I've had enough of the 360 foolishness. First Yahoo announced they were no longer going to support Mac Apps. Then they made it so the one 3rd party application that could reach the chat rooms no longer worked. They've done all they can to freeze Macs out of the Yahoo world. Now, 360 is getting more and more worthless, as RSS feeds are haphazardly showing up, comments won't add (I've even had problems adding comments to my OWN blogs and pages), blogs don't show the actual most recent blog 90% of the time. Bleah. Who needs it? They're not going to fix it, and it's impeding my communication with my friends. So, I've moved everything over to Multiply. Join me if you like. I'll try to continue to update here as well, for a little while, but my preference will be to use Multiply, so please feel free to leave your comments and feedback there, rather than here.

I am not a big jewelry-wearer. At least not for decoration. I've always thought that the idea of wearing a necklace because it means so much to you would be cool, but I've only ever had one necklace like that in my life and it was stolen. Mostly, necklaces just get caught in my hair. Bracelets are annoying, because they hit and rub against everything. Earrings are pointless cuz they're always covered by my hair. Toe rings .. ouch!

But my rings .. those are my "adornments" and also my personal expressions. I like how they look and I like how they feel. They're all silver, and some of them have fairly important meanings to me. Some (the 3rd row up there, out of focus) are primarily just filler. Eventually I'd like to fill my fingers with meaning. For right now, here are the primaries:

Claddagh: A traditional Irish ring, worn usually in friendship or as a wedding ring. I had heard that if you wear it with the ring pointing away from you, it signifies friendship, but with the ring pointing toward you, it signifies love. Other sources say on the ring finger, pointing away = engaged and on the ring finger, pointing toward = married. I wear mine on my ring finger pointing toward me. The ring is supposed to signify love (the heart), friendship (the hands) and loyalty (the crown).

Devangari Om: Devangari is a script used to write a lot of Indian languages, and the Om (Aum) is a sacred syllable used at the beginning and end of many prayers or mantras. I lived for a year in India when I was younger, and I subscribe to a lot of Buddhist followings. While the entire chant of Om Mani Padme Hum is not strictly Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhists believe that saying it out loud or silently to oneself invokes the powerful benevolent attention and blessings of Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. I guess I like to wear the symbol to remind me to be compassionate, too.

IMAGINE: As many of you know, my company name, Geminai, was created because its letters can be rearranged to spell "imagine". I thought this might be good for future marketing. Imagine is probably the only John Lennon song I really like, as well. This ring was purchased in a charitable auction and has the word IMAGINE plus John Lennon's signature and his self-portrait carved into it.

Phoenix: I think of the bird with the large wings to be the Phoenix, the mythical bird that rises up and is reborn of its own ashes. There have definitely been times in my life where I've felt a need to have a rebirth, and this ring helps to remind me that it's always possible to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and recreate your world.

Dragon: As for the dragon, well, in the Asian parts of the world, the dragon is often considered a symbol of luck and health, and are often worshipped. While I wasn't born in the year of the dragon (Chinese astrology), I find it one of most admirable symbols: Those born in those years are supposedly honest, sensitive, brave, and inspire confidence and trust. They supposedly neither borrow money nor make flowery speeches, but tend to be soft-hearted which sometimes gives others an advantage over them. I admire the traits, so I wear the dragon.

The rest are mostly fillers, but now you know a little more about me, I suppose. :)

(for those PP followers, the shot was taken with a Rebel XT with a 50mm lens. Backlit for drama)

(the picture above is from Wikipedia - it's an 8 mm kidney stone)

I thought I felt the twinge at Jeremy's parents' house this weekend. I also had an upset stomach on and off for the last few days. However, it didn't actually hit until last night, after pilates. It kept me awake last night - every time I moved the wrong way, took too deep of a breath, put pressure on the wrong area, I was woken up with the pain that takes my breath away. The best way I can explain it is like when you're running or hiking really hard and you get a sharp stitch in your side, but then add a little hot poker type feeling that flares up with each breath. It passes after a minute or two, usually. But when I got up to go to the bathroom this morning I thought I was going to pass out, it hurt so badly. Apparently what causes the pain is that the stone pokes its way into the soft tissue of the urinary tract and blocks the flow of urine. Usually I will be able to pass a stone within a day or two, now that I know how to handle them. The first one I got threw me for a total loop and had me laid up for days with the stone and then days afterwards with a raging infection where the stone had left a torn-up trail on its way out.

My doctor gave me a prescription for Vicodin about a year ago, and that helps a ton with the pain. My doc said that if I get them a lot, we can do some ultrasounds to try to see if there's just one stone breaking off in pieces and then they can go in and bust that one up. I think I've had about 4 in the past year .. maybe 5. At this point I'm not chomping at the bit to get that kind of stuff done, so I'll wait 'til they get worse. I'm hoping an imminent medication change next year might help them not be as frequent.

But my real reason for posting this blog is to share with you how lucky I am. :)

Jeremy came home with flowers and a cucumber (he'd messaged me during the day and I had a craving for cucumber). He cut the flowers and put them in water for me here in the living room (I was laying, stoned, on the couch) and then went and cut up the cucumber for me. Then he cooked dinner for us, and all this after working a very full work day. He is the absolute best, and I am the luckiest woman in the world. No one's ever done so much for me without asking for anything in return. So, pain or no pain, I am feeling on top of the world.

That's what they say. I wonder if it's as true in bigger cities as it is in small rural towns like Ontonagon?

The town of Ontonagon, when I was a teenager, had about 2,500 people in it (7 people per square mile, to give you an idea of what I mean by "rural"). I knew facts like this because when I went to live in India in 1987, we had to go over there knowing facts about our home towns. Our graduating class was, oh, dunno .. Ang? Bunna? Like what.. 67 people or something? I remember it was one of the largest in many, many years. Of course, everyone knew everyone else. There never seemed to be many secrets. Those of us with cars would often spend evenings "cruising" main street (all 4-5 blocks of it), and there were almost always parties to go to, if that was your interest. I grew up on a dirt road, about 5-6 miles out of town. I remember the road to be at least 4-5 miles long, and our house to be easily a mile up from the highway. There was one bridge by which you could get out to the west side of Ontonagon and the Porkies (Porcupine Mountains), etc., and it was a swing bridge, which mean any time a boat came through, traffic would be stopped for however long it took for the bridge to rotate open (it did not lift), the boat to go through, and the bridge to swing closed again. I guess it was inconvenient, as traffic would back up onto main street, but I never thought much about it. That was just life.

I had a very intimate relationship with all the bars and bar-owners in town. I remember being taught how to play pool as soon as I could see over the table while standing on tiptoes. I learned how to tie my shoes, blow a bubble, and whistle ... all in local bars. In fact, to this day I remember some of the names of the people who used to work at some of them - they were always really nice to me. I remember how both Houghton and Ironwood were such big towns - they were both about 60 miles from Ontonagon, and were places we'd go to see a movie, have fast food or go shopping for school clothes and such. They always held the mystique of big-city bustle.

Now, 15 years after I left Ontonagon for the last time, I returned. There are now 1,500 people, and half the stores in town are vacant. Half of the remaining ones are seasonal. The road I grew up on is now paved, and is really only about 2 miles long. I probably lived about 1/4 to 1/2 mile up it. The swing bridge is gone (luckily it's well-marked, or Jeremy and I would have been floating in the Ontonagon River a week ago, as I drove my remembered route home). There's a new bridge in another area of town. It's big and new, and really is out of place. The local sheriff's office has been closed up, and I didn't see one cop the entire time we were there.

The bars are still there. Most of them are even named the same. I didn't bother going in any. Houghton (population 36,000) and Ironwood (population 6,200) are still "big cities", but nowhere near as big as they seemed when I was younger. We drove all the way to Ironwood one morning to get some coffee. We laughed, talking to the owner, telling her we plugged "Starbucks" into our GPS, just to see, and found that the nearest one to Ontonagon was in Wausau, WI (168 miles away). She happily informed us that there was now a Starbucks in Marquette (119 miles from Ontonagon)! One Starbucks. We chose to do motel/instant coffee for the rest of our trip.

I grew up in a series of house trailers, but I didn't fathom how tiny they were until I went back to see them and realized that the larger of them, which I thought was normal house-sized while growing up, I could easily traverse from one side to the other in about 20 large steps.

At the end of the road I grew up on is an old farm from the '40s. Hibbeln's farm. The Hibbeln families were friends of ours all the while I grew up. They had one son close to my age and we played together a fair amount, and his grandma was actually the first person who taught me how to knit, while she was babysitting me once. My mom and I used to walk to the end of the road to pick clover for our rabbits, gather apples from the old orchard, pick thimbleberries and wild strawberries along the side of the road. Seriously, it was very Norman Rockwell, as we were often accompanied by dogs, cats, sometimes a goat or two, and, for a while, even a lamb. The property was always roped off with No Trespassing signs, but those signs weren't for us, you see. So, last week, before I went to my dad's house, I took Jeremy to see that area. We parked, got out, and walked out into the fields I spent my young life in. I showed him where the bachelor buttons used to grow, where the best spots for the sweetest clover were, and pointed to the back of the orchard, where there is an old hunting camp where we once found a whole colony of deer mice. While I was stumbling down memory lane, a big red truck pulled up and sat watching us for a few minutes. I thought nothing of it, as we'd seen hunters on our way up, and figured this was just more of them. Later on, at my dad's house, his wife La Vern informed us that we had been "busted". Apparently the red truck belongs to someone who now lives on that road, who saw us drive down it and followed us. He then proceeded to write down our license plate and race home to call Mrs. Hibbeln (I was on a first-name basis with her, but I'll keep it at "Mrs." here to respect her privacy), who then jumped in HER car and raced over to find out who was on her property (she lived a few miles down the highway from our road). We had been gone by then, but apparently she'd seen our car in my dad's driveway and called to find out who'd been snooping around the farm.

When she found out it was me, she obviously had no problems with my being there. She knew I was only trying to share a piece of good childhood memory with Jeremy. But this whole thing, more than anything that week, made me really sad. It was so different from the way things used to be when I was a kid (granted, that was way, waaaay back in the late '70s, early '80s). I guess it was my primary realization that the simple, trusting ways of small town Americana I grew up in have vacated the premises. Well, thankfully I can hold them in my memories, but it definitely drove home the original msg - you can never really go "home" again.

P.S. - I should mention that up above is one of my senior picture proofs, taken in 1988, after I'd just returned from India, over 130 lbs. lighter than the year prior. It was taken by Dan Urbanski, who was THE photographer in the area .. I doubt there is any senior for a 10-20 year stretch there that did not have their senior pic taken by him. I learned, when I was back there, that he has since died of cancer. I felt I should still give him the photo credits for the image of me in my beloved jeans jacket which did not get thrown away for YEARS, even after it was torn and no longer wearable. This pic was one of the "treasured posessions" I re-acquired while up in Ontonagon.