I spoke with my supervisor and HR this morning, I’m entitled to 3 days bereavement time off, which I’ll be using Wednesday-Friday so we can drive up for the memorial service on Thursday. This has worked out well, with the weekend I’ll have a total of 5 days in a row for this so we’re not rushing around and exhausting ourselves. And I can handle being at work today and tomorrow, at least it keeps my mind busy.

We had our second Saturday shaman class on Saturday, we had a nice time. Jim spoke about some things that really hit home with me, so it was an interesting day. Unfortunately I had a slight sinus headache during most of it (Advil only helped a little), and I have a more difficult time journeying when I have a headache. Toward the end of the day we got to play with “dowsing rods” (I still think this is silly, but it was fun) and then the really fun part – facepaint! We painted our faces in a way to reflect something of the spirit of our spirit guides. Yeah, a whole room full of adults painting their faces as animals, there were many jokes about driving home/going to the mall/etc without washing it off first.

We got home from that around 6:30 in the evening and took a nap. I don’t usually take naps, but my headache had gotten bad and I needed to. We got up around 8, ordered a pizza and hung out the rest of the evening. Working on wallaceandgromit.net, catching up with a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while (we’ve been so busy). It wasn’t until after 1am that I went to bed.

Sunday morning I heard the news about my grandfather, my cousin Melissa called to tell me. It wasn’t easy news to handle, I cried, I went downstairs and woke up Michael for a hug. I called Annette (youngest sister) to see if she had heard, she hadn’t and didn’t even know Granddad had been in the hospital. Sometimes I think my family needs a mailing list, getting the news to everyone all over the country is so uncoordinated. I spoke with my mother later in the day, she was upset, she had known him for over 20 years. She didn’t ask to come to the service, but wanted to make sure Annette would have a ride down for it, and needed to work things out with Annette’s probation officer so she can leave the state.

Michael’s been great. We ran some errands Sunday afternoon, then came home and I was feeling mopey. He suggested a few places we could go out to and I wasn’t in the mood for any until he mentioned going to the Victory brewery for dinner. I was hungry and that sounded good. So that’s where we went. It’s in Downingtown, in a part of town that I’d call “scary” and it’s tucked in a warehouse area, you don’t even see the front door until you pass a few tractor trailer bays (used to pick up beer from the brewery). It’s in a real warehouse, and was chilly, not anything like the upscale little brewery restaurants I’ve been to in the past. The service was fine, our burgers were good and the beer was great (yay Hopdevil!).

The evening was spent relaxing, watched West Wing and went to bed before 10pm.

After work I need to start getting stuff together so we can make our trip up to New Hampshire for Thursday. We’re not entirely sure when we’ll be leaving, where we will be staying, or how long. A good friend of ours in Maine offered to have us visit if we had time, that would be nice, but we’ll see – going up for a day and coming home might be better, and the Maine bit adds about 3 hours each way to our trip.

A bowl of popcorn and a funny movie tonight would be good medicine.

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” -Charles de Gaulle

And now they gain another.

My grandfather passed away this morning, he had been ill for a few months. According to my cousin he was ready. He was happy that family was making plans to come up, even if they weren’t able to make it in time. He was at peace with everything and content that he had had an amazing life. This makes it easier to take, but it’s still very hard. I’m upset, I feel numb…

Rest in peace Granddad, you were loved.

I had such a great time last night.

It’s always hard to see a movie after you’ve built up these fantastic expectations for it over multiple years, but I have to say that Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit didn’t disappoint! I’ll get around to writing a more in-depth review tomorrow.

We met , , and at the theater for the 7:40 showing. We wanted to avoid kids, but also couldn’t stay out too late because we’re going to our shaman class today and had to be up early. Alas, we didn’t avoid the kids, but they weren’t that bad, and the movie was generally loud enough to drown out the occasional screams.

I’m happy.

And the traffic on WallaceAndGromit.net has now surpassed that of PrincessLeia.com, yowza!

In the past week the Total Hits (every page that was visited, not unique visitors):

PrincessLeia.com: 46,296

WallaceAndGromit.net: 48,876

Wow! I visited my sites from work, and they seem to be handling the load, not too slow, but I haven’t seen them at their peak (WallaceAndGromit.net had 984 hits in a single hour during it’s peak this week).

This is so cool.

I can’t begin to describe how excited I am. I’ve waited for this for years! Ever since I saw that first WnG movie back in 1995 and fell in love I’ve wanted them to grace the silver screen. And now I get my wish! Today! OMG! GLEE!!!!!! IT’S HERE!!

Screw Star Wars, this is the movie release of the decade.

Gosh, it’s going to be hard getting through work today.

Everything I’ve attempted writing since Monday hasn’t come out right.

Including this.

Sometimes I can’t stop writing and I’m constantly thinking about how I’ll word things, but this week is not like that. I hate these slumps. It takes me 10 minutes to form a sentence and it’s still not right.

Yup, just staring at the screen now.

It’s not like I don’t have stuff I want to write down, it just that my ideas aren’t making it from brain to computer. The words aren’t coming, and once they do they aren’t organized properly. I don’t want to post such unorganized junk online.

Can’t focus, playing with a staple remover now.

I’m going to take a walk.

I’m having a long day.

I want to go home and snuggle now!

I didn’t mention it when I wrote my journal entry yesterday, but we did end up going to Michael’s uncle’s gallery opening on Friday in Quakertown. It was great, he’s an amazing sculptor, even offering classes in his workshop now. There was a squirrel sculpture that I was quite fond of, with a price tag of $225, considering it if no one else buys it, but there really are other things we should be spending our money on right now %) I met a few more of Michael’s relatives, and we left after about 45 minutes.

On the way home we picked up a spinach pizza from Moccias, and for the first time they screwed it up. I ordered a “spinach pizza” and I was confident that they’d know that was a white pizza, since it lists “spinach pizza” as a white pizza on their menu. Alas, someone in the chain of ordering and making our pizza must have been new or clueless and made it with red sauce. Yuck! I was pretty disappointed when we got home and opened the box. Luckily it wasn’t as bad as I expected, not nearly as bad as when other pizzerias have screwed up the same order in the same way.

We both went to bed fairly early that night, had to get up early for drum making!

Saturday was detailed in the last entry.

Sunday was our no plans day, good thing since I didn’t sleep well Saturday night. I spent the morning getting caught up on website stuff and email, it was a good feeling to get that out of the way, I got so behind on everything this week. I still haven’t touched mailing lists, some of which I haven’t had a chance to catch up on in 2+ weeks, but that’s ok.

Around 2pm we were showered and ready to leave the house. We went up to Collegeville to pick up some Sake in case we did decided to make our own sushi.

We then headed to Skippack to drop by Dreamcatcher to pick up some white sage, but when we got there they were having “Skippack Day.” This would have been fun, lots of shops having sales, lots of tents on the road selling all sorts of neat things, but there were just too many people, it would have been difficult to get a parking space without paying for one (paying for parking in Skippack? madness!).

So we drove past that all and headed to the North Wales Whole Foods market. Mmm Whole Foods. We got a bunch of stuff we needed, they even had small bundles of white sage. And my carrot cake, yum!

And then it was off to Assi Plaza to check out fish for the sushi possibility. Unfortunately this didn’t quite work out. I think we need to do some more research before doing the sushi at home thing. We’re familiar with what sushi fishes are eaten cooked and what ones are raw, but nothing was coming together for us while we were at the store. I’d rather have things feel right and make sure we’re doing the right thing before we eat raw animals.

By the time we left Assi Plaza I was feeling tired. Michael suggested a few places we could go to eat out, but I just wanted to go home. This is very strange for me, I love eating out. When we got home Michael suggested getting a chicken cheesesteak stromboli. Yeah! So he went out and got one from Chiaros in Green Lane. It was a good dinner, we watched some MST3K while eating and spent the rest of the evening relaxing, and eating carrot cake.

Great weekend. Tonight we’re planning on going to the all genders sweat lodge, perhaps we’ll bring our new drums.

Yesterday was an absolutely amazing day, we got to make our own frame drums!

I had some doubts going into this about how good a drum I could make. I don’t see myself as a very musical person, and for most of my life drums were foreign things that other people used and made, not me. I saw making a drum as a great challenge and was happy to tell myself “nothing to be ashamed of if your drum doesn’t turn out, it’s the first!”

Then on Thursday night we journeyed for our drums. I met with a color-changing snail in the lower world who told me that I just needed to relax and my drum would be fine. Good advice. Whenever undertaking something like this I tend to be an obsessive perfectionist, which is no good – I get worked up about things if they’re not perfect and I have a miserable time with it. This time would be different, I’d do my best and not worry about the details. Have fun, work hard, and come out with whatever I come out with.

The results? Absolutely stunning.

Our drums this morning. They are still not entirely dry in all the corners and thick bits, so we can’t take them out and play them, but already we get an amazingly good sound when we test them. Aren’t they beautiful? Mine’s the one on the left. I can hardly believe I made something so beautiful, I’m absolutely thrilled!

The back of our drums this morning.

It was a beautiful day for making drums, warm out, sunny, perfect! Some people worked inside the garage, and some just outside (garage door was open so it was one big space really).

The elk skins when we pulled them out of the water they were soaking in for 2 days. I really couldn’t believe how floppy it was, like a thin piece of rubber, the skins were so hard and thin when we put them in the bucket on thursday.

The first step is punching holes in it for the sinew (also soaked and floppy) to go through. The skins aren’t hard, but they are somewhat thick and it’s skin so it has the tough qualities of skin.

Stringing the sinew the first time, this is just to get a basic shape in place and stablize it so it can be tightened.

This is the first stringing of our drums. After it’s strung you go around a few times to smooth everything out, tighten it, smooth, tighten. It’s hard work, and many of us had trouble with the sinew breaking if we pulled to hard. Finding what was too tight and not tight enough wasn’t easy.

This is after going around a few times tightening, you can see that it really starts taking shape when compared to the previous photo.

Eventually our drums were finished being pulled, smoothed and tightened and we put them outside on the wood pile to dry. All of this took us from about 10:30am until 1pm, when we took a break for lunch.

After lunch it was time to make the beaters. This is harder than it looks! We spent about 2 hours working on them.

We were finished around 4. My hands were sore from everything I’d done with them, but I was exhilarated. My drum is beautiful! I actually made a wonderful, beautiful musical thing and didn’t beat myself up over it! It’s so perfect!

[EDIT]I just received the group picture from Jim Frank of us with our drums, photo by Jim Frank:

After the drum-making I was way too pumped to just go home. I was so excited about the drums and how well this whole sm thing is going that I told Michael I wanted to go out. We came home and dropped in IRC to see if anyone was around and wanted to see Serenity with us, but alas, no one was. So we went on a date to the movies, just the two of us. We ate at Max & Ermas, where the food was good and service was excellent, the wait to get a seat was bad but we called ahead so we missed most of it.

We got to the theater for the 7:55 showing, I was pretty excited. I avoided everything that talked about the movie, didn’t even watch the trailers because I wanted to be entirely surprised, all I knew about the flim was that my friends who had gone to see the preview shows said it was awesome (and I had the unfortunate luck of reading a journal entry yesterday morning that mentioned something about it, d’oh).

The film was amazing! I admit I was somewhat skeptical that a movie based off of a TV show (even a great TV show) would be good. But it was, one of my favorite movies this year, and it’s been a good year for movies!

Today we might make sushi and have some carrot cake. We haven’t made any solid plans, I want today to be a relaxing day. Too much “we have to be at $place by $time” this week.

I had a good day yesterday.

When I came into work there was a confetti explosion on my desk, and my boss had left a card and a gift, aww! How sweet! The gift was a very nice cat picture frame (I have a half dozen pictures of Caligula hanging around my cubicle). I got cards from a few other co-workers, overwhelmingly cat-themed – oh dear, am I that cat lady? Another co-worker has a husband who works for one of the big pharmaceutical companies in the area and she’s always giving everyone company advertising stuff – pens, pads of paper, tissues, lotion and the most fun one yet, a pedometer! She gave me one of the pedometers because she “knows how much I like gadgets” *glee* She also gave me another picture frame (I’ll put a picture of Michael in that one) and a candle. So nice!

At lunch my boss took me and the other woman in our department out for lunch at Applebees to celebrate my birthday, it was yummy.

After work Michael made dinner and then we headed down to Malvern for the Shamanic drum circle. On the way down we stopped for gas and I got out of the car to pull a leaf out that was stuck to a windshield wiper since we left the house. For some reason I didn’t just toss it aside, I kept it and decided to bring it with us to Malvern.

The drum circle was interesting, there were a lot of new people, and only 4 of us were there because we needed to do the drum making too. I had a nice time, when we finally got to pick out the elk skins for our drums it was about 9pm, we put them all in a large bucket of water and them Jim asked if we had any herbs or anything we wanted to put in. We didn’t have anything… except that leaf! So I went to the car and looked on the ground to find where I had tossed that leaf, I found it and put it in the water with the drum skins.

We got home around 10pm. I was tired, but took a few minutes to check my email and drop into IRC. I went to bed soon after.

I’m still tired. This morning I didn’t want to get out of bed, less than usual sleep and the fact that it was so cold outside of the snuggly covers of the bed made getting up difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the cold, it’s a very refreshing feeling after this summer. It just makes getting out of bed much less appealing. And it was colder than I thought, 41F outside when I got up, and we had the windows open! No wonder Caligula invaded our bed last night! (Wow, “Caligula invaded our bed” sounds really freaky o_o we’ll have to name our next cat “Fluffy” or something with less perverted associations).

And now it’s Friday. I’m wearing the pedometer, it’s fun, counting all my steps. The only problem is that it talks o_o Talks when I set it, talks if I hit a button on the side. I’ve managed to hit it twice today, d’oh. But so far I’ve walked .79 mile, woo! I can see this silly thing becoming quite an addiction – creating websites! graphs! fun statistics about how much I walk on workdays and weekends! Or, more likely, the novelty will wear off by tomorrow and I’ll let it die.

It’s beautiful out, I’m going for a walk now.

[EDIT] Of course I go for said walk, it’s so nice out, and the pedometer falls off and hits the ground. It didn’t hit that hard, I don’t think much of it, put it back on. About 20 minutes later I look at it and realize it hasn’t changed at all. It’s broken! Arrg! Stupid cheap thing! Oh well.

Today is my birthday! %D YAY!!! I’m 24 now.

And happy birthday to and too!