Rae’s Alley

Conversation via text message with the Bald One this morning:

Rae: Journey, Heart and Cheap Trick at the Creek this summer. We going?

Bald One: Fuck ya!

Rae: Love you!

Bald One: love you too

See why I love him?

…so little time.

I often joke with my husband that I love being able to go to the library and sites like PaperBackSwap because it keeps us out of the poor house. I go to the library about every other week and come home with an armload of books. I’ve slowed down a bit of late because I’m working on a show and I’m not reading as much at work as I once did. I’m still consuming books with a voracious appetite though. It’s a good addiction to have, all things considered.

The Bald One and I have a rather extensive library of our own. I spent today’s wet and dreary weather fest compiling it into a spreadsheet so that I could upload it to my Shelfari site. Well, at least my part of the collection. You can see my insanity here - a grand total of 153. About forty of those classified as “owned” are also appearing on my “planning to read” shelf. That’s a shelf that gets more out of hand every week. Partially because I get a chapter-a-day book service (thank you Suzanne of DearReader.com) and partially because I’m an NPR junkie and inevitably some book comes up that just gets added to the list.

I used to just drop the books onto my Amazon wish list, but then figured that keeping a reading list on a book-buying site was a very bad idea. First off, it was all too easy to buy books that I wasn’t sure I’d even like once I read them. The other reason is that Amazon tries to be very helpful and suggest books to you - and one of the ways it suggests is to look at your wish lists. Nothing is stranger than getting a suggestion based on a book you haven’t read to point you to another book you haven’t read.

The thing this reveals, overall, is I appear to have an insane sweet tooth that enjoys rotting my brain on fluffy romance. A good portion of the books I own could be classified as romance (Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Lowell) or fantasy/romance (Mercedes Lackey falls into this group). Then there is my Anne Bishop and Alice Borchardt books. Fantastic stories with sweeping worlds and real people that don’t shy away from the darker elements of life - but then I saw someone listed the Black Jewels Trilogy as a “paranormal romance” and I almost spit water all over the computer. Sure, there’s a bit of a love story in there - but anyone who thinks it’s all about the fainting girl-child into the arms of her demon lover needs to be smacked upside the head.

My sweet tooth, however, keeps me sane - I get to escape the “real world” into one where the bills get paid by mysterious means, the parties are excellent, the men are dashing and the women always say the right thing. And let’s not forget - the gal always gets her man.

Environment April 1, 2008

Do you feel that pagans/neo-pagans as a whole have a responsibility to the environment? Do you incorporate eco-conscious decisions in your spiritual work? Or do you feel that the two subjects should remain separate and have no interest in the environment as a whole?

I think that a pagan’s responsibility to the environment depends on how nature fits into their personal beliefs. I wouldn’t expect a follower a Kali to be terribly involved in saving the ecosystems of the world, for example. Diana’s folowers better though, or she might get a little pissed off.

For those of us without a particular patron, it becomes a question of how do you work. I’m mostly a practicing kitchen witch (which, is funny of late with my lack of cooking). I try to grow my own herbs and use them when cooking. I try to have sustainable methods of working in my own yard and do what I can outside in the greater community (even though my day job is with an agrochemical company and this may seem backwards).

I try to work, when I do something, outside as much as possible. But sometimes the world doesn’t want to make it easy on me and I’d rather do something than do nothing because the conditions weren’t perfect.

I guess where I’m going is that pagans as a whole have no more responsibility to the environment than any other inhabitant of this globe. Past that, it is up to you. But as a society, we’re lacking in meeting our responsibility to the world and we need to fix that, first.

For those of you who’ve met me, I have a thing for frogs. It’s not always the most obvious thing, but it’s something that seeps in to your consciousness after knowing me for a while. There are a few small magnets that I painted in my cube – a gift from my college roommates to keep me entertained before they came back to school. You walk downstairs into our main living area and the fireplace has an octagon of shelves centered on the side wall. The octagon is covered in all kinds of little frogs, from dime-store finds to one of Swarovski crystal. Our bedroom has a large stuffed beanie baby frog name Phoebe that was a gift for my twenty-first birthday and named after the local bar. And I can’t forget to mention Kermit and a good dozen of his fellow stuffed partners in crime hanging out in the spare bedroom.

The most obvious sign I have a thing for frogs is probably the bright green one on my left wrist. He’s been with me now for more than eight years, and I still get people asking me what bar I went to last night. He’s a tattoo; there to hide surgery scars and acting as a talisman against further damage. Just looking at it makes me smile, and thanks to a silly exercise my college senior year, he also relaxes me.

When the Bald One and I first visited the NC Zoological Park, I spent a good chunk of time staring into the little box of the poison arrow tree frogs. I always do. He bought me a pair of frog earrings to go with my obsession. Frogs of all sorts amaze me. I play with the ones that regularly show up in our yard…even going as far as to make sure dishes of water are available or leaving the lid off the jug I keep out there to water my hanging plants. So imagine my surprise at reading the Mini Page this week when it covered the Year of the Frog movement.

Then there was the ad from Clorax saying they are the first major brand supporter of the Year of the Frog. I’ve ripped the ad out and hung it in my cube, facing the hallway where everyone walks by. Courtesy of Amphibian Ark, I’ll also have the “official” Year of the Frog logo right next to it.

I’m also going to call my zoo. And see what else I can do locally to help out. If you’ve never thought about frogs as something other than slimy creatures in your garden…think about the bugs. Frogs help control the bug population in your backyard…and don’t you want to be able to have your cookout fly-free?

What can you do to help?