Category Archives: joy

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new growth

I’ve been thinking about the A to Z challenge again. I did it last year, with 7 sins and friends. I wrote about an emotion each day…. and I planned to do it this year starting with the 7 virtues. Bet you can’t name as many virtues as sins…. though I don’t think any of the emotions are sins. They are part of us. They are part of the way we respond to the world and survive. We have to learn to pay attention to them and not label any of them as negative or bad. We cannot excise grief or fear or anger from our psyche and remain human. Instead we need to learn to be curious about each emotion….

…..and there has been a shift in my life, three parts all shifting at once, this week. It is very odd to have all three go at once. I may leave the virtues until next year, because this sudden freedom is strange, peculiar, unfamiliar…. I need to expand in it and explore it….

New growth….

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Home

This is not a perfect photograph…. and yet, at the same time, it is for me. My daughter was home last week for spring break. She had a haircut and sent her hair to Locks of Love. The background is cluttered with the cupboard open and counter, but her concentration and quiet is a contrast to that. And anyhow, I am biased, right? We love even terrible photos of those we love.

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Round one

This is for photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #101, and he has a round theme too. I was trying to get a photograph without all the kitchen chaos background and thought, oh, from above. Cats enjoy symmetry and design. Boa chooses this stool because our old furnace died and is replaced by a heat pump, high on the kitchen wall. The stool is the closest place to the warm air source: when no lap is available.

I am indoors occasionally….

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Work place

Mostly I post photographs from outdoors, but this is clinic Friday afternoon. Mordecai took off her feather boa, wig and headdress and came into the exam room to add to a visual discussion about the sacroiliac joints. Mordecai is a plastic skeleton and her sacroiliac joints are attached incorrectly but conveniently for the sellers. After all, her bones don’t have the weight of a real skeleton nor does she have tendons or muscles or skin to connect everything. She is sitting beside my Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy, which I use in clinic every day. To show the knee ligaments and menisci, to show the back muscles, to show the connections of the psoas muscle….

Many thanks to Dr. Netter’s brilliant paintings and also to Mordecai for their help!

 

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Blueblack

Here is Boa, in my kitchen, black with blue highlights. She used to sit in front of the vents when the 1979 propane furnace worked. Now I have a heat pump, high on the wall in the kitchen. The closest she can sit is up on the two chairs that tuck in the end of the counter. She is 12 years old and less interested in going outside this cold winter. She misses the kids and the other cat, who was hit by a car three years ago. She likes it when the kids come home, and when they leave again, she is a little bit blue…..