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| Spring!!! | ||
Spring has arrived. Soon, the plants my sister and brother are sending me for my birthday will start arriving and I'll be able to put the compost to good use. They are sending me 3 butterfly bushes, 3 red latham raspberry bushes, and 6 oriental poppies. I'm very excited about gardening this year. I haven't done any gardening since I rented the house in Columbia, Missouri and grew carrots out back. It was a very small house with a small yard, but it was a house with a yard and it was $185/month. Wow, that price seems great now, I couldn't rent a room for that around here these days. It's a different season here, in more ways than just not being winter anymore. | ||
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| Fun With Wikiscanner | ||
Just for fun, I decided to look at the edits made from the United States Department of state using wikiscanner. I only looked at a fraction of the over 2,500 edits, but here are the ones I thought were interesting: Laura Bush thinks Condi would be a great president We're being invaded by Mexicans!! "...the World Bank is one of the most highly-regarded financial institutions in the world..." Tiawan is a pseudostate "The statements about events in 2007 are clearly written by a Russian." State Department predicts what issues will be contentious at the next Intergovernmental Conference of the European Union The Department of State knows a lot about science and technology in China. Somewhere in the world, humans can marry non-human animals Delete – Who said the 2003 invasion of Iraq was illegal? No one said that Delete – You can't say that the U.S. officials should have know that Bin Laden would turn his attention to the west after the Soviets were out of the way Delete – Text on the United States Interests Section in Havana Delete – A large chunk of the Missouri United States Senate election, 2006 article Delete – Part of the discussion on the Agent Orange talk page | ||
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| Free Cardinal Icons | ||
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| Free Bird Icons | ||
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| States I've Been To | ||
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| Revisiting Salvia | ||
I've done salvia divinorum in the past. However, I'd only done 1X. Last night I tried 5X. Oh my, what a difference. The world ripped away in front of my eyes into interference patterns. Then diving down, I forgot everything. Complete dissolving of definition. No knowledge of the day to day world, no sense of self. I had to rebuild my perception of reality. Put everything back together. I had even lost the concept that everything was occurring in a three-dimensional locally-euclidean space, and couldn't figure out what kept me physically separate from anything. Even as I came out of the most intense part, everything kept warping together at the edges of my perception. The strange putting together of things, defining of things, is the journey from the wholeness at the center. Without a sense of self, everything is one. There is no need for definition or distance. What is at the center is beyond definition. It is the All, the Ineffable. Words are boxes which cannot contain It. Even saying it is "beyond definition" misses the mark, as it is neither beyond or before. I took the journey twice last night, the first time the speed of the journey panicked me on my return trip from There to Here. The second journey I was able to experience reconstruction from a much calmer place and was able to observe the experience more. The salvia divinorum experience is not unlike experiences I've had in the past, however the pace at which salvia divinorum triggers these experiences is frighteningly fast: the most intense part is over in the first 5 minutes, and after 10 more it's completely worn off. The short duration along with the physical immobility during the deepest part may be why such a potent herb such as salvia has managed remained legal in most of the entheogenphobic United States (Missouri being the exception). After the journey, I made a map... We are waves emanating out from Unity. We perceive other waves as other selves. At Unity we become all waves, all things. There is no self at Unity. Between the everyday sphere of perception and Unity lies a domain where the waves are not united and a self still exists in some form, however the waves interfere with each other. This interference can show up in a variety of ways, including sensory phenomena (hallucinations, patterns, distortions, etc.) and/or disorganized thinking. When viewing an autostereogram, focus of the eyes travels from normal focus to the adjusted focus where the 3D image is visible, the focus travels through an intermediate stage of visual clutter and interference. Traveling to Unity is like refocusing your eyes. | ||
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| Voice Post: Made the Connection | |||
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| Voice Post: Bust Details | |||
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| Voice Post: Starting Off with a Bust | |||
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| Saint Charles Blooming | ||
I went out on a coffee house crawl with Heather this evening. Saint Charles has changed a lot. It's got a much more vibrant artistic community than it had when I lived in the area. I was impressed by the variety and quality of the local artists. One of the coffee houses was in the New Town at Saint Charles development. It is a planned sustainable community with mixed income levels and a focus on pedestrianism and environment. Narrow streets laid out on a grid and shops and residences within easy walking distance from each other, it's a great alternative to suburban sprawl. Even though it is still very much being built, it already has a warmth and a personality. If I were planning to move back to this area, New Town would be at the top of my list. | ||
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| Yeti | ||
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| My First Stop Motion Animation | ||
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| Cardinals | ||
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| Morning Above the Clouds | ||
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| Ice Storm | ||
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