My cat is trying to win a mildly aggressive staring contest that I'm pretty sure the other cat doesn't even know they're having. I tried telling her she already won. She's still staring. Didn't even blink at me.

The unwanted visitors have left earlier than we expected, and I didn't even have to demonstrate how Southern Passive Aggression is the shadow side of Southern Hospitality! 🥳

My steel tongue drum is very calming for me. Eleven notes that are all harmonious. I cannot screw it up. I play number sequences and let the numbers sing to me.

I was playing n^2 - 1 tonight. (2x2)-1, (3x3)-1, (4x4)-1... And I realized there is an infinite number of patterns! Adjust a number, change subtraction to something else. I will never play all the patterns!

This makes me so happy! The numbers will always have new songs to sing!

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your "perfect" offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

#CoSoMusic
https://youtu.be/c8-BT6y_wYg

The Unwanted Visitors have arrived. I have learned enough Welsh at this point that I can say, "Dw i ddim eisiau ymwelwyr." Thinking about using it as a greeting. They won't know I said, "I don't want visitors."

With luck, my weekend will be a couple of days of quiet terror. Without luck, it won't be quiet.

Banjo is tuned. I don't have to be happy about having visitors. They don't have to be happy about visiting.

We have an unavoidable situation in which relatives no one wants here will be here this weekend. This includes a homophobic person who will reject queer relatives from his own home, but isn't likely to feel he can say anything about it in our home.

So it was requested that I put up the flag I got to replace the one the wind destroyed last year. This one is much bigger! Our whole tiny rural town can see it!

I'm not having a good week, and there's not really a chance of things getting better until next week. So I did a reading to break things down for myself and looking at taking care of my needs in this situation. I'm sharing it as an example of a very real divination reading - not just a practice reading. And you just need playing cards and 6-sided dice to do it.

https://diydiv.substack.com/p/im-sorry-but-now-is-not-a-good-time

@Alfred Can you explain the difference between the knitting stitches "M1L" and "M1R"?

But I'm thinking about it tonight. Maybe, for a little more than a year, my high school friend group got as close as we could at that time to understanding community and unconditional love. It's silly...but also maybe not silly.

Maybe we need to learn how to share water and truly mean it when we say, "May you never thirst."

And we really believed we loved each other! We were brothers and sisters, and any disagreement could be resolved. Because we all drank from the water together. So we were one entity made of multiple people.

My husband asked me at what point did I realize I had started a cult? "A few minutes ago, while I'm telling you about it. But you've read the book! That's weirdly fitting!"

And we laughed.

I got my friends to read it. And you had to read it if you were coming into our friend group. We didn't meet up at each other's lockers. We agreed to meet up at water fountains. There was always a glass of water when we had lunch together. If someone wanted to drink from it, someone else held it for them and told them, "May you never thirst." We did it at water fountains, too. Someone else held the button and tood you, "May you never thirst," while you drank.

Today has been a scary day, so I want to console myself and maybe entertain you by sharing a story.

Last night, I was telling my husband about when I was in high school and read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" the first time. I didn't really understand it until I read it again as an adult. At that time, I was just enchanted by how Valentine Michael Smith viewed water! Like I was on the edge of having a cosmic mystery revealed if I drank and bathed enough!

So...

It's Thursday. That's far enough into the week that I can just say this is an exhausting week.

@Alfred Where is the item I spent most of the day looking for in the current time? I know where it is in two past times, but I can't get to them because I don't have a time machine.

I'm so happy with my headwrap today that it became time to change profile pictures. Also, I like to change them every now and then because I refuse to hide my aging. When I turned 40 I promised myself I would not send the message that aging makes one less beautiful.

And I found my favorite eraser! It was in a bag I didn't look in on my desk. Of course that's where it would be. I put it there so I wouldn't lose it.

Since everything's covered with snow outside, I did find the wood for whittling that I have indoors. I'm a little concerned that I can't find the black walnut spoon I carved a few years ago. I was doing it when we moved. It's probably in a box I'll find one day and wonder how it ended up there.