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By Kathleen DesMaisons, March 13, 2010 10:16 am

someone asked about my *regular life* . Ok, say I, will do

This morning, I went down to the Hotel Albuquerque where we will be holding Radiant Ranch in May. One of our attendees is blind and asked for an orientation. I am going to make her a tactile map so I wanted to scope it out. I ordered breakfast at their restaurant and read USA today while eating it. Then on the way home I stopped at Starbucks and got a decaf latte. I had the dogs in the car with me and Ronan wanted to sit in the front and put his head on my lap which meant he would cover up the sift handle, so we stopped several times to discuss that.

I came home and went to look at one of the computers in the office. It got sick yesterday and it took all night to run disk warrior. The prognosis is not good. I think this is the computer that has all the golden retriever rescue files on it and no, it does not run automatically to a backup and no, I do not think I told the volunteer to back it up regularly. I decided to deal with it later.

I am waiting for AAA to come and jump start my 4-runner so I can take 2 dogs, mo and Curley down to Animal Humane. They were brought to me yesterday and I am assuming they were puppy mill breeding dogs and have only lived in a cage. They are young, unneutered and VERY wild. A little beyond what I can do this week since I am leaving for Maine next weekend to spend a week on the beach.

Patti is coming by in a bit and she and I will go over to LInda’s rental house and prune the roses. Patti just spent a week on the internet learning to prune roses, so I am counting on her skill. Then we will take Ronan over to dog class for clicker training.

After class, my worker, Harold is coming over to repair the back yard and kennels. The last dog was a digger and did some serious damage to the kennel. At 3 or so, someone is coming to see the little guy named Abe. You can see all these dogs at www.grrnm.com if you like. Then I will meet the person who adopted Sugar to finsih their paperwork.

In between, I am working on my taxes, doing the laundry, putting away the groceries I got yesterday and vacuuming the floor. I also did 280 emails this morning, and posted the forum. I will post class lessons later in the day. And will check in on all the assorted face book pages. And David is wanted me to learn how to play Farmville. Last night at dinner he said, *Ma, all your field only have dead strawberries.* Now that was embarasing.

And then this evening, I have dinner plans with friends. After dinner, we will do walks with dogs.

This is a regular life Saturday.It is a little more structured than usual. I even filled out a schedule to keep track, LOL.

I am taking to heart our discussions at chat about *play* so will plan a play day for tomorrow. Maybe I will start working on my quilt thingie. Or maybe I will simply sits on the front porch and watch the balloons go by while I have a cup of tea. I don’t know if quiet time qualifies as play time.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, March 4, 2010 1:54 pm

I woke up really early this morning and decided to meditate. I was floored at how the candle I lit overtook the moonlight coming in to my room. I know what they say 20 min,   it takes that long to quite list making and planning. Then I slept for a while. I was thinking about a line someone said on on of the lists: * I would be nothing without him, My Lord and Savior.*…I have a statue of Quan Yin in my bedroom She is known as the Goddess of Conpassion and her name means One who hears the cries of the world. I also have a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a picture of the stones at Avebury. I sat and had a conversation all of them.  I feel as if I am totally part of the energy flow.  It is not woo-woo or anything like that.  Just that I feel it…little sparkles of light dancing all around. So it is not that they make me whole, I am whole, by virtue of being alive…we just share the knowing. By about 5 am or so I came to the thought that the different between a spiritual teacher, or an avatar, or a savior and us regular people is the level of knowing about the oneness. Like they reach up into the place where everyone remembers the sparkles are what it is about, and we still sort of srunch our eyes closed and try to remember.

But this morning I took Pepper for a walk, she was leaping with the joy of it. There was a red and yellow balloon in the sky, and I could feel all the trees smiling in the morning light. the ditches start to run in Albuquerque on march 15th, so they are getting everything ready. I could cut home the back way because they have mowed the weeds off the little ditch. Pepper is agile and was scampering through. When the water flows, everythign comes alive…so we are getting ready.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, March 2, 2010 9:24 pm

Sometimes I have none and then all at once they arrive

I was talking with my neighbors tonight. He asked if my new book was all written. I laughed. I thought it would be fun to share this with you. Six months ago, the outline was done and I decided to start on the chapters of the newest material as a way of doing the hardest part first. I thought I knew exactly what the book would be about – written for recovering alcoholics wanting to take their programs to a deeper level. I felt clear, confident and competent. I started with the chapter on The Addiction Amoeba. I started drawing pictures. The energy started bubbling. It was the same kind of energy that I had felt when I was writing Potatoes Not Prozac.

I thought, hmmm, this is significant. I decided to teach a class on this, to try out some of these ideas and just see what happened. Lots of people signed up. I had a hunch it would be good to split the class into step 7 people and people working on the other steps. Same material, but different developmental ways of looking at it.

I think most of you know when these special class things happen. My jaw tends to be on the floor. The integrity, honesty and willingness of the people in these two classes is staggering. Doing the food, even very early on does something to your capacity to make sense of complex issues. I am just blown away by it. So once again you guys are rewriting the book. This will not be a subnote to the story, but will start the focus on how we grow, how we heal, how we clear out old hard stuff. It is wonderful.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, March 2, 2010 9:09 pm

We are just starting one of the free orientation classes we do once a month. I am excited to see all these new faces waiting to learn about the community. Selena and I are team teaching and we will be adding some of the new places…like facebook and twitter…and of course this blog! If you want to learn about all the neat stuff we have to support your healing, do come and join us. go to radiantrecovery.com and then, make connections, and then online classes. Here is the URL

http://www.radiantrecovery.com/classes.htm

Keep reading because I am going to be sharing some of the wonderful feedback I am getting.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, March 2, 2010 9:00 pm

My rose bush is stirring. The lesf buds are swelling and according to the book, it is getting close to the time to prune it. Tomorrow I will sharpen my cutters and go to work. I love this bush, it is right on the way out to the shed where we keep all the store goods so I walk by it a lot.

This week has been a lot of rescue work. Somehow I ended up with 4 dogs in the rescue kennels, an assortment of wild teenagers with lots of energy and one grumpy old grandpa who gathers the treasures from the year and hoards them in *his* kennel. I got a wonderful email from one of our adoptive parents about IZZY. Here she is taking her place in their greenhouse. They are growing little gourmet lettuces and Izzy is helping. I know you love hearing about my other life, LOL.

I have a question for you all. Should I be doing more creative titles for my posts. Like Izzy in the lettuce? I suddenly realize that just the date is kinda boring. I am think you might like to have some context about what this post in on.

Hmm, I think I will go change it. You can let me know what you think. And fort he sake of the aesthetics I am adding a last sentence. It needs to look good as well as sounding right.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, February 25, 2010 5:36 pm

I always love Thursday. It is when my housekeeper comes. She LOVES to clean. Today I found her with the couch taking off the cushions and vacuuming under neath. Everything looks and smells so clean when she leaves. I ask the dogs to hold on throwing their hair around for 2 hours.

It is low light tonight and the mountains have snow on them. The light is shining on my neighbors adobe house. There were more robins out today. I went down to Durans for lunch and had hamburger and green chili and read USA today. David is still on vacation but we managed to get all the subscriptions out the door, what a miracle that was. Nothing like doing someone else’s job to appreciate his skill!

My dog runner quit.I know that I can take care of Josie’s exercise needs – she is 12. But man, my little triathlete doggie, Pepper, just keeps saying can’t you speed it up some? I think I will need to go back to Craig’s list again. It is hard trusting someone with my dearest doggies. I want to pout that Margaret decided school was more important.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, February 24, 2010 11:38 am

Everyone asks for these ALL the time, so ….here yah go

Cook up your sweet potatoes (yams are so much easier to say, but we don’t get true yams), and mush them up. Add some oil (I use coconut oil), and about the same amount of rolled oats as you have of yams. I’ll use a cup of yams as an example. So you take your cup of yams, cup of oats, blurp of oil, and about 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ginger, shredded coconut, and mix them all together. You want it to hold together, and be nice and sticky, so add water if you need to. I then use a scoop, and make little mounds, but flatten them with a fork. Bake at 400* for about 15 to 20 minutes. I freeze these, and take them out as needed…they are yummy cold and yummy hot, and they don’t crumble, and don’t get mushy, and travel well!Using peanut butter instead of the oil is yummy. And I bet you could experiment and use different spices…for variety.Enjoy!Colette

I might add, that the yam/Yum cakes are like shake. You can adapt them. Put in nuts, make em crispy, make em cakey. Let me know your variations.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, February 13, 2010 9:20 pm

I turned on the water in the backyard to fill a bucket for the rescue dogs. The handle is down in the bushes. I noticed that there are tiny buds..the bush is shimmering. This afternoon was about 60 degrees with clear crystal blue sky. The mountain was an amazing cross between purple and pink. I took a wee nap and when I woke up, it was late afternoon light. This is the reason I came to NM, that light.I have never seen it anywhere else. I just sat on the bed and wrote a real letter with my real ink and my yellow writing pad. Tomorrow I will put it in an envelope with some stickers on the outside and send it on off to my daughter.

Then I made some spaghetti sauce that was soooo good and had it with brown rice pasta and the most incredible salad full of vegetables. I got a bag of little stubby sweet potatoes at Trader Joe’s and will make one tonight and eat it with the Olympics. Yum, that makes me smile to think about it.

Everything is clean. I have a wonderful housecleaning person. I helped her get refinancing for her house, and we bartered time. Today she came and cleaned the insides of my kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator. This is a very fine trade. Clean house makes for a happy heart.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, February 6, 2010 9:14 pm

Our sturdy little printer was very sick. The paper kept jamming. First diagnostic was that David had purchased generic rather than HP paper. That did not fix the problem. Now it started to eat the paper. And we print a lot. I called some of the local repair places. We would have to bring it in, pay $75 diagnostic fees and then the cost of parts, and no they did not know what the parts might cost.

Then I went over to amazon.com to see what it would cost to replace. They are not longer making this model. A newer model was $350. I could get a refurbished one for $250 but it would mean being without a printer for a number of days. I called our computer tech guy and he said, *try calling Chuck*. I looked up Chuck’s number, his office is just up the street. I called. He said, you can bring it it even though it was 4:15 on Friday. He said he would wait for me.

I found the place.It is an OLD warehouse kinda place, filled

I used to have one

to the ceiling with boxes and an old 1990 blue Bondie Mac sitting on a wobbly table. Chuck is 77, he is think about retiring but not yet. So he played with the printer. *hmmm, he says, I don’t know what is wrong with it.*  Played some more. Paper got caught when the door was closed. Paper not caught when back door was down. He looks and looks, adjusts his glasses, then goes and gets a jug of something, picks up an old rag sitting under the wobbly table with the Bondie on it. Wipes down the pointy things on the back door of the printer. Presses some buttons and the paper goes through without jamming. *Ok, it’s set* he says. And he takes it out to my car. So I say, *so, how much do I owe you?* He says, *Ten dollars.* I kinda choke and say, *Chuck, I am giving you twenty. Go out to dinner.* He says, *oh that is nice* and then told me about the 2 for 1 specials at Applebees.

The printer is fine. I was printing out a google map to take a dog to training class at noon today. She is a little rescue and she did beautifully. I brought her home and placed her with a woman who will take her to class next week. One more convert to clicker training.

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By Kathleen DesMaisons, January 30, 2010 11:38 pm

Well, my conference is continuing and my brain is full. I have no idea what the weather is like outside because the schedule goes from ealy morning till late. This gives me such sympathy to people coming to ranch. We will make some changes based on my experience here…..how to acommodate the brain being fried by information overload.

The conference is sponsorted by The Karen Pryor Clicker Institute. Today Karen did the most brilliant talk about Cesar Milan. I am hoping it was taped. It just knocked my socks off. If it wasn’t, I will review it for you next week. But overall, learning about clicker training is about learning theory. It is fascinating and very, very useful.

And the dogs, the dogs…there are many dogs here and they are all wonderful. I also think it is good for me to learn about things that are in a different world.

One speaker was talking about shock and why the rats would go back for more. I shared about the effect of opioid/BE flooding and people were excited about that addition.