Let’s fight the good fight and get spam comment bots off of JournalSpace!!

Perhaps unattended blogs should be deleted because they’ll just collect spam and as I understand it - that ruins the pagerank of the entire domain. Not a good thing.

Why isn’t Akismet, WordPress’ spam addon, catching all this?

I am an aging woman living in a remote Northern California forest. I don’t feel empowered to do much to help. In my small town, what’s really happening? Not a whole lot! It isn’t like living in Sacramento where I could go keep an eye on the state legislature and tell legislators how I feel about things.

So… I do what I can online, but that’s very little, really. I get busy with other things - my writing, for example. Consequently when I saw this video, I was stunned. Here you’ll see a very young teenager doing something to educate pregnant women about swine flu vaccine dangers. I cannot tell you how much I admire this young man for speaking out and even saving a child.

This is what we all should be doing!

I honestly think the answer to the problem is state sovereignty.

Well, while here I’ve been doing some reading. There are a few good memoirs of people who used to live in this mountain river valley (Klamath River Valley.) One is In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-09 by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed. These two women came here for the government, to help civilize the Klamath’s Karuk natives. The young women moved into a cabin in the vicinity of Orleans and discovered that their neighbor had two husbands. One Karuk husband, and one white husband.

The story continues with their efforts to provide church and education for the Karuks. Though this seems intrusive by today’s standards I think it was a lot better than hauling children off a reservation to educate them in boarding schools… a barbaric act that our nation is still paying for today. I am so totally against forcing separations of children from their parents, especially at an early age.

Another superb memoir I recently read was Dear Mad’m by Stella Walthal Patterson. She was an eighty+ year old woman who came to the Klamath River Valley to live on a mining claim about fifteen miles downriver from Happy Camp in 1946. Her story is a remarkable triumph of woman over nature, over fear, over expectations… the expectations of others to put her into a nursing home and take care of her in her old age.

She wanted to be where people needed her, not where people felt they just needed to take care of her, and she found that kind of sweet interaction with her neighbors on the bank of the Klamath river in a very remote, rough place in the center of a forest.

People all over the country found this inspiring back when it was first published in the 1950s, and three women from the East Coast came here to Happy Camp to live on her property after she died, to take care of the gardens she’d planted there.

This posting isn’t at all what I intended to write about. I wanted to write about Bigfoot to tell you about my blog, Bigfoot Sightings, and to explain why I’m a Bigfoot believer. Well, maybe next time.

I made a commitment to improve my yard this year. The last few years the yard went to waste and weeds because I was working. But since I lost my job last September - I’m home free… with plenty of time for gardening. (Pictures of my garden are at the linked page.)

We live in a cabin type dwelling between two mountain meadows with pine, madrone, and fir on the property. I spent two months intense work clearing garden spaces. One space had been my garden in earlier years. It was overgrown. It had everything in it from compost to junk, and I cleared that land removing weeds, weeds, rocks, grubs, and more weeds. I also cleared a garden area right in front of our house. It was equally time consuming and full of weeds.

The two garden areas are now planted. One contains broccoli, bell peppers, jalapenos, oregano, dill, marigolds, corn, sunflowers, snow peas, spinach, beets, parsley, potatoes, cucumbers, and tomatoes. I have a separate tomato garden with larger plants - one already bearing a couple green tomatoes. Beside that there’s a strawberry garden, and my herb garden which has three varieties of sage, chives, thyme, nasturtiums, rosemary, bacopa, lobelia, three types of mint, lemon balm, yerba buena, and that’s about it. I also have a flower garden on the other side of my porch. Okay, that’s the front of the house.

The garden behind the house has zucchini, crookneck (yellow) squash, scallop squash, tomatoes (more unusual varieties) green beans, watermelon, canteloupe, and a mystery plant that came growing in one of my squash purchases. I’m hoping it is turnips or something like that - but we’ll have to wait and see. Right now I don’t recognize it at all. It is developing little purple flowers. Would be cool if eggplants started growing - or anything I could eat. In other words, I hope it isn’t just a pampered weed!

Yesterday I watched my beloved float downriver on a kayak - that was kind of fun. He’s a gold prospector and manages to do his work most of the time without any help from me - but this time I was there to drive the car from the put-in site to the take-out site downriver. On the way down there we noticed a old truck parked by the side of the road. My S.O. (significant other) was appalled to see that someone had put rocks through the windows — especially since he’d driven by earlier in the day and the windows weren’t broken then. This makes us not want to park our car next to the river anymore, while he’s prospecting. This means I’ll have to take him there, drop him off each day, and then pick him up late in the afternoon hours.

On the work-front I’m getting more organized with my online content writing. I recently made myself a schedule I think will work. I start my day with a walk around town - it takes me about an hour and contains a few semi-challenging uphill climbs. After my walk I water the gardens… I have to keep those plants happy! Then I come inside and eat, drink my morning tea (chai,) and write my three morning pages. (I’m an Artists Way devotee.)

Next I have two hours for blogging, an hour for lunch, an hour for revising novels (or critiquing them for friends,) and then two hours for Squidoo lens building. From four to eight I spend with my S.O. — we go places, or watch movies (almost a nightly occurrence here) and eat dinner. In the evening he goes to sleep and I have a few hours to work on anything I didn’t get done earlier in the day. This seems to be working out fine, so far.

I have so much more to tell you but I know this is getting long… so I’ll leave it for the next posting. I hope to connect with more friends here on JournalSpace. I’ve met wonderful people in the past and know this is a great networking site.

One of my favorite thought-starters is to choose a card. I have several thought-provoking card decks. I’ve managed to steer clear of traditional tarot cards.. they focus too much on the dark side of life and I like to keep things light and airy in my life. I like my “Trust Your Vibes” cards by Sonia Choquette, who wrote a book by the same name. Just now I chose the “Listen To Your Heart” card. My heart was telling me to write a post about jumpstarting my brain. Here it is!

Another thing that works for me is to write in my pen-and-paper notebook journal. I may run into the same “I have nothing to say” problem, but there I’ve got no international audience so there’s considerably less stress involved. Not that blogging is all that stressful. My boundary is that I’ll write in a blog if I feel like it or not at all.

Do you have any brain-jumpstarting ideas for me? Do you look at photographs, read books, read the news, or what? Or are you a blessed person who NEVER runs out of things to write about?

“And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

I would love it if the wealth of the world was spent on resolving the problems of poverty in Africa and elsewhere, rather than on wars, population reduction through wars, and enslavement of soldiers who are mostly way too young to understand they’re being used to promote suffering and evil.

I’m probably stepping on toes again, not that I want to. I’m usually so disgusted with politics I pay little attention to it - but with our country in such a crisis, and with so many others experiencing major emotional traumas or hopes, it is hard to ignore it.

My main point is that Africans are suffering extreme deprivation and I’m tired of seeing the photos of starving children and their elders, while mega-millions are spent on wars and destruction. I hope President Obama can bring some SANITY to the situation and direct some cash back to people who really need it.

If you’d like to help, you might be interested in a charity I’m participating in, called Kiva… with Kiva you can give loans to people in developing nations who are trying to start or maintain businesses. The business owners must repay the money so usually you’ll get your loan money back, and then can either loan it to someone else, or keep it. My first loan went to Mary Barimah in Ghana for her used clothing business.

“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.”

Um… WHAT???  I am not a religionist of any kind, but I’m sure not a nonbeliever either. I have an active spiritual life and am well acquainted with faith.

So here’s my first clue for President Obama’s speech writers: Many of us are believers who choose not to join a specific religion. Get with the program!

Right now I’m back to waking up early and working the morning hours. I wonder how long it will last. My SO seems to like having me sleep in so that he can use my computer all morning. Today I woke up just after midnight and have been working ever since. It is just after 10 am now. When he wakes up I’ll let him use the computer while I go back to sleep for a couple hours.

I looked for information on circadian rhythm disorders. I don’t think I have one because when I need to wake up, I’ll do it - even if I don’t have enough sleep.

This is about fifty miles upriver from my home:

This is about four miles downriver from my home: