Living la vida lowcarb

Well, it was some ungodly hour in the dark morning of the 18th when I stepped on the scale and decided to go back on the low-carb lifestyle, which I never should have ditched to begin with but that's another story.

It's going fine so far. Since I'm dropping carbs and I'm significantly overweight the initial period is pretty easy for the loss. So far it hasn't really been any problem for me. The food is great, if you know what you're doing and know the range and in some cases, have certain ingredients that can vastly improve your food life.

(Edited to add: the guy who used the phrase of this title first is a real success story in changing a life. His blog is here: http://livinlavidalocarb.blogspot.com/)

I just finished reading this exercise book called "slow burn" and I'm going to take up that exercise plan as soon as the eclipse period has fully passed (superstitious, I don't want to start anything during an eclipse, an astrology no-no).

My viewing and meditating have been minimal recently but my dreams have been totally amped into the stratosphere, I don't know what's going on inside but I'm "sitting in on the lives" of many and it's reaaaaaalllly interesting.

I haven't been reading email lists, forums, etc. since about the same time I went back on LC. It's kinda nice to be honest. It eats a lot of my time which is already so profoundly underavailable.

I have more physical energy than I normally do, lately, from dropping a lot of carb-related retained water from my body and the gradual shift into K. That's pretty nice! I'm trying to think of what to do with all my time tomorrow, time I would normally spend online that I'd like to spend actually DOing something.

Quote of the Day

I have studied many philosophers and many cats.
The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
~ Hippolyte Taine

Quote of the Day

"We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle

Time-Space-Love-Money

I have a relationship with time. Not a good one.

I long ago came to the conclusion that time is space is money is love. I mean in a rather metaphysical, create your own reality way.

They are a measured-quantity. They are critical to how we perceive ourselves, our world, and how well we get along in it. And the four of them are almost never found in abundance at the same point-of-now. It's almost like they are the four cardinal directions of self-allowance, in a Sethian sense.

I've had every one of them individually. Often two. Rarely, three. Never all four for more than ten minutes.

I once theorized that any problem in a person's life was an internal geometry that was interacting with another given area of the person's experience, but that the internal part could manifest in any/every situation for that person. To compare it to psychology, as that might make it clearer, you could say that a person who has a problem with authority (as an example) is going to manifest that in many ways. In career, in parenting, in relationships, in finance, and they will possibly also manifest others who have the same issue around them too. So when the person comments on an 'issue' with their wife, you may understand that the dynamic driving that, is probably also causing them 'issues' in their job, with their taxes, with their social groups, etc. etc.

By this same kind of thinking, I concluded that whatever underlies a person having a serious lack of one of them, was probably about the same as whatever was under some other person having a lack of another of them. In short, that it's like a belief system nutritional deficiency, and the person just chooses what area(s) they are going to suffer the shortage most in.

One of the things I find most interesting, in an armchair psych way, is that each person has a variety of settings for things in their life. Some people have money, but no time. Some have time but no money. Some are crowded in their environments and can't seem to get enough space. Some have space but no money, or space and money but no time. And some have much love in their life but none of the others, or all of the others but no sense of real love.

In some esoteric experiences, I have observed that all of these are subjective. Including space. You may think that six feet never changes, but I can tell you that six feet can be a reach away or a room away and still fit the ruler. Yes, this makes no logical sense to the rational mind, but just like time, space is subjectively experienced, and I've just had the interesting opportunity to see that.

So if time, space, money and love are all subjective, and if our reality of "plenty" or "lack" in them is all rooted in us, why is it such a pain in the butt getting it all straight and abundant? If I can work out an abundance at each one of these things at varying here/now-points, why can't I work out proper quantities for them the rest of the time?

Even as a teen, I felt that time was inexorable. That it kept marching on and I could never, ever get ahead of it. That it was merciless, relentless, the impersonal conveyor belt of life, that you could never step off and that was destined to dump your butt off at the end.

I was spending a few hours a night doing webcoding, doing correspondence. So I dropped out of it for the most part. Aside from an occasional blogpost and my best friend, I've ditched it all. I refuse to read anything from email lists, forums, etc. even if I think I have a little time when I see it.

And I still don't have enough damn time.

Some part of my belief system is obviously involved. I have enough money for what I want most, but not nearly enough for what I need (serious obligations). I have space enough for what I need (my own house, my own room) but not nearly enough for what I want (the environ is so tightly cluttered I feel space-deprived). I have enough love for what I need most; I don't get close to many but those I do have, share something on a soul level. Not to mention a loving little girl. But I don't have enough for what I want; all my best friends, in all forms of relationship, live very far away.

I feel as if my belief system has certain major limits it's imposing on my reality. The most serious one is time.

They say that people who schedule time have more of it. This is hard for me to understand, since when I budget money I always have less of it. (This is my belief, anyway, as when I pay attention I panic and am short in 12 places, but the less I pay attention and accept that things are alright, the more they tend to be.)

I recently started tracking my time and what I do with it. There is work and sleep of course -- never enough sleep. And then there are half a dozen things I want to do every day -- meditate, view, exercise, time with kid, a couple other things. And then there is 'everything else', to include everything that is social, internet, reading, watching, from leisure to obligations to personal research. I find that of my available time, everything is falling into 'everything else'.

Just like with money, it's the same fractal in a different color: I have time, I spend time, I spend time on things I want to do, yet I don't have time for the things I NEED to do, like sleeping, viewing, etc. I am tempted to think that if I inquired deeply enough into my issues of space and love I would find the same pattern, replicated, manifesting within the context of the subject.

My friend says there's an eclipse coming up and nothing new should be initiated from the 22nd-24th as a result as such things seldom turn out like planned. I have no personal hard data on this but astrology's a decent tool in the right (very rare) hands so I'll take that at face value. Tomorrow I have to start a schedule or an exercise plan, or wait till next week for the grand beginning. Both tie into my FAVorite issue, of course: time.

I would meditate on this problem, but I can't find the time.

Dance

Was in the dance mood. Here's some cool youtube links for anybody else who likes dance.

First my own favorite: a lovely young girl doing jazz dance to 'Fever' in a competition - wow, really cool!




Another way cool thing in part because it's the gen-u-ine original uprock, get this of the 1930's!,
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6297781268173309822&q=uprock&hl=en




Some b-boying which it turns out is the original name for breakdancing. This appears to be composed of several major component styles, much more detailed than I realized
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0azySiQP2Q&NR




This guy gives an example of how he came up with one b-boying move, it's interesting and looks really cool when he's done!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6Am87jh4U


You can blame the b-boying etc. on LD, an obvious bad influence, that's his thang


This is a long one, called 'stomp' when the feet and something minor (like a pole in this case) is used for all the percussion. I love percussion! And when they go into the part of using the poles like staffs -- way cool.




New Jack Swing 'all stars' video compilation, pretty cool, kinda like piecing together dance bits of 1980's videos and such
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ9U4TVLSYk




If you prefer riverdance tap, which I don't but some do (I prefer jazz tap), here's a little one




Now beware, the boogie funk framptonesque e-pop (and louder than most of these videos) might kill you, but these japanese "lockers" provide nearly 10 minutes of demos of that particular art form (this is part of b-boying too), some of it's really cool



It's like a whole generation of stuff that kind of passed me by. Cool though.


Here's another jazz number with a couple of neat movies, far less jazzy than the one at top but much more humor




To mellow you out after all that thick chompin beat stuff, here is an offbeat eye-candy Chinese dance




And let's be fair, this famous ice dance routine qualifies as dancing by any measure



Nice.


And here's a long dim-stage lighted group dance, Jabbawocky in a b-boying style, gets a bit more interesting as it goes on:

Today is the tomorrow you dreamed about yesterday

Well as of today I am officially on a kinder but definitely less-gentle personal plan. I can't believe I'm 41 years old and still waiting for ... I don't know what. Time to get off my duff and deal with some of the stuff I'm usually too busy, distracted, or in denial, to deal with.

I am ditching most my online stuff for about six weeks, aside from sessions now and then and occasionally blogging. I'll be viewing and writing on the book instead.

And sleeping. Really, I am not making that part up.

Since my metabolism doesn't respond to anything but lowcarb, and since after years of reading and two previous trials I think this is reasonable (then again, I'm also a libertarian--well not entirely, but close to it--and a lot of people wouldn't find that very reasonable, either), I am going "back on the plan" as well.

Getting my husband to help me was worrisome. I implied seriously that he'd better help me or I was going to keel over any moment and then he'd have to get a job, and support the 10 year old into fashion and pricey videogames. I think he will help me just out of terror now. I was on LC when he arrived here a year ago, doing really well, but went off not long after; when someone wants to eat outside-food most the time, or wants to make stuff laden with carbs, it gets a lot harder to maintain your own space without a separate household.

I went on LC briefly years ago, my first time, and he suddenly had the urge to eat all MY food while I worked away from home, then to be making desserts when I arrived home (town of 900--no store open) so I either starved or blew the diet. I made him move back to Canada after that one. I figured he was trying to kill me, indirectly. I suspect he thinks I take these things too literally and have no sense of humor.

Dr. Michael Eades (one of my more favorite LC-related docs) has an interesting article on "intermittant fasting" (you gotta love any diet-related term with an acronym like "IF"), and aside from the beginning where he was being deliberately pollyannic, it's pretty interesting, as it does seem a bit of a pain-free way of pulling fasting into the eating plan, getting the benefits of it, yet never despite 24/24 on/off fasting, never actually going a whole day without food. Read the article for more.

Caloric restriction is a terrific way to lose weight and get healthy; problem is, it's not much fun. When rats live out their little ratty lives calorically restricted in their cages they seem to show signs of depression and irritability. Primates do for sure. If primates don't get enough cholesterol, they can actually become violent. But, if you're willing to put up with a little irritability, hostility and depression, it might be worth cutting your calories by 30 percent for the rest of your long, healthy miserable life.

He's a lot more seriously into the Meat Thing than I am. I was a vegetarian for five years, not for health reasons but because I love animals so much. Mostly just screwed up my health bigtime. That is not the diet for someone who (a) doesn't much like fruits and vegetables, and (b) has food sensitivities to gluten and other grainish things, and (c) seems a born carb/dairy addict. I once said that doing LC in today's world was like trying to be Amish in New York city. It does seem easier nowdays though, with so much info available. Oh yeah: and I decided I'd buy that karmic (so to speak) responsibility, for the end of the animals. It's mine either way. I just feel better about it now, and do anything I can to support organic, free range, etc. foods.

I have a bunch of groovy references I've been wanting to post for free stuff online, like image makers and such. Later. Gotta work.

.

Catching Up

As always, when I wait too long between blogposts, I don't know where to begin.

Where was I when I got distracted?? "Life is what happens while you are making other plans," as the saying goes.

I've done minimal viewing of late, not to mention I've sucked on keeping up with the Radical group. Fortunately most of them are already serious viewers, and from the email digest I just saw, they are not sitting around waiting on me fortunately!

There is no excuse. If I wanted it to be a priority it would be. Of course, even parsing down the things I'm interested in, to about 3 things instead of a million, I haven't time for them all. Damn but working for a living sure wipes out the majority of waking life... a pretty big testament to why one ought to do something for a living that is basically what they want to do anyway. (Several unwritten books are pulsing in the binary cosmos at this very moment going 'Yeah!')

Have had the same experience on my last few sessions as I was beginning to have more often in daily work just before life wigged out a few weeks ago though. First, that at a certain point in, I'm hit by a sort of "condensed intensity of data quantity" that I can't parse. I know it sounds silly to write it that way but it's the most descriptive way I can think of to analogy the experience. (Within minutes of reading this someone will invent a new phrase-acronym for it.)

There are a few different ways I can feel this. The first is as-if it is going 'near' me. For example, like it's flashing by and there is no way I can catch it. A bit like, "here it -- wait, there it went!" Like I am inside, and it is outside the window flashing past.

The second is as-if it is presenting itself to me. For example, like it's springing up "within my absorption sphere" (...whatever that is. I mean it's not outside me, but within my understanding area) and I could normally perceive it, in the 'place' I'm sensing it, but there is just way too much, too dense, too fast, so it isn't that "it went by and I couldn't catch it" but rather, that "I have it, I just can't get any kind of grasp on it at all."

The third is as-is if it going 'through' me. For example, like it literally got into me on some level, all of it, and then my body is trying to "bring it through" the physiology, but utterly failing because there is just way more data there than I can pull through me all at once, like it's running into some kind of bottleneck-effect. I had that shortly before 'The Steve Experience' as I now jokingly call it, in a previous session.

Other kinda new stuff, had in the last dozen sessions almost consistently, but not much before that. Like amazing visuals. I mean, LONG visuals, like I am sitting there going, "Wow, this is incredible! This is like total VR!" as it goes on -- nothing vague, no microsecond blip. I don't know what the heck that is! I mean technically that's supposed to be incredibly rare. And usually wrong. Yet so far (not counting the mutant sandworms session hahahaha) the data's been GREAT and has suggested I'm taking the literal experience-perspective of a person in the target. Similar to the experiences I sometimes have where I perceive someone else in an amazingly literal way, the focus is utterly clear, but there is like zero peripheral somehow.

Also, have had: a sense of 'standing in the environment' of the target (and I don't always record it but so far that's been good info). I really never had that before. Sometimes I'd have a single impression that was aesthetic, but not the whole "I'm standing on the street in a very grey industrial section of a city" sort of feel.

And weird stuff. Like in a practice session the other day, almost interfering, I feel I'm "in" a library, I sense something local to my area, and I turn toward the aisle and a little girl, with real short hair, is there, and she's looking at me like she wants to say something. And I suddenly realize she is a ghost. Then I'm out of it thinking, "I know that is not part of the target!"

Why does it hit me, if it isn't part of the target? Is my subconscious just so intrigued it's looking around for stuff? Is my opening up to data of that nature somehow making me more 'visible' to ... ah ... 'energetic constructs or identities' of that sort?

I was nearly tempted to see if the tiny city I was sitting in when I did the session had a library but I decided that would be taking it a little too far.

You know, I don't want to end up totally nuts like Brown or Dames or other people who've clearly remote viewed several too many aliens (out of protocol to boot, haha). I don't mind getting the weird stuff -- frankly my totally spontaneous life was WAY weirder prior to my getting into Remote Viewing -- but if it isn't on target, then I'm not sure there is any point to it.

I think it's easy to get distracted by the novelty of stuff like that and lose the focus of why one is in session... much like some people start out looking for spiritual growth and end up obsessing on crystals or something instead, as if that's any kind of replacement. If the girl was in the target potentially, in any way, it'd be one thing, but I don't think she is. (No FB yet.)

o0o

I was re-thinking recently following a post on McMoneagle's blog about remote viewing visuals. You know how you're going along and you're getting info and no matter what it is, you don't really know if the data compared to the target is going to turn out to be literal or symbolic, right or wrong, etc. You get what you get, as Calabrese used to say (I wonder where she is these days), and the more you want it to be one thing, or need it to be another thing, the more you're going to screw it up, AOL it to death, or just flat out prevent better target contact by being neurotic instead of letting it flow.

McMoneagle was talking about letting it flow, simply accepting it and communicating it as clearly as you can. He was reminding people that what you see is as likely to be a memory clip or symbol or analogy or whatever, as the actual target itself, so you just can't take most visuals that seriously -- or rather, you do take them seriously, you just don't assume that you know what they mean, or that they mean exactly what they are. Just because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn't mean it isn't the most un-duck-like thing you've ever seen. (I joke about ducks in targets because I've only had two and both have been totally weird sessions that had nothing whatever to do with the target duck.)

So I was thinking about this, from an experiential point of view. I've talked about this with viewer friends before, it's a popular topic for kicking around. Joe gave the example of a boat smoothly sailing through the water being symbolic for a relationship going well, as an example of data that seems literally but may be symbolic depending on the viewer. This is a little exasperating though. The outline of viewer angst I tend to have and talk with friends about goes something like this:

1. You may have no clue whether data is literal or symbolic.


2. You are not supposed to care, during session.


3. You care desperately. Reason: there seems little point to getting into the detail of the way that shape curves, if the shape is only part of a ship and the ship is only there to show you symbolically that your target is having a good relationship. Even if it DID help you get more/better concept data on the relationship, it'd also result in a ton of totally wrong/non-literal data sort of 'mucking up' the better data.
   

1. You may have no clue which 'part' of something you see is the part that is meaningful to the process at hand.


2. You are not supposed to care, during session.


3. You care desperately. Reason: that 1/8 second flash of information would take you 10 minutes to fully record on paper, and you really only have like a few seconds to write down what matters and move on or get lost in AOL about every detail, so you MUST prioritize one way or another, but didn't we just say you don't always know what part of it matters, so...

So then usually with enough consideration of real-life-experience, one meanders around to things like:

1. With proper target contact, it doesn't matter if it's literal or symbolic, because you have a 'feeling' for what it means.


2. With proper target contact, it doesn't matter that you get a bundle of reference data, because you have a 'feeling' for what part matters most.


3. Most of RV life is working on achieving proper target contact.

...and...

1. Since we don't always know for sure when we've got it (proper target contact), and since that is more a matter of degree than any on/off thing anyway, then we are still left working on how to deal with the good % chunk of the time that we are NOT so well connected (or, "yet") that we can 'feel' intuitively what matters and what things mean.


2. Which brings us back to where we begin. You're in session, you get data. Do you follow up on given data points for more about them... or let it go because you don't know if it's literal or important or the aspect of what you got that matters?

In the end, it seems like over time, remote viewing starts to work more as a side effect than whatever I intended in the first place, by which I mean this:

The more I let it happen, the more I allow symbolic data, the more I APPRECIATE the data I get even when it's symbolic or other, then the more I tend to "spontaneously" get better data, more advanced data, more detailed data, more literal data.

So while I am being a happy camper about my potentially wild-ass-weird symbolic data, some other part of me, emboldened by how receptive I am, decides to just tell me that it's a metallic 3-layer composite walled structural object related to high technology, or that it's a machine shaped like so and if you do this it will do that, or that it's a man standing in formal wear, or whatever.

So while I am busy not-stressing about it, gradually I'm starting to get the kind of data that I desperately wished for to begin with, but that usually could NOT be deliberately gotten to any great degree, at least not without sufficient wrong data or symbolic-etc. data mixed in. I think it may be the most significant example of the infamous 'avoid the Lust for Result' lesson I've ever had.

o0o

Let's see, what's the last session I did. Oh yeah, a Tandem practice in the dojo for TKR. That is really fun, viewing with someone else on the same target. Gets me off my butt to do something even if I'm pretty busy, and is sometimes fun to compare after the fact.

I had a few fairly generic impressions. A strong impression of repeated vertical parallel shapes, lots of them. Then a funky dynamic visual that looked sort of like -- but too fast for details -- a coffin-shape that rolled over, a lid opened up, and something spilled out of it. This was so fast and so odd though, that I asked myself what part of it mattered, was it what was inside? the motion outward? The opening? The turning? The shape of it? the superbrief concept-overlay of it? --and decided to write down the "rolling over and opening up" part.

Then I had the sense of this shape that I compared to a variety of things such as a tree, a flaring vase or vase of flowers, some fireworks, stuff where there is a smaller bottom and something rising up and flaring out at the top. Got a couple simple shapes, and then had an impression of an area that was set up for people, a long table, chairs, things like that. The only thing clear was seating so I wrote down that, then I was getting more on the initial shape again, it seemed like it had some importance to the target, just couldn't figure out how. As it was tandem it was time limited and I ran out of time (having spent the first 15 minutes meditating), but just before I ended I had the clear but sudden impression of a man who was dressed very nicely, formally in some way, being present standing in the target. Fine, outta time, moving on.

The target turned out to be a man in formal dress uniform, playing a bugle (there's my flaring vase shape), looking over a military graveyard, each space with a vertical headstone. The text shows it was part of a big formal ceremony, which means I didn't consider the chairs/long table wrong as that would be likely on something official government formal, it just wasn't task focus. I laughed because that super-vague aolish-visual that started it with the coffin-shape opening up and dumping out something made sense then, although as a friend noted, "that was more than you wanted to know about it" LOL. I had to wonder if maybe that ref related to the combo of death and the bugle, like some biblical overlay (you know, like the sound of the horn and the dead will rise, or whatever). I didn't do great but didn't have long so it could have been worse.

o0o

Hero of the day: "Any girl can be glamorous," Hedy Lamarr once said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid."

Aside from being a lovely screen queen of the late 30's and 40's, she was co-inventor of the frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system, which didn't get fully implemented by the navy (though with electronics by then) until a couple decades later, a tech which remains the cornerstone of anti-jamming tech even now (sez the net).

Well on the down side, she was married six times, but who's counting. I adore smart women. All three of them. Wish when I was a kid, someone had bothered to introduce me to role models like that. My entire world of women when young was basically of the shallow, inane, manipulative, immature, somewhat crazy bizarro women my dad chose to marry. Repeatedly. Although this should have made me wonder about male intelligence (well, it did, but not until much later in life!), it mostly set me low opinions of women, which is why in most ways that don't relate to sex, I get on much better with men, and am fairly masculine even in writing-personality.

Now that I'm getting old (41 today!!), I see much more good in women than I used to, and have more women friends. But when young, I really didn't want to be one, since I failed to see anything particularly useful they did with their lives, outside the raising kids part which I never had any desire to do. Yes, I know, my kid is now 10, but she was not part of the plan. You know... she is 'the life that happens while you're making others plans'.

I adopted the moniker PJ in 1993 when I arrived on USENET and didn't want my unique name noticed by any directors or investors in areas talking about aliens (let alone alt.sex.stories hahaha). When I announced I'd had a baby in August of 1996, all kinds of friends nearly fell outta their chairs, promptly ranting that they'd been my good buddy online for 2-3 years and they'd always thought I was a man. Then they backtracked to anything ever said that they might not have said to a woman and how sorry they were about it and hoped I wasn't offended. It struck me as interesting that even in today's culture where we think the sexes are more equal and honest, that even ordinary online/email conversation would be subject to a clear bias based on the gender of who you're talking to.

As life would have it I married someone I met on the internet, took his last name as a middle name, and 'became' the PJ of my internet personality.

I may add Hedy to my list of potentially favorite people, though I'll have to learn more about her first. Current on the list are Ataturk, George Washington Carver, Luther Burbank, Jane Roberts, Aleister Crowley, Nicola Tesla -- well you can see the clear bias toward "explorers and inventors" here.

I hope I'm not too old to explore something now, though I suspect the more realistic question is whether I'm too tired.

o0o

My meditations have been nearly nonexistent. I've had a few clear moments but for the most part I've been in denial. And been avoiding sleep. Go figure.

o0o

Well, work is going well, life and home are going well, and I finally got off my butt and got back to work on my book about Remote Viewing, which is a big project but I think worth doing. I might be on the web, even the dojo, a bit less for the next few months for working more on that and viewing in my spare time.

My and Rykah have a date tonight. Amazon.com has something called "unBox" where you can download TV shows and movies and stuff. It only works for XP so far, and they have a player you must use (much like eBooks also do -- for security of course), but as something like a pay per view option (which you also get to rewatch, if you buy it), for my laptop, it's cool. They have the ENTIRE old early 1960's Twilight Zone series! And the "Firefly" scifi series, and lots of old classic movies. Some modern movies are $10, some older ones $3-8, TV episodes $2. Anyway, so we're going to sit on my bed with my laptop, eat microwave popcorn, and watch a show. It's way late to start given tomorrow is school and work so I better go!

Refs

This is an old post I had in draft mode and thought I'd go ahead and post it.


An old (maybe 60's?) SESAME STREET clip of "How Crayons Are Made."
I am such a TOTAL NERD that I actually watched this and liked it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oJJcZ4BGPnc

A 'paint'-like program available FREE on a website that exports right to a JPG you can then upload with an RV session. I'm not much for digital mouse-drawing -- I'm nearly retarded with a mouse (and especially touchpad) as it is -- but some people are keen on it and you can't beat the price or the export on the spot option.
http://www.depicter.com/

This nifty graph creator may not allow many data points, but it'll create free online -- and export to a variety of image formats -- a very pretty graph, totally customizeable. It has a simple user interface I admire too.
http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/index.asp

For temporal dowsers or anybody who needs to make things like timelines of a variety of types, this page has instructions and links on how to use Excel to do a variety of need things with the timeline concept:
http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/timeline.html

A few folks complain they have no software to get their BMP scans into a web format (which would be, generally, GIF or JPG or PDF). GIMP is free software that is along the lines of photoshop or PaintShop Pro -- less complex of course, yet FREE, and it will let you open most basic format images, and then save as a different image type, so it functions as a conversion utility as well as a graphics program. There's also tons of info on it, wikis and more.
http://www.gimp.org/

I love this thing, you know those itty-bitty images most famously used for RSS type links, this will create them on the fly for you http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/button/ generates the cute little rss type buttons

For music online, a certain kind of coded-text-file is often used for the playlist. For people who might want to stick a little music player on their blog or site but don't write code, this free generator will let you choose your player type and other info and then output the html you can just copy and paste into a file for your playlist.
http://web.forret.com/tools/webjay.asp
http://web.forret.com/tools/webjay.asp

Very cool button-maker, you can even incorporate images, great for putting in a logo. Flexible and addictive. http://www.lucazappa.com/brilliantMaker/buttonImage.php

Few other image creators:
Button Maker (http://www.kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/) by Adam Kalsey: nice simple interface, no image upload though
Button Maker Online (http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/button/) (beta): another button maker, supports different sizes, and has a nice color picker - but no image upload (I just found this one)
Silkscreen (http://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/index.html): the best font to use to create your own micro buttons, free for personal and corporate use
W3C buttons without images (http://www.sovavsiti.cz/css/w3c_buttons.html): nice, but they do have some drawbacks - not all browsers can porperly handle these
CSS Technique: Inline Buttons (2.0) (http://wellstyled.com/css-inline-buttons.html): another approach to the same idea

More to steal:
Raging Platypus http://www.ragingplatypus.com/blog/2003/03/19/steal_these_buttons.html blog post; the actual stealable buttons are on the home page
Steal These Buttons, Too http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/examples/plat-buttons.html
Joe Grossberg: Steal These Buttons Too http://www.joegrossberg.com/archives/000574.html
Steal these Buttons http://gtmcknight.com/buttons/ A huge, categorized collection (menu on the left - or use the search)

Blog Karma

The other day, intending to change the style of the TKR webForum, I was really depressed, so for a day I made it totally grey. Freaked everybody out. I thought it was pretty darn funny personally but I guess humor is relative.

When I tried to log into this blog to write a post the other day, I discovered that Google has eaten Blogger. (This sounds like a book title for toddlers.) As fate and total lack of creativity would have it, my login for google and for blogger are identical. Imagine the confusion this causes, when they now have one login that checks both--starting with google.

They give you the "option" to "upgrade" but it's clear it's only optional for the next 10 minutes, so you might as well do it. When I attempted to say "no thanks," it led me in a circle back to the "Upgrade Now!" screen. After about 15 minutes I finally got in and posted the last entry.

Today I figured I would go ahead and upgrade. I saved my template so I could replace all my colors and images and so on, so the blog would look the same. This 'new' version allows tags which I thought would be useful. The interface tells you that you will lose your previous template changes, but you will be able to edit the new one. So I figure, how bad can it be?

Well, now you know. Dark blue with POLKA DOTS! I'm so embarrassed. I feel like I just got caught out by the cool group while wearing ankle-high plaid pants or something.

What the GoogleBloggerThing neglected to mention was that the ability to edit the html of your template, to change background and images, is "not quite yet available."

And to think, I had updated this total dork-squad theme to something that actually looked cool. Well, at some point, they will let me update the new version, and I will revert it to its former glory.

In the meantime, to petition of the gods of the blogosphere to have mercy on my web reputation, I added a vivid color background to the forum, and a little later I will shift the greys into creams/tans. I repent. I genuflect. I grovel. Please give me back my Red Cairo.

The I's Have It

I was thinking to myself about how I've been going through this phase where my eyes and brain both keep 'unfocusing and diffusing', constantly. Driving me nuts. It occurred to me that my "I's" keep unfocusing and diffusing... maybe that is really what it means.

I was signing a check for my kid's karate dojo today and I realized that for a long time now I have the oddest habit: I keep forgetting the "I" in my last name (Gaenir). Literally, I handwrite it, and then I have to go back in and forcibly insert the I into the name, where it doesn't have enough room really. I thought that LD would probably say that this summed up my life pretty well: "not making room for the I."

o0o

I did a session that was two, short, 'sitting in walmart parking lot' illegible piecess, which are often the only kind I get in. I love describing sessions in retrospect, soon enough that hopefully memory hasn't torqued it to inventing, but late enough that feedback allows the tons of "contextual, below-verbal" levels of info to add into the description for much more sense.

1} There were these little glowy balls that were floating around all over the place in the air, and then suddenly there was this mass interruption and everything went to "static-and-black". It looked as if I'd been watching, with my face just inside the screen so it was all I saw, a 3D TV documentary on these things, and then someone yanked the cable and a second later the plug. Very much a "sudden radical interruption". It was pretty novel.

2} There was something physical that had two kinda flat shapes, horizontally placed, parallel with one above the other, and they were connected to each other only at one end, by this space that was between them and slightly inward from the end. (I sketched this. Twice. Badly.)

3} There was this shape, I couldn't tell what it was, but there was a part of it that was very specifically "peeled away" on the corner, rather like in illustrations where they show you a part of something 'peeled away' to show you what is underneath. I didn't feel the point was what was under, but rather the "peeling off of an outer layer."

4} I saw something facing me that had a bunch of small shapes in a horizontal row, but there was this "swollen thickness" around them that later I wished I'd written down as a sort of "glow" but at the time, I just sketched, badly like everything else, my sketching really needs work darn it.

5} I had a combination of senses hard to articulate that I had to render as AOLs through no choice. A sense like a catapult, throwing one thing high and far; a sense like some kind of forced-air-machine, like whatever was being thrown wasn't really solid.

6} I also had several feelings that suggested the physical thing connected near one end was kinda like a teeter totter, or the finger-side of a clamp at the connected end; a strong feeling like, "You push this side down, and the other side goes up."

I was thrown off because right off at the beginning of the session I got this overwhelming sense of a whole bunch of tall parallel shapes. This nearly always means trees. I also had data with no FB and/or wrong, that seemed to me kinda like a rough edged truncated tree trunk, but I wasn't sure if that was a 'symbol' (of 'rough surface' and 'truncated') or if it was literal. And I had other data that is either no FB or just totally off, and I fell asleep once and nearly did a few times, despite the supershort scribbling 2-part session. I may be hopeless if I can't make more decent time for the art, sheesh!

One interesting thing is in the my last several sessions I've had this experience near the end where it's like, I get *so much data* that it's impossible to fathom or articulate. It's like I'm just aware of this giant glob of tons of stuff all at once, and sometimes I am sort of aware of some tiny aspect or six, but it's all moving so fast, there is just no way. I had it on the prayer ribbons target recently, and on the mcqueen session recently, and again on this one.

Anyway the task was from LD who does most of my tasking that isn't from group efforts or my envelope pool, and it was this novel technology, a Reich orgone cloud buster as it's called, and his intent was describe how it worked. I've no idea if I fulfilled that but it was a fun session anyway. Of course, the disaster of my raw sessions vs. the decent form I can put them in if I have time prior to FB is always a little distressing but oh well. The messy truth is here.

o0o

Last night I sat looking at Dor's talisman. It's been hanging on the little shelf by my bed for a couple days. I felt if he wasn't going to be more proactive with me, and I just don't feel him (maybe this is my ignorance, but still!) that I see no reason to feed him my energy. It is a symbiote relationship but if I don't get my part that'd make him a parasite and not to be over personal but at this moment in my life I think I have enough of those and I'm just not in the mood damn it. So I took off his talisman and hung it up and I have looked at it grumpily but refused to wear it, though I never took it off since I got it. Today I gave in and put it back on, feeling like maybe I was blaming him for my own BS.

Soooo.... as usual, my only time to do anything of interest today was about 15 minutes in the car, while Lu shopped. At this rate someday I'll be on Geraldo talking about "How I found omniscience in the Walmart parking lot." (Just kidding.)

It was TIME to do a meditation. I tuned into my sacred space and then wondered where I was. I often appear in different places and usually I figure that is a form of self communication too. I was way the heck away from the castle, I was over in the space where I began all this years ago, the plateau.

In fact, ironically I never noticed this until not long ago, but my "sacred space" that I made for myself a dozen years ago looks slightly like part of the background pic of this blog. It's a super high "plateau," one of those funky desert looking things, and when I look down the back, way down there is a meandering river. Down the front there is a cage elevator that gets me down to the ground, then there is a small cornfield, and I go through that and then a little clearing and a cave.

I go into the cave and in a ways, there is a tiny creek that goes under the ground just before the entrance. I walk beside the creek until I reach a tiny stone bridge that is one of those little shallow arch footbridges that leads across. Just on the other side, a few steps from the bridge, is a big stone archway that is a doorway out of the cave.

When I exit it, I'm in a different 'inner' reality. I turn right and walk alongside a tiny field, then left and go across it. In the center I reach a big tree, with some little white benches around it, where my inner guide waits. I trace it back exactly to return.

At one point I built a tiny 'pavilion' for the 'four elementals of soul' (3 and me, or "the 4") that was way off to the right of where my armchair sits on the plateau. It was lovely, mostly open, with columns, and on its own little plateau surrounded by sky. Then one day I came in and it had grown massively into this whole castle that was over on the longer, main plateau, way off to the right. This was early this year when these meditations were so autonomous and profound... there's just no putting it in words.

There was a huge walled garden extending about 1/8 of a mile off to the left. Inside the garden there is a really long thin pool-like shape (shallow like a fountain) that goes all the way through it, and inside this at the bottom is a colorfully tiled DNA helix. Don't ask me why. The '4' of DNA is about the only correlation I can make there.

Anyway, on the other side of the garden stairs up to the castle proper. In the middle of the castle on the top level is a roof and that is usually where I appear of late, on the other side of it. The sunsets are quite lovely there and far, far off in the distance, I can see what I am suspicious are dragons flying near the high mountains. There is a big river that goes by the other side of the castle.

In the middle of the castle is a winding square staircase that leads up to a big circular room with a giant symbol (dunno what yet) on the floor, and they call this room the 'tower'. Even though it isn't taller than the rest of the castle and isn't a typical tower. Which is where the Senior (the top of 'the 4') has me come to work with 'the consortium'... the next ring of identities involved in my larger soul. Or... something.

That was way more boring stuff than anybody wanted to know. Moving on.

o0o

I decided prior to going to the tower, where I am way overdue I know, I need to do an archmed on this weird "de-focussed" effect I've had lately. I have really had a hard time lately, haven't meditated in quite some time, and the last time I tried literally everything was semi-opaque, distant and unreal. This seemed ok, not as good as usual but ok. It improved as I went on. So I got to IG, and realized it'd been awhile, and I hugged him --

--and then realized, or understood, that I have actually been avoiding meditation because of my response to him. I had no idea consciously. The last few times I've seen him I have noticed more and more that he is not human, and despite that on that inner world, entities can be anything, all my guides have been human until him. Each time I have seen him he seems to get a little bit more... um... amphibian. The last time I saw him I really noticed the small open gills on him, the spots on him, and his eyes seemed more black, and his skin more... rubbery sorta. A part of me pulls back in semi-repulsion from this, even though the more dominant, conscious me, insists on finding it novel and ignoring that.

"So I was avoiding you," I say, "realizing" that HE has given me this realization when I hugged him. He nods. "I'm so sorry," I say. "Please. I remember when I first met you I couldn't even see you. I know it's like a denial. Please don't go less visible on me last time. I can't stand it. I truly want you to be YOU, whatever you are. I want to know you, in your most natural form."

"Are you sure?" he says. Suddenly a bit unnerved, I stammer, "Yeah, sure!"

He turns into this huge creature that is probably 20 feet high, looks sort of like a frog/toad but also like something else I can't even name, and he sits there and looks down at me.

"Um." I say, struggling to be polite and to keep my word. "So. Um. This is the real you! Wow. That's. Um. That's really... really interesting!"

He sat there and looked at me. I stood there and looked at him. Silence.

"SOooooo," I say, knowing that he KNOWS whatever is inside me, so pretending anything is just SO beyond stupid, "Are you more comfortable in that form than you are in the humanoid form you usually wear with me?" I could only hope not.

"It doesn't matter to me," he says.

I nearly breathed a sigh of relief. Good. I would not be morally obligated to interact with that form then. "Well then... nothing personal but I would really prefer you in a humanoid form," I said apologetically. It's not you!" I assured him hastily, "It's me, you know, I'm simple, easily scared, and I just relate more to species closer to mine." Heh. Nice save. Almost.

Back in his humanoid form, looking rather like an overpale Trill from Star Trek (ok, with small gills as well as spots, lol) he waits for me.

I feel so guilty. I mean, he is part of me. I know he is part of me. I love him, he has done so much for me, he is so wise and brilliant and -- and WTF kind of spiritual path makes your wise inner self a giant alien-amphibian frog-like creature? How come other people get little pink Jesuses and typical Buddha or Native sorts, and I get totally freaky things?!

I felt sort of... I dunno. Not really ashamed of myself, not a bad-guilt feeling, more like a sorry-I'm-not-more-evolved feeling. Like, "Yeah, be who you are!--er, as long as you're like me."

o0o

I tell IG I want to work with an archetype that somehow relates to this weird defocussing of late, and I add for good measure "and that will do me the most good from the med in the limited time I have for it." I close my eyes, turn around, and open them to the arch. For an instant I nearly see something, and then --

-- I see this panel, like a solid object about 2.5 feet wide, 4 feet tall, and about 2 inches thick, vertical flat-facing me, with a horizontal bar running right through the middle of it, and it is spinning slowly on the bar.

I just stand there looking at it like an idiot for a bit. It is always offputting to me when my archetype is an object instead of something I can talk to and I always end up talking to the archetype as if there is an invisible person standing next to it that is actually the 'real' archetype and whatever I see is just some projection.

I watch it spin. I'm asking myself, what does this mean? Should it be spinning, or not? What should I be doing here to interact? I ask it, "what do I do?" and it moves toward me and so I let it merge into me, and I become that funky flat shape slowly, irregularly spinning.

I feel myself defocus. Yes, this is it... feels rather like that. Slightly dizzy. Losing track of what is around. I force myself, now the object, to stop and be vertical, and I think at a space next to us where I imagine something easier for me to imagine having a consciousness is standing.

"So... it's that I'm... um... spinning?" I ask. The shape of us changes, and the bar changes, and then there is a small ball in the middle, like a large ball-bearing, that somehow has its own elevated, stable nature, and now I am spinning in every direction, like one of those triple-ring things they use in the space program and they have at fairs. "Whoa..." I say, and I 'sense' that I'm starting to feel some info now.

One thing is that I feel it's relevent that in order for this spinning to happen I have had to completely lose track of my 'center' feeling. "So I need to... focus on my center," I say, thinking this sure was a lot of trouble to go through only to be told something that even I, dim as I am some days, could have told myself.

I felt something change, and suddenly I was moving all over, and various walls and things around me I was in danger of running into, and some were moving toward me, literal chaos ensued until I forced myself not only to hold the center but to hold an 'awareness' of where everything else was and "keep it equidistant from me" so that I could remain in the center.

"Ah," I say slowly, starting to get it. "So it isn't just about centering myself. It's also about maintaining an awareness of what is around me, because that is a big part of truly centering myself. When I tune out of what is around me--just like defocusing my eyes--I also lose the needed awareness for maintaining my own center--the I." That seemed sorta right. I don't think I totally got this accurately but it was the best I could do.

And then I'm sorry to say that I forget the rest. I do think I ended it but I can't remember. Lu scared me when he opened the door, I yelped loudly, and the last of it fell out of my head.

o0o

Later tonight I went down to see IG and I hugged him, and I asked him to take his real form and I flew up to gently lay on top of his giant head to rest on him. He was kinda slimy. Apparently psychic amphibians are slightly icky too. He warned me but as I landed I said, so what... I'll take a psychic shower. And I laid on him and told him I loved him and I was sorry for being so reactive earlier.

I hope this weekend to get some more 'serious' meditation done esp. in the Tower.

Chess

There is a book called "The 8" by Katherine Neville which is a great novel. I bought it a zillion years ago when it came out and liked it so well I bought copies for several friends. One of the concepts that was sort of 'grafted on' to the larger (complex, but good) plot was that of people literally playing the role, unknowingly, of pieces in a chess game. Social and political and historical changes happening, and someone who... has a very long term outlook on things shall we say, manipulating little things here and there to bring about a combination of people and circumstance for a certain end.

o0o

The last week, perhaps in response to getting enough sleep for a whole 3 nights running a week ago, I've been working insanely. Trying to catch up during the day with a job that was really slow and then just as I got handed more work because it was slow, my normal work exploded. Then when I get off at night, I launch into trying to get some of the early Taskerbot (junior) features up inside TKR at the Dojo Psi.

I swear, web coding, testing, etc. is so insanely time consuming it's ridiculous. Only other webworkers really know what I'm talking about. Even when it's programming or design it's still essentially the tech-secretarial job that, like Grapenuts cereal, seems to breed and multiply while in your bowl, until eventually you're gasping, My God, I'm still not done! Will this ever end??.

o0o

I took a little break to do a quick session last night just in time for the task closing at Radical RV. Eh. Didn't go great, but I feel I kinda understood the feelings when I saw FB so I don't mind. Certainly better than the last one which was an interesting session though alas on a completely different target apparently lol.

On the recent task, I got a common personal symbol (a sense of something going straight up into the sky and it just keeps going, something intangible) for death yet "muted" somehow; more flowing and not as sharp (as dead bodies and death events normally come through). Wasn't sure what to make of it due to the difference. Sometimes frequency-based technology targets have some similar feelings as targets I've done on death and spirits and such (weird, eh? maybe that is reflecting us all being energy-information at base?).

I came 'down from' where the sense had gone up and got "A creative embroidery" and a sense like threads of energy weaving, or something like that, I nearly said strings and now wish I had. ;-) Then I had a similar but different sense I assumed was the same thing (it wasn't) which on FB looks/feels exactly like the bottom of the interesting tree in the FB. So on the bright side I can see in retrospect that when I intended to go downward I did quite literally go down to the ribbons tied to the tree and then just below them, can't get more down that that.

I had a repeated gut feeling that was pretty clear that I was intrigued to see FB on to figure out. It was very much a feeling of energy and yet I figured of something real. It was like at first everything was energetic, normal, and then there was this sort of surge where the ideogram started, and then a sense of it compressing, getting tighter, stretching out, and then finally into a totally flat line of frequency, I even used the term 'flatline' because I still had that sense of death somehow being involved. (I had this vague assoc with my husband laughing about a political situation, Castro is said to be 'very stable', kinda like how the French doctors reported that Arafat's "condition had stabilized"---once he was dead. LOL.)

Then I got some data, there's no FB but it's not the 'focus of the target' so it doesn't matter. Then I saw this Maltese Cross, and there were "radiance rays" coming from it like a thing of spirit. Except oddly, I got exactly that shape--- sans the radiance--- for the HAARP target, so now I associate it with tech! That was a bit confusing, but I went with the spiritual angle given the sense of glory. I had a sense/sketch of something that on FB I see WAS basically the ribbon material but I didn't record it well enough for that to be clear I think.

Then I got a sense of land, not just like 'dirt and grass' but literally "land" like where the heart is, and I felt that the actual land had something significant to do with the target or its nature. That was hard to articulate and I believe this was good data, but not real obvious; next time I'll know to try for more on that kind of data. And lastly, though this was also early on, I kept getting overlays of something like a heart rate monitor, I started to write down "or seismometer" but felt some AOL would screw up my data (...actually I think it was ok overlay given the origin of the target -- the event which THIS target event memorializes is 'intrinsic' to the target), and again that sense of normal energy> pulse/event> tiny really tight compressed frequency> flatline.

The target turned out to be a bit disappointing given my session LOL, it was all these ribbons tied around a tree as a memorial to the tsunami victims. So... aside from the visual of the tree bottom which I wrongly recorded as 'flowing over' (it looks like that!) and the ribbon which I badly recorded as compared to a sine wave and maybe, if we stretch just a little, the radiant maltese cross as some symbol of spiritual... my data has no application to the target focus. Some may seem to relate to what is intrinsic to the target focus (the tsanami and the deaths); I don't mind having data that relates to such things, I just don't really get credit for it. Ah well. The sorta pitiful session -- but great learning experience -- is here.

The current Radical RV task is from RV Sam and closes/FB 10pm Central this Sunday. Another opens tonight that I task. We are keeping this group small but still have a little room for those interested. If you apply, don't do it anonymously with email hidden ok. I want to know who is asking to join my small private group, though I welcome folks to uses aliases in the group if they wish. Yahoo doesn't have any way for me to communicate with an applicant to ask, if they don't have email available, so I have to just not approve it which I'm sure offends!

o0o

So I bet you're wondering why I mentioned The 8.

I was thinking last night, in the 14 seconds between climbing into bed and falling unconscious, about Remote Viewing. About group souls, as Seth puts it. About a higher self that may have more than just our identity and how our lives may be affected by the will/intent/motion of things from another level up. And of the idea of people being in a really big chess game that we haven't the longevity to observe.

Back in May of '95 I had a very weird repeated OBE experience with "a soldier in a graveyard" whom I felt "had died doing something very unusual, very 'mental' in some way." (Article here.) That spawned something different, and in October '95 I was finally able to pull to full conscious recollection a six month chronic series of what I call 'programmed dreams', and knew that because I'd finally done that I was free of them. (Article here.) Ironically, this involved mention of---I am not making this up---the CIA. The next day I heard about RV and was totally obsessed from then on. I'm sure the CIA connection is coincidence right? And RV's connection to a 'solder who died doing something unusual and mental' is coincidence too, right?

I just happened to meet several former stargate people (viewers, scientists, consultants) over the years. I just happened to become friends with some of them. (I often feel that meeting Joe (McM) has been one of the things that has made all the years of BS in the RV field worth it, simply because he and his wife are such exceptional human beings.) Yada yada, stuff just happens. In 1997 I nearly left the field but had literally a shamanic vision one night that kept me in the loop until mid-1998 when I left for four years.

o0o

So.... Out of all the people in the world and even this country who would love to have met all the people I have, in person and through other means, how come it was me who got to do it?

Of all the options and opportunities that there were only a few of and yet a zillion in line, how come they came to me?

I used to feel, in the old days around '97, like archiving everything was literally a spiritual duty, because I had this access to people and info that so many wanted to have and didn't.

Is it possible that my higher self fully intended for me to become involved with RV, and if things have gone well for me in it and I just happened to chance into a lot of people and info and so on, is it because, in part, it's a matter of 'True Will'?

o0o

Might it all be a big, cosmic-sized game of chess in the end. Where I am both a pawn and a Queen depending on what level you are looking at it from.

Where my reasons for a movement of interest, location etc. are not just what I think they are but actually exist on many different levels, for different reasons, just like how a dream can be symbolic of the body but also of psychology and also of spirit and also slightly precognitive about world events---all in one.

Maybe our lives are like that. Maybe my driving obsession with building online RV tools and community and archives and an infrastructure to help perpetuate it into the future and not lose the knowledge we have, relates to more than my intensity as a personality in general. Maybe my future is somehow tied into it. Maybe my higher self is placing me like a Bishop here, and then at some point I will be ready for his planned move that moves me elsewhere. Maybe we think of life as happenstance and daily events but really it's just a lack of perspective and being too close to it. From a distance, maybe it would be evident that it is all just...

Chess.

Dog Spirit

OK I know I was going to bed, but I was quick reviewing my RSS and caught a post I'd missed on Mark's cool Mindblogging. It reminded me of a short little experience I oughtta mention somewhere.

It was Spring of the year 2000 and I moved to NE OK, flat edge of the Ozarks, to live near my dad and grandmother. I was still moving in -- delivered but not unpacked. Ry was with her grandma, my dad was outside somewhere doing yard work and I'd spent the morning putting dishes away out of boxes, and was worn out.

I went into my bedroom, which had nothing in it but my mattresses, and literally fell face down on top of them to just get a nap. After what seemed an instant I stood up, feeling fine all the sudden. I turned to the window behind me, which had no curtains, and looked out at the backyard. There was no fence to the left of us, and our backyard was open to many other yards and the grass alley between the rows of houses here.

Some man was playing with his dogs in my backyard. That seemed a bit odd, but the dogs were loose so I guess I figured they'd just kind of mosey'd on over from some other yard. He was running and leaping and turning and they were leaping all over, from full grown to puppies, and there was such a sense of joy about it all.

I thought, how interesting that they are all black, like the same kind of dog -- he must raise those kinds of dogs.

And then I realized that I couldn't hear the dogs. I mean they were just feet away from my window, barking and leaping in delight with this guy, but I couldn't hear anything at all. I thought, now that is so odd!

I looked at the fellow, who was turned away from me, and as if drawn by my attention he turned and looked at me.

I was totally shocked. His face was covered with black dog-fur! Not like a dog head, or well sorta, but his head and features were human, it's just that his skin was like a dog's back and maybe his eyes were a bit offbeat.

HE was totally shocked too apparently! It was obvious he couldn't believe I could SEE him, or maybe he was just amazed to see ME, but in any case, we spent a couple of full seconds just staring at each other open-mouthed in utter astonishment.

Just at that instant, my father started the chainsaw and I was nearly thrown back in my body.

I wondered if I'd dreamed that. It felt much more OBE though. I was so mad that dad had chosen that moment to interrupt one of the coolest experiences!

After that I kinda wondered about what we don't see, and the stories of people with animal heads and stuff like that.