There's the ferry ride <- note, link leads to a 3D picture, you can drag it with your mouse and look around.

(I have not been on a ferry for quite a long time, but I am assured that you must not PAY the ferryman, until he gets you to the other side. Apparently you are not even to fix a price, which seems strange to me.)

Beautiful, limey! Fingers crossed for you guys.

Awesome!

good luck!

Wow, is right! Think of the acoustics in the main room. :thumb:
I guess we'll have to come help you move. :D

Big change! Both are nice houses. In the new place you'll be in a more traditional neighborhood. How do you feel about leaving the Arran community? I bet you won't miss that ferry.

Is there a place on the mainland for your car and Fanny, or is that extra?

Thanks guys!
@UT - you pay the ferryman on the return journey back to what passes for the mainland. It is, in fact, another Island called Seil which is reached from the mainland by the Bridge over the Atlantic (I kid you not: http://youtu.be/mY-WYQ_1NPM)
@Glatt - a strong sense of community on Arran is what I miss, it has eroded quite abruptly and pretty recently. There is more about the community on Easdale here: http://www.easdale.org/easdale/profile.htm
@ fargon - there is a place for the car and Fanny just across the water. In the longer term we will probably look to swapping them for a campervan.


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Now, the most important question: how's the internet connection?

Internet and cellphone connectivity are both good enough. Better than many parts of Arran.
And UT, I like the kitchen the way it is [emoji846]


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It's fair, it's very bright though! :) Kinda contrasty to the natural settings surrounding it; the blue sea, green island, slate hill. Maybe that's why they chose it.

I even like the very unfashionable coloured bathroom suite. Partly because it will have put people off buying as they will have thought they have to change it [emoji1]


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... they'll let us know by Wednesday ...

:D

I woke up this morning after a very odd and somewhat disturbing dream.

Now, first of all, I don't dream much. Or, if I do dream, I almost never remember them. Secondly, as much as I miss my folks, I don't recall having any dreams about them since they passed away. I've certainly never dreamed about my niece.

So here's what happened:

In my dream, I had just crawled into bed for the night. My niece comes into the room, walks over to a chair in which a huge teddy bear is sitting (I have no huge teddy bears) and hugs it, then leaves.

Next, my mother enters and says something to me, but it's all garbled and I don't understand what she's saying. She leaves and then my father enters. Says he's looking for something (don't recall what it was) and I suggest it might be in his computer. He says, "Yes, I have to go to the office to check that." He leaves the room, goes outside, gets in a car and drives away. End of dream.

I woke up this morning with an uneasy feeling about that dream. Called my brother and sis-in-law this evening; they told me that my niece was diagnosed with vulvar cancer, yesterday.

:eek3: :sniff:

:(

Oh, man, I'm so sorry to hear that.

That sux, Fuck cancer.

Thanks, guys. She's young, very fit, and I expect she'll get through this without too much drama. But, still.

Hopefully, she's got her grandma's cancer-fighting genes. In her mid-30s (same age as my niece), my mom beat thyroid cancer. In her 50s, she beat breast cancer. In her 60s, she beat breast cancer again. And throughout her life, she had multiple skin melanomas, all of which she beat. Cancer took several whacks at my mother, but she kicked its ass to the curb every time. She lived to be 91, and cancer isn't what took her. I hope K can do the same.

:fingerx:

My buddy went to the doctors about 6 years ago and he said you have cancer, third stage, nothing I can do, try hospice. So he tried two other doctors and they turned him away also.

His ace in the hole was he has a niece who teaches at Harvard Medical School. She sent him to a doctor doing research in the Philly area. That doctor made him sign eleventeen forms absolving the doctor and practice of any and all liability, then tried several things he’d been working on with varying degrees of success.
They did remove all the lymph nodes from one side of his body last year. He looks like shit but he seems to be hanging in there, going to work most every day.

There will never be “A cure for Cancer” because it’s a blanket term for a bunch of different diseases with different causes/effects. Besides, the guy/gal who says they’ve found a cure for cancer would be immediately lynched by vigilante doctors for drying up the research money putting thousands out of work. Oh, and Jenny McCarthy would say it’s dangerous.

Don’t give up, never give up, there’s always hope and medical progress every day.

Yes. Yes. Yes. ^^^All of that.^^^

I have hope for medical marijuana research, too. Now that it's possible for doctors and researchers to do actual testing and experimentation, I think we're going to find all kinds of beneficial results from the lowly weed, up to and including effective treatments (preventative/palliative/possible cures?) for various types of cancer, pain relief, and psychological issues.

Feds Call For Even More Marijuana Research After Hosting Cannabis Workshop

Glinda, I'm sorry to hear about the unsettling news from your niece. It sounds like she's got a lot of variables on her side, good for her. The dream does sound weird, even to a dedicated humanist like me. Obviously I have no explanations and I've had similar experiences, "Oh hey, cousin who I haven't talked to in decades, I woke last night with your name on my lips!" "Yes, I dreamt of you too!". Straight up weird.

Yeah. I'm a pragmatist and not what anyone would call a spiritual person, but this dream thing is just out there.

Both my mother and her (only sibling) sister had occasional psychic (?) things happen in their lives - premonitions, sudden feelings of an emergency that panned out, and whatnot. I never have . . . until now?

I have to say, if mom and dad are keeping an eye on the family and are able to get some sort of message to me in times of need, I'm heartened and happy. I miss them terribly and I'm comforted by the idea that they're watching over me/us.

Who's to say? Maybe it's all a coincidence, but I find that pretty hard to believe, given the circumstances.

:neutral:

It's interesting to me how many people attribute this sort of phenomenon to dead people intervening, rather than there being some sort of psychic connection between them and the actual living person. Maybe it's less scary to see oneself as an innocent bystander to the phenomenon, rather than an active but unknowing participant. To me, if we're deciding between the two, it makes much more sense for a signal to exist between living brains than a dead soul using decidedly living-person methods--observing events, then communicating a message based on a free will desire for change--to influence a reality they're no longer a part of. Not saying either one is completely impossible, it just seems like one is a much more logical extension than the other. But that's just me.

Thinking is the best way to travel but if you wake up, or just rouse to semi-consciousness, you don't know how/where/why you are there.

Ten-years-ago-me says, our brains are designed to find patterns, but sometimes there are just patterns with no meaning. There was always a probability that a dream about a family member would happen, and then news be delivered about that same family member at about the same time. We just don't take notice of these sorts of coincidences until they happen. We can kind of dismiss the dream.

Today-me says, your value in your parents means that they *are* always "watching down on you" -- as they continue to exist and operate on you in your unconscious mind. Their impact on your life continues, and so they are affecting reality in the present time, even though they are not physically there. Since the metaphorical meaning is real, the dream is real. We dismiss it at our peril.

I get your point, but the truth is, throughout my life my niece and I never spent any time together (except during the 1.5 years when I traveled to SoCal a few days per month to take care of my folks, and even then it was only a few minutes here or there). We've never called or emailed or texted. She's an international flight attendant and my brother and his wife take care of her son when she's on the job - I've spent FAR more time with her son than with her; she and I were never "close," literally or figuratively.

Oh, we get along just fine, but there's no deep bond that might be considered "a psychic connection."

At least, I can't feature it. :confused:

Since she's kin you know, but neither really friend nor foe, she can't play any role in the story your head produces. The timing could be entirely coincidental, you didn't catch what Mom was about, and Dad looking for something in your room that was probably on his computer at work doesn't make much sense.

What I want to know is why you deny having a big teddy bear?
That's nothing to be ashamed of.
Maybe you don't, maybe you just desire a big bear. Rowr.

Yes. People--families, friends, exist as an interconnected web. Everyone has a sphere of connectedness where their personal patterns influence the patterns that comprise the people around them, and vice versa. The pattern convergence is palpable for deeper, closer connections.

When you remove one person's personal pattern from the web of connectedness, everything about them that was reflected in their connections with others remains completely intact, and it never goes away.

How much of what a person "is" is this? In one way of thinking, it's most of what they are.

:p:

Well, I've thought a lot about that.

One of the few things my mom was absolutely serious about in her declining years was that she wanted to be buried with an old teddy bear she bought in an antique store decades earlier. She said it reminded her of one she had when she was a little girl. I was happy to honor that wish, even though the bear was almost too big for the coffin. (If only she'd cared that much about her damned four karat diamond ring . . . we never did find that. :neutral:)

The bear in my dream didn't look anything like the bear I buried her with, but . . .

*cue Twilight Zone theme*

This is where God really is, then; not some "sky daddy" version of a human who commands respect and punishes bad behavior, as with a stick, but... is God, maybe, partly, our incomplete sense of understanding of interconnected humanity and what consciousness has wrought and will bring about in the future?

~ something like that ~

* yeah, nice *

And maybe this God is comprised of the patterns that we let influence us the most. Whereas nature-worship or ancestor-worship would have one made more sense, what would today's God be?

As we accelerate towards Kurzweil's singularity, technology, and it's oversized impact on our lives, is changing on such an ever-shortening scale, that we've hardly had time to determine what the main influences in society are, before they've changed altogether.

And if we live in a world of false symbols, such as 1981's Simulacra and Simulation suggests, maybe this is why "simulation theory" is starting to take on a religious-like quality.

Flint, you and UT are giving me way too much to think about, and I thank you both.

As it turns out, I've always believed there was some sort of fundamental interconnectedness of all things (and here I thought my weird little "religion" was too out there for polite company. Shoulda known better with this bunch!).

I need to think on this some more. Thanks for giving me some leads to pursue. :)

Sorry for veering off into the weird technology stuff.

We're a social, cooperative species--this is how we survive (not claws, teeth, or muscles). We're made to be interconnected. It's who we are.

Y'all sound like a bunch of dirty hippie Buddhists, but I think you've got the neurological basis of it.

The Dali Lama says...

Sure, but like, what if the stress and pain your brother and his wife were feeling (starting the minute they found out) put, for want of a better phrase, bad vibes out that you picked up on? I guess what I'm saying is that the "message," if it were one, didn't accomplish anything by getting to you a day or two sooner than it would have if you'd had to wait for the news without calling to ask about it. It's not like the dream allowed you to intervene and prevent anything. As a passive receptor, however, I'd believe it's possible for us to be tuned in to the combined emotional state of the people we love (or hate, for that matter.)

One of the 20th Century's greatest poets, Neil Peart-- "the drummer" of progressive trio Rush, calls it "Afterimage" ...

"I feel the way you would"

So, I'm scheduled to leave Portland OR for (JFK, and then) the Dominican Republic, leaving late tomorrow night. I just got an email message from Expedia (through which I booked my flight), saying that ALL my flights - going and returning - had been cancelled. Crap weather is currently forecasted for NY and cancellations over the next few days wouldn't be surprising, but . . . .

I called Jet Blue and they said everything is still on schedule, no cancellations either direction as yet, and no impossible weather issues are anticipated.

Fuckin' Expedia. I should've known better. :censored: It won't kill me to leave a day later if that's necessary, but goddammit, I have a LONNGGG overdue vacation to start and I don't need this bullshit!!!

:flipbird: :angry: :banghead:

Bummer, just tell me when I have to be at JFK. ;)

Flight has repair issues and due to delay they need to find a new pilot. No idea if they'll find one. WTF. Waiting for a ride back home. Next flight out on Wed. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Crap. Sorry

I think it's evil entities colluding to keep us apart. :(

At least she ain't stuck on the tarmac in Newfoundland...

Yeah, I had visions of that, too. :rolleyes:

We'll try it again Wednesday night. Until then, I do believe I shall fire up a big ol' bowl o' green and consider that the universe possibly knows better than I do.

You know, I do have a four-hour layover at JFK on the way home . . . assuming the world doesn't implode before then. :rolleyes:

Just checked on the flight I was supposed to be on last night. It is, at this very minute, finally boarding.

Guess I made the right call to pull the plug last night. Hopefully, there won't be any issues like this come Wednesday night. :)

Good Luck!

Geez, you could have stayed here until Wednesday and saved all that traveling. :cool:

Just got to the airport. Flight is delayed. Great.

You must have pissed off the travel gods.

No shite! Still sitting here waiting to board.

Just look 'em in the eye and say, "Do you know who I am? I have friends in high places.
Then show 'em this picture, they'll be quaking in their boots.

HAA!

Unfortunately, ol' Ronnie's got a bit of an altitude problem, these days. :D

So, I'm here. It's glorious. Wakin' and bakin' to the Stones. Grocery shopping soon, then the beach.

https://i.imgur.com/2QmkrtH.jpg

Hooray! http://cellar.org/2014/willy_nilly.gif

Yay Glinda!!!

You made it!

Grocery shopping whilst high...What could go wrong?:corn:

I'm glad ya got there:), I just hope ya don't have trouble getting home.