I'm Now Blogging From the Securty Of Texteditor

OK here we go. Because of all the trouble I have had lately with composing posts in the
blogger editor, and the protocol conflicts with Word, per Veronica's advice, I am using Apple Textedit. We shall see how this works.

As many of you know, I have had a problem with Blogger devouring some of my posts. Well
low and behold, I got an email today, from none other than my lovely friend Rachel in the UK, telling me that the post I entered last night, was on Google Reader! Very kindly, she copied it, and emailed it to me, so all I had to do was copy it again from her email and repost it. This time it got published, and as far as I know, the Blogger demons have not been able to touch it! Thank you somuch Rachel! You sweetie, you! I just wonder why Google Reader would keep it, but Blogger wouldn't. Strange, but Blogger seems to be going through difficulties lately.

This Textedit is a bit weird. You have to make sure that you don't exceed your margins, because it's such a basic word processor, that it does not automatically wrap your text around to the next line. It's kind of like using an old typewriter, where you have to manually hit the return bar to advancethe platen, and return to the left hand side of the page you are typing on, only this is even more primitive, because unlike a typewriter, there is no bell to warn you that you are running out of space on that line.

I went to my Mother's tenth floor condo for supper last night. My sister, niece and bro-in-law were all there. My brother-in-law delivered the most welcome news, that he would not be there for the next couple of weeks, because he has a high school reunion to go to, and then he plans to spend a week visiting his son and daughter-in-law in upstate New York! I'm sorry.....I know that's uncharitable of me. For the most part, he was actually unusually civil this time. Perhaps he has taken the hint, and is back on his meds. I don't know, but just the two of us actually had a very civil exchange in the parking lot outside, as we were were leaving. He really wouldn't be a bad guy at all, if he would just leave his ego at home, when he goes out.

I'm listening to the last two CD's in my collection of the Wiener Philharmoniker's Gustav Mahler's symphonies, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Gloria sit Patri Domino, at the end of the second to last CD had me in tears! How did I ever neglect to listen to this wonderful composer, for so long? What a treasure!

Jenny blogged today about guilt. There are so many things that happen in our lives, that cause us to harbor so much guilt. Sometimes, when we have done something shameful, the guilt is justified, but often our guilt is foisted upon us by others, and in those cases we have to stand up for ourselves and reject it. We cannot allow others, no matter how close to us, to lay guilt trips upon us. I'm sure we've all had someone in our lives who has done this to us. In my case it was usually my mother. She was famous for making me feel guilty, whenever I disagreed with her plans for my life, which happened to be a frequent occurrence . When I was young, I fell for it. In fact I continued to fall for it until just a few years before my father died. They were visiting a few years before Dad passed, and I was sitting in my sister's backyard, after a particularly nasty exchange with my mother in my sister's kitchen, that left me in tears. My Dad said, "She really knows how punch your buttons, doesn't she?", and I had to agree. I asked him, "How in the world have you been able to live with her all of these years?" His answer was, "It hasn't been easy." I think that was the first time that I was ever able to connect with my father on an emotional level, and I really began to realize just how much I loved him. He had stuck up for me several time when I was growing up, and my mother was going crazy on me. Yes, she could easily do that, and she made me feel like I was the crazy one. It wasn't until I was much older, that I realized that she was the crazy one and not me. Thankfully after she discovered Zoloft, she has become a new woman. Not completely sane, but far more able to cope with disappointment, and much much more easy to get along with.

Just this Monday she announced at supper, that some distant cousin wanted to throw her a 90th birthday party on January the 1st, and this cousin wanted to know if all of us wanted to come. Well........this is a cousin that I have seen exactly twice in 62 years. She wants to have this party on Jan. 1st in the mountains of Pennsylvania! My first reaction was, "Well I'm not going." My mother's immediate response was, "Why not?!" I simply said. "Because I don't want to." In the old days, before Zoloft, she would have argued with me, about my choice, and tried to make me feel guilty about it, but this time, when I said I don't want to go, she immediately accepted that as a legitimate choice. Of course it also helped that my niece said she would have to work that weekend, and my sister also said she wasn't too keen on driving up there on NewYears Eve either.We all reassured Mom that we would give her a party in Richmond, where we could all attend, and if our distant cousin and her family wanted to come down, that would be fine too.

I hope you all got a chance to see may last blog, which I re-posted today, thanks to Rachel's rediscovery of it! It has to do with what a long way we have come, since the days before the internet.

Melissa XX