From the Wee Grimoire: The Story of Petey the Snake

Tags

snakes, story telling, wee grimoire

**this is absolutely and utterly not a Pagan or religious story in the least…
…its a story from when I worked at a summer camp in college, and the kids love it**

Petey the Snake lived in a pit deep, deep in the forest.  It was a green, leafy paradise, with tall trees and dappled sunlight, with boggy puddle pools, and even a fast, tumbling creek running over a small cliff with lots of hidey-holes.  In fact, his pit was right in one of those spots!  He lived there, in the pit, with his momma, his poppa, his four brothers, and his sister, Jill.  Best of all, this part of the forest had very few of the tall two-legs that might chase him and hurt him.

Petey liked to play soccer, Parcheesi, the piano, and over with his best friend Billy Potts.  Billy was a hornet that lived in a rusty old pot that has been abandoned many, many years ago by a frightened camper (Petey & Billy’s great-great-great grandfathers had apparently done the scaring, but that’s a story for another day!). But the one thing that Petey really, really liked to do was The One Thing he wasn’t supposed to do.

Petey loved to hiss.

Its not like hissing was dangerous or anything.  You just sort of stuck your tongue out and did it.  Sure, there was some slobber…but really.  There was nothing wrong with hissing.

But his momma said that hissing was “rude” and his poppa said that it was an “infernal racket” and his brothers just bonked him on the head with their tails, which made momma get mad and put them in the corner and then they stuck their tongues out at him behind her back while he was trying to pretend to listen to her lecture about the rudeness of hissing, and his sister Jill just huffed at him and put on her headphones.

They just didn’t understand.  They were oppressing his creative expression with their outdated modes of decorum!

It wasn’t HIS fault–he just HAD to his.  Petey just couldn’t help himself!  He just had to HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!

When Petey tried to hiss at home, in the pit, his momma got mad and said, “Petey the snake, how many times do I have to tell you there is NO HISSING IN THE PIT!  If you want to hiss, you need to go somewhere else!!”

So Petey the Snake slowly, sadly, silently, slunk down the stairs and began to hiss on the front porch.  Not even two seconds later his momma out there on the front porch, tapping her tail with temper!  “Petey the Snake!”  (You know, just how momma’s always have to say your WHOLE name when they’re mad? Yeah, like that!) “I’ve already told you that hissing is rude and there is NO HISSING IN THE PIT!”

“But momma!” Petey cried, “I’m not hissing in the pit, I’m hissing outside the pit!”

“Oh, don’t you ‘but momma’ me, Petey the Snake!  You may not be hissing in the pit, but the porch is part of this pit and you are definitely hissing too close to the pit.  If you want to hiss…” she said, bringing her nose very, very close to Petey, “Go. Somewhere. Else.”

Petey the Snake slowly, sadly, silently, slunk off the port and over to his best friend Billy’s pot.  There he hissed and hissed while Billy buzzed and buzzed!  They were having a grand old time…until Mrs. Potts, Billy’s mom, came home from the grocery store and said, “Billy!  What have I told you about buzzing like that?!?  And Petey the Snake!  I know your mother doesn’t let you hiss in the pit!  We don’t allow that hissing over here either.  If you want to hiss, go find your own pot to his in!”

Once again, Petey the Snake slowly, sadly, silently slunk off…this time into the woods.  He found himself on a rock, all alone in some dappled sunlight, right next to a boggy puddle pool. “Well,” said Petey to the tall, tall trees, “I can’t hiss in the pit, and I can’t hiss too close to the pit, and now…here I sit, without a pot or pit to hiss in.” Dejected and alone, Petey the Snake drooped his head over his back and on his tail, thinking miserable thoughts…until!

He popped his head up and looked around…he was all alone! There were no pits, no pots, no mommas, or poppas.  The only thing wrong with here was that Billy was still at home, getting lectured by his mom.  But that was okay, Billy could come along next time–for now, Petey the snake smiled, stuck his tongue out, and hissed and hissed and hissed, to his heart’s content.

And everyone lived happily ever after.  Except for the frightened camper…but as I said, that is a story for another day!

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Wordless Wednesday

An Interview with Mr. Thalassa

Tags

interview with hubby, military, pagan in the military, paganism

Just for fun (and to see the oh-so-hilarious look on his face), I informed The Hubby (a.k.a. Mr. Thalassa and Daddy Man) that he was going to be on my blog.  I figure if its amusing enough, I’ll bring him back from time to time…

And I needed to take some time off from Yule blogging.  BTW, Happy Hanukkah!

Mr. Thal & Sharkbait

Me: So babe, tell us about yourself…

Mr. Thalassa: Well, I like long walks on the beach, the wind blowing through my Fabio-like locks, sunrises that could make you cry…running with scissors, shiny things, and viciously large explosions. All of those can be made better with a big cup of coffee.

Me:  You are such a dork.  Just sayin’.

Mr. Thalassa:  (laughs) And you love me for it…its not like you were specific!

Me: Yup, I definitely married you for your dork skills.  Who the heck else would put up with my Star Trek Marathons?  Okay…serious now.  Put on your serious face.

Where are you from? What was your upbringing like?

Mr. Thalassa:  I’m from the land of Cheese–from Wisconsin.  I was born in a small town outside of Milwaukee and both my parents were police officers.  My father passed away when I was six and my mom raised us.  I had ADHD–oh look, something shiny!

Me: Dude…I said serious face.

Mr. Thalassa: Sorry, I wasn’t listening…there was a squirrel holding keys on the window sill.

Me: (snickering) What was it like to have a mom that was a cop?

Mr. Thalassa: Um…how truthful do you want me to be here?  It was hard.  She was gone a lot and Mom brought work home emotionally.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of my mom–she was one of the first female police officers in our county, and the first female to make detective.  But…it still sucked.  It did keep me on the straight and narrow though, if I got in trouble with the cops, they were calling my mom, you know? Really, I just had a better idea of how not to get caught.

Me: I am putting this on the internet.

Mr. Thalassa: Good point.  Let me go check on the squirrel with the keys.

Me: So, how did you end up moving  from the land of Cheese to the Bay?

Mr. Thalassa: I joined the US Navy because I didn’t want to be a farmer, or a logger, or a factory worker.  And school and I didn’t get along very well.  The ADHD, you know.  A lot of my friends had joined the Army, but my dad and my uncle were in the Navy, and I saw my cousin’s boot camp graduation.  I decided to be a sailor instead…and the Navy sent me here.

Me:  And the Navy thing?  What did that do for you?

Mr. Thalassa: Well, it gave me my beautiful wife…

Me:  Are you going for brownie points here?

Mr. Thalassa: Too obvious?

Me: Just a tad.  Don’t get me wrong, I know you are serious and I love you too, but…over all, how did the Navy change things up in your life?  Like…what you thought your life would be like, to where you are now?

Mr. Thalassa: Well, to start out with, I guess it really brought about my change in religious outlook and beliefs.  I had started to questioning my religious upbringing* and indoctrination before that–the history that was wrong, the moral inconsistencies, and stuff. But I didn’t really have any exposure to other ideas and beliefs until I was in my ‘A’ school**, where there was an unofficial Pagan group.

Me: How did that go, being Pagan and in the Navy?

Mr. Thalassa:  It was really never a problem.  At first I kept it on the DL, then later I found there were more and more Pagans among us folks in uniform. I don’t think anyone realizes how many military members are actually Pagan.  There are some problems–people that don’t understand who and what we believe, and those that don’t want to, that would rather keep their own negative stereotypes.   But overall, those people are a minority, I didn’t have any major issues.

Me: How did being in the Navy affect your Pagan beliefs and vice versa?

Mr. Thalassa:  It can be hard to practice in the Navy.  Its not on purpose, its not religious oppression or anything…its just the environment.  Like the physical environment.  You can’t burn incense on a ship.  Its a big gray boat in the middle of the sea…what about the green stuff? Steal a broccoli from the salad bar?  Clean some algae from a tank?

It can be hard to find other Pagans sometimes…not everyone is as comfortable being open about their beliefs as you and I, so it can be hard to find people at your duty station.  It can definitely be hard to participate in the wider Pagan community, just because you aren’t there.  Deployments and all.  And when you do go to places, a lot of people can’t relate.  There’s some pretty big ignorance that borders on bigotry for people in the military in the Pagan community.  That is changing a bit, but…heck–you were there, you remember that lady that called us baby killers at the drum circle at the festival we went to?

Me:  Yeah, I remember that one.  Probably the most blatant one I’ve run across.

Mr. Thalassa:  And that one Druid writer…he wasn’t a fan of military Pagans at all.

Me: Isaac Bonewits?

Mr. Thalassa: Yeah-the one that said you can’t be in the military and be Pagan.  I think he died a while back, so I’m not going to say anything bad, but…  (sighs) He wrote some good shit, but that was…just dumb.

Me: Do you think that had something to do with us hitting it off?  We had both the Navy thing and the Pagan thing in common?  I know you dated Navy girls and Pagan girls before me, but never in the same fabulous package.

Mr. Thalassa: Ha!  You are right there…  At the very least, it made things easier.  Being to relate and all.  I mean, most of our real life friends were both. And even when you go to a festival or a ritual or something, those are the people you have stuff in common with first.  Even before people with the same tradition or beliefs as you.

Me: Ah…Yeah, I’ve talked about this before.  Do you think then, that there is more commonality between different sorts of Pagans from being in the military than there is between civilian Pagans?

Mr. Thalassa: Oh, heck yeah.  I’m not saying that we have the same opinions and beliefs on anything…our perspectives run the gamut just as civilians.  But we have something that binds us.  We have necessity.  We can get together and put aside our spiritual egos, if you will, to support one another, instead of bickering over who believes what and why.  I mean, yeah–we can still disagree with that stuff, but at the end of the day, we don’t bitch about it the same way.

Me: What do you mean?

Mr. Thalassa: I’ve read some of those whiny blogs about whose really Pagan or not over your shoulder…I’d like to see them try to be Pagan on a ship.  You can’t do it, do it well in a way that lets you grow…you can’t do that without support.  And you don’t get to be picky about who that support comes from.  Our Pagan discussion group on-board the ship was sponsored by a Catholic priest, and we had a ton of non-Pagans show up, just to learn what we believe.  And when we had the occasional asshole show up, it was Chaps that kicked them out first.

And my chain of command was pretty cool about it too…they would rotate my watch schedule to attend the meeting.  Even on the (ship name removed) the Chaplain was cool.  The ship sucked, but the Chaplain was cool.  He was actually pretty thrilled to find out there were Pagans aboard, as we both know they don’t really do that good of a job educating Chaplains about Pagans.

Me: You think that’s about it?  I know you have to get ready to work and all…and it would be awesomesauce if I could talk you into vacuuming before you leave.

Mr. Thalassa: Yeah, I should start getting ready.  Ugh, I really don’t want to work evenings this week.  You know…this wasn’t as awkward as I expected.  It was actually sort of fun.

Me: Lol, I love you too…

*The Hubby was raised in a very religious and very conservative Catholic family.  He attended Catholic schools until his 10th grade year, including a year at an all boys boarding school.
**’A’ school is the Navy’s term for a training school after boot camp that offers job-specific training.

Tuesday Musings

Tags

blog award, heat wave, summer

A Big Thank You: Goes to Neferet @ Stay for a Spell, whom (or is it who…I’m so bad at that!) has graciously given me a blog award!!

The “rules” of the award are as follows:

1.  Display the award certificate on your website.
2.  Announce your win with a post and include a link to whoever presented your award.
3.  Present 7 awards to deserving bloggers.  Create a post linking to them and drop them a comment to tip them off.
4.  Post 7 interesting facts about yourself.

AH! This is always so hard…I like so many blogs, for so many different reasons!! Okay…I’ll start off with the easy part.

7 facts about me:

• I’m horribly allergic to cats.  Horribly.  So horribly that its not enough to not pet a cat, I can’t even be in a house where a cat lives or be around a person with a cat unless they are wearing freshly laundered clothing without paying a price for it later (or stuffing myself full of antihistamines beforehand).
• I love Rainier cherries.  Normally I’m down with whatever the local farmer’s market has for our summer fruit an veggie fare.  For the few things I do buy at the grocery store that aren’t local and are out of season during the summer, I’m pretty economical–bananas and oranges mostly.  But.  For a few weeks each July, I splurge.  Rainier cherries are my one weakness.  They seriously taste like the epitome of summer time.
• I don’t have a favorite band.  Apparently this is weird.  I love music, and enjoy quite a few genres of music…I have a number of “favorite” songs…but I’ve never been *into* a band.
• I’ve fallen off the green-wagon a little bit the past month, between my health issues and my new job, which happens to be mostly outside (heat wave+outdoor job+health issues=too tired to make an effort to go the extra mile)…and for the things we *have* kept up, its been more about being cheap than being environmentally friendly.
• I make the hubby drive as often as possible.  I’d rather read a book or something.  It drives him crazy because he’s not one of those guys that thinks he needs to be the one behind the wheel.  And he says I’m a side-seat driver.
• I will not be voting for Mitt Romney.  This includes voting for any third party that might split the vote away from our current President.  Barack Obama may not be my favorite president, and I might not agree on everything he has done thus far…but he scares me far less than a man with so few principles that he is willing to completely and utterly flip-flop on all of them just to get nominated.  Including his own health care plan, gay marriage, working women, women’s health, religion, and I could go on.  The only place where he hasn’t flip-flopped is his own anti-American, anti-family and anti-worker business practices.  As far as I am concerned, Mitt Romney is an example of all that is wrong with this country and its political and economic systems–which put us in this economic mess in the first place.
• I love my new job.  Don’t get me wrong, right now it sucks because its OUTSIDE in a HEAT WAVE in one of the HOTTEST summers of one of the HOTTEST decades on record…but the job itself is awesome.  I seriously get to talk to people about a giant ship, being in the Navy, and how cool the Chesapeake Bay is.  And I get paid to do it.

Recommended Reading (AKA-who I give this award to): I’m passing this award on to a couple of blogs that I follow fairly regularly, a couple of them are homesteading/homemaking sort of blogs, a couple are Pagan blogs, and a couple are mom/homeschooling blogs (and some of them overlap a bit)… Some of their authors probably don’t even know that I’m a lurking reader (so this might be a surprise), but I enjoy them all because they give me something to think about that I might not have otherwise!!
Apartment Farm
The Old Milk Can
Lazy Hippie Mama
Here There Be Gods
Rowan Hale
Under the Maple Canopy
The Pagan House
Hopefully I managed to notify everyone…if not, and you get here because you are notified of a linky, I apologize! The hubby did some rewiring of the system while I was typing, and I lost connection for a few. Sometimes we can be buggy when that happens.

Some very random, ranting, rambling thoughts from today: Today was one of those days that didn’t feel like a day off.

Which sucks, because I just worked in 100 degree heat index on a giant un-air conditioned metal box for two days, and tomorrow start another three days in a row. Long days, I might add, because we have the most awesome group of gentlemen and their wives and families that will be our guests at the museum for the rest of the week.

And I haven’t even seen a pay check yet, due to some issues with the accounting department. This will be remedied shortly…but it still sort of stinks in the meantime–my pantry is growing bare, and that sort of sends me into a mental tizzy.

Also, we just found out today that Miss February won’t be able to watch the kids for the rest of the month, leaving us in a total scramble to find a baby sitter. Its taken care of now, but…

Lets just say, its been a rough day and we all went to McDonald’s because its all we could afford and I really didn’t want to face cooking and dishes.  Now my tummy hurts.

Oh, and my mother-in-law will be here Friday for a fly-by family weekend.

And my health issues aren’t improving–I ended up in the ER again last week (bad enough that I couldn’t even last until my doctor’s appointment later that same day). I ended up with 5 breathing treatments, on another round of prednisone, and we still have no idea what is causing it or why. Except now, I’ve had hives coming and going in a constantly itching misery since my trip to the ER…and they’ve been spreading.

I should be investing in Benadryl…and searching for my sanity!

Enough of the Ranting, some Happy Thoughts: So, in the chaos of today, I took the kids to the park. I wish I had their energy, and their inability to care about the heat and humidity!

They seriously ran up the giant hill and rolled back down at the part at least a dozen times. We “camped out” at a picnic shelter between the giant hill and the playground next to a day camp group, and I thank goodness for them! The kids had a blast making new friends with “big kids” and the teachers were fantastic–if I have to put the kids in a summer program ever, I know who I’m calling. They were so tired out, they both took a nap. It would have been awesome, if only the nap hadn’t been in the car, while I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, lol.

Tips for Beating the Heat Oudoors:

• Invest in a dollar store spray bottle, fill with cold water–instant “mister” sprays down kids to help them stay cool while running amok.  Spray yourself too.  (I learned this one today, from the summer campers)
• Remember those neckerchiefs that were so popular in the 80’s and early 90’s?  The ones with the beads that bulk up in cool water and become this weird gel that stays cool for a while?  Yeah…they still make them.  Get one.  Fill up a bucket of ice water and keep them handy (we do this at work).
• Wear light colors, in natural, light-weight fabrics.  Layer up if you plan to spray yourself a lot…white t-shirt contests aren’t all that attractive sober.
• HYDRATE HEALTHFULLY!!  Drink water, replace electrolytes, avoid caffeine and sodium.  Fruit waters are GREAT for this.
• Wear sunscreen, and re-apply it frequently!

And little oops…I have gotten a bit behind my mental schedule for the blog again!   And, I’d meant to include some “regular” features in these weekly Musings posts–like a Tarot Card draw, Herb of the Week, Deity of the Week, etc…  Ah well, I’ll get around to it next time!

Have a Great Day!

Oh!  And a last thought (quote): 
I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.
~Jimmy Dean

Ode to the Tomato

Tags

tomato

Prayer for the Tomato Season

I stop for a moment to praise tomatoes,
honoring them by eating one.
Lovely are you spirits who grow such things.
First I praise their shapes–the shun the easy perfection of the sphere
and take instead their own forms.
Their weight is worth praising, and the depth of their color.
Before I eat this one, I smell it, taking its scent in deeply,
finding in me a resonance that tells me that this is the smell of fertile Earth.
Their skin, though stretched tightly, yields quickly;
it has performed its duty of containing treasure with and uncommon devotion
and now relinquishes command to me.
With silent thanks, the, I accept the task
and eagerly receive the honor so bestowed,
hoping, by so doing, to honor in turn the giver of the gift
and the gift itself.

From A Book of Pagan Prayer
by Ceisiwr Serith