While hiking Wye Island on the first Sunday of Advent, treesta pointed out to the Sassistas! the above beech tree. On May 24, 1991, a couple first carved their initials and the date. They did this for more than a decade. Below is another side of the tree which reveals how this story ends.
What was their story?
Yesterday marked the First Sunday in Advent, the first season of the Christian church year, leading up to Christmas (and including the four preceding Sundays). To mark the day, the Sassistas! took treesta up on her offer to hike what is a sacred place for her: Wye Island. When we learned that Sukey had died, our visit became even more sacred, thanks to treesta, who decided to build a spirit house for Sukey (pictured above). Here is treesta's description:
About six years ago, I participated in a Vision Quest, seeking guidance and direction in my life. Before beginning the Vision Quest, we also participated in a sweat lodge ceremony. Rocks were heated for several hours at the base of a fire just outside the sweatlodge, and the red-hot rocks were then placed in the center of the sweat lodge. After the Vision Quest, I brought home some of the rocks used in the ceremony and created a little altar around which I built a garden.
When I awoke Sunday morning, it was clear to me that we were to use the sweat lodge rocks to make a spirit house for Sukey. We chose a grandmother of a White Oak tree under and made her spirit house there. May her Spirit be guided on her journey.
This is the grandmother White Oak tree chosen by treesta:
It is a morning like no other morning.
There is a signifying in the silver dawn.
Stars hesitate, streets listen,
Snow melts in tenderness, trees wait.
-- from the poem, "First Light" by Myrna Reid Grant from
A Widening Light: Poems of the Incarnation
According to this morning's Washington Post:
A 12,500-pound decommissioned satellite that was lazily falling toward the Earth over the past two days finally came down around midnight Friday, NASA said early Saturday.
The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) fell back to Earth between 11:23 p.m. Friday and 1:09 a.m. Saturday, NASA said in an update on its website. The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California said the satellite penetrated the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, the agency said. It is not yet known when exactly the satellite hit Earth, and whether it ended up in water or on land, NASA said.
The Sassistas! don't think it's just a coincidence that just yesterday, Flannista discovered the object pictured below in the middle of an intersection here in Sassista!Land East.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
HAPPY BIRD DAY, TREESTA!
Today is treesta's birthday! The Sassistas! thought of her for many reasons this weekend when we visited an amazing business on the outskirts of Flannista's hometown: The Birdwatchers Store. First, this store is all about birds. Second, it's owned and run by a lesbian couple (who woulda thunk in Flann's home town?). Third, it has a great sense of caring for birds and a great sense of humor for humans. Flann loved the place so much, she spent over 100 bucks on a new birdfeeder system.
And here's what we mean by a sense of humor. Before are the store road signs that greet you coming and going:
To mark treesta's special day, let's share our adventures outdoors with or without birds.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TREESTA!
Yesterday, PEACEsista and Flann received the following email from Gwendolyn after she saw her doctor before beginning her second round of palliative chemotherapy:
Dear Women,
Good news from the doctor's exam today. While she can still feel "disease" it is soft, and that's a good sign. She was so dire in her outlook before because the two patients that had my tumor type on which she tried my current regime did not respond at all. I am responding rapidly, in that the belly swelling is controlled and I have energy to go walking.
She did use the word "miracle" somewhere in the conversation. I had already gotten IV benadryl which makes me very sleepy, but Robin was there to help me listen. So the dire prediction about my upcoming demise was because if I didn't respond to this chemo, that would be it. But I am.
Thank you for your thoughts, prayers, incantations, chants, candles. I feel spiritual support from all of you has kept my body responding to the chemo.
Love,
Gwendolyn
On March 22, Gwen's doctor told her that she had, at most, two months to live. During our weekend visit, Gwen shared that her doctor had changed that prognosis to "less than six months."
Do you believe in miracles? Today, I do. And for love of Gwen, I will tomorrow.
What good is an old broad like Flannista, especially when she's well beyond her prime reproductive years?
Well, she's the best leader of the herd and the one most capable of making decisions. How about that?! Click on the image above to see the video that proves our point.
Truth be told, this is the result of a study of older female elephants in Kenya. The above video proves that the oldest matriarchs are best at recognizing a male lion's roar. Watch while 66-year-old matriarch, Joyce, hears three male lions and responds by bunching her herd in a tight phalanx to ward off a possible attack.
The study indicates that the herd benefits from an older leader -- a discovery, researchers say, that shows how vital it is to protect the elders (which usually have the biggest tusks) from ivory poachers. "Families with younger matriarchs typically underreact to roars from male lions," the researchers wrote. "Sensitivity to the key threat . . . is the greatest for the oldest matriarchs, who are likely to have accumulated the most experience."
So why in theeeee hell have no older females been President of the United States?
Today, let's honor all of our favorite matriarchs!
What better way to wish HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Chrysosistah, our resident ornithologist, than with an inspiring bird story sassgested by Matissta!
As Flannista wrote this post, more than 170,000 people around the world were watching a live broadcast of an eagle sitting on a couple of eaglets and waiting for a third egg to hatch. To watch all the action yourself, click here.
Above is a still image from that 24-hour "Eagle Cam" (infrared light allows the nest to be seen at night). It was set up by a nonproft group called the Raptor Resource Project in Decorah, Iowa. It records the home life of a pair of bald eagles in the nest they built in 2007, in a cottonwood tree 80 feet above a stream called Trout Run. Two cameras are positioned (and camouflaged) about five feet above the next, one can be zoomed and panned to follow the bird's movements.
Why does this broadcast have so much appeal? The miracle of birth? How cute the babies are? The attentiveness of BOTH parents (who take turns watching the kids)? What exactly?
We hope you like it Chrysosistah! And perhaps there will be another "birth" on your birthday!
Do you take take naps? Even while at work?
If you regularly fight an overwhelming desire for a little nap, new research indicates that a midday nap would be the right thing to do. It can dramatically restore and even boost your brain power afterward.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley took a group of 39 healthy adults and divided them into two groups. All were given a rigorous learning task at noon designed to test their fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels on that test. Half of the group then took a 90-minute nap -- long enough to go through a full sleep cycle. At 6 p.m. both groups were again given a round of tasks. In this case, the nappers performed significantly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn, according to the study.
Exactly why the nap effect works, "is still a mystery," according to Berkeley assistant professor of psychology, Matthew Walker, lead investigator of the study. "One theory is that particular types of brain-wave patterns that occur during sleep help change the storage locations of recently stored information from short-term to long-term, such that when you wake up, the short-term capacity for new memory formation is refreshed. It's as though the email box in your hippocampus [where short-term memory is stored] is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you're not going to receive any more mail. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder."
Bottom line: staying up all night to study for an exam or to finish a big project at work, has a negative impact, decreasing the ability to recall crammed-in facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions caused by sleep deprivation.
The Sassistas! believe that all Americans ought to take siestas at home and at work so we can be as smart as Flannista's cats. What about you? What are you napping habits?
An Open Letter to Watson, the IBM Computer who this week on Jeopardy!, according to USA Today, "chewed up and spat out humanity's finest knights of trivia . . . in a $77,147 drubbing of past record winners Ken Jennings ($24,000 total) and Brad Rutter ($21,600):
Dr. Watson (we presume):
The Sassistas! watched you on "Jeopardy!" this week not only because "Jeopardy!" ends with an exclamation point like we do, but also because we were curious about how smart you really are. Bet you're feelin' like Hal from "2001: Space Odyssey" or "The Terminator" right now. Look at you, all high and mighty and well, dull to look at, not to mention, listen to.
Here's one of the things that bugged us about you. Those "Jeopardy!" episodes were really three long commercials for IBM disguised as "Jeopardy!" How many times did we have to hear about how you were created and how forward-thinking IBM was? Once was enough. In fact, once was too many. But you know what? You aren't as smart as you think you are because we believe there are COUNTLESS questions you could never answer. For example:
We believe the sassosphere can come up with a bajillion questions such as these that you could NEVER answer. So there, Mr. Smarty-Pants. Wait, you ain't got no pants. There's another question for ya -- where in the hell are your pants?
Sincerely yours, The Sassistas!
P.S. Black is not a good color on you.
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