each day an adventure in alaska: the house of cards is starting to tilt...

Happy Valentines day...it will be tomorrow but it is almost tomorrow. Skelly is ready for the celebration. Skelly sort of demonstrates the length of time i have been without a Valentine in life. i have dogs and i have Skelly...none of these companions cause me too much trouble.

i do seem to have a big bruise on my hand without explanation. Ivy was in jump mode today on the Monday walk but i suspect others took the brunt of that. oh Ivy Rose.

i find myself feeling very tender with her in her time of heat. poor kid...she is such a love bug. she still wants to sit on my lap...even though she is a bit big for it really, but who could resist her.

Tusker filled in for her in her final class today of Rally. even though the teacher, who is easily distracted and chats with others, didn't watch Tusker and i do our run...i felt my boy did excellent considering he's never done this before. well done Tusker and me!! she did have me take 2 toys, one for each so that was nice.

will be nice to not have class for a bit.

this moose was crossing Patterson as i was headed down the street with the kids. we'd done the loop in Bog first then headed out into the neighborhoods. a common route. had saw a moose in the bog as well. passed by within 20 feet. it was laying down so thankfully we weren't worth the bother to get up.

the house of cards...well, of course, it will depend greatly on which news source you are looking at and who you believe i guess. Faux wasn't even covering it as far as i could see. Flynn quit. no doubt on suicide watch now. so far he seems to have gotten off easy but time will tell. he had been in contact with people in RuS during the election and was in contact the same day that Pres O had put sanctions on RuS for interfering with the elections..it may be deeper than that though since flynn had been incontact for months perhaps.

he apparently had told Rus to not worry about sanctions that it would be taken care of once iitoo came into office. Rus would have never turned the other cheek if they didn't have such assurances no doubt. seeing these folks who only watch Faux or read bri news...they will pretty shocked when the truths do come out and the house of cards really crumbles. i will take a positive nibble of the truth escaping with some consequences. damage continues to be done though.

popped over to one brothers page that i do not follow. so apparently i have two brothers who like to post some pretty nasty stuff. sadly, there is a iitoo news page on fb now. crazy...you get your news from him! the guy lies or misrepresents the truth over 50% of the time. average for politicians is not great but for this guy and his crew!! wow!! those who claim to be the moral/ethical party will break all morals and ethics and values to stay in power and get their way.

also had posted some article that i'd seen passed along some of my Mormon friends. they must find a way to diminish those who leave the church. you can't just leave it in peace. the article was something about how most people who leave the Mormon church do not tend to join other churches and often end up atheists, agnostics, naturalists...whatever. i recall a conversation with him where he said if people are agnostic it means they just don't care. love when people make assumptions about your beliefs to make themselves seem to be like the great spiritual giant and you some Godless empty soul.

what really annoys me about this is that those that judge you don't know you. they haven't bothered to know you. they don't ask you, they just assume. i have my spiritual side, i pray. i may not be clear on what the big plan is but i believe it is not needed. i don't believe there is one truth, one path. i don't believe one group is all right and the rest are all wrong. i believe there are many ways to make your way spiritually in this world. that there are good people who are Christian, good people who are Muslim, good people who are atheists, good people who are Hindu, good people who are Buddhist, good people who are transedentalists, naturalists...there is not one path to heaven or enlightenment or whatever awaits us in the next life, if that is what happens.

there are also terrible people who believe all sorts of things. in my mind it's more about how you treat others, how kind you are, how you treat this earth and the animals we share it with. it's about your intentions, it's about your acceptance of others without judgement.

do not assume i am weak in spirit because i don't show up to a building on Sundays to worship. do not assume all the reasons i left the church of my youth just to make yourself feel better or superior or right. i did not comment. commenting to a few of my siblings is not worth the battle that happens. they want to be right, they Know they are right and when you start out with that belief in any conversation it changes it from a conversation to lecture.

a wee bit of snow today, just enough to make my latest flower garden a bit coated.

always makes me happy though.

we have a speaker for our WARIS lecture April 11. :-) it went really well last year so hoping we have a good run again.

speaking out for walrus is not a bad gig in this world. you just never know where life is going to take you. be open, be available and take the ride.

from last Mondays walk.

California has had drought for quite some time. in most parts this has given way to too much water. nearly 200,000 are being evacuated in Oroville and south of it. the damn is holding but the spillway is not looking good. i had joked that i hoped iitoo wouldn't with hold federal funds out of spite in the event of an emergency in CA. heard today that actually, the Governor had requested state of emergency declaration a few days ago but it has gone unanswered. so perhaps he is withholding due to spite. he seems pissed at any state that didn't vote for him.

this is not how i have ever seen a potus react in office.

always beautiful light in the winter months. well hell it's beautiful year round, just different.

more puppies in scarves. so cute.

had a lovely post on fb i thought. nobody got pissed at each other. was just asking about spirits and when folks felt they entered/left bodies and if they felt spirits were fluid. i was much more expansive in how i worded it. just was curious how others view this.

as a nurse i feel i have looked in patients eyes and felt they were dead. i have looked in the same patients eyes to feel that the spirit/entity had returned. then saw those patients go on to recovery. not sure when the spirit would enter. i don't deal with the birth side of life. seemed most did see the spirit as fluid and able to enter/exit the body fairly readily.

i had watched a live feed on facebook where there was a anti-abortion rally along side the pro-choice rally that had showed up and eclipsed the first. abortion is the big issue. many who vote GOP will not change over because of this one issue. guess part of me was trying to find a different approach to it all.

the pro-choice person was much better spoken, but also a bit older than the anti-abortion woman, who was 23. not sure if the interviewer selected someone young for this purpose. anyway. the pro-choice person said a fetus isn't a human until it's born. the battle is always this when is a fetus a human? age of viability? was thinking at some point viability will be moot since at some point we will no doubt be able to take a egg and sperm and then do the entire process start to finish outside of a womb.

i mean they already create the zygote in the lab. it's viable in the petri dish really. it's always been silly to me to try and pretend that a fetus isn't human and i think this denial just infuriates those who are anti-abortion. when a human egg and human sperm get together it is genetically determined to be human. at no point along the growth cycle will that egg and sperm create a rhino or butterfly or whale.

very few women i suspect take getting an abortion lightly. there will always be those few who treat abortion as an acceptable form of birth control but really most of us that are pro-choice would rather see women have better access to birth control and sex education and that this would help decrease the number of abortions...which is really something we all have in common.

i have always felt if i had gotten knocked up at some point, an abortion is not the way i would go, but i do have more alternatives than many women out there. i never felt in danger, i had a means to care for myself and a baby. i had family and friends who, even if "disappointed" would have made sure i was ok i suspect.

i do think it should be available, safely and without judgement though. if i had been brutally raped and did not want to carry the rapists baby i may have then made a decision to abort. thankfully, i never had to make these choices. i don't choose to be pro choice for me, i do so for others.

that was what made me ponder the idea of the spirit. if our bodies are more of a vessel for our spirit and our spirits are fluid, could the spirit of an aborted baby just move on to another vessel and carry on ? just thought the idea was interesting and thought perhaps it was some way to find some common ground. i did not take it to an abortion level discussion on facebook..that would not be wise. more just collecting thoughts.

it was also nice to have that conversation without anyone yelling or name calling or getting pissed in any way. i will say, thankfully, friends from various walks of life responded kindly and respectfully. thank you guys!!

that is a start.

our society for sure needs more of that. talking and listening. there are a few siblings i am sad to say that i feel i can no longer have a conversation with at this time. it's sad really. it's not just them i'm sure. i feel attacked and i tend to attack back. i have felt attacked many times over the years and at some point you recoil from it all. we see the world very differently.