Halloween Poem ~ Nicholas Gordon

Hobgoblins know the proper way to dance:
Arms akimbo, loopy legs askew,
Leaping into darkness with delight,
Lusting for the ecstasy of fright,
Open to the charm of horrors new....
~Nicholas Gordon, poemsforfree.com

Halloween Quote

Jack-o-lantern smiling bright
Witches flying in the night
Ghosts and goblins, cats and bats
Witches with their funny hats
A full moon can’t be beat
As we go out to Trick or Treat 

~Unknown Author

Please Be Aware of Your Surroundings

I have a bit of a rant against people behind the wheel of a vehicle with their cell phone easily accessible. I really hate how frequent cell phones turn people into complete idiots and morons.

Yesterday I saw my doctor and he gave me the standard lecture about my needing to exercise more. Because I have muscular dystrophy exercise and I aren't on the best of terms. He felt that walking would be an activity that I could pursue. It's cheap, it would help get me out of the house, might make it possible for me to drop some weight, and would be safe.

So I decided that I'd humor him and give it a try. Instead of catching the bus to get some items from the store and decreasing my amount of walking, my daughter and I decided to walk from his office to the store and then back to catch the bus home.

We made it safely to the store and through it. Unfortunately we missed the bus by just a few seconds cause I couldn't make it up the hill fast enough as my walker got caught in a critter hole as there is a choice to leave the parking lot by either going across a grassy area or walking in the traffic lane coming into the parking lot because the landscape designers put river rock along the edge instead of sidewalk. Obviously they thought that only people using cars would access these stores. lol

So that left us with the options of either walking home or going to the next bus stop and catching the bus there. We decided to try to make it to the next stop. We would have too if it hadn't been for the driver who decide her cell phone was more important to pay attention to than people crossing the street.

We were at an intersection and the light had just changed to red with the sign for us to cross the street. There was a car with a female driver who acknowledge us getting ready to cross the street or so we thought. She was stopped so it should have been safe to cross in front of her? We noticed a car that was getting ready to make a left hand turn. The driver was so short that it appeared they barely could see over the steering wheel let alone out the driver side window.  We were concerned he wouldn't see us.

The car we were crossing in front of had their windows down. The driver made eye contact gave a little smile. We heard the cell phone go off and saw the driver reach for it. We crossed because we thought it would be safe. the next thing I know instead of facing North, I'm facing east. My foot and leg look all funny. My dd is screaming.

The good thing is that the car was going slow so only dislocated my knee, ankle, foot and scratched/dented the walker were damaged.  Just by luck my dd wasn't walking on the side of me like she normally does or she'd of been hit instead.  The other cars continued to stay stopped at the red light.

The bad thing is the driver didn't stop and kept on going. There are either no traffic cams or they weren't working at this intersection. None of the other cars stopped or hung around after the light changed to green.

The good thing is the ambulance crew was really wonderful with my dd. The cop was OK. Because of the lack of information like a license plate # (there was none just a date tag in the back window) there wasn't much that could be done to catch the offender.

So I would like to request that if your stopped at a red light please make sure your foot is firmly on the brake or you put your car in park before you do anything with your cell phone. If people are going to cross the street in front of you, make sure they are clear before you mess with your phone. If she'd had a bigger vehicle or been going a little faster I might not have been as lucky as I was. Please, Please Please pay attention and be aware of your surroundings. If you do you might just prevent hitting someone and injuring or killing them. Is your phone really worth that?

I will say that I am terrified now to go for a walk where I have to cross a street and use a cross walk. I no longer trust my doctor's advice to walk more because it's safe.

Hard work and baby steps are paying off.

I'm making some real tangible progress at the moment. The baby steps and hard work I've been doing over the last eighteen months is really starting to show up. I'm excited and just have to talk to someone about it.

 

Something I have wanted to do for an extremely long time is learn how to knit socks. I tried as child and I failed miserably. I was deemed hopeless and told to just give it up as no good could come from my hand to hand combat style of knitting. So I buried the dream to learn how to knit socks until recently.

Last month I took a leap of faith and signed up for a learn to knit socks class.  So, I'm currently taking a knitting class to learn how to make hand knit socks. The project my knitting teacher has the class working on to learn  is a wee baby sock. It's suppose to be small enough that we can complete a pair of baby socks by the end of the 4 sessions of class.

The teacher is very good and it's a small group of just 3 women (me and two others). So there is lots of individual attention and time for questions to be answered and mistakes caught and corrected before too much is done. I'm the only one in the class that has been knitting for just a fairly short time. The place offering the classes has deemed me a beginning knitter and as having officially learned to knit in January 2015.

One of the women in my class is old enough to either be my mother (or grandmother per my cheeky daughter)  depending on how you want to look at it.  She saw my progress at the end of the first class and said something that was a tiny bit catty. I just ignored her. As I figured it was simply not worth acknowledging just because I was several steps ahead of her when we left our first class. Some people I have come to learn can just be plain grouchy and down right mean to others when they are learning something new. 

I'm even more steps ahead of her at the class this week. It makes sense that I would be considering the lead I had. So I wasn't too surprised when she saw my progress this week and made a remark about me being an overachiever. I did tell her thank you and just kept on knitting. Even when she repeated it to me several times and then said it to others whom she spoke to who either stopped to see what we were doing or who were browsing the shelves near by.

I just ignored her and kept on doing my thing per the teacher's instructions as to what came next for me. At the end of class and after she left another lady whom she had made that remark to twice apologized and mentioned that she hoped it hadn't hurt my feelings too much that normally this woman is a very kind person but has just been off for the past couple of months. 

I gave her a deer in the headlights look. I’m sure it confused her. I didn’t do it cause I wanted to save face or because of deep pain. I did it because I realized that I could have cared less about the overachiever remarks and the drama. I felt the prick of pain from her words as she had said them with such venom and a look that could kill me if looks could truly kill but it didn't set me off down the path to hurt feelings. I’d like to say that it is because I had those types of remarks thrown at me all the time growing up so I have thick skin but that would be a partial lie. 

I don’t have thick skin. I’ve heard those remarks before from others both teachers and fellow students not to mention my parentals and they’ve reduced me to tears in the past, along with self-loathing, and insecurities that became huge stumbling block monsters. It didn’t this time because I’ve grown a lot in the past eighteen months. I could identify with her feelings but realized I didn’t have to accept the hand off of them. I could identify and feel the pain and frustration in the words said along with facial and body language cues but it didn’t mean I had to take it personally.

I could see thanks to Jani’s past classes on block monsters, that this woman was suffering from one. I could see how she was trying to hand it off to me out of ignorance and get me to accept it and provide it a home.  I saw that for once in my life I could be strong and not accept it. I didn’t need to accept her judgement and I didn’t need to give her seeds a home. I also for once didn’t even feel the need to justify why I was to the point I was.

All of this is a huge thing for me. It’s proof of just how far I have come in healing, working with, facing down, and dealing with my block monsters. I was able to see just how far I’ve made it on the path I am on as a creator and artist. I could see the spiral of really having traveled further than I thought because I’m far enough away from my starting point that I was able to actually recognize a block monster, I could see that I had a clear choice to accept or not to accept said block monsters (compare and over achiever) from her, I could see that my own are still with me but that I didn’t need to take these she was handing me home to give mine company. 

I could see that I didn’t need to justify that I have to redo things in order to learn. I didn’t have to justify my speed or give a tally of just how many hours a day I knit which gives me the confidence to be speedy. I could just smile and say the truth. Its ok, I thought it was a compliment. 

Further proof that I’m no longer on the starting line and have traveled is that I chose to take it as a compliment not as the insult that others in the place pointed it out as being. I am so very thankful for the support I have received to get to this point in my life. I have definitely taken a longer road with kicking and screaming that I’m not so proud of but the view from here is worth it. 

I’m also extremely thankful that the teacher (Jani Franck) who came into my life and that I took that major leap of faith to become her student and take her workshop/classes. I know that is why I am here at this point in my path. I’m also thankful for the cheerleaders and supporters who helped me to find her and whom also have played a huge role in teaching and preparing me for getting here and whom also keep tossing me water, remind me to breathe, hold an umbrella for some shade and pass me a Kleenex every now and then.

If your interested in  learning more about the classes that I took to get to this point please visit. here.

Yes, I am just a student and no I'm not going to get any compensation for sharing the link to her courses. No arm twisting happened either. I am just truly amazed and blessed by the progress I've made that I thought I would share it. Cause it's amazing how good I feel about how far I've come.