Well, when I included today into my weekend narrative, suddenly this journal entry became a roller-coaster. It's a lot less "here's what I did today" than my recent entries, and some of you might be glad to kind of finally hear some of the undercurrent thoughts in my head.

My ex's best friend, when he first met me, asked my ex- "is she always that damn happy?" And my ex- answered him, "Yes, she really is."

Most of you know that I really "am that damn happy" most of the time. Much of it is just that things don't phase me that much, since it's hard to rattle my sense of what's going on in my life. I don't know how to explain it, but well, it'll probably make more sense after the narrative below.

Fri Oct 14 - Friday night continued after work with dinner at Noah's and Karen's house, followed by Saul's Poker Night organized party.

I hurried from the office to my house first, and dropped by my apartment. I got all the photos from GWW downloaded off my phone, and burned copies onto CD for all the Crimson Spade, and extra copies for all the parents lately. This comment will make sense in a moment.

I had to swing past the grocery store to get guacamole ingredients and chips, and then fight the traffic up to Saul's parents' place. I got there late, but it turned out I was the first one there. I was able to give Karen a CD with all the photos from all the events of the Crimson Spade that I've been taking lately: Caidan Rapier Open, Angels Anniversary, and the grand opening of the Crimson Spade at GWW, where I got over a hundred photos of the boys putting up the pavilion/inn for the first time. Karen's happy exclamation was "Wow, you really know how to make a mom happy!" Hee hee.

I also had copies of the GWW photos for each Saul, Ben, and Erica, and another "all events" for Erica's dad, Leonidas. I may have finally found the rest of my data cds in my office supplies, and I hope I can finally start sending photo CDs to all the friends and family that I've been promising them to for the past year or so. Anyways, back to Friday night's narrative.

Shabbat dinner was really fun. The place was packed, we couldn't have fit another chair around the table. Again, I was just so happy to be there with everyone, and honored and humbled at the same time. Karen and Noah, Shosh and Saul have really beautiful voices, and I really enjoyed their music. The tunes were different than the other Shabbat songs I've heard before. I never really thought about how many different songs families and temples might have, and I felt silly not thinking of it before.

Poker Night was quite fun, although I didn't really get to socialize *with* my friends so much, since I actually managed to win quite a bit at the table. I felt a little overwhelmed fairly often, trying to keep all the different rules straight and remember which goals we were playing for each time.

And I finally understood a very bad joke the boys have about how "...poker lasts longer" because if you're still in the game, the game just Never. Seems. To. End! *argh!* Finally at 3:00 in the morning, Diego and I and a guy named "Bear" just decided arbitrarily that there were only 5 more hands left and then we quit. But I'm happy to say I came out $20 ahead, which was a real treat for my first time playing. The boys tell me I might not always be fun to play with (because I'm apparently both erratic and sickeningly lucky, and I'll bet on anything) but mostly I think I'm invited back to poker night.

Sat Oct 15 - However, getting home at 4 am does some strange things to you. But after sleeping in, I felt much better. I spent a little time on my computer in the morning, getting some emails done, and sending my regrets to the Ladies' Night In at Morgana's. Although I'd mostly caught up on my sleep, I had an invitation to go back again to Karen & Noah's for his birthday dinner. And the idea of not having to drive so far, and stay overnight, plus another evening hanging out with some amazing friends, so how could I resist?

But first, the other overcommiting myself bits—my afternoon had to include a trip to Claremont to meet Bjo for another one of her Dyestuff's events. Elyramere had offered her table-top loom to a good home, and Astridr had gotten it before I did. But then Astridr realized she really didn't have room for it after all, so offered it to me, and I was picking it up from her at the Dye Day.

The Dye Day was scheduled from 10-3, and I finally got there around noon. I took some extra time to take photos for Bjo, again, as apparently I've assigned myself to be her official event and catalog photographer if I'm ever at one of her events. (See again the note above about taking photos for other people on a regular basis.)

We witnessed some amazing colors with Osage Orange (bright yellow), Cochineal (reds and pinks), Logwood (purples and reddish), Indigo (blues, obviously), and the various mordants and how they affect the fibers, such as Copper (and the lovely sea-foam green before the fiber is even dyed), Iron (tan), and Tannin (light brown). By the end of the afternoon, we were dying a white shirt right on one of the gals by pressing yarns directly into her shirt, which created the most amazing patterns.

Leaving the Dye Day, with the loom (which only just fit in the back of my car), I had to swing by a grocery store one more time for potluck ingredients. Friday night I made salad with Karen, and tonight I was stir-frying veggies. At war, the guys liked my onions, mushrooms, and zucchini so much that I decided to have a repeat performance. And Karen was good enough to let me cook before the birthday dinner. I grilled a sweet yellow onion, portabellos, zucchini, and yellow squash in a lemon-infused olive oil that had people sneaking bites before dinner was served. A good sign, indeed.

It was somewhat "old home night" at Noah's, with lots of old-time SCA friends coming out to celebrate Noah's and Natalya's husband John's birthdays. Natalya was definitely in her element, having fun making flourishing introductions between all her old friends and me. Maggie also brought an old St. Genesius video tape of some SCA plays performed in 1988.

Watching Natalya on stage, I was reminded of watching my own Mom on stage. I took the time to tell her this, and suggested she and my Mom could nearly be sisters, so it stood to reason that I should be able to call her "Auntie" too. She laughed, and agreed that yes, I may call her "Auntie." Saul tells me, though, that he's the only person who's allowed to call her "Auntie, Your Grace." I won't tell you all the rest of his comments on this, but I agree, he's the only one who call her her that. *grin*

But finally I needed to take off from the party and head home, and get some sleep.

Sun Oct 16 - I was hoping that I could have lounged around watching tv in the morning with a friend who has nearly 6-8 hours saved on my TiVo, but he also overcommitted his Sunday, and had a lunch date with his family. So I just relaxed for a while in the morning, forgetting for a while that he wasn't coming over.

I got a call from Miryam that the bracelet I commissioned at Crown was completed, and so I left early enough to go by her place before choir. The bracelet came out absolutely gorgeous, and I'm really excited about the necklace she's planning to make to match with the rest of the beads.

Choir went really well, and the three of us who were there sounded really quite beautiful together. It was a new level of music, and it was really encouraging to see us getting to this new place. The only bummer is that I had entirely forgotten that that our choir date was set for December 3rd and now the band just booked a show on Dec 3, so now we're looking at a possible change for the choir date.

While I was at rehearsal, Ben and Erica gave me a call and so I hurried to their place after choir let out. And I was really lucky that traffic was working with me this time. And funny enough, right as I arrived, so did Saul and Harmony. So the five of us just hung out and had fun chatting for a few hours together. I've got to start remembering to carry a bag of projects in my car, which is hard to do to try to get over my paranoia of things being stolen from my car, especially my spinning and/or projects bag. But fortunately Harmony had a lucet on her and let me play with it while we were hanging out chatting.

Mon Oct 17 - And then today I got to spend the day at a conference/expo for training and e-learning. The day at the expo wasn't really that much of a big deal, but it was weird being on the other side of things, so to speak. I've worked conferences like that, but this time I was the customer walking around in the vendor room. And I'm definitely a Macromedia junkie now—I wish I could afford to have the full suite for at home, but that's some expensive software. Ah well.

The biggest thing about today was really just the internal dialogue. I've been dreaming and wishing and hoping, and keeping things internal about a dear dear friend. And last night and this morning, I finally saw some reality that I was not looking at before.

I had to somewhat laugh at myself, when I was getting ready to write my journal entries tonight. I always glance at what I last wrote, to figure out where to take up the narrative again. And I'd nearly forgotten that on Friday afternoon I was on top of the world, happier than I'd been in years, and today I'm somewhat sad and disappointed in myself.

Without too many details, all I can say is that I'm tired of being single, I thought I was okay with it, I thought I had met someone fabulous, and I to be honest, I thought more was going on than was really going on. And so now I'm back into the reality of being completely "just friends."

And I don't like saying "not fair" to the universe. I don't want to hear myself whine about being single. I don't want to hear myself thinking that I'm too old and that I'm just never going to have a family or a partner after all.

But I heard myself saying that kind of whiny stuff on my drive home tonight and I did NOT like the sound of my voice.

It makes me sick to my stomach to be off-balance, and I have no clue how long it's going to take for me to finally just grab life and be happy to be on my own forever.

It's slightly annoying how much I miss being a Mom, and how sometimes I feel like that's just never going to happen ever again. I see so many of my 30-something and 40-something friends and siblings and cousins having kids lately, and it hurts a little that I'm still missing out on that. And I'm just not sure how I'm going to come to a quiet place about that anytime soon. I hate being unbalanced and unsure.

And most of all, I hate the little superstitions in my head sometimes. Like, I have a huge overwhelming belief in the power of the spoken word. I will go way out of my way to avoid saying somethings out loud because I do not want to give them power. Dayle thinks this is an admirable quality, that I won't speak ill of anyone, but sometimes it's just my reluctance to unleash ill into the universe, not that I'm not *thinking* ill of someone, but that it's worse to say it out loud.

But for the first time, I think the hidden words that were spoken by someone else have been eating away at me and I didn't realize what they were doing to me. A friend of mine told me she was convinced, almost to the point of saying this to me like it was a kind of "prophesying" that my real, true, for-life partner was really just around the corner in my life. She said she believed that this guy was also significantly younger than me. I had jokingly quipped out loud to her, "What, is he still finishing college?" and she laughed and responded, "No, not that young. But very young." So I just laughed at her predictions and said, "Ah, then that must be why it's taken so long to meet him, I was just waiting for him to grow up."

And then I tried to forget the conversation, hide it, and apparently it had been almost left to fester inside of me. I think it was some time after our shire's anniversary tournament in May that she said these things to me, basically long before I'd become enamoured with someone I usually call "Cute Boy," someone much younger and who I really, really liked. Hard not to think I was putting two and two together.

I wanted to believe in these words, but wanting and wishing isn't how to make Destiny happen. You know that I recently was talking about something like this here in my journal.

The only way I can come into my own Destiny, if you want to call it that, is to turn my thoughts to actions, actions to habits, and continue to build my character. To live the life that it takes to build character in the first place. Because living life isn't what happens when you finally *get* the end, but it's all the living that took you along the way to your end. And I have a lot of living to do in my thoughts and actions and habits.

My other superstition thing lately, besides this weird non-prediction that was uttered to me months ago, is this odd feeling that my life goes in sets of seven years. The years in young school do blend really well with 6th grade through 12th grade—four years in high school, 2 years in middle school, and just 1 last year in elementary school—as one unit in my life.

When I went to college, it was four years full time, one year off, two years part time. At the end of my 7-years of college, I was another person completely different again.

Then I met my ex- and we dated for under 2 years, we were extremely happily married at first, and the last 2 years were evil and horrible before I divorced him, making from 1993 to 2000 another set of seven years.

2000. That started my current epoch or era or whatever. A new set of seven. And at the same time, these sets of seven are broken down with sets of 2-3-2 in so many ways.

In June 2000 I left my ex, moved out, took the room-in-a-house-with-a-family. Ten months later I got my apartment down near the Navy base. Twelve months later I lived with Brian & Tina. A year-and-a-half later I moved in with Dayle & Ken for the job at the Marine base. Ten months later got the apartment with Mer & Mel. Twelve months later moved into this apartment. That's seven addresses in five calendar years.

I'm tired of moving. I love my current home and roomie the best of the whole lot in the past five years, and I was believing that all that could happen next is the final chapter of two years in this set of seven years.

And I have a hard time *not* believing that at the end of my seven year piece, that I'm going to start something radically different and new and different from anything else I've ever lived through, you know: Youth, then College, then MyEx-, then MySingleYearsAgain, and then finally SomethingNext.

Sometimes I dislike my superstitions and I don't know how to shake them any more than I know how to care about all my friends. Or how I care about being kind. Or I care about "Sane and Stable" as a goal in my life. But I'm definitely feeling less bubbly than I was on Friday, and I just want to live a joyous life. I really do.

Somehow I just have to weather this. Again. *heavy sigh*

Thanks for being there, friends, for letting me kvetch about this crap. I appreciate it. Bunches and bunches.

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Oh, and I almost forgot: As of Saturday my weight-loss was 10.0 lbs, from 8.6 last check. And as of this morning my weight-loss was at 10.4 lbs, total. I have *got* to take in two nice pair of business slacks, which does not break my heart at all. As I was telling the boys from the Spade on Saturday night, my long-term goal is to be walking along in the SCA some day and hear someone behind me exclaim, "God, she looks hot!" The boys's faces lit up, and they told me, "On behalf of all the men in the SCA, we thank you for such an honorable goal!" *laughs* That was a bright point in my weekend, certainly.





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Recently Watched: Smallville, NCIS, I, Robot (see? I can get around to watching movies sometimes), Xena