I hope everyone had a blessed Sabbat. Unfortunately, my plans were cut a bit short as a Redbud tree toppled over in my yard late Thursday night. It was a tree I had won as a sapling for an Arbor Day poster contest when I was in fourth grade. We had a good rain shower earlier that day and, later that night as I was watching television, I heard *crackle crackle snap crash* I ran outside to investigate and my beloved tree had split in half. One half was laying in the yard, the other was leaning precariously. We spent most of Friday cleaning it up, which really threw off my plans to observe Lammas Friday night. So, I planned on having a ritual Saturday night.

Well, Saturday afternoon a fierce storm rolled through the Metro Atlanta area and completely laid waste to a ton of trees in my neighborhood (thankfully we got the Redbud tree down the day before. Maybe She knew the storm was a'coming.) Police had to block off three roads in our neighborhood alone because of downed trees and power lines. Only a couple of homes had damage. One of our neighbors had a tree fall on their privacy fence. Another new home that was empty and for sale had a tree come down and sheer off the corner of the covered front porch overhang. So, once again, we spent the rest of the evening making sure our neighbors were okay and picking limbs out of our yard and vegetable garden. One of our tomato cages was knocked over by a large limb that fell on it, but the plant is still intact.

So, I offered up a prayer of thanks for keeping everyone here safe and had a small ritual later that night, but the sheer exhaustion prohibited me from having the lengthy ritual I had been planning all week.

This is one of my favorite pictures from the website I can Has Cheezburger. The site has a ton of funny pictures of animals (mostly cats) with hilarious captions. I have spent hours browsing through page after page of hilarious pictures.

Out of all my ritual tools and all of the "witchy" supplies I have amassed over my years of practicing Wicca, my most cherished tool is my athame. When I first began studying Wicca at the age of nineteen, it was the first tool I purchased. Granted, my athame is rather unorthodox in appearance. It does not have a black handle, nor special inscriptions in the blade. In fact, by all surface appearances, my athame may be considered foppish or tacky. Even still, I love my athame and even if I could make my own and give it my own personal touch with various runes or symbols hand etched into the handle or blade, I could never part with my original one.

Depending upon which tradition you follow, the athame is either attributed to air or fire. I attribute mine to the fire element and have since the day I purchased it. My athame has been used to draw down the Moon, consecrate and charge every one of my ritual tools, to aide in spellcraft, and to cast the Sacred Circle. It has been used to symbolize the sexual union between the Lady and Lord. There is not one single ritual or rite that I have ever observed in which my athame was not a part of.

My athame and I have a special sort of bond. I can feel the energy radiating from it whenever I grab ahold of the non-traditional handle. I feel that energy well up inside of me when I carefully separate the sheath from the blade. In the Sacred Circle, we are one.

I know, another blog entry. I'm bored tonight. Jim's at work and I've consumed far too much coffee. I wanted to share a story about how blessed I am.

I moved out when I was seventeen years old. I got married to my high school sweetheart at eighteen after I graduated. My first house was so old. It was a four-room farmhouse that this sweet elderly woman rented to me for only $300 a month. The floors were sinking. I was infested with little field mice. I had a two-burner stove and a tiny, after-thought bathroom (the old out house was still in the yard). It had cracks and drafts and it was so cold there in the winter time, but it was mine and I loved it dearly. There was the name of the family inscribed in the hearth that was dated 1875. For Christmas, I wrapped my porch in lights and had a tiny K-Mart tree (which I called my Charlie Brown tree it was so pitiful looking). I even wrapped fake gifts to put under it LOL When I got married the first time we moved into a newer home. The marriage lasted a year and a half. Eight months later I met my son's biological father who was a bit older than me and had a very lucrative career in engineering. He bought us this enormous brand new, custom built house when we found out I was pregnant. I hated that house. It smelled like brand new carpet chemicals and it was so big there were echoes when you talked in the living room and half the rooms stayed empty. Four months after my son was born, we split up. He lost his job, foreclosed on the house, filed for bankruptcy and moved back to Alabama to live with his parents. I haven't heard from him since.

I found an adorable little apartment and I lived there for three years. During this time I met Jim. I knew he was living with his mother, or rather, he lived with her so he could take care of her. Jim's mother has Alzheimer's and can't live by herself. After we got serious, I decided to move in with him and his mom. I continued to work full-time until Agoraphobia and trying to take care of everyone took its toll on me. After careful consideration, I left my job and stayed home to take care of Jim's mother. It wasn't easy, but I forged a special bond with her during that time. A little over a month after I left my job, me and Jim were sitting in our bedroom when his mother came in and said, "something smells funny in the kitchen". Jim went to investigate and immediately came running back into the bedroom to cut off the breaker box. At this point I could smell smoke and melting plastic. We had come dangerously close to having a house fire. We lived in a 1960's model mobile home. At some point the previous owners had spliced copper wire in with the original aluminum wiring and whoever did it did a shoddy job and the outlet in the kitchen was burning up. We had an electrician come out immediately and he said very bluntly, "this can't be fixed and you're going to die in a fire if you continue to live here." We packed our stuff that night and basically "fled" the trailer. My sister was staying with a boyfriend that night and she graciously offered to let us stay in her room for the night. Jim's mother stayed with his sister.

Since we knew we couldn't live in the trailer anymore, we had to go through the tedious process of trying to figure out where Jim's mother would live. We decided we were going to try and find another place to live and then Jim found out, two weeks shy of Christmas, that the company he had worked for nearly fourteen years was closing and sending all of their work to China. It was a painful blow. We ended up living in my grandfather's Winnebago parked in my parents' driveway for seven months.  Jim's mother went to live with her brother and the arrangement has been good for her. She's happy and healthy and seems to enjoy being there very much. They torn down the trailer in December after it sat on the lot for four months. In March my sister moved out leaving the entire upstairs of my parents' house available. My parents offered it to me and Jim for a modest monthly fee and we took them up on the offer. Kid Witch has his own room as well. My grandmother has lived with us since I was four, so here we all are living in this five bedroom house - Mom, Dad, Gramma, Kid Witch, my little brother, me and Jim. It took some adjusting for Jim. My mom will be the first to admit she's not the easiest person to live with. But she's just very outspoken and tends to say things off the cuff. Jim is used to his sweet, modest, reserved mother. 

The arrangement has worked out well, thus far. A lot of people ask me, "why don't you get your own place?" I guess I enjoy living here very much. We're a big family, but we're a very close family and I wouldn't have it any other way. :-) 

I hope everyone had a lovely Lammas this past week. I observed the Sabbat with my mother and we had a lovely day. She made homemade bread just for the occasion.

My sister and her boyfriend, fiance, whatever you want to call him broke up. See, he had told not only my sister, but our entire family that his dad was a Brigadier General in the Army and a lot of other fantastic stories. He claims he was a police officer down in Florida a few years ago and blah blah blah. Well, his dad came into town to visit last weekend. We found out that my sister's boyfriend had not only told a few little lies about his life, but that he had fabricated some crazy life story. His dad was not a Brigadier General. He was never a cop. He never lived in Germany with his dad. He even lied to my sister about how many women he'd been with (she was his first and he'd claimed he had "been around"!). So my sister told him that he needs to move out. He was more upset at the thought of Vic taking his cat than he was about losing her. So she said he could have the cat. She's not as upset about it as I thought she would be. Although, she says she has kind of suspected most of his stories were BS and was hoping one day he would come clean.

I got on MySpace today for the first time in almost a year. I found out that Jim has added an ex-fiance to his friends list. I'm not sure if this should upset me or not. Yeah, I had some guys on my friends list, but none of them were ex's of mine and certainly no one I was ever engaged to be married to. She's left all these gooey sweet comments on his homepage also like, "hey sweetie! How are you? (((HUGS)))" I seriously doubt anything is going on. She lives like sixty miles from here and she's long since been married and has had children, but something seems dicey about it. When I asked Jim he said he hasn't spoken to her since he got the friends request. Knowing Jim that's probably true, but it still doesn't sit well with me.

I'm in the process of knitting a "Tarot Sock". Basically I'm using silk ribbon yarn and knitting in the round on DPNs a tube long enough to hold my Thoth deck. When it's long enough I'll graft the bottom seam. I've been having fun telling everyone I'm knitting a "sock" for my Tarot deck LOL

 I've missed everyone so much. I'm sorry to all my friends for disappearing. There's been so much going on lately, but you've all been in my thoughts.