Girlettes' Best Hanukkah ever!

The girlettes vote this the BEST Hanukkah ever. For this, the sixth night, I took them to work, having invited a few days ago a new coworker who is Jewish to join us in candle-lighting.

At 4:15 p.m., three coworkers joined us outside by the dumpster at sunset. Vincent insisted we have a menorah. (I was just going to stick the candles in a snow drift.)
"We can use an apple," he said--bags of apples having been donated that day-- so I ran and got one.
Perfect!

Coworker lit the candles (I'd brought a box of little matches) and sang the prayer. He said he hadn't done this in years because he doesn't have family. "You all are my honorary family." And he said his ancestors were happy to witness him doing this.

 

And so were the girlettes.

It was very, very good.

R.i.p. Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate I voted for—when he was creamed by Reagan.

I’ve been saving books at the store to display when Carter died – – the day to do that is today. 

What I choose as the best symbol of that changeover is Reagan taking the solar panels down off the White House that Jimmy Carter had put up in 1979.

What if Americans had continued in the the direction Carter was aiming– – towards sustainable and responsible use of energy?

Swap out

First thing I did back at work yesterday was swap out the Xmas end-caps. There was damn little display-worthy material to choose from because ever since Halloween we've focused too much on holiday crap. (It'll be different next year.)

I rounded up enough for an Animal theme--including leftovers from a big donation of owl items. And I added BOOKs. Yes!

I've seen other thrift stores match books to housewares, etc. I'm going to try sneaking some in... (Feels like sneaking because almost no one reads at my workplace.)
_________

There's almost no reason anyone would notice this neurotic switcheroo of mine, here:
after I once again exported posts from my newer blog, noodletoon, into my old blog, l'astonave, as I do every so often (to keep them together), I realized--finally!--that I could just SWAP urls!

The loss is, all the comments didn't transfer. They're back at the old noodletoon url--now gugeo.blogspot--which I didn't delete.

The gain is, all my history is in one place.
And I like this old format better. For instance, it shows the running count of each year's posts. This year I broke 300 for the first time since Covid year 2020.

In the 17 full-years I've blogged, I posted more than 300 times in eight. I love having all that self-written history--my own personal entries in the Mass Observation Project that blogging is.

(Is Blogger really going to remove all abandoned blogs? Wouldn't they be a sociological resource? The heyday of blogging is only maybe a dozen years? And while a probably most of them weren't brilliant, blogs caught they mood of the era.)

I've always been an archivist, even when I was little I helped my mother keep up with family photo albums. I love blogging as place to access personal history. What was I doing, who was around?

Who was bink's dog? She's had wire-fox terriers since 1999.
The current one is eleven-year-old Astro. The best! Here, biting the rope toy I gave him. Poster Boy for Xmas.

_____________

I got my hair cut yesterday after work. Karla said of my self-administered cut, "There's a hair style in here, somewhere".
To find it, she cut my hair pretty short. No curls. I feel slightly sadly shorn. But I also feel---tra la, tra la--lighter! It's a relief to have no straggly hairs in my face.

I'm taking the bus to work in half an hour. It's warm enough to bike, but it rained yesterday (!) and I'm afraid the road's are too slick. I'd hate to wipe out and get injured. I'm just feeling strong again, from work.
(Karla told me her 72-y.o. friend John is in the best shape of his life because he started working in the Amazon warehouse. Ha!)

Not-eating added sugar is starting to feel normal. At first I was nervous and didn't eat ANY added sugar. But I've found that if I eat it in rare instances, it doesn't send me back to eating quarts of ice cream, as I'd feared it might.

I'm NOT adding in occasional treats--that would be disastrous for me, I know. I just mean, like, I'd asked Annette to bring fruit for Xmas Eve dessert, and she made a fruit salad with honey. It seemed rude and (hopefully) unnecessary to avoid it. Eating that was fine.

Heading into 2025, that's a big intention:
to stay off the white sugar (syrup, honey, fructose, etc.). 
And––to add in beautiful food, like I've been pondering.

I kinda forget that I DO like non-sweets. [eye roll]
bink and I stopped at Cecil's kosher deli the other day, and I bought turkey pastrami, cole slaw, and onion rolls. With horseradish mustard = The Best Sandwich! I'm drooling writing this.

What else...? Must ponder. I mean, messing with food is BIG enough, but I do like to think... What are my Soul Life intentions?

Do you set intentions?

__________

PS. Walking from the bus to work, I snapped this photo of my haircut. When Marz saw it last night she had said, “Princess Di”.

2024: My Year in Review: "Despite everything, it's still you."

 January 2024, here we go...
             Above: Cider at Black Walnut Café (where Marz works)

Below: Karla trims Penny Cooper's hair. "I paid a dollar."

February: I resign from the Thrift Store after six years as BOOK's & Toys Lady (I'd started to volunteer Feb. 2018)

Sundays: coffee with bink

MARCH:
Below, left: I start work as a special-education assistant (SEA) with Autistic high school students.
Right: Student Joseph makes me a googly-eye card for my birthday, which is also Presidential Primary Election Day. (Results: President Joe Biden, who later drops out, vs. Trump.)

A day in the life...

April: Special-ed outing to bowling alley.
Right: Bookmark I made for student Dylan of Frisk, his favorite character in Undertale video game. The game ends with the line in a mirror: "Despite everything, it's still you."

 

BELOW: K sends a 2009 "Timehop" of me & fellow bloggers Joanna O'C and her  (all taking a selfie at once)

JUNE Below: Summer Solstice & black ash basketry with bink

August
Printmaking class at Highpoint (bottom row, right)

...with (left) Kate; printing The Moth Burial:

BELOW: Emmler pastes up my print, How are you anyway?

Marz moves (in her new car) to Duluth to attend UM-D.

I return to high school for ONE DAY, then quit: I feel like a prison guard.

SEPTEMBER
Visiting Marz, Lake Superior at Two Harbors:

BELOW, left: Page from student JF's notebook
Right: my lino of Pegasus jumping Duluth Lift Bridge


My trio of 'Childhood Tech' prints:

"Faith Hope Love Thrift" print, based on my workplace's boarded-up windows (right), 2020, after police murdered George Floyd

 Penny Cooper is lost in Duluth! But a kind stranger sets her up on a light pole by Speedway Gas Station

October: 
I am rehired at the thrift store (yay!).
L to R: Manageress, me, Jester, Amina,
              Big Boss, E.D., Doc, me

Toys Recreate "The Jolly Flatboatmen", Henry Caleb Bingham (1846):

WaPo humorist endorses Kamala Harris after paper pulls endorsement for US president:

November: but DT wins the election.
bink's Facebook post the morning after:

Unrelated. Books in the Murderbot series by Martha Wells that I've re-covered:

____________
DECEMBER

Below: Winter Solstice; Magi on the way

Me, “Sophie”, & Mo decorate the girlettes' tree:

Christmas Eve Day: Toys Re-create Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" (1565):

. . . On we go!

Toys ReCreate "Hunters in the Snow"

"Hunters in the Snow" (Winter)--cropped--by Pieter Bruegel, 1565, at the Vienna Kuntshistorisches Museum www.khm.at/objektdb/#object-327

I was really disappointed no one was skating today, but a colorful family walked by on their way to the skating hill, so there's still some of the background activity that makes Bruegel's painting so wonderful.

 BELOW: On the radiator, drying off chilly snow. Not everyone here ended up in the picture.

In the original “Hunters in the Snow” painting, one of the hunters is carrying a dead fox over his shoulder. So we had a version with a fox, but as a friend, and a dinosaur as one of the dogs. I like it a lot, but I thought it turned out too colorful.

Christmas Eve Day in the Village

Marz drove down from Duluth last night. Cars were flashing her on the highway, and she realized her tail lights were out! This morning she's off to the mechanics. Luckily they're open until noon this Christmas Eve Day and, surprisingly, not busy. 

Marz is getting a crash course in car ownership--a couple days ago she got her first flat tire!
I was telling my coworkers about this over lunch, and everyone had a lot to say--including Big Boss, who recommended Marz get Triple A roadside service. There's this village attitude--a pull-together/swap information attitude toward cars that I, never having owned a car, have missed out on.

Winter Village (below) is full--little red candles ready to be lit before dinner--and across the room, the Magi are making their way. There's still a toy creche to set up too, if there's time.

"The village needs everybody," said the Metaphysical Cowboy on youtube. "You have to have all kinds of different people. That's why communes fail--they attract too many of the same, like-minded people. Don't feel bad if you act like an idiot--the village needs you!"

That's one of the things I LOVE about the thrift store--it's a village of everybody. Like a spider web, the tension of lots of different lines holds it together. I'm so grateful I was gone for 8 months this year. I could re-set and re-approach with fresh eyes. I haven't bothered to blog about them, but all the old annoyances are still in place. I'm not as bothered. I see the store as sort of an organic animal---shambolic, for sure, but weirdly self-sustaining. Let it be.

While most of the staff are pretty poor (although some, like me, didn't grow up that way), there's a mix of well-off volunteers in the mix. The store always gives a paltry Christmas bonus--last year, I got $50. This Monday, I got a check for an unheard of $200, even though I'd been gone 2/3rds of the year. Others got a lot more. An accompanying letter said that an anonymous donor had given a gift so everyone could get a big bonus.

I immediately thought of the volunteer, a retired doctor, who'd attended the young man dying of a gunshot in the parking lot this summer. I'd blogged about how she'd replied to my text thanking her for being there for him:
"I really did nothing, could do nothing but hold some space for his soul to leave his body, and to witness the results of the violence many live with every day."

She and I have discussed the store in depth, in the past. She thinks the staff is treated atrociously, especially financially.
I texted her saying the donation was the sort of thing she would do.
She texted back, "It takes a village."

Yesterday as I was getting ready to leave (early) after lunch, coworkers still in the break room were discussing a recurring topic--what awful punishments should be meted out to people who hurt children. Medieval villagers could be no more inventive.
I say nothing.

But as I was about to leave, I said, "I'm leaving for Christmas now, let's have a happy moment. Let's sing a song!"
And one of my newer coworkers, Ms Linens, leapt up, came over to me, and started to do simple line-dance moves I could follow. We sang a few lines of "Happy Holidays" while the others laughed and applauded.
I left in a happy mood thinking, I am in the right place.
______________

It's a good gray day here for recreating Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow"--so that's what's on today. It's cold though, so it will have to be fast.
Then around 4 pm, I will start cooking the Moroccan fish for Christmas Eve dinner here, for bink & Maura, a couple other old friends, and Marz and me.

I hope you all are enjoying these holidays--and if not, that they pass quickly for you!

Magi on the move

The magi came “from the east”, following a star – – so they had to have been traveling for months – – but they still arrive late! (They don’t arrive till epiphany, January 6.)

But maybe they’re not late, maybe they’re considerate of the stress around a new birth, and they wanted to wait till all the kerfuffle had died down and Mary was feeling restored.

These garments are actually for the Infant of Prague—but they were donated to the store without an accompanying statue of the infant.

The toys said they would far rather be magi: “babies are the  boring parts,” it was declared. However, on January 6 they would like to be referred to as the Triplets of Prague. (After …Belleville?)

Happy Winter Solstice!

Museum Hours

After years of despising art museums as sterile boxes, I've started to enjoy Mia, the art institute here, and I think I'd like to visit other museums to see certain paintings--including ones the toys have re-created.

I could start in New York City (Goya's "Red Boy") and Wash DC (Manet's "Dead Toreador"), but it would have to be a world tour.
I haven't done this painting with the toys yet, but, for instance, I'd love to see Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" (1565) up close––it's at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum.

Now we have snow again (unlike last winter, weirdly), I was looking more closely at it this morning, thinking how to re-create it.
I'd never looked closely at the skaters. They look so modern.
Hockey sticks!

I will go to the lake this winter, maybe during the next couple holiday weeks, and photograph the ice rink. The figures will look similar.
The most important thing for this re-creation the quality of the light.

The painting reminded me of a movie I'd loved, Museum Hours (2012), about a Canadian woman in Vienna to attend to a dying cousin in a coma... At loose ends, she befriends a guard at the Kunsthistorisches museum. A lot of it is him, the guard, musing on the paintings.

(I remember bink found the woman character so annoying, it ruined the movie for her--but she didn't bother me.)
_______________

I watched a disappointing movie last night--Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002), about guns in America. I'd stopped watching Moore's movies years ago, and this one reminded me why--it's heavy-handed and one sided.
Bam, bam, bam. No nuance.

I turned it off halfway through---BUT, I was glad I watched the first half because there was Timothy McVeigh! Moore interviews the brother of Terry Nichols, TMcV's associate.

I'm almost done with Comfort Me with Apples, the memoir by food writer Ruth Reichl--it also disappoints me. It's as much about her love life as food, and I don't care about that. I mean, it's normal--heard it all before.

But she is inspiring me a little to cook, as I've been thinking I might/should do. Her chapter about eating in Thailand made me want to try cooking Thai food again. I used to make a good Thai chicken soup... There are Asian groceries not far from me that sell lemon grass, galangal (like ginger root), lime leaves, and the like.

Raspberries with Avocado

I made up a really good dessert last night. The food shelf had had perfectly ripe avocados--I only took one, you know they only last a minute––and it occurred to me one would go well with frozen raspberries I had on hand...
I was right! Tart and creamy, and so pretty, pink and green.

Maybe I will enjoy eating food, not just getting high on sugar.

On Weds. Manageress complained that I hadn't brought hot lunch, as I usually do. Ha! I went to the food shelf, and last night I cooked up more vegetarian ("impossible burger") meatballs and spaghetti, and made sauce with oddments of vegetables.

I hadn't brought lunch on Weds. because my friend Volunteer Abby had told me she was going to bring in her annual Homemade Holiday Treats that afternoon. I didn't want to compete for kitchen space.

Abby is an excellent baker, and very generous. She covers the breakroom table with bakery and goodies she makes for people to take home in containers she provides. She must spend hundreds of dollars on the ingredients--for not only the usual holiday sugar cookies and gingerbread, but for sugared nuts; caramel toffees; buttery caramel corn...
She doesn't eat it herself--she just likes to cook, and she is someone who loves--needs, even--to stay busy.

Most people totally love the spread, of course.
But even before this year when I stopped eating sugar (have I mentioned?), I found the onslaught a little disturbing. Though it's all good quality ingredients (real butter), and beautifully and lovingly prepared, it's more of what we at the store already get pounds and pounds of almost every day:
free sugar + fat, in the most seductive forms.

It reminds me of my Uncle Tony, who joined the US Navy at 17 years old, just in time for the end of WWII. He said the Navy would heap piles of individual cigarettes on the mess room tables for the sailors to take as many as they wanted.
"You had all these young men at sea," he said, "you had to keep them occupied..."

My uncle died of emphysema.

To be fair, Abby also brings in fresh fruit almost every week--leftovers from the school lunches where she works--and it often goes uneaten.
An old apple has a hard time competing with a chocolate-dipped pretzel.

On a lighter, brighter note…

I just got an email from Marz with a screen cap of her semester grades: all A’s! 

I am over the moon proud of and happy for her. I’m not surprised at her grades; but I’m, … not ‘surprised’ exactly, but, um, impressed to witness her all semester calling up strengths I didn’t know she had – – probably because I didn’t recognize them in their latency because they are not my strengths: drive and discipline. 

Ya know, I don’t mean to just brag about my “child” [not my child] here. It’s also that I want to share how moved I am to see the resilience of the human spirit. Marz was not exactly encouraged to flourish, but here she is. It’s like how I got all choked up over the reopening of the cathedral of Notre Dame. 

Humans can do great things, if we get on it. You see the cathedral and you think, we could have rebuilt New Orleans in that short time too. (Oh, we knew we could have, but here’s the counter-example to what we did do.)

Here in town, we could get something brilliant at George Floyd Square instead of still squabbling over the tattered dump that it is.

And for our individual selves, we can be great, whatever that is for each of us. We can shine. 

We do shine!

"What is your deal?"

There's a new guy at work--a young, toy-loving (!) punk from the East Coast, "in recovery", Jewish...
I asked him if he'd like to light candles for Hannukah with the girlettes.
"Are you Jewish?" he asked.

"No," I said, "but some of the dolls are. Or, they say they are--but really, they just like to set things on fire."

(You know. Zoroastrians.)

A couple days later I was telling him we're soon entering his sign, Capricorn, and what great energy that is. (He's anxious a lot, and this seemed like a good perspective to share.)

He looked at me suspiciously. "What is your deal?" he said.

Then he immediately took it back––"No, no, I didn't mean that..."––and walked off to do something else.

But, honestly, I was wondering the same thing about him!
You're smart, creative, active... What are you doing here?

What am I doing there? What is my deal?
I don't know...

To do: work on an elevator pitch in reply to that.

And you?
Can you say in the length of a comment, what's your deal?

Stretching Toward Solstice

Last night was the full moon, and now we're in Solstice week!
Winter Solstice is this Saturday,  Dec. 21 (3:20 a.m. Central; 9:20 a.m. Greenwich).

I love this magic dark time for reflection and stock-taking––I've certainly been feeling that ––("Who were you and I to each other, in our previous incarnations?")––and, in astrology we are entering the cardinal [active initiator] sign of Capricorn, the sure-footed goat = a good time for setting intentions.
We can scamper up sheer cliffs!

And pain is a great motivator, eh? Work is a lot of standing and lifting on concrete, and my lower back has gone into crunch-freeze mode.
Thank you, Back, for alerting me that I must attend to you and your (my) musculoskeletal friends.

I remember a physical therapist explaining to me, spelling it out like he was amazed I didn't know this:
"You have to take care of your body."

Sure, ha, yeah, doc, I knew that! (In theory.)

So, after waking up again with a locked back, this weekend I started stretching. It was an eye opener:
stretches that had felt like literally nothing when I was younger are now like trying to open a frozen lock.

Except, of course, I am not metal.
I am living flesh, and gentleness unlocks me.
_________________

Here is a metal object that needs my attention:
I brought home this little Underwood typewriter to test, and it almost works... I think its only problem is a build-up of greasy dust.
I will start with odorless mineral spirits and a toothbrush on the type bars, which stick.

Reindeer ^ is pulling glass bulbs to Winter Village. (Thank you, Tracy, for the Radio Flyer!)

L & M & Annette came over yesterday afternoon for banana-oat pancakes (these are so good, even with no-added-sugar, people asked for the recipe (I add 1/2 cup flour because it's too liquidy)), served with Gala apples baked with cinnamon and plant-butter.

As Penny Cooper (in my right hand, below) had hoped, we decorated the Girlettes' tree again this year. (Another use for a towel woven by Joanne: tree skirt!)

As I was cleaning my apartment, I became fed up with all the LONG hairs I shed, so I took my pinking shears and cut my hair.
It's even a little shorter than this now:

The Girlette calendars arrived Saturday--I am going to take them to the post office this morning on the way to work. (Again, warm enough to bike--in the mid-30s!)
I'll mail them media mail-- hopefully they'll arrive by the weekend.

Enjoy the descent into the dark, everyone. . . It's velvet!

Traveling Toward...

Good things are traveling to us, of which we know naught.

Santa and her reindeer will be On the Road!
(This was my card a few years ago, but they head out every year.)

BELOW: “Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem"; detail of the Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475) by Hugo van der Goes, Flemish, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Other kinds of things are on the way too, of course.
Like, did you know, our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are falling toward each other [per NASA] at the rate of [mumbledy mumledy numbers], and it's looking like we will collide in some 4 billion years? That's around the same time the Sun dies,  so one or the other, good-bye Earth.
_____________________

Yesterday I was browsing through blog posts tagged 'Christmas' (on l'astronave), and saving photos to post online (like, on FB where no one saw them before)--or to repost them here because I love them.
And I have been blogging so long, I forget some of my posts.

Especially some little oddments, like my holiday Costello:

Gosh, reading my posts, I can see that I was down last year more than I realized. Mostly because of work--and there, mostly because of the bad ending with Ass't Man, who left within weeks of our final falling out around Halloween.
(I'd confronted him about his disturbing (to me) behavior when drunk, and in shame (I think), he got defensive and counter-attacked...
And that was the end of that.
[Funny to think he would tell this story entirely differently.])

The idea of reincarnation has been so helpful to me this year.  The idea, that is, that this life is a repeating Spiritual Psych Lab... gives me permission or space to acknowledge feelings, especially ones that appear to exist contradictory to fact.

I mean, last year I knew I was sad and mad about the bad ending with Ass't Man, but I felt I "shouldn't" care so much about this guy who had so often been a jerk to me.

There're other ways to think of it, though, that aren't so tit-for-tat. Relationships aren't a balance sheet. There are a lot of X-factors.
If I add in the idea of reincarnation, it makes more Storybook sense:
This person was someone I am connected to karmically--we've met before in other lives (or, to be less fantastical, I have met the type before in this life)--and I want it to work out, get better, this time. And then it doesn't, and I have feelings about that.
Simple.

That doesn't have to be literally true to be helpful.
Telling the story that way creates a wedge, a little opening where I can feel what I feel, without feeling it needs to be logical.
I don't have to defend it intellectually.
[Adult Child of an Academic Family, here. ACAF.]

Musing on reincarnation, I had a funny little thought about my mother too:
I would very much like to meet her again.

I felt a little exited by the idea of seeing her, like I used to feel when I was going to visit her in my twenties--a decade when she was doing pretty well.
I always remember that on one visit, her downstairs neighbor told us that our laughter had kept her awake until 3 a.m.--but we were so happy, she hadn't wanted to call up and tell us to be quiet.

A mental-health diagnosis never really fit my mother.
Her story was so much more complicated than "a chemical imbalance". That is true for a LOT of people.

I mean, the WORLD is out of balance--how do we stay on our feet?
Various ways...
And some people don't.

I'd say my mother's 'diagnosis' was, to put it simply,
"She was a sensitive soul, and the world was too hard for her."
___________________

Penny Cooper said, sometimes things are too hard for the humans.
And then she went back to roasting marshmallows. (The Girlettes are not really interested in human psychology.)

[This ^ was at Winter Solstice, in Housemate's backyard in 2019. What was one thing that was traveling towards us? Covid-19!]
___________

The idea that the soul would try, try again... that disastrous endings aren't the end forever... I like that.
Even if it's not truel, there are lots of souls like that living right now, and factoring in the idea that This Is Not ALL of It, when I meet them, I can enjoy them, remembering I AM NOT THE SAVIOR (which my mother wanted me to be).

We're not going to work out all of our karma, get it all lined up and sorted--and we can't do it for each other anyway (though of course we help and hurt and otherwise influence each other).
But as St. Paul said,
"Beloveds, work out your own salvation."

Isn't that a curious thing to say? I used to think that sounded mean.
But really, it's a high calling:
ultimately, you are your own. You "belong" to you. Or to the Universe, if you like.

This in no way means it doesn't matter how we treat one another!!!
Rather, the opposite.
We are glass ornaments, and it helps to treat each other gently.
But if you don't like an ornament, or it's broken and cuts you, you can set it down . . . and walk away.

I am trying to say too much, too simply here.
But it adds up to a kind of jolly message, in my mind:
RELAX.
Bad things happen--or things that feel bad to us--like galaxies colliding and suns exploding. It is the law of nature.

Friendships end.
People "unalive" themselves. [I think that word, unalive, is a work-around so social media sites don't flag you?Anyway, I kind of like it!]

It's not that these things aren't tragic.
They are!
But... they are not the whole story.
______________________

Well, anyway, the upshot is, I am in a much better mood this Advent. It helped to feel angry at my mother this fall, for the first time.
And it helps to acknowledge that last year I was just plain old sad about Ass't Man, even if he didn't "deserve" it (a ridiculous concept anyway.)

Advent is a time of Traveling Toward...
All these atoms, or souls, or stories going round and round and bouncing off one another... It's too complicated to chart.
Scientists aren't even sure that the Milky Way and Andromeda WILL collide. Much less are they sure of the weather tomorrow.

I am pretty sure, however, that L & M and Annette are coming over later today for banana pancakes. And the house is a mess! So that's how I'm going to move: toward cleaning it up.
And next week, Marz will be here, and I'll make Christmas Eve dinner.

Here Marz is ten years ago! She is hanging Mr Robinson, the Flying Angel of Christmas. (This was the tiny one-bedroom we shared the first coupla few years after she moved here. She slept on the couch for two years. My goodness.)

And then, we will wrap up the first quarter of this century.
It did not go as I'd hoped (though I am personally happy and well enough).
You too?
I remember on New Year's Eve 1999 thinking maybe we were on the edge of a peaceful prosperous world.
*PEALS OF CRAZED LAUGHTER*

Stop it right now, you all! says the Angel. [from 2018]

Well, as they say in Reincarnation:
Everyone's got karma, or we wouldn't have incarnated here.
Or as St. Augustine said, we're all just pilgrims here.

But sometimes we get it together. Souls have fun!
Starsky & Hutch in the North Woods (2017)

This ^ is my adaptation of a photo-manipulation/paint-over by fan artist extraordinaire, Mortmere---her original is S/H on a snowy beach: "Wonderland", here.

One more favorite--below--my minimalist manger from 2020, the pandemic year when we were locked down.

"Fear not!"