My Weekend Flies By…
There are days that I hate computers… I spent 45 minutes trying to get my stupid fucking Pocket PC device to talk to the work network. We have some pretty decent security for wireless since WEP got cracked a while back. The end result of installing all of the bits is a prompt with my user name and domain. Enter data…hmm….prompt again….enter data…repeat. Fiddle, fiddle…same shit. <sigh>
Of course, at work, it works just fine, even synchs with my work e-mail without a problem. So, basically, it works everywhere but work and that’s after I upgraded the fucker to Pocket PC 2003 just so it could work with the security.
I’ll go find Senor Stearns tomorrow, who has this shit working and see what I can do.
This weekend was relatively busy and I felt uninspired to write. I tried to go to bed early on Friday night and failed. I got up at 5:15 AM in order to meet Monk in Seattle at 6:00 AM to go out to McNeil Island Correctional Center (Aka “The Prison”). An hour and something on the road gets us down there. We get my shiny new badge from security and then wait for the ferry to the island. Eventually, around 8:00 AM, we get through security to the chapel. The guys show up at 8:10 or so and we begin our meeting. For once, we didn’t stay longer than two hours and left around 10:10 (there are scheduled movement periods in prison) after going over the ritual for Beltane this weekend with the guys. They actually had a well put together rite and it seems that they’ve been memorizing their parts so it ought to go well.
This meeting was the last for Monk before being deployed to the Mideast so there was a bit of “fare thee well” going on as well. From now on, it’s just me working with these guys unless I can convince other pagans not to be so afraid of prisons that they don’t run away. Given the potential difficulties and the fact that all of these guys are there for a reason, that can be harder than you think. Strangely enough, the other minority religious groups don’t seem to have as many issues. I wonder what the Buddhists there do…
I got back in Seattle and on the road by 2:00 PM. That’s quite a day and the lack of sleep is always telling at that point. Given the distances involved and the number of hours on the road, I’m not sure what can be done though.
I stopped by the Tibetan shop in Greenwood (about a mile from Monk’s house) on the way out. The proprietor introduced himself to me (we’d only met once or twice before) when I came up with an image of Rahula to buy. Rahula is one of the Dharma Protectors of the line of practice that I work with but I actually don’t know that much about his mythology. Dude has a lot of freakin’ eyes though. The Dharma Protectors are the…dum dum dum…protectors of the teachings (Big shock there, eh?) and definitely have the mojo. Rigdzin, the owner of the place, chatted with me for a few minutes when I mentioned that I’d been in during the three-day Guhyagharba Tantra empowerment last year. He was telling me about the long empowerments he attended when he was young in Tibet when “there wasn’t a lot else going on.” I liked him. A genuinely warm man, which seems to be fairly common with the Tibetans I meet though a lot of American Buddhists could make diamonds for some reason.
I also picked up Namkhai Norbu’s Yantra Yoga video since it was there and I had been meaning to get it. I have the empowerments for it from him through the retreat and transmission last year and it is something I’ve been wanting to study for my practice. The video is necessary for a lot of the basic move as the local yokels don’t seem to have anyone truly good at Yantra Yoga who teaches.
Madeline came over for Saturday night and R and I watched The Cat in the Hat with her. It was more like The Michael Myers Show but I enjoyed it a bit. It made me laugh at least. I won’t watch it again, unlike the Grinch, which I own. Madeline went to bed just after 10:00 PM and the kid didn’t get up until just about 11:00 AM. I was about to go down and see if he had expired in the night when she came upstairs for breakfast. 13 hours?!? Hmm. If she was a teenager….but it is a lot early to be searching her bags yet.
She and R finished painting the tea set from the other week after breakfast and I took her home after a couple of hours. R and I then went out to the Horizon Oasis’ Community Meeting since it was (a) the quarterly meeting for the body and (b) R had promised to take notes. We decided not to go to the Gnostic Mass earlier, needing some time just to chill a bit. Afterwards, we had Thai food and all was good.
My weekend.
