Things I'm grateful for:
Bob. He lived through Vietnam! He loves me even though I'm old. He keeps me laughing. He's always thinking and inventing...
Jack. My favorite and only son, who is a little lost, but keeping on keeping on.
Jack. My favorite and only grandson, who keeps me laughing.
Maggie, my dog, who is smart and loves cats even when they are bopping her.
Missy, Spike, Red and Itty, the cats who love to bop Maggie.
My house, which is big and almost clean...
The Dorkmobile.
The woods, here and in Maine.
Camp.
Books.
A computer to write on.
A Journal to write in.
Friends. (You know who you are!)
My health. I am not dying of an atypical heart attack. I have shingles, and between famcyclovir and prednisone and ibuprofen, I feel GREAT! Thank god I had the shingles vaccine last year or it would be much worse.
My 12 step programs.
Life itself.

Tonight on PBS, there will be The Airmen and the Headhunters about WWII aviation in New Guinea. The best book on the subject is Air Combat at 20 Feet by Garret Middlebrook. Great book and great American. I admire him more than I can say and he explains flying and flying a B-25 strafer/bomber over the mountains of New Guinea.
Then is POV-The Way We Get By, a documentary about the veterans who greet all the incoming vets at the Bangor Airport. Gotta love those Mainers!
Finally a documentary called Hallowed Ground. It is about our overseas graveyards.
I am going to watch them all and probably cry. I have been crying a lot lately. I cried when I hit Florida, coming home on Sunday, cried at the sight of Bob, today I cried when I met a guy in the Winn Dixie who had driven tanding craft in the south Pacific in WWII. I thanked him. He said he lost a lot over there, and I could see he meant his friends, so I said, "I am glad you made it home." Walked off and cried.
War sucks.
Bless them that survive. They are never the same.

I had a really nice homecoming. Bob and Maggie and the three outside cats (Red, Spike, Little Ninja, formerly known as Itty Bitty) were glad to see me, and Missy, who loves Bob the best, tolerated a few hugs. Bob and I spent the whole first day just chortling at stuff that happened and the lame jokes we share.  Big Jack showed up with Little Jack to visit and pick up some tools from our garage. He says he has plenty of work. He was living here till Bob tossed him out over the summer, and he seems to be doing better not living here. Bob certainly is.
We asked them to supper and they stayed. It was fun. They played hard with Maggie which made her day. We are not that into running around, and she sometimes looks depressed that we don't play more.
It is November already and I have not vacuumed out all the spiderwebs and stuff that accumulated over the summer. So I am working on that one room at a time. I also got a new broom which works much better than the old one which is smaller. Bob says that if we ever move into Gainesville we will get a smaller house. I agree as long as we have a guest room and I have my own office... or a library with two desks.
I have started a sci-fi book and just started a new PTSD book in my Scrivener program by importing some research data... Yeay! I love that program.
I am avoiding writing and vacuuming, so I will stop here!

I have been to a number of wonderful presentations yesterday and today., but the kicker was a  bunch of government hacks who presented their warped way of "proving" that only 12 % of OEF/OIF veterans have PTSD and then that those that have it are not, by self-report (of treatment-avoiding active duty servicemembers), really impaired by it either... The insanity of that may not be self evident, but they didn't use the diagnostic criteria, but another method because the diagnostic criteria gave 'em a 26% rate of PTSD, and the idea that active duty guys who don't want to be shoved out of the service will admit to being impaired... I mean it could be a simple lack of knowledge of human nature (which seems to be common among psychiatrists...) but to me it is ass kissing the government/military which does not want high rates of PTSD.
Naturally, at the end, I got up and said how ridiculous it was to do self report on impairment... Ask their wives! Ariah Shalev, MD also got up and suggested that instead of concentrating on PTSD they look for the total burden of combat including depression anxiety and physical disease. The guy just blew him off. Dr Shalev is a brilliant thinker and speaker about PTSD and taught us that it is a disorder of healing. Most people heal from it, but some don't, usually when they get no support and have to avoid talking about what happened.
It is hard to believe that the same stuff that happened during and after Vietnam is happening again. Even down to the exact phony statistic: 12 %. During Vietnam the first study of guys with PTSD found the exact same amount of PTSD in the military. They didn't even ask if the people in the study had been in Vietnam...
I ran into a lot of old timers whom love, Charles Figley, who founded the ISTSS, Jim Monroe, who used to work with my mother at the Boston VA Outpatient Clinic, Art Blank who headed the Vet Centers, Sandra Bloom, who showed me the names of brain based reactions we all have that can become PTSD, Terry Keane who was a grad student when we first met and now heads the PTSD treatment center in Boston...
I am really glad to be going home to morrow morning. I miss Bob a lot.
I almost forgot the BEST thing. The people from the Palo Alto VA came with a companion dog, whom I met and fell in love with. They have the guys in the Inpatient PTSD program train companion helper dogs for wounded vets. We saw a couple of video clips and Huff, the dog, showed us his stuff. It is a wonderful program.
Bed time!

I am up in Atlanta at the 25th Annual meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. I am one of the few non-mental-health-professionals in the place. I've been a member for 20 plus years, started when I was writing Recovering from the War. The founding members helped me a lot with advice and information. Today I was feeling a bit lonely since I don't know everyone anymore, when I stopped to talk with a guy. Someone else came up to talk to us and both of them told me that everyone uses my book, my Post-Traumatic Gazettes (which I wrote for 7 years) and my kid's book, Why Is Daddy Like He Is? That I am a legend and the one person they know is on the side of the veterans. I just about started to cry for the second time at the conference. It meant a lot to me.
Earlier I went to a pre-meeting institute on incorporating spouses in treatment. It brought tears to my eyes too, because there was nothing like that, no treatment even for Bob, much less for us, when we were the young vet and his wife having a hard time and needing help. I am so grateful for what is known and done these days.

I'm sharing a room with Jenny Andrews of notalone.com. It is a website for veterans and their families. There is a long interview with me on it. She came down to do it and we became friends. She goes to some workshops and I go to others. We found an Indian restaurant to die for half a block away. I ran into Johnathan Shay, whom my mother introduced to me 20 + years ago as "a young psychiatrist who is willing to learn." We talked about writing back then, and now he is the author of Achillies in Vietnam, and a McArthur Fellow. Well deserved. Saw Arthur Bland the former head of the Vet Centers and an old pal too. He wrote early seminal articles on PTSD and the difficulty of getting diagnosed which I used in my book. Ariah Shalev, who is the one who first said in my hearing that PTSD is a disorder of healing... Jacob Lindy who was fired from the VA for helping vets too much gave a wonderful persentation on helping the new vets.
Then there was the session on how the other countries are helping their vets, the Australians starting up a system, the Canadian system which is better than anything we have and finally a British video for troops coming home which was pretty funny till the last bit where the shrink talking head tells them that all these symptoms will naturally dissipate in a few months, but if they don't you can get help... Naturally I stood up at the end and said that was dismissive, and he got really defensive and said we don't have a VA system in Britian, and besides of all the people in Britian with PTSD, 75% of them get NO TREATMENT... I'm like GREAT! What a fucked up excuse. (sorry, I swear). Between that and some of the pontificating at the keynote, I tend to get wrapped pretty tight... It was right after that I had such a nice talk with the two people.
I also picked up a bunch of interesting poster presentations (they hand out copies), one of which was on veterans kids, so I asked the presenter if she'd read the late Sarah Haley's paper on the subject, and one actually on Soldier's Heart (the first American term for PTSD after the Civil War) although not using the term. Bob had that too.
Now I am watching Mrs Minniver and writing this. Time to close. Pretty happy, actually.
 

 

 

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Charles De Lint

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I had 3 of the Wee Free Men, but I gave two away.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Nope.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Samuel Vimes or maybe Vetinari

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
I used to read War and Peace and The Lord of the Rings every year. Persuasion is probably third.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
all of Laura Ingalls Wilder, but when I was 14, I had to have Moby Dick for my own, and had to putch a big fit to get my parents to buy it for my birthday. It was the ONLY thing I wanted.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
wpadmirer got me to read some werewolf book, but it was lame. Since then I have read Patricia Briggs and like hers.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Maybe The Kings Peace by Jo Walton. She's a great writer, and this book is a brilliant creation. On the other hand, so is Pratchett's Going Postal

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Recovering from the War, so people understand about war... I wrote it.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
No idea.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
It depends who makes it.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Any book I like.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
Hasn't happened so far.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
I read a lot of books. Probably some SF space opera. No, wait, I read Twilight. Twilight for sure.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Sometimes when I am reading professional books on PTSD, my brain shuts off and I start screaming to myself (usually) "Stupid motherfuckers! Fuck them and their lack of understanding of trauma and their middle class lives."

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
That wierd one where they capture the German barbarian and everyone gets killed at the end, ?Titus andronicus

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The Russians.

18) Roth or Updike?
How about Atwood or Proulx?

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Margaret Cho

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare or Chaucer

21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Literary fiction. ZZZZZZZZ! Except for a few titles.

23) What is your favorite novel(s)?
Persuasion

24) Play?
It is a tossup between Lady Barbara and The Importance of Being Ernest

25) Poem?
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Song of Napalm by Bruce Weigl
Insensibility by Wilfred Owen

26) Essay?
What Did You Do In the War Daddy?

27) Short story?
All of Isak Dinesen's

28) Work of non-fiction?
Air Combat at 20 Feet by Garrett Middlebrook

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Martin Cruz Smith, Terry Pratchett, Charles De Lint, Jo Clayton, Tamora Pierce (glad they let her write big books).

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I have no idea. There are a lot of writers I don't enjoy, but someone obviously does.

31) What is your desert island book?
Lord of the Rings

32) And ... what are you reading right now?
Bedpan Commando by June Wandrey (WWII nurse's memoir), Half a Crown by Jo Clayton. The King's Name by Jo Clayton. Beka Cooper:Bloodhound by Tamora Pierce,

The Red cat playing with one of Maggie's stuffed toys, tossing it with his claws. Then he jumped on it and bit it, stopped, made a face and spat it out. It was as if he'd said "Yuck! Dog spit!"
More fireflies.
Talking to someone from a VA who was ordering 100 copies of my pamphlet, The War at Home, so they could give it to each person who comes through their program! YEAY!
Maggie, Spike, and Red walking the circle with me.
Chinese food so I didn't have to cook.
Cool breezes all day.
The times when my knee didn't feel as if someone had just kicked it.
Maggie.
Bob.

This morning I had both cats and the puppy playing with tennis balls at the same time.
Long talk with Bob about the new Solo book which is set partly in Pakistan where Solo and the fundamentalists clash. Guess who loses?
Got piles (bags) of mixed paper taken to the dump for recycling.
Moved furniture in my office.
Re-posted my book Recovering from the War on Amazon. I hadn't gotten any orders for a while and suddenly wondered if I had sold out the ones on there, and I had! Someone has one on there for $99 as a rare book???
Fireflies.
Puppy.
Knee.

I had a great lunch with wpadmirer  yesterday, my first in a couple of weeks. I miss them when I don't get them. We talk about our men, books, movies and all sorts of stuff. Laugh a lot. It is good for my soul. liblibgar  is about the only person I feel as close to, but I never get to see her by herself. Sounds to me like I should do something about that.
I organized one corner of my office, using my BRAIN, instead of simply shuffling papers. I need to figure out an arrangement so that my Patience Press business stuff is not mixed in with my writing stuff: research and ideas for stuff on ptsd and ideas for YA books I'd like to write for fun, sf/f stuff. So I have the beginnings of an organizational layout, and I am moving stuff into general areas and then will see what I can do to make it easily accessible. I have to save a space to pack books, etc for P Press.
I am also going to list a couple of my other publications on Amazon.com: Why Is Daddy Like He Is?, Why is Mommy Like She Is?, An Explanation of PTSD for 12 Steppers (When I get sober I feel crazy), and After the War, a pamphlet I wrote during the first Gulf War for the wives of all veterans. And I am going to give my latest and favorite pamphlet an ISBN number (The War at Home) and list it too. The pamphlets are only $1.00, so at first I was thinking why bother, but they have good info in them. wpadmirer said list them and then later if I want, I can combine them into a book or whatever.
I also, during my cleanup, found a sample Post-Traumatic Gazette Book, which I don't remember starting, but the layout is much nicer than what I have been doing, which is sort of reproducing the 3 column format. I am seriously considering a switch. It would be easier to paginate and index if I started with a whole new master page... Decisions, decisions. I plan to make it an ebook.
Today I have been packing up ornaments, which is fun, but am completely stumped as to where the lid of one of the new clear plastic boxes is. It was here a minute ago, but seems to have been vaporized by tiny aliens (I can't see them either) so I decided to take a break and write on here.
Big Jack is working on a shed addition to the garage, which will house the tractor and all the wood we have been splitting from the trees we cut down to make the landing zone. Bob and I actually split some this week using a hydraulic splitter. It was fun but it made my arms sore, tossing it into the trailer. His friend Tommy is helping him. They are scabbing rafters together out of the oak planks we have from the last time we cleared an area. The roof will be supported by what looks like a six by eight beam, twenty feet long, also from the trees we cut down in '93, and the first treated electric pole we had which they gave us when we buried the power line, cut in half to make two posts.
We will have firewood for years out of this and some of it sadly enough is cherry. I plan to grab some of that and use it for bases for my bugs. It is beautiful. Jack and Tommy brought me one piece that smells like cherries and has a sort of red goo in it. A place where the tree was wounded i suspect. It is really neat. I love wood, especially twisted curved wood.
I have been making bugs again. I got clear plastic boxes like the ones candles come in, to put the little ones in. My dipping station is not set up, so that is one of my next projects. I have to find my tweezers and tiny scissors, too, so I can nip off excess hot glue strings, whcih I have no idea how to avoid, before I dip them.
Someone in my 12 Step group decided to start a Big Book study a half an hour after the 12 Step Study meeting on Saturday mornings. I find that annoying since I am trying to start a new Thursday Night meeting so I can have three meetings a week, spaced out over the week. I am working on willingness to go to that one too, since wpadmirer is usually okay with a later lunch. However I have been meeting with a person I sponsor for an hour after the Saturday meeting and will have to see how she feels, since she comes from as far, in the opposite direction, as I do. (25 miles)
The thing about this that posses me off is that those who started it are dieters who have been trying to work the program with just a food plan, in isolation from the meetings, which they drop in on every once in a while, usually late. We can't recover alone, and no food plan is the answer, because the answer is in self-examination and transformation through the steps in a community of recovering people who support one another. One of them has been yo-yoing for years and talks constantly about weight loss and her magic food plan, which the program got rid of in the 70's because it was unhealthy and crazy. She goes on it, loses weight, falls off and eats compulsively for months or years, and then comes back once she has forced herself back onto her crazy diet, and brags. Yesterday she said she had lost 14 lbs in two weeks. The sickest person in the room (a woman who comes for a few weeks every few years) applauded her. We don't cross talk, but I felt like saying something unkind! I know this is so obvious to me because I have been slipping and sliding around myself, but I do have the only requirement for membership, "the desire to stop eating compulsively," which is different than the desire to lose weight (which people always seem to find again, ha ha.) Just a stupid rant, but it was on my mind.
The top to the box finally materialized on the TV cabinet... I always wonder if it were there the whole time???
Back to work.

Little Jack was sick at school today so we have him for tomorrow at least if not longer. I love having him here! He was here for the weekend, too. I am happiest when the boys (Jack and Jack) and Bob are here. My guys!
Karen has pneumonia, but she is going to work anyhow. Been on antibiotics for several days. She still sounds bad, but I guess she feels better.
I bought thread today. I have some hemming to do for little Jack and all my thread is 20 years old. It gets brittle. I went in to Gainesville to take Jack to school. Karen works at the same school so I got to see her classroom. Jack seemed tired but I didn't realize he was sick. So then I went over to Sam's Club and got 4 huge jars of artichoke hearts and tried to get Jack the game he wants for Christmas, but it was sold out. Had coffee with my friend Linda, then got myself a happy meal with a boy toy (a Bionicle-goes in Jack's stocking). went to a meeting and then home. I got to the Post Office and there was Bob with my two boxes of internet orders. I wonder if  am getting sick too because I came home and took a nap.
Tomorrow I have a couple of orders to send and then I am going to make some bugs to give away.
Too tired to write more

If McCain/Palin were to win, the Republicans might be electing Nancy Pelosi. If McCain dies, Palin will probably put herself in a position to be impeached, since the law of the land seems to be outside her range of information. Then the Speaker of the House is next in line. Ha ha ha.

That was the most screamingly funny movie, Death at a Funeral, that I've seen since Sarah brought out Speaking of Sex one Wednesday night a few years ago. I had to put the subtitles on because I was laughing so hard I was unable to hear the sound track. I want to see it again!!
I thought another couple of people were coming, plus my son, so I made way too much food and bought two rotisserie chickens at Publix. So chicken soup, chicken in cream of mushroom soup over rice, here we come.
I spent the earlier part of the day in town, took the dorkmobile to the Lincoln place to get the cruise control turned back on now that they have a part that won't cause a fire. The service writer was the most smarmy, sleazy, oily, too-nice, let-me-take-CARE-of-you man I have ever met. I wanted to hit him with a big stick. And when I went in and paid, he hadn't even bothered to check if the key was around. I assumed it was in the car, but it wasn't, so I had to go back in and he had to go find it. What a phony.
I got my ass over to Tuesday Morning, a sort of high class remainder shop, and they didn't have one thing in the flyer, but I asked, and that stuff will be in Apr 1. Oh well. I got two little doormat rugs, and a set of boxes with a gorgeous Chinese bird painting on them. Gave my ex-daughter in law (daughter of choice, too) one. She had come out to clean my house because she needed money to pay the electric bill. She is coming again Friday. I really love having someone else do that crap.
kylielee1000 came out with Pat and wpadmirer and it is always great to see her. We spent one afternoon last summer sitting on the big rock out in the lake talking books, books, books. Next summer she is going to cook us some lobsters. Hurray! I do not want to cook them myself but I will eat them!
Gotta go to work! That means carry the powerbook up to my office. Ha ha.

Saturday we were supposed to have a bunch of people working with Jack and Bob to burn the brush so we can saw up the  big trees into firewood. So no one showed. When I got home Saturday afternoon, Big Jack and I went out  and cut brush to burn. I couldn't believe how out of shape I am! My hands are not strong so I had tp brace the clippers when I did cut through something thick.  So after an hour I had to give up and totter back to the house and rest. It pissed me off.  I used to be able to cut haul and burn brush all day. When I was 30, 40, 50... After sitting for an hour and drinking a bunch of ice water, I went back and worked more slowly for another hour.
I like doing that and I kept finding things I could use for bug making. One of the downed hickories had golden buds instead of the usual grey ones. Little golden bug feet...
I tried to get up at 6:30 this morning, at 7, and finally did at 8. Later when I tried my usual walk, my legs started hurting so much I had to go back. I am determined to get into better shape! This is ridiculous. Then I fell asleep three times during the day.
I did go down to the river with Little Jack and Austen, and sat on the dock while they caught minnows and the sun went down behind the trees. Jack took the minnows home where he has a fish tank.
It was a good day despite all the sleeping.

Had 3 little boys out here, popping off cans with b.b. guns, Jack, Austin, and Austin's friend Daniel. It was fun to watch them. I never had a bb gun. Bob did. I wouldn't let them have b.b. gun fights, though, although I bet they would have liked it... Bob did.
I am reading Holmes on the Range, which WP mentioned a while ago. It is great.
Had a quiet day. I dipped bugs. I make little bugs out of acorns and stuff. I will photograph some and get wpadmirer to make me a user pic out of one. They are hot glued together and then I dip them in polyurethane to make em sturdy.
I also found the broom which had disappeared after Jack and Austin swept the porch last weekend. So I swept the living room and dining room and kitchen. Wooo wooo! There are little oval live oak and water oak leaves everywhere, but when I swept, I found a lot of sand too, and cat hairs.
I hate housework.
Made pasta with pignoli, garlic, raisins and spinach for supper. (Saute pignoli and garlic in olive oil. Soak the raisins in hot water. Cook the pasta and drain, and dump in a big bowl with all that stuff and a thing of fresh spinach which cooks as you toss it.)
I went to the library today. Didn't even know till yesterday that it was open on Sunday. Picked up some reserves.
Bedtime!

I am downloading an OSX update tonight. For the nth time. I spent 2 and a hlf hours at the High Springs library trying to download it. When I started it said it would be 2 hrs, then 15, then 4, then 2, then 4 again. I finally gave up because I had to go to the post office and mail a book to Scotland, but the post office was closed. Ha ha ha! Bangs head on car window. Then I went to Winn-Dixie, the store for morons, run by morons, and stocked by morons. Do you have liquid starch? Uh, I dunno lady... Oh here it is, (you dumb fuck!)  oh gee, I din' know that!
i got the starch so Jack and I  could make play-dough like stuff. Very gloopy.
Bob flew his RC helicopter beautifully this morning and crashed it this afternoon. It was pretty funny. I didn't even know he was flying till he walked in with the fragments of the blades. OOOPS!
My friend Jan wants me to come visit her in Oakland. I would like to go but I feel like taking the time would be wrong. I am supposed to work and slave all the time. Gotta think about it. I would love to see her. She was my best friend in High School, got 1600 on the SAT's and went to Cornell where she became so left eing she later got thrown out of the International Socialist Party for being too left wing. We have lots of fun together.
I walked a half mile again today before it rained.
Little Jack was out of school today, and I am dropping him off at school tomorrow morning, going to pick up my glasses, and other errands. Should be fun.