Monthly Archives: December 2006

Are We Live?

I’m moderately back. In the end Blade reinstalled Windows, and the only things I have lost are my email and all of my music. I’m more annoyed about the email, because there was a bunch of messages I was keeping for reference and I’ve lost all my addresses.

Ironically, all the stuff I back up regularly — namely my photos, book document files, web work, and so forth, anything except programs really — were unaffected, as they were isolated beyond a partition for exactly this reason. So yay for my cleverness, and the main lesson I have learned here is that in the future I’ll store my music behind a partition as well. I backed up my Firefox bookmarks not long ago, so I’ll have those once I dig them out. Obviously I’ll start backing up my email regularly too; I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. I’ll slowly build up my music again by copying my CDs to the computer when I feel like listening to them as I work. Alas, I have lost half of my Vivaldi playlist, but it’s not as crucial as it was earlier when the majority of Il Maestro (etc) was spilling out of my brain into a file at the rate of five thousand words a day.

Damn. It occurs to me that I lost my fonts as well. Downloading fonts, however, is a lovely way to avoid doing work.

I still have to set up accounts and restore settings, and setting up all my email will take a while too. Thanks for your continued patience.

Woes

Well, the good news is that my editor loves the new version of ESTC, and is sending it along to the next step of the publishing process as well as submitting a delivery payment request.

The bad news is that my computer is dead, thanks to an embedded virus on a CD from a trusted source that initialized as soon as the CD started spinning in the drive . My virus shield caught one virus, I quarantined it, and was accepting the restart command when the shield caught another virus, but too late;the system began its reboot. And now that second virus is hanging the Windows load, and crashing the system between the XP load screen and the login screen.

My in-house tech support talked me through the first couple of options for safe restart before he left on a business trip, but nothing worked; it keeps crashing. He’s now gone and I’m left with a non-functional computer. I have a second hard drive that Jan gave me a while back, which I theoretically can put in the place of the bugged one once it’s reformatted and Windows loaded onto it… except I’ve never done that myself before. In theory I can do this, then set my original hard drive as a slave, run Windows off the new drive, and go in and run my anti-virus program on it manually, but theory and computers rarely seem to co-occupy the same level of reality. I may just wait till he’s home again on Saturday and let him do it.

In the meantime, I have my clunky twelve-year old laptop to write with, and I think the dial-up still works; I haven’t checked it in ages. (Or I could try plugging the router into it, if it even has a slot and the required innards for that.) And I can come downstairs into the basement to use HRH’s computer if necessary, which is where I am now, and I hate this mouse and this keyboard and argh.

I’m thankful I didn’t try to load Dreamweaver onto my computer any earlier than this, because if it killed my system before I’d handed the book in, I think I would have done myself an injury. As it is, this is just really, really annoying. You’ll see much less of me over the next four days, and don’t send me anything vital by email, because I won’t get it.

Gifts From The Fairies

I just came upstairs from turning on the dryer, and I discovered a beautiful birch-bark crescent moon hung on my front door where the harvest Indian corn originally was. I have no idea where it came from; one of my visitors over the past couple of days must have hung it there, or the upstairs neighbours, or even HRH without telling me. Or maybe it was fairies. Whoever put it there, it’s absolutely beautiful, and I love it completely.

I think I’ll find some red and green ribbon and sift the tiny jingle bells out of my sewing box to add to it, in order to make it even more Yule-specific for this season.

Witches Weekly: The Start

What with computer time being limited and most of my spiritual RAM being taken up by whatever book I’m writing, I’ve let my Witches Weekly questions slide for a long time. Also, a lot of the questions are already answered elsewhere on the web site, or in my books. But I think I’m going to start going back and answering old ones now and again, because I’ve noticed that I tend to not talk here about my spirituality a lot any more since I’ve been writing about it full-time in manuscripts.

November 10: When did you first realize that the pagan path was for you?

It was one of those by-accident things, as they so often are. (And here I will digress and say that really, what is coincidence? Is it noting a connection between two seemingly disparate things? If one subscribes to the everything-is-connected-by-energy theory, sometimes referred to as “the web” in Neopaganism, can one really argue that there exists such as thing as disconnection? Digression over.) In my mid-twenties I created a fictional character whom I decided would be a modern-day witch. And then, because I thoroughly research issues and backgrounds before I go on to develop a character, I proceeded to look into modern witchcraft in order to have a better handle on what it was.

As I read I started to recognise a sympathy within me for the central tenets and practices demonstrated in witchcraft — the honouring of Nature as an expression of the Divine, the acknowledgement of a feminine energy to deity, the belief that symbols hold energy, and so forth — and realised that hey, not only was witchcraft real (as in not fictional), but it was remarkably grounded in the expression of a spirituality that made sense to my heart and soul. And the more reading I did, the more I found out about different paths of alternative spirituality that encoded different cultural approaches and philosophies, and the more interested I became in the whole idea of cultural-specific spirituality and the revival/reinterpretation of pre-Judeo-Christian religions. My initial research into straightforward witchcraft had led me to the rich tapestry of alternative spirituality and modern religions, and I discovered as I went that a lot of the ideals and moral standpoints found in these religions were ones I already held.

I just kept reading, because what I read nourished something inside me. It all felt right. And eventually I got up out of a chair and started actively and formally practicing beyond living with awareness, being in the headspace, and honouring the world around me. And then I took a class, and then I started to teach, and then I wrote books, and here we are, a dozen years later. My spiritual work hasn’t always been easy, because it demands a lot of self-examination and a willingness to shed behaviours and beliefs that no longer benefit one, as well as a willingness to grow and change and challenge oneself. But it’s a very rewarding long-term path (and I specify this only because it’s hard to recognise personal change in the short-term), and one that I believe is the right one for me to be following.

(There is a longer and more detailed version of this information on the Believe page of my web site.)

Cue The Wibbling

The MS for ESTC was just resubmitted. Now I get to worry about how good my tweaks are, on top of how good the book is as a whole.

No, I cannot win.

I do like it, though, I really do. It’s much better than I remember feeling that it was when I first submitted it, so those two weeks gave me a good step back and helped me regain perspective. I’m more confident this time. I still can’t shake the anxious knot between my shoulders, though, but that’s perfectly natural.

I’m going to go for a drive and pick up the boy with HRH, as he’s stopped by on his way there to offer the opportunity.