I love to blog

I have to restrain myself sometimes to keep from blogging more than I think is wise. After all, we want to be read if possible, so I try to space my entries to that end. Today my son Dan is coming over to put my converter box and a new digital antenna to good use. I have waited until the last day. I made a trip to Walmart on Wednesday when I found out I needed a digital antenna. Hopefully everything is going to work. I needed to get this done before Dan left for Utah, as he is my go to man when it comes to electronics. I am going to miss him when he is gone! But he seems to be looking forward to a cool summer in Utah working with his brother Raymond.
My son Gary called again yesterday elated because 3 jobs they bid on in the city came in. He was just coming back from looking at a job in Prescott. Bidding on a job takes experience and good judgment to be able to get the bid and make some money on it. But he has been working in this kind of construction for 35 years now, and his experience is invaluable to a company. But he said both of his ex-wives were in trouble because of the close to a million dollar houses they both bought when they were feeling rich. His first wife, mother of his children, made money when real estate was booming. Now she is going to have to sell her big house. He said he would have to keep his last wife in food money until their house sold. They have a buyer if they can get the loan to buy. Gary will immediately buy a considerably smaller house with his first wife as the broker, which will be the best way to go when he gets his money out of the big house. His first wife retired but has had to go back to work again.
I know Raymond is very busy right now building on the set and preparing for his two performances of his show this month in Boulder. Dan is going to try to get to Utah in time to run the special effects for him. This will be the first time Dan has spent any time in Boulder for a long time. He is going to go and connect with his roots, since his ancestor was one of the first homesteaders in the valley. They are going to talk about who homesteaded Boulder in the festival this year and who have been recent property owners. I know a lot of Boulder property owners are going to be very interested in this topic. They are still researching and will bring out a book to sell at the festival in a couple of years. This will be the second book to come out of their subjects for the festival. The last one was on School Days in Boulder. They want Dan to work on the foundation web site, too, as he is good at that.
We got bad news in the complex for those of us who go in the big swimming pool on a regular basis. It is going to be closed for repairs for at least 5 weeks! It's very hard to walk in 110 degree heat which hits us almost immediately in the morning.
I uploaded another video of my play, Prince from Saturn, today. Doc can't wait for me to get done with this series so he can get back to work. I think being laid off has been good for him. Taught him a little bit of a lesson on just how unraveled he can be when he reads my play on video. I have another play I want him to read down the road aways playing my dad and a country outlaw boyfriend, a history play on how outlaw men act in that country. The public has always loved the outlaws of the wild west, but I want them to see how they act close up and personal, and maybe they won't glamorize them quite so much.
I think that is why women are so often taken advantage of by the bad guys, because of how they are perceived in the movies. I refer you to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch was born and raised 60 miles from where I was, and I imagined him as lot more scary character than Paul Newman played him. In the first place, he was undoubtedly a bisexual, holing up with a bunch of men for days on end, drinking with them. In fact I think in the early days the homosexual probably thought of himself as someone who could never be accepted, even should he have been born that way. I say whether he had the gene or grew up under the influence of older outlaws, he was not going to be able to help what he was. So you might say some of these men considered themselves 'born' outlaws. These are the men I have studied all my life and have written about many times.

I really appreciate people who are not disturbed by the possible presence of spirits among us

My sister Ann in photo said that she has been visited quite a few times lately by my sister LaRae who passed over 20 years ago, and she is wondering about the meaning of her visits. Ann seems as healthy as she can be without a pancreas resulting in severe diabetis, but my guess would be that my sister LaRae is popping in to remind her to prepare for departure as those with health problems always need to do, just in case. Which does not mean she will be leaving immediately. She seems to be too locked into life right now with many tasks that interest her including tending her smallest grandson before he starts pre school next year, as she tended his two older sisters. I don't look for her to live to be really old as she says it is a tremendous drag to be on the highest possible insulin shots all the time. But I admire her because she drags herself out at 6 am to go swimming in 21 degrees below zero where she lives in the heated public pool, of course, but she says it is icy cold comng and going to the pool. But she is doing it for her health's sake. I am not that conscientious about taking my walks in my nice balmy Phoenix weather. She has been the physical activity queen of the family in later years.
I have decided that Pierre's presence means that I will get more of a look into the afterlife as time goes on. It is like moving to New York so scouting out the city, finding possible activities to engage in. I would be happy to go and do plays. I tried to get Pierre to come to some play readings with the idea that we might put one on at the Westward Ho. In fact, I moved in here with that idea in mind, but have always run into too much dysfunction in the possible actors to do it, like chronic alcoholism for one thing. Pierre had his periodic drunks. He had never acted before so he could not be sold on the idea. Now perhaps he would be more amenable. Ellen, who lived in this big complex, you may remember died last summer as a result of stomach reduction surgery gone wrong. She was still in her fifties so that was really sad. She sang a lot of songs in all the karaoke videos I played for Doc. She loved music and she did 3 shows here to the Westward Ho I participated in. I remember once she wanted us to perform the dance of the hippoes. I was not quite ready to concede I was a hippo yet, so I wouldn't do it, but she did. She made everyone laugh so hard in her tutu trying to get on her tippy toes while weighing a good 350 pounds. It was one of her most successful numbers. Even I knew she could not carry a tune, so she concentrated on dancing at her weight yet. She found a very talented lady who worked in the police department and got her to play the piano for a lot of the numbers. I just loved her. She also gave readings. We had fun, except that Ellen was a non stop talker, and so hot tempered I did not dare object. I thought she spent way too much time talking and not rehearsing. I felt she was going to have to revamp her directing style before I would be in another of her shows.
So now according to Pierre that is just what she is doing. She is helping the other ghosts to do shows, but working under another director to learn how to do it better. And she is getting a chance to be helped with her singing by good vocal coaches.
You might not believe this but about ten years after James Dean died he came and tapped me on the shoulder in a dream and said he was going to take me to a big theater where a play he had written in the afterlife was being performed. James Dean became a good friend of mine, communicating quite often after he passed, especially when I was sick. I remember being seated in the theater, looking around at a full house, and then I watched the show. I remember watching the show in detail, but when I got back to my bed I could not remember what it was about. That was some experience, though, and it caused me to have hope that if we could not get our plays produced in this life we would get another chance, just as he did, after he was was killed at the age of 21.