. No formal training, just a passion for the knowledge and putting it all into practice when I could to see the results for myself. I had let is slide a bit ( okay a lot ) in the past year, because I went through one of those " Dark Nights of the Soul", only mine lasted for most of a year. I turned away from most aspects of the Craft, ( not in favor of any other path, I was just at a standstill, and refused to walk down ANY path ) and my herbalism studies were caught in the crossfire. The last couple of months have really started me back down my path in general, and my herbs have jumped back out into the front over the last couple of weeks. I did not get to grow any this year, my seedlings drown twice in the freak monsoons we had this summer, and I don't have a good place to start them indoors, so after I lost the second batch I was so discouraged I did not try again. I think it is to late in the season to start anything, but I am gearing up for next year which is a good thing.

I guess I could lump all these into one "calling", which is to make myself healthier and to rekindle my passions in life, but I am a very analytical person, and I have looked at these things above from many different angles. I have never felt more open and receptive than I have as of late, and it seems that the Universe is seriously downloading some major info into my brain, and I love it.

It gets a little dark from here...and some will not like it, but you should all know by now I am a blunt person...

On the downside of things..although not for me, for them...it has also made me look at the people in my life, and I have gone through a weeding process. I had a talk with a friend a while back about Psychic Vampires, and how I felt surrounded by them at times. Not the evil ones who do it on purpose. I am talking about the needy, whiny, clingy and perpetually dramafied people that like to attach to me. Other people I have talked to about it, who know more on it than I do, say it is because I am a strong person, and it is a known fact that weaker people are drawn to stronger ones..( their words, not mine ) I agree with that to a degree. Not that I am saying I am better than anyone, quite the opposite, since I have a lot of demons of my own, but as cold and logical as I am, I still try to be nice to everyone, and be helpful when I can, but there comes a point when you just can't handle these Psi Vamps anymore. I was exhausted, no energy, all I seemed to see or read about from these people is how horrible it is and how their life has no meaning, no one understands them, woe is me crap. However, these people have several people trying to reach out to them, but they can't stop moaning about how horrible things are to see it, so those people eventually stop trying. I am a dark person, and these emotions do not usually bother me a bit, so when I talk to you and you depress ME, something is wrong, and I can't deal with that all the time, especially when I am being hit with SEVERAL of these someones at the same time. It was just to damn stressful. Helping a friend through a hard time, or being an ear to just listen is one thing. When this goes on for over an ENTIRE YEAR, I just have to say sorry and distance myself. In those cases, these people need more help than I can give, and it was dragging me down mentally, physically and spiritually to continue to try. In some of the cases, I stopped speaking to them entirely, and removed them from my life, got rid of them on the social networks if they were on there, and basically fell off the face of the earth to them. Some of the reasons for this was they started creating drama in MY life, and I am in a really good place right now, and refuse to let anyone fuck it up like I have done in the past. Others, whom I still care about, but need to have barriers of sorts right now while I work on myself, I have just distanced myself, talk less, things like that.  Still others I have reached out to, only to have it ignored or flung back in my face, and I said to hell with it, you can sit there and be miserable and lash out but I don't have to put myself out there to get stepped on anymore. There is no reason for ME to suffer just because your bf/gf/hubby/wife/ex/best friend/boss/mom/dad/etc is a total and complete jerk. I am sympathetic until you start treating me like crap because of it. So for any of you who still read my blog, yet I have unfriended or drawn away from...sorry, I really am, but your just to much of a drain on me, and my family and myself come first now, instead of everyone else's problems first, and ours last.

Well now that everyone thinks I am a bitch...( oh I know there were one or two of you who still thought I was sweet an innocent, admit it! LOL...) I am going to close. I prolly should have put that last part into a separate post, but it was because of my callings that I did what I did, so I felt I should put it here instead.

Thanks for reading!

*Music of the Moment: Hair of the Dog by Guns N Rosesr*

Ok Universe, I get it.....

Hello guys and gals. I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend. It has been a very very rainy one for me, but that is ok, we needed it and it kept things cool today. It also gave me a lot of time to reflect upon some very obvious signs the Universe has been hitting me over the head with.


For the last few weeks I have been trying to mentally and emotionally heal from the passing of 2 family members, being sick, quitting smoking, and some parental strife (between my parents, not Jack and myself lol). I have been longing for Fall so much it almost hurts. Fall and Winter are when I come alive. The colder it is, the happier I am, the more energy I am filled with...this Summer....hell, this whole YEAR... has been a tough one...and I am over it...ready for the next phase.

Many people "Spring Clean" every year. I "Fall Clean" instead. As the temps tease me by getting into the mid to low 60's a couple of nights a week, my thoughts have turned inward again, as they do this time of year, when I start planning my mental lists of things I want to get done. A huge part of that every year is trying to de-clutter my house. I see articles about it everywhere, I see things that remind me of the projects I want to get done, and then I find this post over at The Domestic Witch, and it really made me stop and think.

This year I have so much more to get rid of than the usual accumulation of crap hanging around. I have a lot of mental, emotional, physical and spiritual clutter to get rid of. A lot has happened over the last year, some good, and a lot of it bad, but all of it has left me cluttered up inside. Things happened so fast I had no time to process one thing before the next one happened. So instead of trying to work through it at all, I just kept pushing it down deeper and deeper inside of me, adding more and more on top of it month by month, until finally I felt like I was literally up to my eyebrows with internal garbage. I tried to finally start working through everything, and I found that I was unable to. I was numb. Totally devoid of emotions other than apathy. I could not seem to care about anything. I did not want to talk to anyone, email anyone, chat with anyone. It took Herculean effort to answer even the shortest of emails. I started avoiding everyone, I just could not deal with one more thing, no more drama, from my side or from anyone else either.I was/am tired of hearing it. I had nothing left to give.

The same day that I read that post from The Domestic Witch ( Not to be confused with Domestic Witch lol ) both my husband and my best friend asked me when they could have the old me back. This really shook me up, and I ended up spilling my guts to my best friend and bawled my eyes out. I felt a little better afterwords, and it gave me enough release so I could think about what was wrong and how could I fix it.

The answer is, as the one woman said during the banishing scene in Practical Magic: "Let's clean house!"

Not just my physical house, although it needs it too, ( and I was working on that at 2 a.m. this morning lol ) but my mind, heart, and spirit. I have felt so lifeless and apathetic about everything in my life, moving  through my day in a fog, not really focusing on anything. I have not felt like anything was magical in my life, or took steps to create magic in my life, in SO long. I do not like the person I had become, and as the energy I feel this time of year starts to slowly ( achingly slow!) fill me up, it is time to let go of all that has been building up inside of me, choking me of life.

I took steps to start that process over the last 24 hours. I spent time last night after everyone was in bed cleaning. Dusting, running the vac, sweeping and mopping, dishes, deep cleaning the stove, cleaning the glass and  bric-a-brac  we have, and I cleaned and refreshed my living room altar for the first time in ages.

Today was my 11 year old son's birthday party, which was nice, and all the kids stayed at Mom's so Jack and I got a very rare chance to be alone. We left there and went to the flea market (We got some squash and zucchini, 4 books, and I replenished my Nag Champa and Egyptian Musk incense) and then we went grocery shopping together (which hardly EVER happens) and really got a chance to reconnect with each other. Later as we were watching the race, he even got up in the middle and whipped up some fresh egg salad and we ate it on crackers lol. It was a nice evening, and long over due.

So in conclusion, I am about to start the de-cluttering of my life phase, and it might be a little rough at times. There is some pretty heavy stuff I need to let go of, and part of me is very afraid to do so, because once I let it go, I am scared that I will forget...and that a part of me will somehow be missing. I know that is not actually the case, but it is still a formidable thing to face...

Skeletons in the closet, Demons of the soul, Monsters under the bed...joy, love, hope, pain, agony, defeat, anger....all being reflected through my eyes back to me as I stare in the mirror....

Have you looked at what lies in the space behind your eyes today?


*Music of the Moment: Southern Cross ( Jimmy Buffet version)*