Dream Cogitation

As I was waking up Sunday morning, I found myself working on a comparison/contrast of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. I have no idea what I might have been dreaming, but it was enough to keep the thought process going even after I was fully awake.

Here's what I came up with:

Psychology is the study of individuals and how they have been shaped through their internal chemistries, their thoughts, and their interactions with others, with the goal of helping each to optimum functioning.

Sociology is the study of people in aggregate, their society, and how the individual effects and is affected by the social system, also with the idea of improving both the aggregate and the individual functioning to an optimal level.

Anthropology is the study of other societies, remote in time, distance, or social strata. It does not seek to "improve" the society being studied (which could be construed as a type of contamination, and which it would be unable to do in historical societies, anyway), but rather to understand to the point that what worked and what didn't work could be applied to optimize the observer's society of origin.

Maybe the next part of this comparison/contrast would be the metaphysical, which attempts to understand the impact of forces that do not originate within the physical self or society. This might include what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious, what people of Western religion call saints, angels, God, or Holy Spirit (or Satan or demons, if that impact is negative), and what New Thought calls Spirit or Higher Self (with the belief that the negative is physically based and not external to humanity), among others.

I still have no idea why this was important enough to make the transition from sleep to wakefulness, but after thinking about it off and on all that day, I thought I'd share.

Manifestation Madness

A few nights ago at dinner, I asked Steve for a story of recent manifestation. (I read a lot of Wayne Dyer.) He said he couldn't think of anything specific, but in general the right things come at the right times all the time.

I said that on the way home that night, I remembered telling him a few weeks ago that I wanted to live in a house where the toilet didn't gurgle when we did laundry. (The cut-rate plumber our landlord usually calls had assured us when it started making that noise after one of his snake-out-the-clogged-drain visits that it was making that noise because the drainage pipes were small and it was actually a good sign and that they were finally venting properly.) Shortly after my wish for a house with a non-conversational toilet, the drains in the entire house stopped up. The cut-rate plumber was not returning the landlord's calls, so he told Steve to make whatever arrangements were necessary and send him the bill. We called James of JHRooter in Oldsmar (727-420-1941). He arrived within the hour, brought along his very nice teenaged son as a helper, made everything ALL better, and after he left, we realized that now that the drain pipes for the house had been snaked properly, the toilet no longer talks on laundry day. Hooray!

The morning after our manifesting conversation, Steve came into the office to tell me that he now had a story for me. He was totally out of his fat-free salad dressing packets that he orders on-line. He was packing his lunch, resigned to the fact that he would not be having his preferred fat-free caesar dressing on his salad that day, when the FedEx truck appeared, bringing his latest order.

And that's how we roll at our house.

Yesterday morning, I realized that it was August 1st and the first day of camp. Woohoo!

Art by Mother

Three mornings per week, a van or car comes to our house and picks Mother up to take her to the Dunedin Day Center. They sing songs, read the paper, play Bingo (sometimes Mother brings me the packages of cookies she's won), and lots of other activities, including breakfast, lunch, and a mid-afternoon snack before she comes back home in the afternoon.


Sometimes she brings home artwork that she's done. Some projects are more impressive than others. Below is one of the first things she brought home and taped to the living room wall.

Soon after, this appeared below it.

Later, this painting appeared, and I was actually quite impressed.

Then came Christmas arts and crafts. (She won the candy jar by being the most accurate guesser of the number of candy canes it held.)

Several more paintings came home, and I was getting quite excited about Mother's previously hidden artistic talent until she told me that the canvases had pencil drawings they then painted.  Still, she seemed to have a good sense of color and blending, and I've purchased inexpensive frames to showcase the growing art collection. When they're all framed, I'll be able to replace the Easter basket she's taped up in the dining room.

Time Traveling Part 2: Sunflowers 2011

Last summer, I took some of the edgers that were stacked on the side of the house and blocked off a little garden area.  I decided to plant sunflowers. I started the seeds in little plastic pots on the lanai, alternately overwatering and ignoring them.  The survivors made it into the flower bed.

They grew pretty quickly, benefitting from the fact that Steve kept reminding me to water the tomato plants .

We got some nice blooms on them and even some bees visiting!

It soon became evident, however, that the extreme rockiness of the soil did not allow them to get a good root system going.  Even though Steve tried staking and tying them to help them stand upright, they never got strong enough stems to support or nourish themselves. Not one of the flower heads set seeds.

I did enjoy watching them grow, even if they didn't do as well as I had hoped.

This year, I've planted mint.

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Time Traveling: Part 1 or Wow! I Just Found My Camera!

Late last summer (growing season in Florida begins in the fall), we made do-it-yourself earth boxes out of some surplus storage bins in order to grow tomatoes. It was quite exciting when our tomato plants grew taller that us! Bella, however, was not so easily impressed.

We stumbled out in the early mornings to make sure the water reservoirs stayed full, braving hungry mosquitoes and the chance that our neighbors would see us in various states of (un)dress. When the tomatoes started ripening, our excitement increased, and we eagerly awaited the first of our harvest.

We finally had a couple that were fully ripened (and not caterpillar abused), so we brought them in and gloried in their home-grown flavor.

When we realized that caterpillars were enjoying more of the ripening tomatoes than we were, we decided to head them off at the pass.  Fried green tomatoes!

Chef Steve carefully selected and sliced several tomatoes of goodly size, and with equal care prepared the cooking line for maximum efficiency.

Don't they look wonderful?  Chef Steve thinks so!

Bella remains unimpressed.

She just doesn't know what she missed!