Recently I was at Domino‘s home and his keyboard had the sticky keys activated which mean he left his shift button down for more than 8 seconds before touching another key.  What happened was it was stuck and he was afraid to try to unstick it himself.  I told him I pop my keys off all the time to clean under them, so I did that to his and immediately found the problem.  He had such a buildup of sludge from cigarette ashes dropping, spilled coffee, loose tobacco and dog hair — ugh — that his keys were sticking.  Typing on his keyboard was kind of like running in quicksand and he didn’t notice it until one of the keys stuck and gave him the error message.  The sticking itself should have been an error message but he had to wait until one flashed on the screen for him – a relatively minor 2 x 4.  And what’s of course relevant is that the sticking keys and sludgy keyboard simply reflected a lot of things going on in his life right now, stuff he needs to take the time to get to the root of and clean up once and for all.

Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God. Ram Dass

I got a message to replace my CYAN cartridge on my printer last month, then printed 45 more pages with blue on them until it got so light I really needed to replace it.  Usually I just use it until the printer refuses to print until I change it.  To me, it’s not about being cheap.  It’s about making the most of my resources and not being wasteful.  Like I used to glob toothpaste up on my brush because that is how I grew up seeing them do it in the commercials.  One day a friend mentioned I sure wasted a lot of toothpaste and from that day forward, I use just a pea size, not a brazil nut size portion to brush my teeth.  So don’t let society – or commercials on tv – tell you how much product you need to buy and use.  You can get more brushes out of a tube of toothpaste.  You can get lots more pages out of your printer by not replacing the ink cartridge at the first error message telling you to do so. I think of them as suggestions well in advance.

I just threw out 4 cans of Maesri curries.  Taking a look in my food pantry, I recognize my habit to over buy.  In the case of canned goods, often by the time I think about using them, they are years past the expiration date.  In this case, 3 years past.  Today I realize that the state of my pantry reflects the state of my digestive system last week: a steady accumulation of too much food, so much there’s no room for it all.  Last week I got a good reminder of what happens when I do that. Continue reading →

Domino had been trying to reach a government organization through an automated phone system and she had exactly 3 days to get through.  She began calling on Day 1.  The line was busy.  She called more often on Day 2.  The line continued to be busy.  On Day 3, she began calling as soon as they opened and called continuously for 90 minutes.  She kept calling while she dropped 2 of her 3 kids at daycare, got gas and shopped for groceries, continually doing the automatic redial.  Line was still busy.  When I arrived at her house for our appointment, she told me she had to continue calling and she had one child sick.  She was exasperated, she had things to do.   One of them was get her little one happy and settled so we could have our time together.  I suggested I continue to call for her while she did that.  Why did I get through when she couldn’t for 2 days?   Continue reading →

I’m writing checks to the IRS for my quarterly estimated tax payment and the checks to pay the property taxes. Thank you to everyone whose dollars allow everything to be paid on time, thank you to me for never doubting it and thank you to You-Know-Who for, well, making everything in the universe possible.

You know that dream where you can’t find your car and you’re trying to get home and no one has a phone that works? Yeah, just had that one.