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Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary has died.

A part of my childhood is gone forever. I just hope Puff is waiting for her in Honah Lee.

Literally. These are shots of Ian that I took today, wearing some family heirlooms. The three smocks shown in these pictures were originally worn by my late uncle, Wethered Woodworth Jr, in the mid-1920s. My mother has pictures of him, herself, my cousin John, me and my sister in these little outfits, although, my mother, my sister and I didn't wear the bloomers under them. Those are for boys only.


Ian in the first Woodworth smock.

( More Pictues of Ian in Vintage Wear Under the Cut )

Hello one and all. I just realized that I haven't posted a great of actual content since we've been back from the beach. There are any number of reasons for this but I feel I should at least let you all know what is really going on here.

Ian: is mostly fine. He's cut 2 teeth in the last 3 weeks and appears to be cutting another one right now. He had a doctor's appointment on Friday and although he's only 21lbs, he's 31 inches long, so he is growing. He had a wonderful time at the beach and seems to be thriving despite the chaos around him.

Brent: is busy getting things settled at work so we can spend 10 days driving across the country. This is actually a pretty good time for him to be unavailable because he has no real deadlines until the beginning of October.

The Move: We've hit some snags here. Our search for movers has been stalled by the holiday weekend but I'm hoping that we will have a moving company by the middle next week. Our apartment is trashed and in chaos and its killing me. We are currently without any moving help because Lynne has to get her belongings out of her mother's house by the middle of September (when it becomes her brother's house) and her deadline is sooner than ours. But that means we are short on boxes and extra hands and its slowed us down.

Our Finances: are a hopeless disaster and will be for the next year to 18 months. Enough said.

Me: This is the hard one. I'm bearing the brunt of the stress here, alone. Brent is wrapped up in work and needs to be for at least a little while longer. I'm packing the entire apartment on my own because he's too busy and no one else has time to help me and the weight of it all is killing me. And then there is physical pain. Sometime on Tuesday, I hurt my back. I'm not sure when it happened but by the evening I was in extreme pain and nothing was helping it. Brent looked me over and couldn't find anything muscular wrong. Right now we think its neurological. I'm OK if I'm standing but if I sit too long or lie down for too long, the pain becomes really bad. And my usual pain remedies haven't done anything for it. So I'm not getting a lot of sleep and I'm not getting a lot of rest in general because I can only really sit long enough to catch my breath.

Why haven't you been to the doctor about this, you ask? Because we still do not have insurance and we cannot afford more than one doctor's appointment uninsured. And Ian wins on that score. And why are we still without insurance, you ask? Because despite being assured by any number of people, some of them here on LJ, that I should qualify for the COBRA subsidy, I was turned down for both COBRA and the subsidy. That's right, due to a screw up on the part of my former employers, I couldn't get my paperwork into COBRA on time and even though they told me that they would consider an extension, I would not qualify for the subsidy (making my monthly COBRA payments more than my rent). So why am I not on Brent's insurance? Well, that is because HealthNet is full of assholes. When we realized that our attempts at going onto COBRA were going to fall through, we contacted the insurance broker that handles AEG's policies and she submitted our paperwork to HealthNet. A month later they still haven't decided whether on not they will cover us and on Friday they sent a bunch of paperwork to fill out about pre-existing conditions, even though we had already sent them the notification from the previous company with all that info on it. Basically they are looking for a reason to refuse to cover us. The broker, who is a really wonderful person and has done everything she can think of to help us, keeps getting told that we will be covered for future expenses but they won't give us cards yet because they don't know if they can cover us from the beginning of June. We find this highly amusing, since Ian's 12 month appointment was covered by my previous insurance and we hadn't been to the doctor again until Friday. And we had already rescheduled that appointment twice to try and get the health insurance issues sorted out. We couldn't wait any longer because Ian needed his immunizations before we head east. But I can't go to the doctor for my back and that means that to all intents and purposes I'm crippled until further notice. If we had the money to do it, I'd be contacting a lawyer right now and suing HealthNet, the COBRA Admin company and possibly my former employers. But my life is screwed and I have no power to make any of the above pay for what they have done to my family.

This would not be a good time for anyone to defend the health insurance industry in my hearing. They are at fault here. We are the victims. If you can't support us, shut up.

And none of this deals with the fact that we won't have insurance once we leave California. Brent is going to talk to his boss about that next week...

I'm tired all the time. I'm in pain all the time. I look at our apartment and I want to scream. And I have no where to go with it all. help...

I just finished going through my pagan and new age titles and here is the list of the titles I'm getting rid of. If you are interested, drop me an email or comment here. Comments will be screened.

Wheel of the Year – Teresa Moorey and Jane Brideson
The Sabbats – Edain McCoy
Celtic Myth & Magic – Edain McCoy
A Witches Guide the Faery Folk – Edain McCoy
O Mother Sun! – Patricia Monaghan
A Bard’s Book of Pagan Song – Hugin the Bard
People of the Earth – Ellen Evert Hopman & Lawrence Bond
Magical Rites from the Crystal Well – Ed Fitch
What Witches Do – Stewart Farrar
The Wicca Book of Days – Gerina Dunwich
Sanctuaries of the Goddess – Peg Streep
Women’s Medicine Ways – Marcia Starck
Dancing with Dragons – D.J. Conway
Celtic Magic – D.J. Conway
The Magical Household – Scott Cunningham & David Harrington
Witchcraft Today (book 1) – Chas S. Clifton, ed.
A Wiccan Bardo – Paul V. Beyerl
The Celtic Twilight – W. B. Yeats
A Gift of Awakening – Gill Farrar-Halls
The Veil’s Edge – Willow Polson
Magical Meditations – Yasmine Galenorn
The Heart of the Goddess – Hallie Iglehart Austen
The Divine Feminine – Andrew Harvey & Anne Baring

I just saw pictures that Brent's boss posted on FB. They had a line wrapped around the booth at 11am edt to buy Adventurers. They may sell out of it before they get to the end of the line. I guess the game is a hit.

Happy Birthday to my loving (and long suffering) Husband, Brent!

After spending 2 days in bed with an injured back, here is the updated book list. All the new titles are bolded.

( Fiction Book List as of 07/22/09 )
I'm about half way through the large bookcase in Ian's room (in the Gs alphabetically). Once that is done, I'm moving on to the dining room, where the rest of the fiction is (all 5 book cases worth). I hope I'll have everything through J done by the end of the week.

As before, contact me here or by email if you are interested in any of the titles here.

Ian off to the pool in his very "Maryland" bathing suit. I just love the crab on his little butt.



Sleepy Ian. He was totally wiped out after a day with Auntie strixluna. We had to wake him up to feed him dinner.