escape from despair is always legitimate.

I am horrified at the death and cruelty one man delivered in Oslo, Norway. If you can't persuade with logic and reason people to understand and adopt your political views then open fire.

We are on very limited means right now, until the 29th of July. I blame myself of course, having initiated a refinance that required a cashier's cheque of the amount equal to three weeks' living expenses. I liquidated two silver coins and did some creative rearrangement of funds, shopped at a very low-cost grocery for vegetables, and started pulling food from our garden. We're also using two-for-one coupons and searching for money in the house. Again, this is only for another week, but it's $20/day. It'd be a lot worse if we didn't have a full freezer, and had to take the car out everyday.

We'll see how far $27 takes me. I imagine there'll be many lentil and bean, soba and udon dishes this week. On the plus side, we won't have a mortgage payment until September 1 at the earliest, and an escrow refund cheque by September 15.

I've read The Pope's War by Matthew Fox, and recognized several names on the "Wall" appendix, theologians, clerics and women religious who have been silenced or deemed dissident. Contrarian/perverse that I am, I am interested to read the works of the dissenters. All I need is a stamp and the will to walk to the post office to send a postcard to an eighty-three-year-old professor emeritus telling him how lately I came across his writings: he is one of the dissidents. I am always a dissident of counter-reformation and corrupt hierarchy. How out and proud I am about being a dissident, well, obviously not much. I can't say that the current antics of the Vatican, nor learning that while Jesus was interested only in reforming the spirituality and rules of his Jewish faith and appointed twelve MARRIED JEWISH MEN, to represent the twelve tribes of Israel, the Catholic Church decided two of those three qualifications had to go a thousand years after Jesus abandoned preaching exclusively to Judea and started traveling and introducing Gentiles to the Word of God. But not all three of them. As the original Gospels get translated and reinterpreted to suit church powers, a New Testament reader can't be at all certain what was originally meant. And if the qualifications for preachers and Eucharistic ministers changed, who's to say that no books now apocrypha were included in earlier versions of the New Testament?

Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear by Srinivasan S. Pillay

The Tao of Abundance: Eight Ancient Principles for Living Abundantly in the 21st Century (Compass) by Laurence G. Boldt

I am reading Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut. Fascinating. Vonnegut and Murakami are almost always out of the libraries I frequent.

Five minutes later edit OH YEAH I am now on Google+.

Bean There, Done the Crossword

I must exercise my comedy/writing skills online more.
Firstly, I would do my small part to help people know proper spelling and usage of English words.
Secondly, some people get paid for writing.

Hubby and I visited Bean City Espresso, a very small place with seating for six people for the second consecutive day. Yesterday I started to do a puzzle in a sudoku book, waving my pen across the grid as if to conjure the answers to appear. The affable owner/barista appeared to be impressed. My eyes fell to the New York Times Thursday crossword that he had started: "well, you attempted this so you must like puzzles."

He said: "You can carry on with the crossword if you like. What I'd love to do is leave a crossword out for people to do when they come in and out, we could all solve it together." We agreed this was a good idea and started on the Thursday puzzle, with help from the husband. I can solve the Thursday puzzle with help from a smart person in about twenty minutes.

So we come in today, because he serves great Cafe Viennas, and has organic this and stevia that, and good reading/puzzling material, and he says "oh wait! I don't have the paper yet!" and he runs out of the shop to grab a local newspaper. We are left to chat with a friendly customer reading a JavaScript technical manual. I am super-impressed that he would think to buy the newspaper: I figure he does this on a daily basis, but to consider that we might want to do the crossword is excellent. Get this: there are people who like to watch people solve crosswords. I'm not very good at crosswords myself. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "I use the Internet to solve the TV Guide puzzles" and 10 is Tyler Hinman or Ellen Ripstein, I am a 5: the one who frequently needs help on Thursday -> Saturday puzzles. Solving a Friday or Saturday puzzle by myself is a triumph.

Friday took us an hour to do, even with some straightforward nine-letter entries: FREETIBET, AIRCANADA, THEGRUDGE, ERIECANAL. The thing with the crosswords is that my best bets are: getting a bunch of shortish pop culture clues, and scoring big with at least one nine-letter to fifteen-letter entry across the grid. I start out slowly, gulp some liquid splendour, and then the synapses fire and the letters get filled in.

We had some misdirection and wrong answers -- shame on me, for we were using a pen, but ultimately we filled in the grid with at least answers that connected and made sense to us.

Tomorrow he's going to get the Saturday puzzle. I hope he's open early enough for me or my husband.