It's raining, it's pouring = no baseball game for grandson numero uno today.

I finished up my required internship hours on Thursday.

Uncle Sam raided my coffer.

Classes are doing their semester end whirlwind of activity. I can't believe this is my last semester and how quickly the 2 years have gone.

Graduation is May 18th. My parents are coming, and possibly my brother and his family.

Party time.

I drove from Weatherford clear to Azle last Sunday in search of the bluebonnet fields that were there in the past. On the way back to town I figured out exactly where they had been. It looked like the fields had been plowed over. I think I'll go looking for the ones Jarhead mentioned.

I need a social life. Where do you find one of those?

And a real job.

I am okay, Sili, just a little winded and confused.

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

This article in Texas Monthy is about the little Panhandle town I lived in. I first moved to Perryton around 1980 and left in 1988 thinking I'd never go back. Ah, but fate and oil field jobs have their own agendas because back we went for another 8 years in 1996. It sounds cliche but it really was a great place to raise children, and the second time around, to find a wonderful son-in-law.

Please don't make me move back there a third time, though.

Don't want to be like this person anymore

http://dallas.craigslist.org/ndf/mis/1669678038.html
"Your first love or return love or "soulmate" whatever-- is BS. If it were perfect, if you were meant to be-- you would be. period. This silver lining romantic wanna be bullshit -being in love with a non relationship-being infatuated with "what couldve been, " loving a ghost of what was--- makes it easier for you to just fuck around and excuse the crap that you will likely pull with the next girl. The next girl who will probably try to prove to you she is so worth it and you will just hurt her. You will waste her time because you wanna brood in fairy land with unicorns. What it all comes down to - is you are an assclown. An assclown who is in love with the game of what you cant have. Because if your true love came tomrorow-and said buddy im here to stay-- you would be bored in 6 months. You love the chase, the game. I am not trying to down play your fantastical notion of teenage yearning--but Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the play. It's very glamorous when you are 15-- but you are not. Grow up, put your big boy undies on, and realize that things dont work out because they didnt work in the first place. Im not trying to be mean- weve all been there. But you gotta smarter than your ideas. Move on. Stop ignoring your life, stop pining for lost things, and stop trying to make imperfect things perfect. It doesnt work. Sorry to burst your barbie bubble."

Spoooooky

The rat bastard was interested in psychics and supernatural phenomena. Someone, heck not just someone, it was his paramour (although I didn't know it at the time) told him about a specific psychic who plies her trade at the annual Renaissance Faire in Waxahatchie, so off we went to the Faire. He had his reading which was taped for later review. He was very close-mouthed regarding what she said and for some odd reason the tape was garbled so we couldn't listen to it.

I guess I would classify myself as a skeptic and a paranoid when it comes to the occult. I'm not sure I believe it in but at the same time I don't think it's a good idea to mess around with it either. I also know there are many, many people who use their so-called psychic abilities to hoodwink the unsuspecting and gullible. With that being said, do I reconcile what was told to me during the one tarot reading I've ever had as coincidence, self-fulfilling prophesy or as a flat out psychic prediction?

*I don't know if it's still going on at this time, but around July of 2007 the rat bastard found out about a monthly psychic fair held in a convention room at a hotel off one of the interstates in Dallas. It might have been an odd choice for a family outing when one weekend we decided to take my daughter and her family along to the fair, although that's neither here nor there. Just before entering the convention room there was a registration table set up with a huge whiteboard behind with the names of the various psychics and readers and a scheduling grid beside each name. You decided what you wanted then picked a person and a time slot that was empty and paid your fee. It seems like it was $15.00 per transaction but I don't recollect, maybe it was just $5.00.

I forget what the rat bastard signed up for but both my daughter and son-in-law had their palms read and my grandson was interested in the pretty rocks (crystals) for sale. I decided to have a tarot reading done. The lady I chose, whose name I think was Eli, looked normal, by that I mean she wasn't dressed in scarves and bells and voluminous skirts. I don't recall many of the specifics of the process except after a general greeting she had me split the cards before she laid them out. The only card I remember being on the table was the hanged man and I believe he was inverted but I'm not sure.

She told me that by the end of the year I would be facing a huge crisis. She saw a strong person helping me through the crisis. She said when she'd drawn the same cards her strong person was, literally, her attorney who helped her through some IRS problems. She said I would be surrounded by and have the support of family and friends and at the end they would all be proud of me and I would come out of it all okay. She had more to say and gave me a time frame for it all, but I've forgotten it all, too.

I thought...well, okay, that was interesting if nothing else, and tucked it away. I couldn't see a looming crisis on the horizon. Everything was going well, we had no money problems and the rat bastard and I were getting along better than we ever had. Little did I know...

In October of that same year things started not adding up. I became suspicious and did a little spying on the rat bastard that turned up some information that could either be benign or could mean exactly what it turned out to be, he was schtupping his secretary. Thus began my crisis.

So, was the reading a genuine prediction? Did it merely make me suspicious enough to keep my eyes open for trouble on a subconscious level? Was it woman's intuition or was the rat bastard careless because he wanted to get caught? Or was it all an ironic coincidence?

Whatever....it's an oddity.

* I checked, it's still there. Dallas Psychic Fair

I really like Facebook but I'm thinking I need to make another FB profile and add only those who don't play all those damned games. I'm tired of wading thru the farmyard muck to read what's going on with everybody.

Good God, people, get a grip.

Notice I wasn't brave or mean enough to post this on Facebook....