I will live through the next 24 hours and try not to tackle all of life's problems at once.

I will improve my mind, I will learn something that requires effort and concentration.

I will be agreeable.  I will look my best, speak in a well modulated voice, and be courteous and considerate.

I will not find fault with a friend, relative or colleague. I will not try to change or improve anyone but myself.

I will have a programme. I might not follow it exactly, but I will have it. I will save myself from two enemies:
hurry and indecision.

I will do a good turn and keep it a secret. If anyone finds out, it will not count.

I will do two things I don't want to do, just for the exercise.

I will believe in myself. I will give my best to the world and feel confident that the world will give it's best to me.

I am looking around at leaves that have already started changing and remembering the snow dump I saw the other day while I was on my ballon ride, which still has snow in it from last winter, and wondering where the summer has gone.

I was expecting my quarterly bonus to be on my paycheque this week. I even know how much to expect, but it wasn't there.  Apparently there is a delay and the bonuses will be on the next paycheque.

Now the down side of this all is that it makes things very tight for me this pay period.  But I have managed to make things work and paid everyone I had expected to pay, then shopped carefully for groceries and now when my bonus money comes in two weeks, I will be that much ahead.  Perhaps I will be able to put a little extra away for spending money in Mexico.

Today the washing machine finally died completely. I went down to do a load of laundry and instead of filling it just dumped water all over my floor.  So now I have a load of wet soapy clothes and a huge puddle on the floor in the basement.  I called the landlord but I doubt I will hear from them before Monday.

Fortunately I am heading out to visit with Magpie and Bear tomorrow so I will take the clothes out there and beg the use of their washing machine. 

Next weekend we are all headed up into the Haliburton highlands for the long weekend, Bear to the Men's Weekend and Magpie and I to the Widow's Weekend (the wives of all the men who are off doing macho stuff LOL).

Anyway, really quite quiet here.  Had someone approach me to ask if they could join the coven.  It is a woman who has visited with us a few times and I am certain she will be welcomed by all but I will confirm that tomorrow.  So even as Grasshopper chooses to move on, the Goddess brings another student my way.  Guess it's all about what she wants me to do.

Well what a day yesterday turned out to be.

The nice weather finally held for the whole day and I got to go on my hot air balloon ride.  What an amazing experience.

I have to tell you after years of watching them fly over my home I never had any idea who huge they really are.

Here is a picture of them spreading the balloon out on the ground getting it ready to inflate.  It's massive.

I have to say, there is no easy way to get into or out of the basket. It is about the height of your armpits and although for the take off they preloaded me and several other people for ballast, which meant they put us in with the basket still on it's side, and then as the air in the balloon heated up and the balloon started to rise, the basket stood upright with us in it already.  However, upon landing I had to climb out of this thing.  Thank the Goddess a young man who was there flying with his grandmother helped me out or they would have had to leave me in there until they could tip the basket over on its side and dump me out LOL.

They kept going high and then low, to give us a different sort of perspective.  At one point we went low over a farmer's field and startled a couple of deer feeding there.  We also "tree topped" once and the young guy next to me managed to grab some leaves off the very top of a birch tree.

We didn't fly over the area where I live, but I was able to get a pic of it off in the distance and have circled where I work and where I live.  My work is the left hand circle and my home is in the right hand circle.  It is a distance of about a mile or so in between for my American friends.

We ended up landing on a golf course south east of Ottawa and got to use all the corny jokes about just dropping in with golfers who came to check us out.

It was an amazing experience.  It is very quiet and there is no wind, since you are the wind.  I noticed that although people in the balloon were talking a lot when the ride started, as time went on the balloon got more and more quiet and finally the only sound was that of the burner from time to time.  People were just in awe I guess.

I would highly recommend the experience to anyone.  It wasn't remotely scarey and it gives you a whole new perspective on the beauty of Mother Earth.

There are other pics on my site, after all I only took about 200 LOL so go check them out if you like.

Eithne

 

I give you money and send you into the grocery store to pick up 6 items. You can only pick one thing from the following departments. What is it?

 

1. Produce: Blood oranges

2. Bakery: fruit flan with custard

3. Meat: sirloin steak

4. Frozen: Hagen Daas Bailey's Ice cream

5. Dry goods: Captain Crunch

6. Dairy: sour cream

 

Let's say we're heading out for a weekend getaway. You're only allowed to bring 3 articles of clothing with you... (assuming it's someplace warm)

1. a sarong

2. comfy shoes

3. a big hat

 

If I was to listen in on one of your conversations throughout the day... What 5 phrases or words would I be most likely to hear?

1. Peanut

2. I'm sorry to hear that

3. So what was your reason for asking to speak to a manager

4. Doesn't anyone ever put anything in the dishwasher

5. What in Hades?

 

What 3 things do you find yourself doing every single day, and if you didn't get to do, you probably wouldn't be in the best mood?

1. Hugging a three year old

2. Drinking Tim Horton's coffee

3. Drinking more Tim Horton's coffee

 

 

Sweet, you just scored a whole afternoon to yourself. What 5 activities might we find you doing?

1. Painting

2. Reading

3. Thrift store shopping

4. Visiting friends

5. Eating a lot of stuff that contains no useful calories but lots of bad ones LOL

 

We're going to the zoo. But, it looks like it could start storming, so it'll have to be a quick visit. What 3 exhibits do we have to get to?

1. Aquarium

2. Raptors

3. Big cats

 

 

You just scored two tickets to the taping of any live show that comes on t.v. of your choice. They are to....

1. I have absolutely no idea...

 

 

You're hungry for ice cream. I'll give you a triple dipper ice cream cone.

(from top to bottom)

1. Praline

2. Chocolate

3. Wild cherry

 

 

Somebody stole your wallet. In order to get it back, you have to name 5 things you know are inside to claim it.

1. driver's licence

2. postage stamps

3. Additon Elle discount card

4. Air miles card

5. social insurance number

 

 

If you could go back and talk to the 'old you' when you were in high school, and inform yourself of 4 things, what would you say?

1. Never stop fighting for what is fairly yours, remember you never really know a woman until you meet her in court.

2. Don't ever make a life decision based on anyone's opinion but your own

3. Wait until you are older to have children...university will be much harder when you have kids.

4. Keep travelling and have no regrets.

Well last night was one of the worst night's sleep I have had in a while.  My mind was all over the place.

Late yesterday evening Grasshopper came by the house on her way home from work.  She came to tell me she is leaving the Coven.  I should not have been surprised as she has been unable to attend for some time now, with the pressures of work and a new baby she has very little time that is her own, and her partner unfortunately is a very selfish man and not at all supportive of her having an evening a week that is her own.

Still it was hard for me to hear. She has been my student and closest friend for almost eight years, and to find that she won't be coming back to the coven is hard.  I had been grooming her to take over the coven when I am ready to step down.

More than leaving the coven however, she announced that she will also camp alone at Kaleidoscope next year. Now this may not sound like much, but she and I have accummulated a lot of camping gear over eight years, and we have always camped together.  We have this great community kitchen set up and we take care of one another at fest.  We are both on staff so have limited time for ourselves, so we have alway made sure that the other one got fed or a break when needed.

Now as I said I should not have been surprised that she is not coming back to coven, and even camping on her own makes perfect sense as she is considering creating a campsite where she can have the volunteer sign up booth and her campsite in the same place, which makes perfect sense, especially now that she has the baby at fest with her as her partner won't look after her alone for a week a year.  Still it is hard to imagine her not being there all the time.

I never take a student on with the idea that they will be with me forever.  In fact I encourage them to go out and study with other teachers, as I am not the holder of the one true key to enlightenment.  I walk my own path and that isn't necessarily going to be theirs.  I have had a number of students move on over the years, one who turned to the Egyptian path, one who turned to something he calls the dragon path, two who went off to work as a solitary couple, finding that group work wasn't for them.  So having a student decide that the time has come to do something different, to explore a new path isn't unusual.  I guess I had just grown to think of her as being here always.

She has agreed after talking to me to take a one year sabbatical to go off and explore other paths, and to do solitary work she feels she needs to do right now, and to check in with me once every quarter.  The reason for the check in is that knowing her as well as I do, I suspect that she might let the muggle world of her husband and her family overrun her own needs to do this work, and slip further in her studies than she already has.  With having a commitment to check in once a quarter it will help to keep the need to actively work her path in the forefront of her mind.

After a year, if she still feels she needs to move on then I will perform a ritual to release her from her oaths but I didn't want to do that without her taking a year to decide if it is what she really wants.  If it takes a minimum of a year and a day to become an initiate it should take an equal amount of time to be released.  It is not a decision to be made in a hurry. Things could change a lot in a year, or she could find that the answers she thinks she will find elsewhere are in fact here with us.  Who can say?  I just don't want to see her do something that can't be undone without taking the time to really work through it and confront her daemons.

She does have a lot of shadow work to do. This became apparent at Kaleidoscope and I had intended to speak with her about it when we got together again.  Turns out she was also aware of it and that in part drove her to her decision.  One of the other coven members had recently expressed that they did not know who she was any more, as she wasn't the same person.  They felt that there was something missing in her.

She said pretty much the same thing last night, stating that (insert her craft name) was so dead in many ways and that she had been working under the burden of trying to be that person for so long she hadn't realized it previously.  But that she now recognized that she was not that person any more but she doesn't know who she is and needs to do some solitary work to get centred and grounded and find herself again.

Still, most of last night I tossed and turned, asking myself if I had somehow failed her?  Had I as a teacher missed something I should have seen?  Should I have been there more for her? Did I let her down?  Did I do or say something wrong at this latest festival that made her suddenly decide she needed to move on?

On an intellectual level, and having talked at length with her, I know I did the best I could and nothing I did other than encourage her to take responsibility for her own path is responsible for her decision.  It is not a bad decision.  Yet in my heart, it hurts like it has never hurt to lose a student before.  I need to stop thinking of it as losing a student and start looking at it as if she were one of my kids who was all grown up and leaving home.

Still, it is going to change things a lot for me.  It also means that there is little chance I can step down as long as Hearthfire continues to operate as there is no one else close to being ready to take over the reins of running this coven of critters.  I guess the Gods have other plans for me LOL.