Friday Night Miscellany

Hola! Whew, what a week at the office. End of year in our practice is always the busiest time of the year and I'm exhausted. After my candlelit aroma-therapy bath ritual later this evening, I'll be calling it a night early. Tomorrow promises to be absolutely horrid outside weather-wise. In the morning, temperatures in the teens with snow starting, changing later on when a "warm front" comes through to freezing rain and sleet. By Sunday morning we may have an inch or more of ice over 4 inches of snow on the ground. Great. Just great. Unfortunately, I have to be out in it for several hours in the morning, and hope to be back home before the worst of it hits. (Please, Weather Goddess, let it be so...) I stopped at the supermarket tonight on the way home from work - like about a kajillion other people - to stock up on essentials in anticipation of the storm. Does everyone in the world have ill-tempered, screaming, nasty bratty children - and why, oh why, do they have to haul their sorry butts to the grocery store where, after a long, hard day at the office, I am subjected to their non-stop screaming, whining and conniption fits in the middle of the aisles? Some of the little monsters even THROW things at people - swoop they pluck something off a shelf and you have to duck for your life! And don't you DARE say anything to the oblivious parent about their precious little darling's behavior. One of these days, I'm going to throw my own conniption fit right in the middle of the meat aisle - I will scream at the top of my lungs, jump up and down, fling myself down and flail my arms and legs, and curse the day the Goddess created children. We'd be much better off if we hatched out of eggs fully grown and matured. Anyway, I stocked up on the essentials - nuts for the squirrels, delicacies for myself, croissants for breakfast for the next few days, and double-dark chocolate coated Pepperidge Farm cookies. I have coffee, wine, Christian Bros. (HAR!) egg nog stocked and my fireplace is ready to go. Plus, I have a new flat screen LCD HDTV. What an amazing thing. No giant tube sticking out the back; the TV is perhaps 3 inches deep. It's sitting on top of the fireplace mantle, which is 12 inches deep, with lots of room to spare. Perfect! And Absolutely Amazing. So I'm more or less ready for whatever winter throws at me this weekend, as long as the electricity stays on. Man, it was cold as hell walking home from the supermarket in the dark - and it wasn't even windy! It felt like near zero. We are cursed this week with a "clipper" from Canada. Curse the Canadians and their clippers! How will I survive when it drops to below zero with 40 below windchills? To cheer myself up, I've done some Christmas shopping online. I love shopping online, and one of my favorite places to shop is Wine Country Gift Baskets - they make it so easy to order multiple baskets and you can designate individual shipping instructions for each basket, all in one order. I ordered four gifts from Wine Country - shipping rates in the US are quite reasonable. As I've ordered from Wine Country before, I can attest to the quality of their products. When unwrapped from their protective shipping packaging, the towers I've ordered come in individually stacked, decorated gift boxes, five high, wrapped in ribbon, loaded with all sorts of delicious goodies. I've also done a good deed at the start of this Christmas season, I'll be getting a gift for a young person who requested a chess set through the "Giving Tree" program. Okay - to work here. If you are a religious Christian, you may not want to read this: The Nine Most (bleep) Bible Verses. I laughed my head off - and I'm religious! But then, I've always been a strange one...a blend of Pagan and Christian and Animist and lots of other stuff. That's what happens when you let your children read without supervision, parents, and THEN let them attend night-school at a state-funded college in order to earn a college diploma. Be warned! You may end up with a child like - MOI! Quel horreurs! On a sad note, Richard Leigh, one of the co-authors of the best-selling work The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail (with Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln) died at age 64 on November 21, 2007. There is an obituary published on The Daily Grail, posted on November 29, 2007. The authors brought a law suit against mega best-selling author Dan Brown for plagarism (The Da Vinci Code), but they lost the suit. Still, the law suit, along with Brown's novel, kindled renewed interest in The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and introduced an entirely new generation to an intersting hypothesis about the Priory of Scion and the bloodline allegedly produced by the marriage of Jesus Christ (who did NOT die after all) and Mary Magdelene. For those interested in geology, new research from geoscientists at the University of Michigan and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln calls into question the accepted timeline/scenario about when and how the great pan-continent called "Pangea" began to split apart, forming the present continents we all see on modern maps of the world today (for the map challenged, that's seven continents, darlings, although actually "Europe" and "Asia" are joined together at the waist, and are not really separate at all). Traditional theory holds (allegedly supported by geomagnetic evidence) that the portion of the ancient supercontinent of Pangea that is now the Colorado Plateau in southern Utah shifted more than 1,300 miles north during a 100-million-year span that ended about 200 million years ago in the early Jurassic Period, when Pangea began to break up. However, the new research says the area must have remained at the equator during the time in question. The scientists cannot reconcile the conflicting evidence. "It's a conundrum" they say. "Further research is needed", they say, in order to reconcile the conflicting evidence. They have no idea how that may happen. Ha ha ha! Maybe their entire "Pangea" continent theory is a lot of hog-wash - ohhhh, slap my face for even thinking such a thing! These silly people. If "God" supposedly dies in The Golden Compass book/film, what does this say about the faith these so-called "Christians" have - and the faith they are supposed to be passing along to their children? If they really had faith, they'd know that obviously Phillip Pullman's books are pure fantasy, because - as a FUNDAMENTAL element of faith - GODDESS can NEVER die. She is everlasting, without beginning, without end. A Mystery, as it were. Accept it - or not. And just shut up already, hey? I'm really sick of their whining. They're all as bad as their nasty, ill-manner kids they haul along to the supermarket! "Source: KHARTOUM, Sudan - Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of a British teacher Friday and demanded her execution for insulting Islam by letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad." These people need to do some seriously chilling-out. How about dancing around a bonfire to "Boogey Wonderland?" while drinking lots of fire-water. Oh - sorry - that might possibly be construed as a racist comment. Should I add a disclaimer? Should I say what I REALLY think about these people? [White Angel, sitting on Jan's right shoulder is now saying "Now Jan, you know better than that. Where is your charity? Where is your forebearance and tolerance?" Red Devil sitting on Jan's left shoulder is saying "Go for it Hot Momma, blast those suckas. Tell it like it really is." At which point I interject to Red Devil that while I am Hot (particularly with my new "do"), I am NOT a momma. Heaven Forbid!] Oh, geez, just had a hot flash! Now I know I'm on the right track (hot flashes are signs from Goddess, you know). So, all those Sudanese "Muslims" who supposedly believe in the Koran, but who can't read or write and are utterly depending upon the "imans" giving them The Word (rather like Christians were dependent upon "The Church" feeding them their own Word prior to the invention of the printing press) should gather around gigantic bonfires shaped like a woman's reproductive tract (that's what the Ka'bah is, after all, a gigantic Goddess symbol embodied in a carved meteorite - do some research on the subject if you don't believe me), and do a jig in honor of the Arabic Triple Goddess whose sacred shrine underlies the most sacred site in Mecca. The ancient Arabic tribes prayed to the Triple Goddess three times a day, and the Muslims continue the tradition today, although they don't know it. See what "unsupervised" reading can do for a woman? Tsk, tsk. GODDESS POWER!