Friends:

Not 100% sure I've drank enough wine to get the creative juices flowing... some days, the posts just flow from my fingers into creation; other times, they need a little jump start...

Can't even begin to express how nice it was to *finally* have company over today; there's something about sharing where you live with other people that makes you see your life in a new perspective (sometimes good, sometimes bad, tee hee).
And I truly do feel that if it wasn't for company, I'd NEVER clean beyond the most obvious:
Starting at 7 am, in frenzied anticipation of witnesses to my poor housekeeping skills, I was cleaning the faces of the cupboards, washing the grates to the stove, etc and etc... we women are ruthless when it comes to domestic self abuse, so no matter how much I cleaned, dusted, tidied, and downright *hid* piles of clutter, it never seemed like it was enough. I even gave the chicken coop a quick brush up and weeded the gardens a bit, der!
And who really cares? Cause unless Martha herself was coming to call, no one would likely notice.
Can't tell ya, either, how much fun it is to hang with our old/new friends, Todd and Lynn:
Is it really that strange to be friends with your teenage boyfriend and his wife, even if the teeny bopper romance ended over 20 years ago? Really??
So do you think Jerry Springer will be showing up at the door anytime soon...
and will he notice that the chicken coop is in disarray and the gardens are a mess????
Sigh!

Friends are hard to come by, especially those who knew you before life got so complicated, so I'm not going to over analyze...
*Fun* people are hard to come by as well, so I'm glad that any awkwardness can be overlooked and we can enjoy the newness of friendships begun and those small bits of familiarity of the best and oldest of friends.

Damn! Now I've drank too much, and I'm sleeeeepy:-(
There's so not a set formula for liquid inspiration, and it seems I've overdosed... off to bed, to face a chaotic week of working too much and catching up on my finances, wheeeee!

p.s. read something interesting tonight, written by a man who recently ended his own life:

" Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."
http://reno.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html