What kind of revolution for this 2000 sign?

Happy New 2009! It's ice where I am. Where Heather and I are.

We happen to be cozy in a tiny little home in Provo, Utah, of all places on the planet! I haven't been to Utah in some time, and it's completely different-looking with all this whiteness. It's like we are in Alaska, and I kind of like that. It's industrial looking and wild looking, and I absolutely love those feelings. We are here with my brother Matt and his beauteous amazing wife Amy, and their 3 adorable children, Jarom, Bella, and Orion (O-ey) for those of you who don't know my family so well (just in case this blog ever makes the big time or something? what the heck am I talking about.) Most of you, clearly, if you know me, you know my family. My wild and wonderful Beatty family.
Anyways, Matt and Amy are so inspiring to be around because they can take an ordinary day and make it jam-packed with at least 10 great little adventures. In this one day, January 5th, I have had so many of them! I guess it's the 6th now, as it is quite late, but for me it's still the same long day. .... So earlier tonight, even in the middle of a practical whiteout, we all decided to go roller skating, after a bunch of other fun little adventures and errands and such. It was so much fun to put on the skates and be rollin' with the tiny ones. It was family night, which meant all 7 of us got in for ten bucks! Heather bought our admission because she had fancied rollerskating at a rink for a couple days and hoped we would do it. I have so many more pictures....but that blog will be for the writings I make when I get home. We skated round and round, completely bailed a few times, won a game as a family with Oey as the center skater, and played ski ball to boot. We even won about 130 tickets at the game arcade so the kids got to pick out lots o prizes afterwards! Amy played this one game "Let's Make A Deal" and did fantastic at it! Too bad it wasn't a casino, she would have won like 5,000 dollars or something. But just as exciting in the land of families, she won 70 tickets all at once which is kind of like unheard of! I love being around this family because it helps me to realize just how lazy my internet-obsessed self is while at home. I need to get in the practice of GETTING OFF MY BUM! Because if this little family can make adventure happen, well then so can I! Even if it's just in the form of going to get an ice cream, or go to the library, or to go take a walk in the leaves or snow, or practice music for 2 hours, or write a blog, or WHATEVER...I just must learn to spend my time more wisely. Amy says having kids MAKES you spend your time much much more wisely, because you have so precious little of it free! Perhaps having a lil baby will one day help me out. But I am not sure quite WHEN I will make the leap into WANTING to get pregnant and have a fam. It's gonna happen. I might just be 35 before it does! Until then, at least I can hope I LOOK 26 and not my grand old age of THIRTY THREE. Yikesers. ANd besides, for now, these are the kinds of CRAZILY immature things swimming through my grand old mind:

Facebook is a really weird new thing. Through it I have gotten in touch with so many people that I never would have seen again. It's bizarre. I remember growing up thinking how our parents must be so sad to not see their friends from high school ever, or even KNOW WHERE THEY LIVED anymore. Our generations are so lucky to be a part of the birth of the internet...to communicate with each other for entire lifetimes, to have our fingers on the pulse of each other's adventures and trials and errors and magicalnesses. To wonder how random it is the people we even know in the first place, or how we may have crossed paths the very first time and why. Just being in school is the answer to that question for most people. And I suppose that's true. But I went to 8 different schools growing up so I met alot of people on the move! The longest time I spent at a school was my run at El Dorado High School, and I feel lucky for that- for being in the scariest of my adolescent glow with the same people for 4 years. But before that it was kindergarten and 1st at Conway Elementary in Escondido, 2nd, 3rd and half of 4th at North Broadway Elementary in Escondido, 4th and half of 5th at Arlington Elementary in Citrus Heights, 5th at Citrus Heights School, 6th at Carriage School, Sylvan Junior High for 2 weeks of 7th, then Churchill Junior High, and then El Dorado High School. Needless to say, I don't remember or know alot of people that I knew when I was 5.

Sometimes I think I have a real problem remembering faces. I kind of have these ideas that we all have bar-graphed-out allotments of amounts of certain things we can handle in this life....and then when your bar graph amount maxes out....well your just kind of screwed then. Like you can only drink so much before you become and actual alcoholic or something. And after you get to that point it only takes one sip of a drink...and you just start being alcoholic. Because you used up your freebie get out of karma free cards or something. Not all things are measured in this way (as far as MY own theory goes), it's different for everyone. Some people can drink tons their whole lifetimes and they never max out or become alcoholics. Some people can travel to 6 countries before they are maxed out on traveling and others can travel their whole lives without ever losing that sparkle of sheer appreciation for differences in people and lands.....For me, I think I had a limited amount of faces I could take in before I just got maxed out on face-memory. It's a real problem, and I am the last person on earth that is rude or stuck up, but I KNOW sometimes that I have known someone (even quite well) and then two years later I have no idea how I know them. Or I meet someone like NINE times and I tell them "no, I don't think we have ever met" and then they say (pretty annoyedly) "ummm....yes we have, I've met you like NINE times." (this has happened) and it's totally lame and I feel like I have Alzheimer's or something. But it's a completely different story with going places. I can drive into a town for the very first time and two years later I will remember how all the streets go and where the bakery is and where to find the comic book shop and where the subways meet up. Help!

Anyways, what a rant! It's just that this happens more and more and only WORSENS as I travel more and more, play shows, go on adventures, and meet more and MORE PEOPLE! The worse thing ever is when I know THAT I KNOW SOMEONE, I recognize them....sitting at my restaurant, or walking toward me down the street, and not only that I KNOW THAT I USED TO REALLY HANG OUT WITH THEM! and yet I can't place how I know them or what we did together or anything. What the h??????? My bar graph for new faces....all MAXED out. Maybe God is trying to tell me something? Like....stop traveling and meeting new people and stop playing shows and just shut up and have your own family already???!!!

Who knows.

I just don't know what kind of girl I am.
I know I am a country girl, and I want to be a stylish girl, but for all I know I am completely 100 percent dork-out-of-it and no hipness whatsoever.
I feel to be the gyspy type, a traveler of dashing new ideas and romance and modern things, but I also feel like an old homebody grandma, tired for a cup of tea, holding my cats on my bed, never wanting to leave the WARMthhhh..
I feel like I am lucky in love, that my life is rich in every beautiful way, but perhaps I am just a poor old fool, destined for poverty forever and a life of hearth and beat-up cars.
I thought I was a musician, writing songs of hope and true love to cut the edges of the world back with fierceness and some semblance of courage....but perhaps I am just a failed teenager, a dreamer of nothingness, an insecure mess of grasping-at-straws and fears of being boring.
I imagined I'd have a family of my own by now, but perhaps I am just a selfish bastard, frittering away my giving heart on dancing and parties and other youthful whims of futile.
I know I could have done anything and I believe I could have succeeded, the choices lay like littered paths around me- and I feel I have chosen the best one for me, but I don't know what that path is when looking at it, or what others see especially. It kind of looks like nothing.

I can't say I am a lawyer or a mother, a politician or a graduate, a famous singer or a philosopher of great regard. I can't say I can fly to Hawaii tomorrow, or go to Japan, or swim in the Mediterranean, for I barely have a dime to my name.

This is not depression or regret, confusion or distress.....this only me wondering, what am I?

I think more than I know what I am, I know what I WOULD LIKE TO STILL BECOME.
Some main ones..........
A promoter of true love, by ways that are true to my own happiness because I think you cannot promote true love if you don't love your own life with straight VIGOR.
An activist for children and world poverty.
A singer of great braveness.
A mother of childlike attributes and holy nurturing.
A traveler so that I can converse with wisdom with anyone in the world.
An absolutely good friend, in the true-est of ways.

I must sleep now.
Thanks to any dear lover who's been readin'

Your GOOD FRIEND,
adie

A reposted poem from Fall 2005

Leaves quiver hold to olden light.
Morning fades from July's drastic dry to smooth cold shimmer.
Sunshine falls shy and cool.
Papers scattered through the office wood.
Voices on a weathered radio, claim your donation to manifest
public real news.
The world overrides its claws on suits and ties and $7,000 dollar shoes
For hurricane nervous breakdowns into the patient heart of awareness.
The same global page awaiting its new viewers.
Turn in your fat crusty balcony of remote controls and voiceover microwaves.
Throw them to the sea of junk they belong in.

I want more family and feet and hands to feel.
I want to grasp starlight with my eyes and to never
forget
twenty and the beginning of every new life.
I want cold to shoot into my lungs and create dance of joy.
I am muksha now I am red and gold and eskimo!
I am fire water ether air earth.
I am biomolecular receptors of nuero firings!

I want to sing from my throat cells and my heart's
own beauty strings.
A song that befalls every curtain of night every window of death
and the moment without fear.
One moment.
The only moment.
The only bridge across to an absolute.
Absolute that defeats itself as being its own arch nemesis.

And all of its thrift stores eternal.
violins, sands, clocks, fingernails, housepaint, billboards, gasoline
incense, coffee table books, records, turbans, frames, rainbows, harpsichords
forests, freeways, ferns, magazines, praying mantis, lollypops, silver, lipsticks
bricks, naan, spider, moss, garbage sack, snake, tv tray, gazebo, coconut, cigarette
hammocks, wrought iron, dolls, signpost, welcome mat
antique, video tape, earrings, airplane, laptop
peas, carrots, coins, plastic wrap, ac adaptors, bric-a-brac, bric-a-brac, bric-a-brac,
littered. used. over. ended. life junk. life junk. time.
I need need need
I am.
I am.
TIMELESS.
Without time.

We have smiles to pass around and kiss.
We have tongues that want grain and water.
We have new countries to sustain.
Their granted needs save my heart such pain of my own.
Childrens gleaming teeth.
Sun skimming hair.
Dancing ocean sands.
Flying feathers birds.
Call, fly, ocean shell.
SSsssssssss desert wind whip.
Dry, wet, yes, no, no, no
Yes.

Pre-2009 Quake Possibility

With a few cues from people of the likes of Jim Berkland, Geologist (RG 107, CEG 58) (Link him here) and George Ure ( Link Here ) and via the publicity of my new fave nighttime listening program Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and sometimes Ian Punnit Coast To Coast Link , I am hearing there may be a major earthquake in the next week or so. And possibly even two earthquakes. Earthquakes are more likely to happen during the time around a full moon.

Just putting that out there. Keep your loved ones close at hand and say your blessings for the ones in the danger zones.

A little snow would make it all perfect!

Well, I decided to seize the moment and write a blog about our holiday activities here off the Highway 49 at our new little ramshackle trailerhome of goodness and cheer. This week we have put up Christmas lights, made mulled wine, made wreaths, gone through old childhood ornaments with Mom, listened to much Christmas music from the 40's as well as a little George Noory and Coast to Coast, and pretty much cheered our little hearts out for the holidays. I am really going all for it this year.
It seems that even though I can feel that the economy is down and out as we all have very little money, and I will probably have hardly any fundage to go towards the actual gift-giving day (homemade is from the heart!), the Spirit of Christmas is even more in the air when you can feel that people are already focusing more on each passing moment of love and togetherness and excitement than on the catalogs and department store ads and Target aisles this year. Honestly, I think the contraction of over-consumerism in our country can only restore the true health of Christmas! Things have been out of control in past Christmases and throughout the year in general, and it's refreshing to see people cutting back on the endless, non-fulfilling hunger for "stuff". Christmas in the past few years has been so shoppy! It practically has reminded me of that scene from Miyazaki's Spirited Away where Noface starts giving gold and more and more people want to give him anything for it and then he turns to a monster as he in return gives them back the greed they gave him. Our society has been out of contol with economic greed, and I just watched this documentary called the 11th Hour in which many scientists and leaders of environmental groups describe this kind of unhealthy, overconsuming, material world that we have become. How we have exchanged our beautiful earth for a corporate and capitalist based economy. We have placed profit and power over nature and spirit time and again. It's a film produced by Leonardo DiCaprio (go ahead, sneer at him if you must be snobby, but I am endeared!) and the people interviewed describe how our society has lost the real meaningfulness of life and nature and the abundance of gifts in the natural world around us. We have turned into that greed machine. So, this economic downturn shall also be an awakening. It makes us understand what we should truly be valuing in our everyday lives.

Anyhoo............a little off topic, but it has been so very much on my mind lately. I think back to the 70's as a teeny weeny kid and I remember a far more humbler and glowy feeling of Christmas. The 2000's have been so different than that. Not so much in our family, cause we were born to fight materialism for the most part -it is in our blood to do so (and because the Beatty's are damn near PERFECT), but just out there in parking lots, in restaurants, in stores, on the streets. Everyone in such a huge, hurried, gift-wrapping rush of insanity, and no one stops to smile at each other!Maybe this year more people shall focus on the sweet small things like cookie baskets for neighbors, gifts for poor children, handmade gifts for each other, and singing carols and celebrating the moment.
So here's a little taste of our December days! And by the way I am totally in love with living here close to my Marma and Pops and my sister Heather, and brother and sister Joey and Emily AND getting to see more of Mikie and Candice whilst I am at it. I miss Matt and Amy and childs terribly but hope to see them this Christmas Eve. But I know deep inside my beatin' heart, it was such a good decision to move closer to y'all special ones. This one's actually from Thanksgiving. The starting point of Christmas cheer. Me starting up the decorating. Art put lights up all around our house!

Through the Gilded Door

I have no desire for it anymore.

What I do desire anymore though is...............
your mind.
Your eyes
Your stories.
your ghosts.
Your smile.
Your family.
Your truth

MONEY IS FAKE

Oh how I have learned what is real and important.
They lied to us!
Fame is a fake!
Money is lies!

What I have learned is that you my friend, your story, no matter how big or small, is the best story of all. And worth millions.

Help! 2008- The Year Fashion Died

Don't get me wrong, I love Sesame Street, and all of it's characters, but come on!
Grover in a shirt? Big Bird in a dress?
I would rather wear Grover any day.
What the F is going on with fashion this winter? These colors might not run, but I sure will when I see them on the racks. Just like I did today, while visiting a nearby Target and Mervyns.

Is this just happening to ME because I finally made it to my 30's? Is this just what happens when you loved last year's styles just fine but finally the moment comes when you cannot identify with the trends of the day anymore WHATSOEVER? Am I alone in my disgust or is anyone out there with me? Are we grandmas yet?


PTA Meeting 1993 anyone?
Are the early 90's ACTUALLY REALLY COOL AGAIN, or are we being force-fed our own regurgitated vomit?



Or is this just a tragic misunderstanding of the fashion industry and some guru of style decided that George Bush could pick out the imported clothes?
Cause this stuff ain't made in the US of A. This is what they are selling at Target, Walmart, Mervyns, Forever 21 and Macys..... these clothes are most assuredly from China. So it's my fault for encouraging sweat shops all this time anyways then right? Honestly, I am sure I had it coming. Cause for years I have walked into those stores and wished I hadn't because the fashions every year just kept getting better and beautifuller and more lacy and bohemian and well-fitting and vintagey and with passion I wanted half the clothes I laid my eyes on .....even Spring this year was OK....but, well, I guess I can walk away from the aisles with no sadness over my poverty this year. AN ABRUPT ENDING to the lovely styles that were. I guess that era of goodness has died and I'd rather shop a thrift store any day than look at this complete crapola.



Really? As if.... Clueless was back? Unfortunately, the styles that came out of Clueless were heartily more clued in than this piece of crap, available at your local Wet Seal.



Not that I am some fashionista, by no means am I. At the MOST, I usually circuit a couple of thrift stores and wear clothes I was given by cooler-dressing friends. Glad I developed my craft of thriftyness..... No wonder another there's another Depression. Fashion sales just crashed, or at least, I would damn hope so.





SOS! Distress call! Does anyone have an ACTUAL explanation for what the shit is going on? I am assuming French people would KILL US for going out in public in something like this. Not that I know much at all about fashion.....I really don't. I just know my gut instincts, and today.....they were telling me to exit the buildings.

And I am not such a pessimist-really! But I do truly appreciate beauty!Do me a favor and check out the clothing at this website....where beauty and bomemian flare actually still reign. Velvet Leaf

For Once and For All

I have to write this now. Because I always forget. But for once I am not going to forget. I NEED A HANDHELD DIGITAL RECORDER THIS CHRISTMAS. A LITTLE ONE IS FINE. One that records for one or two minutes is fine........PLEASE!
I would buy myself one today, but because Christmas is close I might as well ask.
The thing is, for those of you that know me well, you also know I am married to someone who JUST MIGHT be more overdramatic than I am. ABOUT EVERYTHING. A few times a month we have an issue that involves me needing a digital recording device. SERIOUSLY. I have thought about needing it ever since we got married.
The problem is this. (perhaps it's more typical in marriages than I realize?)
Art uses a very very sarcastic almost rude sounding tone of voice daily. But usually he is describing how hot he is, or how much he wants to kill a song on the radio, or how bad his knees hurt, or how annoying some poor bystander's coat looks, or how busy it was at work. This quality in him is MOST DEFINITELY NOT one I enjoy. As you all probably know, I am kind of an extreme optimist, a pretty damn positive girl.... I believe using such rudeness at the environment around you reverberates out into the world and creates dissonance around a person. So I do my best to steer clear of his mean overdramatic moments. But at least he usually keeps it directed at distant things and not me....for the most part....EXCEPT ON DAYS LIKE TODAY. Sometimes he slips up and uses this tone at me right in a moment when I am cheerful and happy and everything is going just fine and we are getting along perfectly and then afterwards HE NEVER EVER EVER REALIZES THAT HE JUST DID IT!!!!!! Literally, he will completely hurt my feelings by his rudest tone of voice and the kind of pent up sarcasm on his brow that speaks millions when he says things like "What do you mean share this table? There's not even room for ONE of my elbows?!!!" all the while he's looking at me with this look that says EXACTLY "YOU COMPLETE IDIOT!" in a rolling-eye kind of sarcasm. And it's not funny and he's not TRYING to be humorous. He's just being a plain old grouchy rude DOWNRIGHT MEANHEAD. I EFFING HATE IT! So then I get my feelings hurt and barely even know what to say since we weren't even arguing in the first place he just got rude out of nowhere, so I will say something back like "GEEZ! What the heck, I am trying to be nice and hang out close to you and you get MAD at me?" And then he will be even RUDER than the first time trying to defend himself (because when Art is wrong, even if he is REALLY wrong, he will defend himself to the stubborn bitter end- seriously it takes HOURS sometimes for me to make him realize that he was the one in the wrong)....anyways the whole thing gets out of control and comes back to the same old thing, every single time. HIS TONE OF VOICE. When we discuss how the whole arguing got started out of nowhere HE COMPLETELY DENIES THAT HE USED A RUDE TONE OF VOICE AT ALL. He acts like a suddenly just got upset after he said something polite and kind to me! And you know what? I honestly think that he does not realize how rude and mean his voice sounds at such times. I honestly am beginning to believe he actually believes that he was talking completely normal and cordial to me the whole time!!!! SO I HAVE GOT to get a recorder that sits in the kitchen or somewhere that we both are frequently so that I can discreetly press record the next time it happens. I just want him to realize what his jerky take-me-for-granted-completely- sarcastic tone of voice sounds like in real life and why it hurts my feelings. He know this too. This isn't some secret blog to the world leaving him out. He knows he does this and he always says sorry even if the "sorry" take five hours, and he realizes that his tone of voice may in fact be out of line whilst talking to his nice little wife-girl.


HELP!
Anyone got some ideas besides the recorder? I could most definitely use them.