Greetings, friends. Between a boisterous puppy and numerous sewing projects, I didn't realize it had been so long since I'd written. Since Luna is at the kennel till tomorrow, I have an uninterrupted opportunity to write - that is, unless the cats decide to get into some mischief, which is always a distinct possibility.

 Memorial Day. Day of cookouts and sales, no mail, and no work for many of us. Last year I had the day off because I was unemployed; this year I have the day off because I have a day off! I am gainfully employed in a position that suits me, and that is certainly cause for celebration. Memorial Day, however, is much more than that.

 I think of my 19th century cousin, John B. Feather, who died at Andersonville Prison in 1864. According to the records, he was captured as a straggler after the Battle of Cloyd's Mountain in May of 1864. He died in September of that year, the cause listed as "chronic diarrhea." He was 18 years old, maybe 19. John Feather was a farmer boy from West Virginia. He spent four months in one of the most notorious prisons in US history and died of dehydration.

Four months. Think about that for a minute. Four months with little food, no medicine, and dirty water. FOUR MONTHS. At his age, he should have been off chasing pretty girls and planning for his future, not spending FOUR MONTHS in a military prison, only to die of what is now an easily treatable affliction.

FOUR MONTHS. And he wasn't the only one. More Civil War soldiers died from disease than combat.

I also think of my dad, who earned a Purple Heart in the Korean War. Fast forward to the 21st century, and I think of my step-nephew Frankie, who lost a leg to an IED in Afghanistan on his first tour of duty with the Marines. He survived and is now doing quite well. For the rest of his life, though, he'll have a constant reminder of what he gave up for his country.

Memorial Day isn't just about the soldiers and their sacrifices, though. It's also about their families and the people they left behind. When you raise a glass today, remember all of them.

Till next time ---

Midnight in Paris.

See this movie. No, really. See it. Heck, just go on and buy yourself a copy.

I had heard a little buzz about it, but didn't give it much thought since I'm not a huge fan of Woody Allen (too much whiny angst, as Mister says) or Owen Wilson (plays the same character in every movie). Then my big brother recommended it to me. Big Brother has impeccable taste and has never let me down, except for that Christmas when I was 6 years old and he gave me this horrible troll-like stuffed animal-thing, but that's a whole 'nother story. Anyhow, the first time I went to go put it in my Netflix queue, it wasn't available, so I promptly forgot about it. Something triggered my memory a few weeks ago, and I ordered the movie.

Seriously, this is one of the most adorable things I've seen in a long time, in spite of Woody Allen and Owen Wilson. It just so happens that Wilson's natural goofiness is perfect in his role as Gil Pender, a burned-out screenwriter/hopeful novelist who longs to be in 1920s Paris. It's evident from the start that his relationship with his fiancee Inez, played by Rachel McAdams, is ill-fated when she makes faces about walking in Paris in the rain. She has no imagination and her parents are even worse.

Gil and Inez are in Paris for some pre-wedding shopping and a visit with her parents, who are there on a business trip. And then there's the pedantic Paul, a friend of Inez's who is an expert on everydamnthing and is happy to tell everydamnone. (I couldn't decide who was worse: Inez, her parents, or Paul.) It's Paul who makes the comment that people who long for the past are just living in a fantasy world of false romantic notions because they can't handle the present. (More on that later.)

Understandably, Gil would prefer to spend some time alone in his beloved Paris than hang around with these jokers, so that's what he does. While he's sitting on a sidewalk bench at midnight, an antique car pulls up, and the partygoers inside tell him to get in the car - and they promptly drive off into the 1920s.

Gil meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and my personal favorite, Salvador Dali, played by Adrien Brody. He also meets a beatiful French woman, Adriana, with whom he promptly falls in love. Adriana wants to go back to the France of the 1890s.

I don't have to tell you that chaos ensues, in 1920 and 2011. I won't spoil the conclusion, but I will point out that in each of these time periods, someone wants to go Somewhere Else. The artists of La Belle Epoque want to go back to the Renaissance. Is it because they can't handle the present, as Pedantic Paul says early in the movie, or is it simply because they feel a connection to the past?

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I don't think I have any false romantic notions about life before running water, sanitation, and migraine meds that work. I love to study history because I want to know what the people who came before me did, and to keep some of those skills alive. I love the 21st century, mostly, but I think it's prudent to know how to get along if the power goes out. It's great being able to use all the modern technology and whatnot, but we still need to know what to do when those things aren't available. I mean, I don't know about you, but I intend to survive the impending Zombie Apocalypse.

Besides that, we are irrevocably connected to our ancestors. That's a fact. And it's darn near impossible to move ahead without first considering what came before. I know you've all heard the one about "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

History is part of the fabric of the future, after all.

Till next time ---- get some popcorn and have a movie night.

Why, yes, I do have a little Irish in the family tree.

I just love an election year, don't you? It really brings out the best in people, doesn't it? And I can predict exactly what's going to happen. Thing 1 will win, then the people who followed Thing 2 will cry foul and there will be a great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from the losing side. It really doesn't matter who Thing 1 and Thing 2 are - this has happened in every election since I've been voting, and even more so since the Great Hanging Chad Debacle of 2000. Fasten your seatbelts, because we've got about six more months of this folderol. But of course, that's not what I came to talk to you about. Being that St. Patrick's Day is two days away, I wanted to talk about my g-g-g-g-g-grandfather, or at least what little I know of him.

Like a lot of historical reenactors, I wanted to research my family history to see if anyone fought in any interesting wars. In the beginning, I was hoping to find a Confederate soldier or two and maybe some Irish ancestry, even though I knew a good bit of my forbears were German. I did most of this research back when Ancestry.com was still free for basic access - that should tell you how long ago it was. I also had a copy of a huge tome on my father's side of the family, which had been written in the 1980s by a distant cousin. I had a glimmer of hope when I found out that my g-g-g-g-g-grandfather Jacob Vatter (later Feather) married a woman named Mary Connoly. Connoly's an Irish name, right? Well. . . if you've ever done any genealogical research, you've probably found the farther back you go, the less information there is about your female ancestors. All we know is that she was born in 1769 in Pennsylvania, and that she married Jacob, a Rev War vet, around 1790. To this day I have yet to find any information on her parents.

So. Moving on to my mother's side of the family, I discovered they were mostly Dutch, coming to America in the 1600s: first to New Jersey, then New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and finally to Kentucky 300 years later. One of my g-g-g-g-g-grandfathers on that branch, Jacob Van Meter, was a founding father of Elizabethtown, KY, and has a DAR chapter named after him. It's this side of the family tree project that got really fun, because I had to do my own research, and you all know that my geek love of research knows no bounds. And it was my great-grandmother who led me to Daniel McMillin, born in Ulster in 1757.

I haven't been able to find much specific information about Daniel, except that he came to America at an "early age," and fought in a Maryland unit during the Revolutionary War. He was also a minister of the gospel: I'm presuming he was a Protestant, although I could be mistaken. I haven't found anything yet that says one way or the other. For his service in the war, he was awarded a land grant in Pennsylvania, which he later sold. He died in 1838 in Indiana.

Daniel married Eleanor "Nellie" Keenan of Cumberland County, KY. They had one child, Patrick Keenan McMillin. After Nellie died, the good Reverend married a second time and had several more children, but Patrick is my g-g-g-g-grandfather. As I expected, there's not much information out there about Eleanor, except that her father was a man named Patrick Keenan. Hey! Another Irish name! As of yet, I haven't found any more information about Patrick Sr., but I'll keep looking. I did discover that Patrick Keenan McMillin was a War of 1812 veteran, but again, no specific details yet.

And that Confederate ancestor? I found one, and only one. Patrick McMillin's nephew, John D. McMillin, fought in the CSA in a Missouri regiment. My other Civil War ancestors wore blue suits, seeing as how they were from West Virginia and all.  (One of them, John B. Feather, died at Andersonville prison at the age of 19.)

So, this St. Patrick's Day, I'll be raising a glass to the McMillins, Keenans, and Connolys. (It won't be green beer, however, because green beer is an abomination unto man.) Most of all, I hope they'll like the music, because I have a feeling they'll be listening.

Till next time - NO GREEN BEER.

It's the small successes.

I was going to talk about music today, but that will have to wait till next time, because this is SO much more important.

I made rice. Lovely, fluffy, just-right quick-cooking organic brown basmati rice from Trader Joe's. This is a cause for celebration. Why? I'm glad you asked.

I consider myself a decent cook, all things considered. I come by it honestly as my parents and both my grandmas were/are good cooks. My brother also is pretty handy in the kitchen. I'm pretty good at taking random ingredients and putting them together to create something edible, tasty, and sometimes even healthy. But rice? Rice has always eluded me. Me cooking rice is like Charlie Brown kicking the football. It never quite works out.

Yes, I follow the directions on the package. Yes, I let the lid stay on the pot. I do everything I'm supposed to do and I still get substandard rice, and yet, I keep trying, I guess because I am not going to be outdone by a tiny inanimate grain. I am bigger than rice.

A few years back, my mom got me one of those automatic rice cookers, and I still managed to screw up the rice. Even following the directions exactly, the bottom of the rice got all hard and crunchy, and I'm not talking about the good kind of hard & crunchy rice that is a delicacy in some Mediterranean/Middle Eastern cooking.  This was icky tough wet cardboard hard & crunchy rice. I e-mailed Oster customer service about this issue, and was told that "that's a common problem with rice machines." Oh, okay. That makes it so much better, I suppose. Whatever. (Anybody want a rice cooker?)

I started substituting couscous as a side dish. It's hard to screw up couscous. This is fine for most of the meals I make at home, but sometimes, you just gotta have rice. On my last trip to Trader Joe's, the bag of organic brown quick-cooking basmati rice called to me seductively from the shelf. "Try meeeeeeeee," it wailed. "Take me hoooooome." So with a deep breath and plenty of doubts, I put the rice in my cart. I figured I have wasted more than $3 on less noble pursuits.

All week I've been wanting to make channa masala for dinner to go with the garlic naan from Trader Joe's, and channa masala really calls for rice. With much trepidation, I took the bag from the cabinet and read the directions. "Ready in 15 minutes," the bag said. (Brown rice usually takes about an hour to cook, so 15 minutes is pretty ambitious.) Put rice and water in a saucepan, let it boil, turn it down, put the top on, blahblahblahblah. I know that drill. It's the same drill I follow every time and I still get crappy rice. But I endeavored to persevere, so I tried once again.

When the clock read 5:12, I took the lid off the pot, expecting to see either water still in the pan or a mass of undercooked chewy rice, but it looked perfect. Yeah, right, I thought. It's probably all chewy. I took a bite. And then the angels sang.

I had perfect rice! Not mushy, not dry and chewy, but PERFECT RICE! And it actually tasted good! Quick-cooking rice sometimes doesn't have much oomph, but this was great. I realize this is probably just a fluke - the rice gods are taunting me and next time will be back to the old status rice quo. But in the meantime?

Hell yeah, I MADE RICE.

Till next time - celebrate the small victories.

Welcome to the Year of the Dragon.

Yeah, I know. I'm late. Ah well. Stuff happens.

Luna, aka Jaws, has continued to thrive, although just as she was done with parvo, she came down with giardia. Whee. Giardia is this little protozoal parasite that lives just about everywhere, and lots of people and animals carry it without ever getting infected. This is most likely what makes you sick when you drink water that hasn't been properly purified, and dogs usually get it from drinking out of puddles & whatnot. But that's not what I came to talk about.

I came to talk about mental health. Y'all can sing along when it comes around again on the guitar.

Over the last few months, a couple of my favorite bloggers have shared their struggles with depression: Hyperbole and a Half (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html) and The Bloggess (http://thebloggess.com/2012/01/the-fight-goes-on/). These two ladies talk about their experiences with honesty and humor. I can especially relate to Hyperbole's cartoon self curled up into a little ball behind the couch, because I have been that little ball behind the couch.

I bring this up because I think it needs bringing up. About 25% of the population will experience clinical depression at some point. And in the world we live in right now, who could possibly be surprised at that? Everything seems to move faster than our feeble mortal minds can keep up with, not to mention the deplorable state of the economy, which has caused people to lose their jobs, homes, and self-respect. Can you blame anyone for being depressed? Most people won't get help, because of stigma, pride, finances, or denial, among other reasons.

Now, you have to understand, there's a difference between clinical depression and having a bad day. Depression is having a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day 24/7 for at least two weeks running. Mine went on for about a solid year.

Yes. I spent a year in one terrible, horrible, no good very bad day, where I ran off to the bathroom at work so I could go cry - for no good reason, except that I just felt like it. This was the nadir of many years of denial. (The irony is that at the time, I worked for a mental health organization.)

Yes again. I did say YEARS. When I finally got help and came out the other side, I was like, what the hell took me so long? And that's one of the bizarre things about depression: you don't know how sick you really were till you get better. It's cruel, for sure, but that's how it is. While depression is a temporary situation for most people, for others (like me) it's chronic, and the best we can do is manage it.

It's been over 10 years now. I should have gotten help 10 years before that. It was one of the best things I ever did. I have the tools now to recognize when things aren't right and the knowledge to fix them, or at least take care of myself till it passes. So I guess what I'm saying to you is, if you're having a perpetual 24/7 Bad Day, don't ignore it. Don't wait to get help. DON'T SUFFER. Visit the Mental Health America website at www.nmha.org and look for the affiliate office nearest you. Call them. They can put you in touch with the resources you need, so don't assume that because you're broke and/or have no insurance, you can't get help. Chances are, you can, and you'll be glad you did.

Till next time, take care of yourself. And Happy New Year.

Fast Away the Old Year Passes.

Hail the new year, lads and lasses.

This is the usual time when we all sit around scratching our heads and asking, "Where has the time gone?" and as always, getting no real answer. Time comes and goes of its own accord, no matter how we set the clocks, but that, as we say in the South, is a whole nother story.

So. 2011. I lost several friends to cancer, including my dog. I lost my job, making me unemployed for the first time ever in my adult life. Presidential campaigning is going on and people are kvetching about the same things they kvetch about every election: jobs, the economy, civil rights, etc. You'd think by now we'd have figured out how to elect people who could solve some of these problems, but I digress.

All the fuss over Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas has worn me slap out. Really, people? I'm sure you have something better to do with your time than fuss about how someone wants to wish you well. It's a courtesy that we wish each other well at all; why complain about it? Smile and say Thank You and get on with it. I've said before, if it's important to you to keep Christ in Christmas, then do something Christ would have done instead of getting your knickers in a twist about greetings. That cashier at the MegaLoMart who wished you Season's Greetings may be working three jobs because her husband got laid off and hers is the only income they have to provide even a tiny bit of Christmas joy to their kids. You never know what someone's story is, so why not keep Christ in Christmas by showing a little compassion to people? It neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg. And to go one step further, as Ebenezer Scrooge once said, why not keep Christmas in your heart all year long? Why wait till December to be nice to folks? Compassion and generosity know no season, because there is always someone in need somewhere, even if all they need is a friendly smile and a sincere "Thank you."

That's enough of that, so let's change the subject to PUPPIES! As you know, Mister and I were heartbroken when our pal Sampson died suddenly in October. It was the first time in 20 years we didn't have a dog in our house. I hated it. I could have gone out the next week and brought home a puppy, but Mister wasn't quite ready, and fall really is our busiest time of the year, so we waited. On December 10, the day of a full moon and a lunar eclipse, we brought a puppy home from Metro Animal Control and named her Luna. I was so happy I started crying right there in the Animal Control lobby, and the front desk lady asked, "Are y'all okay?" Yes ma'am, we are absolutely, unequivocally fine. Do not be alarmed.

One week later, Luna started vomiting pretty badly. I took her to the vet the next morning, and to my great horror and disappointment, she tested positive for parvo, in spite of already having two rounds of vaccine. Turns out, young pups aren't really immune until they've had the whole series of vaccines and given their little pup bodies time to build up antibodies to the virus. I was devastated. I thought, surely we did not bring this little sassy puppy home with us just so she could die from a horrible virus.

Mister and I were on pins and needles for a week while Luna was at the vet, getting IV fluids and lots of attention. I have to give some big props to the staff at PetMed in Antioch, where we've taken all our pets for the last 20 years. They really stepped up to the plate and took great care of Luna. She came home just a couple days before Christmas and while she's still recovering, she's eating well and acting like a normal puppy - zooming all around the yard, trying to put everything in her mouth, then taking a huge nap. The cats still aren't sure what to think, but they seem to be coming around.

I am ready to put 2011 in the rearview mirror and drive on to 2012. I wish all of you happiness and prosperity in the new year, and I'll leave you with this little rhyme I've always found most inspirational:

May you always have a reason to dance,
And never find frogs in your underpants.

Till next time ---

Unbroken Threads.

I had planned to come on here tonight and talk about memento mori and my love of skulls, seeing as how we just had Halloween and El Dia de los Muertos, but that's going to have to wait, because I had A Moment on the way home from work tonight.

Maybe it's those premenopausal hormones, but as I was driving home from work just at dusk, I looked up for a moment and the moon took my breath away. It made me gasp aloud. It was so huge and bright and creamy there in the almost-night sky, it took me by surprise as if I had never seen it before. Listening to Richard Thompson on the iPod, singing one of the myriad "cruel mother" ballads of yore, I thought, here I am listening to a 400-year-old song, looking at the same moon those people looked at 400 years ago. And it was like I was hearing the song and seeing the moon for the first time ever.

It's not the first time I've had that thought, but tonight for some reason it seemed especially poignant. Maybe it was the hormones, maybe it was sweet sadness of the murder ballad; I don't know. For a moment, I was aware of being part of a much greater whole - part of the unbroken thread of history. Of course, all of us are part of that thread, but it's something most of us don't contemplate on a daily basis, if at all. We're usually too busy to notice what's been there all along.

Several years back, I was confined to the sofa with a case of bursitis in my knee, thanks to an overzealous attempt at learning Irish step dancing. Since we've never had cable tee-vee, we were tuned in to PBS for some intellectual enlightenment. The show was NOVA, and the episode was about 3000-year-old Caucasian mummies that had been unearthed in the Chinese desert. Who were they? Where had they come from? Why did they settle in China? Excavations revealed woven fabrics that looked suspiciously like woolen plaid, along with some stone spindle whorls. (See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2502chinamum.html to read a transcript of the episode.)

When I saw those 3000-year-old spindle whorls, I nearly lept off the couch, bursitis be damned. At that moment, I felt myself connected to those European mummies in the Chinese desert, because I also use a drop spindle, 3000 years later. I don't remember if I cried, but I do remember getting really choked up. This is a hard thing to explain to people who aren't into history, but it's sort of like the Beatles: "I am, he is, you are, he is, you are me and we are all together." For a moment, I was one of those desert immigrants.

And tonight, looking at the moon and listening to "Bonnie St. Johnstone," I found myself thinking how I could make that centuries-old song my own, spinning off Richard Thompson's version, which was spun off from other versions, and so on and so on. It's the folk process at work, and it's still alive and well. I know many of us bemoan the idea that the old ways are vanishing, but maybe that's not necessarily true. The old ways are still there; we just use them differently in our ever-changing world, adapting as we must, often flying by the seat of our pants. And why not? That's the best way to see what you might not otherwise have seen.

Till next time --- keep spinning that thread.