54, huh?

Not a witty title, particularly....

Haven't said anything lately because I haven't had anything to say. I'm stuck stuck stuck waiting for this house to sell---not "doing nothing", still packing, still cleaning, et cetera, but still, utterly mired down.

Can't buy my next house until this one sells. Can't do anything with my future until this house sells. Stuck stuck stuck.

Happy stuck birthday.

On the other hand, got some people up to a *third* viewing. My insurance guy predicted the house would sell "before the end of May"---well, it's got 32 hours and change to make that. Love to see it happen, not holding my breath.

Since the beginning of this process, I've heard a voice in my head saying "June...June...June." I'll settle for that, especially if it's early June.

On the brighter side, I ****DANCED**** at powwow! I can dance again! It's been years, and I have missed it SOO much.

Next Saturday, my daughter and I are taking my granddaughter to powwow. She has her first dance dress, now; I spent the last week sewing it. I am so looking forward to dancing with her, both of us in our ribbon dresses.

So happy birthday to me......

My Day Takes Flight.....

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm terrified of birds, at least when they're indoors. And free.

Wild birds, loose in the house---hysterics time. I've gone through a thousand permutations of panic-and-get-someone-else-to-fix-it over the years: closing up the room the bird is in until somebody else is home, leaving the house until someone else comes home, you name it. Except now, there's no one else home, or ever coming home.

About five o'clock this morning, I was awakened by some banging and squawking that experience told me meant that Sarah the Siamese had come through the cat door bringing Company, presumably Unwilling Company. And the volume level said that she'd chased whatever it was upstairs, and was now chasing it back downstairs.

Well, another thing people know about me is that I Don't Do Mornings---at least not 5 am, unless it means I haven't been to bed yet. So I got up, closed the bedroom door, and said "I'll deal with this when I get up."

Eventually, of course, I did just that. Got dressed, came trucking downstairs, looking around cautiously. One or another of the cats had barfed at the bottom of the stairs, and I thought "Oh, maybe all it was was two cats arguing..." and headed for the kitchen for the paper towels.

Screeching halt.

There on the kitchen curtain rod, cheerfully hopping back and forth, is a full grown male robin, looking quite healthy, if spectacularly bored.

Well, one of the prices of responding to birds in the house by panicking is that either you're outside, locked in the bathroom, or sitting with a blanket over your head when the birds are being caught. You have NO clue what the procedure is. So I called my daughter Beth and asked her what to do.

"Just throw a towel over it, then kind of wad up the towel and take it outside."

Uh-huh.

I get a towel---and a box, just in case I need it to put over either his head or mine---and head into the kitchen, where I discover what happens if you throw a towel over a bird who is hopping back and forth on the rod of cafe curtains.

He just goes behind the curtains, then flies out and back up on the curtain rod. No Significant Progress Here.

OK, Plan B. Hmm, Beth didn't have a Plan B. Well, what can we come up with?

The bird is in front of a *window*. Windows go outside. Let's work with this....tiptoe over, gently open window....tiptoe outside, and pull off the screen. Now we can go back inside and shoo him out the window.

Well, maybe we could do that if Taliesin and Sarah didn't immediately park on the windowsill with big "Hey, Birdie, Birdie!" grins on their little cat faces. We've found parameter #1 in the intelligence of this bird: he ain't that dumb.

By the time I'm back in the house, I'm not sure where he is, until I spot Floofy staring. Bird's in the back room, just sitting, looking.

As it happens, the back door of our house is in that room. So I open the (wooden) door, and go outside to prop the screen door. Bird seems to get at least part of the concept, as he decides that the wooden door makes a great perch.

I come around the house and back in the front door and look at him: he's two feet away from freedom, sitting on top of the wooden door, looking anywhere and everywhere except outdoors. Parameter #2 in the intelligence of this bird: he ain't that bright, either. :)

Eventually, by wiggling the door from time to time while telling him repeatedly "Stupid, the door's open...", he managed to get the idea and flew away......leaving me to close the door and go back to dealing with cat barf.

Which I guess is pretty anticlimactic if you're reading this, but it was kind of a big deal from my end........

A New Holiday....

This week Jews and Christians are ramping up into the spring holiday season with Pesach and Easter, and leaving the pagans behind, since the Vernal Equinox has already passed.

Your average pagan, however, is generally Up For A Good Party at any time, and rather dislikes being left out of things. In this vein, I'd like to propose a new holiday.

The Official Hatching of the Solstice (or Equinox) Peeps.

The original Peeps, of course, are the baby chicks, and we all know that baby chicks come from eggs. Since they're all related, no matter what odd shapes they come in, I think we can assume that as unlikely as it may appear, *all* Peeps come from eggs.

So given that eggs, baby chicks and many other less-than-religiously-obvious "Easter symbols" have their roots in pagan antiquity.......

Pig hereby pronounces that All Peeps are Laid on Solstices and Equinoxes (depending, of course, on their holiday associations).

And that this week is the Week of the Hatching of the (spring) Peeps.

Is "Access" Enough?

We have a pretty binary concept when it comes to handicapped accessibility in this country: locations either is or they ain't. I had an experience last Saturday night that brought home to me the idea that maybe that's not quite enough.

I was invited to the Lund Theatre at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, to see the Waswagoning Dance Theatre, which is an Anishinabe group worth going out of your way to see. Excellent show. But on arriving, I discovered that the Lund prides itself on being handicapped accessible---the parking area has a variety of "handicapped entrance this way" signs pointing you to the ramp, from their *three* handicapped spots (which were full long before I got there). And it's a lovely ramp, which I didn't take---now that I'm recovering from the knee surgery, stairs aren't as much of an issue as number of steps I have to take, and the ramp is easily four times the length of the stairs.

Unfortunately, the first thing you see when you enter is a sign saying "All bathrooms downstairs." A combination of visual inspection and asking around tells you that it's a very steep set of stairs, and there are no elevators. Now operating with a cane, I can do that, if slowly and carefully.

The theatre itself is beautiful, and obviously not new. That combined with being a part of an educational institution with not much money, I suppose, is how they managed to come under the hardship provision of the ADA: there really isn't anywhere, in any practical sense, to put an elevator in the building. And since there's no way to do so, and no way to get a wheelchair downstairs anyway, the money of course hasn't been spent to make either the outer bathroom doors nor any stall doors wheelchair-wide or provide rails.

But imagine yourself limited to a wheelchair, come to see a play that may last two hours or more, making the journey to this theatre having been assured that it's "handicapped accessible." And it is, of course---you will have no difficulty entering the building, or entering the theatre in your wheelchair. That's not going to be a hell of a lot of consolation when you desperately have to pee, and there's nowhere you can possibly go.

Seems to me that we need at least two handicapped classifications: "handicapped accessible" and "minimally" or "partially handicapped accessible."

"Handicapped accessible" would mean "you can come here in a wheelchair and do absolutely anything and everything anyone else can do."

"Minimally/partially handicapped accessible" would mean "you can come here, but there are things other folks can do here that you won't be able to." This would warn you that you might need to call ahead and see what those limitations are: "you can get into our theatre to see the play, but you won't be able to get to our art display on the far side of the lobby" may be quite all right with you, since the art display isn't what you came for. But "you can see the play, spend half a day, buy a great deal of consumable liquid at our concession stand, but you won't have anywhere to pee" just might be a dealbreaker.

Equinocturnal......

In a year that's chock full---perhaps overfull---of new beginnings, when better to take a bit of time to focus, contemplate, meditate, open one's mind and heart to the new, than an equinox?

Time for a bit of ceremony, a bit of ritual....a letting go of the cold dark winter. A fertilizing, being open to new growth...even if I don't know where it's going.

Time to be a wildflower---or a tomato. However it works out.

House is on the market. No nibbles yet. Not a clue how long this process will take.

Can't seriously look at replacement houses until this one sells. Have my eye on one, but who knows if it will still be available? I try to be one with the universe and will it to be available when I am available, if it is the house I'm meant to be in.

Can't make plans either to go back to school or find work without knowing where I'm going to live. Hanging fire, packing boxes......

Wonder where it will all be by the time of the summer solstice?

Wake up, Little Susie!

I read in the Sun-Times today that the Gary city clerk Suzette Raggs just had to run into the mall for a minute. Just a minute, for cryin' out loud. No big deal.

And do please note that she did NOT park in any handicapped spots. She certainly wouldn't do anything of THAT sort---we all know that's not legal. No, she parked in the "stripy bits" between handicapped spots....in her official car with the official (police) plates.....

Handicapped van owner (and the local cop he called) only had to wait an hour for her to come out, so that the van's doors could be opened and the ramp extended. How is that an inconvenience to anybody?

You know, there are few things that will concentrate your attention on how folks park in handicapped areas quite as much as having handicapped plates or placard yourself. And I've noticed a great upsurge in this lately---the idea that it doesn't count as parking in a handicapped spot if you stay out of the marked spaces and only park in the "stripy bits".

Am I the only person in this country who vaguely remembers that at some point in her upbringing, she was taught "if asphalt is painted with parallel diagonal yellow stripes, it means NO PARKING"? It's beginning to seem that way.

This event happened at Westfield's Southlake Mall on route 30, over on the edge between Merrillville and Hobart. For those of you who have never been there, I have to say I'm really surprised that she managed to do this.

Surprised because Southlake seems to have had a policy for the last three or four years of "repurposing" many of their handicapped parking spaces. Going there for a quick run into Build-A-Bear, I scope the parking lot---the area where handicapped parking usually is near a mall entrance.

You can see by the lot paint that they USED to have handicapped parking here. Apparently, however, it attracted handicapped people, and I'm guessing that might not be the heaviest shopping/biggest spending demographic out there.

It's been "fixed." Half of it is "Kid's Club Parking" (Yes, we're a nation with an obese child problem. Best way to fix it? Under no circumstances make a kid walk further than 20 yards from their car into a mall!), the other half is "Pregnant Women Only Parking" (marked as "brought to you" by a maternity shop in the mall.)

If you're handicapped and need to run into Build-A-Bear, the Correct Solution is to park somewhere else, by some other entrance, and walk the length of the mall to get to your store---that the reason you have a handicapped card is that you have a demonstrated *need* not to walk long distances only applies to car-to-mall, apparently. Intra-mall mileage on your tootsies doesn't count.

That's the Correct Solution by way of Mall Management Think. It's not the Piggie Solution.

There is no official status to "Pregnant Women Only Parking."

There is no Gummint Agency in charge of handing out nice pink Pregnant Placards.

Piggie parks in the preggers spaces. Piggie is, after all Demonstrably Female.......if visibly presumably post-menopausal. But look at all those news stories of older women and babies........how can you know for sure?

If questioned by mall personnel, they get only my name, rank and serial number. I ain't peeing in the cup. That said, exactly how are they going to prove I'm *not* pregnant? :)

Leaving my mind on idle, unsupervised......

Scenario: Tom Sawyer and his friends, in their later years, go to visit a radio studio. They look around at all that is new and different since the pre-Civil War days of their childhood.

Finn is particularly fascinated with the table of various gadgets, boxes and machines used to make live sound effects. He turns to his friend, who has spent far more years in the big city than he.

"Tom, what do they call that?"
"Foley, Huck!"