A Lady's Life...

Liberty or Loss of it.

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:28:00 +0000

Inside Job -Charles Ferguson speaking with journalists, politicians and financial advisors, about the economic melt down.
http://w3.newsmax.com/a/aftershockb/video97.cfm?PROMO_CODE=CACB-1

I can't say I exactly understand what these people were doing with dirivitives etc... but I do know that I remember when they spoke of de regularization, it left me with a question mark as to what this all meant.
Why did they need to de regularize?
Why are financial institutions not accountable to their customers?
Banks are there to help customers not to destroy them. If they destroy them then they should be held responsible and accountable. People are.

Why make things so complicated no one understands what they are doing?
Government doesn't understand so they let them do whatever.

Obama was elected saying he will make financial institutions accountable but then he hired the same people responsible for the crash and still paying them public funds.
They stole public funds and are being rewarded for it.

Now It is very nice the Republican Nominees committee is talking about how bad things are
but what do they know? Will they hire the same evil people to run things to their advantage?
And after watching this movie it is obvious to me every one in these companies should have all their money taken away from them and CEO's put in jail.

To think how many people were defrauded by giving them non existent mortgages and taking away all their lives' savings to leave them on the street is just plain evil and then people have to bail them out
Well I'd say people paid enough taxes for sure and now all these CEO's and Employees who made millions out of fraud should be examined and their money frozen or taken away.

The government has a right to take back all the land and open government banks and give back to the people what was stolen from them and then once they regularize everything, bring back jobs
the people should pay modest tax and live in homes with mortgages they can trust.

This economy story is just unacceptable.

Bank CEO's were paid millions to keep their mouths shut. They should all go to jail.
The whole thing is like a night mare. They became super rich over night without doing a stitch of work legally robbing the working guy. Government is elected to protect you from things like this.
Every time Bush talked business to the people, his face would turn red. He knew he was lying lol

When Obama appeared out of nowhere to be elected, it was clear the Republicans were not trying too hard to win the election.
They all knew something and now the people know.

Obama also doesn't know what he is doing by hiring the same people who did all this to get America out of the problem
What incredibly difficult things will they come up with again that no one will understand?
No one seems can be trusted to do the right thing.

Taking God out of the court system was a sign.
Does America still say In God We Trust?
He is the only one teaching humility, love of man instead of money.

Have a good one.
:)

Age of Aquarius

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:05:00 +0000

I liked this song and when I first heard it people were saying it was written by someone who knew their astrology.

What they didn't tell you is that we are in the age of Pisces and Aquarius is still 600 years away so the hell we live in today is still around to stay for our lifetime anyway lol

The age of Pisces is said to be the time of Jesus, who began to teach us about love.

Love conquers all and eliminates the need for rulers dictators and religions but I guess man is just beginning to understand its' power. Love in fact, can be a religion in itself.

It was what Jesus attempted to create in Christianity.

Instead of fighting to have powers over other people, the fight will be over self power. Power over self, the ability to rein oneself in, in face of aggression. Understanding how we feel about ourselves, will reflect on how we feel about other people.

Love yourself and you will love people.

Respect yourself and people will respect you.

Progress in science and technology in the Age of Aquarius, will not be for personal profits but for mankind, as we learn we are a part of the whole. We learn this today through zooming into things whereby the object disappears into itself. If we go far enough away, the same thing happens with earth which becomes a dot and disappears into the vastness of space, so in essence, no one even knows billions of people exist on this dot.

In a sense it is also like the molecules in our bodies. They could be viewed as little planets living inside a huge body. They act strangely and the body either loves them or tries to expel them, kill them vis a vis medicine, radiaton, etc....

The Universe could be acting in the same way. If Earth becomes a pimple, the universe will try to squeeze it. lol So the little part we play as a dot in the universe can have consequences because we are part of the creator.We have the power to create heaven on earth and live with the creator and Jesus understanding now that he is always with us.

The Age of Aquarius is a good thing to look forward to for future generations.

It makes everything we are fighting about today totally stupid.

Heaven lives in God and we live in God. We are all one.

Now this is something nice to think about.

Have a great day!

Empowering Father Frost

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:17:00 +0000

Old Man Winter allows for the creation of many beautiful things.
Tremendous works of art which disappear come spring.
If only........

Childrens' Rights To the Dark Side.

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:37:00 +0000

Children's Rights to the Dark Side.

Sherman Alexie is the author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” winner of the 2007 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.
He laughed at Meghan Cox Gurdon when she complained about contemporary young adult literature as being too dark.

He said, how is anything shocking to young adults, when they have already been raped by clergy, or had babies at 12- 14.years of age.
Or grow up with drugs and alcohol abuse in the home, murder, lived with a serial killer, and wife and child beater. etc....

Many people believe like Sherman Alexie that maybe by knowing things, young adults could be spared of some of these things.
This is what psychologists feed us every day.

You know......two wrongs, do not make a right.

First of all, if adults were not exposed to such things, maybe they would not do these things.
If something is not good for your child, it probably is not good for you either.

Second. Just because one person was exposed to dark issues, doesn't mean it is right
to hurt the souls of other young adults whose families are good,
responsible, loving, God fearing people. It is these same people who fight to save, abused children. Otherwise, why would they care?

Third and this is the biggie. If our children are robbed of their child hood, which is a crime in itself, and if they become adults at what say....
10 years of age,( just to give it an age because one can easily go down to 2-3 years of age,)
how is this right?

How can a child this age, stop dark things from happening to it, by knowing it exists?
They are not smart enough, nor strong enough.
Dark issues are crimes against adolescence and therefore against humanity.

We, as parents and adults, fight every day for the rights our children have, to be children.

Simple respect from other people, even who don't agree, is not too much to ask in a society which prides itself on being loving and caring.

It's not a question about freedom to do things but a question of maturity to know right from wrong and have respect for other peoples' rights.

But as it turns out......
You have porn and rap that calls Mothers bitches and whores and people making millions on this sort of thing to heal themselves, while killing other good Mothers' childrens' souls.

You have people fighting for the right to be prostitutes as opposed to Africa where they want an education and steer clear of prostitution.

You have drug addicts fighting for their rights to take drugs as opposed to many places like Singapore who has a zero tolerance for drugs and gum. People don't complain.

All of the above will have side effects, which now becomes something society has to pay for to heal and very costly.

Then to demand on top of all this , copy right laws, to make more money out of, as owners of this type of entertainment.........

one has to sit and think ......
no wonder the 10 commandments have no place in front of a Judicial Institution.

It is shameful to put true love in front of a judicial system, supposedly portraying truth and justice.
There is none to be got there.

Why are we fighting for good schools to educate our young?
Why are we asking for a good country to live in?
What constitutes or what makes a country good?

We say a child is smart when he studies and gets good grades.

How do we grade, what a good society is, if it is based on freedoms profiteering from drugs, porn, prostitution, corruption, fraud etc.....
Do we say let's look at what Europe is doing? And Islamic countries have nothing to be proud of either with the way women are treated.
Honor killings , sharia laws while men sit do drugs, rape 12 year old girls and procure harems making tons of children to feed in an over populated world, while their cities have no infrastructure or education.

Shall we look at other countries?

OK let's look at Europe.........lol Let's look at how many people run away from their countries and then sit and complain in the free countries living off of social welfare and health care they didn't put money into.
Rights, truths, freedom, love............all imbalances. People want, but do not understand what this all means. And we know but because of these new people, we cannot pass the right laws through democracy.
Democracy is not just about what people want but about what is right as well.
You cannot protect a drug addict against himself or a prostitute against herself especially if they are minors.

If children get old before their time, they still have no capacity to understand, because the brain cannot absorb all this information. To be educated takes time.
Before a child is old enough to have an opinion, he has to be exposed to a wide variety of books and people and life and laws and history.
Children have to grow into information gradually, otherwise they grow up into thinking everything is ok.
They become, because of immaturity, what you do not want them to become.

The word " no" is not supported in dark issues.

Life is not all about fun and entertainment. What you expose your children to is what they will grow up into.

So, if like Sherman says, the kids are already exposed to the dark side on Indian reservations, and we see what it does to the kids there, how is it ok to expose more children to this sort of thing?
Logically, one would expect to want to have less exposure, so kids are not laden with all these sordid affairs, they don't, nor should they, understand.

No matter how much you educate children, if they are not ready for this information,
which they are not, all you are doing is killing souls.
One would think the Native people would understand this better than any one else.

Two wrongs do not make a right.

Show children dreams, sweetness,work ethics. Guide them out of darkness into a world where they belong, and watch them grow and flower.

Go to Africa.
The Missionaries show you abused, starving children.
They take these children and put them into a different environment with food, water, clothing
and schools and then they show you what beautiful children these children turn into.

What's our problem in North America? How is it our psychologists do not see the benefits of keeping children away from dark issues?
Instead they promote them at school.
Most of these dark issues, would not occur if people did not see them everywhere.

We never heard about beheadings in North America until the Taliban.
Now every second body we find is decapitated.
Feet, hands, heads found everywhere.

You sit on a bus and a guy flips out, takes a machete
and chops your head off for nothing.

Then we sit spending money to debate why he did this?
He had rights to go insane?
What about the justice for the innocent, beheaded person?

It can be argued as much as you want but
my Mother once told me not to put my hand on the hot stove burner and
the first thing I did,
when I saw a red hot burner, was tell my Mother :
Mom, don't put your hand on the red hot burner and then went and did it.

I was no different than any other kid is today or will be tomorrow.
If my Mother today, tells me not to put my hand on a hot burner, I probably won't lol

Kids, no matter how many times you tell them, do not understand until they are mature enough to understand.
So every one who tells you showing kids dark things is ok, is nothing but a liberal with a hidden agenda.
This person is there to make money at someones' expense.
He has a right to do it but parents also have rights to say no.

Kids have rights to be kids and no one has a right to rob them of their child hood,
which is what is happening in North America and Europe today against the wishes of many parents.

Megan Cox Gurdon is right. Time to pull in the reins.
Children need their time to be innocent and to play in innocence in their own world.
and adults have to behave as adults.
They have to be respectful, dignified and role models to the young.
Freedom is not a right. It's a privilege.

People also misconstrue what an adult is.
Maybe what we need is a different definition, as to what makes an adult an adult.
It's not just turning 21.

Have a good one:)

meaning

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:12:00 +0000

Some people argue atheism is not a religion
Atheism ...........is an - ism
like socialism, communism, fascism,........ which are all beliefs.

Whether you believe or not in God, you still believe in something, so you have in a sense, religion.

There is no escaping religion I'm afraid.

In the end you have to face evil and either succumb to it or fight it.

Today, as in the past, we see many succumbing to it.
It's a slow process.

The difference between Islam and Christianity is that Islam believes in order to obtain peace, people must all be Muslim with the same belief.

In Christianity, Jesus found another way.

He teaches love , believing we can all be different in beliefs, religions, languages, colors, politics, etc... and still be united in ......love.
Love makes the world go round.
Love procreates through the mind, body, spirit and soul.

Christianity encorporates every one, of their own free will ,because of love, without violence.

People speak of love every day without really understanding what this word means.

God is one.

The law and truth is one.

No matter what we do or do not do is irrelevant because we are ONE, whether we want to be or not.
We are all incorporated in the big I AM ........God.

God is an entity, a force, a knowledge, a creator, far beyond anything we understand.
We can't dispute him. Trying to only makes us look foolish.

So killing people serves no purpose at all. Killing is evil in the face of life and living, which is a gift bestowed unto mankind for a period of time.

Land , life , possessions, power, gold....etc...
nothing belongs to anyone. Most of our mental illnesses arise over worrying about things we should not be worried about.
We are all governed by temptation because we do not understand that what tempts us is stupid.

We are given life to live. We are given a brain to think with to make life good for every one.
We are introduced to the word LOVE and in love you find peace, through the 10 commandments.
But no one forces you to believe in the 10 Commandments. You need to understand them in order to believe in them.
If you don't believe in them then
this only reflects on your ability, capability, to understand the true meaning of love.
No wonder marriages don't work?
No wonder we fight over borders and land rights and water rights.
If you don't understand the basic 10 Commandments, how are you to understand any law?

This powerful message , which Jesus tried to teach us, was feared by men who would stand to lose a lot, if man understood the true meaning of love.

Their legitimacy to rule, kill, build armies, etc..... would disappear.

So Jesus had to die so we could talk about it to this day lol

If Jesus was not powerful and insignificant, he would have been forgotten.
But he also warned us about false prophets who will use his name for personal gain.

So these false prophets confuse and separate people, force them to argue and fight.
If you need to fight another man, this means you are following a false prophet because Jesus
taught love.
Love your fellow man.
Love your Mother and Father.
Forgive sins as you wish yours to be forgiven.
The message is so powerful, it brings you to tears.
It explodes you, from the inside out.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Fighting and arguing over issues serves no purpose at all.
Evil entices man to cause pain and suffering.

Through science, we have gone so far as to learn, that we can either be constructive and build or
deconstructive and destroy.

Deconstruction is equal to annihilation, to going back into the creator, into the big I AM.
Then he decides what to do with you since matter can neither be created or destroyed.

It all makes sense, if you think about it.

John Lennon, The Beatles, The Hippie Generation all spoke about love.
But we only touched upon this most powerful of all words ......LOVE.

Love,is the light we all look to. It unites us all.

Man is so busy punishing himself that God has no heart to do more to him.
He knows as well as we all do, that if we do not learn and quickly from all the science
and enlightenment, we have been gifted, man will annihilate himself.
He will be extinct unless some one or some other intelligence finds some DNA and decides to try and see what exactly is this creature called man, as we do with the dinosaurs in our search for answers.
And then once reborn, man will again defy the creation theory lol and history begins anew lol

Have a great day!

the next step

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:38:00 +0000

Yesterday I watched a movie about Jesus that was very disturbing.

The Last Temptation of Christ starring Willem Dafoe.

The movie made Jesus out to look like a lunatic.

It made no sense considering the message Jesus tried to portray, was a message of love.

Love your fellow man, is what he preached.
He tried to teach what it was that love really meant and it did not mean stoning or hanging or cutting off of limbs, burning, crucifying people who break laws which is what was done by people who carried guilt themselves on their own person.

Laws are broken because people do not understand them or find them to be ridiculous and unfair or designed to cheat and hurt another person. Some laws are broken because of greed, lust.. well ...you know.

It is a law to tax but how do you tax a man of the last things which he needs to survive?
It is a law to pay mortgage but how is it right to keep changing the rules to ensure the mortgage cannot be paid?
Killing is against the law and yet we train men to kill.
People invest in the stock market to make money out of good business.
But when CEO's gobble up the profits on purpose, putting them in jail ,will not return the money they gobbled, or the people they hurt. These men do not know what love means and they can't teach it to their wives or children and yet they will still be entrusted to do a job that will hurt millions of people because there is no accountability. Why not cheat and steal?
If I make a billion dollars, it pays to sit in jail a few years on tax payers expense.

Jesus was sent to do his homework and to inform God about who man is and Jesus found man to be in essence, good.

In order to successfully teach something as important as love , one must be above such temptations such as shown in this movie.
In order to gain followers, a man must show leadership and have people who have faith in his teachings.
He broke no ones' arm. People followed him of their own accord.
You need to have a straight head for this.

The movie depicted only people, who wanted to see him crucified watching.
They showed him dying basically lonely, with no followers.
If this was so, this movie would not have been made.
So some one is definitely afraid of Jesus, to this day.

A man capable of performing miracles such as reattaching a severed ear , reviving the dead, giving the blind sight, curing leprosy, growing apple trees stocked with apples from seeds in two minutes, feeding people with so many fish,turning water into wine etc....would be above such temptations as shown in this movie.

The movie down played the multiplying of fish to feed the people but up played the turning of water into wine making Jesus look like he was a closet alcoholic.

A Jesus who preached love, would never deny knowing his Mother, the woman who raised him.
He preached Love thy Father and thy Mother.

The person who wrote the script went out of his way to degrade the image of a man, who wanted a good life , truth and dignity for all man kind.
Jesus was gentle and kind.

Pontius Pilate told the Jews he found no guilt in the man and refused to punish him . He gave him to the Jews to do what they wished for political reasons, but he himself stayed out of it because it was wrong.

This script made Pontius Pilate out to look as if he ordered Jesus to be crucified and saw him as guilty.

The question this script put into peoples' minds was, that if Jesus was not calling himself King of this Kingdom and world, then why was he getting so angry and breaking the laws of Rome and threatening to destroy flood and punish?

Jesus hated to see cruelty. He was not doing the punishing. He was telling cruel men, that they will be punished by the Father, if not today, then when we all have to face judgement day.

No one knows who God is because he has no face, so they went to kill the messenger.

The story line brought Jesus an Angel, a little girl, who he had sex with. They implied Jesus had fantasies of having sex with children. One of his temptations.
Another of his temptations was to make love with men.
They replaced love, with lust and sex in the movie

I love my children but my head is clean where they are concerned.
I never worry that I may touch them wrong or kiss them wrong because I have no dirt in my head. I am never tempted to hurt a child be it mine or some one elses' which could very well be mine, let alone have sex with any of them.

I am a Mother and I Mother and protect and this is what God does as a Father to to his children who are so way below his intellect, that to actually believe we tempt him with our vices???? The very thought is down right ludicrous.

God would not send a pervert son, to teach people what love is. If he knew man uses his imagination to create these kind of fantasies, he would send an intelligent person to correct it. lol

The sad part is that young people, not acquainted with Jesus, will never know him .
This movie utterly destroyed the character of a holy man.

Freedom of speech grants the script writer freedom to write but life, will show in the end, God will touch people in a way they will understand and see the truth for what it is.
Truth will prevail because the Fallen Angel will not be able to deny it.

Jesus would never say kill all men who are not Christian.
If it was as simple a solution as killing, he would have formed an army of men, guerillas and
underground taliban as they do today and gone about doing it but he didn't.
God would have annihilated man kind long before Jesus, himself, if he thought there was no hope for man. but he didn't. Men picked up arms in his name but all it shows in history, is that men do and still do not know the meaning of
true love.

Jesus went about teaching people to love. He went about teaching people that when you know what love is and how to love, you would not conduct yourself in a way to hurt another man .
Just imagine, all soldiers and men of war, putting down their arms?

These so called temptations, would not exist because you would be above all that.
Temptation would attract you like sucking a lemon does.

If you do not vex another man and he doesn't vex you, there would never be a problem.

In that teaching about the meaning of love, people would find solutions to problems without lawyers , dictators, kings and government, because we would all know what the right thing to do was.

ex When a man is hungry, you feed him.
You do not say to him I will feed you if you bow down to me and my god and kill you if you don't.

Laws are designed to protect people but if people know how to conduct themselves, there would be no need of law.

ex. if the Jews left Palestine, what would the next step be for the Palestinians, to take more land ....... if not the whole nation?

This situation would not exist if man knew how to love. Land belongs to no one.

Books written by man, are just books.

Truth cannot be rewritten and this is the power God has in the two words
I AM.
Try to prove he isn't.

Why do we have borders? We have borders because powerful men established laws and do not want to live by laws they disagree with.

And why do people break boundary laws and then support the places they ran away from?
They do this because they do not believe in the laws of their country of origin.
They do this because they have no voice in their country of origin.

They do this..... because they are not loved ........by their country of origin.

Such issues should never exist, if man knew what love was.
We are no closer to knowing what love is, than when we were in Neros' time because we still kill one another.

We have a word love. we don't know what to do with.

Jesus was indeed a very powerful man because of the truth in his method, message and teaching.
No man could argue with the logic here.

Even today, truth hurts.
No one likes truth and to speak it, is to sentence yourself to death because you make so many enemies.
Why?
Why this is, is a question we are not taught in schools, philosophies, or in our religions.

Why are people afraid of truth?

How do we pass judgement on another man, when we fear and deny truth?

How is justice to be expected when people deny truth?

If our laws do not depict truth, then why do we pass them and expect them to be obeyed?

-----------------------------------------------------------------

I found this to be a terrible movie for the negative implications and I also found Mel Gibsons movie on Jesus equally distasteful. Just plain gore.

If I was God and saw my son being tormented , I would make sure he felt no pain.

Jesus did not get crucified for God.

He did this for man to understand something and we still talk about it today so must be there is something there.
Some call it politics. He was political.
Well then, I would like to propose to todays' political people, to clarify
what political issues would they
allow themselves to be crucified for,
for the people?
.......................

Why can't they make a movie depicting true love and show people what they really want to see.?

Tell people the truth about what love is.

Neither of these two movies is something I would want to see again.

This is not the Jesus and God I know.

Have a good one
:)

A Story to Remember

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:41:00 +0000

Out in the cold, you see despair treading city streets, sleeping in card board boxes , cars and old tool sheds.
People who have long ago given up to it, feeling nothing they do, will change any of it.
They exist without feelings or thought, empty shells, having lost all hope.

But once in a while you see a man with sparkling eyes and a smile surrounded by an aura
of internal warmth.
He's accepted his situation and has not given up because he knows he carries a treasure inside.

Man was created from clay, earth..... and like a clay pot, he carries his treasures within, which make all of us, the people we were born to be.

We carry life, a soul, wisdom, experiences, love, grace, generosity, kindness, and most of all
God.
We carry him and his blessings, every where we go.
We carry his story.

Because he is in us, hope can never be lost and
change is always possible.
The only thing that stops something better from being achieved is,
to not want to try.

-----------
On a cold winters' day, a man with sparkling eyes and a smile surrounded by an aura
of internal warmth, stood by a school waiting for the children. They came out one by one.

Some lighting a cigarette, some a joint, some swearing, and some beautiful people who
walked by silently, giving him a curious, disturbed look.
As he sat there in the parking lot, a few stopped at first to kid him and then to ask him his story.

As he began his story, more and more kids began to surround him, for his story was both wonderful and sad. His eyes continued to sparkle and the smile never left his lips as as he talked .
It was as if he was full of joy and contained the most deepest of secrets.

He was calm, depicting some kind of inner strength, accepting of his plight and intriguing enough, for kids to want to hear more.
One gave him a hot cup of coffee to warm his hands.
Another had a cookie.
The janitor came out to the dumpsters to throw out a few carton boxes and stood, to watch the man, before going back inside. Before long the Principal came out to the group to see what was going on and listened to the continuing tale.

She was going to call the police but hesitated, for something about this man pulled her to him.
She told the children to go home and asked the man to follow her inside.

And it was here he kept on with his tale whereby other teachers, counselors and secretaries began to stop and listen from behind the Principals door.
They brought him a cup of soup from the microwave and finally asked him if there was someplace he had to go.

The man told them, wherever he is , is a good place to be, thanked them and walked out the schools' front door.

During the week, he came every day to the parking lot and as the kids saw him, they would approach wanting more of his stories and brought him many things. A book , gloves, a sleeping bag, sandwiches, McDonald burgers, and as word went around about this strange man, who broke no laws and had so much to offer in terms of keeping kids out of trouble, a curious parent took an interest.

He asked the man his name and was given the name Joe.
The parent was an off duty policeman and asked him if he had a place to stay and the man said: Wherever I am, is a good place to be.

Well then, come with us and be in another good place.
The parent smiled and offered his hand to carry Joes' bag.

Joe smiled and got into the car.
He was brought to a modest house where two, ear to ear smiling kids, couldn't do enough for him
They took his coat and his boots. settled him into a nice comfy couch and turned on the fireplace to warm him up.
There was more coffee and cake as dishes clanked and dinner was being put together on a stove.
Outside gentle flakes of snow began to feather the sky and as Joe gazed outside he closed his eyes.

He was quietly covered by a blanket and left alone to sleep.
He slumbered through dinner and through the night.

It was Saturday morning and every one was up early. The kids waited till they saw Joes' eyes open and ran to tell the parents: Joe's up! Joe's up!

Joe asked for the use of the bathroom.
Mrs Linwood gave him a towel and told him to help himself to a shower and a shave. She had a change of clothing for him consisting of a thick fleecy shirt, jeans, wool socks and underwear.
Over breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and jam and as it turns out, Joe preferred tea,
Joe told the parents he was a University Professor, by trade.

He lost his way after the death of his wife and children in a car accident.
His life became a journey as he ventured out into the world to find them.

He keeps walking because he sees them every where and they keep him warm and safe.
They are always happy to see him, wherever he is and he takes great comfort in this.

He touched the head of the youngest child.
You look like my little Marilynn and you son, look like my son Paul.
Paul looked at his Dad.

Joe lifted his thin knuckled hand to his eye to wipe away a tear.

Tell us more stories Joe, quipped Annie Rose.

Don't bother Joe . Corrected Mother giving Joe a chance to collect himself.

It's all right. I have plenty to tell and Joe began a story about a legend he heard in Greece and myths from far away India and Africa.

Paul was 14 years old and he sat wide eyed, totally absorbed, as if he never heard a story before.
At the end of Joes' stories, Dad cleared his throat and looked at his wife.

Joe, you have to spend the night and go to church with us tomorrow.

I could go to church. Wherever I am, is a good place to be. He smiled.

That Saturday, the Linwood family spent together at home, taking care of Joe and loving it.
Love flowed and surrounded the family in a beautiful candle like glow.

Every one was happy. Happier than they've been in a long time.
Paul didn't rush to soccer. Mom didn't go shopping or talk on the phone.
Annie didn't play outside with her friends
And Dad stayed in the house, instead of the garage.

The next day word got around in church and people were waiting for the arrival of this now famous Joe.
People greeted him as he walked in with the family.

Joe listened to the Pastor speak on the importance of family with bent head.
After church, there was a cafeteria full of finger food to snack on and this gave the Pastor a chance to come for a little visit with Joe.

Hi! I'm Pastor Wilkes .
He put out his hand to shake Joes' .
Welcome to our Parish Joe.
I understand you are a Professor?

Yes. I taught physics.

Where about you from Joe?

From every where and no where in particular.
I was born in Montreal.

Oh gosh, you are far away from home.
chuckled the Pastor.

Yes and no, depending on how you want to see it.
The world is a pretty small place.

Well you sure made an impact with your stories .
I was wondering if you would like to attend our meeting tomorrow night.
We would sure love to hear more of your travels and there will be a supper served.

Joe stood a long time and looked deep into the eyes of the Pastor.
He then looked into the eyes of
the people around him full of hope and wanting.

Thank you.
he said quietly.
I'd like that.

At home with the Linwoods, he helped with the cooking and the washing up of the dishes.
and of course there were more after dinner stories.

The children learned about love, in a way they never heard before.
They learned more about a man who looked death in the eye and refused to accept it.
They met his family, his children and his dog through his eyes and heart and they were as alive to them, as they were to him.

Joe attended the meeting with the pastor and was offered a job at a local college to teach Humanities. "Through the Eyes of Love."

His courses were always packed because it seemed people had a thirst and a longing to know what love really was .

The little town of Dunsmore, began to change slowly as the year came to an end.

Kids stopped doing drugs. Adults stopped drinking. Families began spending more time together . Chores were all done without having to ask for them to be.
There were fewer car accidents, fewer crimes, fewer deaths, fewer people in hospitals, less homelessness as people went home to friends and relatives instead of depending on social welfare and housing programs and more family dinners with Gramma and Grand pa.

Houses began to flower as each street began to take care of their gardens, growing vegetables and raising chicks and bunnies.
The city began to have more money in its' coffers so taxes could be lowered.

Things were really beginning to unexpectedly change, in a big way.

One day Joe disappeared as mysteriously as he appeared.
He took nothing with him except his old clothes.
People looked for him and missed him.
They wondered why he left, since they thought he fit right in.

But they understood Joe.
He left behind his kind eyes and smile and his words echoed
from hearts which were once blessed to sit and listen, by his side.

Every where I am......is a good place to be.
A.L.L.

Have a good one.

:)

An Arab Sheik was admitted to St Vincent's Hospital for heart surgery, but prior to the surgery, the doctors needed to store his blood in case the need arises. As the gentleman had a rare type of blood, it couldn't be found locally, so, the call went out to all the states. Finally a Scot was located who had a similar blood type. The Scot willingly donated his blood for the Arab. After the surgery, the Arab sent the Scotsman as appreciation for giving his blood, a new BMW, diamonds & US dollars. A couple of days later, once again, the Arab had to go through a corrective surgery. His doctor telephoned the Scotsman who was more than happy to donate his blood again. After the second surgery, the Arab sent the Scotsman a thank-you card & a jar of candies. The Scotsman was shocked that the Arab this time did not reciprocate his kind gesture as he had anticipated. He phoned the Arab & asked him: "I thought you would be generous again, that you would give me a BMW, diamonds & money... But you only gave me a thank-you card & a jar of candies".

To this the Arab replied:

"Aye, but I now have Scottish blood in me veins".__

Dusseldorf Sirens of War

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:48:00 +0000

Dusseldorf

One story my parents told me was quite scary about Germany and the war.
It had to do with bunkers.
The German soldiers were given better bunkers to hide in and
people like my parents were given regular ones which were not as good.

When the bombs fell (on I presume Dusseldorf) my grand father never rushed.
By the time he reached a bunker the bombing would already be over and every
one would give him heck.
He would stand and say: If it's meant for me,
then I will not escape it.

What he said was very true.
There was one man who was always first.
He'd run all the way down the bunker and hide under a bench.

One day the sirens began and as usual he was the first one down there.
A bomb hit the bunker, went all the way down to the bottom and landed
right in front of his face.
It didn't explode.

When people finally reached the bottom to see what happened, they found him
staring at this bomb, totally out of his mind.

Every one understood then why my Grand Father never rushed. lol

There were other people like him, tired and reaching a point where they've seen enough
burn't people with bubbles coming out of their noses.

They stood around and made wonderful friend ships, sharing what could be their last cigarette , as bombs exploded all around them.

When my family came to Canada and saw what kind of issues people were fighting over, they seemed so petty after their experience over seas.
No one ever wanted to see war , famine or death again.
They got busy with life and living.

This is why my parents taught me to be a proud Canadian.
They said you have to know history so you are not fooled into war.

But the old die, we are taking their place and the young have never experienced anything other than a belief in entitlement which we instilled into them.
They are entitled to freedom, independence, individualism.

Yet the world always has a twist to it. Instead of getting better , things get worse
and reasons for war again come to the forefront. Our planet shows us there is no such thing as freedom, independence and individualism.

We all need each other to work in unison so our species survives.

Wars are always different but the causes are always the same, dictatorship, poverty, fear, power. They always take precedence over love. We have not learned how to use love yet, to conquer war.
The thing is, if we cannot love our parents, our wives and husbands and children enough to do the right things, then how are we supposed to be able to love the world?

Everything starts at the beginning.

As for the German soldiers in Germany, they noticed that the better German bunkers were hit a lot more than the other ones and so they went to hide with the regular population because they saw God was on their side.

So no matter what you believe, a time comes when God touches people he wants to touch, so they may one day tell the stories of his little miracles.

He performs many of them every day in hospitals, schools, places of employment, airplanes.
etc..... and he may use each person as a vessel to be his Angel that day.

I often wonder why, I was where I was, at the time I was, to help a person in need and why people were where they were to help me when I needed it.

9/11 survivors have the same stories to tell. They were supposed to be at work in those buildings but for some reason that day, could not be.
Others who were not supposed to be there, went in that day ......to die..
It gives you chills just thinking about it.

Have a good one.:)

Happy Chinese New Year!!

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:32:00 +0000

Every one is celebrating 2012, the Year of the Dragon

Feng Shui experts believe 2012 is the Year of the Black Dragon (or the Water Dragon or the Black Water Dragon). In any case, this year will be one of transformation and improvement.

As is custom the streets are full of orange trees and tables are full of
good food shared between family and friends.

The children are ready for their red packets

Gong Xi Fa Cai!!!!

to all my Chinese friends.:)

Oh This Woolly Bully

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:55:00 +0000

When ever I see a bull run in Spain, I always wonder where the heads of these men are, who run on the street chased by so many. Even a Matador, alone in a ring, should not be there.
I feel bad for some of these bulls who are forced into fighting.
Personally, my experience with bulls on a farm was quite memorable.

I visited my cousins grand fathers' farm.
He was little maybe 1 and I was a big 5.
The farm was old. It had a muddy river running in the back which looked quite deep. You wouldn't want to fall into it.
Beside the river was a hammock strung between two trees .
Again, you wouldn't want to roll into the river, so you stayed away from the hammock. lol

The Grand father was a little old bald man. He was very kind and sweet and quite bullied by his wicked wife.lol
He had two sons and both came for a visit. The other son had a girl and a boy who were either the same age or one year older than I was.
There was a long dirt road to get to the main road where the mail box stood and I guess we were going to check it.

The Grand Father kept trying to stop the other two children from running onto the road but they equally showed him disrespect by yelling at him and kicking him in the shins and still running towards the highway.
I remember feeling very sad for this old man, so I came and took his hand and we walked slowly together up the road.
Wherever he went, I followed him.
I remember they had an out house and it was quite stinky with many flies .
I didn't like that too much and always feared something would come out of that hole and grab me lol

But other things I really liked. He owned bee hives.
I stood and watched as he dressed up to go check them. I found these bees very interesting and would love to own a field of wild flowers, just to keep a few hives.
Bees are nice little guys and I prefer them to wasps. Once my third little cousin stepped into a nest of either wasps or bees.
She was bit so many times her Dad had to rush her to the hospital.
Whenever I saw any such wasps around my house I would take the hose and try to swamp their living quarters so they would find a new place to live.

The old man also had a barn with cows and we'd go into it to collect milk but at the entrance, in the first stall, they kept a bull with a ring through his nose. I called him raging bull.
Of course my Mother dressed me in red, so he did not like me at all.

When I walked in there, this huge black bull, began to dig his hoof into the ground and snort, lowering his head. I saw his long sharp horns and he scared the day lights out of me. I just stood and stared at him as he got angrier and angrier.
This is when the grand mother would begin to yell and chase me out of the barn.lol

They only had a long piece of wood across the stall to stop him from coming out and this I remember thinking was not a good thing. It was nothing for him to break it and come through.

It was this same year in winter, that the old man went to the out house in the middle of the night and they found him on the cold ground in the morning.
He had a stroke and died.

The boys sold the farm and the grand mother went to live with the younger son in Montreal.
She wasn't my favorite grand mother. She had wicked looking eyes and she wasn't very kind to me either. So I didn't like it very much because she transferred all this bullying from her own husband, to my aunt, who was herself basically a new bride.
My aunt was a very beautiful loving woman.

I felt so sorry for the Grandfather and her son had a handful to handle coming home each night from work. She was very critical and reported every tiny thing to him.
Eventually she changed.
I don't think she had much of a choice cause no one wanted her. lol

I guess men in those days never argued with their wives cause my Grand Father was equally kind and gentle and this is why I thought he was a Saint.
My Uncle never argued with my Aunt.
If he didn't like something he'd go out for a smoke or into the garden to BBQ with a beer. lol
and if he did get mad on the rare occasion, he'd stick out his finger to point and his nose would lift high into the air but all he did was utter the persons' name and say: enough.

He looked so funny, no one ever took him seriously, so he was ignored, as life bustled around him.
This was the same guy whose pants I wanted to wet so he would not touch my Aunt. lol
Come to think of it, my husband is the same. Doesn't suit being mad.
If he gets mad, every one laughs.

I guess the same applies to comedians. They have a certain kind of face that is funny to look at.
Other people always look angry even when they aren't. Each of us is born to be spoken of, having more to do with what we look like, than anything else and this may also shape the kind of people we turn into.

When my cousin moved to New York, the grandmother went to live with her brother.
I went to New York to visit them one day.
I was a new driver with my own drivers' license . My aunt was in the process of trying to get her license with a learners permit.
She liked shopping so she'd say: Lets go for a drive.
So the kids all got in and we'd drive and talk and laugh.

It never dawned on me she didn't have a license to drive.
After a few days she said: You know, I like driving with you.
My husband yells all the time and with you we have a lot of fun.
Of course, not knowing she didn't have a full license, I didn't think to watch her driving lol
So we had a good laugh and I told her she was a great driver.

My Uncle then gave me his car and told me I could drive it to the store. I didn't want to take his car but he insisted so I took it.
I drove very carefully not wanting to smash it.
The last bit of road, beside their house, was narrow and quite winding.
I thought, if another car would come round the curve, I would not see it, so I kept closer to the right edge of the street, leaving two and a half feet from the solid line, separating the two sides of the road. This is not the way you are supposed to drive but something told me to do it.

This is why I say I have an Angel sitting on my shoulder and Guiding me.
Right at this moment, a speeding car came round the curve, on my side of the road.
Had I been driving normally, this car would have made a head on collision with my Uncles' car.
It would not have been pretty because he was going quite fast. I could have died.
He just continued and sped off.
I got home and told my Aunt and Uncle what a close call I had.

I was so surprised he was on my side of the road on this curve but for some reason I steered closer to the other edge.

Today I am left with memories and it's hard to believe, people you love, slowly disappear.

Bullying takes place every where, not just in a barn or the bull ring. lol

I think if I had a choice for a bull though, I would not choose the one shown above. I'd choose and nice heavy meaty bull, with big brown eyes, who would just be happy chewing his hay and smelling flowers.
They always say fat people are jolly
Maybe it pays to be fat. lol

I sure hope my family met up there and are enjoying themselves.
They are probably finding it funny, knowing what they do
about all our fights and struggles here on this planet.

Have a good one.
:)

Life - A Wonderland.

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:58:00 +0000

The other day my Son put on some cologne and it smelled like my teacher in grade one.
Hers was a much heavier smell and I thought hmmm. Interesting, but he didn't tell me which one he used. He has so many.

It took me back again into my little world.
My school was the best.
Mrs Fratkin was no push over. She kept me in the corner the whole year where the book shelves were. I don't even remember being bad so I think she just pretended and put me there during reading class. We had the See Spot Run books with Dick and Jane and I knew this book by heart.

One day, before school finished at around 5 min to 3, I raised my hand to go to the bathroom. She told me to put my hand down and I tried but just couldn't hold it for 5 minutes.
I sat suffering until this puddle began forming under my chair.
The teacher felt so bad for me and asked me why I didn't tell her.
I told her I tried. She was not some one who you could argue with.
Teachers were strict. I felt so bad being laughed at but then another, one of these ASHLEY, girls did the same in grade three and she had a wonderful teacher.
She didn't raise her hand at all. So I felt much better lol

During lunch we would be sent to the gym where they placed the benches horizontally.
The kids sat eating while this nice lady would come in with her velvet poster boards and display the bible story characters as she told us about Mary Joseph Jesus and the Wisemen.
I remember being fascinated. Time flew with her there.

After school for 25 cents we would have Disney movies like Ol Yeller and all go home crying lol
For 5 cents you'd buy a small brown bag of candy. I put my house key into it and then threw it away by mistake. My parents know these things happen so they didn't punish me.

At this school they designated me librarian so I also had a key to the door and went there every lunch hour to read and check out what other books they had. That was fun.
We had our Music teacher teach us to sing hymns at an Anglican church next door. I enjoyed that. Then they promoted volley ball basket ball soft ball and I played in everything.

We had two sets of twins. One set were girls who I played with and another set were boys.
They were very smart and athletic, with freckles. One summer just before school began, one of them went under a big Daddy Truck and had his head squashed. He probably went to get a ball or something. We started school that year on a very sad note. They were a year older and close to graduating.
They were similar to our Cunuck twins and you always saw them together.
Then we had a student exchange with the French school. This was a very big deal.
The French students wanted to go back because our work load was just too hard for them.
All we did at their school was sing and go to church and a little bit of the other things.

I made friends with one very nice girl. She put her finger into a door when it closed and lost the tip of her fore finger. In summer we went to the pool where guys looked at us and we at guys. One boy was a life guard and he took turns either walking her home or me.
One day she came and told me that she and I are competing for him.
I looked at her with this questioning look and she said he hasn't decided which one he wants to marry.
I laughed. He hasn't decided? She laughed too. We giggled all the way home.

What ever gave him the idea either one of us wanted to marry him? lol
He was good looking so I guess he figured we were both infatuated with him.
Guys thought girls were easy if they told them they wanted to marry us.

I can't speak for my friend but my mind was very far away from this girl / boy stuff.
I had a lot of boy friends but that's all we were ........boys that were friends lol
It felt good cause guys always watched out for their local girls. They never let bad things happen to them if they knew about anything that was supposed to go down.

They'd battle behind your back between themselves or threaten each other that if some one did something bad to a girl .... there would be heck to pay.
But being an only child, I couldn't depend on other people to help me, so I decided to take self defense.
Our teacher told us that we must always look for a way out but if we are cornered then to make sure what ever we did counted, because we probably wouldn't get another chance at it.
He made our program tough even for the girls.
I'd basically crawl out of that class at the end of the hour to get to the changing room. But once we got into it, we had the normal class and then we'd have our own classes with black belt friends and then we'd go on week ends. It was basically like a drug. You had to have more and more.

One day I practiced with this one older guy and he hit with such force that I thought ...woah.
I know he's being judged on being able to stop at a half inch from your face, but if he missed and hit, there would be serious damage. I wasn't sure I liked that. After class it had snowed a lot.
He asked me if I wanted a lift home and I said: Ok. Where's your car? He said: Right here.
pointing to a pile of snow. I asked: Where?

Right here. He began to push the snow off this tiny Mini Austin.
I was flabbergasted. The tires were smaller than the height of the snow we had to drive in.
I wasn't sure about this. lol
We both climbed in and I heard the engine rumble and he put it in gear.
I was soooooo impressed with that little car and he was smiling all the way, so proud of it.
It didn't slide or stop anywhere and we had huge trucks in front leaving high snow behind their tires and it didn't phase that Mini Austin in the least bit.

When we had a lot of snow, I would put on my skiis and cross country to school. Hardly any one was there so I could enjoy the whole building to myself. It felt like going to a chalet.
Coming back in the snow was equally as fun. It took two hours each way.I had a black coat with a hoody and never got cold in it. The city would make mounds along the side walks so you had a few things to slide on. It was great exercise and I always said why pay gym rooms when you could do things like this for free.

When I got home I'd count the blisters on my feet. The boots were not as comfortable as they are today. You could not walk in them all day and not expect some side effects.
I still have my old boots and skiis.
People ask why do you keep all these things?
I ask how can you throw them away?

Of course I would never do this today. There is no place like home is my todays' motto.
When I tell my son this story he calls me some kind of square geek.
I reply no. I wasn't interested in clubs and booze. I went a few times with my friends and found it boring.
I loved the outdoors and especially in winter, when the whole city became so beautiful in white.
You walked and you enjoyed every light, every house, every street corner, the people, the cars, the hustle and bustle. Everything looked so wonderful even the snow flakes.
You'd enjoy making it to where you were going. The coffee tasted better as you sat warming up with it.

You could read in peace looking outside at the huge snow flakes through a panorama window and when your clothes dried you began the journey home with different lights and hustle and bustle.
At home you slept like a baby with rosy cheeks. This was a healthy great life.

Today when young people say they can't make it to work I smile and remember how different it was in my time when snow never stopped people from trying.

Of course it wasn't as dangerous in Montreal as it is in some places in BC.
The climate was milder than Toronto's where the cold seems to go under everything.
Sometimes it just isn't worth the risk.

Have a good one :)

Half Breed by Maria Campbell

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:07:00 +0000

Half Breed by Maria Campbell is a nice easy 156 page book.
It got you interested from the get go with Louis Riel and how everything he did was misconstrued.
Finally the Metis are fighting back and taking pride in who they are.

When I was in College one Humanities Teacher asked the class:
Where do you find yourself?
Most of the kids pointed to their heads and I pointed to my Heart.
I think I was the only one in the class who did this.

Then he informed us that white people usually find themselves in their heads and Am Indians in their hearts and the Chinese in their stomachs.
I guess all my excursions on the river turned me into a free spirit lol
because I could truly relate and love these people.
Her great Grand Mother had second sight met this naturalist man from England, who pretended to be Grey Owl, a Red Indian.

The Indians knew Grey Owl was not an Indian but he was accepted by them because they knew he wanted to be. They found him amusing lol.
These are very special people in the way they behave and believe in things.

Reading this book and the experiences this woman Maria had, reminds me of things that happened in Quebec, although the story takes place in BC , Alberta and Saskatchewan.

I found page 72 very special, where Maria spoke with her Cree Great Grand Mother Cheechum,who lived to be 104 years of age,
so beautiful and right on the nose.
I couldn't have said it better myself.

Cheechum kept the grand daughter believing that things would change for the better.
I loved that Grand Mother.

It's a great read if any one is interested in a good, true, personal story.

It's funny cause my dogs name was Cheechen or Cheechpeach as I called him and he was my best friend. He is the one I swam the river with and who protected me from dogs who would attack bicycle riders and accompanied me on my 10 km rides.
He loved his freedom, as all animals and people do.
I never knew the Cree had names similar to this.
I also learned about a Canadian food called Bannock made by Indians and new settlers when flour was not easily come by.
Usually if they used flour it was to thicken pemmican soup, rubbaboo, or to make galettes.
Galettes otherwise known as bannock.
Tiger's Bannock (tried and true)

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
1/3 cup or more cold water

Directions: Mix dry ingredients thoroughly then rub in butter until well incorporated. Add enough water to make a thick dough. Form into 1-inch thick cakes and place in the bottom of a greased cast iron frying pan. Cook on low heat until done on both sides, or prop the pan in the coals of the campfire. For a variety add dry fruits, raisins, blueberries, etc. Taste especially good with molasses and butter when done. For pancakes, simply add a couple of eggs, omit the butter and substitute water for milk. For native style use half white flour and half corn flour. To avoid the mess when clean up is a problem, measure out individual portions into a Ziploc and knead until done.

The Book was published by University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln and London

Have a good one :)

History - A Story of Life

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:02:00 +0000

The other day I watched a program on Armenia .
They always put these programs on, to teach about genocide.
They showed Christmas trees planted by different countries
recognizing that indeed a genocide took place there.

Unlike with Hitler, who made it rather clear what he was doing with and to the Jews,
Armenia warred with the Turks and I am not sure if any Turkish leader stood up to declare that all Armenians in the world, had to be annihilated off the face of the earth.

Turkey, to my knowledge, was not aiming at world control like Hitler was.
Armenians were Christians and lived in Eastern Turkey and Western Russia and they were friends with Russia which disturbed the Turks. So the Turks, wanting an all Muslim country, gathered them up and murdered them.
The young people are being taught by survivors, that it is important to keep your own land and heritage if for nothing else than posterity but then they bring in the word genocide.
Genocide is an ugly word.

When I asked my Dad about the war and where he came from, he said what ever happened to me, has nothing to do with you, You are Canadian. This is your country. So if I was to learn anything, it had to come from other people and history books. After meeting other ethnic kids, and seeing how they shook over subjects dealing with the countries their parents came from, I have to say thanks to my parents. They did not put a stone on my back. Their country, would never be mine. That land, I could never call mine, any more than the people living there, would accept me anyway.To them I am a foreigner and I will never understand what they understand.
I may have a certain heritage but my land, is the one I live in.
This land raised me, fed me,
employed me, took care of me and raised my children. If I had to make a choice as to which land I'd fight for, it would be for my Canada.

Did Kruschev try to genocide his own people in Ukraine by taking all their wheat away leaving them to starve to death? In the papers they wrote it up as Ukrainian Famine.
The end result would have been the same.Kruschev was Ukrainian.

If we are to compare this to the number of Russian men/boys who were sent to fight with basically picks and shovels, against well equipped German troops and were not allowed to be taken prisoner without being called a traitor and killed or sent to Siberia sentenced to hard labor if they went home after the war, one could say Russia was genociding its' own people.

Of course this was not the case. Russia gave orders to her soldiers, to give the last breath to save the Motherland, from the Germans. Saying it this way, put it in a different light.
The Turks might have been given the same order under the threat of spreading Armenian Christianity. Their Quran specifically teaches all non muslims must die. In the end, there can only be one for peace to reign.

Throughout history, whole armies were felled in great battles.
Do we attach genocide to them as well?
This would include a lot of nations, not just Jews and Armenians.

So countries understand the pain in Armenia but there seems to be a bit of a problem to call this what happened in Armenia an actual genocide.It was ugly unacceptable, ruthless and typical behavior to be expected of a Muslim in the face of a Christian. It was A message to all, not to live in their countries unless you are Muslim.

When I watched this program on Armenia, I saw the plaques in front of trees as acts of kindness so people could heal. I still have to question the term Genocide because I don't feel this is a term that should be thrown around.

And it got me to thinking .
What if the so called Quiet Revolution, started by Liberal Jean Lessard and refined by Renee Levesque in Quebec, was overtaken by the English speaking people?

Political books were written claiming the Quebecois were the White Niggers of America, over this French/ English issue, and if the English rounded up all the nationalists, would the Quebecois claim genocide? This is basically what they were saying to the people and to the world, that if we don;t allow them to speak Quebecois, they were a dead group of people.

It never sat well with me, that my French neighbor, who lived the same way I did if not better,
could relate himself to the slavery that took place in US, in Quebec.

If the English fought and won, again, would the Quebecois have disappeared?

"Quebecois" is relatively a new term for French Canadians born in Quebec. If you went any where in the world, you would not find a "Quebecois" in history past 200 years or so, except Quebec. lol

Instead 700,000 English speaking people quietly left Quebec and the tetes carre who stayed, are always invited politely to leave. They are replaced by new French speaking immigrants, who have no idea, that they will be asked to leave next. and so.....the Quiet Revolution. lol

If the Quebecois won and did an ethnic cleansing because they want Quebec for the true Quebecois, not immigrants, what would this be called then?
Would the White Niggers of America be then associated with genociding other ethnic people if they didn't leave Quebec of their own volition?

The Quebecois are different from the French in France. In fact, French people in France, do not call the Quebecois people, French, because of the dialect. Every French teacher from France that we had, always told us what we had in Quebec, was not French lol So why were we learning it to survive in Quebec?
I have to admit, I loved the French language, from France.

We had one beautiful, young French teacher teaching us and one day after Christmas, we heard she went skiing and got into a fatal car accident coming home from the Laurentians. All the kids were devastated. She made learning French fun and we just couldn't believe she ended her life this way, so far away from home.

Of course General De Gaulle would have liked Quebec to separate because of old wounds between France and England and he can surely be blamed for sparking this language trouble in Quebec by coming as a guest and screaming at the top of his lungs : VIVE LE QUEBEC LIBRE!
Rather evil and sly of him . :)

This began a whole new era in Quebec which also was interesting to experience and live through.
We grew and learned a lot about life and people from this social experience.
Every one ignored the Catholic Religion which was the real cause, keeping people down and uneducated.
Even today. I went home to visit my parents, and this woman saw me and walked into their house like it belonged to her, to ask me if I visited Toronto. I was going to call the police because obviously she was deranged and could one day even be dangerous but then I decided not to begin a scandal in My Dad's house. She had no weapons but she could have .
This means, speaking French will never be enough for the Quebecois. You were not a Leduc or Brebuf, or Letourneau. These are Quebec names coming from way back when it all began here in Quebec.

In some ways, this behavior resembles what's going on with Islam today and in the past.

People lay blame on everything and everyone except the real causes that create the effects, ending in war and death and it's funny because land belongs to no one. We buy it but it can be expropriated any time by the country. Land belongs to no one. In fact in Belize where they grow cacao, the people don't want to own land. They want the government to buy it off of them saying we pay taxes and then are told what to do on it.lol I thought, hmmmm.
This person probably never went past grade 6 but speaks quite intelligently.
Why do we pay 1,000,000 dollars for homes today? They are not worth the price. They say we pay for the land. Even if there is no demand they put the prices up. Well, give the land back to Canada and Canada will employ you, to take care of your place of residence.
It's a job right there computers can't do. You pay rent, and the rest of the money is yours to do as you want. Today even waitress jobs are being eliminated. Computers take the orders and you also pay the machine at the table. Servers only serve, clean tables and are now denied a tip since they don't have to socialize with the customer.

This was a summer I spent glued to the radio listening to the Pat Burns Program discussing our Quebec problem with the people of Quebec and boy did it get hot!! No one knew who Pat Burns was because he would have been shot for discussing the French issues in Quebec. He sure did a lot of yelling .

Today, we see French speaking immigrants, who replaced the exiting English speaking people, are living well in Quebec, becoming MP's etc..... and everything looks fine on the surface because Quebec belongs to Canada.

But History has shown that it always pays to be careful and to
BEWARE the Radical element,( unless you have a ruthless dictator).

Radicals do the stepping stone routine. They always have a hidden agenda. They gain power being nice and then to do the other things, people who elect and help them, know nothing about.

Stalin ( killed 7 million and suppressed 50 million). He was a nice guy.
Hitler, Alexander the Great, were also nice guys.
Renee Levesque learned a lot from Nazi Germany, etc..
Nice guy. lol They changed Dorchester Street to Renee Levesque Str.to honor him.

And Islams Quran's teaching is similar to Hitlers' ,
except they want every person converted to Muslim or turned into slaves or worse if they can get away with it according to the Quran. In a way this makes Armenias' Claim valid but it doesn't just stop at Armenians. This was an active act, to aid in eradicating Christians from the face of the earth. Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Athiests , communists etc.....lol
So is this view considered genocide if it applies to religions and not to actual ethnic people themselves?

These are discrepancies no one discusses.

Was the Genocide on Armenians against a "people or against a religion"?
The genocide claimed against the Jews was against the people as a whole by Hitler.
He didn't care if they were blonde with blue eyes or changed their religion. It was Jewish blood and it had to be eliminated off the face of the planet as if they were aliens, who landed here and a full scale war ensued to get them off the planet. No one knew the Slavs were next on his list in his mission to create an Aryan race.

In Quebec they changed the license plates from la belle province to je me souviens.
Hardly amicable to drive a car with such a license plate considering what they are implying with it. It's political and hardly speaks for our province. We have nicer things to remember.

Che Guevera said: Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.

In Canada, we have no cruel leaders so what do the French Nationals really want?

Right now we can drive from coast to coast without borders.
Canadians are truly blessed.

Will we be left one day, with only memories of this as well?

We are only travelers and land belongs to no one.
Every one should be able to enjoy this planet amicably without hate.

And as for Armenia, the Turks will never admit to the true reasons behind what they did.
They will hide it as they always did behind, not being allowed to discuss Muhhammad and there will always be a question as to if indeed, this was a real genocide that took place there.

Genocide means to do an act of violence to eliminate a group of people. In war, revolutions etc... people die but it's never a genocide. Never total annihilation but then I haven't studied small tribes with religions which may have already been annihilated.

As far as I can see or understand, Hitler did not succeed in his genocide mission either.
He performed horrendous, unspeakable acts on a people, but he did not eliminate the Jews.
Now I will have both Jews and Armenians mad at me lol

I am a person who doesn't like secrets. If you have to keep a secret,then it must be because it's offensive to someone . It's nice to be a free person, to be able to walk tall, be free to make your own decisions about life, discuss your beliefs,dress how you want and not be challenged by things which really do not matter in life.Of course some laws need to exist to keep order and the aim is to always grow to become better , smarter people.
Something to think about .
-----------------------------

I was a very happy man. My wonderful girlfriend and I had been
dating for over a year, and so we decided to get married. There was
only one little thing bothering me...It was her beautiful younger sister.

My prospective sister-in-law was twenty-two, wore very tight mini
skirts, and generally was bra-less. She would regularly bend down
when she was near me, and I always got more than a nice view. It had
to be deliberate because she never did it when she was near anyone else.

One day her 'little' sister called and asked me to come over to
check the wedding invitations. She was alone when I arrived, and she
whispered to me that she had feelings and desires for me that she
couldn't overcome. She told me that she wanted me just once before I
got married and committed my life to her sister.

Well, I was in total shock and couldn't say a word.

She said, 'I'm going upstairs to my bedroom, and if you want one
last wild fling, just come up and get me.'

I was stunned and frozen in shock as I watched her go up the stairs.
I stood there for a moment, then turned and made a beeline straight
to the front door. I opened the door, and headed straight towards my car.

Lord... And behold, my entire future family was standing outside,
all clapping!

With tears in his eyes, my father-in-law hugged me and said, 'We are
very happy that you have passed our little test. We couldn't ask for
a better man for our daughter. Welcome to the family.'

And the moral of this story is: Always keep your condoms in your car.

Have a good one :)

Gone Fishin Ain't Sure for What

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:39:00 +0000

It took me a while but I finally learned how to water ski and my Dad would take me on long rides while my Mom watched to make sure I didn't fall.I jumped over waves and even did the one ski ride.
Sometimes the motor would get tangled in weeds and slow down.
I didn't want to fall, so did the worst possible thing a person could do.
I collected the rope until the boat picked up speed again and then slowly dropped it.
This way I didn't have to sink into the water.

I knew better than to collect the rope so it would tangle around me and always made sure to be very careful but when you are not supposed to do something, you shouldn't do it.

One day as I was collecting the rope, the boat jerked the rope out of my hand and my hand tangled in it and I fell.
My Dad immediately stopped the engine but the boat was still coasting.

The rope pulled up and the water pulled me down. I thought my arm was going to be ripped out of my shoulder socket.

Luckily the boat stopped before that happened.

My Dad called out to see if I was ok and being stubborn, not wanting a lecture about rope collecting lol ....I said Ya.Fine! lol

So he revved up the boat and put it in gear again to go.
My arm hurt so badly I couldn't use it so I used my left hand and just pretended to hold the rope with my right to rise up out of the water.lol

Thank fully I did my ride and when my Dad swerved the boat around to shore, I was able to let the rope go and coast in to the wharf on my skiis to sit on it.
If you did things right, you'd leave dry and come in dry. lol

My shoulder hurt a few days and then got better but now I knew not to collect the rope to look like a hero. lol
There is never such a thing as control.

The family loved fishing. So one day my Mom got into the boat with the tackle box and rods. We just put the boat in and forgot to insert the plug under the motor, which we take out to empty any excess water that might be in it. The boat was always cleaned after each use and washed out with clean water and drained once we pull it out onto the trailer.

As my Dad went to get the other stuff, the boat began to sink. My Mom did not know how to swim. Instead of getting out of the boat, she stood there like a true captain, who goes down with the ship. lol
When my Dad saw her, she was already knee deep in the boat at the motor end, holding all her stuff high up in the air.
We laughed at her later and told her what if it was deep? Did you not think you could drown? Her answer was, the thought never crossed her mind.

My Dad said this was the mark of a true sports man. My Mom was extremely happy to know she was a hero for saving the tackle box and fishing rods. lol
Not that they were ever in trouble to begin with.

Not long ago in BC, we had such an incident where the ferry boat was sinking, and the crew jumped off the ship first, leaving the passengers to fend for themselves. lol This is unheard of and truly disgraceful since they know where all the safety equipment is.
Most people escaped but
One older couple was missing and upon investigation, it seems the ship went off course because the crew was high on pot and some apparently having sex , they were not looking where they were going.
----------

Our family liked to cast and before starting, each took a spot on the boat further away from the other so as to keep it safe.
The hook I had was three pronged, attached to this red and white striped oval metal piece.
These were good to catch pike but other fish liked them as well. They twirled well and shone to attract attention.

I turned to look behind me to make sure it was safe, put the rod back and as I was bringing my arm forward to cast, my Mother decided to stand up.

The hook really caught her good.
One prong went into the crease behind the ear where it attaches to the head and the other sewed the lobe in and out.
My Mom grabbed her ear and I was devastated when I saw what I did.
I thought she was going to be deaf.

My Dad rushed to shore,jumped out of the boat, into the car and in less than a minute they were off to the hospital with this new pierced earring hanging from her ear, leaving me behind with the boat.
With a deep sinking feeling of guilt, I put everything away and went home.
I sat and waited and waited and waited.
They left at 2 pm and now
it was midnight and they were still not back.

With each passing minute I was feeling worse and worse
And then I saw lights coming and they were back.
I ran outside and my Mom said my Dad wanted to stay home in the city but she knew I'd be worried so they came back, after a little rest.
I sighed a sigh of relief.

They had to cut into the crease of the ear to pull that part of the hook out and stitch it but the other side, which sewed up the ear lobe, they just cut off the hooky part to take out.
After her tetanus shot she was allowed to leave.
Needless to say, I lost my taste for fishing after that.
I never went again.

I kept thinking:
What if it had been her eye or if I Ripped her cheek open.She would have been scarred for life.
My Mom had beautiful skin and she always took such good care of herself.

Then I thought about how the fish must feel. Until now, I was sure they had no feelings cause they had no nerve endings but now I wasn't so sure.

I know when we cut off a cat fish head, it didn't stop it from biting nor did it stop the body from jumping on the skillet a full two minutes before it stopped.
We'd give it a stick to bite and it would really clamp down on it.

These fish grow to 8 feet and have been known to grab rabbits, ducks and even kids off the shore.
We have a Nessie in these waters, so who knew what else we had and here we are fishing not knowing really how these creatures feel.

My Dad never said a word but his face said it all.
I guess he didn't want to start talking cause he didn't trust himself to say the right things but I knew he was mad and he already probably got an earful from my Mom telling him it was a mistake.

The next day we talked and I asked her why she got up?
I checked before casting and I was already half way doing it when she got up without looking.

You should check on what other people are doing before getting up in a boat.
At this point, there was no way to stop it from happening.

To this day I still feel bad but she was a good sport and a hero cause she never uttered a word.
There wasn't a peep coming out of her through the whole ordeal.

Again we had a story and something to laugh about later about my Mother. lol
It wasn't funny except for the fact she did something we were taught not to do.

Our car License Bureau says: There is no such thing as an accident.
Hello!.........They've attached new meanings to what an accident is???
An accident is caused by misjudgement. People are human. They make mistakes.
Machines have no brain. They make no judgement decisions at all so they too make mistakes if changes they are not programmed for take place.Machines hiccup as do computers.
In fact if you have a hacker or a person feeding it false info, machines like computers, can create a catastrophe.

There is always a wise guy somewhere trying to play with your brain.
No matter how prepared you are, shit happens.

------------------------Central Station Copenhagen Symphony Orchestra ---------

Have a good one.
:)

Indian Summer.

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:17:00 +0000

This was the best picture I could find.

The end of summer - Aug Sept Oct. we celebrate the gathering of the crops.
The colors of the landscape change as everything bursts into the final stages of life
in all its' glory.
All the leaves burn in yellows reds and orange as they fall softly to the ground. You tread on streets covered by a leafy carpet fit for a king.

This is the most beautiful time of the whole year. Indian summer.
In the city I would take my bike and head on out to the back river.
The roads were beautiful as we had maple trees on both sides of the street.
Once the bike was laid against some stones, I would jump from stone to stone searching for a good place to turn over smaller stones under which cray fish hid. The place was full of them.

Once I almost stepped on a black snake that looked like a long piece of wood. Thankfully it slithered away and I was stunned at how quickly it could disappear into a nearby bush. Who said you need legs to walk? lol

Recession lobster

I'd pick up each cray fish to examine how large they were. Some were small and others were a good 3 1/2 inches.

You then had a choice to either follow the river along the Rivieres des Prairies shore line or follow a winding road, Blvd Gouin, to Belmont Park. This was an amusement park Ernest Gaudreau and three shareholders opened up in 1923 full of fun rides, popcorn, cotton candy and the best roller coaster.There was always the smell of fries with lots of salt and vinegar. It smelled so good you couldn't resist buying some. Even the beaches had an RV that came every day filling the air with smells of hot dogs and those great smelling fries.People couldn't get enough and there was always a long line up.

Every kid loves the lights and the music from the rides. Mine was the carrousel because of all the horses. I was no different from any kid.I loved it.My Dad would take us there once a year and needless to say, we looked forward to it.

Sometimes I'd do a bad thing and follow the road to Belmont Park on my bike. It was a beautiful ride but the street had lots of cars and I should not have done that but kids are kids.
I was so sad when they finally closed it down. I envied the people who lived nearby and could watch the lights from the parc every night. Belmont
was replaced by a bigger and better La Ronde at Expo 67.

In the country,
My Dad used to get long logs and pile them high to make a huge bonfire for us to enjoy and every year it was quite a spectacle to behold.

We would sit around the fire with neighbors and family listening to it crackle all night, hoping it would last forever. We'd sit to watch the last embers die in the morning dew. The kids would bring their sleeping bags and the grown ups talked ate and laughed into the long hours of the night until they could no longer keep their eyes open. My Dad would bring out his guitar.
There is something hypnotic about fire.
You can sit and stare into it without ever getting bored.It burnt your face to rosy red and as we poked long sticks with marshmallows and hot dogs into it, it didn't take us long to turn into coal mine munchkins.
You loved the fire and it made you want to embrace it.

It was here, on one of these occasions, my girl cousin twisted her chair and fell right into it with her long blonde hair.
My Dad was quick to grasp her arm and jerk her out before the fire could
singe her hair or catch her clothing on fire.
She was so lucky. He was soooo quick.
But like I said .....kids are unpredictable.
She was no different than I was, wanting to sit very close to the fire.

The town would also put on its' own bonfire and had large metal barrels they filled with water to boil fresh corn from a local field. We had lots of corn fields but no one knew which were for the cows and which for the people lol
The corn was delicious, sweet with huge yellow kernels every farmer could be very proud of.Tents were put up for games to be played. The kids had the most fun while the adults walked around, watched the fire and ate the corn. If you wanted, you could buy tickets for a pig roast.
It was a nice way to say good bye till next year, to the summer.

After the leaves fell my Dad would collect them and put them into his garden which he then tilled for winter.He would collect other peoples bags too and they would wonder what it was he was doing until they saw. They never thought about doing this. It was at this time we also paid attention to the farmer who flew a plane over head, spraying the corn.

We all had wells to drink from and I noticed my Mom got sick with Parkenson's and the neighbor had died from a brain tumor. I thought would be interesting to read up on it and found many people who got Parkinsons lived in farming communities. My Dad and I had arguments because he said they had the best water and I was wasting my money but I always used bought water.
Who knows if the spring it came from was any better or worse than what we had.
I began paying attention even to things what dentists did, like putting in mercury fillings and forcing kids to take xrays so they could find tiny cavities to fill which probably they could fix just by brushing more. They still made holes for tiny cavities.
Putting so many fillings into teeth guarantees them more work when the fillings fall out and then the tooth has to be replaced sooner than later. You're talking big bucks.
When people complain, they don't like it, but people should complain and ask more questions.

Gods' healthy gifts however, are thrown away instead of recycled and used on your own property, keeping it enriched and beautiful.
Recycling is not a new idea.lol

In the city, my Dad put up a fence in the front yard so kids wouldn't run on our grass.
So instead, they began to grab the fence and pull on it and still walk on our grass.
One day he brought a trailer full of cow manure and covered the front lawn.
Our yard stunk to high heaven lol
All the kids blocked their noses and began crossing the street passing our house.lol
It was fun to watch their expressions lol I still laugh remembering.
In this way, he got them used to walking across the street and they stopped pulling our fence down.
My Dad was a funny man.

My parents always had a good crop of vegetables and what they didn't can, bottle and freeze they gave away to neighbors and to me. I'd have my own stock of things I never had to buy in winter.
I sure miss that today every time I have to pay 9 dollars for 4 zuccini. That's high way robbery.We used to buy a bushel for 9 bucks. Then the bushels began to get smaller and smaller until they brown bagged it lol Then they would say a price for each piece and
Now they don't bother at all. They sell by weight.
I wouldn't mind, ok yes I do mind cause the prices are not good prices, but sometimes you come home and find the vegetables rotten inside.
Like potatoes for example.
You can't see inside what is going on.
4.99 a 10 lb bag and half you throw away. Some you try to cut and its very hard, not like a normal potato.
Then they wonder why people don't eat much fruit and vegetables. lol
Many times people don't buy everything so the products wilt. They pour more water on them to pump them up but as soon as they are brought home, they wilt faster.

Indian summer was also a time when my Mom would constantly tell me not to sit on the ground.
She said the cold ground is not good for your kidneys .
-------------------
The Iroquois had a Creation story that went like this:

In the beginning, in the Sky World, a pregnant wife asked her husband to fetch the delicacies she craved, the bark of a root of the Great Tree in the middle of the Sky World. None were permitted to touch it.

Giving in to her whims he scraped away soil to bare the root of the Tree, to find a hole . The woman peered into it and fell through. The birds tried to catch her to break the fall she fell and great Sea Turtle received her on his back.

On the Sea Turtle's back, she planted bits of the roots and plants she had brought from the Sky World. As she planted and prayed, she created the Earth that we know as Turtle Island.

The woman then had a daughter, who became impregnated by the West Wind. While in the womb, the daughter's unborn twins began to quarrel about how they should emerge.

The left-handed twin refused to be born in the usual way. Instead, he forced himself out of his mother's left armpit, killing her. The newborn twins then buried their mother, who became Corn Mother, a source of corn, beans and squash, the Three Sisters of the Iroquois. From her heart grew sacred tobacco, used to send messages and thanks to the Sky World.

The two brothers continued to compete with each other as they created the animals and plants, and in the process, represented different ways of living.

The Right-Handed Twin created the beautiful hills, lakes, blossoms, gentle creatures while the Left-Handed Twin, the jagged cliffs and whirlpools, thorns and predators.

The Right-Handed Twin was always truthful, reasonable, goodhearted, and "straight-arrow" while the Left-Handed Twin lied, fought, rebelled and made "crooked" choices.

Because Right-Handed Twin created human beings, he is known as "Our Creator," and "The Master of Life." But Left-Handed Twin helped, and invented rituals of sorcery and healing. The world they built included both cooperation and competition, loving kindness and aggression.

After they finished their creations, the continued to compete - by gambling, playing lacross, and fighting with clubs.

One day, grasping a deer antler,the Right-handed Twin finally prevailed, and killed his brother, throwing the body of Left-Handed Twin over the edge of the earth. As a result,the Right-Handed Twin rules day and the Sky-World and Left-Handed Twin prevails over night and the lower world.

Grandmother Skywoman was furious that Right-Handed Twin murdered his brother, and accused him of wrongdoing. Angry, and believing that grandmother had always favored the Left- Handed Twin, he cut off her head and threw it up toward the sky, where it became the Moon. Then he threw her body into the ocean, where it became all the fish of the sea.

The Iroquois believe that both Left-Handed Twin and Right- Handed Twin are necessary for the world to be in balance. During festivals, day activities honor Right-Handed Twin, and night activities such as feasting, singing and dancing honor Left-Handed Twin. This tension and struggle for balance between the two brothers and principles of life is incorporated into Iroquois festivals and cycles of life.

Have a good one :)

Story Fever

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:22:00 +0000

John Masefield wrote 46 poems and this poem - Sea Fever - is my favorite of all time
I received a book from my Aunt for a Birthday called Stories to Remember.
This book took you to all parts of the world so you'd have a small glimpse as well as an introduction to mythologies like Hercules holding up the sky and Pandora.
I still have this book and treasure it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

Since then I've been introduced to many fables, stories and myths and it made my world for me.

People lived exciting lives all over the world. There were many mysteries in the world, many excursions one could take to explore, to understand, what it is we were really born for?One must live many life times to experience everything.

The world really is a stage, full of magic and miracles, sadness and joy, Danger, evil and goodness. One could literally burst from all the knowledge one could grasp and learn from it and yet still die totally stupid and ignorant.

As I read the stories, I wanted more.It is easy to become a drifter, a collector of stories, a collector of minds and memories.It is easy to see why the wise men would follow a star not knowing where it would lead .

And then, when the myths and stories come to life..... well.... then it becomes mind blowing.

Here in BC the aboriginals believe in the crow as a carrier of their ancestors' spirit.It is almost taboo to kill such birds and we see so many of them.They leer at you and make you feel most unwelcome as if we are not supposed to be here.

Pirates on the other hand had the same beliefs and superstitions when it came to rats and the albatross.If rats left the ship, they took it as a bad omen . Rats also knew about sickness before people did.The albatross was associated with both good and bad luck at sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem called The Rime of the ancient Mariner where both sides of the albatross can be seen. The albatross was a good omen if seen in dense snowy fog. It was said to be the restless soul of a dead sailor, so if one killed such a bird, it would be tied to his neck and the sailor would be tied to the main mast until the storm was over, without food or water.

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.
It ate the food it ne’er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!
Why look’st thou so?’--With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work ’em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Other myths included:

The Kraken, in Iceland and Norway were giant squids which took ships down

Gryndilows in England - were water demons who would drag children into the water.
People told their kids about them so they wouldn't swim in cold water

Ceto, a Greek invention, was a sea monster with a husband and children consisting of gorgons, sea nymphs, medusas.
She became all sea monsters.

Ashrays were translucent creatures resembling sea ghosts, in Scotland.
They melt in light so you only see them under water at night.

Chessie is a sea monster found in Virginia and Maryland. She's a serpant like creature with scales
and flippers . There is one in Lochness and Lake Champlain as well.

Kappas are from Japan and they have monkey like features with long noses and yellowish skin. They lure children into the water so they could drink their blood.
They lose power if their heads get filled with water and then loses it.

Blue men in minch from around shiant islands near scotland . They had blue skins and swam around ships conjuring storms to wreck them Some call them fallen angels or mermen. They have a leader and to save your ship you had to solves their riddles and rhymes and have the last word.

Bäckahästen had to do with a brook horse in Scandinavia
Anyone who found her near a river in foggy weather and rode her would be drowned

Bunyips come from Australia and are found by swamps creeks and waterholes. They eat humans
and have flippers walrus tuskshorse tails. They also spread disease in the water.

Charon is the mythical ferryman who takes you to the underworld through the river of woe, Acheron. Only the souls of people buried with a coin in their mouths was taken I guess to pay their way lol No souls ever left because the three headed hell hound, Cerberus, guarded the exit

Dragon Kings exist in China. They are made up of 4 dragons ruling over 4 seas.
They were shape shifters living in crystal palaces guarded by crabs and shrimps.

Fosse grim comes from
Scandinavian mythology. He is a water spirit that played enchanted songs on the violin, luring women and children to drown in lakes and streams. Some stories speak of him as harmless only entertaining men, women and children with songs. According to myth Fosse grim fell in love with a human but couldn't stay because he had to be near water.

Jengu
These were water spirits in mythology of the Sawa, an ethnic group in Cameroon . The resembled merpeople - gap-toothed, with long, woolly hair. These spirits act as an intermediate between the living and the spiritual world, could cure disease, and played an important role in some tribal rites, for example when a child entered adulthood.

With so many mythological dangers in the oceans and seas, one wonders why men would ever sail into them but they do and sometimes the spirits favor men and sometimes they don't.
Men like to race and beat the devil. lol
Men like to live on the edge and it is because of these kind of people full of spirit, searching for answers, people have so much to entertain them with, learn and progress.

Have a great day :)

Be Life So Humble

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:05:00 +0000

Once in a while we had storms on the Richelieu.
Great lightning storms.

My otherwise fearless dog, would shake when he heard the loud thunder
He and my Mom would sit down by the living room door and wait for things to calm down.
Once a lightning bolt hit my Dad's outside antenna and went straight into the TV.
My parents always shut down the electricity in storms like this.

It was not uncommon to see rain on one side of the street and none on the other or walk up the road and have the rain slowly following you lol
Some people a few streets away were flooded with rain and we wouldn't get a drop.

For trolling my Dad put on a small motor with a long neck and a small propeller.
I got stuck in huge waves trying to get back home and the propeller seemed more out of the water than in.
It took me a while to get to shore and frightened me little bit because I never thought river water could get so high. These waves were higher than anything a passing boat made and those could be quite high too. They are fun to race through with a powerful engine but with a trolling motor, it was a losing battle.

I thought, this is more than enough for me to handle. I don't think I'd make a good fisherman out 200 miles from shore in the ocean.
It's no fun being a mermaid in water like that lol
You can't dream anymore with the prospect of being washed over board by those type of waves or even sunk. Nature's power is over whelming and a humbling experience.
I began devising how I would build an unsinkable boat, something that could be thrashed around and survive the deadliest storm. I came up with a submarine with sails killing two birds with one stone.
Now that would resolve all my problems lol

With my husband, pulling a boat in distress to a marina, in BC, in White Rock, we had a similar experience but without the rain. My youngest feared nothing but my oldest sat with bulging eyes as the waves became higher than our boat but they rolled and so our boat was able to go up and down on them as did the boat we hauled. There was enough pull there to snap the back of our boat right off and leave us all splashing in stormy waters, so we went real slow.

What we feared was the rope breaking from all the weight we were pulling and a piece of metal flying into someones' head, but we had no choice, because first of all it's the law and second of all the other boat would crash into rocks if it was not helped. We had to steer in the middle of the inlet to keep away from being taken in by the waves. It took us a long while to get it to safety and we also ran out of gas endangering ourselves. lol
People were shocked but we told them we were pulling a long time and our tank was full when we started.

Other smaller boats went in front of us to try to cut the waves and rescued us by giving us some gas for the final few feet we had to pull.
People are good in times of crisis.
That family was so upset they would lose their boat too so it made us feel good to do something nice for someone and for everything to turn out well.

This little expedition, wasn't exactly like going on a wild Parc Safari excursion but it was exciting and better than going on rides in Disneyland cause it was the real thing but then you expect this in an ocean , not on a river which can become equally as dangerous.

Then there were killer whales swimming in the area.

Before this happened, I decided to take a dip off the boat. The water looked so inviting. Soft like velvet and warm. The calm before the storm. Nick saw me and jumped in after me.
He was little, around 2 and even if he was a foot away from my hand, which he was, I couldn't reach him and it would have been easy to lose him in the 200 feet of water, that was below me. He was lying face down and I had to turn him over but he was never afraid. He could have been a nice tid bit for those whales. lol

Thankfully he had a life jacket on and he didn't slip from it.
He scared me half to death. Kids have no fear.

I hugged him so hard thinking about the close call I almost had.
Then we saw the clouds and thought we better hurry back.
It wasn't far and we had plenty of time but then this boat we had to rescue happened.

Needless to say we had an exciting day that day and made new memories on a wider frontier.
lol
We have to thank Poseidon and Neptune for being kind in our hour of need.

Have a good Day ! :)

My Life on the Richelieu River

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:29:00 +0000

http://www.historiclakes.org/canada/fort_lennox.htm

I call the Richelieu River as my River. I feel like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer here .

Although I never saw any paddle steam ships like they had along the Mississippi River, I did see huge ships go by our country house and then for some reason they stopped. With the aid of a few canals they connected the Champlain with the Hudson and you could go by boat all the way to New York and going the other way up the Richelieu you'd get into the St Lawrence and out into the ocean through the Lachine Rapid Canals.

I spent an awful lot of time growing up there, exploring, diving, fishing .
From the bottom shot of Fort Montgomery, (You see it on a little peninsula looking arm sticking out, on the left hand side,) you could see how wide the river was. It was here the river opened up into Lake Champlain.

We lived on the right hand side. I am sure if you look close enough you will be able to see a tall white silo belonging to Mr McCallum. His is a heritage farm over 100 years old and we lived a bit further up that road.
I used to ride my bike every day to the border and back and then tie my Dad's boat to myself and swim across that river with my dog. We'd only go to the left hand shore and then ride back in the boat. lol. My dog was extremely powerful and lived a great life. One day we came in to the wharf and my Dad was standing there waiting to go out fishing.
I gave him the boat and he got in, started it but the boat wouldn't go. He asked me what I did with the boat and I said nothing. You saw me coming in. He lifted the motor and there was no propeller.
The shear pin broke. I gathered once I stopped the motor and the boat just kept coasting to the wharf, the propeller dropped off.
My Dad told me I better find that propeller cause its expensive to buy so I had to go fishing for it.
I followed the route the boat came in and sure enough there it was.
I was very happy I found it and so was my Dad. He got a new shear pin and we were fine. Good thing it didn't happen in the middle of the river cause that would then be hard to find it.

My Dad being a machinist, made himself another propeller. Gosh he was good at what he did.

Surrounded by farmers fields, it was not surprising they would be full of deer and other rodents and lots of birds. So my parents had a great time in winter entertaining and being entertained by wild life.
Ducks would fly by heading south for winter and the river would be packed with duck hunters.
This was a dangerous time cause sometimes they shot at ducks and bullets would come in through your window. lol
The river was stocked with so much fish that you never had to wait even a minute to catch one or two. Sunfish, pike,perch,rockfish,eel, heck sometimes you'd go to the rail road track bridge and look down at the huge white fish that would lie sleeping there.

Even if you put a hook in front of their mouths they wouldn't bite. It didn't bother us. We'd go there to jump off the bridge lol

Life was good back then for kids. We were free to do all kinds of things.
Campers of course would come and do crazy things once in a while. One person had their head chopped off from what I heard by a propeller. Kids were chasing each other around in two boats and the boat behind couldn't stop in time when one kid fell in. But those of us living there knew the river and were river smart enough to know not to do things like this.

The river was so beautiful to swim in, clean, warm. Life was everywhere from tad poles to schools of tiny fry swimming around in between the tall grasses.
The sun would set through these grasses and rays of sunshine would sneak through them and you'd be down there sitting at the bottom wishing you never had to come up for air and live like a mermaid absorbing all this life energy around you. Sometimes you'd go down 30 feet and this was when I really wanted to scuba dive. In actuality, you never have to go deeper than this cause everything turns gray in color.
People could drink this water and did at least until companies polluted it and now no one eats or drinks anything even though they cleaned it up.
In the winter the river would be full of fishermen cutting holes in the ice. People would ride their ski doos on the frozen ice, I could skate.
Some people put up sails or flew kites on their sleds and let the wind pull them across the shore line. Of course you had to be river smart or end up breaking through the ice into the water. Trick was to stay close to the shore line where it wasn't deep.
Sometimes I would put on my skiis and do cross country through the farmers field where I would come to a quarry. The snow would be bright, the sun hot and the water so tempting.
I'd take my skiis and jacket off and sit there just soaking it all in and then walk back.
The day before I had my first baby we walked through this field to the quarry with my big belly, with my husband and Dad. My Dad was afraid I'd have it in the field. lol
We went home and decided to go for pizza and after the pizza I had to go to the hospital.
My Dad called cause he knew to keep tabs on me at this time and found out where I was. He got my husbands Dad and they both sat at the hospital waiting for the baby to be born. My husband walked in and said you will never believe who is out there. The pressure was on lol

At Christmas and New Years the towns' hotel bars were open for business.
They hired bands and every one would show up to dance. No one cared if they knew you or not.
This was country. We didn't have to drive our car and just walked home in fresh icy air, gazing at a sky full of stars and my river.

The old timers were the greatest people,always smiling, always cheerful.
They had stories to tell like the one about the white fish which had pearls in their brains.
People would catch and kill them for these pearls and throw the bodies away. Now they had hardly any of these fish left they told us. They said at least if they ate them, it would have been a better story. Farming people hated waste.

When my Dad had to drill for water he called an old dowser who always knew where the best water was with his apple stick and he got us two great places to dig and we got great water in both places as opposed to my neighbor who hit sulfur water.

You could always feel there was something special about this place. It had history written all over it and I lived through history like I lived with Swan Lake dreaming about the Iroquois The French and The English fighting big battles. I looked at my place and wondered who walked there before and who died. Who touched this tree? You had plenty of food to let your imagination run wild . lol
Further up the street, close to Fort Lennox, was Charlie's place where he had a monument on his shore line depicting a famous battle that took place. and on the border side, half a mile up our road,was a small house with a big monument as well. We were only allowed to go up to this monument because on the other side you'd be in the USA.

Fort Montgomery

http://www.fortmontgomery.net/

It was here one day that my cousin showed up with his two sisters and a friend.
He asked my Dad to use the boat. My Dad told me to take them out and I said no. lol
I didn't want to get into trouble.
But instead of saying no to my cousin, he forced me to go out in the boat.
So I went and we went to Fort Montgomery since it was closer. I was going to show them the Fort and come home but everyone wanted to stop so we did.
The guys jumped over board to swim. They came up and told us they saw eels and just at that moment came a border patrol boat.
They saw us kids there and asked what we were doing there.
I told him I lived just on the other side and come here all the time but my
cousin automatically said: this isn't my boat and I don't know nothing, I'm from New York.
Both of us were pointing in different directions. lol

My mouth fell open. I could lose a boat and get into huge trouble here.
The border patrol guy looked at my face and understood what was going on.
He had to check because of all the drugs being smuggled in but we were just a bunch of kids with a baby sister cause now my aunt had another baby.
She offered him a "she shell" lol
Well the border guy laid into my cousin and told him if he is from the states he must know the laws better.
He explained we were on the US side and should not come here any more. So I lost my rights now to go to Fort Montgomery, a place I went to for a long long time without any trouble.
I was not happy
Thankfully we had enough life preservers but we didn't have a whistle.
My Dad sold the other boat we had and got a small aluminum Princecraft.
I got no fine and we went home.
But I told my cousin that was a nice class act he did after forcing me to take the boat out trying to make himself sound so innocent like nothing was his fault.
He pretended he knew what he was doing but I was not impressed with his answer.
And he was allowed to go there cause he was American and no I couldn't.
Later I told my Father he was never to make me do things I didn't want again.
He should have taken my cousin out.
I would have just told the patrol man we came to see the fort cause I had visitors and lived across the river and he would have let us go without much discussion. We fished there all the time.
Living between two Forts like this was great!
Now from the net it seems they are selling lots there.

Have a good one. :)

Witness of the Stars

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:38:00 +0000

http://www.archive.org/stream/witnessofstars00bull#page/n7/mode/2up

Witness of the Stars is a very interesting old book dealing with the origin of the Zodiac, which can be read free on line.
Many people believe in the zodiac without knowing its' origin.
People say there is no God because he never speaks to anyone and there is no evidence of his existence.
This book attempts to answer this dilemma as it was written in the heavens in Astrology and Astronomy .

Astronomy and Astrology were created from the beginning and apparently+ studied by the Babylonians 3,800 before Christ.

They had 70 Creation tablets according to Dr Budge, of the British museum.

The 5th creation tablet spoke of ANU ( the creator) made mansions (celestial houses) of great gods (12 in number). He placed fixed stars in them and the year was arranged by these 12 signs.

Job, which is said to be the oldest book of the Bible, 2000 years before Christ, referenced names such as ASH - great bear; Cesil and Cimah; Orion Pleiades etc...
from them.
Egypts' Astrology also goes back 5,400 BC

One astronomer Eudoxos of Cnidus, in 403BC, wrote on Astronomy. His writings were noticed by the King of Macedonia who asked Aratus the poet to write this work in a poem called the Divine Signs and it is believed Apostle Paul read them.

The poem described the signs and constellations as they were 4000 years before but the thing is
they could not be seen from Tarsus, where Aratus was
so he must have used the ancient zodiac.

The heavens have a slow change taking place in them.
The pole of the heavens recedes 50" every year.
Alpha of the constellation Draco used to be the first polar star but now was found to be in Ursa Minor. The change after calculation, showed that it had to take 5000 years for this change to take place.

The Word Zodiac came from the Hebrew Sodi meaning "A way" path or step.
The earth seems to revolve around the sun one time, every 24 hours.
but the time it takes the stars to do the same, differs by 1/12th part of the whole circle, each month.

So if the circle is divided into 12 parts, the sun appears to move through each one of them, 1 time per mo. and the path is called ecliptic.

The signs always stayed the same beginning with Aries, proving common origin from one source.

Israel used them to depict 12 tribes with each one ensign of their fathers' house.
The ancient start pictures, show 12 signs with three constellations each , making a total of 46

The Sphinx has a head of a woman and the body of a lion and the word itself means " together".

So two ends of the Zodiac had to meet to make a circle and shows where the heavens begin and end.
So we see the heavens begin with Virgo and end with Leo.

Now the book shows and explains each zodiac sign with its' three constellations and the meanings derived from each one showing the way, thus proving that God does speak to us from the heavens if we know how to read what he is saying. and what we are just discovering today, was already known by the Egyptians and Babylonians long before Christ was born. So no one could have told the story after the birth of Jesus because it was foretold long before.

Some say this book is Satanic and confuses Christianity probably because it deals with the zodiac but I found it interesting. We have to understand, people believed the world was flat in those days. lol
Whether it is true or not remains to be seen but it is a mind expanding read and fun if you like to read your horoscope. lol

It also gives you an idea of how the Zodiac we know, is designed to speak to us.

http://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Witness_of_the_Stars.html?id=j9lE5e30fSEC

Have a good one !

:)

The book is found on line and can be read for free.

.

What did the astronaut cook for lunch?

A: An unidentified frying object.
-----------------------------------
One day there was a big lady swimming in the ocean by the beach . Sudenly , she noticed that she had lost her top. She thought that no one would notice if she covered herself with her arms and walked over to her towel.

So she went, and nobody seemed to notice her as she approached her towel. Then a little girl went up to her and said, "Hey,excuse me !"

"What ?"asked the startled lady.

"If you're going to drown those puppies, can you let me have the one with the cute little brown nose."
----------------------------------------
What do you call an overweight ET ? (extra terrestrial)
An extra cholesterol !

The President was awakened one night by an urgent call from the Pentagon. "Mr. President," said the four-star general, barely able to contain himself, "there's good news & bad news." "Oh, no," muttered the President, "Well, let me have the bad news first." "The bad news, sir, is that we've been invaded by creatures from another planet." "Gosh, and the good news?" "The good news, sir, is that they eat reporters and pee oil."

Bend Over

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:33:00 +0000

Spanking made me remember a lot of things.
First of all, spanking is not beating.
You spank to teach a lesson and so it has to be with forethought and the child has to know he has to bend over to take his punishment. Schools also had this and you had to know if you did bad and they gave you chances to stop but you didn't, you had to wait in front of the Principals' office until he came out with the ruler.

The waiting is worse than the punishment. lol That's why my Dad always made me wait till we got home because the anticipation of a spanking was worse than the spank.

My Dads' Dad never spanked but many times I heard my Dad say I wish he did spank because he'd go on and on and on and on and he'd make him more angry and very nervous.
One day he told him :
Just hit me why don't you and get it over with so I can go? lol Then my Grand father again would begin with the lectures and again he'd sit with his blood pressure rising. But he sat. He respected his Dad and sat. Today kids don't sit.

My Grand mother used to take a towel and twist it and she'd chase my Dad around the table. The towel would untwist and then she would hit his sister with it.
My Dad complained and said : How come you are hitting me with a twisted towel and her with an untwisted one. She would pretend to spit from anger and walk away. My Dad and his sister always remembered their spanks and laughed.

My Husbands' parents would grab an ankle and the kids would scream from fear but then the screams turned into laughter because instead of hitting the bottom of the feet they would hit themselves. The point was made and tears turned into giggles and screams.

I spanked once in a while but very seldom. There is no point to spank if learning doesn't take place.
Sometimes you have to if nothing else works.

As for me, I grew up and took Shotokan Karate. My muscles became hard as rock.
One day my Dad got angry with me and I said to him, do you want to spank me? Here!

I gave him my bum and he gave it a hard wallop but I felt nothing.
He, on the other hand, hurt his hand and I saw him slowly put it down so I would not see.

But he was proud of me. I grew up strong and sure of myself.
I didn't commit suicide over stupid problems, I was never bullied.
I took my knocks. I was also smart to avoid being knocked.
I respected people, didn't swear or take drugs and showed kindness to the old the weak and less fortunate. It is funny, but all our names in my Family mean Defender of men and that's what we are.

Kids learned from pressure. It's not like an adult learning because a kid always had parents to fall back on to give support.

Today we have a whiner society. Every time something happens... Oh,we need to pass a law.
So things get ugly and people get ugly and laws get ugly.
No one wins.

We passed anti spanking laws because some parents were abusing their kids. Abuse is never a good thing to do but that's different from spanking. If you need to give a child a good spank, that's a different story.
A spank is not for your benefit but for the childs'.
Kids went to school to squeal on the parents so the school gets them into trouble as payback for saying no at home. Today the schools ignore these kids because they themselves can't handle them.
Some just can't be handled. So today they drug them. They destroy their brain cells.
But our parents spanked us and we corrected our behavior without drugs.

I much prefer I do it myself, than to have my arrogant kid go out into the street and get shot or beaten or killed by a police man. That would be abuse.
Today the police fear the public and when they shoot, they shoot to kill and they don't care how old you are.
Then the public complains and I say...... it's too late.

ex You want rights to be a prostitute knowing you will be in danger.
Where were the parents to help you change your decision before you ended in a ditch?
Now you are dead and passing laws isn't going to change that.
Killing your killer isn't going to change that.

When your kid was small did you teach him?
Did he accept authority?
Did he take drugs?
Did he go to school or play hooky?
Did he bully ?
How did he handle bullying?
Did he do chores?
Was your child temperamental or easy going?

We all had the same problems growing up as the kids do today but we were tougher kids as a result of being taught respect and accepting authority.

Today they speak of children committing suicide.
Why?
I couldn't take the bullying!
They write on face book about me.
They laugh at me at school.

We were taught how to handle such situations. Our minds were working all the time.
We'd sit and wait for an opportunity for the bully to make a mistake and usually he does and then the jokes' on him... and the bully becomes the bullied.

The bully gets his just rewards and this is what a powerful mind does.
A powerful mind is not afraid of a spanking any more than it is afraid of bullying
or anything else. A powerful mind walks through life proud.
A powerful mind, when he falls down, gets up and walks again.

Laws do not fix life problems. You have a life problem, you have to learn to be strong and fix it yourself.
Once you learn to do this, you become an adult.
You become a man.
lol
I have to ask looking at our society today, how many people can call themselves men?

:) Have a Good One
Rudyard Kipling If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

To Spank or Not to Spank That Is the Question.

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:16:00 +0000

Today people frown on spanking and you see kids sitting on Ritalin instead.
I prefer spanking to drugs anytime.
Even at school, teachers and principals were allowed to punish.
Our school usually used a ruler on hands.

My Mom's sponsor that paid for the boat trip across the ocean to Halifax was this Jewish family . She had to baby sit and do the housecleaning and cooking for them for a year, as a live in.
Being young, she knew nothing about any of those things and the Mom of the house had to teach her many things, how to set the table, how to clean silver, how to do the washing, etc....
The family had a boy and a girl.
My Mom said when they did something bad the Father would give them two choices.
Either they got a spanking or they had to stay in their rooms a week.
She said the girl took her spanking and then went to do her normal things but the boy was a chicken and stayed in his room a week lol.

My Mom found spankings amusing because her own Dad sat at the table with a wooden spoon.
When the kids misbehaved they got spooned on the forehead lol
It can be intimidating if you are alone but with a group all getting the same thing...... it becomes fun.
Thank fully she said she was the oldest and when the war began she wasn't around much.

Being Jewish, this family she lived with was not allowed things like pork but for my Mother they provided her with bacon, kolbasa's and other tid bits they knew she would like.
She was extremely skinny but ate a lot and they always wondered where she put it all.lol

One day they were expecting guests and my Mom was told to bake the turkey.
Simple enough. She took the turkey , stuffed it into a dish and put it into the oven.
Come dinner time, the table was set and the guests seated and she served it for carving. This was when they found out that she did not clean it out inside. lol It still had all its organs .The whole dinner was spoiled. lol
So this was when cooking lessons were in order for my Mom.
She learned all kind of Jewish cooking . She liked that family because they were good to her.
So when she got married she cooked some of what she learned from them. Our family knew things like gifilte fish, mozza balls, cheese knishes lol These were good compared to the stew one woman made at our House.
My parents let this Rumanian couple a room for a few weeks till they got a place of their own to live.
They had a boy but he was in a private school and never came home but he did have a train set which I found in their closet. I put it together and played with it. It was a great train so I made sure to put it away before the couple came home.lol

One day this woman cooked this stew for my lunch . She put so much pepper I couldn't eat it and I began to cry. She was going to force me to eat it and even to beat me but thankfully, my Mom walked into the kitchen and told me I didn't have to eat it. I ran out of the kitchen so fast .
When they finally left I was happy lol

On the whole our neighborhood was great, very cosmopolitan. We had Italian families along with French Canadians English Polish Ukrainian, Black and when they all got together they began having moon shine competitions.One started it and then every one wanted to get into it.

Every one had their own little still at home and once a brew was made to taste, they went to each others houses for a sample. On week ends in winter, with 4 foot snow piles outside, parties were frequent at our house. lol
My parents did this for a few years and thought they better stop because you can't drink every week. My Dad was not a drinker He would have a few shots and then go take a nap. lol
But other people would not know when and things could get quite rowdy as discussions got into politics.
As kids we'd get together and discuss what our parents said and did at home.
One Italian family had a grown up son. He came home one day from university with a very long beard. His Dad didn't like it. My friend said her brother used to tease his Dad by sitting and putting his beard into the spaghetti sauce when he ate. Her Dad would fly into a frenzy and everyone at the table laughed as he chased him out of the house. lol

When we first built our house, the neighbor had a little boy my age, Carmenuch. He stood on his balcony with a bottle of chocolate milk and I stood on mine with my normal milk and we'd stand and point at each other talking jibberish.
Then I went out side and so did he and we would wet our underwear. I thought I would take mine off so my Mom wouldn't yell at me but she yelled at me anyway lol I was running around without clothes.I wouldn't listen so eventually I got a spanking for that. lol

One day Carmenuches' big brother came out and picked up a rock and threw it at me for no reason. I ran but it hit me in the back of the head. My Mother tried to find out who did it because there was a lot of blood but all I could tell her through my tears that it was it was a big boy and he ran away. I still have an indentation in my skull at that spot.
When we grew up this big boy, whose name I now knew as Dominic, wanted to marry me but I remembered the rock he threw at my head lol so this wasn't going to happen. He was an honors student in physics and quite a good looker with tons of girls after him.

My Dad didn't like to hear me crying all the time when I got bullied. When I went to school I was not a very small girl and quite athletic like my Dad. I was a good kid. When kids got bullied they'd come to me and hide behind my back and the bullies would look in my face and back away. It must have been because I never showed fear.

But one boy, Bobbie, would sneak up, in grade one, and push me from behind. I'd lose my balance and fall and tear my leotards. I came home one day like this then another day and my parents became very annoyed.
My Dad said if I did not stop him and stand up for myself, he would spank me. The next day I was petrified to come home again with torn stockings lol So he took me to the boys' Mother and showed her my legs. Bobbie got the spanking of his life that day.lol
I learned that I was allowed to stand up for myself because we were not allowed to fight at school. We'd get a ruler on the hands or a suspension.

Carmenuch had other big brothers and one sister who they married off at 15. The poor girl had baby after baby and by the time she was 23 she looked 55. The doctor told her she couldn't have any more, but being Catholic they didn't practice birth control, so she got pregnant again and almost died. The family was very upset with her husband but she refused to have an abortion so when the baby was born the doctors decided they would tie her tubes so she had no more babies.
She had no say in the matter. She had no say anywhere , not at home, not in her marriage and not with the doctor. I watched and thought, this will never happen to me.

I liked this family though. They were Italian and the Mom and Dad did not look like they had much schooling but the Mom was extremely smart.
She did lace piecework at home, always had a huge pot of spaghetti and a pot full of sauce on the stove and they grew huge dandelions, tomatoes and cucumbers for salad in the back yard.

Once when her oldest boy got into a major fight with his cousin. He came home with a torn ear.
Well this woman took out her needle and thread and began to sew it up. He was yelling and each time he yelled, she swatted him on the head and winked at me with a smile, while probably cursing at him in Italian saying: tapotsanachee lol.

This boy always fought with his cousin(, the one with the long beard and the spaghetti sauce). lol Once they began a fight and my Dad saw them.
He came out and said:
Boy, you call this a fight? You guys hate each other so much.
Why don't you just finish it?
He took out two 2 x 4's and pretended to check them out and to hand one to each of the boys saying: Now here.... with this you can do the job good and finish it once and for all. Just give each other a good bash on the head and it will be over. May the best man win. Lol

The two guys looked at him then at each other, turned and went home lol They thought my Dad was crazy and my Dad began to laugh. We never saw them fight anymore after that. He knew they wouldn't take the 2x4's.

The family also had an old beat up cat. He was a very nice cat but very scarred from all the fights he was in. He got very old and stiff, sorta like my Tatty became in old age. He always came for a pat but you didn't know where to pat him because of the scars.

My Dad brought home many cats but they seemed to disappear. We thought someone was eating cats in the neighborhood.
I also had baby rabbits.
Once I decided to take my favorite white bunny and drop him off the balcony to see if he would land on his feet, like the cats do. It was an experiment and it failed because the poor bunny broke its' back. I screamed and my Mom came running and she was so sad. She said
What did you do? I was crying cause my favorite white bunny was dying. I never expected that to happen but it was just a tiny thing so the fall must have been too high for it.

My heart always ached for animals when they were hurt. One day the same neighbors went to the market and brought home a black lamb. They left it tied by the legs on the balcony and I heard it bleating.
I came running and knew what was going to happen to it and became quite upset. I contemplated on stealing it but I had no place to hide it lol
So the poor thing disappeared and that was the last we saw of it.

Things were quite free in those days.
Dogs ran on the streets and we lost many dogs to rabies, including my own.
But going to school was fun cause a female dog would be in heat and she'd run into the school yard followed by many male dogs. These dogs would ignore kids but they would get into dog fights and this always made our day to watch lol
Someone eventually had to be called to round them up.

But we also had people who took very good care of their dogs. One old couple had an old gray terrier they named Nipper. He'd always come out to bark at you and they'd laugh and say be careful. You see, his name is Nipper. Why do you think he got that name ?.But he was too old to do any fighting or biting. lol

Another family had this small Chihuahua. He'd come running out at you into the middle of the street wagging his tail, looking as if he was smiling at you and being so friendly, just to get close enough to bite you lol Now his name should have been Nipper.lol

And then my next door neighbor had a female Boxer and she was my favorite. Her name was Tawny. Tawny and I spent a great deal of time together. The neighbors were an older couple and they saw I loved dogs so they let me take her for daily walks. Other kids came to ask them to do the same thing but they always said no so I was touched that they trusted me with their dog. In the morning on garbage day you would take the garbage out and hear this heavy breathing behind you. It always scared you thinking it was some pervert and then you'd turn and it was Tawny wagging her stumpy tail. She was a darling dog and you'd hug and kiss her and tell her how naughty she was scaring you this way.lol

One day I came to take her for a walk but she was gone. She was replaced by a black Doberman
who didn't look very friendly. I asked where Tawny was and the neighbor said her policeman son took it and gave her this one. I took this dog for a walk but he was not one to be told what to do. He'd give you a wicked look as if to say: Watch it. So he took me for a walk instead of the other way around.
I brought him home very carefully and handed him back to the lady and never went back to walk it again. But then.......lo and behold.....there was Tawny again.

We both jumped for joy to see each other and what a reunion we had. The lady told me she told her son to take the Doberman back because she was afraid of him as well. Things went back to normal.
One day Tawny had a litter of cute pups.
They offered my Dad a pup for 75 dollars and my Dad said no. I was disappointed and so were the couple because they said that was a cheap price for this dog and they really wanted me to have one since they saw how much I loved Tawny.
My Dad didn't believe in spending money on animals He always got them for free. I had problems with him when it came to cats and dogs. He liked to see animals run free and I knew they had to be tied. He'd have cats and always lose them once they began fighting with other cats but mine I neutered so they were home buddies.

I gave him one such cat and he was stuck to them like glue. Every where they went. the cat walked alongside like a dog. He stayed with them 18 years and they couldn't stop talking about what a great cat he was and how they lucked out with this cat. lol But they kept forgetting he was neutered. lol

Well to end on a spanking note, my Mom once thought she would please her husband and paint the dining room. She took out a can of paint, a roller and went for it.
She was so pleased and proud of herself and couldn't wait for my Dad to come home to show him.

Well he came home alright. But she did not get the compliments she wanted.
He grabbed his head aghast at what she had done. She used too much paint and it was all streaking down the wall. By now it was almost all dry as well.

He started screaming and she started crying. He grabbed sand paper and immediately began to scrape the paint before it got too hard to come off. He worked the whole night scraping while my Mom sat sniffling. lol

Boy that sure was a story they laughed at later. My Dad would hug her and shake his head laughing at what she had done and my Mom kept saying how he hurt her feelings cause she worked so hard to please him and instead, got a yelling of a lifetime.

I'd sit and watch the two of them thinking, if ever two people were meant for each other, those two were.
They were love birds till the end.

Have a good one :)

Dollar Down Dollar a Week.

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:44:00 +0000

In the 50's what we call abuse today was prevalent. The idea was spare the rod spoil the child.
However no one complained cause every one had their turn lol
Kids were not wooses like they are today, always complaining.
Spanking was a way of life and I am not sure it was a bad thing.

No kid ever got damaged from a spanking and it wasn't like what they did to people in hospitals.
I got spanked and all my friends got spanked. We'd see big guys with beards get chased by their little Fathers with a stick but not one ever laid a hand to their parent. Kids were good kids in those days and we all grew up to be good family people.

My Dad was strict but he was also the life spirit in our house.
My Mom was meticulous about cleanliness as she was a surgical nurse before coming to Canada. During the war she saw lots of blood and in the camps the doctors made it her job to help them. If she did not give them the right instruments she'd get slapped, so she learned quickly, but her nature was against blood so when she'd see it she would get dizzy and almost faint. I'd always laugh and ask: Mom, what kind of nurse were you? and she'd give me a sour look lol

But her floors were clean enough to eat from and she would always complain if we did something to dirty them. She ironed and especially loved to hang her clothes outside in winter so they came in a little damp cause they were frozen, but so fresh smelling and the rest of the drying they did on hangers before being ironed. We did the same with the Carpet in winter. We'd take it out into the snow and throw snow on it and then broom it off on both sides and then bring it back in. The carpet would always look great. This was a great job for kids to do and I enjoyed it a lot. Who said cleaning sucks. lol
I never remember using chemicals on it. People get sick because of these chemicals. In our house we only used Parissienne Javel.

I was not exposed to dance or ballet or piano but I was exposed to other things. My Mom handled story telling, reading and writing. My Dad played the guitar and my Mom and would sing. We both had good singing voices.
She was very critical about the writing and it had to be perfect. How many times I'd be in tears because I didn't do a letter the way she wanted it.
But eventually I got smart and told her my hand writing was better than hers and she'd laugh cause then I would tell her to write the way she wanted me to. lol
Pressure always made you look for solutions to your problems and made you of stronger mind than people who have things done for them, problems solved for them.

I had my own bike which I had to keep spotless and I took great pride in it. My Mom would always check at night to make sure I slept but she slept in the early morning and I had plenty of time before school to take off on my bike and she never knew. Mornings were so nice especially in the fall.

My Dad was a hands on man, very athletic and liked to do everything himself. He loved cars and would tinker with them and I would be at his side. I loved the smell of oil and gas and grease. His cars had lots of chrome and white tires and I would love to help him polish cause driving a spiffy car was special. I asked him one day to teach me about motors but he refused and told me to keep my hands clean and be a lady.

I had animals like rabbits ducks kittens and dogs. He'd take me to the farm to see horses and tell me about how he worked on one for a year, to pay his sponsor for his boat ride across the ocean.
He had two huge draft horses to till the land with and he said they were the nicest animals but the farmer beat them and they feared him . If they saw him coming they'd go nuts. He said one day he brought them into the barn and didn't see the farmer coming but the horses did and they almost killed him trying to get away. The farmer was always drunk and not very nice.
The horses broke the supporting beam to the barn and it collapsed. He said it was a very thick beam.

After this episode my Dad went and complained to the farmers' brother, also a farmer and this one was a good guy, so he took him away to work for him and my Dad sighed a sigh of relief.
He said he was given a truck to drive and this guy was a well to do farmer as well as a good family man and he lent money to people because of hard times.

Every week he would make his rounds to see what he could collect back, a dollar here, a dollar there. People were honest and paid back what they could so his pocket was always full of money.lol
Then they would come home and he'd ask my Dad if he ever ate steak. My Dad said yes he did. The farmer said not like this one and then he'd take a huge thick steak and flip it a few times over a hot skillet and served it to him.
Those were lean times when steak was not that accessible so my Dad said he ate it with him with such delight. After this He always made steak at home with the same delight this farmer served him his first Canadian steak.
After that first year paying off the sposor was done, my Dad and his Dad carried two jobs to help save money. Every one worked.
My aunt and grand mother at a sewing factory and the guys in a garage and then later in huge companies like Canadian Vickers and Canada Air as machinists. European people were hired quickly because everyone knew they knew their jobs and were quite educated.

Before long they bought a lot and built a house. My Dad got married and then bought his own lot and began building his own house and I was born into this constructive time.

In between they grew gardens, pickled winter preserves. We'd go berry picking. He taught me about mushrooms. We'd go in the fall around 4:30 am into farmers woods to collect them.
The woods had rich black soil and I so enjoyed foraging with him through them. We'd come home with bags full which we had to dump right away and clean in salty water to get any little worm that might have crawled in, out.
My Mom would take over and wash them, cook them and then pickle them. They made their own shredded salted cabbage, and pickled guerkins as well as tomatoes and jams. We'd go apple picking and she made apple sauce and put that away for winter.We had rhubarb she also cooked and canned.
One time we went apple picking and my Dad found a wounded hawk. He brought it out of the woods and we saw one of the claws was frozen shut and it could in no way be opened. Seems it was shot by a hunter. So we took it home and my Mom laid out one room wall to wall with newspaper.
The bird ate a whole fresh turkey and behaved itself. We let it walk freely in the room. When he had to go, he'd lift his tail and shoot and we never knew how he did it, but he always found a tiny spot that was not covered with paper for the thing to fall on. So we had to clean it up quickly.
My Mom never got mad. Everyone was so impressed with this bird because he never missed a shot lol.
Well after three -four days and one turkey he was strong enough to let go and so we took him outside and he flew away but not before thanking us.
You think animals don't understand but they do. He flew in a circle came back and gave us a look to say thanks, before disappearing into the horizon.
Summers I spent swimming and helping to paint stairs, pulling weeds, reading. I had a great thirst for books for they were my window to the world.
These are things kids don't do today. Later on we built a second floor to our house and this I partook in. Our area was zoned for bungalows but then duplexes began to spring up so we had to upgrade so to speak.
My Dad gave me a job to clean the old bricks from the front of the house we took off and we used them for the side. The front got brand new white stones which were quite beautiful. Later he got another lot to build a country house and we spent every spare moment with hammer and nails. I learned what team work was like, with my Dad.
We'd work till noon and then went fishing and water skiing. Those days were my favorite days. I'd love to take the boat out. He got it second hand from a retired newspaper man. It had a siren and a 75 horsepower motor and you could even sleep in it. We tried it a few nights for the fun of it and slept in the middle of the river surrounded by bull frogs. It was great!
Then in the early dawn we'd catch fish for break fast and head on to my friends' camping ground to cook them.
My Dad loved camping so he got an axle from the junk yard and he welded himself a metal box frame. Before we knew it we had a fold out camping trailer. Then he got some canvas and sewed a tent to go over it. He got foam to make mattresses with. We had the best time with this trailer before we got the lot and he decided he liked the area enough to settle into a country house.

When we went home I used the trailer as my tree house in the back yard. It was my special place to go to play in.
Of course we had friends come over. My neighbor was always a princess and when we played dress up she would go into her dream land pretending. My dream was I was an amazon woman. I lived in a forest surrounded by danger and my friends were lions. Sorta like Tarzan, I had my own island and if anyone needed rescuing I was there to provide them secretly, with safety food and warmth. The trick was to never to be found out. lol

My aunt spent her money on clothes and parties and my Dad spent his, dollar down dollar a week on nails lol
Everything was a learning experience for my Mom and I and it was a good healthy life.

:)

Veritas - Truth

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:54:00 +0000

truth veritas
IF YOU KNEW THAT SOME OF THE GREAT STRIDES IN MODERN NEUROSCIENCE CAME ABOUT AS A DIRECT RESULT OF LETHAL EXPERIMENTS, CONDUCTED ON HUMAN BEINGS, INCLUDING CHILDREN, WOULD THAT ALTER YOUR OPINION OF MEDICAL RESEARCH? WOULD IT MAKE YOU WANT TO ASK MORE CRITICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR FUTURE PROFESSION, OR CONSIDER AN ALTERNATIVE CAREER?
http://www.anndiamond.net/could_you_be_one.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Growing up in Montreal was very interesting in the 50's.60's and 70's.
Secrecy existed every where, not just between adults in ones' home.

Every where you went, people whispered and I began to see a correlation between secrecy and bad things happening as a result of it.
Let's face it, if you had nothing to hide, why would you whisper? lol
To this day when I see people whisper, I don't like it.

The Mental institution I spoke of in my previous post was called
The Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine Hospital. It was a psychiatric hospital run by La Congregation des Soeurs de la Provedence since 1873. It is here they say, that normal children (orphans) were sent and labeled mentally ill or retarded so experiments could be performed on them. The papers today call them the Duplessis Orphans.

The Catholic Church is now being accused of all kind of atrocities done during this period.
But they were not alone.

WW2 Immigrants brought with them anxieties and distress from abuse in Nazi Labor Camps.
The Allies collected all the info from the German scientists obtained through torture and experiments they could not do at home.
The time was ripe to learn more from them.

It was a dangerous time to hang around psychiatric wards.

As a kid, you walked around everywhere watched and wondered why so many people were sick?
You never thought how easy something like this could happen to you.
I became a watcher and learned why it was that no one could be trusted.

You were raised to trust and believe in higher authority and the difference between right and wrong and yet these same people in authority who you were raised to honor were dishonorable.

http://www.oikos.org/psychabuse.htm

McGill University was associated with the
Allan Memorial, St. Mary's, the Montreal General, the Lakeshore General and the Douglas Psychiatric Hospital -- all dealing in mind control.

The GODs walked the hospital wards , churches and schools holding tremendous power. They lifted their thumb, you lived and they put down the thumb, you died. It was that simple and some of these Gods were very sick people themselves.
Some of them belonged in these same institutions they put people in.
Instead, the most vulnerable were at risk. Children, the homeless the drug addicts, the mentally ill etc....

Nothing of the horrible things these places did to people was published because the owners of the newspapers are listed in them as honored hospital donors. They could not afford a scandal.

When ever you went to the hospital, you had to make sure your family went with you and even then, there were no guarantees. They'd come in at night to do the deed, As they did with my Grand Mother. They put her on a dying list behind your back and then it didn't matter what they did to her cause no one would know.They sent in students and there was no main doctor there to watch them or maybe he left to give them more room to cut into people's chests through the mouth, where no one would see the scars. But we did and yes, she died twice during the night but because we made a stink, she got better miraculously and went home to live another 10 years. lol

With my Mother we were not so lucky. They overdosed her with Parkinson medication and destroyed her brain cells and then blamed the patient for being schizophrenic. My Mother never had any mental symptoms, until she took the pills and then she developed immediately hallucinations and alzheimers. It was only here in BC that I was able to find one book that explained the importance of giving the right dosage to people or risk brain cell destruction.
They also did not explain that there are two forms of Parkinsons. One form they could treat and the other with lesions they cannot.One had to think why would they over dose her on purpose? Did they want access to her brain under the false pretense of wanting to cure her?
No one gives their body to science and they need bodies. They don't get dead bodies so they secretly work with live ones. They always have the excuse well they are students and don't know everything but the doctor who is supposed to be there is out golfing. lol

Today everything is disclosed to the public and then maybe not, but in those days you could not say no to people like Heinz Lehman and Donald Cameron or any doctor. You ask them questions and they answer, that's why we are doctors and you are not.

Cameran ran the MK ULTRA at McGill University. It was financed by the US military and the CIA where patients were brutalized, maimed with drugs, shocks and lobotomies as a means to “depattern” and “re-program” the human mind. In truth they wanted to see how far a person would go before he cracked and was able to devulge information.

It would not be an exaggeration to think that maybe they could turn a man into a robot through hypnotism, triggered to act by a certain word or phrase.Many people on city streets don't remember anything of what was done to them in these wards.

After that,in the 60's ,LSD was made in McGill labs and maybe even sold to the people on the street, thanks to people like psychologist Timothy Leary, who encouraged students to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” This created an entire counterculture of drug abuse and spread the drug from North America to the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. Even today, use of LSD in the United Kingdom is significantly higher than in other parts of the world.

Leary in the end admitted that taking drugs was not good . Too little too late.

These people using LSD ended up in hospitals where the psychiatrists wanted them, because now they required and could have, more mental experiments done on them using other drugs like largactile, truth serum, chlorpromazine. Who would know?

Donald Ewan Cameron himself was a very scary kind of character. Some would call him a mad man.

He wanted the weak to be separated from the strong and that the weak should have no access to children. He wanted the weak to be removed from society and the root cause of mental illness eradicated. Reading about him really gives you reason to question every doctor, especially psychiatrists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron.

I noticed doctors behaviors with my own child, when he had ear infections that wouldn't go away.

The doctor wanted to put a hole in his ear drum and I said no, so he walked out the door. He had no use for me because I was not going to let him make money off my child from the government.

He did not tell me I could spend a week in Florida and cure my sons ear for good without surgery. It was not in his interest.

I had to figure this out for myself.

To not be able to trust your fellow man because of money, makes everything in life very difficult to deal with and no matter where we look, the church, government, medicine, politics, media , business etc...it's always the same thing.

People are not trained to look for and find truth but truth does exist.

I found it always in the basics I was brought up with, where I was taught to differentiate right from wrong and good from bad.

These childhood lessons saved me many a time because people give themselves away enough for the truth to seep through and be seen. You just have to know what to look for and be able to be strong enough to walk away.

In philosophy I guess it's called being able to sift through the grid, the things you don't want, to be able to see things that are left, as they really and truly are.

-----

At the end of the day, you retire to your room , sit down and reflect on all the statues of great men, learned men of science, law and philosophy whose words you study because of the honor bestowed unto them by the academic fields as well as nations.

You sit and wonder who exactly were these men and under what conditions did they warrant the term "Your Honor" attached to them.

Then you switch back into Shakespeares' tragedies where by villains hid in shadows to camouflage their black souls, behind their " honor ".

Truth...........Veritas.

SALUTE!

Have a good day :)

Memory Lane

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:16:00 +0000

The first time I was a flower girl was at my Aunts wedding.
I must have just turned 3.
In those days it seems every one had dresses made of Satin.
My Mom's dress was beautiful. So was my Aunts' .

I was the youngest and not really sure what was going on. There were two other, much older girls and they were always nasty to me.
We were all told to hold my Aunts trane but
one kept pushing me so I fall and the other kept pinching me, so
I would defend myself while holding her trane and this was a typical comedy you see on TV in weddings, with bad behavior between people having to do with the bride.lol

They were four years older and should have know better and told to stop but instead,
everyone kept telling me to stop fighting while they stood like they were offended by my behavior.

They took a picture and I was the saddest little girl there, looking heart broken at my Aunt and then at the camera, while the other two stood
arrogant and stuffy holding their bouquets in front of the bride and groom.
I think, between the two of them, they even tore my dress.

I don't remember much of the day except that it was quite a stressful one for me.

This rivalry between kids continued for a long time.

When my aunt had her baby boy I loved to watch him in his crib.
He was a fat little rascal with chubby cheeks and he'd lay there kicking away.
Sometimes being 4 and very knowledgeable already when it came to changing diapers I would help out and then help him hold the bottle so he could drink.

My Grand Mother told us one day that she scolded him because he was also quick, stubborn and into everything just like me. He told her she better stop or he wouldn't let her wipe his bum anymore. Well ! she said: What a loss . lol
He never lived that one down . lol

By now there were three girls and my baby cousin who would come with their parents for dinner to my Grand Mothers House. The older girls were the same old stuffy ones. They tried to hold my cousin who didn't like to be held and then there was me and another girl who was one year younger. She became more of a playmate for me, but she always liked to cry .

She cried over everything and it wasn't just a cry but a sort of low bellow.
She would begin on a very low note and head on up the scale to a high note.
This is probably where she got her ear for piano cause she was born knowing the scale. lol
She played but she never liked it lol

I found it quite entertaining to listen to her when she started because
it annoyed the adults. They hated it and she got spanked for it all the time which made her bellow more.

When she finally did stop, we'd be sitting there, I'd pinch her gently from behind.
She never knew it was me and she'd begin all over again.
Parents were strict in those days and I was glad for once it wasn't me in trouble lol
My cousin later always got me into trouble because I was 4 years older and it was my job to watch him while the adults ate dinner.

If he'd get into some trouble I was blamed and even spanked. My Dad would say when we get home, which terrified me because I knew he meant it and would not forget.
To this day I don't know what they expected me to do?

Once my cousin found out I would get into trouble for what he did, he made sure to do more bad things around me.
This got me very upset and I began to refuse going there or to play with him but then he'd complain to my Dad that he wanted to do something and I didn't and my Dad would lay into me and order me to watch him. I'd say
No, you go and watch him. I don't want to .

Then I'd get into trouble and my cousin would sit and smirk.
We all get our turn I guess lol

My little bellowing friends' claim to fame was once when her Mom was holding her, she pretended to have a piece of chocolate in her hand and she put it into her Mom's mouth. Her Mom enjoyed it till she tasted a ball of poop. She got it from her diaper.
That story kept us giggling for a long time. lol

They took a picture of us all sitting together at one dinner party and she and I were smiling, all innocence, while the two older girls were still huffy and serious looking. I don't know if any one of us ever liked each other but it had nothing to do with the younger gals. It was the older gals with the problem. I know one of them had a very strict up bringing even worse than I did.

I don't have pictures to share because my Father foolishly gave all our photos to my cousin who promised to put them on a disc for him. My Dad told me what he did and I was very annoyed with him for doing this because I told him he will never see them again.
This upset him and he tried to get them back but then he died and I asked my cousin also to give them back but..........
so far nothing.

My Aunt had another baby, a daughter and it ended up that the three of us played together. The other three girls were friends of the family and I didn't see much of them.

What was funny though was that one of the older girls got married and was very happy with her new husband.
She took birth control pills and died within a year of marriage at around 26. She left her home to go somewhere and collapsed in the front yard. From what I heard it sounded like a vein burst in her brain and it had something to do with these pills. They changed the pills after that for women.
This was a very upsetting time for her family because she was the only daughter and they raised her to be the best at everything. She was especially good at piano. Goes to show, no matter how strict you are with your kids or how much you guard them , shit happens.

The other older one's life was not very good . Her parents were very obliging. Anything she wanted she would sniffle out of them. She was into ballet and dancing. Once I found her ballet shoes and tried them on. It was the first time I was able to stand on my toes and I loved the feeling. My parents never let me do anything. Unlike my friends who hated piano, I wanted to play. My Dad had a chance to get me a piano for 54 dollars but my Mother refused saying it would be too noisy and she didn't want to listen to all the noise I would make all day. I remember he was disappointed and my Aunt and Gramma were quite upset with my Mom cause they believed in exposure for children. So My Mom got a teacher at school to give me lessons on a card key board and this made no sense for me so I never learned. The teacher said I had no talent and my Mom was only too happy to pass this on to my Gramma and Aunt.

Anyway , this other older girl was busy marrying and divorcing last I heard.
My youngest friend who I played with, died of pancreatic cancer. She went wild in high school and our friendship suffered on account of it.
She had one boy and her parents who were already quite old, had a very hard time getting over it.
No parent wants to see their child die before they do.
This girl was not an easy child to raise and almost died from ....... maybe meningitis. I remember the whole church praying for her when we were kids.
In those days the adults always whispered and we caught a bit here and a bit there but kids were usually sent away to another room.

So out of that group only my two cousins and I remained close but now, even we are far apart.
It's funny how life takes over and everyone goes their own way.

In those days polio was prevalent. There was a little neighbor girl afflicted with it but I had shots so I was spared.
We had many thalidomide babies born with short arms and legs. I could have been one of them if my mom took these nausea pills but she refused and down my street we had a bungalow used as a care unit for babies with water on the brain.

I have no idea why this was but we'd walk and look down an incline and we'd see them all in cribs, some with bigger heads than others. Then they would eventually die. We never hear of such things today.

The milk was brought to my Grand Mothers house by a horse and carriage and the horse sometimes left droppings which of course I had to taste. Then they came to pave the street and they tarred it. My Mom just dressed me in a fine new white dress for Sunday. The first thing I did was get into the tar and she had a job getting it out of my hair. The dress went into the garbage.

The first year of school I must have caught everything from the other kids. The doctor back then made house calls and mine came numerous times even during the night to see me. Looking back it was like from Brontes time or even better, from the book, Little Women.

My Mom would shut my blinds and sit with me all day and night with compresses and then she'd hear a knock on the door around midnight and outside in the cold and snow, was the doctor.
She'd be shocked that he was so vigilant and caring.
We all have angels and he was mine.

We also had by, what is now the La Fontaine Tunnel, a huge building for mental afflictions.
We would see so many people walking outside but we were told to stay away because we did not know what to expect of them. Sometimes they threw things at you over the fence.
There are many horror stories about what went on in that building in those days.
One never wanted to end up there, that's for sure. As you walked by, you could not help but feel sorry for them because they looked so sad and confused and angry.

Once you begin going down memory lane more and more things pop up.

Have a good one :)

The Innocent Traveller

noreply@blogger.com (A Lady's Life) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:32:00 +0000

I just finished reading a very nice Canadian novel, the Innocent Traveller, which is basically a saga of a woman, who lived 100 years.

It touched upon both England and Canada, mostly Vancouver, from 1895 on wards.

Topaz lived the life of a single woman. It gave me a little smirk because when I got married and they issued my marriage certificate, it said spinster of age on it.

I laughed when I saw it then and I still laugh at the comedy of being called a spinster, in my still young 20's.

Had I married at 15 or 16, the marriage certificate would have said the same thing.

The book went through this "spinsters'" child hood, how she was raised, how the people around her died, how this affected her life and how finally she arrived on the shores of English Bay to live on Hastings Street.

By the sound of how they portray this street and China town, this once must have been the best area to live in.

The life this lady lived reminded me of my own Aunt Eugenia, who was also a lovely, lively, carefree woman. She loved everything, life, love children family and wherever she went her

gusto for life affected every one around her. She was followed around like bees to honey, admired, invited everywhere for tea.

She had no time for philosophy or politics but roses, flowers, picnics, parties , good cooking

everything having to do with entertainment,was what she was good at.

She loved to dress and sewed her own ball gowns which she looked dazzling in.

This was a lady with so many high heeled shoes, which are still in style today, and hats and necklaces, all of which I covered myself in, from head to toe.

She was a lot different from my own strict Mother.

She never complained when I got into her closet and would laugh seeing me all dolled up in her things.

I have to admit I was a cutie pie from the pictures where she was holding hugging and kissing me after I was so naughty.

But one time she was not so happy with me and I actually made her cry.

This was when she worked a whole month at the sewing factory, to buy herself

a very expensive bottle of perfume.

Of course I went into her room and found it. Her room always smelled nice because she had this mirror tray on her boudoir with old fashioned perfume atomizers which you were able to pushpush from a little ball at the end of a tube. I still prefer these kind of perfume dispensers to the new ones which take the personal touch away from the person using it and only promotes the brand name of the seller.

They were gorgeous and I so loved to touch and look at them.

But this perfume she did not have time or maybe did not want to put into the atomizer and left the bottle in the mirror tray.

So my little fingers grabbed it and opened it, and dumped it on my white curly head.

Not only did I do that but I also heard some one coming so I hid under the bed and dumped the rest of it on my head .

I was able to sit under there so I must have been small or the bed must have been very high.

Of course I stunk to high heaven and I don't remember who found me but I don't think it was my aunt.

I think it was my Mother and she was aghast at what I had done because she was always chasing me out of my aunts' room.

We all lived together at that time like they did in Topaz' time.

My aunt came home and she cried.

No matter what they did they could not get the smell out of my hair for a month and every day she would come home I would sit and remind her of the awful thing I did and she'd go into her room to wipe a tear from her eye.

I felt soo bad because I finally understood that I had hurt this beautiful womans' feelings badly.

She was not married at that time and I was very protective of her when gentlemen callers came to visit.

Whenever they would sit on the couch, I would make sure to come sit between them.

When ever they would touch her hand I would take it away lol

One day, the man who would become my uncle, was doing things because he was amused by the way I was defending my aunt. He would sit and laugh and I got angry and told him that if he did not stop touching my aunt I was going to push him and he would get his pants wet in a river.

This was a very big thing for me. lol

Until he died, he reminded me of what I threatened him with and kept asking me if I still wanted to push him so he got his pants wet.lol

I had the same experience with my husbands' nephew.

My husband and I just got married and we were all sitting talking and somehow he asked me if his uncle and I slept together. Of course I told him Oh no. Uncle has his bed and I have mine.

Well his parents slept together , so his feelings were very hurt for me because I had to sleep by myself.

So my precious hero announced. Don't worry Auntie, I'm going to sleep with you. lol BIG MISTAKE!

Now he is grown, married, with his own children and I always ask him if he still wants to sleep with me. He gets embarrassed but I being an old chicken now, just laugh.

And so........this is family.

This is why family is important.

It keeps you alive and busy thinking about and caring about people around you who you love and become meaningful to you and your very existence. You worry about them and get into their business all for the purpose of having good will so they don't make big mistakes

which can cost them dearly raising their families.

So the Innocent Traveller brought back many memories for me because the people in it were very similar to those in my own family, where there always sat a heirarch which held things together by caring and then the heirarch dies and things disperse.

No matter how much you didn't like it, you respected family because it was the right thing to do.

You honoured it,because these people, with their busy body behavior loved and cared about you and what came out of their mouths could be trusted.

Every one of these people would stand up for you and your honor as much as for the family honor.

This is so different from todays' world where no one cares until someone is found in a ditch.

They put blame every where except where it belongs.

You always ask why was this person alone?

Why was this person not surrounded by a loving family?

Families separate. Behavior is selfish. Kids are not catered to and so much love is lost to

other things

and we wonder what happened to family?

Passion is also not something you get every day and breeding is not something that happens over night because you read a book or got a diploma. These things like family, become a way of life.

You have a passion for something that lasts a lifetime and breeding is something that keeps saying no, at a time when everything else says yes.

And yes keeps running on , saying yes till life becomes unbearable, and you wonder when and why NO became a bad word.

I enjoyed this book and it probably is something kids should read to have a taste of the old ways.

Who knows, it might skip a generation and have it grow on them, and their parents might end up being the lucky ones.

Have a great Day!